Skull Cathedral

by Melissa Wiley

Overview

In Skull Cathedral, Melissa Wiley pulls stories from the vestigial remnants of the creatures we were or could have become. 

The appendix, pinky toes, tonsils, male nipples, wisdom teeth, and coccyx are starting points through which Wiley explores exaltation, eroticism, grief, and desire. Using the slow evolution and odd disintegration of vestigial organs to enter the braided stories of the lives we establish for ourselves, the people we grieve, and the mysteries of youth, memory, and longing, Wiley’s lens is deeply feminist and compassionate.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781938769573
Publisher:	Autumn House Press
Publication date:	09/05/2020
Series:	Autumn House Press Nonfiction Prize
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	232
File size:	950 KB

About the Author

Melissa Wiley grew up on a small farm in Indiana. She earned her Master’s in Writing and Publishing from DePaul University in Chicago, where she works as a freelance writer and editor. Primarily a writer of creative nonfiction, she is also the author of the personal essay collection Antlers in Space and Other Common Phenomena (Split Lip Press, 2017), and her work has appeared in many literary magazines, including the American Literary Review, Terrain.org, The Rumpus, Entropy, DIAGRAM, Phoebe, Waxwing, The Offing, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and PANK. She has been a member of the nonfiction programs of literary programs including Disquiet International in Lisbon, Portugal, and the Writer’s Hotel in NYC. Currently, she is at work on a collection of short stories about extinction.

Table of Contents

Grasping Reflex: Swallowing Needles Hymen: A Traveling Circus Appendix: A River Homing Wisdom Teeth: Man in the Moon Coccyx: The Mermaids of Austin Pinky Toes: Ghost Feet Spleen: Cloud Elephants Sinuses: Skull Cathedral Third Eyelid: Running through Water Male Nipples: Nurturing Instincts Palmaris Longus: The End of Longing Tonsils: Winter Honey Horripilation: Playing Dress-up Darwins Tubercle: Softer Hearing

Editorial Reviews

"Longlisted"

PEN America/ Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

Skull Cathedral is a lovely summoning to another world, one in which the body is lifted into pure essayistic fury, a stormy, haunted thought-scape that strives to reach and clutch and keep close the inevitable losses of a life. These memoiristic essays zoom in and out, showcasing what we have lost, what we have yet to lose. Wiley offers us the moon and its brilliance and its depressions, but more importantly, she telegraphs its distance, longing, and unknowing.

Jenny Boully

Hungry, ascetic, erotic, and haunted, Skull Cathedral moves from essay to essay as if from one dream to the next, testing what it means to be attached to a body, to beauty, to love. There isn’t a sentence here that isn’t in awe of consciousness and the cold, clear ache of being alive. Wiley is a writer who takes no moment for granted, and maybe that's why perception here is so intensified, from a strand of hair in an infant’s hand to a stranger's lipstick left behind on a coffee cup. This is life on the brink, confronting the inescapable fact that all of us die and everything goes. It’s also a joy to read, rigorous and brilliant, so fresh.

Paul Lisicky