Wednesday, January 5 - poet Anne Germanacos

8 PM on KPFK: The fragmented-seeming narratives written by my guest this week offer at first individual voices and epigrammatic lines suggesting ancient inscription, references to classical mythology. A schematic almost for storytelling itself, bigger stories accumulate and culminate in an adding up of the sum of parts. The individual sections of stories in Anne Germanacos’s In the Time of the Girls work as little prose poems but together offer a unity, often breathtaking, revelatory and strong and clear, especially in their big (small) conclusions. Characters include aging, dying parents, students at a girls school in Greece, the wife of an abortion doctor murderer, tourists in Turkey, a woman who carries with her the map hung hung from the ceiling of her childhood bedroom. Names and places suggest Greek mythology and the journey. Sven Birkerts writes about In the Time of the Girls, that “Germanacos has hammered the solid of expected form to disclose the fine fracture lines that map how it really is—between men and women, women and women, myths and memories…The echoing narratives convey a rich, mysterious flow of possibility, and a sense of ancient energies pushing up into the ongoing present.” Anne Germanacos earned an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars, and lives in both San Francisco and Greece, where the stories are mostly set. Her work has appeared in Agni online, Descant, Swink, Quarterly West and elsewhere.