The Brick House, 11/2/17
The Brick House
The Brick House is a place where people dream of love and loneliness, of the world's beauty, and of ongoing environmental degradation. In this short but moving work, travelers confront their lives in the strange, elemental language which dreams allow for, a strangeness mirrored in the accompanying illustrations by Fowzia Karimi. Inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and following in the tradition of Armenian illuminated manuscripts, The Brick House is a delight to the eye and mind.
“...impressed by their lush lyricism and incantatory cadences, their fearless engagements with desire and violence and the overlappings of both.”
Author and Illustrator Bios
Micheline Aharonian Marcom was born in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia and raised in Los Angeles. She has published five novels, including a trilogy of books about the Armenian genocide and its aftermath in the twentieth century. She has received fellowships and awards from the Lannan Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, and the US Artists’ Foundation.
Her first novel, Three Apples Fell From Heaven, was a New York Times Notable Book and Runner-Up for the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction. It was recently announced that Shekhar Kapur will direct Three Apples Fell From Heaven, a film based on her novel and adapted by Motorcycle Diaries writer José Rivera. This becomes the first film from a new social justice storytelling production company, Disruptive Narrative, which will launch at Cannes as part of Sunday’s Refugee Voices In Film day, presented by IEFTA, the UNHCR and Marché du Film. The company is founded by leading human rights lawyer, Jen Robinson, of Doughty St Chambers, and Syrian-Armenian actress/writer/producer, Sona Tatoyan.
Her second novel, The Daydreaming Boy, won the PEN/USA Award for Fiction. In 2008, Marcom taught in Beirut, Lebanon on a Fulbright Fellowship.
She is the Founder and Creative Director for The New American Story Project, which is a space for new Americans to tell their stories. NASP’s mission is to foster humane and substantive dialogue around the complexities of migration, US immigration and asylum laws, and human rights concerns of new immigrants. Their current project Welcome Children: Voices of the Central American Refugee Crisis focuses on unaccompanied Central American minors who journeyed thousands of miles to reach the U.S. The children tell their stories in their own words while legal, social science and policy experts provide perspective, up-to-date data, and detailed context. The hope is to foster greater understanding about the ongoing humanitarian crises in Central America.
Marcom lives in Northern California where she teaches Creative Writing at Mills College. She is also on faculty at Goddard College in the MFA program in Creative Writing. You can follow her Words Collectio on Instagram @michelinemarcom.
Fowzia Karimi has a background in Visual Arts and Biology. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College. In her work, she combines the written and visual arts to tell stories. She was a recipient of The Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Awards – 2011. She lives in Texas.
