Rikki Ducornet

Rikki Ducornet grew up on the Bard campus in the Hudson River Valley, but her childhood included interludes in Cuba ("I cherish memories of the old Havana") and Egypt ("I was 'stunned' by Egypt"). She came upon surrealism, via Dali and Cocteau, at a very early age. ("After that I was forever hunting down a similar resonance or 'quality;' it was a kind of hunger.") She became an illustrator long before she started writing, an event that was motivated by the torture and miscarriage of a leftist agitator after the coup d'état in Greece. ("I felt such outrage I wrote all night.") Rikki Ducornet has illustrated books for Robert Coover, Jorge Luis Borges and, most recently, Karen Elizabeth Gordon (Torn Wings and Faux PAS). A recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship as well as grants from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Eben Demarest Trust, her literary works (six novels, six books of poetry, two collections of short stories, and two children's books) include Phosphor in Dreamland, The Word Desire, The Fan-Maker’s Inquisition, and The Monstrous and the Marvelous. Her novel The Jade Cabinet, published by Dalkey Archive, is featured in our GEMS section. After living in North Africa, Canada, and France, Rikki now resides in Colorado, where she teaches creative writing at the University of Denver. "I'm basically a very intuitive writer," she says. "When I write it's almost as if I'm in a waking hallucination even though I'm aware that I'm consistently dealing with certain kinds of motifs, like the cosmic egg, or twins, or monkeys, or the problem of power. . . It seems to me that rigor–aesthetic, intellectual–is the paradox at the heart of creative work. But what I call rigor resists definition because it cannot be reduced to one small bone; it is not palpable, but intuited. Every artist worth her salt knows what I mean–either one chooses the well trodden path, platitude, sentimentality, the current orthodoxy, whatever, or one blazes a trail which is, no matter the nature of the work, part of the process of becoming."
		The Fountains of Neptune, Rikki Ducornet's "water" novel, begins, My sleep began in the spring of 1914. I slept through both World Wars and the tainted calm between. It was as if I had been cursed by an evil fairy, pricked by an enchanted spinning wheel; an impenetrable briar had gripped my mind.

		The Jade Cabinet, her novel devoted to air and ether, begins, Memory, wrote Mr. Beattie, presents us with thoughts of what is past accompanied with a persuasion that they were once real. The ambiguity so delighted my father that with my mother's permission I was named Memory—a curious coincidence considering this memoir which has seized the lion's part of my relic years. I write from the new century about the old, my purpose to reanimate planets that have long ceased to spin.