Read Art Critic Shana Nys Dambrot’s Review of Another Name For Autumn
Corrie Greathouse is one of LA’s most promising independent writers. Despite rich emotional depth and almost ritualistic appreciation of melancholy, hers is actually quite a light touch; gossamer, as delicate, durable, and sticky as a spiderweb. Her most recent book is the slim but satisfying memoir/novella of love and loss, Another Name for Autumn (Black Hill Press). Sweet and sad, there is a poetic rhythm to the prose and its motifs that both describes and inhabits the stages of love, heartbreak, and hope through which its narrative arc moves. She has a talent for identifying the magic hiding in the plain sight of ordinary things (rain, screen doors, birds, books, sidewalk graffiti) and for using them to read the tea leaves of the world around her — and the world inside of her.
“In front of the cafe near my apartment in Los Angeles, "Michelle + Ryan = Love Forever” is carved into the sidewalk. Written when the cement was wet and now petrified by the sun and time. Every day hundreds of people pass by and I wonder if they think about Michelle and Ryan and long forever was for them. Sometimes, I walk by the cafe only to look at their names and hope that they are still in love somewhere. Sometimes, I wish I could travel the world following sidewalk cement love stories and finding the people who made them and asking them how they knew it was forever.“
Greathouse’s particular magic is in how she interweaves external phenomena and the personal, existential insights they engender. Her description of the role of painting in her imagination and the life of her mind and body is especially captivating and evocative. It’s the sort of book that makes you want to underline passages and turn down the corners; it stays with you long after you’ve read it through.
"Greathouse’s particular magic is in how she interweaves external phenomena and the personal, existential insights they engender.”
Humbled. Thank you.
