Housebreaking the Muse: Enter Simone Kahn

Simone Kahn was the first wife of André Breton, founder of Mouvement Dada in Paris and more famously known as the lifelong "pope of Surrealism." But before she knew Breton, Kahn, a young student at the Sorbonne, was the close friend of Jacques Rigaut, the dadaist poet, gigolo, drug addict, and suicide who haunts the…

Experiment in Public Fiction Writing (installment 4)

This experiment arose from a Craft Note post I published last week, titled How Things Begin, in which I described how my work arises from a single line, to which I append more lines. To demonstrate the process, and as something of a challenge to myself, I'm attempting to write a story "in public." What…