Between Appear and Disappear: a memoir

Book #4 in our Blue Bustard Memoir Series

“Between Appear and Disappear is a secular prayer, a body prayer, between seeing and saying, between experience and representation. It is the only book that I have ever read in my life that is truly corporeal, which is to say truly emobdied by and through desire in language. I will hold it close to my heart for the rest of my life. Kind of I wanted to eat it. Definitely I slept with it under my pillow. It is an unforgettable and perfect book at a time when we need books to be exactly what they are, gloriously, unapologetically, mercifully real. —Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water and Dora: A Headcase

"beautiful-beyond-words” —Sharon Doubiago, author of My Father’s Love, Love in the Streets, and Hard Country

The blood of Mai’s ancestors run through her syllables. She takes photographs of sentences she abandoned in childhood—that loss of memory, that theme of what photography exposes. Written in the breath of a man in love, a novel, a poem, a photo album, this delirium of river language is finally a treatise on writing. ‘Her breath remains in my mouth.’ She told him the Vietnamese legend of a story that never begins, darker than any darkness when her family pushes their unsteady boat into the water. They fear arriving as much as they fear drowning. “Every word is a goodbye.” She escapes sentences. Her body lay against him like moonlight.

Doug Rice was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He received his BA in English from Slippery Rock State College and received his MA in creative writing at SUNY-Binghamton, where he studied under John C. Gardner, and his MA in English Literature at Duquesne University. He studied for his PhD in Literature at the University of Pittsburgh. His first novel, Blood of Mugwump, was selected by Kathy Acker as a runner-up for the FC2 First Novel Award. He has taught at La Roche College, Kent State University-Salem and currently teaches creative writing, literary theory and film history and theory at Sacramento State University. His work has appeared in numerous anthologies and literary journals including Avant Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation, Dirty : Dirty Anthology, Kiss the Sky, Alice Redux, Phantoms of Desire, Discourse, Gargoyle, Zyzzyvya, and others. His work has been translated into Polish, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and German.