Heather Bartel
writer. wildfire.
Heather Bartel is the author of the essay collection Exit the Body (Split/Lip Press, 2024).
Her writing has appeared recently in FENCE, Birdcoat Quarterly, Leavings, Grimoire, and Heavy Feather Review. She is founder and co-editor of the literary journal and community The Champagne Room.
Heather lives, writes, and dances in Columbia, Missouri.
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Books
Exit the Body (Split/Lip Press, 2024)
In Exit the Body, Heather Bartel makes an offering-as-essay-collection, if a collection of essays can include a tarot reading, a one-act starring dead and dreamed women, conversations with Sylvia Plath through a mirror, and letters to a living ghost.
Like journeying through the hallways of a haunted house, Bartel moves through a narrative landscape that shape-shifts, engaging in conversation with the women who haunt her to ask the question at the core of Exit the Body: what to do with an obsession with the mirror when the person in the mirror is either the only person you can trust or the one who is trying to kill you.
A dance with illusion and choice, Exit the Body is a meditation on the mind and its place within the body: what escapes, what ruptures, what is created, what echoes, and where we find ourselves on the other side.
Publications
"MURMURATIONS (II): MIRRORS," Heavy Feather Review, Volume 13, 2023
"STILL LIFE," Leavings, Issue 4, 2023
"TRAJECTORIES," Birdcoat Quarterly, Issue 13, 2023
"REFLECTION," FENCE, Issue 40, 2023
"YET THE PHANTOM WAS PART OF THE FLOWER," Miracle Monocle, Issue 19, 2022
"THE KNIFE SPEAKS," Grimoire, Issue 10, 2022
"MURMURATIONS (I): FIRST MEMORY OF BIRDS," MAYDAY, December 2021
"FLOAT," Qu, Issue 12, 2020
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