A. R. Taylor
A.R. Taylor is the author of JENNA TAKES THE FALL (She Writes Press) as well as an award-winning playwright, essayist, and fiction writer. Her debut novel, Sex, Rain, and Cold Fusion, won a Gold Medal for Best Regional Fiction at the Independent Publisher Book Awards 2015, was a USA Best Book Awards Finalist, and was named one of the 12 Most Cinematic Indie Books of 2014 by Kirkus Reviews. She's been published in the Los Angeles Times, the Southwest Review, Pedantic Monthly, The Cynic online magazine, the Berkeley Insider, So It Goes—the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library Magazine on Humor, Red Rock Review, and Rosebud.
In her past life, Taylor was head writer on two Emmy-winning series for public television. She has performed at the Gotham Comedy Club in New York, Tongue & Groove in Hollywood, and Lit Crawl L.A. You can find her video blog, Trailing Edge: Ideas Whose Time Has Come and Gone at her website www.lonecamel.com.
Twitter: @Lonecamel
Is there a genre of music that influences your writing/thinking? Do you listen to music while you write?
I love rock music, as in Rickie Lee Jones (think “Gravity”), The Band, certainly Prince, and then there’s George Thorogood. For a more contemporary group, lately I’ve gotten interested in the British band Massive Wagons.
I never listen to music when I write. It gets me too wired up, and I want to dance. But there have been times when I really tried to write something that would rival the pulse of music, that would contain that sexuality and drive.
Favorite non-reading activity?
Paddle tennis at the Venice Boardwalk. The game is a cross between ping pong and tennis, with paddles that are a bit smaller than tennis racquets and made with composite materials. You stick a pin into a regular tennis ball and let approximately half the air go out. The courts are slightly smaller, and you get only one serve. It’s a speeded-up form of tennis, really fun.
Is there a work of art that you love. Why? Have you ever visited it in person?
Flaming June by Sir Frederic Leighton, painted in 1895, which I saw at the Frick Museum in New York in 2015. It is the most lavish, sensual depiction of an amazingly beautiful woman, all in shades of silky, diaphanous orange. She curves around a settee with impossible grace.
Do you have another artistic outlet in addition to your writing? Do you sew? Paint? Draw? Knit? Dance?
I play classical piano, used to play it as a kid, then gave it up when I forgot an entire piece during a recital (age 13). Now I’m back at it with lessons for the last three years. I’ve been in two recitals and haven’t forgotten a thing!
If you could create a museum exhibition, what would be the theme?
Great women artists who hit their stride in middle age, and now in their later years continue on with wonderful new work. A few of these artists:
Carmen Herrera (born in 1915) said of her lengthy wait for recognition, “If you wait for the bus, the bus will come.” She sold her first painting at age 89 and had a one woman show at The Whitney Museum of American Art in 2016-2017. She specializes in the pleasures of the geometric hard-edged line and the shock of explosive color.
Etel Adnan, born in 1924. A Lebanese-American painter of lush landscapes, a poet as well. “My painting is very much a reflection of my immense love for the world…”
Zilia Sánchez, born in 1926, got her first museum retrospective in the U.S. in 2019. She does large installation-like pieces of shaped canvas covered with acrylic and paint, sculptural, intimately suggestive of the female body.
Then there’s the baby of my little list, Mernet Larsen, born in 1940, who has had shows recently in New York and Los Angeles. Her usually large paintings feature something she calls “reverse perspective,” figures engaged in incredible teetering balance against impossible buildings or spaces. Elegant and yet somehow funny.
