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Sumner Carnahan

Melody Sumner Carnahan has six books in print: three story collections and two artist anthologies from Burning Books, and the biography of a Tibetan nobleman (clearlightbooks.org). Numerous short works have been published in magazines and anthologies, including City Lights Review, Leonardo Music Journal, and At A Distance from MIT, 2005. She has worked with composers and performers for two decades to present her writing off-the-page, including "performance novels” with Laetitia Sonami, audioworks and soundtracks for film and video with Joan La Barbara and Robert Ashley, and in recordings from Tellus, NonesuchElectra, 4-Tay Records, Frog Peak Music, HighMayhem.org, and in Morton Subotnick’s DVD-CDrom, Gestures, from Mode Records. Carnahan was Creative Media Arts Fellow 2000 at ABC Radio /Univ. of Technology in Sydney, Australia. Her book/CD, The Time Is Now, won a 1998 Independent Publisher Award for Audio-Fiction. Woody Vasulka commissioned “The Maiden” for his installation, The Brotherhood, at NTT/ICC, Tokyo, 1998. Other acknowledgements have come from New American Radio, Experimental Intermedia Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

"No other writer since e.e.cummings has inspired such a wealth of innovative music." -- The Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes

"There have been few precedents to this kind of sustained avant-garde literature with a moving human content." -- The Oakland Tribune

"The most musical prose since Gertrude Stein." -- The Village Voice

books by Sumner Carnahan

13 Stories --designed and illustrated by Michael Sumner

Thirteen short works of fiction in an arrangement from the profane to the elevated. Sumner Carnahan’s second collection of stories includes “Three Adult Children,” “Entelechy,” “The Centerpiece,” and other recent works.

“Transcendence can be achieved in a double bed more truly than in a cell. The writing in 13 is lovely, gifted. This is transcendence.” –Dorothea Tanning

The Guests Go in to Supper -seven composers who use words in their music

Interviews with and texts by:
John Cage, Robert Ashley, Yoko Ono, Laurie Anderson, Charles Amirkhanian, Michael Peppe, K. Atchley

"A remarkable cast of artists and musicians whose works deal with language. . . . If you buy only one book on the contemporary, experimental performing arts, this is unquestionably the one to get." --Dean Suzuki, Option Magazine

The Time is Now (boxed set, book with cd)

The Village Voice
“Carnahan's short, commanding sentences leap off from each other at arresting right angles. This is manna for musicians.” –Kyle Gann

The Oakland Tribune
“Fascinating, continuously interesting, not merely intellectual or clever. . . . A book like no other.” –Charles Shere

Weekly Alibi
“Stands bold and upright in the face of variant definitions of the avant-garde and charges the listeners with deciphering meaning for themselves.” –Michael Henningsen

When The Time Is Now was first published (Burning Books, 1983) Carnahan gave the book to musician and composer friends asking them to put the words to music using any story they liked. They did. The works on this compilation were created from 1983 to 1996. Original spiral-bound book with tabbed section dividers is redesigned here to fit CD as boxed set.

The Form: 1970-1979

Special Purchase Award, The Art Institute of Chicago

“A conceptual-art compilation of the highest order.” —Kirk Rader

What were the 70s anyway? During 1978-79, writer Carnahan (aka Melody Sumner) sent out over one hundred photocopies of a blank form—soliciting one-line responses to each year of the 1970s—to friends, family, and artists she admired. Nearly everyone responded without knowing what, if anything, would be done with the completed forms. The book reproduces the forms as filled out by 100 citizens including the likes of Vito Acconci, John Baldessari, Genesis P-Orridge, Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol, et al. A novel on each page. Back in print after twenty-five years. See Carnahan’s chapter in At a Distance (MIT Press, 2005) for detailed background.

One Inch Equals 25 Miles

Semi-Finalist, Short Story Fiction, Independent Publisher Book Awards 2005

A dynamic circus of word, image, and type in an all-over-the-map tour through a frontier where head and heart merge and divide. Twenty-five enigmatic fables for a new era, twenty-five forms of the quotidian becoming the extraordinary. Carnahan says of her third story collection: ?Many of the events and characters in these stories are sad or ridiculous and any resemblance to real or fictitious situations or persons is entirely my intention.? Produced in collaboration with artist/designer Michael Sumner. (See musical interpretation by the Out of Context Ensemble, audio CD from highmayhem.org).