Tag: Dodie Bellamy

Desire, Text, & a San Francisco Apartment: Interview with Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian

by Daniel Benjamin

Posted on by Zack Ravas
ZYZZYVA Volume 35, #3, Winter 2019

I sat down with authors and artists Dodie Bellamy and the late Kevin Killian in their Minna Street apartment in San Francisco on a Sunday afternoon in early May. I didn’t know it would be my last time seeing Kevin—he died following complications from chemotherapy on June 15, 2019. On the day of my visit,

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Complicity

by

Posted on by editor

Dodie Bellamy is a San Francisco writer and teacher. Her books include Academonia, Pink Steam, and The Letters of Mina Harker. Her book Cunt-Ups won the 2002 Firecracker Alternative Book Award for poetry. In its Fall 1985 issue, ZYZZYVA published her story “Complicity.”

A snapshot of an arguably lost San Francisco — one before the Loma Prieta earthquake, long before the dot-com boom and bust — Bellamy’s piece is experimental without being indulgent. It meditates on sex, art, identity, and friendship, confronting the inherent messiness those themes invite. Living off of bad checks and shoplifted goods, the men and women in “Complicity” may be marginalized by society at large, but there’s nothing shrinking about them. As the narrator says, “We knew we were perverts so we wallowed in it.”

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