ACTIVE

PROJECTS

I love collaborating, and am seeking a comrade who vibes with these projects and wants to see my books in print. I have a number of semi-realized books that continue to unfurl and expand. Are you an agent or publisher who groks my vision? Please be in touch!

ART BECOMING BECOMING ART: A RECTO VERSO MEMOIR

Art Becoming Becoming Art is a memoir in the form of an artist's portfolio, where processes of making serve as metaphors for transformation and self-discovery. Bookbinding, filmmaking, theater, printmaking, performance art, and painting are explored as allegories for struggles with identity, purpose, and philosophical unrest. This manuscript is built of pieces of literary art, weaving in art history and art appreciation, that grow more experimental as the artist-writer shifts from figurative writing into abstraction, culminating in literary fauvism, interdisciplinary work, and impassioned expressionism. Several essays from this collection have won contests or prizes. This manuscript has made it to the semi-final round and been long-listed at several small press contests. 

Lidia Yuknavitch shares this praise: “Liz Asch's genre-bending collection takes readers on a journey between art, writing, and the body through stories of gender, sexuality, artistic practice, and the range and intensity of relationships between women and the world. Establishing a poetics of the physical and an erotics of the image, from portraits to reveries to activism, from word to image to body, she weaves a deep and rich new lexicon about why art matters. Intimately. An unforgettable book. A triumph of artistic passion. A lovesong to making art.”   

This collection is 55,500 words in 210 pages.

FUTURE GHOSTS

Future Ghosts is a memoir on personal ghosts, and how they can haunt or heal us. Drawing on mortality, mental illness, spiritual connection, and somatic healing, this memoir is in the voice of a Jewish girl growing up amidst the wreckage of the Holocaust who is coming of age queer during the AIDS crisis in the American South. It centers on the quandary of how to craft a meaningful life when the world around us, and sometimes within, feels fractured beyond repair. Several chapters from this collection have won essay contests or prizes.

44,000 words in 180 pages

YOUR SALT ON MY LIPS

Your Salt on My Lips: (Mostly) Queer Erotica, (Cleis Press, 2021; Ars Salutaria Press, 2022 and 2023) is a playful tribute to eros across the spectrum of sexuality, gender, and queerness, in bodies of the global majority. These shorts and tableaux are an eclectic variety of irreverent explorations of embodied sexuality and sensuality. This collection is, according to Justin Hocking, " reinventing the genre of erotica" and Stella Harris called it “erotica at its best.” Coquettish, bawdy, outlandish, and sublime, each story is a surprise, including innovative forms and the nouveau topic of somatic erotic healing.

This book exists digitaly and in-print, and it is open to promotion, creative collaboration, educational opportunities, and opportunities to participate in LGBTQIA+ activism. I am seeking a pathway to an audiobook version with guest readers.

This book can be purchased as an e-book, an author-made limited print edition (2022, pink cover), or in a second edition with two bonus stories (2023, grey cover). This project was generously funded by Oregon’s Regional Arts and Culture Council.

METAPHOR MEDICINE:meditation gone wild

Metaphor Medicine is a book based on my podcast (BODY LAND METAPHOR MEDICINE), an archive of guided visualizations informed by deep image poetry, surrealist art, and acupuncture theory. This project began ten years ago and is a work in progress. I envision it as the start of a series.

This book takes the reader into their imagination in an artful way to feel better in their body and psyche. This method is widely permissive, creative, somatic, and restorative. I call it “embodied surrealism” or “salutary storytelling.” This is the kind of book anyone might keep in their backpack or on their nightstand, read a chapter a la carte (in order or at random), or reach for as part of a morning or nightly routine, to feel more centered, grounded, and calm. With each story, you get a dose of metaphor as medicine, the kind of somatic storytelling that takes you somewhere magical, and coaxes you into a trippy, relaxed, aligned place, and trains you to self-regulate, all while stoking the imagination, cultivating a deeper sense of belonging, and nurturing the mind-body connection.

I am seeking an agent or publisher for this book, which is the start of a bountiful series.