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!

RECTO VERSO: A Relfective MEMOIR on Art-Making, Creative Process, and Personal transformation

Recto Verso is a memoir in the form of an artist's portfolio, where processes of making serve as metaphors for self-discovery and acceptance. 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

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 standalone is 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.

Metaphor Medicine is estimated to be 50-60,000 words. I’ve been working on it for many years at various residencies and it’s up to 40,000. Just a little ways to go!