Waidner’s narrator begins by searching the internet for second-hand figure skating dresses and skates. They confess that they came to figure skating late, having been “a butch child” with no time for the monoculture of mid-1980s rural Germany, in which skating at the weekend involves engaging with a repressively conservative culture. Fast forward a few decades and our narrator is writing about the career of the anti-drag artist David Hoyle, and his 2000 show The Divine David On Ice at Streatham Ice Rink. The performance (and perhaps Hoyle’s work more generally) is a revelation, and for the transitioning narrator, figure skating becomes a territory to explore the self. I like how Waidner plays with forms of biography and art criticism within this story and the other pieces by Waidner in the collection, which work really well together. The collection itself had an absolutely seismic effect on me when I read it in 2018, and I think that was true for others at Desperate Literature as well. It was such an exciting book, and I think remains so. Containing work by writers like Isabel Waidner (who edited the collection), Eley Williams, Jay Bernard, Joanna Walsh, and Juliet Jacques, Liberating the Canon introduced me to a new generation of writers doing something that felt so fresh and new. It’s a book that I’m constantly returning to.
First published in Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2018
A Personal Anthology 