Debra DiBlasi | Jiri & the Media

December 7, 2007

Interview with Debra DiBlasi [15:27m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This week, we spoke with fiction guru Debra DiBlasi. Her multi-media landscape is caustic, sardonic, cute, and intellectually satisfying, in a dirty little way. Her closing comments about Otis Redding (on the 40th anniversary of Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay) on behalf of her fictional character Jiri, said that he liked Otis because he liked water. Free association is a powerful tool, and DiBlasi uses it to illuminate race and gender issues for her audience, as well as fully confuse us from time to time.

Her projects are broad in scope, and can be accessed across the web. Her fictional character that plays in the real world much like Sasha Cohen’s Borat character, but with far more integrity and depth, and less slapstick humor, never fails to satisfy. Check out his band Umlaut with four dots not two.

The New York Times Book Review said of her writing:

“In clear, resonant prose, laced with bittersweet humor, Di Blasi imparts her understanding of love’s multiple ironies.” -The New York Times Book Review

Debra DiBlasi’s complete biography from her website at www.debradiblasi.com:

Debra Di Blasi is the recipient of many awards, including a James C. McCormick Fellowship in Fiction from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, Thorpe Menn Book Award, and Eyster Prize in Fiction. Her novel What the Body Requires was one of four finalists in the Heekin Foundation’s James Fellowship for the Novel-in-Progress and is being adapted to the screen for Indian director Biju Viswanath. Her story, “Sparrows,” was nominated for a 2005 Pushcart Prize, and a mixed media fiction, “Machine Ghosts,” was a finalist in the 2005 Panliterary Awards. In 2006, she received Pushcart nominations for “A Bird Does Not Understand the Concept of Glass” and “Personal Effects,” also selected by Web del Sol as “Best of Web Fiction.”

Books include the novellas Drought & Say What You Like (New Directions), and a short story collection Prayers of an Accidental Nature, (Coffee House Press), praised by The New York Times Book Review for its “clear, resonant prose, laced with bittersweet humor.” Regarding her newest fiction collection, The Jirí Chronicles & Other Fictions , (FC2 Books/University of Alabama Press, Pleiades editor Kevin Prufer writes, “Di Blasi has a mind unlike anyone else writing fiction today, and this is her finest work yet.” And from David Hamilton, longtime editor of The Iowa Review: “Agitated, angry, inventive, iconoclastic, both literally and figuratively graphic… Beware, reader, you’re in for a sumptuous, hypertextual, hypercharged ride. Hyperion himself would smile.”

Other writing includes short stories, poetry, essays, art reviews and articles published in a variety of national and regional publications, such as The Iowa Review, Notre Dame Review, Poetry Midwest, First Intensity, Boulevard, New Art Examiner, New Letters, Chelsea, Sleepingfish and many others. Her fiction has been adapted to film, radio, theatre, and audio CD in the U.S. and abroad, and appears in the anthologies Wreckage of Reason: Xxperimental Women Writers in the 21st Century (Spuyten Duyvil), Brothers and Beasts: An Anthology of Men on Fairy Tales (Wayne State University Press), and &Now / And Then (Notre Dame Review), among others. Collaborations with visual and audio artists have been featured museum installations, and her drawings, paintings and art installations exhibited in prominent galleries.

Screenwriting credits include Drought, for which she won the 1999 Cinovation Screenwriting Award, and The Walking Wounded, finalist in the 1996 Austin Screenwriters Competition. The short film, Drought, was directed by Lisa Moncure and went on to win a host of international and national awards including Best Drama and Best Director (Toronto, Canada), Best Medium Film (Lisbon, Portugal), Kodak Visions Award for Cinematography (Avignon, France), and Grand Prize and Kansas City Filmmakers Jubilee. Drought was only one of six films selected for the Universe Elle section at the 2000 Cannes International Film Festival in France.

Debra is president of Jaded Ibis Productions, a transmedia corporation™ producing most notably, The Jirí Chronicles, a mélange of over 450 individual works of prose, poetry, fictive audio interviews and music, videos, print, web and visual art. She is a former arts writer at The Pitch, SOMA, and The New Art Examiner, and taught experimental writing forms at Kansas City Art Institute.