It’s about paying attention to the shape of what’s not there - the edges of the thing that you’re describing, whether in words or images. His description of negative space as a concept was something that really stuck with me, and that I kept coming back to when I was writing this story. My father was always giving me art lessons from a very young age, explaining technique, concepts, art history - all kinds of things. I want to start by talking about the title, “Negative Space.” Towards the end of the book, you write movingly about how your art and writing was built around the shape of your father’s absence. It’s not an easy subject matter, but Dancyger, who previously edited Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger, a powerful collection of essays on anger, dives into the task headfirst in Negative Space.Īhead of the publication, we chatted about writing grief, finding Judaism, and her father’s impression of Tevye from “Fiddler on the Roof. It’s also a reflection of her own life as she dealt with grief and found her own voice as a writer in the ensuing years. The memoir is an examination of the life and work of her father, the artist Joe Schactman, who struggled with a heroin addiction and died when Dancyger was 12 years old.
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