“In Donald Barthelme’s seminal 1968 Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning, a narrator suddenly appears out of nowhere in the very last section of the short story and throws a rope out to the main character ‘K,’ who is close to being pulled under in a turbulent sea. With one end of the rope around his waist, the narrator braces himself against a rock and pulls ‘K’ out of the water, saving him from drowning.
“Like the narrator, I have spent my career as an artist dragging narratives to the shore, rescuing them from oblivion – saving them from being drowned in an ocean of both cultural and personal amnesia.” —Dan Hurlin