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Rikki Ducornet: My Favorite Living Author (& Steely Dan Muse)
A Taliswoman Short
Oct 16, 2022
Gazelle was the name of the Rikki Ducornet book that caught my eye in an Austin bookstore. Could it have been 20 years ago? Probably longer, by now. It called to my mind the Fayum mummy portraits, with which I’ve long been obsessed.
Her writing is animal exquisite. Pulsating, bloody, and fierce as trapped prey, but able to bend back on itself & invoke an icy chill with its cold veneer of power. I devoured her oeuvre. I took a workshop with her. I wrote my MFA thesis on her work.
Long before, she had been a student at Bard college. It was there that Donald Fagen met her and was inspired to write Rikki Don’t Lose That Number.
Writer, painter, poet, and muse. Rikki Ducornet is one of my literary Taliswomen.
