Description
Award-winning writer, performer, and filmmaker Marshall "Gripp" Gillson presents their first collection of shorts with THE FAINTING GAME (AND OTHER STORIES). After spending a decade earning accolades as a spoken word artist, this collection offers the author's perspective in a new format: closet screenplays.
The scripts, written to be enjoyed on the page and in the mind rather than onscreen, explore the influence of racial capitalism on art, notions of self in the digital age, juvenile depression, and the surreal experience of an antinormative life. Characters in six short scripts invite readers to discover the magical in the worlds of their stories, and in turn the wonder in our own.
Fiction. Hybrid. Film. African & African American Studies. LGBTQ+ Studies.
“THE FAINTING GAME is at its core an invitation and a longing. Beneath the different genre elements is coming-of-age in the sense that the the characters in these stories are trying to arrive at truths. By asking “what do you see here” is more than just explicating the stories; it’s a way of learning more about yourself. Without the help of a cast, crew, lighting, and music, what do these stories look like? Who is looking into the mirror, and who is reflected back? What we ask ourselves is important because the answers we choose shape who we are.”
—Keana Aguila Labra, The Script as Mirror: Review of The Fainting Game (And Other Stories) by Marshall “Gripp” Gillson
Author Bio
Marshall "Gripp" Gillson is a genderfluid/nonbinary writer and technocreative based in New York City. Gillson graduated from Morehouse College and the Georgia Institute of Technology and is currently an MFA candidate and Turner Fellow at Stony Brook University. Their work is multimedia and interdisciplinary, ranging from written word to performance art to electronic installation. They have appeared onstage as an actor and a poet, self-published and been printed in literary magazines, built digital chapbooks and Twitter bots, taught college courses and workshops, and have written, produced and appeared in short films. Much of their work is fantastical, surreal and absurdist. It confronts race, gender, mental imbalance, loneliness, existential dread and sometimes robots. In their spare time, they enjoy board games, avoiding attention, and writing biographies in the third person. Gillson is the runner- up for the 2019 Yawp Poem of the Year award from Brooklyn Poets.
Author City: BOSTON, MA USA