Christine Lehner

In her fiction, Christine Lehner attends to the human body. With great tenderness, she uncovers a gothic beauty in the body's failures, illnesses, and longings, a beauty inseparable from its frailty. But her stories are as intellectually nervy and alive as they are grounded in the physical. From wheelchairs and hospital beds, over family dinners and through the mail, her characters are obsessed with the delights and quirks of the English language—its literature, its etymology, its strange and charming imperfections. In stylish, playful prose and with a dry, gentle wit, Lehner juxtaposes unexpected series of images—bats, love letters, cysts, the nervous habits of childhood—charging them with personal, idiosyncratic, and erotic meaning.

To read Christine's contribution to Image #15, "Twins, Again," click here.

Christine's Current Projects

I am currently working on a novel. It is narrated by Alice, an unemployed radio talk show host, parochial high school teacher and mother, and recounts a journey she takes to Nicaragua that is set in motion when one of her dogs is deathly ill and cannot be left alone. She goes to Nicaragua at the behest of a college buddy of her husband's who believes that his great aunt should be canonized and therefore become Nicaragua 's first  native-born saint. The book is called Stranger Things Have Happened, at least for now it is.

Biography