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.

Some of Lehner’s work is featured in Image issue 15 and issue 29.

Biography

Christine, the eldest of five, spent the first weeks of her life across the street from the Charles Street Jail in Boston. At the age of four she attended a French-speaking kindergarten in Cairo. In a Catholic elementary school back in the States, Christine wrote her first full length novel—an imitation of the Nancy Drew stories called The Clue in the Rafters. She went on to receive her B.A. from the College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara in 1973. After college Christine again traveled the world, learning Spanish in Mexico and Central America. She received her M.A. from Brown University. Christine’s first published novel, Expecting, was written while living on a coffee plantation in Costa Rica. She later moved to New York where she taught part-time in local colleges and wrote articles for a Readers Digest book about heating systems. Christine also made two contributions to the Literary Guide to America ( Connecticut and Idaho ). Eventually she moved to Hastings-on-Hudson , New York , where she became involved in community organizations such as the Ladies’ Literature Club. Christine still lives in Hastings with her two Springer spaniels and continues to write. Her most recent book is a collection of short stories, What to Wear to See the Pope (2004)—two of which appeared in Image. It will appear in paperback in the spring of 2005.

Current Projects
March 2005

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.