Periodic Companions

Author: Laynie Browne

Publisher: Tinderbox Editions (2018)

"Every day more pressing and relevant, Periodic Companions is a novel that points to the conditions that allow for generative as opposed to violent work in the face of tragedy and loss of hope. Its characters, based on the periodic table of elements, are constantly in dialogue with how we react, what we give off, and what it means to subvert our existing conditions. They remind us that while we have innate and proscribed capacities to act, the ways these come into being in relationship not only remains flexible but also matters most. Periodic Companions asks, what does it mean to live from what we know and what we are, and what does it mean to change? How do we relate to inherited and learned characteristics? What allows us to generate, re-generate and co-generate? The sheer weight of it was paralyzing but it did not exist without us, Browne writes, and so we are invited in to our complicity and agency. Periodic Companions' conversations and contradictions are a both mythologies and instruction manuals for the evolution and dissolution of contemporary stuckness—and these days, who doesn't need to be un-stuck?"

–Leora Fridman