Sheila Ascher was my lifelong partner in love and work. We were at pains all our writing lives, for aesthetic, political, and ethical reasons, to insist that everything written by either of us be understood to belong to both of us completely. I’m now forced to do what goes against my grain—against our grain—by writing distinctly in my own voice as Dennis Straus, because Sheila died unexpectedly at 9:30 p.m. on Christmas Eve in the ICU unit of NYU Langone Hospital.
I have to live with the heartbreak of not being able to save Sheila, so what’s left for me has to be my salvation and my mission: to work on whatever of ours is unfinished and to tend also to the public side of our work, something that neither of us relished and were able to avoid because we had each other as a complete literary universe. We permitted no outside editing because we were both good at it: ruthlessly honest with each other for the sake of the work.
All Ascher/Straus work needs to be read as written jointly with one final voice that evolved over time but was always our conscious creation (we didn’t literally work together, but developed a way of mutual editing that worked miraculously for us). The place to look for Sheila’s unique voice and vision, something close to her distilled essence, is in the vast online work, Monica’s Chronicle, an endless sketchbook drawn directly from life that at the same time is meant to model another idea of fiction. Another place to look is the two, more structured, traditionally published Green Integer volumes derived from it, ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party.
I don’t know of another set of literary works that deliberately create a resonance between an online project and traditionally published books. For the back cover of Hank Forest’s Party we wrote that Monica’s Chronicle opens “a channel into the background where the lives and places of the two ABC Street volumes are always forming and re-forming,” but I believe serious study would reveal a lot more than that. Our description of those volumes as an “outward-looking autobiography/novel/philosophical journal” meant to “suggest a dedicated, life-long way of documenting life as fiction” applies equally and accurately to their source, Monica’s Chronicle.
Looking through Sheila’s writing I re-discovered a sentence that I’ve always liked and that I think goes to the heart of how Sheila worked and saw life: “I love this process for itself and I wonder how many others find that the outer world is (always has been) their inner life.”
It was Sheila’s joy to add to her Chronicle every day. My role was secondary, as editor, and it was one of the miracles of our partnership that we were able to do that for each other seamlessly.
A good overview of all our work can be found in Stephen Beachy’s “Foreword” to the 30th Anniversary Edition of our novel The Other Planet, and I think something could be learned about all our later fiction by tracing our path backward to our SPACE NOVEL experiments of the late ‘70’s/early 80’s when we announced that it was our goal “to create a new kind of un-bound novel, transparent and porous between writer and reader.” One way or another I don’t think either of us ever abandoned that idea.
I didn’t deal with our early experimental work—the graphic and structural narrative alternatives we worked hard on and sometimes explored in the pages of Chicago Review. All that seems a long time ago, though what we did there lingers in disguised ways in her and our later work.