July 30, 2014
I first became aware of Edward Ives in 1998. I had just moved back to Seattle after my divorce, and I wasn’t working yet so I spent most of my days browsing in used bookstores. I found a battered copy of Monster Cottage on the floor in front of the Science Fiction shelf, so I picked it up, thinking it was some kind of fantasy novel.
To my surprise, it wasn’t fantasy at all, or at least not genre fiction. It was a slim novel — not much more than a novella — about the travails of a young aspiring writer living in Madison, Wisconsin. Since I had been a young aspiring writer living in Madison, Wisconsin, I was immediately hooked. I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t buy that copy, since it only took me about half an hour to finish the whole thing while standing in the store.
I responded to Ives’ writing because of its openness and lack of affect. Ives was a romantic in a cynical age, and his characters were emotionally intense and larger than life. For a reader weary of stories with jaded, flat-affect, disengaged observers wallowing in anomie, it was refreshing to read literary fiction that felt transcendent and almost like fantasy world-building within the real world.
The more of Ives’ work I dug up, the more I became intrigued with the author himself. He was a recluse, but not famous enough (like Salinger or Watterson) to be referred to as a recluse. In other words, just a loner who didn’t like to be interviewed or photographed, and who didn’t do readings or the typical things writers have to do in order to move books. (Hence, I guess, why his writing was and is hard to find.)
People talk about books or music or films that “saved their lives.” For me, that book was Monster Cottage. It came to me at a time when I was feeling alienated from the world and becoming consumed with cynicism and misanthropy, and it made me feel less alone in the cosmos, knowing there was at least one person out there who had been where I was, and knew of a way out.
That’s why I’ve created this website. I don’t see any other online resources for Ives’ work, and I thought it might be useful to compile here as much information as I can find on a worthwhile author who has been largely forgotten by the literary world.
This website is a repository for information and news regarding Edward Ives, author of the novels Monster Cottage and Dark Penguin. It is not an authorized fan site, nor is it personally associated with Edward Ives in any way.
You may find here a biography of Ives, as well as a bibliography and other resources, including any unpublished work we are able to locate.
ABOUT THE EDITOR
EdwardIves.com is edited by Edward Sung, blogger and wage slave. You can find his blog and links to other things he does at Enemy of Joy. You can contact him at ed@edwardsung.com.
The precise date of Edward Ives’ birth is unknown, but he was estimated to have been two to three months old when he was left at the Mennonite Children’s Home in Seoul, South Korea, in the winter of 1960. The young Korean woman who brought him to the orphanage did not identify herself, nor did she tell the caretakers who received the infant the name of the baby.
According to Leland Jakob, the orphanage’s administrator from 1954 to 1987, the anonymous woman did not speak a single word, and kept her face covered throughout her brief visit. In the period following the Korean War, it was not uncommon for mothers of children fathered by American soldiers to surrender their infants to orphanages, since Korean society treasures “purity” of race and a mixed-race child was an object of shame and abuse.
Baby Edward spent two years at the orphanage before he was adopted by Thomas and Sylvia Ives of Bossier City, Louisiana. They gave him the name Edward after Thomas’ father, a notorious New Orleans rum-runner. Thomas was an Air Force captain stationed at the nearby base, and Sylvia ran a small ladies’ clothing shop in downtown Shreveport. Edward would later recall that the Ives were kind, if emotionally distant, parents, and his childhood was relatively stable and comfortable, although as a mixed-race Asian child he was subjected to a fair amount of racism throughout his youth.
In 1973, Thomas was transferred to Nellis AFB in Las Vegas, Nevada. Edward would live in Las Vegas for only a few years, however, as his parents divorced two years into their stay. Sylvia, who retained custody of her son, moved the two of them to Buena Park, California, where Ives would eventually graduate from Troy High School. Following graduation, Ives attended college at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, but did not complete his degree, dropping out in the spring of 1981.
THE LOST YEARS, PART ONE
Very little is known about the decade of Ives’ life following his departure from Madison, outside of what we might infer from his more autobiographical works (Ives refuses to speak publicly about this period). In his novel Dark Penguin (2004), protagonist Edward Moss — who appears in nearly all of Ives’ work — spends a year drifting around the American West, finally setting down in the fictional Central California town of Edendale, where he pursues a tumultuous, ultimately doomed relationship with Amanda Claypole, daughter of a Methodist minister.
In the novel, Moss leaves Edendale and spends the next several years working in Alaska at a fish processing plant, but it is unclear if Ives actually did so in real life. He was largely out of touch with his few friends during this period, and those he did occasionally contact claimed that he was, among other things, living in Paris as a charcutier’s apprentice, in federal prison for a bank robbery, and running a pizza parlor in Tucson, Arizona. It’s likely that Ives, even then a reclusive and somewhat paranoid personality, spread these rumors on purpose in order to obfuscate his actual whereabouts for anyone who might be trying to locate him.
Perhaps the closest we come to the truth of Ives’ circumstances during this period is in his short story “Lunch Rush at the Bellevue Café” (published in the May 1997 issue of The Atlantic), in which Edward Moss is living in Los Angeles and working in the cafeteria of the Metropolitan State Hospital.
MONSTER COTTAGE AND LITERARY RECOGNITION
Ives came out of hiding in 1992 with the publication of Monster Cottage, his first novel. Ives had published a few stories in previous years, but was considered an unknown prior to Monster Cottage, which was published by Black Robin Press. Attracting very little notice upon publication, Monster Cottage came and went like most small-press novels, until 1993 when Teresa Glass, widow of renowned author Russell Glass, began championing Monster Cottage as “the only novel I have read that captures the fire of my husband’s work”1
Monster Cottage, a melancholy, frequently poignant tale of loss and uncertain redemption, found cult success among the youth of the early 90s, and turned Ives into something of an underground celebrity. Naturally, the ever-more reclusive Ives resisted celebrity with all his might, turning down all interview requests and refusing to do readings or any in-person publicity for his novel.
In 1995, Ives married Nora Kaufman, a 27-year-old reader at Chronicle Books. His union was known among close friends to be largely free of turbulence, albeit lacking in passion. Nora, who would later publish a memoir of her years with Ives, My Life in the Cottage, divorced Ives in 2000 over a purported affair with an unnamed woman described only as a “pharmaceutical company rep.” Ives did not deny the affair, but dismissed the memoir as “shallow, tedious bean-counting with one finger dipped lightly into the truth.”
THE LOST YEARS, PART TWO
In the wake of his divorce, Ives once again fell out of sight, moving out of his Los Angeles residence and disappearing so abruptly that even his closest friends were taken by surprise. Unlike his previous “lost decade,” there were not even rumors of his whereabouts. A missing persons report was filed with the LAPD, but the only response was that Ives was alive and well, but did not wish to be contacted.
DARK PENGUIN AND THE CONTINUING MYSTERY OF EDWARD IVES
Ives broke silence in 2004 with his second novel, Dark Penguin, which he mailed to Black Robin Press with a Xerox of a Colorado drivers license with his name and photo, and no return address. By now, the mystique surrounding his disappearance had made Ives into a mainstream literary figure — if only as a curiosity — and the novel quickly topped bestseller lists.
When Ives failed to show himself in the wake of Dark Penguin‘s publication, rumors began to swirl that “Edward Ives” may have been a fabrication, conjured up by Teresa Glass (or, some alleged, Russell Glass himself, having faked his death in order to write in peace).
With no solid evidence to go on, readers avidly combed through Dark Penguin for clues to Ives’ whereabouts. An unconventional, even experimental work, Dark Penguin eschewed conventional storytelling in favor of a sweeping romantic epic told in the form of dual storylines — one set in WWI-era Congo and the other in present-day America — improbably combined into a single continuous narrative. While critically well-regarded, Dark Penguin proved too challenging for many readers, and although it outsold his previous novel by a comfortable margin, it was considered a failure by many.
Unfortunately for his readers, Dark Penguin failed to produce any meaningful clues about where Ives had gone off to. It did however stoke his growing cult popularity to new levels of intensity; in 2010, a 22-year-old bookstore employee named Patrick Reyes traveled to Africa in search of Ives, believing he had uncovered information that would lead him to his idol. Reyes disappeared shortly after his arrival in Brazzaville, and has not been heard from since.
As of this writing, Ives has been missing for fourteen years, with no indication since 2004 as to whether he is alive or dead. Mystery-loving readers have speculated far and wide as to his fate, and there is even fan fiction about Ives’ life and (improbably wild) adventures in obscurity. While there is little consensus about Ives’ current status, his readers share an abiding hope that he will one day resurface, with a new novel in hand.
1. “Teresa Glass On Rosewater Memento And Life After Russell.” American Poetry Review. May/June 1993.
Novels
Monster Cottage
Black Robin Press, 1992
Dark Penguin
Black Robin Press, 2004
Short Stories
“Plague Dog”
Black Warrior Review, Spring/Summer 1989
“Absinthe”
The Missouri Review, Fall 1990
“In the Cold Country”
Glimmer Train, Fall/Winter 1994
“Vomit: A Love Story”
The Kenyon Review, Spring 1997
“Lunch Rush at the Bellevue Café”
The Atlantic, May 1997
“Ballad”
Glimmer Train, Spring/Summer 1999
(and from a much, much earlier version of edwardives.com)
I'm fortysomething years old and living out in the desert with my wife and assorted pets. I used to be a writer. I'm trying to be one again. I haven't written fiction with any kind of regularity in many years. I started this site in order to help me get back into it. They say you have to write a million practice words before you're ready to write well. My million starts here.
I'll be writing and posting that writing here in various forms. Most of it is probably not going to be much good. I'm not trying to be good. I'm trying to be regular. If I can keep it up, I may get better.
This site and the material I post here is not going to be very well planned or revised. It's all a work in progress; it's all first drafts. I may start a project and then abruptly take it down. Or completely change something I've put online. I hope you'll bear with me.
I started two new projects today. Two Twitter experiments. Last Lines is a collection of...last lines...from imaginary novels and stories. Water From Water is an experiment in writing a novel in Twitter. More about these later.
I'm also (obviously) rebooting my website. I wanted a flexible, minimal design that can evolve to reflect whatever I'm up to. I have an appalling tendency to abandon projects shortly after starting them.
In this case, Carroll hypothesized that modern readers would gravitate toward protagonists who displayed pro-social tendencies or promoted group cooperation -- similar to how ancestral human hunter-gatherers valued such behavior.
I'm doomed.
For Skattie.