# Andrea Scrima

Andrea Scrima (born 1960 in New York City) is an American novelist, essayist, and artist living in Berlin, Germany. An extensive essay on her experiences as an American living more than half her life abroad appeared 3 July 2018 in The Millions. In 2021, these observations were continued in the essay “On the Weaponization of Language in a Traumatized Nation,” published in LitHub.

## Early life

Andrea Scrima grew up on Staten Island, New York as one of four children. An early interest in mathematics led to a National Science Foundation scholarship for the high school summer program in mathematics at Bard College in 1977. From the age of fifteen, she took part in courses in painting and drawing at the Parsons School of Design's Summer Program and the Saturday Program at Cooper Union. Scrima studied fine arts at the School of Visual Arts and received a BFA in 1983. In 1984, a scholarship from the Stiftung Luftbrückendank brought her to West Berlin, where she received the German Meisterschüler degree in fine arts at the Berlin University of the Arts in 1986.

## Career

Scrima has received numerous awards for her artistic work, including the Lingener Kunstpreis and a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. She worked mainly in painting and text installation and exhibited widely before she began writing in a literary context.

### Novels

Scrima's first book, A Lesser Day, was published in 2010. A German edition titled Wie viele Tage was published in 2018. In an early review, The Brooklyn Rail called it a "small, wondrous book", and reviewed it once again when the second edition came out in 2018, calling it a "brilliant debut novel" in which a "delicious unease slowly builds".
A Lesser Day records an artist's restless life on two continents as five locations in Berlin and New York of the 1980s and 1990s serve as touchstones for a work of poetic prose that inquires into the way memory inscribes itself into place. Kate Christensen writes: "Scrima paints vivid, detailed memories of places to evoke a web of intimate relationships that emerges gradually from a temporal fog into shocking, unforgettable clarity", while Robert Goolrick calls A Lesser Day "a monument to the human struggle to survive, to remember, to understand, and to love". The German translation, titled Wie viele Tage, was published by Literaturverlag Droschl, Graz, Austria in 2018 to great acclaim, with Bettina Schulte of the Badische Zeitung noting its "uncanny precision of perception" and Claudia Fuchs of SWR2 its "remarkable freedom of thought and agency". In the German daily paper Die Taz, Elisabeth Wagner writes: "The narrator of A Lesser Day takes her ambivalence, her 'difficulty with the present tense' as the departure point of a quest in which writing becomes a means of merging with life. In her mind, she need only open a drawer in the old kitchen cabinet on Staten Island or imagine the Italian language primers from school or remember how, 'in this vast empire of our childhood,’ she invented 'scientific facts' about the universe for her brother, and already the figures are set into motion (...) This is a high art, and it testifies to the richness of a book that succeeds in freeing itself from any concerns of self-assertion to create a space in which the reader indeed begins to think more precisely, see more clearly—and become more receptive and sentient."
Scrima received a literature grant from the Berlin Council on Science, Research, and the Arts in 2004; she won a Hackney Literary Award for her short story Sisters and took part in residencies at Ledig House, New York; and Schloss Salem, Germany. An excerpt of a novel-in-progress won second prize in the National Glimmer Train Fiction Open.
Scrima took part in the 2016 Stadtsprachen Literary Festival in Berlin and was invited to read from and discuss the German edition of A Lesser Day, Wie viele Tage, at the 2018 Poetische Quellen literary festival in Bad Oeynhausen and the 2018 Erlanger Poetenfest in Erlangen, Germany.
In 2021, Literaturverlag Droschl published the German edition of Scrima’s second novel, Like Lips, Like Skins, under the title Kreisläufe, a word that carries multiple meanings including cycles, circuits, circulations, which are themes in this novel about family trauma. Kreisläufe received extensive praise in the German-language press, with Paul Jandl of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung observing: “With tender justice and laconic resistance, it seeks to elucidate grievances in family relationships, one might say the injustice of life itself (...) In the end, there aren’t very many authors writing in the literary field today as capable of evoking these images in such detail and with such depth as Andrea Scrima.” Maria Frisé calls Scrima a “powerful storyteller” in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, while Dussmann’s included Kreisläufe in their podcast “Criminally Underrated” and spoke about “the genius of this book,” (…) which “spreads out into wider reflections on how memory works, and how we often only remember the memory of a memory, or the story of a memory we’ve told ourselves.” Anne Kohlick of Deutschlandfunkkultur writes: “Again and again, between its temporal layers, the book opens up the various ‘cans’ that memory is stored in. And just like with the fabled Pandora’s Box, the moment the lid is removed, dangerous forces rush to escape: emotional and physical abuse, mental illness, the devastating after-effects of psychopharmaceuticals—and all of it presented in a fragmentary narrative form that echoes the very structures our memories operate within.” In the taz, Elisabeth Wagner calls the book “wise and beautiful (…) it’s hard to imagine not admiring the formal sophistication of this book. The delicate transitions between grammatical forms of past and present, for instance, which slip by unnoticed as one moves through time and space.” Kreisläufe was also reviewed in the magazines Hotlist and literaturblatt and the blogs Gute Literatur—Meine Empfehlung and Literaturleuchtet. The German author Ally Klein interviewed Andrea Scrima for a two-part interview published on Three Quarks Daily. Andrea Scrima has received several research grants from the Berlin Council on Science, Research, and the Arts, has spent several working periods in Florence, Italy, as the guest of the Villa Romana, and was awarded a 2023 fellowship at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico.

### Visual art

Prior to her decision to focus on literature, Scrima worked as a professional artist for many years, incorporating short fiction pieces into large-scale text installations, many of which have been site-specific. She has received numerous awards for her artistic work, including the Lingener Kunstpreis and a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and has exhibited internationally. In 2018, she presented the exhibition "The Ethnic Chinese Millionaire" in the Berlin project space Manière Noire, a room-sized text installation based on the description of a newspaper photograph. In 2020, Scrima took part in a group show at the Haus der Statistik titled “The New Normal” with drawings and a video of her essay "Corona Report." In 2021, the Katharina Maria Raab Gallery in Berlin included four work groups from Scrima’s drawing series Loopy Loonies in the exhibition "Fragility." In 2021/22, Andrea Scrima collaborated with the artist Anike Joyce Sadiq on a joint piece on institutional criticism in the form of a conversation titled "Against the Erasure of Dissent," published in the German original by Künstlerhaus Stuttgart and presented at the Villa Romana in the context of the conference series "Manifestiamo."

### Literary criticism

Scrima has written critical essays for numerous journals including The Rumpus, The Brooklyn Rail, Music & Literature, The Scofield, The Quarterly Conversation, Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, The Millions, Times Literary Supplement, LitHub, and The American Scholar, as well as the German-language journals Schreibheft, Schreibkraft, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Manuskripte.
She is a Monday columnist at 3QuarksDaily and editor-in-chief at the literary magazine Statorec, where she has published "Beyond the Bosphorus," "The Corona Issue," many of the works anthologized in Writing the Virus, a New York Times Sunday Book Review "New & Notable" title of 2021, and the more recent "Strange Bedfellows," a joint project with the Austrian literary magazine Manuskripte.