For Immediate Release

SUSAN CLARKE ENTERS THIRD DECADE OF NOT WRITING ABOUT FELINES

OCTOBER 30, 2007, LOS ANGELES, Calif. This fall marks the third decade in a row that Susan Clarke has written nothing on the subject of cats. A professional writer in the editorial field as well as an emerging creative writer, Clarke has never wasted any of her award-winning observational wordsmithing on cats, including descriptions of their hilariously superior attitudes, how cute they look sleeping with their paw curled around their nose, how to sew a Christmas stocking for them, and why they should all be named Mittens regardless of the markings on their feet. Clarke’s earliest surviving written works — a folder of stories dating from 1977 when she was eight years old — likewise waste no verbiage on the preciousness of a fluffy kitten napping upon a gingham cushion or anything about how sometimes cats end up being your only true friend when everyone else has abandoned you due to your hard drinking and unpredictable episodes of gunplay.

Clarke’s recent lambasting of Garfield does not count, as the target of her disdain in that essay was a predictable and unfunny comic strip. “The fact that Garfield is a cat is secondary,” she clarified in an interview from her apartment where she does not have a cat that serves as a child substitute. She goes on to explain that her personal code of artistic ethics forbids the written considerations of real, non-cartoon housecats, “with their velvety pink ears, affectionate lap kneading, and irresistible tiny meows every time you use the can opener.” According to Clarke, no respectable social commentator should waste his talent on descriptions of a cat chasing a butterfly in the sun. “Or a cat being your only company when everyone else turns out to be a liar who siphoned the gas from your Tercel to get out of the state and jump bail.”

In the future, Clarke promises there will continue to be no place in her work for “twee frippery or sentimental treacle” about such broad, pedestrian topics as cats. Indeed, Clarke’s frippery-free treatises seek to explore more provocative topics related to the alienation of the individual in a post-post-modern corporate-dominated landscape, and his struggle to find meaning in the modern human experience whose explosion of communication technologies is seemingly at odds with legions of voracious consumers who actually have little to say.

Clarke prefers that “the cat writing be left to people who have nothing else to talk about. I have much bigger fish to fry. Don’t I Mittens? Yes I do! Mommy has fish! Oh who’s a good boy now? Yes you are!”

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