Author Archives: Gina Abelkop

Gesturing Towards Intimacy: An Interview with Janice Lee


The Sky Isn't Blue Janice Lee

The first time I met Janice Lee was at an off-site AWP reading in Seattle. She was wearing a black leather jacket and looked cool and tough as fuck, and was there to read from the chapbook she co-wrote with Will Alexander, The Transparent as Witness (from Solar Luxuriance). Over the years since (and before!) I’ve run into Janice online and IRL many times, all of which attest to her way-of-being-in-the-world: cool and tough as fuck as her leather jacket promised, and also generous, supportive, and constantly working on her own books while also engaging with and helping sustain literature in her community. We talked over email about her book The Sky Isn’t Blue (CCM 2016), colors and textures, and how everything is everything– plus a brand new excerpt from her novel-in-progress, Imagine a Death.

Janice Lee is the author of KEROTAKIS (Dog Horn Press, 2010), Daughter (Jaded Ibis, 2011), Damnation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013), Reconsolidation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2015), and most recently the essay collection The Sky Isn’t Blue (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016). She currently lives in Los Angeles and is Editor of the imprint #RECURRENT for Civil Coping Mechanisms, Founder & Executive Editor of Entropy, Assistant Editor at Fanzine, and Co-Editor (w/ Maggie Nelson) of SUBLEVEL, the new online literary magazine based in the CalArts MFA Writing Program. She can be found online at janicel.com.

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Gina Abelkop: I visited the Entropy post in which you first published a draft of “The Salton Sea,” a section in your book The Sky Isn’t Blue, and loved so much that an essay on the poetics of space engaged so closely with sound and image, referencing Django Reinhardt and Wilco, the sound of water in your video from the Salton Sea– it’s a multisensory reading experience on the level of the sensory in addition to language. What was it like moving a text from a home on the internet to a home in a physical book– how did that shift the parameters of the project?

Janice Lee: There were rewrites, additions, deletions. Also thinking about how most of the images were less necessary in the book. I needed to reframe the project. The essays online were more like blog posts, immediate reactions, confessionals. It was a way for me to combat my writer’s block by writing, by articulating what I was feeling, and the immediate space of the internet allowed me to be urgent and honest and open. So for the book, there was a little bit of “cleaning up,” bringing the slightly more raw writing to the page, but I also wanted to preserve a lot of that. So it’s not a completely rewritten, polished book because the original feelings and thoughts, even if flawed, were important to keep intact for me.

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Between Memory and Forgetting: An Interview with Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes

Photograph by Brittainy Lauback

Photograph by Brittainy Lauback

I’m lucky to have known Gabrille Lucille Fuentes for several years now– we both live in Athens, GA and attend the same PhD program, and we co-curate a reading series together at our local indie bookstore. The first time I got to hear Gabrielle read her work aloud I was spellbound– not only was her prose riveting, but her ability to embody the work as she read it made for a thrilling listening experience. I knew she was a serious workhorse when it came to writing– working on several novels at once, and more diligently than most writers I know– and brilliant to boot, so it would only be a matter of time before her work began to enter world as books. Fuentes’ first novel, The Sleeping World, is out tomorrow (9/13) from Simon & Schuster/Touchstone, and it is ferocious, a book hot with searching and loss, tension thrumming constantly at the periphery. Per the jacket copy:

“Casasrojas, Spain, 1977. Military rule is over. Bootleg punk music oozes out of illegal basement bars and fascists fight anarchists for political control. Students perform protest art in the city center, rioting against the old government, the undecided new order, against the university, against themselves. At the center is Mosca, an intelligent, disillusioned university student, whose younger brother is among ‘the disappeared,’ kidnapped by fascist police, missing for two years, and presumed dead. Spurred by the turmoil around them, Mosca and her friends carry their rebellion too far and a violent act sends them spiraling out of their provincial hometown. But the further they go, the more Mosca believes her brother is alive and the more she is willing to do anything to find him.”

You can feel this novel in your bones– when the characters are sore and tired, sweatily roaming through Spain and France, your body meets the book in feeling. I was excited to ask Fuentes some questions about her writing process, the seeds of the book, and much more.

Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes is a writer and teacher. Her first novel, The Sleeping World, will be published by Touchstone  (Simon & Schuster) in 2016.  She has received fellowships from Yaddo and Blue Mountain Arts Center and was a Bernard O’Keefe Scholar in Fiction at Bread Loaf. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in One Story, Slice, Pank, The Collagist, Tweed’s, NANO Fiction, Western Humanities Review, The YokeSpringGun, and elsewhere.

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Gina Abelkop: What and when were the first seeds of this novel planted? Where were you living? Did it begin with a plot, character, or an emotional impluse?

Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes: Song lyrics often start stories for me. I’ll become obsessed with a song—especially one with a scrap of narrative and want to enter into the world of the song through my writing. Or the song will provide entry into a world I’ve carried but didn’t yet have access to. The Sleeping World began as a short story I wrote while listening to The National’s song “Runaway.” I was living in Boulder, Colorado and had just started my MFA. Boulder is a surreal town—it’s surrounded by gorgeous mountains but the town itself like a play-land created by Patagonia and Disney. Very new, very expensive, very white. The initial story came quickly, transported by a few of the lyrics. I wanted to communicate a tension between forgetting and memory, and when I went back to the story, I found that I was writing my own, despite the distance between me and the narrative. My brother had recently passed away and writing was a way for me to grieve, to speak to the dead and carry him with me in the living world.

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Roxane Gay and Yona Harvey will be writing a Marvel comic set in the world of Black Panther called World of Wakanda; Marvel interviewed Ta-Nehisi Coates (writer of Black Panther) and Gay about the new series: “It’s challenging but in a good way. As a fiction and nonfiction writer, it’s just me and the page but with this, there are so many people involved. It makes me admire the comic form even more, to see what it takes to pull an issue together.”

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Poets Morgan Parker, Angel Nafis, and Danez Smith are on tour in Paris this month!

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Apogee’s new Queer History, Queer Now issue is available to read online. Edited by Cecca Ochoa and Alejandro Varela, the issue includes work by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, Cristy Road, Raquel Salas Rivera, Audre Lorde Project, and more: “We offer up this work, unas ofrendas, for those who were taken from us this month, on June 12. Let our collective rage, love, tears, and dance beats move us toward a more just future.”

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Roxane Gay on the murder of Alton Sterling and America’s continued racist violence: “It’s overwhelming to see what we are up against, to live in a world where too many people have their fingers on the triggers of guns aimed directly at black people. I don’t know what to do anymore. I don’t know how to allow myself to feel grief and outrage while also thinking about change. I don’t know how to believe change is possible when there is so much evidence to the contrary. I don’t know how to feel that my life matters when there is so much evidence to the contrary.”

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Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore writes about why transgender troops should be an oxymoron: “What, then, would an end to the ban on trans people serving openly in the US military serve to facilitate? More of the same: endless war, plundering of Indigenous resources, both in the US and abroad, and a militaristic orientation that sees oppressed people as cannon fodder for US imperialism.”

Alice Bag discusses her new solo album with the L.A. Times: “I remember growing up and having people say that there are certain things you don’t talk about at the dinner table…You don’t talk about religion or sex or politics. Well, then I’m going to go eat on the TV tray. Those are the only things I want to talk about.”

Novelist Gabby Rivera discusses her YA novel Juliet Takes a Breath with Remezcla: “I had to do some serious soul searching and evolving in my personhood and politics. As I asked myself those questions, Juliet really came alive and the purpose of it, connecting with queer youth of color, became clearer to me.”

Fanta Sylla has created (and continues to edit) the Black Film Critics Syllabus, feat. subheadings such as “Black music video is Black cinema,” “Black women looking/looked at,” and many more.

Kathleen Hanna is featured in the new installment of Pitchfork’s Over/Under series.

Dev Hynes released his new Blood Orange record, Freetown Sound, a few days early, and you can watch the new video for “Thank You/Augustine” at his website.

Read a transcript of Jesse Williams’ recent BET Awards speech at Colorlines: “Now, this is also in particular for the [B]lack women in particular who have spent their lifetimes dedicated to nurturing everyone before themselves. We can and will do better for you.”

Eileen Myles on guns and gays: “When we talk about gun control I think we need to put the focus explicitly on protecting us from us and not from ISIS. We have guns, we live here, we find it so easy to kill. Something is so very wrong with America when the right to bear arms is not freedom but a curse.”

The 20th anniversary edition of Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues is now available in multiple formats, including free PDF.

At Buzzfeed, Doree Shafrir writes about how the media (specifically People) covers domestic violence: “And today, the language around domestic abuse remains euphemistic. Marriages or relationships that seem haunted by the specter of physical and/or emotional abuse are often labeled ‘turbulent’ or ‘volatile’ — certainly a legal hedge, but one that also allows the severity of domestic violence to be downplayed and, in a way, normalized.”

 

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Remember their names, faces, and lives– these are the victims of the Pulse shooting, primarily queer POC.

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If you live in Brooklyn/NYC or thereabouts, you are in the for a treat tomorrow! Popsickle 2016 features readings by Naomi Jackson, Wo Chan, our own WS editor Marisa Crawford, Joey De Jesus, Jami Attenberg and many more.

For those of you on the West Coast (Los Angeles, specifically), This Will Hurt Me More Than You opens at Last Projects tomorrow, feat. work by Ciriza, Michael Dee, and Cynthia Herrera; tomorrow night’s opening features a (not to be missed) a performance by Ciriza.

Alice Bag is interviewed at Bitch about her new solo album, how teaching informs her work, and more: “But when I go out on book tours and speak to students, it feels like I’m teaching again. It’s wonderful to get into discussions with college students who’ve read my book. As artists, we sometimes have opportunities to spark discussions about the changes we’d like to see. I’ve been able to do that through my music and touring, so in a way, I guess I’m still teaching, I’m just not in a classroom anymore.” Continue reading

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At Bitch, Amy Lam interviews MariNaomi about her new graphic memoir Turning Japanese: “I think every young person feels like they don’t quite fit in, or if they do fit in, they feel like people don’t really know them. My version of not fitting in was because I was half-Japanese in a very Caucasian area. It was definitely pretty naive to think that I would find some kind of belonging in a foreign country.”

The Offing, the online literary magazine formerly attached to the Los Angeles Review of Books, is making some big, necessary changes; support them and read more about it in this essay from editor Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: “In 2016 our endeavors must include engaging in long overdue transgressions against tradition by actively working with and for people who have long been pushed to the margins, whether through dispossession, slavery, colonialism, erasure or all of the above.”

Over at Flavorwire Sesali B. writes about navigating abuse allegations in the media in regards to the recent split of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard: “But can you legitimately defend someone against allegations that are so personal? How? In a situation like this, can you really use your experience with them to gauge what their experience was like with someone else?”

Amandla Stenberg answers readers’ questions at Rookie as part of their new “How We Live” series, which is “a series centering on the lived experience and thought of black teenagers.”

Iman Williams writes on Beyoncé’s Lemonade for Entropy: “The Black feminine is denied entry and access to worlds and modes of being that cease to exist without her; Beyoncé’s Lemonade indicates that the conditions that situate the Black feminine in this interstitial space inaugurate a Black feminist futurity that exceeds a traditional symbolic order.”

Ginger Ko writes on connecting through the internet in her new essay for The Offing, “The Cave”: “I don’t consider myself obligated to maintain Facebook as a representative snapshot of the world, in which the most adamant and idle take up the most space with their ample voices and ample time. My blocked list is important to me, and shall be maintained for as long as my Facebook lives.”

Women are having to travel farther and father to access abortion, as reported at the L.A. Times: “As more states adopt more restrictive laws and the number of clinics dwindles in the so-called “abortion desert” – an area that stretches from Florida to New Mexico and north into the Midwest – women are increasingly traveling across state lines to avoid long waits for appointments and escape the legal barriers in their home states.”

Domonique Echeverria talks to Paper Magazine about her suicide attempt, the harm pharmaceuticals can do, prosthetics, and her own path to healing: “I’d done coke and heroin and acid and I’ll tell you, pharmaceuticals are the worst fucking drugs. They can make people sick. I guarantee you there’s more people addicted to pharmaceuticals than street drugs.”

The new issue of Divine Magnet (edited by WS contributor Seth Landman!) is now live, featuring work from Monica Fambrough, Lesley Yalen, Cheryl Quimba, Natalie Lyalin, and more.

What did we miss this week? Let us know in the comments! <3

 

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