A bunch of us weird sisters are launching Geri Kim’s new chapbook THINGS I’D LET YOU DO TO ME (Recreation League) tonight in NYC! Come out for readings + killer jams! Continue reading
Category Archives: Books + Literature
The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson: An Object of Love
Maggie Nelson’s new book, The Argonauts (Graywolf Press, 2015), might be better than anything I’ve read previously by her (yes, better than The Art of Cruelty, and even, I dare say, Bluets). Part personal essay/cultural critique/love letter to her newborn child and to her partner, renowned artist Harry Dodge, this whirlwind of text falls into neat fragments with its title borne from a Barthesian simile:
… in which Barthes describes how the subject who utters the phrase “I love you” is like “the Argonaut renewing his ship during its voyage without changing its name.” Just as the Argo’s parts may be replaced over time but the boat is still called the Argo, whenever the lover utters the phrase “I love you,” its meaning must be renewed by each use, as “the very task of love and of language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new” (p. 5).
Filed under Books + Literature, Reviews
You Must Follow Your Own Trajectory: An Interview with Lucy K. Shaw
Despite all the ‘it’s not what you write, it’s how you write it’ clichés flying around, sometimes I still have a teenage belief that I need to be living some kind of physical extreme to be a good writer. I should be doing more drugs, having dramatic love affairs, traveling to the ends of the world, and generally making every day such an aggressive pursuit of experiences that I am always close to death. Then I read Lucy K. Shaw’s writing and feel very silly. She can make a story about a simple trip to the park or museum completely compelling to read. In her debut book The Motion (421 Atlanta), it is moments of solitude, disappointing social interactions, or simply living as a woman with fierce artistic ambition, that truly makes a—to borrow a phrase of Shaw’s—sensational lifestyle.
The book ends with a list called “Incomplete List of People I Would Want to Blurb My Chapbook.” The people range from the very famous (Beyoncé, Fiona Apple), to the dead (Louise Bourgeois, Amy Winehouse), to great writers who actually did end up blurbing The Motion (Chloe Caldwell, Wendy C. Ortiz). In lieu of a traditional interview, I thought it would be fun to ask Lucy questions about the people on that list, essentially having her blurb the people she wanted to blurb her book. The list is almost completely all women, so we get to be two feminist creatives talking about (as well as exchanging links/images/quotes of) other female artists, which is pretty much one of my favorite things to do. It happened through a shared Google doc. Continue reading
Filed under Books + Literature, Interviews
On Breaking the Bad Bitch Archetype in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child
It isn’t difficult to notice the similarity between the title of Toni Morrison’s latest novel, God Help the Child, and the famous tune sung by Billie Holiday, “God Bless the Child.” Holiday’s tune speaks measures to how we see and treat vulnerable members of our society. It contains a problematic message about who is deserving of help. As the song goes: “God bless the child that’s got his own….”
Filed under Books + Literature, Everything Else
Translating Djuna Barnes to Film: An Interview with Daviel Shy
My heart gaped when I learned that Chicago-based filmmaker Daviel Shy‘s next project would be a feature-length film based on Djuna Barnes’s novel Ladies Almanack. If you, like me, are enthusiastic about lesbian communities, ex-pat literary culture, fashion, and temporal wormholes, you’ll be as impatient as I am to see it. It won’t be long: the film is currently in production, with an ETA of early next year.
Barnes’s Ladies Almanack, first published in 1928 (full title: Ladies Almanack: showing their Signs and their Tides; their Moons and their Changes; the Seasons as it is with them; their Eclipses and Equinoxes; as well as a full Record of diurnal and nocturnal Distempers, written & illustrated by a lady of fashion), is a sly roman à clef chronicling Barnes’s (mostly lesbian) circle of friends and lovers, and their HQ in Natalie Clifford Barney’s long-running Parisian salon. In reinventing it as a film, Shy is creating a hybrid Chicago-Paris setting and what she calls a “triple time” zone where three distinct periods collide. The film follows characters based not only on Barney (played by Brie Roland) and other thinly veiled figures in the book, including Mina Loy (Brenna Kail) and Radclyffe Hall (Deborah Bright), anchored by narration from French feminists of a later time: Luce Irigaray (Elesa Rosasco), Monique Wittig (Eileen Myles), and Hélène Cixous (as herself). All of these characters blur into the present as they find form in the bodies of contemporary artists and writers. I spoke with Shy about the genesis of the project, her relationship to the book and the community to which it pays homage, and what it was like to work with the great Cixous. Continue reading
Filed under Books + Literature, Interviews, Movies + TV
Evidence of Humanity in Emily Hunt’s Dark Green
At one point in the history of the world, the continents were just one continent made up of many different tectonic plates. Actually, it seems that this happened at various moments in time; moreover, that the history of this planet is nothing more than the endless coming together and breaking apart of giant masses of land; only it isn’t endless, because it started at some point, and at some point our star—The Sun, which is a great name, I think—supposedly will die or will eat us, and this planet will not exist as anything more than matter, which exists forever. As far as we know. I mean, I don’t know if matter exists forever; that is not a thing that a person can know. It sounds right to me. I feel the truth of it someplace in my body, which is where one feels. And yet. Continue reading
Filed under Books + Literature, Reviews
Pretty Standard F*ck the System Stuff: An Interview with Halle Butler
Halle Butler’s Jillian’s the lucky thrill of a story, a first novel bursting out of its publishing gates with some of the funniest, grittiest and most devourable prose you’ll find all 2015. The story of Megan, a depressed and anxious 20-something slacker working at a dead-end job at a gastrointestinal doctor’s office, and her chatty coworker Jillian who’s about to descend on a financial meltdown after adopting a new dog, the novel revolves around attitudes—from the depths of Megan’s sarcastic remarks to Jillian’s “The Secret”-inspired too-wishful thinking. Continue reading
Filed under Books + Literature, Interviews
Writing to End a Tradition of Silence
Image via awwproject.org
Since early 2014, I have worked as a writing mentor for the Afghan Women’s Writing Project (AWWP), where I lead online creative writing workshops for women based in Kabul, Afghanistan. Responding to weekly writing prompts, workshop participants create poems and short essays which are discussed as a group, then revised and often published via the organization’s blog. The AWWP strives to create a safe, empowering space where women can share their stories with the world without the threats of violent retaliation, harsh criticism, or indifference that are part of many Afghan women’s lives. The organization was founded by journalist and novelist Masha Hamilton to honor the memory of Zarmeena, an Afghan mother of seven who was publicly executed by the Taliban in 1999. All of the AWWP’s mentors are women, which I believe makes it a little less intimidating for workshop participants who have been traditionally oppressed by male presences. I passionately believe in the importance of women collaborating with other women, encouraging them to find their voices and share their experiences.
Storytelling puts the power back into the hands of the writer. Through writing, workshop participants bring more narrative coherence to their own experiences, which offers a renewed sense of power and freedom within the constraints and oppression of their circumstances. When asked to reflect on her experiences working with AWWP, Nasima, a writer who lives in the Herat province, stated that the AWWP “understand[s] me and respect[s] me… AWWP provided me time to talk and find my heart. When I am writing… from my heart to paper, it makes me free of pain and hardship.” Continue reading
Filed under Books + Literature
Tender Points: An Interview with Amy Berkowitz
The following is an interview between Amy Berkowitz and me for her new book, Tender Points (Timeless Infinite Light), to be published this month. A narrative fractured by trauma and named after the diagnostic criteria for fibromyalgia, this book-length lyric essay explores sexual violence, gendered illness, chronic pain, and patriarchy through the lenses of lived experience and pop culture.
My body is washing dishes and it’s in pain. My body is on hold with California Blue Cross Blue Shield and it’s in pain. My body is dancing and it’s in pain. My body is Skyping Beth and it’s in pain. My body is taking a shower and it’s in pain. My body is riding BART and it’s in pain. My body is politely saying no and it’s in pain. My body is reading a book and it’s in pain. My body is at work and it’s in pain. My body is writing this and it’s in pain. My body is walking to meet you and it’s in pain. (127)
Filed under Books + Literature, Interviews
Locked and Loaded: An Interview with Montana Ray
Of Montana Ray’s debut book of poems, (guns & butter), Cathy Park Hong says, “Each magnetic phrase is locked and loaded as Ray burns holes into subjects ranging from interracial love, single motherhood, to America’s unrelenting addiction to gun violence.” Ray’s debut collection consists of 32 concrete poems in the shape of guns juxtaposed with ten delicious recipes (try the mango soup!), which, Ray points out, look like upside-down guns.
Ray is a feminist poet, translator, and scholar working on her PhD in Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She’s also mom to budding zoologist Amadeus and author of five chapbooks and artist books. I had the pleasure of talking with Montana over an order of Pão de Queijo about the process and thinking behind (guns & butter).
Emily Brandt: I love this book so much, Montana. I’m curious about the first time you made a concrete poem in the shape of a gun, and I’m curious about whether these poems were written in lines and then transformed into guns, or written in the gun shape.
Montana Ray: A lot of the language is sourced, so in the first poem I wrote for the book, the lines just cohered together in the shape of the gun. I’ve said this elsewhere, but the first poem I wrote in that shape is the first poem in the book. I’d received a text from my babysitter that said, “I might be late. A gun war is on.” Or a slightly less poetic version of that sentence. And I walked out to do my laundry with Ami; and some guy on the street was like, “You can touch it,” and then when I came home—I used to live in front of a tattoo parlor, I still live in the same place but the tattoo parlor has moved, and it’s now a fancy restaurant—one of the tattoo guys there, who I had a little crush on, he’d just gotten a new tattoo on his leg that was Billy the Kid’s gun. I was like, “Do you like guns?” And he said, “I like Billy the Kid.” So basically half of the language in the poem is sourced from one day’s interactions. I was also thinking about art, how you see guns on necklaces and on bags. The appropriation of that shape is done by designers of all sorts, and I wanted to do that for poetry.
Filed under Books + Literature, Interviews
