Sarah McCarry's Blog, page 2

all the books i read in ohio

megan martin / nevers

A photo posted by sarah mccarry (@sarahmccarry) on Feb 27, 2016 at 1:43pm PST

All the menu links on the Rejectionist are broken! I know! I’m working on it. I have sort of a lot to do at the moment. Yesterday I was having a (few) drink(s) before a meeting I didn’t want to go to and asked the bartender what he was reading, and he said “A Nick Hornby essay collection,” and I said, quite politely I will have you know, “Oh, I’ve never read him,” and the bartender looked at me for a minute and then said “You probably shouldn’t.” I don’t know, I guess I have a certain air about me.

I’ve been reading other things that aren’t Nick Hornby! Mostly women, aren’t you surprised. Last weekend I went to Ohio to read at Miami University, and it was great—people in Ohio are so nice!!! and I made lots of new friends, and got taken to a speakeasy, and got to tell a lot of Young People what to do with their lives, and was generally very impressed with myself. In Cincinnati I read with Megan Martin, who’s brilliant, and whose book Keep loving, keep fighting.
xoxo
sarah

most of all the books i am reading right now

A photo posted by sarah mccarry (@sarahmccarry) on Jan 29, 2016 at 9:29am PST

I read an interview a little while ago with someone who has a new book—I can’t remember who, honestly, or what MFA program he had gone to, but in the interview he said something about bringing his (also male) professor bits of beginnings of things, and his professor told him over and over again Not that one, that won’t make a novel—until, presumably, he came up with the idea that became his new book.

The interviewer described that process as a gift—how lucky to be told from the outset that what you are doing will never go anywhere, before you’ve put years of your life and sweat and blood and tears into some monster that will never even go loping off on its own across the cold ice of the far north but will just lie inert and gangrenous until finally you give it up of your own volition.

I don’t know how you know whether a bit will make a novel or not. That chunk of interview rankled when I read it and it’s still under my skin weeks later; I can’t help but think of friends, and friends of friends, who’ve been told over and over again by established writers and editors and agents (spoiler alert: my friends weren’t white; the writers/editors/agents nearly always were) that their stories weren’t stories. (“We just don’t see who will read this. We just don’t see the universal appeal. We just don’t think there’s a market. It’s so obvious you care about this story but will it reach a broader audience.”) But even where structural inequality is not a factor (and HMPH where is it NOT, I ask you, thanks a lot capitalism, you asshole) I think “this thing you’ve brought me isn’t a book” is bad advice. Any idea is a novel in the right hands, or a poem, or a play or a story or a nonfiction hybrid or any of a number of things; what matters is what you bring to the work, not what the work brings to you.

I’m reading Garth Greenwell’s first novel, What Belongs to You, right now, imagining pitching it in nascent form to some eagle-eyed member of the literary establishment: Well I don’t know, it’s about queer shame, sort of? And I mean it kind of has a plot but it’s like mostly at first about this professor’s encounters with a charismatic and periodically sinister homeless hustler and it’s set in Bulgaria but also Kentucky and the language is just really, really beautiful? Or Rabih Alameddine’s The Hakawati, which I’m also working through—So it’s like this guy’s dad is dying and he has to go back to Beirut but it’s also all of Lebanese history and like forty different sources from the Old Testament and Homer and the Panchatantra and the Quran and Persephone and this medieval book of gay poetry I didn’t even know existed and it jumps around in time a lot and all the stories are nested inside each other and it uses foreign words sometimes, I mean foreign to people who speak English? Or Mairead’s book See You In The Morning (have you read it???? if not why not????): The narrator is a teenager who has no established gender and is just kind of wandering around being wise and hurting? there's ice cream? Or Alia Mamdouh’s The Loved Ones, which I finally finished: Nothing happens except someone is dying and half the time you can’t even figure out who’s talking except suddenly you’re crying on the subway because it’s so perfect you don’t know what to do with yourself? And I mean I certainly wish people's writing teachers would tell them that "the failure of a white middle-class marriage" is the most boring idea on the planet, second maybe only to "Charles Bukowski," but I'm not in charge of things, which is probably for the best since then nobody would have published Lauren Groff's Fates and Furies, which I loved, because while technically it is about the failure of a white middle-class marriage I'm pretty sure it actually is about making fun of Jonathan Franzen.

Probably you see where I am going with this. And I think, too, that sometimes the most useful thing you can do as a writer is fail completely: to throw yourself into an absolute fucking disaster of a book, a hopeless wreck of a book, a terrible premise or a terrible execution or just a straight-up terror, because at some point you will emerge on the other side with a little more understanding of what you can and cannot do, of when an idea is fighting you because you’re lazy and cranky and tired and when it’s fighting you because it’s a terrible fucking idea, and no one can tell you that or teach it to you, no one on this earth can give you the gift of surviving failure; that’s a grimy old treasure you have to dig up all on your own.

Christine talked me into this amazing yoga cult that I’m falling in love with; you’re supposed to go every morning but I am reminding myself that I’m a work in progress and it’s okay if it takes me more than a few weeks to undo a lifetime of certain bad habits, like whiskey and sleeping through my alarm. This weekend I went to see Sleep No More with Nathan and it was great although I’m still not totally sure what it has to do with Macbeth. I just wandered around touching things and getting in trouble with the poor silent masked people whose job it is to prevent you from going places you’re not supposed to, and a pretty lady took me into a corridor and gave me a secret paper and I thought I was special but it turns out she does that at every performance, sometimes more than once (she gave Nathan a locket, hmph), and I fell down a flight of stairs while saluting a portrait of Shakespeare, which I am telling you in case you thought I was a glamorous person leading a glamorous life. Also apparently there’s nude witch orgy finale and I missed it; after falling down the stairs I retreated to the bar area to nurse my dignity and the end of the show passed me by.

What Belongs To You is lovely and The Hakawati is like—I can’t even describe what that book is like, but it’s certainly a humbling experience—and you should read Mairead’s book because it’s fucking brilliant. I read Kristen Stone’s chapbook from Birds of Lace, The Story of Ruth and Eliza, and it’s about queer women in the South and witches and friendship and it was so unbelievably good that I looked up interviews with her and ordered all the books she cited as influences, including Magdalena Zurawski’s The Bruise which is also incredible and an object lesson in writing queer-girl sex if such a thing is of interest to you. I read a bunch of other things that I keep meaning to tell you about. Alexander Chee’s The Queen of the Night comes out today and by now you probably don’t need me to tell you about it—huzzah, Alex!!!!!!—but in case you have been under a rock for the last six months it’s one of the best books I read last year and it has glamor and sex and opera and tragedy and doomed love and incredible clothes and queens and politics and scheming and sections that are so sad and epic and magnificent that it’s like reading Tolstoy except without any of the slow parts. Oh! and I'm reading Danielle Dutton's new book Margaret the First and it's GORGEOUS and you should get it as soon as it comes out, I'll tell you more about it when I finish it.

I got a car home from Sleep No More and my driver was great, one of those fantastic New York drivers you get every now and then who wants to tell you everything (“I used to drive Bruce Willis, you know he likes a lot of girls in his car”) and it was four in the morning by the time I got home but I couldn’t stop laughing and I remembered, again and again and again like how you do, even in the midst of despair, why it is that I live here, in this huge stupid glorious city of wild humans, in all these streets teeming thick with stories. Don’t let anyone ever tell you that yours can’t be a book.

xoxo
sarah

a conversation with szilvia molnar

Future Tense Books’s Kevin Sampsell has basically flawless taste (I’ve been fanning out on Future Tense since Sampsell published the hilariously brilliant Please Don’t Kill the Freshman in 2001) in addition to being a fabulous writer in his own right and a supporter of my own press, Guillotine, from the very beginning (FLAWLESS taste, I am telling you). Thus it comes as no surprise that FT’s newish chapbook release Soft Split is a slick percussive gem of a story: funny, dirty, feral, full of sex and death and masturbation and bad behavior and ladies just trying to get what’s theirs. Brooklyn-based Hungarian-Swedish writer Szilvia Molnar was just named one of Dazed magazine’s

xoxoxo sarah

Soft Split seems like a bit of a departure from (or maybe an extension of) your previous work in that it is less minimal; there’s a lot of very feral imagery and language that’s explicitly lush in places, or luxurious, although like your previous work it moves very swiftly back and forth between the real and the surreal. I’m curious if you started with the idea of writing about dreams or if you started writing and realized you were writing about dreams and then kept going.

I wasn’t well a couple of winters ago; I would wake up in the middle of the night and not manage to fall back asleep. I was dreaming a lot, mainly having nightmares, and I started to write them down just to start doing something. So, Soft Split always originated from a handful of real dreams but then I created more of a story around them and also made up a handful of more dreamlike scenarios.

Do you find that people respond to the chapbook as though it’s “true”? I’m always so interested in how experimental and/or first-person work by women gets received; people always seem to think you’re writing about yourself and your own experiences.

Yes, sometimes. I’ve had some male readers assume that I’m up for sex with them or up for talking about sex with them just because I write about sex in Soft Split. It’s frustrating and infuriating to think that men can view it as an invitation. But, I’m not going to let that hinder me in any way.

You’re a writer and you also work in publishing at an agency where I once interned, ha ha, small world [NOT THE AGENCY DOCUMENTED IN THE EARLY DAYS OF THIS WEBSITE --ed.] and as a translator and I’m always curious how other people move around between modes that are formed around work that’s structurally similar but also involves very different kinds of labor (or maybe it doesn’t for you?). Do you work on a lot of things at once, or do you focus on one project at a time?

Hey small world indeed! I haven’t translated in years so I’m not a translator but I get what you’re saying with the different modes of work that one can do, that may or may not also revolve around art. I need to separate the different things that I do in order to do a good job with them all. Sometimes I fail and sometimes I succeed. But on the side of my office job, I can sometimes work on different things at the same time. It depends on what I’m capable of and what I need to do. Before Soft Split, I was in the middle of writing a novel, but then got stuck and then thinking of Soft Split became so much more fun so I focused on that for a bit and now I have managed to go back to the novel and feel stronger how to approach it. I value that sometimes your work needs to sit and brew and simmer before you can continue.

How do you work? Where and when do you work?

Ha, I work all over the place on a lot of different things at once. I have a hard time figuring that balance out still, to be honest--my paid work usually takes precedence, for obvious reasons, but I’m trying hard to make more room for the writing I’m doing for love. I definitely find that I let my own projects percolate for a long time and then write fairly quickly once I’ve done a lot of thinking. Does most of your work involve that approach or is that a more recent thing?

I’m glad you are. And I’m sure it makes you better at the paid work that you have too.

It’s a wild mix for me. I’ve been working on a novel for two years and I’m still working on it but I’ve made a handful of other projects during that time too (all while working full-time...). And now I’m just back to focusing on the novel, even though there are a bunch of things I’d love to do at the same time. But, at this point, I would just be distracting myself from what I’m meant to be doing.

The other day I was completely stuck and wanted to give up and I texted a friend, an artist who lives in LA and asked him to tell me how it’s possible to keep on keeping on and he told me a story that ended with him encouraging me to keep the dream alive. It was so helpful to be reminded of what is important to you, since it can be so easy to forget.

I loved, loved, loved your photo project “The Man, The Writer, and His Cigarette,” and it made me think a lot about how exhausting it is to me at this point to engage with those kinds of gendered affects in a critical way; it’s a lot more satisfying and a lot less work to just make fun of them, and I think satire can often accomplish the same degree of subversion quite a bit more effectively. Was that impulse behind the project or did it come from a different place? Were you surprised by how much attention it got?

Thank you so much! I’m so glad you like it. I was surprised by the attention because it was just something that I did with a friend and then posted to my friends for us to laugh about but I’m happy that others get a kick out of it too. And you’re totally right, that’s definitely what I was aiming for with my friend, Maria, who helped me with the project. We’re both fascinated by how we can comment on something that is twisted or absurd or wrong! through humor.

Someone like Knausgaard for example, who keeps being photographed again and again with his piles of cigarettes and leather jacket and drum set and wrinkles and crossed arms is just begging to be made fun of (because what kind of a female writer is photographed like that? where are those writers?).

But I don’t care so much about him as about how other people can perceive that “persona” as attractive/interesting or even just taken more seriously. Like, did you see the video interview Vice did with him? Maria and I talked about putting on a sock puppet show where one of us pretends to be Knausgaard and the other one is the journalist and we drink beer and talk about Proust and listen and nod with socks on our hands. Respecting each other fully and taking each other seriously. What do you think—should we do it?

Oh my god. Yes. Yes, absolutely.

Hahahaha.

all the books i read in hudson

A photo posted by sarah mccarry (@sarahmccarry) on Nov 30, 2015 at 11:27am PST

I went away for the weekend and I didn’t look at the internet, not even my email really, for four days, which turned out to be a good idea, and then I looked at the internet briefly this morning and I didn’t want to look at the internet again after that.

So many people have said it already, I feel like I’ve been saying the same thing every day for years and I don’t want to have to say it anymore. If you don’t think human bodies should be safe from harm, if you don’t think human beings should be able to make their own choices about what happens to their bodies, if you don’t think human beings deserve access to basic medical care, I have nothing for you really, except that our morals don’t have much in common and I hope you never find yourself in a position where someone else turns the same degree of inhumanity on you. You’d be surprised how fast it can happen. I have held the hands of hundreds of people through their abortions, literally hundreds at this point in my life, and I can tell you that nobody ever thinks they are going to end up on that table until they do and some people are wrecked by it and some people are fine with it and some people come away with a complicated mixture of both of those things but nobody has ever once been anything other than relieved at the end. It’s okay for the life that matters most to be your own. It’s okay to say not now and it’s okay to say not ever. It’s okay to realize that not knowing what you want is in itself a decision about not wanting. If you think anyone makes that choice lightly you don’t know very much about being human and if you think meeting that choice with violence is acceptable do us both a favor and close this browser window right now and get the fuck away from me and everyone I love and everything I care about and don’t ever come back here again. Ever.

Before I went away for the weekend I read Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching, which is beautiful and confusing in that way of dreams you have sometimes where everything is clear and jewel-bright while you are dreaming and you come to understand something terribly important that your dream-self demands you hold on to but as soon as you wake up you realize the dream didn’t make any sense at all and you have no idea what it was you were supposed to remember. I am still thinking about that book but I might have missed something important. It’s hard to admit you don’t get something that you want to understand, I think that’s why so many book critics are so grumpy.

I’m not really a Thanksgiving person, it’s not a holiday that sits well with me, but it was nice to eat tasty things with people I like. And then on Saturday morning I got on the train with a person I like very much and trundled north along the river and got off in a lovely small town that used to be quite poor I think and is now stuffed with people from Brooklyn farting money all over the place and hilariously expensive antique stores and stores that sell ten-dollar pasta and stores that sell nice-smelling soaps and stores that sell that sort of furniture that looks as though somebody had a terrible idea on their lunch break at an architecture firm. But it was beautiful and there were lots of nice things to eat (I actually very much like ten-dollar pasta, which is an embarrassing thing to learn about yourself) and I had a brief delusional fantasy about a Splendid Apartment with a garden and old plank floorboards and a threadbare velvet couch in the bay window and dust motes dancing in the pale fall-morning light and drinking lots of coffee whilst I worked quietly at various masterpieces, et cetera et cetera.

There was also a bookstore with a bar in it, which I think is a fantastic idea, although this bar hasn’t got any whiskey, only wine and beer. I suppose it’s a bit more work to get drunk off beer than off whiskey and one doesn’t want idiots staggering about one’s bookstore spilling drinks on the books and pawing at the shelves but it still would have been better with whiskey. If I ever open a bookstore bar I shall have whiskey in it and I simply shan’t allow any persons to enter who can’t drink respectably, which I suppose is not a very good business model for a bar, but if I ever have enough money to open a bookstore bar it will be because I am so spectacularly rich I can open a bookstore for recreational reasons and then it won’t matter if I haven’t got a very good business model and the only people who can come in will be people I like and nobody will be allowed to talk about stupid books either.

Oh! but I meant to say that I got an omnibus of His Dark Materials and took it on the train with me and read it in huge gulps all weekend—I’ve read them all before of course, probably a dozen times each, but not in years, and I hadn’t exactly forgotten how much I love those books but I hadn’t thought about them in a while. They’re brilliant in a lot of ways and even when they aren’t they are so gorgeous it doesn’t matter. There’s something delicious about reading books like that in winter. And on the train home I cried like a little kid at the death of Lee Scoresby, and the train was so crowded I’d had to sit next to some hippie-ish character who had tucked a pint of milk in his seat-back pocket and the train was hot and the milk had gone off a bit, so I snuffled through the death of Lee Scoresby next to this snoring stranger who smelt of spoilt milk and feet, and I didn’t even mind. Well, I minded enough to tell you about it, I guess.

I have a million things to do! as always! But it was awfully nice to have a weekend. I don’t get those very often, to tell you the truth. Beauty Is a Wound just came in for me at the library, I will tell you about it, and also I am still reading The Loved Ones by Alia Mamdouh in little bits here and there, and I am like five hundredth in line at the library for M Train, there are a bunch of other books in a pile on the floor that I can’t remember the titles of [SOMEONE MAKE ME STOP BUYING BOOKS FOR THE LOVE OF GOD], obviously I’m not doing anything until I finish The Amber Spyglass but that won’t take long. I didn’t know about dark matter when I first read those books and then I wrote a whole book of my own about the wild mysteries of the cosmos and all the bits about dark matter now seem both sillier and more beautiful in a way that’s hard to explain. Dust happens when matter becomes aware of itself; that’s a nice way to think about it, if you ask me, although an astronomer would probably throw The Golden Compass at your head for putting it like that. I know I always sound like a hippie and of course in fact I’m quite fierce and very goth and mean but I can’t help it, I still think the universe is breathing. Take care, okay? Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other.

xoxo
sarah

new guillotine title from sofia samatar & kat howard!!!!

I know I know!!!! It took forever!!!! But it's here at last and it is 100% worth the wait! I am SO excited for this brand-new Guillotine chapbook, with two gorgeous new short stories from the magnificent Sofia Samatar and Kat Howard, with a fabulous cover designed by the equally fabulous Adly Elewa and interior design by the brilliant Claudia Martinez! This one will sell out REAL fast so don't be slow on the draw.

Guillotine is fiscally sponsored by Fractured Atlas! You can make a tax-deductible donation to Guillotine here.

SOFIA SAMATAR: MEET ME IN IRAM / KAT HOWARD: THOSE ARE PEARLS

Introducing GUILLOTINE FANTASTIQUE: Speculative fictions from some of the most brilliant voices working in the field. From luminaries Sofia Samatar and Kat Howard, two unsettling and gorgeous short stories exploring memory, loss, language, and love.

Sofia Samatar is the author of the award-winning novel A Stranger in Olondria and co-editor of the online journal Interfictions. Kat Howard is a former competitive fencer, a sport she feels was excellent preparation for becoming a fiction writer. Her debut novel, Roses and Rot, will be published by Saga Press in early 2016.

as always, thank you for your support! have a good week, treasures!

xoxo
sarah

something there is that doesn't love a wall

A photo posted by sarah mccarry (@sarahmccarry) on Nov 17, 2015 at 10:30am PST

I went to yoga in the morning yesterday like a real grownup & wandered around the Botanical Garden after (free on Tuesdays!) in the pale cool sun, looking at the blown roses, the fallen leaves red-gold against the bright grass.

What a luxury to breathe in deep the last faint scent of blooming, pocket a drift of petals. All around us pain aggregates, an abscess of fluid crusting over, breaking through, crusting over, breaking through, no clean scar for the fester when even the bone is rotten. All I want is to go around with the people I love and the people I would love if I knew them and keep them safe, burning from the inside out with the raw fear of how much danger tracks so many of my chosen family: police, real terrorists (drunk on whiteness, guns in their hands, guns in their pockets), governments; how can we ever learn to carry every day the simmering terror that at any moment a call will come, an email, I’m sorry to have to tell you. Why should any of us have to learn to carry this kind of pain. Why should any of us—

I’ve been crying in the wrong places, half-undone by the need to hold strangers as I pass them on the street, to say I love you, I love you, I’m sorry, please stay safe, please be safe, please. Is it really so much to ask that all kinds of human bodies be allowed to move around unharmed in the light. The other night a man followed me for a block singing lyrics of his own invention, an off-key litany of blood, very loud: murdering his neighbors, murdering the women who refused him (meant for me? I don’t know but it was dark and the block was the longest one I’ve walked in recent memory); why, I wanted to ask him, why do this, is your own heart so starved you can think only to gorge it on the fear of other people. Thinking: we are an ill-made species.

But yesterday after I lay in the grass at the gardens I went to Unveiling Visions, the Afrofuturism exhibit at the Schomburg Center: circled through story after story, painting after painting, song after song about black people as kings and queens amidst all the constellations, as cyborgs and pilots, as pioneers, as citizens of far planets, as protagonists, as free, of building palaces in distant galaxies in spite of, because of, sorrow, of daring to dream past suffering but not without it, what miracle these stories that both bear witness to trauma and give shape to hope. Sobbing like a child in front of a glass case of books while a little old lady (tourist) edged away from me, thinking here is the future, here is the future, here is the future: we can still tell stories. Perhaps we are not so badly made after all. We have at least this one piece of grace to carry with us as weapon, as shelter, as beacon, as promise.

What else is there to do? I don’t know. I’ve been reading Alia Mamdouh’s The Loved Ones and it is very beautiful, and Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation, which is funny in a way that hurts, and listening to the new Robert Galbraith audiobook when I run, I love those books (more than Harry Potter actually, don’t tell anyone) but this one has a lot of ladies getting cut up in it so I might have to give it up (J.K.R.!!! Why!!!!!). I read The Wolf Border and I liked it pretty well but not so well as The Electric Michaelangelo. Wolves though! Wolves, rare and wise, running in the mountains. Oh and that little Philip Pullman book about how Lee Scoresby met Iorek Byrnison, which is charming but hasn’t got Lyra in it so really what use is that. I’m going right now on my lunch break to meet my best friend’s baby for the first time. She said when he was very new all he did was sleep but now that he’s been around for a bit he can’t stop screaming. Yeah, I said, that sounds about right.

Take good care of each other, okay? Take care.

xoxo sarah

new moon, 11/11

print day

A photo posted by sarah mccarry (@sarahmccarry) on Nov 7, 2015 at 9:18am PST

HI BABIES happy new moon! & happy Diwali! The new moon is transiting through Scorpio and you know what that means: death and rebirth, transformation, cleaning out the closet of your heart. Throw out the shit that doesn’t fit you. It’s okay if you get a little cranky, change is hard.

I have been thinking a lot about how to hang out with the pain of people I love, because a lot of people I love are dealing with a lot of pain right now, because it’s a hard time to be alive and human and going around in the world, it’s a hard time to be poor, it’s a hard time to live in certain kinds of bodies and certain kinds of lives. It’s a hard time to have awful things happen in an otherwise gentle life. It’s a hard world to live in, the world we’ve been given. The world to which most of us did not consent. I have been saying you’re not alone a lot and it’s not you and no really it’s not you and really for real, it’s not you. Living with pain is hard and living with the pain of people you love when you are not in pain is hard because you want to fix it and you can’t, you want to take it away and you can’t, you want to undo all the things that are wrong with the world and you can’t. You can sit with the raw flesh and the gristle, you can think about the times you yourself were a walking wound making messes everywhere and leaving a trail of blood and spit and sweat and tears. You can be quiet. You can say I see you, I see you, I’m here. What else? I don’t know. I’m working on it.

This time last year, more or less, I was thinking about light and transformation and how many times my life has circled back on itself, how each of those loops has taken me to the same place and a new place all at once. In a different decade I sold books at a Margaret Atwood reading and last weekend I hung out with Margaret Atwood at a cocktail party (thanks Book Riot!!!!) and I got to say I’m a writer too (I didn’t say this, actually, I am terrible about saying this, my friend Stephanie told Margaret Atwood this on my behalf while I looked around in a panic) and Margaret Atwood asked me what I wrote about and I said Teenagers and Margaret Atwood said What do the teenagers do you in your books and I said Drugs mostly and Margaret Atwood (no beats missed by that woman I tell you what) said Oooh what kind. Then she told me what she’s working on. I’m working on something too I said. She kind of rolled her eyes. Of course, Margaret Atwood said.

Molly told me to read Radiance by Catherynne Valente and she was totally right, it’s gorgeous: space noir? undoing the story of the Sad Lost Girl? fairytale, decoupage, a book about velvet and sadness and glasses clinking and movies and stories and all those things pieced together in a way that made me want to throw out everything I’m working on and start it all over again but in a good kind of way, not a despairing one. I really wanted to read Emily Bitto’s The Strays but it was so expensive to order it from Australia! and then I met Emily Bitto in a bar in Brooklyn (she’s lovely), true story, and we traded books in the mail, and I tell you what The Strays is totally worth ordering from Australia and if you like complicated girl friendships (who doesn’t) and books about how artists fuck things up and replicate the same old while pretending to do things differently and feral girl childhoods and jealousy and making a life out of making art you had ought to get it from Australia too, or else you should just publish it in the US if you are a person who does that sort of thing. I read a popular thriller to see if I could figure out how to write one but it was awful so I’m not going to tell you what it was. Do me a favor and put a lot of love out into the world right now, and if you don’t have room for that know that a lot of that love is directed at you.

Kat Howard and Sofia Samatar’s Guillotine chapbook is almost done! I will tell you as soon as it’s ready. The cover is designed by Adly Elewa and printed by me and it looks so good.

xoxo sarah

i can't stop reading elena ferrante!!!

A photo posted by sarah mccarry (@sarahmccarry) on Oct 18, 2015 at 2:28pm PDT

I can’t stop reading Elena Ferrante!!!

It drives me nuts when other people are right but what can a person do. It is a bleak bleak world, the Neapolitan Quartet, and it is making me think a lot about trust and exhaustion and refusing to take care of people and how useful that can be sometimes and how bad I am at it. I read the first three books in two weeks and now I’m partly into the fourth and I have all sorts of things I am supposed to be doing today and tomorrow and this weekend and next week but ALL I WANT TO DO IS FINISH ELENA FERRANTE, what can a person do about that either.

I went to see the Martian a couple of weeks ago and I liked it fine for a movie in which the white dude lives, who doesn’t love space, idiots is who, but what was missing from that movie for me was a sense of wonder, of joy, of holy shit guys we’re on Mars, look at the crazy nonsense human beings get up to for absolutely no reason: art, poetry, flying around in spaceships, discovering the secrets of the universe. For a movie in which things are constantly happening there is next to no interiority, so little joy or emotional truth, and so ultimately it’s boring. And obviously it’s not very fair to compare the Martian to Elena Ferrante but for books in which basically nothing happens and which had ought to be quite boring there is so much emotional truth that they are relentlessly fascinating, and in another book the Postmodern Conceit of a pseudonymous writer creating a writer-character who shares the same name would be totally insufferable but Ferrante is so good at it—funny, also, how when a Fellow gets up to something similarly meta he is most likely to be hailed by critics as wildly clever whereas when a lady does it people are just like “yes but are they AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL,” which is the least interesting question it is possible to ask about a work of literature, which is probably why people ask it of women all the time, but anyway that’s neither here nor there.

I almost got into a fight last night with someone complaining about how his son has to read Jane Austen in school and I mean to be honest I am not the world’s biggest Austen fan either but if you are going to say a thing like “he should be reading books about real themes instead” in reference to Jane Austen you should be prepared for me to hit you in the face, but then I was like you know what, whatever, another whiskey please bartender and why don’t I get out my Elena Ferrante book now, alas! it's not about real themes like for example what men think about things. I am going to be talking about publishing Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (EVE this conference tomorrow if you are in New York and if you aren’t the whole conference will be livestreamed, look at us all inhabiting the future together. I went to see the Space Shuttle Discovery and I ate some astronaut ice cream and it's not as good as I remember it being from third grade. I’m working on a new book, it’s not about space, it’s slow going, I keep wanting to throw everything out and start over but at some point you have to just, like, barrel forward and then fix it later. It’s still fall! Aren’t you happy!!!! I read Alexander Chee’s book The Queen of the Night and you are going to LOVE IT when it comes out I promise, and I read Rebecca finally and oh my god is that book great or what, just so gorgeously bonkers. After Elena Ferrante I am going to read some more Helen Oyeyemi and a bunch of books that I bought when I forgot that I’m not allowed to buy books anymore, I’ll tell you all about them. Happy October, dear creatures, see you soon. xoxoxo sarah

A Book I Have Been Reading Lately

A photo posted by sarah mccarry (@sarahmccarry) on Oct 7, 2015 at 12:37pm PDT

I’ve been reading books and making piles of books to write about for several months now, so that the pile of books I read and meant to write about three months ago is slowly being eclipsed by the pile of books I read and meant to write about two months ago, which is disappearing under the pile of books I read and meant to write about last month, also half of them are overdue at the library, all of which is causing me undue stress, so why don’t I tell you about the book I read yesterday instead.

I mean, I didn’t start it yesterday, but I didn’t do anything else yesterday either so that I could finish it, with that glorious terrible feeling of being completely unable to put down a book that you never ever ever want to end and now I HAVE finished it and it is OVER and I don’t know what ELSE I am going to READ that is this GOOD (I started Elena Ferrante today like seventeen hundred years after everyone else in the universe told me to read Elena Ferrante and idk, I like it fine, but do people not know that other books by women about being friends with women exist? I guess not. People should read more, especially book critics, here’s looking at YOU James “’amiably peopled bildungsroman’ my ass” Woods). (Like seriously James Woods do you even read your WIFE? You SHOULD.)

I got Mira Jacob’s debut novel out of the library after I read her facemelting essay for Buzzfeed on racism and publishing; in her own words from that piece, A Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing is about “what happens to a family when one of its members starts to disappear right in front of them. It’s about how crazy we get trying to save each other, how love can both fuck you up and save the day at the exact same time.” But I would argue that Mira Jacob is, here, being tremendously modest; this book is about that, yes, but it is also about love and loss and family and grief and when your mom is a stubborn motherfucker and your dad is just as stubborn, and when you are trying to be an artist and so scared of your own self you keep fucking it up, about trying to make your family happy and your friends happy and everyone who loves you happy all at once and how that can fuck you up too. It’s about all your well-meaning relatives at every goddamn family event screaming WHEN YOU GONNA GET MARRIED KIDDO like your ovaries will wither on the spot and fall out of your body in front of them if you are not sufficiently interrogated on your degree of acquiescence to heteropatriarchal norms. It’s about never getting over losing someone you love. It’s about coming to terms with living on colonized land. It’s about being a human figuring out how to be a human, something resembling a grownup maybe even, which is a little more relatable at this point in my life than I would honestly like it to be but we work with what we’ve got. I cannot believe this book is a debut novel—Jacob says in the acknowledgments that it took her ten years, and I believe it, this book is so rich and so well thought-out and tackles so many complex and interwoven threads with grace and delicacy and somehow anchors this whole vast and gorgeous web effortlessly around the story of its more-or-less main character, a youngish photographer trying to build a career as an artist in 1990s Seattle (I KNOW, BE STILL MY HEART).

“In the publishing world, they don’t say, ‘We just don’t want your story.’ They say, ‘We’re not sure you’re relatable’ and ‘You don’t want to exclude anyone with your work,’” Jacob writes, about the reception her book sometimes received and the reception work by writers of color receives in general, and I can tell you for a fact that I heard this a thousand goddamn times out of the mouths of very well-intentioned people who would rather drink Miller High-Life in front of Lorin Stein than be called racist, like super-nice people you would be happy to have lunch with and if you work in publishing or are a writer probably already have had lunch with at some point. Possibly you are these people. The point is they are not monsters. That’s not usually how it works. I mean I’ve heard some of the dudes at New Yorker parties are a little sketch but in general, you know, everyone’s nice.

But let’s take a Great American Novel like, I don’t know, Freedom, which is in my wildly unhumble opinion a distinctly less funny Madame Bovary cover album: what, for real, is “relatable” about Freedom? Like, which part? Seriously, tell me? Because I can’t actually figure it out. I don’t mean to keep harping on JFranz! I’m not even mad at him anymore! But if we are interested solely in “relating” to our literatures, what sounds more relatable to you, a bunch of really stifled and unpleasant middle-class white people (if I remember correctly literally the only character of color in Freedom is a super-hot boss-banging Slutty “Exotic” South Asian Secretary who is conveniently DECAPITATED IN A CAR ACCIDENT so that the Noble Bird-Watcher can return to his Shrewish and Unintelligent Wife) or a big extended messy family where everybody loves each other and no one really knows how to express it and lots of people are mad about shit they won’t talk about and one of these people, the protagonist, is trying to build a life for herself AND reconcile herself to her family’s complicated history AND deal with a bunch of grief AND not bury her dreams in her dead-end job that is slowly overtaking her life? Yeah, I know which book I’d rather read, too. I could write another ten thousand words on subtle racisms in publishing but I swear to god I do that, like, every week, so just how about MORE BOOKS LIKE THIS, OKAY. MORE OF THEM. I LOVED THIS BOOK. I WANTED IT TO NEVER EVER EVER END. I WANT MORE BOOKS WITH STORIES LIKE THIS. MORE BIG EPIC AMBITIOUS BOOKS BY WOMEN AND WOMEN OF COLOR. I. WANT. THAT. I. BUY. A. FUCKTON. OF. BOOKS. And I also make a lot of other people buy books that I love, either by force of personality or just sheer force, so. I am going to go buy THIS book, which I got out of the library, because it is so GOOD I want it in my HOUSE.

I’m not unhinged, cross my heart, or even drunk, the Internet has just really been irritating me lately. Other stuff I read that I will try to write about: May-Lan Tan’s Things to Make and Break (SO CREEPY, SO GOOD), Geoff Ryman’s Was (see, I do too read books by men (sometimes)), Liz Hand’s Wylding Hall, which is, duh, gorgeous, Meagan Brothers’ Weird Girl and What’s His Name. I am really excited about Sunil Yapa’s Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, out next year, which is about the WTO protests!!!! Someone finally wrote a novel about the WTO protests!!!!! I can’t wait!!!! I read A Little Life and I have a LOT of Thoughts about it and Tragic Queer Narratives and writing about trauma and other stuff but also I am supposed to be writing another book by myself. So many things to do. Anyway it’s fall, dear ones, I hope you are doing fall things and wearing your best fall clothes, and digging out your finest vampire lipsticks, and making pies and picking apples and lying in fields on the last warm days looking up at the clouds and napping. Me too.

xoxox

sarah

on totems

Recently, the Native American critic and scholar Dr. Debbie Reese, whose work focuses on representations of Native Americans in children's literature, wrote to me after reading my first novel, All Our Pretty Songs. (One of the main characters of the book, Raoul, is Navajo.) She was kind enough to tell me she enjoyed the book; however, she wrote that:

A task ahead of me is how to write about a book that [...] has one of those 'one line' problems that I rail about:

"High school has gotten no less prisonlike over the summer. I’m a senior now, officially at the top of the totem pole, building memories and planning for my future."

McCarry, Sarah (2013-07-30). All Our Pretty Songs (p. 158). St. Martin's Press. Kindle Edition.

As she rightly points out, to describe a person's status as "high" or "low" on the totem pole is a misrepresentation of the culture of the Northwest Native tribes who create totem poles and the meaning and purpose of those poles. Further, as Robin K. Wright notes:

In the late 1800s most tribes ceased to carve these monumental poles when the potlatch, the ceremony held when poles were raised, was made illegal in Canada. Nevertheless, some families, especially the Kwakwaka'wakw people at the north end of Vancouver Island, continued to potlatch in secret. They carved and raised poles and made many masks to use at these ceremonies. During this time, Indian agents and missionaries discouraged the carving of new poles and the associated ceremonial activities, and people began to move from their old clan houses into single-family frame houses located near fish canneries, lumber mills, and trading posts. Very few old poles still stand in their original locations today. Many of the poles were taken or sold to museums and collectors around the world, others were allowed to decay, or cut down and chopped up. --"Totem Poles: Heraldic Columns of the Northwest Coast," Robin K. Wright

"Officially at the top of the totem pole," then, is a single line that invokes an entire history of genocide, erasure, and oppression; what appears at first glance to be a minor misrepresentation becomes a kind of synechdochic stand-in for centuries of violence against the indigenous peoples of the part of the world where I was born and that I love more than any other landscape on earth. As Ayesha Siddiqi notes, "every border implies the violence of its maintenance"; my glib reproduction of a cultural misrepresentation, far from being a minor slip, fully implies the violence required to create and disseminate it. And my own individual response to Dr. Reese's rightful highlighting of that violence--whether it is embarrassment, shame, a heartfelt apology and promise to do better--neither alters that violence nor undoes the actual harm it both represents and reinforces. Dr. Reese's careful and attentive reading of my work, for which I am deeply grateful, came when I had already been thinking for some time about white writers' responses to individual or structural critique of structural oppressions within the publishing industry, representations of race in texts by white writers, and white writers' anxiety around "punishment" of white writers who reproduce stereotypical and racist representations of racialized bodies.

It is important to recognize that, while the perceived and emotional consequences of that often very public castigation are real, there are almost never material consequences for white writers who participate--either with awareness or unwittingly--in the propagation of institutionalized racisms (and sexisms, and homophobias). In particular, white writers who are already commercially successful will continue to be commercially successful and will see few to no professional consequences for actions or language that are complicit with or openly supportive of those institutional oppressions. They will, in short, continue to make money. The same degree of material safety is not in any way extended to writers, especially writers of color, who call into question dominant ideologies or individual actions. Publishing is an industry, not an anticapitalist project, and any industry whose end goal is capital is not an industry that will ever invest in--or, frankly, have any interest in--material, transformative justice. If "diversity" sells, publishers will sell diversity, but increasingly effective packaging and distribution of "diverse" stories should not be mistaken for anything resembling structural change. (See here Jennifer Pan, "The Limits of Diversity.")

I do not mean at all to discount individual experiences of harassment, shame, or scrutiny via social media; it is not fun, by any stretch of the imagination, to experience the wrath of the internet. But it is also important to recognize that the more social and material capital an individual has access to, the more he or she is able to mediate the real or perceived emotional consequences of that attention, and the more likely that attention is to be a single moment in the span of a lifetime rather than, as it is for marginalized people, a lifetime's span of oppressions ranging from daily microaggressions to physical assault or even death. (I am deeply indebted here to Tressie McMillan Cottom's 2014 piece "Racists Getting Fired: The Sins of Whiteness on Social Media.")

As creators, it is extremely difficult for us--for all of us, no matter our race, religion, ethnicity, ability, or sexuality--to decenter ourselves from conversations around the purpose and production of what we create. For those of us who occupy one or more identities privileged by the dominant culture, it is also extremely easy to fixate on the wrong questions. "Why aren't I 'allowed' to write characters of color," "How do I 'correctly' write characters of color," and "Who is the 'expert' I can access to 'authenticate' my portrayal of a character of color" are far less useful questions for white writers to be asking ourselves than "What does it mean to write characters of color within the confines of an industry that routinely privileges narratives by white writers over writers of color."

We are all inhabitants of an explicitly and implicitly racist, sexist, homophobic, and imperialist system. There is no out; there is no story we can tell that will exonerate us from its implications or liberate us from its effects. For many white writers, including myself, writing stories that include a diverse spectrum of sexualities and racial identities is an accurate reflection of the world we live in. But the professed longing of white writers to reproduce the "authentic" racialized body, the "correct" narrative of otherness, is a convenient disguise for the underlying gestures of colonization and erasure that enable those reproductions to be canonized and rewarded to an extent that narratives produced by othered writers themselves are not. The performance of that longing for "authenticity" serves only to further insist on the centering of whiteness at the expense of writers of color, whose sole role in any conversation about "authenticity" can only be as experts whose testimony serves to reassure the all-pervasive anxieties of whiteness. It goes without saying that that labor of authentication is unpaid.

For white writers, it is imperative as well for us to remember that we are not producing these stories in a vacuum. As writers of color--and in particular, women writers of color--have been pointing out for literal decades, white writers' work is far more likely to be praised, promoted, published, and financially rewarded than the work of writers of color reflecting their own experiences of the world. White writers have the institutional power to constantly refute any interrogations of that injustice with our own individual hurt, anxiety, or insistence that we ought to be "allowed" to tell stories that do not mirror our own lived experiences (as if any Twitter controversy has ever actually prevented a commercially successful white writer from telling whatever story about people of color he or she wishes to produce). We are far more likely to receive material and emotional support and sympathy if our work is called into question than the writers of color who are investing time and energy into producing those critiques. And we are far less likely--indeed, not very likely at all--to suffer any professional consequences whatsoever if we produce narratives outside our own experience that reinforce racist tropes and ideologies. There is no correct performance of allyship, no perfect narrative, no story we can tell that makes institutional racism go away. There is no institutional body that will punish us if we cause harm, whether or not we intend to. If language is our business, it is our work as well to at the very least pay attention to it.

All of which brings me back to All Our Pretty Songs, totem poles, and the thankless, exhausting work of writers and critics like Dr. Reese, who have devoted their careers to calling into question the constant reinforcement of stereotypes and racist tropes that occurs within the publishing industry. As an individual, I can apologize all I like for failing to do my job as a writer, but no apology I can make will take away the fact that my error is indicative both of my own inattention and the inattention or outright disinterest of an industry that continues to put into wide circulation that error and thousands of others like it by thousands of other writers. There is no closure available here. And so I will leave you not with my words, but with those of Dr. Reese, who has given me permission to reprint them here:

In talks I give, and in conversations, I suggest that teachers teach kids that books are not sacred. We can write in them, if they're ours. What if you said to your readers, that you want them to take our their copy of SONGS and turn to that page, and do x or y or z.

First, they need to know the phrase "low man on the totem pole" is inaccurate because those poles do not have that kind of value associated with them. They cross out that sentence.

Second, they can choose what to do. Kind of like those "choose your own ending" books. They can...

Replace those words with ones you give them.

Come up with their own phrase to replace the one in the book.

Redo the passage, maybe with the character saying that out loud to someone, Raoul, maybe, and having him say 'hold up' in some way. A mini-lecture, but delivered in a clever and not didactic way.

I am, as always, hugely in debt to the work of a great many writers of color in my thinking around these issues, including but by no means limited to:

Ken Chen
Daniel José Older
Justina Ireland
Camryn Garrett
Debbie Reese
Tressie McMillan Cottom
Sara Ahmed