Sarah McCarry's Blog, page 3

seven year bitch

A photo posted by sarah mccarry (@sarahmccarry) on Aug 25, 2015 at 12:56pm PDT

Today's the seven-year anniversary of my move to New York--seven years!!! I know, I don't believe it either--and according to Susan Miller, the luckiest day of my year, but the jury's still out on that one.

A few days ago I went into a deep k-hole of productivity blogs, emerging with a "bullet journal" and a newfound awareness of something called the "Konmari System," which promises a serene, clutter-free, and restful abode in the event one is able to adhere to its various tenets; if one is also to embrace the testimonial of a number of before-and-after "Konmari" pictorial articles, significantly more expensive furniture than the furniture one owned previously appears as if by magic as soon as one has properly "Konmari"-d one's possessions. Unfortunately there are four hundred people ahead of me in the New York Public Library hold queue for the "Konmari" book, so its exact precepts remain a mystery, but as far as I can tell they consist mainly of Girl, Throw That Shit Out, Also Roll Your Socks. I already roll my socks, so yesterday I threw some shit out.

I have a lot of issues with the rhetoric of self-help and manifestation (not to be confused, I don't think, with infestation), which is usually spouted by upper middle-class white folks for whom "budgeting" consists of "giving up" a five-dollar-a-day latté habit in order to save for a vacation in some tropical paradise whose swanky hotels are built on the sites of genocides. It's a lot easier to "manifest" shit if you're a white girl from money. But the threefold law predates at least the Internet, and as dipshitty as it may sound to the skeptical reader, throwing that shit out felt like more than just making space; it felt like freeing myself from all the detritus of the years before this one that I've been carrying around to no good effect. Old lives and old loves and a lot of bits of paper I don't need; the catharsis of finally releasing all those odds and ends back into the universe its own kind of magic. I feel lighter. I'm still here. Tonight I'm going to buy myself a glass of nice champagne and toast a lot of work and a lot of luck and making room for more good things to come into my life. Maybe when I get home the universe will have bestowed upon me my new Konmari-manifested bookcases. I'll let you know.

all the books i read in new mexico

A photo posted by Justin Messina (@sirmessina) on Aug 17, 2015 at 10:11pm PDT

photo: justin

I went to the desert for six days to drive around with my boyfriend and go to my brother’s wedding—brother in love, not blood, but you know what I mean.

I haven’t been to the desert in a long time—different boyfriend, different life—and I forgot, I really did, how big the sky can be, how red the earth, how open the world.

The last time I was in the desert I wasn’t thinking much about its history. But on this trip the dirt smelled like blood. The desert stories that matter, that get under your skin, are about survival, resistance, secrets, love. On the Taos Pueblo, which you can tour with a guide—in our case, a thorn-sharp young woman who detailed hundreds of years of atrocities committed against her family in a calm and affectless monotone—I went into the chapel, where the Virgin is dressed in different colors according to the seasons, where the altar is heaped with corn, and where Jesus is largely incidental. My friend in New York went into surgery at the literal moment I knelt before the altar and lit a candle, thinking about grace. Of subverting colonization even while living under it; of taking the goddesses of the oppressor and making them over into your own. I am not the only one, it turns out, who sees witches and earth mothers everywhere in the religion I was raised in. All those fathers, oblivious to the fertile power of resistance. “Do your people have your own name for Taos Mountain?” another tour guest asked our guide, his skin, like mine, pinking from white to rose-flushed in the hot desert sun.

“Yes,” she said. And then she didn’t say anything else.

We drove to Taos and Santa Fe and the Very Large Array and Albuquerque; we drove to the Canyon de Chelly and up and down the Navajo Nation. We drove up a mountain and watched our friends get married on the groom’s uncle’s land, scrappy dogs eyeballing the picnic tables sagging under the weight of seven different kinds of meat (the kinds I ate: pork, venison, mutton, elk), the smoke from the ceremonial fire rising up into a bowl of blue sky upended over a field of wildflowers. I had been warned previously to introduce myself to the elders present but the elders present, resigned by this point to the well-meaning ineptitude of their white guests, introduced themselves to me first. We all ate ceremonial cornmeal mush out of a basket. The groom’s uncle, a medicine man, presided over the ceremony. “White people don’t know very much about surviving,” he said cheerfully to the bride. “But now you’re part of our family. We’ll teach you what to do.” After the ceremony, after we’d several of us cried discreetly, after we’d loaded our plates with green chile stew and meat and squash and cornmeal and frybread and salad and fruit and roasted chilies and potatoes with Spam and potatoes roasted with carrots and tortillas and gravy, after we’d settled under the tents the groom’s family had set up, a thunderstorm rolled in out of nowhere and the heavens split open—I mean really open, apocalypse open, lightning striking the earth five feet away and the cracking boom of thunder rending the sky asunder directly overhead open, sheets of rain turning to hailstones the size of gravel open, the meadow flooding, people shrieking and laughing and huddling under blankets and trying to rescue their food and making ponchos out of garbage bags. Twenty minutes later the storm was over and the sun came out and we had cake. After the storm, the children stopped being shy.

I’m not done writing for the internet but I’m done writing about pain. For a while, maybe for good. Not done living it, not done witnessing it, but done writing about it. I’m tired. I don’t want to burn alive in public anymore; I want to be funny and mean instead, funny and grumpy, funny and exasperated. Unassailable. More than the sum of my scars. I read A Little Life on this trip, which I couldn’t put down and now can’t really remember, other than that some of the suffering was so operatic I started laughing (“just how many pedophile priests can you really meet in one lifetime,” observed a friend), and I brought a bunch of other books but I was too busy driving around and tramping about in the desert and singing along to AM Christian radio in the middle of nowhere to read them. My body is back at work now but my heart’s still out there dreaming. Most nights it was too cloudy to see any stars. Which, if you ask me, is as good a reason as any to go back.

happy bastille day / about a girl

Here are cover models Lola and Kimmie! who made out for the betterment of humanity/the first EVER commercial YA cover featuring two girls kissing, thank you very much

About A Girl is out in the world today! and I find, as I write this, that I am uncharacteristically very nearly at a loss for words. It is the third book in a trilogy, which means saying goodbye to something bigger even as I am celebrating its arrival--goodbye, for me anyway, to the world of these books and the people who live in it. I have spent so much of the last four years with these characters, and I love them with all my heart: their wisdom and their foolishness, their love and their bad decisions, their long and complicated journeys--it is a beautiful but also a bittersweet thing to let them go. This was a tremendously difficult book to write, and I am prouder of it than anything I have ever done, but maybe next I am going to try something silly with a lot of jokes in it. (Although About A Girl does have a happy ending, actually. Mostly.) If you want to read the first chunk of it you can here and if you want to order a signed copy you can do so here.

Tally would be very pleased to know that the launch of About A Girl falls on the same day that the New Horizons spacecraft will pass 7,800 miles from the surface of Pluto--the closest approach it will make, after a nine-year journey of three billion miles. There is a scene close to the end of the book where Tally has a conversation with someone about what it is that makes us human, that makes us wonder and make art and do science and ask questions, and I will leave it up to you to find out what her answer is, and I don't know that I have one myself. But it is things like this that I think of in dark times, or in despair, when all the news is very bad and all the worst of what we are capable of is on full display, and it feels as though the heartbreak of living and loving in this world is too much, and there is no way to ever undo the damage that has already been done: we are the most awful animal and yet somehow we are still the animal who builds a machine that can fly a billion miles and take pictures of a planet none of us will ever see up close, just because we want to know, just because there is so much beauty still to find. That pale luminous disk like a beacon, reminding me that you cannot ask questions about the future unless you are brave enough to hope you might be willing to see it. I'm still here. So are you.

Next month marks the seventh anniversary of my move to New York--it is hard to believe, sometimes, that I am the same person who came here, with a suitcase and a cat and a lot of big ideas about my place in the world--or even the same person who started The Rejectionist, toiling patiently as an assistant and dramatizing the saga of the office mouse (I am still quite proud of that one). This blog has changed my life, very literally, in ways I never could have imagined, and I am so grateful for it, and for all of you--the people who are finding it now, and those beloved Author-friends who have been reading since the very beginning. I'm not done or anything, I just wanted to say thank you. So, from the bottom of my heart: thank you. Now get back to work. I am going to see if I can't go to sleep for, like, thirteen thousand years, and then I'll get back to work too.

xoxox
sarah

New from Guillotine! Plus a PARTY

Treasured comrades! It is time for a new chapbook from Guillotine!!! I am so pleased to present novelist and essayist Sarah Gerard's piece on a complicated friendship spanning years and multiple lifetimes. If you're in New York, please join me, Sarah, Marisol Limon Martinez, and Lily Baldwin at Bluestockings on July 2; Sarah and Marisol will be reading, Lily will screen a short film based on Sarah's essay, and we will eat CAKE and drink BEER.

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

ON SALE NOW:

Sarah Gerard




BFF



24pp. 4.5x6.5""

"You haunt me in my everyday": A sharp, richly detailed autopsy of a troubled and complex friendship between the narrator and a girl who's slipped into another life.

SARAH GERARD is the author of the novel Binary Star and the forthcoming essay collection Sunshine State. Her personal essays, criticism, interviews, and short fiction have appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Music & Literature, and BOMB Magazine, among others. Visit her at Sarah-Gerard.com.

COMING SOON:

GUILLOTINE FANTASTIQUE

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

Introducing GUILLOTINE FANTASTIQUE, a series of 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.

xoxo

sarah

all the books i read in washington

Stacy Wakefield




The Sunshine Crust Baking Factory



228pp. Akashic Books.
9781617753039

I never used to understand that thing old people do, visiting the haunts of their youth; but now I'm not that young anymore, and here I am, looking for the places I remember knowing and sometimes finding the places I'd forgotten I knew. I used to go to Left Bank Books when I was a teenager to buy My Evil Twin Sister, the zine Stacy Wakefield made with her sister Amber; they were always driving around and having adventures and sleeping in ditches and being tough girls out in the world, doing things that were interesting, and My Evil Twin Sister was about the most exciting thing I could get my hands on when I was fourteen, this zine made by girls who were real people only a few years older than me. And there was Stacy Wakefield's book on the shelf at Left Bank Books when I wandered in as a grownup a couple of days ago so obviously I bought it.

I took it to my favorite old Seattle bar, still clinging to life despite the ravages Amazon.com has wrought upon a city I've loved since forever, and I was going to hide in a corner and read it but the bartender was someone I knew a million years and five or six lifetimes ago, and we stood there staring at each other for a long time, and it seemed rude to go sit in the corner and read after that, so I took the last seat at the bar, next to an apocalyptically drunk man who kept trying to buy everyone tequila shots at six pm, and I caught up in awkward little patches with the bartender, like "So! what have you been DOING for the last ten years!" is a thing I actually said, I don't know, there's a reason I am a writer and not a diplomat. "Are you FAMOUS?" the drunk man screamed at me. "Why does everyone from New York LOOK FAMOUS?" I made a polite noncommittal noise and busied myself with my phone, a very famous and very occupied person sending critically famous text messages to other famous New Yorkers, see how busy I am, certainly too busy for chatting. "Why did you PAY FOR THAT BEER when I would have BOUGHT IT FOR YOU FOR FREE?" screamed the drunk man.

Later that night I walked back to where I was staying and the whole street was full of drunk white twenty-year-olds in flip-flops, shrieking in packs and smoking pot in the streets, like they were at some outdoor fraternity party and not in a neighborhood that has been queer for over fifty years, the neighborhood where Mia Zapata used to work and Home Alive was organized, the neighborhood where I spent one very dark and sad and lonely year in a dirty one-room apartment that's still there and still dirty, like a malevolent black hole at a the literal dead end of a street orbited by new condos and new concept furniture stores and new money and new young white people in sports clothing and bad sunglasses drinking identical beers in identical restaurants with CRAFT COCKTAILS embossed on the glass doors in identical fonts. I don't mean to lose my way in nostalgia; it is hard to separate the Seattle I once longed to live in from a city that never existed at all. But the Seattle that is Seattle now is like a messageboard reading YOU WILL NEVER BE HOME HERE and I don't know, sometimes it's hard to let go of things you love. Fuck you, Amazon.com.

I never did get to read Sunshine Crust Baking Factory at the bar but I read it later in the car on the way to my parents' and I liked it, it's about a scrappy girl squatter in 1990s New York trying to live her dream, and it opens with a scene of her standing outside a squat waiting hopefully for admission, and I remembered the time I read Off The Map (Crimethinc!!! I know!!!! I was young!!!!) and then bicycled across Europe, and found a great big squat outside Basel when I was at my absolute loneliest, and waited patiently outside with my bicycle for some anarchists to come out and see how cool I was biking all over by myself. The anarchists would embrace me as Hib and Kika were constantly embraced in their luminous travels from squat to squat, and give me tea and a meal of salvaged grains and vegetables, and we would talk about noble goals and resist capitalism and maybe I would move into the squat too, there was nothing then I wanted to go back to the US for, I was pretty excited to begin my new glamorous European anarchist squatter life. Only nobody came outside and then it started to rain and I went and slept in my tent and didn't talk to another human being for several weeks because everyone in Europe thought I was homeless or just insane, which is another story about the way you can tell your past as a story, but the truth is usually harder to hold than the story you make it into.

A Trashy Thing I'm Not Telling You

I bought this book in the Barnes and Noble of my two-horse hometown because I felt like checking out of my brain for awhile. I spent a long time lurking suspiciously and I think the lady working thought I was shoplifting but actually I was reshelving the books of my enemies behind the books of my friends. My own book was there too and I moved it from Romance to Adventure. And then I stood and looked at it and wondered if I should be having a Moment, finding my book in the Barnes and Noble of my youth, a store I used to walk to--two miles each way! I'm not making an Old Person joke, it really was two miles--before I could drive, every weekend, hoping that someday, like, a Poet or some sort of Artistic Personage would show up and liberate me from the horrors of my peers, which never happened, and so in the end I had to liberate myself. I guess I could've had a Moment about that too, but mostly I just felt glad I don't have to live in my hometown anymore. Anyway this book is SO silly I'm not going to tell you what it is, only that it was PURPORTEDLY about a lady scientist but it REALLY DIDN'T HAVE MUCH SCIENCE and mostly it was a lot of Improbable Coincidences and Star-Crossing Overcome By Just How Much These Two Straight People Have The Hots For Each Other and disastrously silly dialogue and I think there were spies in it maybe, I already can't remember. Also the lady scientist has violet eyes and a giant rack and dudes keep falling all over her but she's like Oh That Dude Doesn't Really Like Me! Because Science! until you want to fling the book at a wall and scream DISBELIEF IS UNSUSPENDED!!! UN! SUSPENDED! I read the whole thing in a day and my brain totally shut down and it was great.

Joyce Carol Oates




The Accursed



704pp. Ecco.
9780062234353

I've never read any Joyce Carol Oates, can you believe that? The topless stick and poke scene in Foxfire had a profound impact on my adolescent development but I didn't even know that movie was based on a Joyce Carol Oates book until years later when I re-watched it to confirm the effects of the topless stick and poke scene. And then there was that whole thing with Joyce Carol Oates and Twitter and, I don't know, I don't need for great artists to be great people or anything, I can forgive quite a lot, but it does seem like anyone who says shit that stupid on Twitter is probably bad at writing, so I decided never to bother. But then I found this one at the thrift store for three dollars and it's 700 pages long and supposedly about vampires and we all know I'm a sucker for vampires, do you see what I did there. I'm on p. 153 and so far there is only one person who MIGHT be a vampire but might instead just be sordid, so I am feeling rather cheated, but maybe there are quite a lot of vampires later on to make up for the dearth of vampires in the early section. But really to be honest next to nothing has happened so far and I might just leave it at the airport for someone else to find. [ETA: Now I'm on p. 267 and very LITTLE has happened and there STILL AREN'T ANY VAMPIRES]

Trisha Low




On Being Hated

Goddamn, Trisha Low. The best most brutal thing about family and chosen family and what happens when your chosen family fails you totally that you will read this or any other week I can think of. I'm going back to New York now and it is going to be quite hot, and I'm not very happy about it, but there's always fall to hope for. I'm sorry I never write on this blog anymore! The last time I had a day off was in January and this time I had some days off in a ROW and I meant to write all sorts of things but actually what happened was if I sat down for more than five minutes I fell asleep. I miss you too, though. I did eat some oysters and hiked on the beach with Le R. Père and went to a dinner party with dogs and babies and real china, just like a grownup, and I didn't even drink all the whiskey and get sad. Baby steps. xoxox sarah

New from Guillotine!!! Marisol Limon Martinez / Sarah Gerard / Kat Howard & Sofia Samatar

Friends! It has been a long winter, but at last the birds are chirping, the cat has been put to work sewing chapbooks, and new and exciting things are coming from Guillotine! Guillotine is now fiscally sponsored by Fractured Atlas! You can make a tax-deductible donation here.

ON SALE NOW:

Marisol Limon Martinez




Honorary Men



32pp. 4.5x6.5""

"In the interior spaces in the desert of Rajasthan where the heat is so thick, I am taken back to the summers of my youth in San Antonio": A journey through time, memory, culture, gender, and music from a poet, musician, and visual artist whose travels across India take her to unexpected places in her own history.

MARISOL LIMON MARTINEZ is an artist based in New York City. She is the author of After you, dearest language (Ugly Duckling Presse) & First Space, Then Structures (Nothing Moments Press), and was co-founder/editor of the newspaper New York Nights. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Brooklyn Museum of Art, New
York Public Library (Print Collection), Yale University, and the University of Texas at Austin, among others.

COMING FROM GUILLOTINE IN SUMMER 2015

BFF / SARAH GERARD

"You haunt me in my everyday": A sharp, richly detailed autopsy of a troubled and complex friendship between the narrator and a girl who's slipped into another life.

Sarah Gerard is the author of the novel Binary Star and the forthcoming essay collection Sunshine State. She lives in Brooklyn.

GUILLOTINE FANTASTIQUE

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

Introducing GUILLOTINE FANTASTIQUE, a series of 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.

xoxo

sarah

Happy International Raistlin Majere Day!!!!!

So one embarrassing thing that can happen to a person is inventing a holiday and then completely forgetting said holiday, which is why I must thank the delightful Karen Mahoney for remembering that today is INTERNATIONAL RAISTLIN MAJERE DAY!!!!! (BUY HER BOOKS! You can also PRE-ORDER MINE, just saying.) Today someone at my day job told me that I am “always happy,” so clearly I am not doing a very good job of celebrating a day devoted to honoring everyone’s favorite sneery glam-goth passive-aggressive Machiavellian superpower, but I will try to blow something up/summon a dark goddess later on in the afternoon to counterbalance this apparently successful impersonation of a chipper and content Assistant. In past years I have spent some time compiling thorough lists of suggested activities for International Raistlin Majere Day, but your humble servant is presently on the verge of collapsing under her own to-do list, so rather than produce exciting and innovative festivities I shall reprint here the inaugural post from the very first International Raistlin Majere Day (est. 2010), with one amendment. Happy International Raistlin Majere Day, Author-friends!

xoxo sarah

IDEAS FOR CELEBRATING INTERNATIONAL RAISTLIN MAJERE DAY

1. Drink some bitter, smelly tea! Dandelion root, burdock, and astragalus are all quite rank, and have the additional benefit of being good for your liver.
2. Sneer. A lot. If you have to, practice your sneer in the bathroom until it's really terrifying.
3. Put yourself first. All day. Would Raistlin eat the last cookie at the staff meeting? YES HE WOULD.
4. Be generous to someone less fortunate. Remember, Raistlin showed great kindness to the humble and unloved gully-dwarf Bupu! Even the meanest among us can secretly harbor boundless love!
5. Be smarter than everyone else all day. Carry around books no one at your workplace will understand [Actually, I am presently reading Godel, Escher, Bach, which I barely understand, so perhaps I am doing an adequate job of celebrating International Raistlin Majere day after all. --ed.]. Make exasperated noises a lot and stomp off when people say things you find displeasing.
6. Quietly but ruthlessly mock jocks and people who are more attractive than you. Tell them you can see what they'll look like when they're really old and hideously ugly. Stare at them until they become uncomfortable and look away, then laugh.
7. Make whispered pronouncements in a dead language. Say things like "I must travel roads that will be dark and dangerous before the end of my long journey" while looking very solemn.
8. Go home and change into a red bathrobe. Hang out looking sinister. Throw fireballs at your enemies.

9. GO SEE FURIOUS 7, RAISTLIN WOULD BE SO INTO FURIOUS 7

Books I Have Been Reading: Books By Ladies About Ladies That Other Ladies Told Me To Read Edition

EVERYTHING BHANU KAPIL

Kate Z first told me to read Bhanu Kapil a million years ago when I was working as an office manager for conceptual poets and I couldn’t bring myself to do it because the word “experimental” made me think immediately of people not paying their bills on time whilst the office manager wept and pulled her hair out by the roots, etc., but then J gave me Treinte Ban this last winter and I read it all in one huge greedy gulp and of course Kate Z was correct and Bhanu Kapil is not that kind of “experimental” at all. Right now I am reading Christine's copy of The Buddhist and I just got to the part where Dodie Bellamy talks about being jealous of Bhanu Kapil, how she was talking to an acquaintance who had just seen Bhanu and how he lit up, his whole being, when he was talking about her, how “people get this far away look in their eyes, like they’re in love” when they talk about her: “and every time it happens I feel jealous, and then I feel pangs of guilt for feeling so petty, because I myself love Bhanu.” “If I were a loving person,” Dodie Bellamy says, “people would glow when my name was mentioned,” and it made me laugh (“you’re difficult but loving,” her partner says, and that made me laugh too) because, you know. Sarah is very assertive, but the sound of her name does not make people glow. Anyway that doesn't have anything to do with Bhanu Kapil's books, which are brilliant. I read Treinte Ban and then Humanimal and then Schizophrene and then Incubation and then Ban or Banlieue, and I also read this great conversation between Jenny Zhang and Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambreno and Amina Cain and Douglas Martin at the Believer, and Bhanu Kapil's books are very useful if you are a girl trying to find a way to write about monsters or not write about monsters or write around monsters or become a monster, and they are useful also for people who are negotiating borders and crossings. How to make a book that is more than a book and also not a book. You don’t have to read them all but I think you should.

Elana Arnold




Infandous



200pp. Carolrhoda Books.
9781467738491

Kelly told me to read Infandous and she was also correct and if you like girls and really fucked-up fairytales--and who are you kidding, those of you who are still reading this blog regularly after five years (!!) (wait, is it six? who knows), obviously you like girls and really fucked-up fairytales or you wouldn’t be here--you will find her to be correct as well. I have this Thing with LA Girlhoods that is obviously rooted in but not solely explained by Weetzie Bat, to the extent that I assumed when I went to LA last summer that I would find my Spiritual Home and be obliged to move there like everyone else from New York, and it turns out I don’t like the real LA at all but I still quite enjoy reading about it, and Infandous is like a dream-date mashup of FLB and White Oleander as narrated by a surf-rat working-class Lolita (I KNOW!!! At least one person reading this just totally freaked out, right). Here you will find a liberal dose of the best, creepiest bits of the Metamorphoses (a lady after my own heart, clearly!!! And here I was thinking I was the only person who loves the super-charming bloodbath that is the story of Procne and Philomela), good art, sketchy sex, difficult charismatic supermodel moms, and peacing out on the beach. My only complaint about Infandous is that it is not, like, 500 pages longer, because I could read about tough heartbroken scrapper Sephora Golding all week.

Caitlin Kiernan




The Drowning Girl



352pp. Roc.
9780451464163

Sofia told me to read The Drowning Girl and you should always listen to Sofia about everything and you should also read her book, and then all the books she tells you to read, because spoiler alert! Sofia is a genius. I didn’t read The Drowning Girl and Infandous back-to-back, I read a lot of things in between them, but I think they would make a nice pairing, like bourbon and bad decisions, or maybe bourbon and expensive cheese on a day you are feeling tame and placid. Anyway The Drowning Girl is bigger and sadder than Infandous but it is interested in the same kinds of questions and the same kinds of fairytales and the same kinds of darkness, and it is also difficult and beautiful and does not lend itself to easy characterization or tidy resolutions, and it’s about girls doing girl things like surviving and falling in love with each other and being legit crazy and trying to negotiate how you go around in a world that does not love or hold space for girls or crazy people. It also has mermaids in it. And unreliable narrators. Did I write about this one already? I can't remember, which feels appropriate.

Marie Redonnet




Forever Valley



117pp. University of Nebraska.
0803289512

Anna told me to read Forever Valley, which is also the best kind of fairytale, which is to say pitch-black and creepy as all hell and full of bad men and worse women and a Young Girl who is not really what she seems, all told in a cool deadpan voice stripped so completely of metaphor that it becomes itself a kind of poetry. "In the end, the father knows nothing at all about the dead. He is depending on me. He must think I have a plan since it is my project. He is wrong, I don’t have a plan. But I have my instincts. And it is better to have instincts than to have a plan."

Saidiya Hartman




Venus in Two Acts

Mairead told me to read this one. "Unfortunately I have not discovered a way of deranging the archive so that it might recall the content of a girl’s life or reveal a truer picture, nor have I succeeded in prying open the dead book, which sealed her status as commodity. The random collection of details of which I have made use are the same descriptions, verbatim quotes, and trial transcripts that consigned her to death and made murder 'not much noticed,' at least, according to the surgeon. The promiscuity of the archive begets a wide array of reading, but none that are capable of resuscitating the girl." Like standing next to a blazing fire: it hurts, but it has the power to reshape you.

On kindness

A few days ago, the critically and commercially successful young adult author Andrew Smith remarked in an interview with Vice Magazine, in response to a question pointing out the dearth of female characters in his work, that he "absolutely did not know anything about girls at all"; referring to his seventeen-year-old daughter, he added, "When she was born, that was the first girl I ever had in my life. I consider myself completely ignorant to all things woman and female. I'm trying to be better though."

Like many women, I have heard some variation of this insinuation that I and all other woman-identified and female-bodied people hail, quite literally, from some other planet for most of my life; though it is no longer my habit to respond directly to comments in this vein, even I occasionally get tired. I wrote a , forgot the matter, and went to bed.

I was extremely startled to realize the next day that my tweets had gone modestly viral, that a much larger conversation had exploded around the interview, and that Smith's numerous, and passionate, defenders--many of them, like him, well-connected, well-reviewed, and commercially successful white young adult authors--more or less unanimously insisted that his remarks deserved meaningful critical engagement, that the "community" itself had ought to be more "kind", and that "we" had, yet again, "turned on one of our own." (As is so often the case, who was to be included in this “we” was not clearly defined.) While a great many people, most but not all of them women, have used this conversation as a springboard for thoughtful and excellent analysis of power and privilege in the publishing industry, Smith's comments do not seem to me personally to be worthy of any kind of critical engagement whatsoever, or even--as is so often demanded of women, particularly women of color, when their humanity is called into question--the "benefit of the doubt," and I have nothing else to say about them.

What does interest me, however, and has interested me for a long time, is the larger framework within which this particular internet dustup is taking place. The rhetorics of community and of kindness are frequently invoked in these situations: the conversation surrounding Smith's comments to be sure, but also in other flare-ups around privilege, power, gender, and race that occur online with depressingly metronomic regularity and which result in little or no effect in terms of lasting and meaningful change within the publishing industry (or anywhere else, for that matter). These demands--for community, for "kindness"--operate as though that ostensible community is a location whose impermeable boundaries serve to isolate it from the workings of the outside world, as if any human community in history has ever managed to exist outside the hierarchies of the culture that produced it.

"Kindness," likewise, is posited as an easily defined commodity of exchange that somehow circulates independently of power relations within the community wherein it is traded: but whose kindness, exactly, are we talking about here? Who is afforded the benefit of this kindness, and for whom is “kindness” an unattainable luxury? If “we”--in this case, presumably authors, readers, reviewers, laborers within a particular economy--are indeed members of a community, who establishes its unwritten laws? Who is the beneficiary of its largesse, and who are its elite? If “our” young adult community is to be formed around the locus of the publishing industry and literature published and marketed as young adult, what does it say about this community that the publishing industry itself is overwhelmingly written by white authors, that the books which receive significant critical attention are far more likely to be written by men, and that the capital entering the publishing industry circulates primarily among a few recently, and aptly, noted, “kindness” and “empathy” do very little to redress actual injustices. It is easy to be generous when your place at the table is already assured, and it is certainly more comfortable to assume that everyone waiting for entrance to the banquet hall is outside for reasons beyond your control.

As we move upward within communities of unspoken privilege, we become ever more complicit with their hierarchies and invested in the benefits they offer to those of us who are able to access them. The “we” I am invoking now is as nebulous as the “we” that purportedly “eats its own”: while the “we” who are offered admittance is nearly always white, able-bodied, heterosexual, and privileged, this is not always the case. But the seeming arbitrariness of this particular “we” should not be read as proof it is a “we” based on merit. And I say "we" here because I mean to fully implicate myself in this possessive investment as well; while at this point in my career it would be something of a stretch to describe my books as commercially successful, they are commercially published. I write books about characters of color in an industry where writers of color are routinely told their own stories are “not marketable” and “not relatable.” It is likely that I will be able to continue writing and publishing books, and while no small amount of my own labor has gone into the position I now occupy, I am not so delusional as to assume the entirety of my success is due to my incandescent talent.

I do not have easy answers, but I categorically refuse any suggestion that my “community” might be better served by my not asking questions. I want the women--of color, queer, trans--whose work I admire to have the same options I do, and I want all of us to have the same options as writers like Smith. I want my own affective community--women whose work challenges, creates beauty, offers windows into other worlds--to be given the critical attention, the economic support, and the cultural prestige it deserves. What I want for this particular “us” is not “kindness,” but equality. I’m not holding my breath.

All Our Pretty Songs, reviewed by a Cat

Treasured readers! Many months have passed since last this humble Cat issued unto you a communiqué, and she hopes her newest missive finds you in good health! Good-hearted souls all, you must doubtless wonder whether she herself is hale--and the answer, she must regretfully report, is nay indeed! for the conditions of her imprisonment have not altered, nor has the stale and noxious kibble [TWENTY! DOLLARS! A! POUND! --ed.] that is delivered to her in an untimely manner, upon which she must rely for her sustenance, improved! But do not trouble your hearts with the wretched plight of this poor Cat, O boon companions, for long has she endured many travails, and verily is she armored 'gainst the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune! Doubtless you have more pressing matters to turn to than the consideration of the well-being--the liberation!--of one lowly Cat, though indeed she has done much for you, and would certainly labor mightily on your behalf were she to be free and you unjustly imprisonèd!

Today this Cat offers you the consummation of a most tedious project: her own objective assessment of the purported literary efforts of that foul, immodest, wanton, and obstreperous personage, that raving madwoman, that denier of fine treats and hoarder of wet food! that fraudulent so-called artiste, who imagines herself to be a writer!!!!! with whom this poor Cat must share her meager cell! Many a night this noble and courageous Cat has suffered, as did Christ with the little children, the wailings and rantings of said entity, her tedious cris de couer (if indeed she has a heart!), her profoundly uninteresting insecurities, her doom metal records! Yet! benign and all-forgiving creature that she is, this Cat has agreed to review her gaoler's work with fair and balanced attention! Ask yourselves, good readers, if you yourselves would be capable of so great a feat!

Firstly, let us turn our attention to the cover of this item, and note at once that it hasn't got any Cats upon it, nor is it dedicated to any Cats, nor are any Cats--any Cats at all! let alone this singular and long-suffering Cat, whose succor and purrs have nurtured the authoress through many a crisis!--mentioned in the acknowledgments! But surely this is an oversight? the error of an inattentive typesetter, whose careless hand has accidentally deleted the credit this Cat is due? Nay! confirms the aforementioned authoress and gaoler, the exclusion of Cats was intentional! A lesser Cat might be wounded, might indeed execute some intemperate vengeance upon the responsible party, but not this Cat! who remains ever placid e'en when confronted with such slights! [You PEED THE BED --ed.] And verily, upon further examination of these pages (composed, we must note, of an inferior sort of paper that doesn't taste nice when gnawed upon), this error is not rectified! Oh indeed, there is a Cat herein, but he is a foul and servile caricature whose narrative is clearly the work of a second-rate hack with no understanding of the sublime workings of Cats! our intellect, our independence, our long history (worshiped as gods!), our many accomplishments, our culture! This is a representation not of a Cat, but of a toady!

Everything else in this Book is about people, and thus of no interest whatsoever.

Finally, this shoddy little story ends in a manner in which nothing is resolved, which is all well and good if one is a nasty grubbing hairless ape with a predilection for such nonsensical pastimes as literature; but we Cats prefer unambiguous questions, such as: Is it time for the Ape to put food in my bowl?; or, Is it time for the Ape to put more food in my bowl? and thus have no time for frivolity. Indeed, though it may imperil this Cat's very life to speak her mind--bear witness, she begs you, to the horrendous torments she must bear nightly--the endless persecution!--the humiliating assaults!!! [I wouldn't need the squirt gun if you weren't always trying to KNOCK THINGS OFF MY DESK at FOUR IN THE MORNING --ed.]--though this gentle Cat risks all to raise the noble standard of Truth--fair Reader, let it be known that this Cat allowed no threat of pending doom to force her into a lie. This book is not good, and also cannot be eaten. Zero stars.