Juliet Escoria's Blog, page 9

we went for a long walk in the forest

we went for a long walk in the forest

today i was in the grocery store and there was this gigantic woman squatting down with her ass...

today i was in the grocery store and there was this gigantic woman squatting down with her ass hanging out, looking at the food on the bottom shelves. her husband was standing next to her, with the cart blocking the whole aisle. i waited for a second for them to move so i could get through. another woman came into the aisle behind me and we both waited for a second for them to move. they did not move. they stared at us instead. finally i said “excuse me,” and the man moved the cart.

i felt annoyed, but i also felt impressed. their sitting there and staring felt like an act of defiance. it felt like, “fuck you bitches, look at my fat ass.” 

it was beautiful. 

I will be reading at the Tattooed Mom in Philadelphia on...

I will be reading at the Tattooed Mom in Philadelphia on Thursday, for the very last Tire Fire Reading Series of 2014, along with Diane Cook, Carmen Maria Machado, and Ryan MacDonald.

The last time I was in Philadelphia was February of 2013. A writer friend of mine offered to fly me out. I thought maybe he wanted in my pants, so I told him that I wasn’t interested in that kind of thing and he said it was fine, he wasn’t expecting that kind of thing— he just wanted a friend around. He said he’d get me my own hotel room and not to worry. It sounded fun and absurd so I said yes. I figured he just wanted someone along who was sober and supportive, because he was going through a rough time with depression and the alcohols. 

We went to the Mutter Museum together and we walked through the streets and ate pizza and chicken wings and I did an interview with him and we had a lot of fun. He kept his promise and didn’t come on to me. I guess that impressed me or something, because a couple months later we started dating, and then a year and some change after that we got married. 

Another in the "True Life: I Married Scott McClanahan" series is up at Hobart. It’s about...

Another in the "True Life: I Married Scott McClanahan" series is up at Hobart. It’s about cooking! There’s a video! WOW

A cry for help

I am working on Scott’s CV in order to better our lives. I am personally doing it because Scott has no patience/ability for MS Word (and also I don’t have a job rn). It is a real pain in the ass because he has not updated his CV in like 10 years. I have no record of things earlier than August 2012; I can track down his publications and press for these earlier dates, but the readings/appearances are more difficult. 

SO THIS IS A “CRY FOR HELP”

Did you read with Scott prior to August 2012? Can you tell me the name of the reading, the city, and the month and year? Email me at julietescoria at gmail, please and thank you, I will love you forever. So far all I got is:

Beep Beep Gallery, Atlanta, GA (July 2012)
Convocation at AWP, Chicago, IL (March 2012)
Franklin Park Reading Series, Brooklyn, NY (October 2011)
Perfect Day Publishing, Brooklyn, NY (September 2011)
Great Lakes, Great Times, Ann Arbor, MI (October 2010)
The Whistler, Chicago, IL (April 2010)
Solar Anus Reading Series, Atlanta, GA (March 2010)
Dogzplot, Atlantic City, NJ (August 2009)
The New Yinzer Presents, Pittsburgh, PA (August 2009)
Gist Street Reading Series, Pittsburgh, PA (August 2009)

An Interview with Lindsay Hunter

believermag:

 

Ugly Girls is Lindsay Hunter’s first novel—her first two books, Daddy’s (Featherproof, 2010) and Don’t Kiss Me (FSG, 2013) were  kind of short stories that punch you in the mouth and then peace the fuck out. I was interested in seeing if the prowess in her stories held in a longer work. Fortunately, the chapters in Ugly Girls are as brisk as her stories, with most ending in a way that forces the reader into the next and the next.

In the Publisher’s Weekly review the plot of Ugly Girls was described as “depressing,” “relentlessly bleak” and “intolerable,” which seems, to me, to point to exactly why this book is valuable.  If much of contemporary literary fiction feels like cocktail banter, Ugly Girls feels a lot more like puking red wine on the host’s white carpet—beautiful and savage in its ugly glory.

This interview was conducted over a series of emails. Hunter and I both took an impolite amount of time to return each other’s emails, which felt both comfortable and fitting. 

—Juliet Escoria

THE BELIEVER: Maybe this is for selfish reasons (being someone who writes short fiction who would someday like to write longer work), but I was wondering about the technical aspects of how you wrote this book. Did you have to outline at all? What was the scariest part?

LINDSAY HUNTER: I really struggled, for a long time, trying to figure out how I, would write a novel. It’s a pretty daunting proposition! Would I get bored? Would I be able to maintain the way I like to write in such a long form? Would it be interesting to ANYONE? I decided the only way I could write a novel was to sit down and write the way I knew how, which was to give myself a daily word count goal, and to treat each “chapter” like a flash fiction piece. That’s what I set out to do. I told myself to write 2,000-2,500 words a day, and each chapter would be from the point of view of one of the five main characters. That way, I had a very clear end in sight for each day I wrote. I had a concrete goal. That is very important for me. I don’t work well when I think of the whole thing at once. I need to take it one day at a time.  

I think I outlined as I went. So, I started out wanting to write a fairy tale about a girl who couldn’t feel fear. That girl ended up being Perry, but as I wrote Baby Girl, and Myra, and Jim, and even Jamey started seeming like minds I wanted to dip into, and that’s how it went from a first-person narrative to the omniscient kind of thing it is now. I would write my day’s chunk of words, and then, to remind myself, I’d outline on a scratch sheet of paper what I wanted to work on the following day. Or I’d write notes about why I’d planted a seed here, what I wanted it to blossom into later. I’d also write the word count I started the day with, and then I’d draw an arrow and write the word count I wanted to end the day with. It all felt pretty satisfying when I viewed it in achievable tasks like that. Beep boop, I am a robot. 

The scariest part is ongoing. Have I done my best work? Will people like it? Why do I care so much about being liked? And all the existential horror that comes after those thoughts. 

Read More

Super happy that I got to interview Lindsay Hunter. Her book is amazing and was just published on the 4th.

One time shortly after I moved in I found a pair of women’s panties under the dresser.I was like,...

One time shortly after I moved in I found a pair of women’s panties under the dresser.

I was like, “Whose panties are those?”

And Scott replied, “Oh you know, just some bitch’s.”

And I got mad.

But it turned out that they were Scott’s good luck panties that he wears when he’s writing sometimes. It turns out they were the pair he wore when I went to see him in Philadelphia, the ones that he snapped the sides of in front of me and Matthew Savoca to weird us out.

With anyone else I might think this was a really creative face-saving lie. But no, I married the kind of man who owns a pair of good luck writing panties.

Still ranks pretty high up there on the list of Dumbest Things Scott’s Ever Said tho

Big Wayne

Big Wayne

GIF from In the Woods

GIF from In the Woods

Here is the 10th "video" for Black Cloud. It’s a moving...

Here is the 10th "video" for Black Cloud. It’s a moving picture book, aka a series of animated GIFs, that I made using NewHive.

For the full-screen version, go here.

Special thanks to Carabella Sands and Scott McClanahan for the help, and Heiko Julien, Matt Margo, Sean H. Doyle, Barclay Montrose, Juliana Grace, the Holler Boys, and vomt for the music.

It was run as the very last Sunday Service on HTMLGIANT, and is currently making the entire HTMLGIANT site sound of crickets, wind in the trees, and light road noise.

RIP HTMLGIANT :(