Roxane Gay

http://www.roxanegay.com

Roxane Gay’s writing has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, NOON, The New York Times Book Review, The Rumpus, Salon, The Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy culture blog, and many others. She is the co-editor of PANK and essays editor for The Rumpus. She teaches writing at Eastern Illinois University. Her novel, An Untamed State, will be published by Grove Atlantic and her essay collection, Bad Feminist, will be published by Harper Perennial, both in 2014.

Reviews

Blank by Davis Schneiderman and Working Toward an Understanding of Experimental Literature

I can openly admit I struggle, at times, with experimental literature, understanding how it works, what a given experimental text means, the significance of the text. I’ve been reading Christopher Higg’s series with great interest in the hopes that his thoughts might help address some of the intense confusion I feel. His posts have indeed helped but I’m still struggling.

At AWP, I had the opportunity to pick up the book Blank, a novel by Davis Schneiderman, published by Jaded Ibis Press. I had received some press materials about the book in the preceding months so the title was familiar and I had also recently met the author so I thought I would buy the book and see what it was about. I didn’t pay close attention to the press materials so nothing could have surprised me more than to realize that Blank is actually blank. I probably should have but that’s a different matter. There is no text in the book save for the copyright page, the Table of Contents, twenty chapter titles, an About the Author page and an About the Artist page. There is also artwork, by Susan White, what appear to be pieces of pictures of water, clouds, snow—it’s difficult to make out what some of the imagery represents.

That night in my hotel room, I opened the book and realized it was blank and felt angry about the $15 or so I paid for the book. I ranted something incoherently at my roommate then angrily shoved the book into my suitcase. I may have used the word, “Seriously,” with a tone.

READ MORE >

134 Comments
February 18th, 2011 / 8:23 pm

Some Monday Items of Interest

Over at Tayari Jones’s blog, she talks about some of the bizarre choices black writers face when trying to get published. As an aside, I got an advance copy of her novel Silver Sparrow, review forthcoming, and the accompanying literature said, “When I first read Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones, I was reminded of the great black women writers of our time,” and I wonder why the writer of the letter wasn’t simply reminded of the great writers of our time. Later, there’s a blurb from the Atlanta Journal Constitution that says, “One of the most important writers of her generation, able to stand confidently alongside such heralded young black authors as Edwidge Danticat, Colson Whitehead, and ZZ Packer.” Does that mean she can’t stand confidently alongside young writers who are not black? Curious.

It’s Black History Month. Here’s a roundup of movies about black history in one way or another.

Have you checked out the Journal of Universal Rejection?

This is a really interesting open letter from Claudia Rankine, post AWP.

Brad Green wrote a really solid essay you should read. I’ve also been loving his thoughtful interviews for Dark Sky Magazine.

The Lumberyard has a new online imprint, The Saw Mill.

Martin Amis doesn’t want to write children’s books. Shocking, I know.

Question: can critics and authors be friends?

Lendle allows Kindle users to share books. Finally.

I am really enjoying the Chick Litz blog, run by a group of really active undergraduates at Ball State. There’s a great community of young writers at Ball State who are involved in all sorts of interesting projects. They also have a Kickstarter to raise funds for a writer exchange they are doing with the University of Alabama, if you’re of a mind to contribute a dollar or ten.

Eileen Myles writes about being female for The Awl. The comments are “interesting” but her essay is brilliant.

Roundup / 22 Comments
February 14th, 2011 / 6:09 pm

Bitches Be Trippin’

I love the Urban Dictionary because they seem to have a definition for everything. I spend a lot of time looking up dirty words and phrases. I learned what a snowball was via Urban Dictionary. It has nothing to do with the snow, that’s for sure. I love the phrase “Bitches be trippin’.” I don’t know why. On a whim, I decided to look up the phrase on Urban Dictionary. Sure enough, there was a definition. According to them, the phrase is “used primarily by heterosexual males to justify the irrational behaviors of women.” For example, when women bring attention to certain pervasive and longstanding disparities, one might say, “I don’t know what all the fuss is about. Bitches be trippin’.”

READ MORE >

Random / 167 Comments
February 8th, 2011 / 8:26 pm

Everything Happened All At Once

It feels like there is a lot of literary news today.

McSweeney’s is launching a cookbook imprint. When I first read that, I thought it was a joke. McSweeney’s also shares some good news about publishing.

There is a brilliant, long form investigative article in The New Yorker about Scientology. A new bar has been set. There is also fiction from Mary Gaitskill.

Another magazine has decided to charge for submissions. Robert Swartwood is on the case. The publisher responds. The world continues to turn.

I saw Kara Candito read at AWP and was blown away so I’m going to share some of her writing that’s up at BLIP.

AWP happened. You loved it. You hated it. There was a Literature Party and an amazing deejay who felt what she was spinning so hard she jumped up and down to the beat. There was dancing. My god, there was drinking. You didn’t go. You were glad not to go. You wish you could have gone. You wish you hadn’t gone. Your liver hurts. You are sweating. You didn’t want AWP to end. Did you see that? What was his name? That really happened. You wish that had happened. The recaps abound. They are amusing to read.

Emily St. John Mandel writes about bad reviews.

The Kartika Review has launched The 500 Project which will profile 10 Asian writers from each of the 50 states. I am really intrigued by this idea of using these profiles to start toward a canon of contemporary Asian literature.

Crowds might be able to write as well as individuals.

Laura Ellen Scott’s Curio is being serialized by Uncanny Valley. I think you will enjoy it.

Is the Internet free? Perhaps not so much.

Cathy Day offers some valuable advice for a linked stories workshop and Dylan Landis shares some lessons on linked stories. This is a tiny preview of a post I am working on about how to shape a short story collection. I don’t know how. That’s what I’m writing about. It might not be the most useful post in the world.

David Quigg suggests some edits to “The Problem With Memoirs.”

There is a new issue of Bookslut which includes a feature by Daniel Nester and Steve Black about the lifespan of a literary magazine. You should also check out this piece about women and criticism.

Anis Shivani thinks Freedom is overrated. He works for AOL now though, for free, so he might not have the last laugh. Toward the end of his essay, Shivani writes, “The problem with realism is also that it ends up being conservative, and even pessimistic. This is because it wants to rule out unpredictability to the extent possible, believes in a stable social order (otherwise why write realistically?), and wants the end to be internally and formally consistent with its premises, once they have been laid out.” You know how I feel about things that begin, “The problem with…” There is no problem with realism though their may be a problem with Freedom. I haven’t finished the book yet. I will come back, Shivani! We will talk realism. Just you wait.

Roundup / 67 Comments
February 7th, 2011 / 6:40 pm

A Conversation with Jonathan Starke, Co-Editor, Palooka

I recently had the opportunity to meet Jonathan Starke, who was visiting Eastern Illinois University as a visiting writer and we sat down to talk about the new magazine he’s editing, Palooka.

What is underdog excellence?

It’s the showcase of skills by writers who aren’t quite making it in the top journals. Publishing in the literary world is a hard thing to do, especially if you don’t have a name or connections. But there are so many writers and artists out there who have no MFA, no name, no connection, or only choose to publish in smaller journals, and these are the kinds of people we consider underdogs. They might be on the cusp of breaking through or not even close, but what doesn’t change is the fact that these unknowns are creating work that is both hard-hitting and pretty impossible to forget, even days, weeks and months after seeing them for the first time.

READ MORE >

Behind the Scenes / 22 Comments
February 7th, 2011 / 3:00 pm

Four Brief Notes of Varying Significance

If you’re interested in antique printing, there’s a whole plant for sale in Boston.

I love stand up comedy so I really enjoyed this profile of comedian Greg Giraldo and his untimely passing in The Awl.

Mima Simić writes a disturbing account of how her work was edited, without her approval, for Best European Fiction 2011, by an editor at Dalkey Archive. One of the edits assigned a gender to the narrator when the gender ambiguity was a deliberate authorial choice. It’s not a good situation.

Vida released a count for how women writers are represented across several publications great and small during 2010. Meghan O’Rourke responds at Slate. The numbers are not surprising. The issue is, of course, more complex than mere statistics but statistics are always a good place to start. I find the numbers disheartening.  Actually, I think it’s fucked up. I do. I understand if you don’t and why. We’ve had this conversation already but I thought I would share the latest numbers.

Random / 7 Comments
February 2nd, 2011 / 9:52 pm

{LMC}: A Review of Benjamin Percy’s “The Red Balloon”

I was a lazy reader. I read too much too quickly into the title of Benamin Percy’s story “the Red Balloon.” “Balloon… Balloon… Barthleme. Ripoff,” was the thinking. I grabbed a friend. “Sit down,” I told him. “Tell me what this reminds you of.”

He sat down.

“Remember, it’s called ‘the Red Balloon.’ Keep that in mind. Okay. It’s important. ‘The Red Balloon.’”

I read the first couple sentences for the first time:

“No one knows where it came from. Some say a long car pulled up to the gas station and from it stepped a black haired, black-eyed man in a black suit, who coughed once into his fist and then gripped the pump and muddied it with his phlegm.”

My friend said, “I don’t know who that sounds like.”

I decided I’d better read the whole piece before assuming its contents.

READ MORE >

Literary Magazine Club / 1 Comment
February 2nd, 2011 / 2:00 pm

Get Me Up Close To the Lives of Others

Anytime an essay’s title riffs on a variation of “The Problem With [insert perceived source of a problem],” there is likely to be a problem. It is a provocative way to begin a conversation, surely, and provocation is often useful to instigate discussion but when there’s “a problem” with something, vague generalizations are likely to follow. In the Sunday Book Review this week, Neil Genzlinger wrote an essay, “The Problem With Memoirs,” where he takes issue with this “age of oversharing.” He writes, “There was a time when you had to earn the right to draft a memoir, by accomplishing something noteworthy or having an extremely unusual experience or being such a brilliant writer that you could turn relatively ordinary occur­rences into a snapshot of a broader historical moment,” as if there should be a vetting process for who is or is not eligible to write a memoir.

For a long time, I was fairly skeptical of memoirs and did not necessarily see the utility in reading an accounting of someone else’s memories, particularly when those memories seemed to come from an ordinary life or a life not yet fully lived, as is the case for young memoirists. I understand Genzlinger’s frustration but his lament felt a bit narrow and shortsighted. When a very young person writes a memoir, I often wonder what they could have possibly learned, but that attitude is not necessarily fair, particularly because people often mistake memoirs for autobiographies and they are not the same thing. As I understand them, autobiographies recount the entirety of a life lived. Memoir, which takes its meaning from the Latin memoria, to reminisce, is about a moment or series of moments in time that might speak to something greater. Memoirs are more intimate in scope. A memoir tells a close story so it is not surprising then that memoirs are written by people of all ages, whether they have accomplished something noteworthy (a relative concept) or had an unusual experience (also relative), or not.

READ MORE >

Craft Notes / 42 Comments
January 31st, 2011 / 10:22 pm

There Are Always Things On My Mind

[1]

One of the things I love most when ordering a book from Amazon.com or a subscription from one of the well-established literary magazines is I know I can trust I will receive what I ordered in a reasonable amount of time. I know I am not just throwing my money into the wind and hoping for the best. Often times, however, when I order books and magazines from smaller outfits, it feels like a real crapshoot. Maybe I will receive what I ordered, maybe I won’t. Maybe what I ordered will arrive during the timeframe promised, maybe it won’t. More often than not, it feels like I have to track down small press books and magazines I’ve ordered and if I forget I’ve ordered something, I’ve essentially donated that money with nothing but, perhaps, good karma, to show for it. I’ve contributed to several Kickstarter projects and only received what was promised by two. I don’t really care but still, if you say you’re going to do something, you should do it otherwise you really undermine yourself and lose potential customers.

At times, I feel like we eschew professionalism. We don’t use contracts. We don’t stick to timelines. We don’t send out review copies in advance. Sometimes, I think we don’t bother trying to do what the bigger presses our doing because we think we can’t. Word Riot has proven that wrong. Paula Bomer’s book, for example, was reviewed in Publisher’s Weekly and had a mention in O Magazine. We don’t communicate effectively. We don’t update our websites or we delete our archives without notifying our authors. I’m generalizing here, but these things happen all the time and it can be frustrating, as a consumer, as a writer, as an editor.

READ MORE >

Random / 28 Comments
January 28th, 2011 / 2:31 pm

Joan Crawford Says No Rhetorical Questions

All too often, when a writer wants to express some kind of doubt or curiosity or insecurity in their characters, they will invoke a plaintive rhetorical question like, “Ella loved her husband, didn’t she?” or “What was he thinking?” or “This wasn’t really her life, was it?” or “Did that really happen?” These  interrogatory  moments are a facile way of introducing tension, of letting the audience know an internal debate is taking place, of pandering in really annoying ways, of stating the blatantly obvious. Are rhetorical questions necessary though? I think not. They are lazy writing, using the questions to drive the narrative forward when that same forward motion could be achieved by just telling the damn story and showing that doubt or insecurity in other ways.  I have been seeing a rash of rhetorical questions lately. I now often cringe. I am even more troubled when a story begins or ends with a rhetorical question. In these instances, I am left with the impression that the writer is lacking confidence or that the writer is unsure of how to begin or where to end their story. Every one has a different set of rules for writing but I have to insist that two of those unbreakable rules must be: 1) do not use rhetorical questions unless absolutely necessary and 2) never begin or end your story with a question. It’s your writing. You (should) know the answers. Am I the only one who is driven crazy by rhetorical questions?

Wait. See what I just did there?

Craft Notes / 19 Comments
January 27th, 2011 / 8:05 pm