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.

Weekend Reading and Such

PressBooks, a new way to make an ePub and print-ready PDF of a manuscript,  is open to the public. I haven’t used the service yet but it seems interesting, particular when so many small presses are trying to find affordable, uncomplicated ways to create e-books.

At The Millions, Edan Lepucki explains her reasons for not self-publishing. Both the essay and the comments are interesting.

In cool news, Ben Tanzer’s You Can Make Him Like You is the December selection for The Cult, Chuck Palahniuk’s book club. You can buy the book here.

This may be the best corporate apology ever.

I really enjoyed this interview with Dagoberto Gilb on the Zyzzyva blog (via Chris Arnold).

John Branch’s three-part series on the life and death of hockey player Derek Boogard is some of the finest long form journalism I’ve read in a while. Boogard’s story is at once infuriating, intriguing, and ultimately, heartbreaking. I learned that there are “enforcers” in hockey which makes the sport seem infinitely more menacing.

On the Paris Review blog, Avi Steinberg writes about the art of air travel crises.

A leaked memo from Hachette explains why publishers are still relevant.

Roundup / 20 Comments
December 9th, 2011 / 6:03 pm

ToBS R1: Gmail chat people who are always visible vs. People who leave really long comments

[Matchup #21 in Tournament of Bookshit]

Gmail chat people who are always visible

We get it. You are always online and you want the world to know it. You are connected and plugged in and able to immediately respond to every electronic message appearing in your Inbox. You are there, waiting beneath the pale glow of your monitor, to chat and abuse emoticons and the English language typing phrases like i want 2 c u cum. You are the Motel 6 of Gmail—your light is always on, always green. When you’re busy, you do not hesitate to turn on the red light but still, you are there. Never, though, is your light yellow. Never does that light fade to gray. You do not idle. You do not step away from the computer. You do not stop typing. Your fingers are always tap tap tapping away, letting the world know you will not abandon your virtual post. You are the Internet presence. You are the bright e-mail light in the dark, dark night. We see the messages you leave, floating in the screen ether just below your name. You’re writing or you’re reading or you’re promoting the last thing you wrote. More often than not, you are passive aggressively communicating your displeasure about the state of the world or, as is usually the case, the state of your world. You are pithy or bitter or bitterly pithy but at least you are there. You will always be there. The rest of us, lurking silently behind the gray dot of feigned absence, we watch and we wait. Sooner or later, your time will come. Your light too, will go gray. READ MORE >

Contests / 19 Comments
December 7th, 2011 / 12:36 pm

{LMC} A Conversation with the Editors of Beecher’s

It has been a great month and some change talking about Beecher’s. I had a roundtable discussion with editors past and present about the magazine, what they look for, and what they hope for the future of Beecher’s.

Why the name Beecher’s? 

Chloe Cooper Jones: Obscure Kansas history reference!

Iris Moulton:  It’s meant as a reference to Henry Ward Beecher, an abolitionist who wanted to make sure Kansas would enter as a free state. He packed rifles for this cause in crates labeled Beecher’s Bibles, sneaking weapons for the cause. Chloe’s right, it is an obscure Kansas reference, and that’s part of why it endeared itself to us. And we felt like we were putting some serious ammunition in an unsuspecting package as we worked to assemble Beecher’s One.

Ben Pfeiffer:  Also, we liked the simplicity of Beecher’s, the sound of it, and we liked the flexibility that name provides to future KU-MFA students: They can put their own stamp on Beecher’s while retaining continuity with earlier editorial boards. In the future, we anticipate editions with titles like Beecher’s Last Stand, Beecher’s Grocery List, and Beecher’s Carnival of Sadness. Even in the beginning we were thinking: “How do we build a magazine that lasts once we’re graduated?”

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Literary Magazine Club / 14 Comments
December 5th, 2011 / 1:00 pm

{LMC}: January’s Selection: Versal 9

In January 2012, we will be reading Versal 9, a literary journal out of Amsterdam.  The editors of Versal have been kind enough to offer ten  four  two  one remaining free copies of the magazine and a discount for those who buy the magazine. If you’re interested in a free copy, e-mail me with your name and address.

The sale price for LMC members is $10 instead of the usual $14.95. You can buy the issue here.

Versal is a literary & art annual out of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Versal was founded in 2002 by American poet Megan M. Garr to help foster the translocal literary community in Amsterdam. In 2010, Versal was named one of seventeen “Indie Innovator” presses by Poets & Writers Magazine, which called it “the most visible product of a passionate group helping to sustain ‘transnational networks’ for writers.”

Community, wide-reaching aesthetic and bold design have been at the core of the Versal project from the outset. Today, Versal is built by a volunteer team of nearly 20 writers and artists around the globe. The team is currently working towards Versal’s 10-year anniversary, which will be marked by the release of the tenth issue in May 2012.

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Literary Magazine Club / 2 Comments
December 1st, 2011 / 1:00 pm

Privacy, Personal Papers, Pricks, Rumps

 

Do we have the right to read, discuss and analyze the personal papers of famous writers, often who have died? I think about this a lot because I am as curious (nosy) as I am uncomfortable with the idea of intellectually traipsing through a writer’s personal papers. In Slate last week, Katie Roiphe wrote about David Foster Wallace’s syllabus. Her article wasn’t particularly noteworthy but I was reminded of how often writers write about DFW and, increasingly, draw from his personal papers. Who knows how many hundreds, if not thousands of articles have been written about the man, the writer, and the scholar, each one trying to offer some kind of new insight into the man and his work. Certainly, there’s a lot to be learned from most things related to DFW including his syllabi. He had a unique, at times incisive approach to communicating to his students the material that would be covered in his courses as well as his general expectations of students in his classes. At the same time, as a teacher, I shudder to imagine anyone reading too much into my syllabi because I know how the sausage gets made.

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Behind the Scenes / 20 Comments
November 29th, 2011 / 2:44 am

We Can’t Sit This One Out


At UC Davis, students protested nonviolently, the campus police responded, an officer casually sprayed a group of student  sitting their arms interlocked, like plants, he became a meme and, along with the police chief, was placed on leave. Many people in many places expressed outrage, students participated in a powerful, silent protest. Assistant Professor Nathan Brown wrote an open letter to Katehi expressing his outrage. The UC Davis English department has changed their website so that the header issues a call for the chancellor, Linda Katehi, to resign and for the police force to be disbanded. On a national faculty mailing list I’m on, a member issued a call to action stating, “We cannot sit this one out.” During turbulent times, writers often ask themselves, how do we write about this? How do we respond? What is our responsibility to social change? How do we participate and avoid sitting this one out? Poet Robert Hass wrote a New York Times editorial that has been widely read and lauded but he also avoided sitting this one out because he and his wife were at the Berkeley protest. As writers, do you feel a need to respond to what happened at UC Davis, or UC Berkeley, or at any of the occupy movements? Do you feel the need to physically participate in these protests? Why and how?

Random / 171 Comments
November 22nd, 2011 / 4:41 pm

Pleasant and Painful Experiences

1.

A few weeks ago, Glen Duncan reviewed Colson Whitehead’s Zone One and he certainly got a vocal reaction, not necessarily because it was a less than glowing review but because of how he wrote the review, the strange and insulting analogies he made and so on. In his review he, among other things, attempts to predict what those ultimate arbiters of literary taste–Amazon.com reviewers–might have to say. As he discusses the literary nature of the novel, Duncan writes, ” We get, in short, an attempt to take the psychology of the premise seriously, to see if it makes a relevant shape.” He also revisits this idea of porn starts, throughout. Ooh! He said porn star in a literary review! Edgy! Today, he wrote a defense (???) of his review. He responded to the criticism of his criticism with more criticism! Meta! The follow up can be summarized thusly: You are all haters who didn’t understand what I wrote.

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Roundup / 40 Comments
November 18th, 2011 / 5:13 pm

A Conversation With Gregory Sherl

Gregory Sherl is the author of the excellent poetry collection Heavy Petting (my review, here, at Diode). I’ve always admired the sensuality and openness of his writing so we talked about the way he exposes himself in his poetry, Ryan Gosling’s satin jacket in Drive, and the matter of fucking in poetry.

 

What is your obsession as a writer?

Trying to stop myself from being so desperately aware that I’m a writer. Or maybe my obsession is figuring out how to pay for healthcare when my only income comes from being an Adjunct English Instructor. Or maybe it’s me obsessing over obsessing about the fact that I need to apply for my MFA like today but not doing it because writing new poems is better than putting old poems together in a packet with some stamps on it. Or maybe it’s watching the doctor try to figure out the right cocktail of medication so I don’t sleep nineteen hours in one day. Or maybe it’s trying to watchFelicity in its entirety as quickly as possible (a little over two weeks, I believe). Or maybe these aren’t my obsessions as a writer but my obsessions as me but I’m a writer so I think it fits.

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Random / 15 Comments
November 9th, 2011 / 1:00 pm

{LMC}: Beecher’s One

The first thing you will notice about Beecher’s is the design and production–clean and elegant. The spine is bound with black thread. The pages are thick, linen, creamy, the grain of it holding the ink to the page.

Introducing a video about the debut issue, the editors said, “Beecher’s One was designed to give the text inside primacy, and as well record the reader’s tactile interaction with the physical magazine. The layout is straight-forward, and the text is presented simply in a black serif font on white paper. The physical object, with a naked spine and rigid, toothy, absorbent paper is meant to show evidence of the reader by literally absorbing and recording the reading experience: the hands holding the book, the fingers on the page, the bending of turned pages, the weakening of the unprotected spine.”

Reading Beecher’s is, indeed, a physical experience that openly acknowledges and engages the reader. This is a magazine that wants to develop a relationship with readers and writers. In this, and other regards, Beecher’s succeeds beautifully. The writing showcased within the magazine’s pages is as engaging as the design and production. Contributors include Rebecca Wadlinger, Alec Niedenthal, Joshua Cohen, Rhoads Stevens, John Dermot Woods, Phil Estes, Creed J. Shepard, Lincoln Michel, John Coletti, Yelena Akthiorskaya, Colin Winnette, Dana Ward & Stephanie Young, James Yeh, Alexis Orgera, Rozalia Jovanovic, Ricky Garni, and Justin Runge as well as interviews with Stephen Elliott and Adam Robinson.

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Literary Magazine Club / 13 Comments
November 1st, 2011 / 12:22 pm

Class Is in Session With Professor Edith Wharton

 

Edith Wharton is one of my favorite writers. Her stories are timeless and elegant and if I had to be trapped somewhere with only one writer’s books for the rest of my life, I’d probably choose the complete works of Edith Wharton.

I’ve been thinking about Edith a great deal lately because I’ve been having a lot of self-doubt about my writing for a number of reasons, few of them rational, all of them frustrating. The Internet is great but it’s also terrible because you know, all the time, what everyone else is doing and it’s easy to lose sight of writing itself as what matters most. It’s not hard to fall into the trap of losing confidence in what you do as a writer and/or trying to keep up with the literary Joneses by writing outside of your comfort zone to respond to the literary zeitgeiest. The older I get, the more I realize that while you can and should grow and challenge yourself as a writer, you can only be who you are. Sometimes, like many writers, I lose sight of that. I recently consoled myself with Age of Innocence and Wharton’s amazing short story, “Copy: A Dialogue.” Then I read Wharton’s The Writing of Fiction, a slim but rich volume of writing on writing. Wharton’s insights are sharp, timeless, and truly invaluable.

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Craft Notes / 47 Comments
October 27th, 2011 / 2:00 am