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.

Literary Magazine Club: Beecher’s Edition (11/1/11)

The next installment of Literary Magazine Club begins on November 1 when we will be reading and discussing the debut issue of Beecher’s, the graduate student run literary magazine from the University of Kansas.

Beecher’s is selling the issue at a 40% discount for HTMLGIANT readers. Take them up on that bargain–$6.50 for a great literary magazine which is beautifully designed and produced–you can’t pass that up. To take advantage of this discount, go to http://www.beechersmag.com/2011/10/htmlgiant-book-club/. Enter the password HTMLGIANT.  This will take them to a secure Paypal portal on the Beecher’s website for you to complete your order.

Future club selections:
January 2012: Versal
March 2012: Salt Hill
May 2012: Trnsfr
July 2012: Uncanny Valley
September 2012: J Journal: New Writing on Justice

Stay tuned for special offers and giveaways for these magazines.

If you’re interested in writing a guest post or some other feature related to Beecher’s, get in touch by e-mailing me at roxane at htmlgiant.com. Topics you might consider discussing include the design, content, overall aesthetic, whether the magazine met your expectations, if the debut is promising, what the magazine contributes to the literary scene, etc. You might also do an in-depth analysis of one writer’s work, etc. There are no limits.

There’s also a Google Group with light posting about literary magazines and club announcements. If you want to join the group or want more information about the LMC, if you’re an editor who wants your magazine featured, etc, send me an e-mail. To summarize: however you want to participate please get in touch or watch this space in November when hopefully, we’ll have a great discussion about an interesting new literary magazine.

Literary Magazine Club / 1 Comment
October 26th, 2011 / 2:00 pm

Reading Material

Today, Nouvella Books is launching Matthew Salesses’s novella The Last Repatriate. About the book: In 1953, after the end of the Korean War, 23 POWs refused to repatriate to America. The Last Repatriate tells the story of Theodore Dickerson, a prisoner who eventually returns to his home in Virginia in the midst of the McCarthy Era. He is welcomed back as a hero, though he has not returned unscathed. The lasting effects of the POW camp and troubles with his ex-fiancée complicate his new marriage as he struggles to readjust to the Virginia he holds dear. Nouvella is helmed by Deena Drewis and their business model looks interesting–limited print runs, 400 of which are sold during a week long launch, 100 sent to bookstores and events, as well as e-book distribution.

I was thoroughly entertained by this exploration of the minibar by Dubravka Ugresic—one of the best essays I’ve read in a long time.

If you’ve ever wondered what script writers think of bad movie scripts, wait no longer.

At the Los Angeles Review of Books, a thoughtful essay about the Occupy movement.

David Carr asks, “Why not occupy the newsrooms?”

Kyle Winkler thinks books are an existential crisis.

A lot of writers bristle when their work is vetted by students at literary magazines. Mike Meginnis has a lot to say about the matter. As a follow up, he has questions.

You can see the history of science fiction in one image. It is amazing.

 

Random / 34 Comments
October 25th, 2011 / 2:29 pm

Modern Submission Convenience

We just finished our first workshop in my fiction class and now my students and I are talking about revision and what students should consider, if and when they choose to submit writing to literary magazines. I want to make clear to my students that publication isn’t what they should be thinking about right now but I still want them to start to understand what it means to submit work, receive editorial feedback and face rejection or acceptance. Most of the students are, understandably, intimidated by the submission process and what it means to put their work out into the world. Hell, I’m still intimidated by the submission process. For newer writers, it is hard to grasp what editors really want. It’s hard to break yourself of the mindset that you need to worry about what editors want. I went over some of the basic etiquette of submitting–address the proper editors, spell their names correctly, don’t explain your story, don’t ramble, proofread your work, read it aloud, proofread it again, research the magazines where you’re sending your work, read the magazines where you’re sending your work, and more than anything, make sure you’re submitting writing that matters.

When I first started submitting work, there was a ritual to it. I’d print a story out on my dot matrix printer and tear off the perforated edges dotted with tiny holes. I’d consult my Writer’s Market, write a cover letter, address a return envelope affixed with enough postage for a response and send off a story I now know had no shot in hell of ever being published by the likes of those glittery magazines I foolishly hoped would love my work. I am not nostalgic for that time. It was pretty terrible. I did learn, though, that becoming a published writer required patience and effort and sometimes that effort was secretarial.

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Random / 78 Comments
October 21st, 2011 / 5:38 pm
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When you’re asked to withdraw something or to resign from a position, there’s often some kind of pressure involved and that pressure is generally wielded to make someone else save face. Last week, the National Book Foundation announced this year’s nominees for the National Book Award. They made a mistake (?!) and today, the writer whose work was “mistakenly” included,  withdrew her work from consideration, at the Foundation’s “request.” The word clusterfuck comes to mind. Real talk: I’d cry if this happened to me.

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Q&A #8

If you have questions about writing or publishing or whatever, leave them in the comments or e-mail them to roxane at htmlgiant dot com and we will find you some answers.

Question:
i have a website and published stories. i sell booklets of my stories on the streets. sometimes i feel like no one reads anything i’ve written. how do i put myself out in the public more? how do i get a broader readership?

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Behind the Scenes / 24 Comments
October 14th, 2011 / 4:46 pm

The Savage Specifics of Such a Finale: A Conversation With Joshua Mohr

Joshua Mohr’s Damascus (Two Dollar Radio) is a tightly packed novel about the lost, losing, and broken people who frequent Damascus, a dive bar in San Francisco. The story is moving, bitterly charming, sometimes depressing, but always engaging. I talked to Joshua about his book, character driven writing, writing as a form of protest and much more.

I read Damascus as very character driven. It’s really the people and what you show us about their lives that create the narrative. Would you consider Damascus character driven?

Absolutely. Books don’t work if the people on the pages aren’t alive. It’s why writing a novel takes so long. You have to dig around in other psyches, other hearts and souls. The book isn’t going to be any good until your characters are the ones telling the story, and you’re just the poorly paid secretary scribbling it all down.

I teach in the MFA program at the University of San Francisco and when I talk characterization with my students, I emphasize the idea that actually the characters have to characterize themselves: the reader just sits back and watches the players stalk their sordid habitats. This kind of active characterization involves your reader in the story, too, making them put the pieces together for what each new scene means, how it contributes and complicates the action they’ve already observed. They become a kind of detective trying to compile an interpretation.

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Author Spotlight / 8 Comments
October 11th, 2011 / 1:00 pm

This/That

The Dzanc Sessions, coordinated by Anna Leigh Clark, look pretty interesting. Session One classes begin the week of October 16. Each class spans eight or ten weeks. The content of the class is the same regardless of the time span; it is merely accelerated in the eight-week version. Eight-week Session One classes run through the week of December 4. Ten-week classes run through the week of December 18. Session Two will begin the first week of January 2012 with another eclectic line-up of workshop opportunities. The price for workshops is $325 Cost includes a three-month membership to the Dzanc Books eBook Club. (Or, if you do not have an e-reader, you can select a free copy of any print title from Dzanc Books.) The bulk of your registration fee supports the non-profit work of Dzanc Books. A portion of it supports the work of your instructor and the administration of the Dzanc Sessions.

Anna also has a great roundup of literary things here.

Don’t forget that the new Literary Magazine Club discussion begins on November 1. You can find details on ordering the magazine we’ll be reading, Beecher’s here.

Emily Books. What do you guys think of the concept? I’ve talked about how we’re inundated by books these days and it’s hard to know what to read. I’ve also talked about Vouched Books, where Chris Newgent personally vouches for the books he sells and is both able and willing to talk about any title he caries (from a limited, curated selection). That intimacy makes it easy to get on board with taking a chance on writers we’re not familiar with and I’ve enjoyed learning about books I wouldn’t ordinarily come across at his table. Emily Books seems to do something similar. They feature one title a month, selling only e-books. There’s also a book club… if you live in NYC. A bookstore that only sells one book at any given time is intriguing. This has kind of been done before but I’m interested in future selections and seeing if other people adopt similar approaches to bookselling.

Does Timothy McSweeney have a white savior complex? I found this essay really thought provoking and it introduces interesting questions about cultural representation and the consequences of getting “it” wrong or right (via Jackson Nieuwland).

The Occupy Wall Street library has a blog worth checking out (via Bookslut).

Writer’s Relief is having a contest to support literary magazines.

The new TV season is kind of disappointing, right? I haven’t seen anything yet that I must watch.

The last two books I enjoyed: Blueprints for Building Better Girls by Elissa Schappell (not perfect but very immersive and more complex than I initially realized) and Reality Bites Back by Jennifer Pozner (very incisive). Don’t read that latter book unless you want your enjoyment of reality television to be ruined forever (I kid, mostly).

There is an encyclopedia of science fiction. I wonder what an encyclopedia of literary fiction would look like. Divorce: In literary parlance, the dissolution of a marriage as a narrative catalyst to explain character motivations such as drinking, promiscuity, bitterness, and tear-stained arguments. See also: the children.

 

Roundup / 10 Comments
October 10th, 2011 / 4:55 pm

I Felt Like I Was Part of Something

Last spring I graduated from my MFA program with a degree in fiction and was expelled into the wilds of a Pittsburgh recession with very few—if any!—marketable skills. I drank a lot and watched TV and cooked up elaborate theories about LOST involving a super intelligent ape named Joop mentioned only briefly during a second season viral campaign. Halfway through the summer I lucked into a few teaching gigs and ended up with a section of Intermediate Fiction Workshop. I always had vague notions of one day teaching college, but those were always hazy fantasies set deep in a future where I’d be a distinguished silver fox smoking cigars in some type of hover mansion. I wasn’t a TA during my MFA campaign and had no earthly idea if I was cut out to actually walk into a classroom and explain anything to students, let alone fiction, the thing in the world I care most about. As the summer wound down and I made stab after stab at a syllabus, I’d lie awake at night listening to the trains howl through Pittsburgh while trying not to vomit from crippling anxiety.

Classes began. Fall came and went. I was again unbelievably lucky and landed a section of Advanced Fiction in the spring which many of my Intermediate students signed up for. The process was endlessly humbling, mostly because of the students. I was shocked at how genuinely good so many of them were. I was ready for anything on that first day of class: from manic scribbles on a napkin to thousand page genre opuses. But these students were wonderful. They loved fiction as much as I did, and their enthusiasm hyped me up and I hope vice versa. By the time the academic year drew to a close, many of them were beginning to publish their work in journals I respected, and all of them had shown some pretty big improvements from the first day. And all of this from a workshop. The workshop!

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Craft Notes / 17 Comments
October 4th, 2011 / 1:00 pm

Literary Magazine Club Never Dies

I’m reviving LMC and the first magazine we’ll be discussing is Beecher’s, the graduate student run literary magazine from the University of Kansas. We’ll feature a new magazine every two months and hopefully that lighter schedule will allow more readers to participate.

The debut issue of Beecher’s we’ll be reading features Alec Niedenthal, Rebecca Wadlinger, Joshua Cohen, Rhoads Stevens, John Dermot Woods, Phil Estes, Creed J. Shepard, Lincoln Michel, Yelena Akhtiorskaya, John Coletti, Colin Winnette, Dana Ward & Stephanie Young, James Yeh, Alexis Orgera, Rozalia Jovanovich, Ricky Garni, and Justin Runge.

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Literary Magazine Club / 12 Comments
October 3rd, 2011 / 12:15 pm

Juggalos on Writing

“It’s a lifestyle, it ain’t only a music choice.”

“Do what you gotta do, don’t gotta hate on people because they’re different.”

“I do whatever the fuck I want and don’t give two fucking shits.”

“I am fucked up on E and vodka.”

“I got fucked up.”

“It was a fucking spectacle and shit and I don’t give a fuck because it was righteous.”

“I can cook like a motherfucker.”

“I’m a happy motherfucker living life day to day.”

“Most people think I’m on drugs because I’m always happy.”

“It’s a puzzle and each and everyone of us is an integral piece.”

“It actually really burns, I’m not going to lie.”

“Keep it trippy. Legalize everything.”

“The gathering don’t stop. You do.”

“It’s the greatest.”

“I’m still fucking here.”

“Life is something special that you can only have one time. Enjoy the shit out of it.”

“We have alcohol and we’ve got explosives.”

“We just drank a little bit. Probably get all stoned, smoke some hash and fucking chill, do it all again the next day.”

“All of us have jobs.”

“Being a juggalo does not mean you’re not fit for society,”

“I’m insane. I like to stab people, know what I mean?”

“I’m showing my titties to everyone.”

“Why am I a juggalo? Because that’s who I am. That’s how I was born.”

‘There is no bigatory in juggaloism.”

“True life is inside your soul.”

“WOO WOO!”

Craft Notes / 21 Comments
September 30th, 2011 / 7:04 pm