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.

Our Submission Need Not Be Guided

Unsaid 4 has been discussed here before and I’m going to discuss it again. The magazine is fairly new to me and after reading all the glowing reviews of the fourth issue, in particular, I was really intrigued but that intrigue was coupled with a dash of skepticism that was short-lived once I began reading. From the very first story, Unsaid had my attention. There is a breathtaking range of writing in this issue and as I read, I would fold the corners of every page that had some really interesting turn of phrase. By the time I reached the end of the massive, 504 pp. issue, more than half of the book’s pages were folded (See Figure 1). I was not familiar with most of the writers in the issue so it was also great to be introduced to new (to me) writers and writing styles. A lot of the content from this issue is online at the Unsaid website and I highly recommend checking the magazine out if you haven’t already.

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Uncategorized / 69 Comments
February 25th, 2010 / 5:44 pm

The Rules

The Guardian has published ten rules for writing fiction from several different writers. Find Part 1 here and Part 2 here. My favorite are Jeanette Winterson’s rules which include:

2. Never stop when you are stuck. You may not be able to solve the problem, but turn aside and write something else. Do not stop altogether.

7. Take no notice of anyone with a ­gender agenda. A lot of men still think that women lack imagination of the fiery kind.

9. Trust your creativity.

What are your rules?

Author Spotlight & Massive People / 95 Comments
February 20th, 2010 / 6:15 am

We’re Getting On: A Conversation With James Kaelan

We're Getting On Covers

James Kaelen’s We’re Getting On, a collection of interconnected stories following five people as they relocate to the Nevada desert intending to abandon technology, will be published by Flatmancrooked on July 2, 2010. The project is being billed as a Zero Emission book. In addition to sending his writing out into the world, Kaelen also plans on going on a West Coast bike tour without leaving a carbon footprint  to promote the book and, in many ways, the ideology behind the book. He took some time from his busy schedule to talk with me about the book and the book/bicycle tour.

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Author Spotlight & Web Hype / 16 Comments
February 18th, 2010 / 5:39 pm

Q & A #4

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

If you withdraw a story, is it appropriate to immediately send another story to that lit. journal? What if you have multiple withdrawals from that publication? (And I’m talking the kind of place where you have to email them to withdraw your piece, not just pull it out yourself and they never even knew it was there.) Are they going to get pissed at some point? When does your good/bad luck become a reason to basically stop submitting to a journal?

Sean Lovelace
Yes, they get pissed eventually. Numerous withdraws? I am already souring your name. What are you doing? If you are continually getting accepted by multiple journals, bless you. But why not stop the simultaneous submissions? You obviously know how to write a great story lit mags want. Cut the shotgun approach at this point.

Lily Hoang

I don’t submit enough to journals to withdraw, but I have withdrawn book ms from presses. I do ask if they’ll consider another ms in the future, unless I have a spare lying around (which I never do). Usually, they’re nice, but with one press in particular, I’ve pulled two or three ms from them (one just a week or two after I submitted it). That’s just embarrassing. With journals though, I don’t think it’s a big deal.

Ryan Call

I don’t think it’s bad to immediately send another story to take the place of a withdrawal. It doesn’t bother me when I read submissions for NOÖ. I just mark the previous story ‘withdrawn’ and the new story goes at the end of the queue. As a writer, I tend not to send an immediate replacement. I don’t often have a story to replace another story, so it takes me a long time to figure out what to send to that editor if I had to withdraw another story that I thought was perfect for him or her.

Roxane Gay

Multiple withdrawals gets annoying. To go on a tiny tangent, I get irritated when people withdraw stories the same day or the same week. I realize that cannot be helped at times, but it is aggravating. When you find yourself in the position where you’re always withdrawing stories, it’s time to stop simultaneously submitting or at least submitting to no more than two or three markets for each story. To really answer your question, I don’t mind a writer immediately sending another submission immediately after they withdraw a piece but if it happened four or five times in a very short time span, I would start to get testy about it.

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Uncategorized / 156 Comments
February 18th, 2010 / 2:36 am

I Am Not Sorry I Have A Vagina*

The fiction section of the new issue (ETA: the set of stories that indicate they’ve been guest edited by Claire Messud) of Guernica is guest-edited by Claire Messud and she offers a brief essay, Writers, Plain and Simple, to introduce her selections, all written by women. In her essay, Messud writes of how Elizabeth Bishop did not wish to be known as a woman writer and she states:

As an American writer of the early twenty-first century, I agree with her wholeheartedly. An artist’s work is in no way limited or defined by her gender. To allot space, then—such as this fiction section of Guernica—to women writers specifically is, surely, to limit and define them—us!—by an irrelevant fact of birth.

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Random / 232 Comments
February 16th, 2010 / 5:46 pm
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One of the books I’ve most enjoyed in recent memory is Tina May Hall’s All the Day’s Sad Stories which has been out of print for some time now. This has been particularly frustrating as it has impeded by my efforts to evangelize about the book by sending it to everyone I know as well as a few strangers. Good news! That novella will now be re-released as part of May Hall’s short story collection The Physics of Imaginary Objects, which just won the 2010 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. I shall take to my pulpit, as should we all.

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New From Peter Schwartz: Old Men, Girls, and Monsters

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Author Spotlight / 1 Comment
February 10th, 2010 / 2:24 pm
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What always astounds me about the Internet is the speed with which it can respond to all things new. Meet Digital Americana, the “first” literary magazine made for the Apple iPad. That’s pretty crafty, getting to the head of that line before the iPad is even available. They’re accepting submissions if you want to get in on the newness and firstness and such. In the past year, I’ve seen literary magazines for cellphones, Twitter, the Kindle and on and on and on. To simply create a magazine for readers feels kind of old-fashioned. I like old-fashioned.

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An enterprising individual has come up with a list of ten reasons why poetry is bullshit and folks have added to the list which is now a whopping 93 items long. It’s worth reading, chuckling over, agreeing with or railing against.

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Burch Chapbook Winners

We were really blown away by the number of entries for the chapbook giveaway as well as the very interesting ways in which you take yourselves apart. Jereme, we would be inclined to answer your question with a question.  We thank everyone who entered.

Without further delay, Matt has carefully considered the entries, meditated, read some tea leaves and chosen his five favorites. If you’re one of these folks, e-mail me your address (roxane at pankmagazine dot com) and we’ll get the book in the mail to you early this week.

How the winners take themselves apart:

1. Teresa turns it up loud, takes an acidbath and gets sweaty.

2. Marco tears in with tongs and staple guns.

3. Bob follows the Way and does it ’til it’s done.

4. Cameron accomplishes it with panache, mustachioed.

5. Vaughan first undoes the leather.

Congratulations to you all and a big thanks to the anonymous donor who made this giveaway possible.

Contests / 4 Comments
January 24th, 2010 / 7:37 pm