Q

Anonymous asked:

Hi, my name is Miladine Etienne and I was part of a novel you helped exist..."The Books They Gave Me" really holds a dear place in my heart because I really feel like my thoughts mean something🙂. I know I've thanked you in email correspondence but I'm doing it again, today...4 years later. I still search for an outlet like that book to get my writing out there and I wanted to know if you have any projects or works that I could be a part of again? Thank you in advance

A

Hi, Miladine! I’m currently focused on my fiction work–just completed one book and sent it off to my agent, and I’m deep in research mode for another. So no more collaborative projects for now. 

One really great outlet I’m familiar with is Narratively. They publish a wide variety of reportage and memoir–a few of the editors are friends of mine and it’s a great journal. Check them out and keep writing!

Best, 

J

lastnightsreading:
“aaknopf:
“kategavino:
“Authors as Breakfast Cereal Mascots by Kate Gavino
”
Cat Sized Frosted Murakami Wheats!!
”
Never underestimate the amount of time I spend thinking about author name puns.
” lastnightsreading:
“aaknopf:
“kategavino:
“Authors as Breakfast Cereal Mascots by Kate Gavino
”
Cat Sized Frosted Murakami Wheats!!
”
Never underestimate the amount of time I spend thinking about author name puns.
” lastnightsreading:
“aaknopf:
“kategavino:
“Authors as Breakfast Cereal Mascots by Kate Gavino
”
Cat Sized Frosted Murakami Wheats!!
”
Never underestimate the amount of time I spend thinking about author name puns.
” lastnightsreading:
“aaknopf:
“kategavino:
“Authors as Breakfast Cereal Mascots by Kate Gavino
”
Cat Sized Frosted Murakami Wheats!!
”
Never underestimate the amount of time I spend thinking about author name puns.
” lastnightsreading:
“aaknopf:
“kategavino:
“Authors as Breakfast Cereal Mascots by Kate Gavino
”
Cat Sized Frosted Murakami Wheats!!
”
Never underestimate the amount of time I spend thinking about author name puns.
” lastnightsreading:
“aaknopf:
“kategavino:
“Authors as Breakfast Cereal Mascots by Kate Gavino
”
Cat Sized Frosted Murakami Wheats!!
”
Never underestimate the amount of time I spend thinking about author name puns.
” lastnightsreading:
“aaknopf:
“kategavino:
“Authors as Breakfast Cereal Mascots by Kate Gavino
”
Cat Sized Frosted Murakami Wheats!!
”
Never underestimate the amount of time I spend thinking about author name puns.
” lastnightsreading:
“aaknopf:
“kategavino:
“Authors as Breakfast Cereal Mascots by Kate Gavino
”
Cat Sized Frosted Murakami Wheats!!
”
Never underestimate the amount of time I spend thinking about author name puns.
”

lastnightsreading:

aaknopf:

kategavino:

Authors as Breakfast Cereal Mascots by Kate Gavino

Cat Sized Frosted Murakami Wheats!!

Never underestimate the amount of time I spend thinking about author name puns.

(via thetinhouse-deactivated20180604)

Coming out.

It feels a lot like standing on a beach. Early in the season. The sun’s hot, but the breeze is brisk, and you know exactly how that cold, cold water will burn as it touches your skin. First, just the feet, and as soon as they begin you numb, you have to go deeper. Because once you start, you have to go all the way. 

Whoo. Ok. Next step.

Months ago, I realized I’d been cheating myself. I had been at a party and a friend later asked me if I’d met a particular person… no. Who? What was she wearing? Hum. Then I realized I hadn’t talked to any of the women. Couldn’t recall a single name or face. The men? Sure. I’d paid plenty of attention to them. I could list and rank them in order of cleverness and appearance. 

At home, my bookshelf betrayed the same biases. All those guys. Amis and McEwan and Ballard. Roth, Ellroy. I even have two books by David Foster Wallace, whose writing I don’t even really like. There were women, too, of course: as much Highsmith as Ellroy and more Wharton than James. But not enough. 

It turns out I’d been ignoring women. Deliberately. The drive to seek male approval had been beaten into me, and I sought intellectual approval within the male world. (Other kinds of approval, too, but that’s a rigged game.)

And so I vowed to read only books written by women for a time. A year, let’s say. I didn’t announce this, I don’t want to be obnoxious and pretentious about it. I’m not totally catholic about it; I’ll read magazine and news pieces by men. But, just for a while, I’m turning my ear to my sisters. 

The reason I’ve been loathe to make a big announcement is that I reserve the right to change my mind. What if something brilliant comes out and I want to make an exception? I don’t want to make a big stupid prideful announcement, I just want to expand my literacy in a direction I’ve neglected. And there are other woman writers who’ve made similar announcements (later, I will truthfully say, than my own decision) and this is not a competition. Stepping out of competition is half the point. I don’t stress about how fast I’m writing or how much I am publishing. I don’t. I won’t. 

This experiment has been good for me. Almost immediately, I realized I was looking at mostly white women, so I’ve been seeking out work by a broader array of women. And I thought I’d learned a lot. 

But tonight I had one of those New York thrills. In SoHo, saw a famous TV star and comedian, someone with whom I strongly identify. He’s a divorced dad, I’m a divorced mom. We’re each trying to balance paying work and creative work and being a good parent in a world we see all too clearly for what it is. And we live in the same town. Our kids are in the same grades. We actually know people in common. I could run into this guy at a PTA meeting. He’s a real guy. And there he was, walking with his teenaged kid, as I was walking with my teenaged kid. They were probably going to the movies, I felt. There’s a great art cinema a couple of blocks away, and they were headed in that direction. He’s a big film buff, and there’s nothing better than introducing your budding-intellectual kid to a great film. I was taking mine to the sporting goods store to buy a duffel for his class trip. We were two New York parents, each out on a Saturday night with our kids. 

I waited ten or fifteen minutes, then tweeted my excitement. Later, after we concluded our errands, had dinner, and came home, I checked Twitter to see if anyone else commented or noticed my Tweet. And, omg, one person saw him too! There was another tweet, someone echoing my excitement. A famous female punk musician from the 80s, still active today. 

I didn’t see her. Now, she may well have seen him a block away and five minutes later than I did, but the fact remains that even if she and I had crossed paths, I probably would not have noticed her. Because, despite my reading, I still have a lot of work left to do. I’m still seeking that boy-approval on some level. 

Sorry, guys. (Not sorry.) It’s going to be another year…

Today in Connections…

Lately I keep finding news pieces side-by-side which beg to be connected to each other, as each addresses the same problem from a different side.

Today we have two pieces in Salon that each address the defensive strategies men undertake to excuse–even legitimize–their bad behavior. 

First, from Brittney Cooper: Black girls’ sexual burden: Why Mo’ne Davis was really called a “slut.” Cooper’s take is that Black girls are socialized to be even more empathetic and forgiving than their white counterparts: that Black women are trained to be uber-feminine, to bear all insults, always turning the other cheek and taking care of others. I’d go a step further. The root of this lies in men’s need to generate a reason why their transgressions don’t “count”–aren’t, in fact, transgressions at all. Women, and Black women especially, are hyper-sexualized under this schema. All our actions are interpreted as signals of our desire for male attention and sex. In this way, no matter what a man chooses to do to us, we were “asking for it.” It’s a deeply ingrained ritual process of dehumanizing us, removing our agency and turning every woman (and minority women especially) into vessels for sex, just like Helen DeWitt’s Lightning Rods. If any reason at all can be found to suggest that a woman was “asking for it,” her agency is gone. 

Second, via Erin Keane, another example of the exact same phenomenon. Mariel Hemingway has a new autobiography out in which she details how her parents, very horrifyingly, encouraged her to go with Woody Allen on a romantic vacation to Paris shortly after Manhattan finished shooting. When she was 17, and Allen was 44. Converting harassment (which Allen obviously hoped would lead to sex) to a willingly-undertaken relationship would exonerate him from any claims that his desires were inappropriate. 

The key to both of these is that women still have agency. Mo’ne, unfortunately, gracefully forgave the older boy who derided her, while Mariel had the presence of mind to realize she was being fed to a wolf, and refused to go on the trip. If her parents were supportive and Mariel agreed, it wouldn’t be molestation, it would be a charmingly transgressive May (April)-December romance. 

In both cases, men needed to get a woman’s permission to abuse her. That need, that shred of decency still exists, and it means, more than ever, that we have to raise our daughters to never, never give quarter. Never give permission. 

“Obviously there is a big nod to [Leo Tolstoy’s] Anna Karenina, but I would say that [Gustave Flaubert’s] Madame Bovary is the book that I am more taken with — that I’m most taken with, actually. It’s a fantastic novel. It’s maybe my favorite novel. This book — I think of it as an homage.”

Poet Jill Alexander Essbaum tells NPR’s Lynn Neary about the literary heavyweights that influenced her first novel, Hausfrau, about a deeply unhappy married woman who seeks solace in extramarital affairs.

‘Hausfrau’ Strips Down Its Modern-Day Madame Bovary

(via nprbooks)

(via books)

“My favorite piece of media this year (I’ve had many, but since I have to choose) is The Toast, and specifically all of the pieces written by Mallory Ortberg. Her dirtbag retellings of literature, her analysis of what women in art have really been thinking, her book, Texts From Jane Eyre… basically everything Mallory does is my favorite. I wish she would come and live in my house.”

Maureen Johnson in · The A.V. Club

Mallory and Maureen are *both* my favorite!

(via rachelfershleiser)

Ditto.

(via rachelfershleiser)

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