Stacey May Fowles

“Return to No Fun City,” posted at The Walrus Blog

I have been in Vancouver International Airport’s baggage claim area about a dozen times. Every time I stood waiting for my luggage to appear from a flight arriving from Toronto or Montreal, I had the same feeling — a toxic mixture of hopeless love and aching lust, peppered with a knowledge that I was both stupid and doomed…

I have a profile piece about the lovely and talented Dani Couture in the latest issue of Broken Pencil, which is on newsstands now.

“Where the Wild Things Are: Poet Dani Couture walks the fine line between urban life and the natural world”

Revenge of the Sexy Nerds: The cult of Lady Gaga and the mainstreaming of outcast culture

“Unlike her pop-tart contemporaries (and like Madge), Gaga understands that female sexuality, much like fame, is nothing but performance and artifice. Like a pop music JT Leroy, in tricking the media machine into making her famous, she has proved it to be meaningless.” (more)

Drinking With Men Who Are Not Russell Smith: One woman’s perspective of the price of loving the culture we call “books”

“What Smith missed in his column is that for some of those publishing ‘hotties,’ sexuality is a tool used in pursuit of respect — and there is a deep sadness that sets in with the realization that so few really care about your manuscript or your theories or what you studied at university, but instead are deeply interested in how well you ‘entertain.’” (more)

The National Post: Rules For Writing Fiction

“Don’t dismiss pop culture as beneath you. Watching an episode of America’s Next Top Model can be just as useful in studying human strife and conflict as reading Tolstoy.  Especially now that André Leon Talley is a judge.” (more)

Open Book Toronto: The Proust Questionnaire

“More time. More sleep. More passion. More martinis. More puppies.” (more)

(photo by petercruise)

Be Good, a novel

Quill and Quire: “…the novel offers a thoughtful examination of sexuality, relationships, and what it means to tell the truth.”

This Magazine: “…probably the most finely realized small press novel to come out of Canada in the last year…Thank you, Stacey May Fowles.”

Fear of Fighting, a novel with illustrations by Marlena Zuber

Eye Weekly: “Paired well with Zuber’s drawings, Fowles words are simple and elegant. She has perfectly bottled the ennui and cruel narcissism of people old enough to have bad credit but still young enough to puke outside of bars. Even if you’re comfortably past that age, Fowles’ book is worth the sobering read. After all, we’re never as far from our worst years as we think we are.”

She’s Shameless: Women write about growing up, rocking out and fighting back, co-edited with Megan Griffith-Greene

Broken Pencil: “With She’s Shameless, the current publisher and editor of Shameless magazine take aim at the incredibly unrealistic demands put upon young girls and women by the likes of popular fashion and style magazines like Vogue, Seventeen and Elle. Both the book and the magazine attempt to reassure young girls that there is something more to life than the standards of unthinking, apolitical, apathetic and beauty-obsessed consumption offered by the mainstream media. Above all, it seeks to rid young women of feelings of shame-for their bodies, sexuality, gender, outlook and so forth.” Read more »

Suzanna Alyssa Andrew reviews Fear of Fighting:

It’s easy to feel invisible in Toronto, especially when your boyfriend leaves, your co-workers forget your name and your cat runs away. That’s why Marnie, the fading anti-heroine of Fear of Fighting decides to wallow in her studio apartment and count the days until she disappears completely.

Written by Stacey May Fowles and illustrated by Marlena Zuber, Fear of Fighting compiles the secret confessions of an unambitious woman nearing 30 whose youthful aspirations and romantic illusions have been erased by student loan payment overload.

Read the entire review here.

She’s Shameless has been picked to be part of the Toronto Public Library’s Word Out! 2010 reading program for teens. August 9-15 the book will be featured and discussed online as part of the initiative.

With wit and honesty, the writers share stories of their teen experiences (both positive and negative) on everything from pop culture to high school principals. The book is founded on Shameless magazine’s tradition of smart, sassy, honest and inclusive writing, and reaches out to young female readers who are often ignored by mainstream: freethinkers, queer youth, young women of colour, punk rockers, feminists, intellectuals, artists, and activists.

Check out all of the library’s 2010 picks here.

Since the recent Davidar allegations came to light I’ve been thinking a lot about how to use this opportunity to create a dialogue about the culture of publishing. As someone who has worked in both publishing spheres, book and magazine, the allegations, however disturbing and upsetting, are actually unsurprising to me. The most striking thing about the sexual harassment claim is how quickly it has sparked a wave of private admissions from others that they too had experienced or seen something they felt uncomfortable about in their own publishing workplaces. Ranging from a brief comment or touch, to shockingly obscene suggestions or actions, it seems that so many people in publishing have a story tell, and more importantly that they’ve accepted  this is “just the way things are…”

Read the rest of my post on what the Davidar case means to publishing over at Masthead Online.

“It’s pretty much part of Dating 101 that you keep your crazy under wraps for as long as possible. It’s best to wait until there’s an L-bomb or a ring involved, when it becomes harder for the other person to make a clean getaway. (I always think of Carla’s advice on Scrubs: “He doesn’t know that I cry sometimes because I’m not sure there’s a cat heaven!’) One would think that the same thing would apply to the protagonists in the books we read (after all, we don’t want to sacrifice hours of our lives to a complete screw job), but there are plenty of exceptions. In a book, sometimes crazy can be charming. Or sometimes it allows us to see our own crazy writ large on the page, making those deep darks seem a little less menacing. And sometimes, as with Stacey May Fowles‘ Fear of Fighting (Invisible Publishing, 2008), it does both…”

Full review here.

I have a short story in the latest issue of Taddle Creek, and you can read it online here.

“It was the pregnant chain-smoking teenage girl waiting for the northbound bus at Dufferin station who finalized it for Walter.

She stood there, smiling and smoking, her red hair piled high on her head in a hairsprayed slick she incorrectly thought was stylish, her huge belly swaddled in a ridiculous pink fleece zip-up sweater. Walter had tried to slip cautiously past her to get through the station doors—no simple feat given both his and her thickness—and when he inadvertently nudged her with an elbow she sucked at her teeth and spun viciously toward him, her massive midsection leading the turn.

She then decided she would spit squarely in the middle of the back of his grey tweed overcoat…”

Read the full story here.