Stacey May Fowles

“A major part of the appeal of Berger’s work for women is that the sex (and there is indeed a lot of it, on almost every page) is stripped so bare, flying in the face of so called ‘mommy porn’ and soft-core glossed erotica-lite like Fifty Shades of Grey. Gone are the layers of polish, the soft-lens Photoshopped depictions of women’s bodies so culturally commonplace on magazine racks, and in mainstream film and television. Berger doesn’t coyly write around the mechanics or vaguely suggest the actions in horrifyingly palatable euphemism. Instead she gives us a straightforward animal ugliness, the literal ins and outs, all impossible to look away from and freeing readers from the false idea of how sex ’should’ look. For those of us who carry shame, it can be extremely liberating.” Read the entire profile here.
(Photo by Tyler Anderson)

“In our hyper-consumptive culture we value volume, the word prolific a complimentary ideal attached to a bursting bio. We fetishize endless bibliographies — books are misguidedly rushed out, memoirs announced in the weeks after death, star writers pulling together a haphazard manuscript because of an award or scandal-induced media moment. Long-awaited is a term littering press releases. Books have expiry dates and writers not consistently publishing eventually get ignored, the equivalent of literary death. Some of this has to do with the realities of marketing in a crippled industry, but more of it has to do with a cultural value of more being more, writers internalizing the demand because its so commonly equated to success. Add that to the fact that in the digital age, you’re only as good as your last link, and that restless itch to get something out pounds at one’s fragile patience relentlessly. At what point did we stop taking our time and start denigrating the process?”

Read the entire essay here.

“The facts of tragedy can be offensively clean and unadorned. I learned this a few days before Christmas, when a friend charged me with the task of disseminating the information that someone she knew had committed suicide. Each email I wrote and call I made was cold and direct: a chronological, bullet-point list of what and how, lacking why. It was an exercise in control, muting the reality of the thing and ignoring the clamour of emotional turmoil ringing in our ears like a bell. In the most extreme catastrophes, there is no other topic of conversation than the inconceivable thing at hand. Yet because it is impossible to face tragedy in every moment, we fill time with blandness as a coping mechanism. In everything that is said, we pretend to discuss something else, an inadequate pause before returning to the unresolvable subject. A successful narrative of fictional tragedy works in much the same way. Its plot points are so extreme that the actions and dialogue surrounding them require a pallid looseness, even tedium, to prevent the reader from recoiling in both repulsion and exhaustion.”

Read the entire review here.

The Walrus: How the literary establishment mistreats young, shameless writers like Marie Calloway

“Unregulated honesty is painted as juvenile tendency, as if with age comes the gift of selective concealment — to succeed in any serious literary endeavour, one must develop a cold distance even from the most intimate events of our lives. This necessity to step back from experience mirrors a valued coldness in human interactions; feel little, remain private, do not speak openly of the ugliness in one’s life. The fact is that a woman who publishes an in-depth study of her sex life is no more in need of attention than a man who publishes an in-depth study of twentieth-century literary criticism; it is a cultural dictation of value that defaults to her “neediness” and his ‘genius.’

Perhaps it is true that the ‘over share’ is a product of youth, but it is the element of youth that should be most valued, a time before so many of us develop the cynicism and mistrust that distances us from other human beings and makes us fear their disdain. While it is true that time and the labour it brings are essential to learning how to successfully tell a story, we shouldn’t be learning to eliminate our most personal experiences from the well of subject matter. Then, what are we truly learning other than how to be embarrassed? It is entirely possible that for each high-volume condemnation of a writer’s confessional frankness, there is a silent, thankful chorus of readers appreciating the liberating sincerity of it all.”

Read more.

Image via @kimlw

Madonna & Me will be published by Soft Skull Press in March 2012. In Madonna & Me, nearly 40 female authors including Cintra Wilson, Gloria Feldt, Caroline Leavitt, Bee Lavender, Wendy Shanker, and Susan Shapiro write about how Madonna changed their lives.

“Even those among us enamoured with the romance of printed word will find Ithaca a shameless glorification of gatekeepers and star-makers, packed with diatribes on how the book will conquer all despite a digital and corporate tide that consistently threatens it.” Read the full review at The Afterword.

“Ami McKay’s second novel, The Virgin Cure, is a finely crafted and remarkably researched tale of twelve-year-old Moth, a girl born into poverty in nineteenth-century New York, deserted by her father and sold into domestic work by her mother. Moth comes to understand that beauty is her commodity, and she finds eventual escape in a brothel that delivers virginity to well-paying men.” Read the full review at The Walrus.

“I had to process what happened to Quintana. Considering it was the one thing on my mind, I managed to avoid it for a long while. It was difficult in every possible way because it was unlike anything I had ever written. Most things that I had written had a narrative. This had no narrative. I just kind of plunged in, and plunged in, and plunged in again. It was like drowning.”

Read the full interview here.

Lying awake early on a Saturday morning, it occurred to me that I have recently endured some of the worst months of my life. They began with an unusually high onslaught of the trivial — those tiny items that plague you when there’s nothing else to really worry about. And then the monumental happened, the kind of unwelcome news that immediately renders all else meaningless.

Read more here.

Over at The Walrus, The Unbalancing Act: How Literary Periodicals Fail to Correct Gender Inequity

But what of those in demand: writers who have the liberty, the privilege, and the means to publish where they like? Maybe it isn’t too novel a concept to have them recognize the glaring inequities of the literary publications that endeavour to include them, and in extreme cases say “no thanks.”

Over at The National Post, Write Like a Man

The real question, the one we consistently avoid in op-eds and blog posts on the topic, the one we’re truly afraid to ask and that’s so much harder (and more embarrassing) to grapple with, is this -why don’t we value women themselves? Their lives, their experiences, their domains -stereotypical and otherwise?

Most readers will confess to mining the details of their favourite novels for evidence of the writer’s life. Switch out one gender for another, add ten years and relocate a character to another province or territory and we’re all but certain that the writer is talking about his or her first love, a parent, an old boss, maybe a child.

What, though, of the non-fiction writer and the memoirist? What of the people we’ve come to know only through a very focused view of their world? Do we take for granted that we know something about them? Do we as readers in a sense fictionalize non-fiction writers, creating heroes and, in some cases, villains? What do we really know of the non-fiction writer?

Presented by Freehand Books and Canadian Bookshelf, join Book Madam, Julie Wilson, in conversation with a panel of authors, illustrators and essayists.

Featuring:

• Illustrator Sarah Leavitt whose graphic novel Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me became the first graphic narrative to be a finalist for the Writers’ Trust of Canada Non-fiction Prize;
• Andrew Westoll whose recent book The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary has garnered much praise and media attention in large part due to Westoll’s first-hand experience as a volunteer caregiver;
• Stacey May Fowles, known as much for her gutsy personal essays on gender performance and sexual identity as her two novels, Be Good and Fear of Fighting.

Julie Wilson will moderate as well as participate as the writer behind SeenReading.com, the literary voyeurism project that creates fictional biographies of readers seen engaged with a book on public transit.

What: You Think You Know Me But You Have No Idea
Where: Ben McNally Books, 366 Bay Street, Toronto
When: Tuesday, July 19 at 6:00 p.m.
Admission: Free