SUNDAY NIGHT FEELINGS / on women writers 👯

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SUNDAY
NIGHT
FEELINGS

A WEEKLY COLLECTION OF DELIGHTFUL, DEVASTATING, DISTURBING THINGS.

10.04.2015 / on women writers

Hello! I completely forgot about my responsibilities last week, I blame the blood moon. In that time I have read and re-read so many great pieces, all of them by incredible smart and incisive women who are probably working and writing RIGHT NOW. So while there is not a theme, there is unity.

If there's anything recent I've missed, women we should all be reading more of, send me an email!

+ Alana Massey ca$hing in on writing about men in The Monetized Man

I became a writer because I adhere to the radical notion that the female experience on its own has sufficient worth to warrant both chronicle and sale. My chronicle expanded to include the lived realities of other women and then contracted again back into my own microcosm and expanded out again. But too often these stories are not about women living in the abundance of a shared world. They are about surviving in the brutality of a world held hostage by men whose interior fragility is conveniently offset by material might.

+ Sofia Samatar's essay on black visibility and the academy, Skin Feeling

“Highly visible examples of black success are critical to the maintenance of a racial caste system in the era of colorblindness.” It’s not that we’re too few, nor is it that we suffer survivor guilt for having escaped the fate of so many in our communities. It’s that our visibility is consumed in a way that legitimizes the structures of exclusion.

Skin feeling: to be encountered as a surface.

+ Anne Boyer's terrific prose poem, Not Writing

When I am not writing a memoir I am also not writing any kind of poetry,

not prose poems contemporary or otherwise, not poems made of frag-

ments, not tightened and compressed poems, not loosened and conversa-

tional poems, not conceptual poems, not virtuosic poems employing many

different types of euphonious devices, not poems with epiphanies and not

poems without, not documentary poems about recent political moments,

not poems heavy with allusions to critical theory and popular song.

+ This essay by Sarah Nicole Prickett, which was on Elliot Rodger but also about right now: The Ultimate Humiliation

There are many extensions of the weapons of struggle. Manufactured, then programmed, these weapons are arguably helpful to those who do struggle in what is—this bit of child morality holding fast—an unfair and massively garbage world, but they are provably harmful in the hands of ailing, flailing young men who tend to put “my” before that “struggle.” If you’re going to go for these boys’ guns, never mind their knives, you might consider seizing their computers while you’re at it

+ Eileen Myles has a new book out, and here's an excerpt.

all I ever wanted was dinner
or at least his
love the delight I see

in him is equally empty for anyone
& probably that’s his
stealth.

+ Mary HK Choi's formidable writearound, Becoming Rihanna

I have discussed, at length, over drinks, whether or not she works out. How many phones she has. If she ever gets sick. If there exists a man who could date her and, more importantly, who we’d want that man to be, because surely we deserve a vote, because stars are just like us, and of all stars, Rihanna feels the most real. I believe this is a sentiment shared by many of her fans, even ones who were never trapped on a plane with her. Still, I can’t picture Rihanna jogging. Or going to the dentist. I usually envision Rihanna in the sun, languidly smoking. In short, I can only imagine things that she’s already shown us.

+ Ysabelle Cheung on her progressive hearing loss: What Will I Hear When My Ears Stop Working

The point is not to understand it all, because the truth is that I can’t. My relationship with sound is volatile – I hear it when it’s not there, and I can’t hear it when I would like to. The only control I have over anything is to listen harder, to try to archive already fading sound memories like my baby sister gurgling at bath time, or one of the dozens of singing-bird music boxes my grandfather used to collect. Or maybe simpler, humbler sounds of the everyday: a glass of water being poured. A clock ticking. A sneeze.

+ A stunning piece by Rahawa Haile, A Low and Distant Paradise

My friends detect my anxiety in the way I talk about the future. When they list places they might like to live someday, I instead rattle off regions where we might extinguish the least troubled. It’s unfair of me. The truth is this mind in this black body fears isolation, has difficulty looking westward, would like to stay in place. Meanwhile, Florida coats my teeth like plaque. I can’t speak without its effects showing on my gums. The state has made trust difficult.

Time for me to start writing again.

xo,
Tracy