YEP, THAT'S ME

THE LIBRAEST LIBRA TO EVER LIBRA

You're reading this while I'm at AWP, the Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference. I'm writing this while preparing for AWP, which, this year, involves doing a minimum of practical preparation, stressing out, and hoping for the best.

On assignment, I reviewed Captain Marvel for Book & Film Globe. I loved the movie. I've had a few arguments with people since, people who say it's really just okay, not great. That's fine. For a broad-audience action movie in 2019, the difference between just okay and great is needle-thin, in my mind.

March's Books I Hate (and Also Some I Like) is with Erika T. Wurth. (No link, sorry; it went live after I had to finish and schedule this newsletter.) It's sheer coincidence that she finished the interview around the same time that my review of her latest novel appeared at the Fanzine.

A lot of the work I did this month was invisible: pitching, revising, evaluating, editing others' writing. A couple of reviews I wrote got scrapped. A terribly sad thing happened in my husband's family on the other side of the country, and we went there and gave love in person. And nothing about my life is going to be back to normal until mid-April. Maybe, by then, I'll have some new goals in place.

Because this month, I hit such a significant goal that my motivation has slumped a little bit. That is, I almost don't know what to reach for now that I've achieved this goal: a byline in the Washington Post. I've wanted this since I was a wee aspiring journalist in high school. And now I have it: in her grace, the nonfiction books editor allowed me to review Sissy, by Jacob Tobia. I hear tell that it was even in the paper version, though I haven't seen it.

So now what?

Recent Book Reviews:

For the Guardian, Something Like Breathing by Angela Readman. A tweet from the author says I fulfilled a dream of hers by writing this review. That felt nice.
For Rain Taxi (only in print), Five Plots by Erica Trabold. I wish this review could appear online, because I'm proud of having given it a mixed opinion in brief.
For the Arts Fuse, The Bird King by G. Willow Wilson. This book was unbelievably gorgeous, and my review is exactly as effusive as I intended it to be.
For Book and Film Globe, two reviews: The Body Myth by Rheea Mukherjee and This Never Happened by Liz Scott. Extremely different books, but I recommend them both.
For the Women's Review of Books (also only in print), a dual review of The Silk Road and Labrador by Kathryn Davis. No idea how I could've never heard of Davis until now, because she is an astonishing writer.

What I'm thinking about:

This essay about the art of bad men--a topic that shall never be exhausted, evidently--in the Women's Review of Books, to which I'm a fairly regular contributor. (My work is never online, alas.) I don't quite agree with the author on everything here, but the essay made me think and consider, which few do.

This wonderful, philosophical essay in Entropy about meanness. I think this is part and parcel of "the new sincerity." At a personal level, it's how I live: meanness is counterproductive.

On assignment, I read all of JT LeRoy's books and watched a documentary about them. Unlike with so much else in today's art landscape, I have very definite opinions about what was right and wrong in that situation.

What I'm reading:

Ann Hood's memoir, Comfort, about the death of her daughter. I'm taking a class from Hood in April so I thought I should prepare. It was harrowing. By coincidence, I've read a slew of books in a row about death or dying or grief, and I'm kind of ready to read something else.
Dennis Cooper's Closer. I only got through half of it because what he does is not really my jam, but I see now why people say what they say about him. Which was the point of reading.
A little book about the movie Heathers. Soft Skull put out a small handful of monographs about movies, "A Novel Approach to Cinema," some years back, but then discontinued the line. It was helpful to read this as I start gathering my thoughts for my own monograph about a movie. Also, I love Heathers. Though not as much as John Ross Bowie does, for sure.

Upcoming:

A change of pace: a long story that slots into the "women's fiction" genre, to be released as an ebook by the Wild Rose Press. I expect the audience for it to be totally different from the audience for my other work, but I hope it sells well among that different audience. Not sure when it'll be released--later this year sometime. The galley's nearly done.
Another dual review in the Women's Review of Books, coming in May.
Yet more commentary about goddamn Stoner. I feel like I'm going to be writing about that book forever.

Recently on the Fictator:

Again, almost all to-do lists, but also this combination of to-do list and explanation of why I haven't responded to your email.