This happened:

photo by Karen Tongson

In September I got the opportunity to interview Tegan and Sara at Lambda Litfest, on the occasion of the release of their new memoir HIGH SCHOOL. They are wonderful, as is the book! I will write more about this in the next installment of Name Dropping, my occasional TinyLetter.

*

My short story “Take Us to Your LDR,” a weird LDR alien sex simulation queer/trans breakup story, forthcoming in Epiphany Journal, has nominated for a Pushcart Prize — thank you, editors!

*

photo by Temim Fruchter

In late October I visited Brown University for their new Authors in the Archives series and read with Lauren Russell, whose forthcoming work of documentary poetry DESCENT is going to be major. I shared work from The Feels (which draws on fan fiction from An Archive of Our Own), Proxies (which draws on court documents and media reports related to the Slender Man Stabbing), and a new, in-progress long essay called The Hooded Figure, which is about finding love while digging through the archives of Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian and simultaneously studying Philip Guston’s hood paintings.

*

Speaking of Dodie, my 10,000 word profile of her is forthcoming in Dodie Bellamy Is On Our Mind,  to be published by Semiotext(e) in January 2020. (Save the date: NYC book launch will be February 27.) More on this book:

Dodie Bellamy (b. 1951, in North Hammond, Indiana) has lived and worked in San Francisco since 1978. A vital contributor to the Bay Area’s avant-garde literary scene, Bellamy is a novelist and poet whose work has focused on sexuality, politics, feminism, narrative experimentation, and all things queer. In her words, she champions “the vulnerable, the fractured, the disenfranchised, the fucked-up.”

Dodie Bellamy Is on Our Mind is the first major publication to address Bellamy’s prolific career as a genre-bending writer. Megan Milks made several trips to San Francisco in order to spend time with Bellamy and craft a provocative and fascinating profile of the writer. Originally delivered as a lecture at the Wattis Institute, Andrew Durbin’s text takes the form of a personal essay, expertly weaving anecdotes of his own encounters with Bellamy’s writing with insights into broader themes in her work. Academic Kaye Mitchell takes a close look at the role of shame and its relationship to femininity in particular texts by Bellamy. And Bellamy and her late husband Kevin Killian offer deeply personal, emotionally wrenching ruminations on topics from the mundane (drawing) to the profound (mortality). These texts, alongside archival photos and a complete bibliography make, this book an important compendium on Bellamy.

*

I’ll be giving a talk about Kathy Acker, desire, and im/maturity at the upcoming Trans/Acker symposium, organized by McKenzie Wark, at The New School, on 11/22. Also appearing: Marquis Bey, Kay Gabriel, Juliana Huxtable, Grace Lavery, Torrey Peters, K. K. Trieu, and McKenzie Wark. (Our talks will be published on Public Seminar.)

*

My review of Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House is now out on 4Columns.

*

And I have some gossip. More soon in the next Name Dropping….subscribe here.