Tagged: updates
Fall 2019 News & Updates
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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.)
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My review of Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House is now out on 4Columns.
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And I have some gossip. More soon in the next Name Dropping….subscribe here.
Fall 2017 Notes & News
Below find, in order, one dispatch from Communal Presence, some news, and a pile of enthusiasms.
COMMUNAL PRESENCE
Last weekend I was in Berkeley for Communal Presence: New Narrative Writing Today, featuring the legends of New Narrative past and present: Bob Glück, Bruce Boone, Dodie Bellamy, Kevin Killian, Camille Roy, Renee Gladman, Dennis Cooper, Eileen Myles, Gabrielle Daniels, Matias Viegener, Roberto Bedoya, Rob Halpern, Gail Scott, yes yes and so on. Seeing all of these writers together in the same room was exhilarating and historical.
In the first plenary, devoted to Kevin and Dodie’s recent anthology Writers Who Love Too Much, Gabrielle, Matias, Roberto, Dennis, and Eileen each briefly shared their own histories and entanglements with New Narrative – how they found it, how it found them. Gabrielle, chronicling what she described as her “apprenticeship” with Bruce and Steve Abbott: “It was a time for my mind to be blown.” Roberto, on “being inside and outside of aesthetic ordering,” particularly as a writer of color: “in and out is a porous terrain of imagination.” Dennis: “Sometimes I was part of [New Narrative], like Kathy Acker, and sometimes we weren’t….now I’ve become lifelong friends with these writers.” Matias [I’m paraphrasing]: “all of us were thrown into these [given] families and then you get a choice, but so much randomness is involved…so many of the people here have become fixtures in my life, and it’s kind of miraculous.” Eileen: “I feel like I’m just hanging out with my teachers…in New York I had learned that you hung out with people who had what you wanted. Each of these guys had what I wanted and I happily took it.” Eileen on meeting Dennis: “We didn’t meet, our magazines met” (Eileen’s Dodgems meeting Dennis’s Little Caesar).
Later, Renee Gladman, in a panel called “New Enactments”: “To be in narrative now is to be in an already fractured state.” At the final marathon reading, she read a stunning piece that got cut out of Calamities; in it, she engaged with Gail Scott’s notion of “a community of sentences” to describe this whole moving architecture of interacting, communal language.
My panel was also a highlight! Sam Cohen and I organized “Bad Boundaries II: Ethics in New Narrative Writing” as a continuation of a panel we put on for the most recent &NOW Festival (2015 in Los Angeles). Maxe Crandall started it off with with a presentation on Poets Theater. “Why is Poets Theater ‘over,’” he asked, “when New Narrative is ongoing, ever-relevant?” He suggested that it may relate to a new cultural investment in the star system–“Poets Theater dies when the star system becomes real.” Three performances on Saturday revived Poets Theater works by Carla Harryman, Kevin Killian & Brian Kim Stefans, and Camille Roy; I trust Maxe (et al.) will keep the medium alive in new forms.
Our panel continued with Nikki Darling, whose paper made connections between New Narrative, magical realism, and experimental fiction as a whole, working to situate both Gloria Anzaldua and Lidia Yuknavitch within the tradition.
Then Sam and I read part of our chapbook in the works, which collects the two stories we each wrote about the other after our difficult breakup in 2015, and a conversation we’re calling “Processing: On Revision and Repair.” For the panel we read modified excerpts from that conversation, doing a kind of mutual overshare via public processing. The chapbook is an exercise in accountability and repair, and it’s a polarizing project: are we only poking at each other’s emotional leftovers, or are we working toward a new queer intimacy? We think the latter. Here we are with Stephen and Nikki post-panel.

Stephen van Dyck, me, Sam Cohen, Nikki Darling (photo by Jess Horn)
Our panel competed with other good-looking panels, and there was much I missed overall. At the Saturday plenary, Rob Halpern and Camille Roy each read deeply affecting back-to-back pieces documenting care and grief for a lover’s gone body. And the opportunity to finally see OG New Narrativists Bob and Bruce read was a gift I don’t take for granted.
Kevin and Dodie’s Writers Who Love Too Much launches at Artists Space in NYC tomorrow. I reviewed it for 4Columns in April.
NEW OLD NAME NEWS
Presently going by both M. and Megan. For now I am liking holding onto my history in my name as I shift into a new embodiment.
BURIED LEAD
I’ve got two books in the works and recently signed with Rachel Crawford at Wolf Literary Services, joining some of my favorite peer contemporaries: Tom Cho, Patty Yumi Cottrell, Sarah Gerard.
BOOK NOTES
I’d been working on a Best-of-2016 (yes, 2016!) type post that got sidetracked repeatedly by national and world events. Now I’ve turned it into an early Best of 2017(+), and I have beaten you all. Here are some (mostly) recently published books that have delighted and devastated me the past, oh, year or so.
Myriam Gurba, Mean Gurba’s first memoir is officially out in a week or two; I’ve got a review forthcoming in 4Columns, so more TK. But for now: the links Gurba makes here between her own experiences of sexual assault and a much broader rape culture that pervades everything have new timeliness in connection with the Weinstein fallout and the #metoo movement. If you know Gurba’s work at all, you’ll be expecting clever, crass humor and Mean has it in spades: the book is both devastating and devastatingly funny.
Summer updates
Some things to report, plus calls for submissions…
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The latest issue of The Account: A Journal of Poetry, Prose & Thought is out, with art by Xiaoze Xie; poems by Hadara Bar-Nadav, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, Dorothy Chan, Alain Ginsberg, Nazifa Islam, Moira J., or Gaagé Dat’éhe, and more; nonfiction by Anne Yoder, Kristin McCandless, and Justin Lawrence Daugherty and Jill Talbot; AND . . . fiction (<–my section!!) by Lily Hoang, Jennifer Morales, and Cecca Austin Ochoa. Lily’s “The Mystical Adventures of the Happy Cat” is a delightful and eerie fable starring one Happy Cat; Jennifer’s excerpt from Junction/Flame on the Mesa is a sneak peek at her current novel, which houses a lesbian pulp novel within it; Cecca’s “Transient” gives a glimmer of queer utopia to a homeless youth at a farm called Fog Orchard.
Submissions are now open for our next issue. We read twice a year; deadlines are March 1 and September 1. Consider submitting your work!
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(art by Kristen Stone)
I’ve rebooted Name Tags, a column series on issues related to names and naming, over at Entropy, and am looking for contributors. Here’s the Call for Submissions. This CFS may be familiar: it’s a new iteration of a column I edited for the Land Line Quarterly from 2011-3.
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Speaking of names, I’ve dropped the Henry from my nominal identity — it just wasn’t sticking. I’m currently publishing under the names M. and Megan until further notice.
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I’ve been writing for a new arts criticism site, 4Columns. My most recent review, of Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian’s essential Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative Writing, 1977-1997, was recently posted in full on Dennis Cooper’s blog. Alright!
Speaking of New Narrative, I’ll be at the upcoming Communal Presence conference at Berkeley in October, appearing on a panel called Bad Boundaries 2: Ethics in New Narrative Writing Then & Now, with Sam Cohen, Maxe Crandall, Nikki Darling, and Tim Jones-Yelvington. Sam and I will be presenting work related to our collaborative chapbook project in progress, Bad Boundaries (which collects a story by each of us as well as a conversation about breakups/conflict, writing the ex, and accountability and the duty of repair).
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Thanks to a tip from Sam, this spring I took a psychomagic writing class with the genius Laurie Weeks, author of the great Zipper Mouth (Feminist Press), whose short story “Swallow” is included in the above Writers Who Love Too Much. I read “Swallow” in 2005 thanks to one Andrea Lawlor gifting me a copy of its original publication in a 4×4 tiny journal; it CHANGED me. So it was exhilarating to work with her for a few months as part of a queer feminist art cabal in South Williamsburg. We even had our own tincture (thanks, Grace!). I wish I had taken some photos; it was a dreamy and powerful collection of wild weirdos, a lifeboat during nervous times.
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I’ve also been contributing a bit to the New York Trans Oral History Project. My conversations with musician Eli Oberman and artist/writer J. Soto are now available in the archive, alongside many other treasures. I believe the project is still looking for more volunteers.
Notes & Updates: Summer/Fall 2016
I started this post long ago! Will not pretend I didn’t. Here you will find: A recap of summer activities & reading notes / updates & announcements, etc.
Summer Recap
June 2016: I’m in Lawrence for two weeks, participating in speculative fiction novel camp for two weeks with friends and friends of friends at the University of Kansas. Three weeks ago, I attended WisCon, the feminist science fiction convention in Madison. I’ve been participating in an Octavia Butler reading group, where we read Butler and other feminist science fiction. When I return, I’ll be teaching a workshop in speculative writing (sign up here!) (September update: This didn’t happen due to bad timing and low enrollment. Would love to try again.) Then moving to New York. (Update: DONE.) It’s been a specfic summer, in other words.
Highlights from novel workshop:
Group plotting FTW! Look how my M moved, became clean and possible! (By M, I mean the shape of the novel, in four arcs. Speaking of M’s: I’m going by M now, transitionally–more on that below.)
At the suggestion of fellow KU novel workshopper and fantastic writer Brooke Wonders, I picked up a copy of The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, a new anthology series developed by John Joseph Adams; this year’s editor is Joe Hill. This first volume collects a ton of writers who participate in/are associated with WisCon (i.e., write feminist, antiracist, proqueer)—like Sofia Samatar, one of this year’s guests of honor, who has not one, but two stories here.
Her “How to Get Back to the Forest” is one of the best stories I’ve read: it appeals entirely to my interests. It recasts bulimia as a survival mode: girls at camp using self-induced vomiting in an effort to get rid of bugs that have been implanted at the bottom of their throats. In her notes on the story (included in the appendix), Samatar brings the story into conversation with Eileen Myles’ “Everyday Barf,” Dodie Bellamy’s Barf Manifesto, and Kate Zambreno’s chapbook Apoplexia, Toxic Shock, and Toilet Bowl: Some Notes on Why I Write. Really smart, horrifying, sometimes funny, tremendously moving story that thinks eating disorders in a speculative register.
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Another recent read is Sarah Schulman’s The Cosmopolitans: which is fantastic in a superlative if not speculative way. I suggested it for my queer/trans/feminist book club and was so looking forward to talking about it with other people; but Book Club LET ME DOWN, i.e., I was the only one who finished it. Okay, in their defense, yes, we’ve all had busy summers, and as it’s a newer book on an independent press, there weren’t many library copies available. (This issue of accessibility has been an ongoing problem for our book club; if we want to read contemporary queer and trans literature, much of which is published on small independent presses, there usually are no or few library copies. We need to get more queer and trans lit into libraries.)
On The Cosmopolitans: structurally one of the most elegant and well-executed novels I’ve read. I was deeply impressed by Schulman’s mastery of the form; the depth of character, the links to theater, the surprises, the authorial intrusions, the winkingly anachronistic style: the book takes place in 1958 and has the affective and stylistic texture of a book of the 50s. Indeed, it’s very Baldwin-esque, and his Another Country is mentioned by the author as an informing text in her author’s note.
It’s a novel of friendship, and I think more successful than Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life in creating a complex worldview and addressing head-on the ways in which friendship is complicated by difference. The central relationship is formed between a white straight cis woman and an African-American gay cis man. Schulman carefully crafts a narrative that, at the same time as it prioritizes lifelong friendship over sexual/romantic relationships, also legitimizes Earl’s desire for a lover/boyfriend. The novel seems very interested in demarcating the gaps and fissures in Bette and Earl’s relationship, creating parallax by presenting it through both characters’ eyes to show that each one is getting something valuable—if different—from the relationship.
I haven’t read Balzac’s Cousin Bette, one of Schulman’s models for the book, but saw a connection to Henry James’s Beast in the Jungle, which similarly chronicles the lifelong nonsexual relationship between a (presumably gay or asexual) man, John Marcher, and a straight woman, May Bertram, who, the story suggests, wants more than friendship from John—but this uneven desire remains unspoken between them. Schulman’s novel can be read in some ways as a corrective to James’s story, which presents nonsexual hetero friendship as a beard, a pretense. In The Cosmopolitans the friendship is real, valuable, prioritized: although each individual is getting something different out of it, and ultimately Earl needs something else in addition to (not instead of) this friendship.
My main question for my book club, which hangs unanswered in my meeting notes, but maybe you’ll want to think through this with me, is as follows: is Bette’s desire for Truth, her relentless insistence upon and near-maniacal investment in it—heroic or tragic? Or both.
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September/October 2016 Updates & Announcements
I taught Sofia’s speculative bulimia story in my intro to CW class last week. Still so impressed with it.
My own contribution to the conversation on bulimic writing is forthcoming in a scholarly volume called Reading and Writing Experimental Texts: Critical Innovations edited by Robin Silbergleid and Kristina Quynn. My chapter “Blah Blah Bleh: Bulimic Writing as Resistance” thinks through Bellamy’s and Zambreno’s theorizations from a feminist disability studies lens while engaging with literary criticism’s historical reliance on pathologizing reading practices. This is an essay that’s gone through many versions: first published in much different, more personal form in Mildred Pierce 5: Comedy and the Grotesque; later funneled through a Society for Disability Studies conference paper; now in happily hybrid semi-academic state.
I’m living in New York now, teaching and writing.
I’m going by “M” until I land on a new name. I’ve got this Name Tags series on names/naming in the works for Entropy but haven’t followed through with it while deliberating over my own name stuff. What’s my name? Is it Zig? Mason? Zegan? Maze? Marzipan? Taking votes.
Shortly before moving, I took one last trip to Chicago to see some friends and meet with Cheryl Wollner who interviewed me for Luna Station Quarterly.
Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives, which I co-edited with KJ Cerankowski, will be available in paperback soon–exciting! Will make it much more accessible to folks without access to academic libraries. We were never happy about the price tag of the volume.
I’ll be in Indiana in October as part of University of Indianapolis’s Kellogg Writers Series…
…and in Toronto in November as part of the Naked Heart LGBTQ Festival of Words.
Otherwise, not leaving. New York folks, say hi. Everyone else, come visit.