My fellow poet and girl crush, Danielle Shutt,  had a poem called “Narcotic Winter” in the September 2011 issue of Pank. It was accompanied by an interview conducted by J. Bradley. I’d heard the poem before during our monthly graduate reading, Voice Over, and I was excited to see what Danielle had to say about it.  I wasn’t disappointed.  As usual, Danielle was eloquent and witty, insightful and self-deprecating when speaking about her impulses as a writer. And it made me wonder how I would’ve answered questions about my own poetry.

For the next few months, I hounded my fellow poets. At parties, I got drunk and asked each one to “Describe to me your writing aesthetic.” I wanted to know what contemporary writers they would compare their work to. I wanted to know about their opinions on rhetorical questions in poems and how they viewed titles that had no seeming relation to their poems. I wanted to know about dashes. I wanted all these answers because I couldn’t answer them for myself. Read more »

Roxane Gay

On the way to a café in Denver where I intended to work on a screenplay, I began to imagine a stand-up comedy schtick. At the café, I wrote it down and later put it through several drafts. Parts of it were sort of funny. The theme was a poet wandering Mr. Magoo-style into a science-dominated academic setting. There’s certainly lots of potential there.

I was watching a lot of comedy at the time—mostly Dave Chappelle, who is one of my favorites. And then I watched some female comics who I probably shouldn’t name but who I thought were painfully unfunny. And that’s when a familiar, but also surprising, strand of my feminism asserted itself.

Each endeavor I undertake represents my people: women; and I do not want to be the representative of women who aren’t as funny as men. It’s wonderful for us all to break into fields where we are less represented (there are still more male comics than female), but whatever we do, we have to do it because we mean it. If we do things with proving points as primary motives, we will often undermine our purpose.

Stefanie Freele

I’ve run across this dynamic many times before. I like to try new things, and as a construction worker I also found that I could do it—I could do the work. My hard work and work ethic were assets to the project (the house we built is on Mercer on Seattle’s Capitol Hill). In other ways I did not excel—not because I’m a woman, but the fact that I am a woman and don’t naturally kick-booty at many parts of the job put me in the awkward position of perpetuating the notion that women are not as able to do construction work as men are. The challenges I faced were: I had to do a lot of mathematical calculations, which I am able to do but find taxing; I’m agitated by loud noises and worked with lots of power tools; and I don’t have a good sense of where my body is in the physical world, to the point of walking into door jams, trees, and parking meters.

Other things I’ve tried—both because they interested me and because I thought I should try to help represent women in them are: commercial fishing, guitar playing, philosophy, and film making.

One thing the world does not need more of is writers, and women are very well represented in the field. Read more »

that novel of yours that you love?  the one that no one else does?  you know, that thing you’ve been trying to get published forever, but just can’t seem to get a press interested in, even though it’s obviously brilliant?  well, fuck those ignorant editors.  you don’t need ‘em.  or a vanity press, for that matter.  you only need word riot.

in a move that i think the rumpus pretty accurately describes as “an interesting stunt,” on june 7 word riot will publish whatever PDF’ed piece of crap you give them, as long as you’ve previously had work appear in any of 22 specific lit mags they’ve named.  and word riot will only make these short story collection & novel manuscripts available for 24 hours.  and i’m kinda confused about who benefits in this situation.

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