Tuesday, December 29, 2020

Stross on tech-free fiction

 Prolific novelist Charlie Stross earlier this month weighed-in on the habit of "serious" novelists to omit many basic features of the modern world:

My take: any “literary” novel that doesn’t exist in a world with magic internet mirrors in every hand, strange plagues exploding out of wet markets in Wuhan, and invisible killer robots haunting the skies above Kandahar, is historical nostalgia for a world that went away in 1990.

User Pickwick invites us to characterize such boring fiction as "grimdull", contrasting with e.g. "grimdark" and "grimpunk."

Wednesday, December 9, 2020

The deadwhitemaleness of school curricula and the YA canon

From the timeline, on that bird site, of Massachusetts poet Johnny Longfellow:

Try imagining all the public tax dollars that land in the coffers of the copyright holders of canonical texts. Then, you'll understand much of what underlies and drives toxic YA lit debates regarding which texts are deemed worthy of inclusion/exclusion within school curricula.

Imagine, too, the profits made by publishers who republish and promote works in the public domain for use in school curricula, minus any need to pay agents, authors, or their estates. So too, the profits made by those who create supplementary texts to accompany such works.

Yet, such factors are little discussed in YA circles, lest they distract from the seemingly well-intended and righteous topics of pedagogical practice, the inclusion of traditionally marginalized voices, and what values are transmitted to children/young adults via the humanities.


Monday, November 23, 2020

Emily August reviews Cat Dossett

We have learned of a generous review of one of last year's Komma Series chapbooks, Odysseus & Eden by Cat Dossett:

Y’all, just yesterday I was musing about starting a utopian society organized around poetry. Lo and behold, today I picked up this little morsel of versitude from Pen and Anvil Press’s Komma Series, a series of micro-chapbook publications. Check out the series mission statement:“The bite-sized booklets of the Komma Series are a mouthful of literature each, intended to be read in a single sitting. When you’re done with one, pass it along! Look for them lying around in Boston, Portland, or New York City. When you see one waiting to be read, go ahead and pick it up. Give it a home in your hands for a ten-minute lit snack. Then when you’re finished, leave it behind for the next person to find, in an ATM lobby, on a train station bench, in the coffeeshop, at the pub.” 

Cat Dossett’s Odysseus & Eden is the 18th publication in the series. This smart, ruminating collection brings together three fascinating persona poems from the perspectives of three different mythical women: Penelope, Ophelia, and an unnamed Garden of Eden resident who seems to be Eve. These are feminist retellings that humanize and complicate three of western patriarchy’s most blamed and besieged female archetypes. The famously loyal Penelope, whose characteristic virtue is that she remained faithful to her absent husband Odysseus for twenty years despite over a hundred love interests, here finally unleashes her libidinal rage in a surprising way. Eve—the legendary scapegoat blamed for an entire humanity’s fall from grace (eye roll)—is reimagined as an embodied sexual subject who transgresses erogenous, rather than culinary, boundaries. And Ophelia, who we’re used to seeing as the tragic, long-suffering victim of Hamlet’s self-interested scheming, here compassionately contemplates her own history of mental illness.

The main theme Dossett draws from each tale is erotic betrayal, and the recurring image that links the poems together is blood, which smears and pools across the poems like an accusation. As a result, readers see these grossly twisted “love” stories for what they truly are. 

Dossett highlights the ways in which women have historically been sacrificed for the preservation of various kinds of kingdoms, and the ways those sacrifices are naturalized and glorified by being codified as myth. Like the best myth and fairy tale revisions, these poems helped me reexamine and deeply reconsider what our treasured cultural legends are truly encoding and passing down. 

#TheSealeyChallenge, day 28.  

The reviewer, Emily August, is an Assistant Professor of literature at Stockton University, and she came to Dossett's work as part of the Sealey Challenge, in which participants commit to reading a new book or chapbook of poetry every day in the month of August. If you'd like to receive a complimentary copy of one of our Pen & Anvil poetry publications for your own Sealey Challenge reviewing in 2021, drop us a line

Saturday, September 12, 2020

Chateaubriand on the pelagian

 “Between the sea and the land is a stretch of pelagian country . . . 

... where the frontiers of the two elements become indistinct. Skylarks from the fields fly with sealarks. The plow and the fishing boat, a stone’s throw apart, furrow the land and the water alike. The sailor and the shepherd borrow from one another’s tongues: the sailor says ‘the waves are flocking,’ and the shepherd speaks of ‘fleets of sheep.’ The multicolored sands, the variegated heaps of shells, the kelp, and the silvery fringe of foam rise up to the blond or green edges of the wheatfields. I forget now on which Mediterranean island I saw a bas-relief depicting the Nereids pinning scallops to the hem of Ceres’s robe.”  

(from Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, the autobiography of François-René de Chateaubriand, 1848)

 


Friday, June 26, 2020

Seeing past the limits of majority status

Over the past few years, a number of linkages have appeared to which connect New England and Nigeria in the network of Pen & Anvil collaborators. This relationship is the product of several factors, not the least of which is the 2016 publication of a portfolio of ten African writers in Clarion magazine. (A tip of the hat here to editors Samantha Arnold and Emma Forbes for that work.) And the links in that network are growing all the time as we continue to share news of publication opportunities and new magazine issues and book launches, and engage in the chatter of social media.

This background suffices to explain how it is we came to turn our attention to a Facebook conversation between young Nigerian authors. The conversation is paradigmatic of similar questions and answers being exchanged in literary spaces all over the map, as awareness of structural inequalities in the arts (as in all domains) creeps a little higher in the hierarchy of social concerns.

The original post was authored by a young writer who expressed frustration with the "hypocrisy and double standard" applied to the depiction of cross-gender characters. He writes:
In many writing groups, male writers continually ask fellow writers to "teach" them how to write female characters without annoying them or offending them. And I always think: No one has ever asked males to teach them how to write MALE characters without offending us! It appears to me that it is okay to portray "this gender that betrayed Jesus" any way we want, but an innocent description of a woman's breasts is objectification.
Anyone who has been in a mixed-gender workshop environment has likely heard expressions of this sort of frustration. There certainly are differences in how the act of depicting a gendered character in fiction is evaluated depending on the gender identity of the author. Is there any way to account for these differences, without coming to the pat conclusion that an unjust double standard exists?

Into the conversation comes Chukwuebuka Ibeh. Based in Port Harcourt, the capital city of Rivers State, Chuk is a long-time Pen & Anvil contributor, with bylines in ClarionCharles River Journbal, NERObooks, and Ampersand. His reply to the question above was so cogent that we asked his permission to reproduce here in full. He writes:
Generally, when writing about (or from the perspective of) a minority, as someone who's not part of that minority group, it is reasonable enough that you get insights from actual members of the group. This is because your own privilege as a member of the majority could blind you to the realities of the group you're writing about, and you end up feeding into a stereotypical, drawn-from-the-closet, cliche narrative in your portrayal.
Now, specifically, when cismen write about women, there's often a tendency to present idealistic portrayals that most actual women are unable to relate to. You're a writer yourself so you should know what a cringeworthy storytelling is. (Straight) male writers almost always fail when describing women, as they are so fixated on the physical appearance (which is often inaccurately described) and fail to take into cognisance the complex emotional makeup of the character. They come to the script with basic, internalized ideas of what a woman "should be": soft, tender, curved, malleable, nice breast, shapely hips etc etc.
It's NOT exactly the same thing as a woman writing a man. There's a visibility of sorts that come with being the majority. You are basically the mainstream and so is your story. It's why queer people are more likely to write straight people better than vice versa, why black people are more likely to write white people better, etc etc.
This is a great answer! It doesn't punch up or down; it speaks across the table to a fellow writer, and invites that person to be a better writer (and a more compassionate human) by overcoming a natural inclination to prioritize one's experience of the world as most normal. The original poster agreed, writing as a reply: "Visibility, majority: these are the convincing words."

All well worth quoting and sharing. You can connect with Chuk on Twitter, where he posts as @ChukwuebukaIbe4.

Sunday, June 14, 2020

June 2020: Books Available for Review

Reviewers interested in receiving one of the books listed below for a review to appear in New England Review of Books (full-length review or interview), Clarion (full-length, microreview, review column, or interview), Pusteblume (for works in translation), or Poetry Northeast (for works pertaining to poetry and poetics) are asked to email press@penandanvil.com with a request. Please include any links to previous published reviews, and a brief description of the project you have in mind.

  1. Albakry and Maggor: Tahrir Tales: Plays from the Egyptian Revolution
  2. Ben Hinson: Eteka: Rise of the Imamba
  3. Arlie Russell Hochschild: Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right
  4. Franck Salameh: The Other Middle East
  5. J.D. Vance: Hillbilly Elegy
  6. Gary Fincke: How Blasphemy Sounds to God
  7. Joan Naviyuk Kane: Milk Black Carbon
  8. R. Marie Griffith: Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics
  9. Nadya Hajj: Protection Amid Chaos: The Creation of property Rights in Palestinian Refugee Camps
  10. Joshua Bennett: The Sobbing School
  11. Joel Edward Goza: America's Unholy Ghosts
  12. Alan King: Point Blank
  13. Yahia Lababidi : The Artist as Mystic
  14. Umberto Saba: Ernesto
  15. Eilis Dillon: The Island of Horses
  16. Ryunosuke Akutagawa: Mandarins: Stories
  17. Cass Sunstein: #REPUBLIC: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media
  18. Gabriel Gudding: A Defense of Poetry
  19. Qais Akbar Omar: A Fort of Nine Towers
  20. Sergey Gandlevsky: A Kindred Orphanhood
  21. Viktor Sosnora: A Million Premonitions
  22. H. E. Bates: A Month by the Lake and Other Stories
  23. Katie Peterson: A Piece of Good News
  24. Owen Davies: A Supernatural War: Magic, Divination and Faith during the First World War
  25. Kristin Dimitrova: A Visit to the Clockmaker
  26. A. Marie Houser: After Coetzee: An Anthology of Animal Fictions
  27. Carrie Jerrell: After the Revival
  28. Alexandra Chreiteh: Ali and His Russian Mother
  29. Paul Hudon: All in Good Time
  30. Michael Sims: Arthur and Sherlock: Conan Doyle and the Creation of Holmes
  31. Justine Mintsa: Awu's Story
  32. Yahia Lababidi: Balancing Acts
  33. Joshua Corey: Beautiful Soul
  34. Ann Morgan: Beside Myself
  35. Alex Epstein: Blue Has No South
  36. Jack Kohl: Bone Over Ivory
  37. Tom Sexton: Bridge Street at Dusk
  38. Syeus Mottel: Charas: The Improbable Dome Builders
  39. Clint Smith: Counting Descent
  40. Richard Littler: Discovering Scarfolk
  41. Machado de Assis: Dom Casmurro
  42. Mary Maxwell: Emporia
  43. Outcast: Feridon Rashidi
  44. Szilárd Borbély: Final Matters: Selected Poems, 2004-2010
  45. Michael Wolff: Fire and Fury
  46. Austin Smith: Flyover Country
  47. Tess Taylor: Forage House
  48. Brenda Hillman: Fortres2
  49. Kelly and Zetzsche: Found in Translation: How Languages Shapes Our Lives and Transforms Our World
  50. Lawrence Shainberg: Four Men Shaking
  51. Michael Schmidt: Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem
  52. Micklethwait and Wooldrige: God Is Back
  53. Alyson Foster: Heart Attack Watch
  54. Michael Shermer: How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science
  55. ed. Roberta Micallef: Illusion and Disillusionment: Travel Writing in the Modern Age
  56. Kodi Scheer: Incendiary Girls
  57. Phillipa K. Chong: Inside the Critic's Circle
  58. Allen Ginsberg: Iron Curtain Journals: January-May 1965
  59. Stanley Moss: It's About Time
  60. Elizabeth and Stephen Ferry: La Batea
  61. Liliana Ursu: Lightwall
  62. Kevin Gallagher: Loom
  63. Meia Geddes: Love Letters to the World
  64. Melissa Green: Magpiety
  65. Matt Rader: What I Want To Tell Goes Like This
  66. Jack Nicholls: Meat Songs
  67. Catao and Obstfield: Meeting Globalization's Challenges: Policies to Make Trade Work for All
  68. Serhiy Zhadan: Mesopotamia
  69. Michael Lista: Strike Anywhere
  70. Mary Maxwell: Nine Over Sixes
  71. Richard Fein: Not a Separate Surge
  72. Hugo Mercier: Not Born Yesterday
  73. Glyn Maxwell: On Poetry
  74. Karen Swallow Prior: On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books
  75. David Ferry: On This Side of the River
  76. B. J. Novack: One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories
  77. Thanassis Valtinos: Orthokosta
  78. James Fenton: Out of Danger
  79. Paula Arai : Painting Enlightenment: Healing Visions of the Heart Sutra
  80. Fei-Hsien Wang: Pirates and Publishers: A Social History of Copyright in Modern China
  81. Michael E. Bratman: Planning, Time, and Self-Governance: Essays in Practical Rationality
  82. Marko Vešović: Polish Cavalry
  83. Subcomandante Marcos: Professionals of Hope: The Selected Writings of Subcomandante Marcos
  84. Ray Greenblatt: Twenty Years on Graysheep Bay
  85. Mary Fulbrook: Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and The Quest for Justice
  86. Hank Fox: Red Neck, Blue Collar Atheist
  87. Kniss and Numrich: Sacred Assemblies and Civic Engagement: How Religion Matters for America's Newest Immigrants
  88. Marzanna Kielar: Salt Monody
  89. Theophile Gautier: Selected Lyrics
  90. Giovanni Pascoli: Selected Poems
  91. Hose Danial Garcia: shadowslongshoreman
  92. Whiskey Radish: Snow Walk (a hand-illustrated chapbook)
  93. Ladette Randolph: Solos Volume 3 (an omnibus of Ploughshares fiction)
  94. Josef Sorett : Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetic
  95. Alison Hawthorne Deming: Stairway to Heaven
  96. Carl Phillips: Star Map with Action Figures
  97. Dora Malech: Stet
  98. Edward Mackay: Swarming
  99. Michael Filimowicz: Tatvan
  100. Nancy Willard: The Adventures of Anatole
  101. Ryan Honeyman: The B Corp Handbook
  102. Duo Duo: The Boy Who Catches Wasps
  103. Kate Tempest: The Bricks That Built the Houses
  104. Andrew March: The Caliphate of Man
  105. Bryan Caplan: The Case Against Education
  106. Natalya Semenova: The Collector: The Story of Sergei Shchukin and His Lost Masterpieces
  107. Rochard Hatch: The Curious Lobster
  108. Sergio Chejfec: The Dark
  109. Johanna Skibsrud: The Description of the World
  110. Buchanan and Powell: The Evolution of Moral Progress: A Biocultural Theory
  111. Magnus Mills: The Field of the Cloth of Gold
  112. Nicholas Buccola: The Fire Is Upon Us: James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr. and the Debate over Race in America
  113. Ivo Goldstein: The Holocaust in Croatia
  114. Edmund Gordon: The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography
  115. Laura Van Den Berg: The Isle of Youth
  116. Ilija Trojanow: The Lamentations of Zeno
  117. Meia Geddes: The Little Queen
  118. Andrus Kivirähk: The Man Who Spoke Snakish
  119. John Burnside: The Music of Time
  120. Michael Tennesen: The Next Species: The Future of Evolution in the Aftermath of Man
  121. Helen Vendler: The Ocean, The Bird and the Scholar: Essays on Poets & Poetry
  122. Marina Keegan: The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories
  123. Leonard Kress: The Orpheus Complex
  124. Kirk Wulf: The Partly Chosen (pamphlet)
  125. Michael Bazzett (trans.): The Popol Vuh
  126. Kathleen Graber: The River Twice
  127. Olafur Gunnarsson: The Thaw: Stories
  128. Angela Flournoy: The Turner House
  129. Jerry Z. Muller: The Tyranny of Metrics
  130. Miller Oberman: The Unstill Ones
  131. Bo Balder: The Wan
  132. Iman Humaydan: The Weight of Paradise
  133. Robert Priest: The Wolf Is Back
  134. Joan Dempsey: This Is How It Begins
  135. Jedediah Purdy: This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth
  136. Renee Emerson: Threshing Floor
  137. Maxim D. Shrayer: Voices of Jewish-Russian Literature: An Anthology
  138. Naomi Oreske: Why Trust Science
  139. Edmund Jorgensen: World Enough (And Time)
  140. Raquel Balboni: XXX Poems
  141. Eleanor Wilner: Before Our Eyes
  142. Debbie Blue: Consider the Women: A Provocative Guide to Three Matriarchs of the Bible
  143. Kathryn T. Long: God in the Rainforest
  144. Nancy Freund Bills: The Red Ribbon: A Memoir of Lightning and Rebuilding After Loss
  145. Marilyn McEntyre: When Poets Pray
  146. Debasish Lahiri: Tinder Tender
  147. Nathan J. Robinson: My Affairs: A Memoir of the Magazine Industry 2016-2076
  148. Abhay K.: 100 More Great Indian Poems
  149. Jane LaForge: Daphne and Her Discontents
  150. Richard Scholar: Émigrés: French Words That Turned English
  151. Jeffrey H. Ryan: Hermit - The Mysterious Life of Jim Whyte
  152. Goirick Brahmachari: Joining the Dots
  153. Molly McCully Brown: Places I've Taken My Body
  154. Bruce Bond: Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand
  155. Vanesha Pravin: Disorder
  156. CP Surendran: Available Light

Friday, June 12, 2020

Crytids, Comics, and Sfé R. Monster


For fans of cryptids, try Canadian trans artist Sfé R. Monster's collection of monster-centric comics.

Included below is Eth's Skin, a webcomic with a focus on "mermaids, selkies, and sea monsters living in the old growth forests along the northern coast of British Columbia." Gorgeous character designs and visuals---plus this particular webcomic is free-to-read.


Sfé explains their method on their Patreon page thusly:
I create exclusively queer and genderqueer stories- comics that explore the width and breadth of gender identity, and showcase and celebrate the diversity of queerness. 
I am also a monster enthusiast, having made projects ... that investigate the weird, wonderful, and occasionally woeful creatures that lurk around the edge of our reality.  

Mystical beasts are an area of interest for us at Pen & Anvil. We are huge fans of Jorge Luis Borges and his Book of Imaginary Beings, even contributing new entries with our "New Book of Imaginary Beings," published to Clarion issue 17 in the winter of 2014. Over on Twitter, @dasneuesbuch serves as our tribute to Borges' bestiary.