Tag Archives: literature

 

Messy and Beautiful

liberty-for-all

Since I was a child, I knew I was going to be a writer. Early on, though, I was ruined by the romanticism surrounding the craft. I’d read too much Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson, and Charles Bukowski. I did drugs. I drank. I wandered. At first it may have been to emulate my idols, but eventually it became about survival: running fast and hard from the horrors of an abusive home.

I don’t recall ever making the connection that all of my literary heroes were straight white men, but in the back of my head I knew that so much of how the world opened up for them would never be in the cards for me. But I kept writing, filling up composition books, not thinking about getting published so much as trying, word by word, to patch up my life.

In high school, several teachers took an interest in me, despite the fact I was a miserable fuckup who barely showed up to class. I read all of the writers they believed a girl like me should read. The men gave me Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Albert Camus. The women gave me Kate Chopin, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton. Not once did any teacher ever hand me a book by a writer of color.

I now understand this experience is hardly unique to me. If it weren’t for one of my oldest friends, Jessica Rodriguez, loaning me Loose Woman by Sandra Cisneros in high school, I would have never known a Latina could be a writer. I mean, I knew Latina writers existed—they were my friends, fellow notebook scribblers—but I don’t think it ever occurred to us that one day we could hold each other’s books in our hands.

Diversity in literature is something I’ve been thinking about quite a bit lately. Last month I attended a workshop run by the Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation (VONA), which sponsors programs for writers of color working in a variety of genres. I sat at the orientation looking around in disbelief at more than 150 writers crammed into a room at UC Berkeley, thinking, “Holy fuck, I had no idea there were so many of us.”

I was there because of the weekly comic strip I write with my best friend Julio SalgadoLiberty For All is his baby. In its early days, the queer, undocumented artist drew and wrote it himself and posted it on his Facebook page. When the comic was picked up by CultureStrike, I was brought on as the writer, giving the two of us the opportunity to work on our first project together after nearly ten years of friendship.

Liberty, the strip’s main character, is a writer without much of a filter. She is sometimes Salgado. Sometimes me. Sometimes our friends, lovers, or family members. She is never a stranger to us. By featuring her story, week after week, we hope she is seen as the quirky, complicated, sometimes problematic character we know her to be, rather than a laundry list of oppressions. But because of those less-than-conventional details of who she is—chubby, brown, undocumented, queer, feminist—I worry that mainstream audiences aren’t capable of recognizing her humanity.

Junot Díaz, the celebrated Dominican American author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and one of VONA’s founders, has spoken out about the tough environment writers of color face. In a recent New Yorker piece—an excerpt from an anthology of writing from VONA attendees and instructors—Díaz describes his particularly miserable experience studying in an MFA program: “That shit was too white.” It’s the “standard problem” of MFA programs everywhere, he adds. Díaz brings up the story of Athena, a Caribbean American woman he praises as a “truly gifted writer.” She dropped out of his program because it was simply too challenging to be a woman of color in that space. Over the years, he looked for Athena’s work, but it appeared that she had chosen not to pursue writing. Díaz seems to recognize the tragedy of this, if only in the distant way a man who “made it” can.

How much better are things today? The women’s literary group VIDA does a yearly tally of the number of women writers in various mainstream literary publications, from the Atlantic to the New Republic—both of whose bylines were more than two-thirds male in 2013. Inspired by this hard-numbers approach, Roxane Gay set out to find out where things stood for writers of color. She found that nearly 90 percent of the books reviewed by the New York Times in 2011 were written by white writers. (Today, few writers of color can be found even in the pages of liberal magazines, which may laud diversity in theory, but do not actually practice it.)

Gay also pointed out another issue: the identity hierarchy. “Race often gets lost in the gender conversation as if it’s an issue we’ll get to later,” she wrote. Yes, progress is slow, but it’s always the most needed voices that are forced to wait. And as we push for a racial mix that better represents the world we live in, does that mean we’ll also need to “get to” queer and transgender writers later?

At least people today are more willing to speak out about these issues—on social media, in particular. In May, the #WeNeedDiverseBooks hashtag went viral after it was announced only white writers would be featured at BookCon, a new reader-focused book festival held in conjunction with the annual trade show BookExpo America. It wasn’t the first time BookCon organizers had come under fire. A month earlier, they had put together a panel on young-adult literature composed solely of white men.

Another diversity-related dustup blew up on Twitter in May when writer Daniel José Older reacted to criticism of a story in Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History, an anthology he co-edited. A review chided one of the anthology’s writers, Troy L. Wiggins, for relying too heavily on “phonetic dialect,” calling it a “literary trick” that rarely works. Older tweeted that the reviewer was unfairly coming at a black writer for using AAVE (African American Vernacular English), even though critics have long called white writers—from Joyce to Shakespeare—“brilliant” for using vernacular in their prose. He and Wiggins, Older wrote, are “trying to stay true to our voices in a white ass world.”

In the comic strip Julio and I work on, many of the characters are queer, undocumented, body positivesex positive, transgender, and people of color. They suffer from mental health issues. They live below the poverty line. They do bad things. In other words, they are messy and beautiful, just like our real-life communities.

Julio and I never had a conversation about being all-inclusive, but sometimes we get commended for our “diverse” comic. No doubt the nine other people in my graphic novel writing workshop—eight of whom were women—encounter the same weird praise. And that’s just it, really. When you give people at the margins the opportunity and platform to tell their own stories, what is reflected will look like intentional pushback against mainstream narratives. Our stories only seem revolutionary because they so often go untold.

At VONA, our instructor Mat Johnson told us we can’t hide behind our oppressions. We have to be good writers. Our only hope of getting mainstream readers to take interest in stories featuring people of color is by tapping into the human condition, those seemingly mundane and yet monumentally important life events that connect us all—and that magically render gender, race, culture, and class unimportant.

 

The Graphic Canon: Literature Gets a Modern Kick

In The Graphic Canon, comic artists reimagine dozens of classic works of literature, philosophy, and religion. The result, says creator Russ Kick, is like The Norton Anthology with pictures, drawn by an army of emerging artists who provide their personal — and sometimes unexpected — gloss on the world's great books.

More than a decade before Julian Assange and Edward Snowden became poster boys for information freedom, Russ Kick was a pioneer of using the Internet to heighten government accountability. If you’ve seen the video of then president George W. Bush reading “The Pet Goat” with a second-grade class in Sarasota, Florida, as terrorist attacks were underway on September 11, 2001, you can thank Kick for posting an uncut version of the footage on the web.

While he was an editor at the Disinformation Company, an online publisher of “the most shocking, unusual, and quirkiest news articles, podcasts, and videos,” Kick produced a number of anthologies that exposed untruths and challenged conventional wisdom. His most popular collections are Everything You Know Is Wrong and You Are Being Lied To. When a decade of media-based, information-freedom advocacy began to take its toll on his well-being, Kick knew it was time for him to switch gears.

While visiting a bookstore in Tucson, Arizona, Kick’s chance encounter with a graphic novel sparked a new direction. For the last three and a half years, he has been working with comic artists to reimagine classic works of literature, philosophy, and religion for a three-volume collection called The Graphic Canon. This summer, the final volume was released (the first and second volumes were released last year), and the trilogy will be available as a box set in October.

I spoke with Kick about how going in a new direction can be both daunting and gratifying, and why his current project adapting children’s stories is unsuitable for kids.

Part of what makes The Graphic Canon intriguing is that it does two things at once: elevates comic art while making classic literature more accessible to contemporary audiences. What led you to take on this ambitious project?

It was so depressing to produce these sociopolitical books, but I knew I wanted to keep writing and editing anthologies. So, I returned to some of my other lifelong interests: literature and art. One day I was in was in the graphic-novel section of a bookstore in Tucson and found a full-length, graphic adaptation of The Trial by Kafka. It struck me that there should be an anthology of graphic adaptations of classic works of literature. I thought it should be like The Norton Anthology I had dragged around in college. That was the moment the idea was born, and it seemed so obvious to me once I had it.

When did you become interested in graphic novels?

I’ve read comics all my life. Once I signed the contract with Seven Stories Press, I started approaching my favorite artists to ask them to be a part of this project. Then I branched out from there. One of the most fun parts of working on The Graphic Canon was discovering new talent. It is unbelievable how many talented illustrators and comic artists are out there. It was great to find people who are essentially unknown and give them the opportunity to be part of this collection.

George Orwell, Animal Farm
Animal Farm  as reimagined by Laura Plansker.

Reinterpreting iconic works of literature must be intimidating, and some of the chapters are closer renderings than others. Did you feel a responsibility to maintain these works’ original forms?

Because this is an art project, I started out by making the decision not to place limits on what the artist could do. I wanted the result to be a real collaboration between the original writer, their work, and the artist. By giving talented artists the greatest source material possible, I knew the result would be amazing.

A part of editing an anthology is learning to let go of control. It’s a process of chance and synchronicity. Some things you want at the start never materialize, and you end up with other things you’d never even considered that are just brilliant. It’s like looking into a kaleidoscope; what you see is always unpredictable yet interesting.

The Graphic Canon isn’t just works of literature. You also include philosophical writings from people like Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche and excerpts from religious texts. How did you decide what to include as “the canon?”

I started with a list of what I considered to be the most critical works of literature. These were stories that would leave a noticeable gap if they weren’t included, like The Iliad, The Odyssey, Dante’s Inferno, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and The Tale of Genji. But I also wanted to go beyond what was predictable and bring in unexpected things. That’s why I included the Incan play Apu Ollantay.

I also had a wish list of things I wanted to see adapted because I thought the story would work really well visually. Some of the artists I worked with told me they’d always wanted to adapt a certain work, but they never had a reason to do it. That’s what happened with Rebecca Dart and Paradise Lost, which are these stunning full-page illustrations and beautiful hand-lettering. It also happened with Rick Geary and the book of Revelation. Being a part of this project gave those artists the excuse they needed.

The Graphic Canon, Jabberwocky
“Jabberwocky,” as reimagined by Eran Cantrell.

There’s a lot of diversity in the collection, stylistically and in how the artist approached the material. Some adaptations are straightforward and use the original text, while others are more abstract interpretations of a partial or whole work. What does this diversity bring to the collection as a whole?

People have told me they were pleasantly surprised with The Graphic Canon because it is so multilayered and features so many different artistic styles. A few times while I was editing, I was surprised when an artist brought something out of a story that I’d never noticed before. Even though some of these works are hundreds of years old, they still have really relevant things to say. The themes are so timeless and universal, and the artwork helps to get that across.

Every chapter begins with an introduction you penned that serves to contextualize the work and familiarize the reader with the comic artist. What did you learn by writing those introductions?

Too many amazing writers and poets died in total poverty, and only gained recognition for their work posthumously. In the chapter introductions, I talk about why the work is important and give some interesting facts about the writer or poet and the history of the work, to humanize it. A lot of times the backstory of a writer’s life and career is as interesting as the work itself. There are a lot of fascinating stories about pieces that were either completely ignored during a writer’s lifetime or torn to pieces by critics when it was published. I almost got tired of having to write that again and again. But it did teach me to never give up hope.

You mention the possibility of a fourth volume a couple of times in The Graphic Canon. Is that something you have in the works?

I am working on another anthology right now, but it won’t be a fourth volume. It will be graphic adaptations of children’s literature. Originally, the publisher and I thought this would be a book for children and adults, but now that the artwork has started coming in, I realize the book isn’t going to be appropriate for kids. It’s well known that a lot of what we consider to be children’s stories are really dark and violent, so you can imagine how the artwork might be disturbing. The artists and I won’t be watering these stories down like they do at Disney.

Mandy Van Deven was previously In The Fray’s managing editor. Site: mandyvandeven.com | Twitter: @mandyvandeven

 

My War: Killing Time in Iraq

"This is a totally screwed up policy… The commanders are just really nervous because they can't keep control any more."

Colby Buzzell, winner of this year’s Blooker prize for his blog-based book, My War: Killing Time in Iraq, speaking about the recent Pentagon decision to restrict the soldiers’ freedom to post to blogs. Soldiers will need to present potential blog entries to their supervising officers before they may post their entries. Buzzell, a former machine gunner, recorded his year-long tour of duty in his blog, which today won the $10,000 annual Blooker prize.

 

Sontag’s last stand

If you haven't already done so, get your hands on a copy of Susan Sontag's At the Same Time. To read this book — the collection of nonfiction pieces Sontag was working on at the end of her life — is to realize what a bold mind and voice we have lost. But this collection, though less groundbreaking than its predecessors — Against Interpretation, Illness As Metaphor, On Photography, also reassures us that Sontag’s writing, her wit, grace, and resolve, will continue to influence serious readers, curious minds, and the politically concerned for generations to come. Each essay published in its unedited form, these pieces, right down to the collection’s structure, were shaped by Sontag’s hands alone.

Its unsentimental foreword penned by Sontag’s son David Rieff, At the Same Time illuminates the late writer’s many passions: literature, translation, beauty and aesthetics, politics, free speech, and, of course, photography. Featuring forewords Sontag wrote for translated works like Leonid Tsypkin’s Summer in Baden-Baden and Anna Banti’s Artemisia, the collection’s first third gives us an intimate portrait of Sontag the reader. Written in a way that reads like curling up with a glass of wine and talking to a good friend, the forewords all but ensure that we readers will becomes fans of the authors Sontag celebrates.

With its focus on September 11, the second third of the collection initially feels pedestrian. But read alongside Sontag’s reflections on September 11, 2002, and Abu Ghraib, these essays reveal the power of candor when it was eschewed, courage when it was confused with consent. Considering how quickly Sontag said what few other Americans dared to mutter, they remind us how Sontag has changed our understandings of this post-9/11 world.

It seems fitting that the collection’s back cover includes a picture of a note that says, “Do something. Do something. Do something," for the collection’s concluding pages relay this urgency through Sontag's final public speeches. Illuminating the ethical importance of translating foreign works, of writing and truth telling, of resistance, they are a lasting reminder of the inseparability of politics and literature, one that confirms Sontag’s belief that “in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.”