Relationships
The writer on her new novel, creative partnerships, sex as communication, and tending to old drafts.
The writer on her new novel, creative partnerships, sex as communication, and tending to old drafts.
The writer on writing about secrets, food as love language, and releasing a debut novel during a pandemic.
On writing mentally ill characters with nuance and how our identities shape the power relationships of our most intimate interactions.
I have just read a diary entry from fifteen years ago, in which I wrote that I had just read some diary entries from many more years before that, written at a time when I was staying by myself in a small town near Caen, in Normandy.
The debut writer on complex characters, love stories, and how we code each other.
A short story from the collection The Dominant Animal.
On the individuality of grief, demystifying the creative process, and the right time to tell a story.
“People talk about algorithms like they’re magic. It’s easy to see why. They govern how the internet is shown to us, conjured from spells. Their methods are opaque, and yet we put our trust in them.”
Mapping personal attachment styles onto art institutions.
The writer on romance under capitalism, Nietzsche, sex work, and freedom from the tyranny of the sentence.
Goddamn it to motherfucking hell, she says. I think that ought to cover it, he says. He asks her why she feels the need to swear so much, so deliberately, what depends on it, why it’s so important to her. Why, after so long, she hasn’t grown tired. Worn out in the mouth.
we consummated our marriage / on a bed littered with sour faces / of dead presidents, liberated livestock / sweating through the dollars.
She was coming out of the library when she saw him. Their paths had crossed a couple of times before. Three, to be exact. More or less under the same circumstances. He was riding an orange bicycle, and a little girl was standing behind him on the pannier rack.
On resisting parasitic invasions—from the poisons in our soil, to toxic masculinity in the psyche.
The writer on her new story collection about the lives of the displaced and the daily estrangements we all face.
My twin and I met in the Midwestern college town where she lives, at a fan convention for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I was dressed as Faith, the bad slayer in black leather and burgundy lips.
Laker gold is how Pops describes it. To Little Man, though, that motherfucker is yellow. Canary yellow and dirty. Little Man knows it’s a Westview Public Works truck, even though the WPW tag was zig-zagged over with black spray paint.
We’re walking through the centered skylight spaces of the mall. I drop back on the cloud-white floor tiles, holding my phone up to record a video. Beautiful in its own way to watch in reality, but when I replay the video, following Alice into a store selling soap, the video doesn’t show Alice, only oval shaped air heat-trembling at the edges. I replay it three times, shocked each time when I’m unable to see her.
