Eugene Fischer

Tag: Carmen Machado

On Junot Díaz, Carmen Machado, and Monica Byrne

Junot Díaz is having a #metoo moment that was a long time coming. I think the first open accusation was from Zinzi Clemmons, in this tweet:

Shortly thereafter, both Carmen Machado and Monica Byrne related their own experiences. Carmen’s is in a Twitter thread starting here:

Monica’s was on Twitter, and at greater length on Facebook:

There have since been this damning story from Alisa Valdes, an overview article in The Cut, and I’m sure more to come.

I’m writing this post to bear witness. I was present for the events related by both Carmen Machado and Monica Byrne. Things happened as they described. I watched the belittling histrionics Junot Díaz displayed in response to Carmen’s questions in Iowa City, with his subsequent tantrum of a reading. I was seated next to Monica in North Carolina when Díaz, on her other side, lectured the table about VIDA statistics and the sexist silencing of women in literature, only to actively interrupt or condescendingly dismiss the woman novelist right beside him whenever she tried to contribute to the conversation.1

Carmen is telling the truth. Monica is telling the truth. I have absolutely no doubt that Zinzi Clemmons and Alisa Valdes are telling the truth. For all the discussion to come, this much is without question: these things happened, just as described.

  1. An ironic cherry to go atop that farce: in both instances he employed the rhetorical tactic of treating his female interlocutors like underachieving students, beginning dismissive comments with something like, “One of the first things we teach students at MIT is….” Monica, as it happens, has a masters degree from MIT. ↩

Carmen Machado’s Crawford Award Acceptance Speech

I only believe in bounded meritocracies. Below a certain threshold of power, prestige, attention, population—that is where actual events can, sometimes, resemble such a fanciful notion. Add a few more eyes, a greater quantity of dollars, the weight of more history, and invariably you’ll find that chaos, luck, and zeitgeist dominate events. But, very occasionally, those uncontrollable factors line up in a way that is functionally indistinguishable from an impossible meritocratic dream.

That’s how I see the tremendous success of Carmen Maria Machado’s book Her Body and Other Parties. It’s been a finalist for the National Book Award, a Tiptree Honoree, won the John Leonard Prize, won the Crawford Award, and undoubtedly has a slew of other accolades yet to come. I’ve been Carmen’s friend for years, and seen how long in the making was her overnight success. This triumph couldn’t have happened to a lovelier person, nor someone who worked harder for it, nor someone whose writing merited it more. Carmen is the real deal, and her stories are piercingly relevant and stunningly rendered.

I spent the past weekend in Orlando, Florida, grinning from ear to ear as I watched writers young and old flock around her, agog at her literary accomplishments and casual brilliance. I got to sit next to her while she accepted an award for best first fantasy book. (I wasn’t planning on attending the International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts award banquet this year, but of course that all changed when Carmen won.) Here’s a video of her acceptance speech. The completely shameless yee-hah! is, of course, mine.

Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

Have you preordered this book yet? It’s the debut collection by one of the best writers of short fiction alive, and it comes out on October 3rd. Inside you’ll find stories playful and dark, sexy and heartbreaking, so structurally inventive they’re like nothing else you’ve seen. Also, it happens that it was just among the ten books longlisted for the National Book Award. If you like fiction but aren’t reading Carmen Machado’s then you are making bad life choices.

The Coode Street Podcast with Jo Walton and Me

itunescoodestreet

At WorldCon in Kansas City I got the chance to join Jo Walton on the Coode Street podcast, hosted by Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe. We talked about writers that characterize different eras of science fiction, how science fiction differs rhetorically from fantasy (more detail on that here), and whether there’s a difference between the kinds of literary experimentation in the past and what is pursued today. As tends to happen, I fell a little bit into just listening to Jo be enviably clever, but I did get a chance to talk about the Iowa Writers’ Workshop’s modern support for genre writing, and contemporary writers who inspire me (going on for a bit about  Carmen Maria Machado and Meghan McCarron and Carola Dibbell). You can listen to the episode on the Coode Street site, on your podcast player of choice through iTunes, or via the embedded player below.

Even More Kind Words About “The New Mother”

The nomination period for the Nebula awards closed a couple of days ago, and in the lead-up to that deadline many people said awfully nice things about my story.

  • Morgan Dhu reviewed it at length on her book blog, concluding that it’s, “A profoundly thoughtful, elegantly written work.”
  • John Chu included it in his “Stuff I want people to read” blog post.
  • Rachel Swirsky recommended it for Nebula consideration, saying it’s, “the best riff on ‘disappearing male’ stories I’ve ever seen, a smart story that accomplishes both literary and speculative goals in a sharp, well-characterized, traditionally ‘what if?’ SF way.”
  • Joseph Tomaras put it at the top of his list of tentative Nebula nominations.
  • Carmen Machado tweeted that it deserved a place on the ballot.
  • Aliette de Bodard helped spread the word on Twitter also.

Thanks to all of you for taking the time to read “The New Mother,” and for sharing your appreciation. I’m really touched to see that it’s connecting with so many people.

Latest Love for “The New Mother”

A few more people have been publicly kind about “The New Mother” recently.

As ever, my thanks for spreading the word.

My Friends Write Things: Hurricanes and Hauntings

Fiction

  • “Kingdom by the Sea” by Amy Parker – I was lucky enough to see an early draft of this story, a glorious, intense reimagining of Lolita. It’s like a literary vivisection, using scalpels historical, critical, fictional to slice away twitching layers of Humbert Humbert and extract a personal narrative for Dorothy Haze.
  • “The Invention of Separate People” by Kevin Brockmeier – Kevin is one of our greatest living fantasists, and if you’ve never read him before it’s time to start. This story was originally published in Unstuck, and is about a world where people are themselves, yes, but also everyone else. Everyone is one person, until someone (everyone) begins to learn how to be separate.
  • “Skin Suit” by Janalyn Guo – The main character is a lump of dark, amorphous matter that must wear taxidermied suits to appear human, but its parents are two planes of brilliant light, and it’s time for a family reunion.
  • “Horror Story” by Carmen Machado – This time Carmen’s penned a creepy tale of crumbling relationships and haunted houses. Read it in the dark.
  • “The Game of Smash and Recovery” by Kelly Link – It’s a Kelly Link story. That should be all you need to know, but I’ll add that this story is Kelly’s take on space opera, and dedicated to Iain M. Banks.

Nonfiction

Poetry

Recommended Short Books by Women

Yesterday I asked the internet for recommendations of short books written by women, with no criterion for what constituted “short.” Here’s what people offered. Books I’ve already read are in bold. (Recommenders are in parentheses.)

  • Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red. (Carmen Machado)
  • Willa Cather, A Lost Lady. (Debbie Kennedy)
  • Willa Cather, My Antonia. (Sarah Boden)
  • Kate Chopin, The Awakening. (Rebecca Coffey, Krystal Rios)
  • Marguerite Duras, The Lover. (Diana Spechler, Josh Rhome)
  • George Eliot, Silas Marner. (Amy Parker)
  • Marian Engel, Bear. (Carmen Machado)
  • Louise Erdich, Love Medicine. (Maureen McHugh)
  • Elena Ferrante, Days of Abandonment. (Amy Parker)
  • Carolyn Forché, The Country Between Us. (Joseph Tomaras)
  • Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm. (Jed Hartman)
  • Carolyn Ives Gilman, Halfway Human. (Jeanne Griggs)
  • Nadine Gordimer, July’s People. (Maureen McHugh)
  • Helene Hanff, 84 Charing Cross Road. (Jed Hartman)
  • Zora Neal Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God. (Amy Parker)
  • Rachel Ingall, Mrs. Caliban. (Carmen Machado)
  • Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House. (Rebecca Coffey, Amy Parker, Carmen Machado, Maureen McHugh)
  • Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived In The Castle. (Amy Parker, Maureen McHugh)
  • Tove Jansson, Tales from Moominvalley. (Jed Hartman)
  • Sesyle Joslin, The Spy Lady and the Muffin Man. (Jed Hartman)
  • Hitomi Kanehera, Snakes and Earrings. (Nick Mamatas)
  • Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy. (Valérie Savard)
  • Barbara Kingsolver, Pigs in Heaven. (Patrice Sarath)
  • Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees. (Patrice Sarath)
  • Nella Larson, Quicksand. (Alea Adigwame)
  • Ursula Le Guin, Fish Soup. (Jed Hartman)
  • Ursula Le Guin, Very Far From Anywhere Else. (Jed Hartman)
  • Tanith Lee, Don’t Bite the Sun. (@Rwenchette)
  • Doris Lessing, Memoirs of a Survivor. (Maureen McHugh)
  • Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child. (Amy Parker, Rebecca Coffey)
  • Denise Levertov, Collected Earlier Poems. (Joseph Tomaras)
  • Bertie MacAvoy, Tea with the Black Dragon. (Dana Huber)
  • Katherine Mansfield, At The Bay. (Debbie Kennedy)
  • Katherine Mansfield, Prelude. (Debbie Kennedy)
  • Patricia McKillip, Stepping from the Shadows. (Jed Hartman)
  • Jane Mendelsohn, I Was Amelia Earhart. (Stephanie Feldman)
  • Naomi Mitchison, Travel Light. (Jackie Monkiewicz)
  • Katherine Faw Morris, Young God. (Nick Mamatas)
  • Toni Morrison, Sula. (Maureen McHugh)
  • Jenny Offill, The Dept. of Speculation. (Josh Rhome)
  • Yoko Ogawa, Revenge. (Alexandra Geraets, Joseph Tomaras)
  • Sharon Olds, The Cold Cell. (Jed Hartman)
  • Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea. (Valérie Savard)
  • Joanna Russ, Picnic on Paradise. (Karen Meisner)
  • Joanna Russ, The Female Man. (Jed Hartman)
  • Ruth Sawyer, Roller Skates. (Jed Hartman)
  • Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. (Monica Byrne, Justin Cosner, Carmen Machado)
  • Cynthia Voigt, Dicey’s Song. (Jed Hartman)
  • Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome. (Amy Parker)
  • Kate Wilhelm, Where Late the Sweet Bird Sang. (Maureen McHugh)
  • Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry. (Jed Hartman)
  • Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse. (Amy Parker)
  • Margarite Yourcenar, Coup d’Grace. (Maureen McHugh)

I already own a copy of the most recommended book, The Haunting of Hill House, so that’s in the stack (as are several others). I think the first new one of these I’ll add is The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

Carmen Machado’s “O Adjunct! My Adjunct!”

I’ve often been asked lately whether I miss teaching. My standard answer is to say that I miss teaching very much, but I don’t miss all the things around teaching: the low pay, the lack of benefits, the constant feeling that I’m complicit in the adulteration of a once-great intellectual tradition. Which is all to say, I miss teaching, but not adjuncting. The work itself gave me profound satisfaction, but the working conditions were an affront to my pride. It was nothing like the vision of academia I received as an undergraduate; I went to a small liberal arts university which I’m not sure even had any adjunct professors. I certainly never had one. So while I now know the adjuncting experience from the faculty side, I have only my evaluations to suggest what it’s like for a student.

Carmen, though, has lived at both ends of the adjunct’s college classroom. She wrote about it for the New Yorker with exquisite clarity. Read about the pathology of placing students’ formative experiences in the hands of those with “great responsibility, precariously held.”

“O Adjunct! My Adjunct!” at the New Yorker.

My Friends Write Things: Pains Real and Imagined

As I’ve spent most of my reading time this year in books, I’ve gotten way behind on the things my brilliant friends have published digitally. So here’s a slice of 2015 writing worth  catching up on, with more to come.

Fiction

  • “Descent” by Carmen Maria Machado – Newly Nebula-nominated author and all-around force of nature Carmen Machado, with a horror story about women haunted by death.
  • “Pockets” by Amal El-Mohtar – A story about the quiet magic of reaching your hand in your pocket and pulling out something you never put in, that’s also an extended metaphor for the act of making a piece of art and sending it out into the world. (Disclosure: I gave the author some advice that informed the scientific testing scenes in this story.)
  • “And You Shall Know Her By The Trail Of Dead” by Brooke Bolander – A pulpy, profane, bloodslicked story of cyborg assassins and data thieves who don’t give a damn about anything but each other. Like Battle Angel Alita and Ghost in the Shell got addled on bourbon, had a stumbling fuck in an alley, and couldn’t look one another in the eye the next day.

Nonfiction

  • “A Girl’s Guide to Sexual Purity” by Carmen Maria Machado – Because she’s as adept with a personal essay as she is with a short story, here’s Carmen again, revealing that she was once an earnest, purity ring-wearing 13-year-old, and how she became the queer, sex-positive feminist she is now.
  • “Kidhood (Ritalin, Concerta, Adderall)” by Rebekah Frumkin – The latest installment in Rebekah’s continuing column for McSweeney’s about psychoactive pharmaceuticals, and the insider’s view of the cognition that makes doctors hand them out.
  • “In Manila, Two Seasons, No Regrets” by Laurel Fantauzzo – A Modern Love article about falling into a relationship while traveling, the kind of relationship that’s everything it can be, but not everything you want it to be.
  • “Reflections on a Dirty Dog” by Lisa Wells – A kaleidoscopic, hypnotic essay of suffering for the sake of experience, or for no reason whatsoever, on cross-country Greyhound bus trips.

Poetry

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