Bill Clegg: Surviving Addiction
Posted on May 12, 2012 by Nels P. Highberg in Features, Interviews
“For years, I tried to control my drinking and my drug use, and I nearly lost my life because of it. I hurt many people in that deluded thrashing. In the writing of these two books, which has taken up all of my free time for the last six years, I think–coming to the end–I felt a real sense of closure…”
In 2010, Bill Clegg published Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man, a memoir chronicling a life of addiction that culminated in a two-month binge where he spent $70,000 on crack, vodka, male escorts, and high-end hotel rooms.
Obviously, he survived, but it wasn’t easy for him or anyone else in his life. Ninety Days, his new memoir, begins as he leaves rehab and returns to New York City, focusing on the challenge of attaining ninety continuous days of sobriety. Attaining that sobriety demands constant, conscious vigilance, and Clegg makes it clear he could never have done it alone. (more…)
Alison Bechdel: The Personal and the Familial
Posted on May 6, 2012 by Sassafras Lowrey in Features, Interviews
“Writing a memoir about living people in your family is a problematic undertaking . I think I only do it because my family was so screwed up in a very particular way.”
I haven’t spoken to my mother in over a decade, and I’m a total sucker for troubled mother dyke-daughter stories. I’m also a huge Alison Bechdel fan, so I was thrilled when I learned she had a new memoir coming out this spring focusing on the not so smooth relationship she has with her mother. I loved her highly celebrated memoir Fun Home, which was about her father, and I was excited to see what new ground she would cover with this new memoir, Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).
Bechdel’s latest book weaves together her struggles to relate to her mother, with psychoanalytic theory —specifically the work of Donald Winnicott, the writings of literary greats like Virginia Woolf and Adrienne Rich, and Bechdel’s turbulent romantic relationships with women throughout her adult life. Like Fun Home, Are You My Mother? is a gorgeous and intense graphic novel that combines her unique storytelling with insightful and intricate images. I was thrilled to have the opportunity to sit down with Bechdel to talk about the new memoir, her creative process, and what the future holds for her work.
Wayne Koestenbaum: The Horror and Fascination of Humiliation
Posted on April 29, 2012 by William Johnson in Features, Interviews
“If you stumble upon negative comments concerning your body or your personality, remember that the online universe equalizes every utterance, and that negative or humiliating comments concerning your body or your personality weigh no more than a feather. Imagine the feather blowing away.”
Last year, I was asked by Band of Thebes to name my favorite book of 2011. Without hesitation, I picked poet, critic, and author Wayne Koestenbaum’s Humiliation (Picador). (more…)
Kevin Killian: The Contingency Approach
Posted on April 23, 2012 by Bradford Nordeen in Features, Interviews
“…I realized there wasn’t any point in me trying to be the new Henry James, Marcel Proust or William Faulkner. Living in California, I think, helped this. California is like the home of failure, I suppose. Not only failure, but contingency, accidents and things falling apart, so that the best writing and art from here has always been… well… kind of half-assed – in the best sense! I realized it didn’t matter if something was good or not. It just had to be sufficiently gestural. And then I’d be satisfied with it. I don’t know if that made me a better writer, to realize that, but it made me a more confident one…”
Novelist and critic Kevin Killian is a master of a chameleon-like prose. Most closely associated with San Francisco’s New Narrative movement, at times bleak and at others hysterical, Killian can twist whatever project he’s yielding into a hilariously poignant prose that fuses light-handed gossip with the achingly personal. Killian and I sat down in San Francisco on the afternoon of February 11, to discuss six or so forthcoming projects, including his recently released novel Spreadeagle, his first novel in 15 years, and the re-publication of his first three novels. (more…)
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore: Keeping the Pot Stirred
Posted on April 17, 2012 by L. Michael Gipson in Features, Interviews
“Whatever happened to our dreams of sexual splendor only bounded by the limitations of imagination? Gay sex is now more about regimentation than experimentation, following the hideous rules rather than creating new possibilities for loving, lusting for and taking care of one another. “
Mattilda Sycamore agitates. A self-declared troublemaker, the community she’s most recently zeroed in on for a bruising migraine is the mainstream LGBT community and its campaign for normalcy.
Despite conservative queerdom’s best efforts to hide its “otherness” behind a velvet wall of “same as you” Tom and Hank and Jill and Janes, Mattilda and her like will not be ignored. As parades of neo-nuclear same sex families mug for the cameras on courthouse steps, queer body boys parade and flex impossibly taut muscles across our nation’s gym runways and circuit parties, and far, far too many proudly proclaim in knee-jerk defensiveness how “straight-acting” they are across the net, Sycamore blows raspberries at the forced mirage and holds up faded pictures of yesteryear boys and girls whose one claim to fame once was their difference. Sycamore endlessly delights in reminding them of the sacrifice they are making to be like everyone else. Nobody likes a know-it-all whose nervous tic seems to be a penchant for aggressive truth telling. A 90s era activist kid from San Francisco Act Up’s height, the now Santa Fe resident has released two novels So Many Ways to Sleep Badly (City Lights 2008) and Pulling Taffy (Suspect Thoughts 2003), edited four non-fiction anthologies (including: Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity (Seal 2007), That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation (Soft Skull 2004; 2008), and Dangerous Families: Queer Writing on Surviving (Haworth 2004), appeared in film (All That Sheltering Emptiness), and is a columnist and review editor for the feminist magazine Make/shift.
Released earlier this year, her latest anthology, Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?: Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform, is a pesky reminder of those being left behind (the drag kings, differently-abled, the obese and average bodied, feminist women and men, and most of all, people of color) in the political and economic rush for “normalcy,” a word likely to make Mattilda shudder. (more…)
Emily M. Danforth: Exploring Compelling Young Adult Characters
Posted on April 10, 2012 by Brent Taylor in Features, Interviews
“What I hope The Miseducation of Cameron Post offers to its readers is a nuanced picture of a particular time and place as seen through the eyes of a young woman discovering her sexuality and her voice.”
Last month, Harper Collins published creative writing professor Emily M. Danforth’s debut novel, The Miseducation of Cameron Post. About a girl growing up Miles City, Montana, and what happens when her aunt unearths one of her deepest secrets, the novel eloquently portrays life in a small town with small-minded people. In a market where sassy gay male protagonists reign supreme, Cameron Post is a refreshing character to read about—she’s a lesbian.
Danforth, a former resident of the town where her novel is set, sat down to answer a few questions about writing and growing up gay in Miles City, Montana. (more…)
Anna Joy Springer: Love, Trauma, Loss, and Forgiveness
Posted on April 9, 2012 by TT Jax in Features, Interviews
“But most people just hate discomfort and uncertainty, and will go to all lengths to avoid it, even in the art they engage. That kind of person will find The Vicious Red Relic, Love too jumpy, heady, and heavy. Maybe too unresolved. I think the book speaks to people who are already very courageous.”
Anna Joy Springer’s The Vicious Red Relic, Love (Jaded Ibis Press) is a powerful book of love, trauma, loss, and forgiveness, as well as an exploration of a specific period and place in feminist queer history. Readers are guided through 80s/90s San Francisco, arranged in a series of conceptual forests, by a spray-painted tinfoil elephant named Blinky (or Winky). The main character, Nina, uses Blinky/Winky to communicate with the dead: namely [Gil,] her ex, an HIV-positive mentally unstable lesbian who died alone of an intentional overdose. Through letters, diary entries, poems, and re-tellings of ancient texts, Nina tells Winky (and readers) the story of her complicated and sometimes damaging relationship with [Gil].I interviewed Anna Joy Springer, former punk rocker and current professor at UC San Diego, somewhat reluctantly: the spell of her book is so powerful that I did not want to break it. In the end I composed the interview in layers of questions, building to coherency as I worked through my own hesitation to acknowledge the book as a work of craft and artifice, of theory and brilliance, instead of having sprung, as Springer suggested of [Gil], perfect, intact, and armed from the forehead of the author. (more…)
Q&A With Nina Revoyr by Ellis Avery
Posted on March 27, 2012 by Edit Team in Features, Interviews
“…I do believe in the importance of story, of narrative. I always try to create a sense of urgency; ideally the reader will be pulled along, will want to know what happens next.”
Named one of “Ten Titles to Pick Up Now” by O: The Oprah Magazine, Nina Revoyr’s new Lambda nominated novel is at once a breathtakingly beautiful hymn to the American outdoors—and to the bond between grandfather and granddaughter—and at the same time a chilling snapshot of race in this country. Wingshooters serves as a stark corrective to lazy, cozy assumptions that racism doesn’t exist in the North the way it does in the South, or that lynching ended with the Civil Rights Movement. It is also an aching, lonely, sure-handed portrait of small-town lesbian girlhood. (more…)
Allison Moon: Sex, Werewolves, and Self-Publishing
Posted on March 27, 2012 by Sarah Burghauser in Features, Interviews
“I love writing sex. And I love talking sex. A lot of writers feel stymied or scared of writing sex because it’s like, ‘Oh I can totally reveal myself through all these horrible violent things I’m writing, but when I reveal myself through sex it’s like too personal’ or something. Maybe it’s because I am confident around it, but sex is this place full of senses.”
Allison Moon is the author of Lunatic Fringe (Lunatic Ink), the sexy, fast-paced, first book in her lesbian werewolf trilogy. Self-publishing pioneer and 2011 Lambda Literary Fellow, Moon has published with Not For Tourists, Nerve.com, McSweeney’s, and Psychopedia.com. She teaches an arsenal of workshops ranging in topic from “Self-Publishing 101” to “Pegging 101.” I met with Moon in her Oakland home to talk about her book, sex writing, and the state of self-publishing today. (more…)
Edmund White: Invention, Imagination, and Memory
Posted on March 19, 2012 by Frank Pizzoli in Features, Interviews
“…gays only make up about 3% of the population so we spend our whole lives ‘translating’ straight movies, books, ballets into gay terms and studying the heterosexuals around us—we know much more about them than they know about us, just as blacks know a lot about whites but whites know virtually nothing about blacks.”
At a recent reading by Edmund White from his current novel Jack Holmes & His Friend (Bloomsbury) at Philadelphia’s Giovanni’s Room, the country’s oldest gay and lesbian bookstore, the audience leaned toward older gay men sprinkled with curious younger readers. A few days earlier the fiercely productive White had described the novel as “my most popular novel so far” when he talked with writer Frank Pizzoli about some general literary themes and some specific criticisms of his work. Pizzoli last interviewed White for LLR in March 2007.[i] White’s Sacred Monsters (Magnus Books), more than 20 essays collected in book form, was also recently released. Currently, he’s working on another manuscript about his years in Paris.
Often steeped in controversy, White remains unabridged. (more…)
