btw the ellipses

[melodynixon]

()

An essay in five parts about this summer in Sicily, Italy. 

[clutchcurriculum]

MELODY NIXON READING

[thecommonmag]

Melody Nixon (MN): Your latest book Multiply/Divide is immediately arresting in the way it interrupts the marketing-model division between nonfiction and fiction. Can you talk about your intentions in combining “multi-genre” pieces in this collection? Wendy S. Walters (WSW): For this book, I brought together work that seemed to make sense in context. I made the above categorizations because I think the border between nonfiction and fiction—while seemingly clear to many—is often transparent enough to render the distinction irrelevant. In the book, I offer as a hypothetical example the writer who pens a memoir about a life with her parents, but leaves out the complicated relationship with her siblings, omitting for the reader a complete understanding of her family dynamic. Her memoir is “nonfiction.” But that doesn’t make it true. Conversely, many works of fiction, precisely because they take liberties with experience and fact, can depict a world that is better designed than our own to reveal truth. I wrote the Author’s Statement as I wanted to be honest about the various kinds of labor this book represents, as well as the kinds of stories I am telling.

MN: This opening contrasts strikingly with the assertion “I’m not kidding,” on p. 75. This voice, imploring us to believe the narrator, feels mischievous, cheeky. Do you really want the reader to believe the narrator? WSW: Yes! I want the reader to believe me! In these works the difference between what is plausible and implausible has little to do with the degree to which a fact seems outrageous. Plus part of the work of the author is to introduce the reader to conditions of possibility. This means, at least for me, part of my work is bringing light to possibilities the reader might not have imagined herself.

I enjoy doing that work. So maybe cheekiness might also be read as enthusiasm? MN: In the lyric essays I found myself obsessing over which sections were “true”—for example, in “Chicago Radio” the section about the plane filled with prisoners that went missing (p. 38). This frustration brought to mind the way history/histories manipulate us, and the ways historical truths are not always discernible from historical lies. Can you talk about your relationship to fact, fiction, and historical “truths” while writing the collection? WSW: I am interested in the material impact of narrative, whether construed from fact or fiction. I do believe narratives leave a trace, either psychological or metaphysical, and for that reason, I think it’s as important to invent stories as it is to uncover them. Fact and fiction can both serve those in power and those who are not. The power to tell stories resides within everyone. 

Read on for more of “Outer Space as Utopia,” as Wendy S. Walters speaks with Melody Nixon on the American Real and Surreal. 

[melodynixon]

It’s June, and somehow the time of year seems important, though I think of it only this once.

A new fiction piece from me at Conjunctions this week. http://www.conjunctions.com/webconj.htm

[melodynixon]

"Is subjectivity heightened, when you add to its puzzle the meeting of two separate cultural backgrounds? Or is subjectivity somehow lessened, by not being able to read the usual social cues? Sometimes cultural misalignment actually short-circuits people's defenses. It's hard to act distant if you don't know when you're supposed to. If you haven't learned the history of how to act distant from one another."

My new essay on human relationships and subjectivity and race and culture, at Cura Magazine:

http://curamag.com/issues/2014/11/19/dissolve

[mtvredefine2014]

Studio Visit: Robyn Renee Hasty (Pioneer Works)

Robyn is a multi-faceted artist whose work spans photography, installation, printmaking, sculpture and the streets. She employs obsolete technology and pre-industrial practices, juxtaposing fine craftsmanship and the unpredictability of these outdated methods.

How long have you been at Pioneer Works and what brought you here?

I’ve been teaching at Pioneer Works since Summer of 2013, and became a resident in March 2014. I met Gabe,the Director of Operations, when he took my Introduction to Tintype class at 3rd Ward. He mentioned that Dustin had a few antique cameras that he’d like to refurbish to use as equipment for the Pioneer Works photography program. I started refurbishing the cameras, teaching tintype courses, and eventually I started using the cameras I had refurbished. This led organically to my residency at Pioneer.

[melodynixon]

Was so pleased to be a model in this series of stunning tintypes by good friend and artist, Robyn Renee Hasty

[melodynixon]

"Some poems in this issue navigate incredible spaces: a shore of broken shells, a sea where low clouds swagger in, a tarred roof shingle on which might land a thuggish blue jay. Others tear up the spaces they traverse, rough road of the trip, strip malls in a twister’s damage path. I hope you feel both alienation and solidarity in these poems. Some speak to resistance. They interrogate whiteness as it finds its way into in/visibility, they interrogate the body of the hybrid to the point of dissection—scary, huh?—it is a lived metaphor—mongoloid, Caucasoid, sweet tilt of the sockets, hybrid outcast called lips—these poems are little bodies asphyxiating. Love too, love and exploitation; these themes appear in tandem in a handful of poems; one tricky kiss in the bathroom of peacock bar, you facebook me, I bottompoke you and suddenly I’m hand washing your socks. I know this preview is a little unhinged but I can’t imagine a better way to tease these poems. The poems tease, are teased, they have subjects, they have no subject—all I can promise is this: in the end, what each poem fevers, you will fever after. That is how they found each other."

http://www.thereviewreview.net/interviews/activism-literature-and-reclaiming-margins-alexan

[catapultpodcast]

Today we’ve got two writers with poetry and an essay from Apogee Journal’s new issue. Apogee

is a literary journal specializing in art and literature that engage with issues of identity politics: race, gender, sexuality, class, and hyphenated identities. We currently produce an annual issue...

[carriemurph]

Love this poem by J.D. Scott. It’s about Mike Brown. 

“It’s the same sentence again and again and still it’s not enough.

Steal a bag of chips. Make it Skittles. Make it a Popsicle and read me

the riddle on the stick: ‘How many Black bodies does it take to _______________?’

O who will be the accountant and sort through the dead that fill this silence?

Who will answer? Who will be accountable?”

[melodynixon]

"In my first months in New York City I rode in the back of taxicabs through Central Park thinking, “When will this sink in? When will it feel like I know where I am?”"

... my essay for The Common about grappling with the big beast that is New York City. 

[melodynixon]

Lil tweet from me in this coverage of a wonderful, inspiring night by a wonderful, inspiring writer.

[melodynixon]

"What literary magazines do you tend to read when looking to spot great new voices?" Thank you Slice Magazine & Carrie Howland!

[richlouis]

This is one if those shots that you can’t fake. Out shooting writer @melodyaucontrary (left) in #Bedstuyand this mother and son (on the right) got real curious about what we were doing and I included them in a few shots. The kid in the back just decided to get off his bike and sat in. He did not say a word. #portrait #Brooklyn

[melodynixon]

The Poetry Foundation writes about our new Alternate Canon series, starting with Trinh T. Minh-ha’s classic text, "Woman, Native, Other"

[melodynixon]

My interview with spoken word poet and artist of the Chinese diaspora, Kelly Tsai.

[roxanegay]

I did nothing this weekend so today I will be working my ass off and then I will rinse and repeat for the rest of all time. Or something...

[mttbll]

I believe that all work is necessarily of its specific time. There’s just no getting around that, even if you’re consciously writing historical or speculative fiction. I’m not interested in zeitgeists, but I am interested in the way that people live, think, and speak; the technologies we use; our experience of ourselves and each other in everyday life. I think that when people say great books are ‘timeless’ they don’t—or they shouldn’t—mean that the book is unmoored from its own moment or shot like a rocket beyond the orbit of history, or whatever. It’s rather that the work is so firmly rooted that it continues to grow and live with the world as it changes. Leaves of Grass, Moby-Dick, Middlemarch, Independent People, Housekeeping: these books aren’t rockets, they’re trees.

-- My interview with Justin Taylor (via mttbll) http://www.thecommononline.org/features/we-dont-ride-reindeer-here-interview-justin-taylor