#reading mixtape

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ANNA MARCH’S READING MIXTAPE #29: Literary Bitches

I’m a bitch. By that I mean: I am proud to have an essay included in the anthology, The Bitch Is Back: Older, Wiser, and (Getting) Happier, published yesterday. Edited by Cathi Hanauer, this is a sequel to her earlier collection, the bestselling The Bitch in the House—the anthology that changed the national conversation about how we live now for a generation of young women.

Bitch. It can be a term of great love and affection. Yaaas queen—get your power on. But: All too often, it gets hurled at strong women like a boulder of hate tied up with a big red misogynistic bow. We hear it more these days—aimed most often at presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. (I hope we all remember to say, “Bitch is the new president, bitch”, to anyone who calls her a bitch in that snarling, degrading way some people do.) We can (and are) taking back the night, the word—and the world, too, bitches.

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ANNA MARCH’S READING MIXTAPE #28: Linked Stories/Novels In Stories

I recently finished revisions to a novel I’ve been working on for years and have embarked on writing a new novel, in stories, Hazel Conquers the World. I’ve always loved the form and these are some favorites and masterful examples of the very specific craft of making each story stand alone and in service to the whole.

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ANNA MARCH’S READING MIXTAPE #27: True Stories

These are extraordinary stories, exceptionally well-told. In a world where too many storytellers don’t tell truths, these writers do. Each one of these authors is steadfast and loyal, fierce and open, generous and unflinching. Their works deeply satisfy. Every story here made me consider my own life more carefully and inspired me to tell my own truths more deeply—on and off the page.

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ANNA MARCH’S READING MIXTAPE #26: Fiction I Read And Loved This Summer.

Not a one of these is a “beach read,” though I read many of them on the beach. Every one of these novels and short story collections transported me deeper into myself. Every one of these books excited me and made me hungry to live more, love more, think more, feel more, give more. What else could you want from a book than to make you want your own life more than you ever have?

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ANNA MARCH’S READING MIXTAPE #25: In A Daze, ‘Cause I Found God.

I’m an atheist who often carries crystal rosary beads and a relic of Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton. My grandparents, Mary and Gus, bought them both at the Vatican where they had traveled to see Pope Paul VI canonize Mother Seton. The rosary beads were a gift to me some months later when I made my first communion and thirty years later my grandmother would give me the relic, which I’ve had an odd fixation on since I first glanced at it as a seven-year-old. The relic is a bone fragment set on a linen bed encased in silver and glass. In my hand it reminds me that the whole enterprise is witchcraft and of the miracle of faith. It’s tempting to dismiss it all, all the God stuff, as silly—but lots of people so much smarter than me believe, so who am I to question their faith? A better use of my time is to see the questions—and the answers—through the power of these books.

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ANNA MARCH’S READING MIXTAPE #24: Pussy Riot.

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Writing is born of living. I want nothing more than the poet to tell me what she has seen and can think of no better tribute to life than to render it into art. My own art seeks to create images that use subjectivity as a vehicle for illumination. Our voice, our point of view and the lens through which we see the world is important—it is how we connect, how we reach out to others. Our stories lie in the small spaces between what we have seen and what we say because the events that resonate with us are actually magnifying glasses. They allow us to see the fibers that make up the cloth of experience—it drapes us all.

Jen Fitzgerald’s Poetry Mixtape #4: Poetry That Wants To Tell You What It Has Seen.

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Jen Fitzgerald’s Poetry Mixtape #3: Poetry That Asks You To Sit And Sort This Whole Thing Out.

Poems are invitations to thought. The elite of these thinking poems ask you to pull up a chair and get comfortable because you are about to work through something. It may not be pretty or easy, but at the end of it you will see an event, an image, or an accepted idea differently.