Stacey May Fowles

A Girl’s Life: Marjorie Celona’s coming of age novel, Y, tells a familiar story of female suffering

“While the male Bildungsroman , such as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Catcher in the Rye, or The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, tends to involve the acquisition of power, the experience of adventure, or the act of rebellion, the female version seems dictated by how well a heroine can withstand suffering without flinching.”

An excerpt from my forthcoming novel with ECW Press is in the latest issue of Taddle Creek magazine.

“Ronnie knew the moment she saw Charlie that she would follow him somewhere. It didn’t really matter where, she just knew it would happen sooner or later—that one day she would desert everything important and chase him down. And that somehow it would be worth it. That there would be some sort of sacrifice made somewhere down the line.”

I had the real pleasure of interviewing literary and feminist icon Susan Swan for the September issue of Quill and Quire. It’s on newsstands now.

“Leanne Shapton asks the question so many of us are embarrassed to articulate — what is the implication of coming very close to greatness, of very nearly grasping it, yet falling short?” A review of Swimming Studies in The National Post.

“We have been fooling ourselves that narrative and plot, and the gleeful exhaustive analysis of both, will save us from suffering.” A review of Life is About Losing Everything in The National Post.

“The choice to have children can be the biggest a woman will make in her life, but it is also one consistently governed by the unrelenting influence of intrusive social norms.” A review of The Conflict in The National Post.

“Snyder’s new book is the rare successful execution, a stream of sensual imagery that grows more sophisticated with each page.” A review of The Juliet Stories in The Walrus.

“Maclear’s complex, sweeping narrative travels loaded political terrain, lush in its descriptions and unencumbered by overwrought detail.” A review of Stray Love in The Walrus.

“A major part of the appeal of Berger’s work for women is that the sex (and there is indeed a lot of it, on almost every page) is stripped so bare, flying in the face of so called ‘mommy porn’ and soft-core glossed erotica-lite like Fifty Shades of Grey. Gone are the layers of polish, the soft-lens Photoshopped depictions of women’s bodies so culturally commonplace on magazine racks, and in mainstream film and television. Berger doesn’t coyly write around the mechanics or vaguely suggest the actions in horrifyingly palatable euphemism. Instead she gives us a straightforward animal ugliness, the literal ins and outs, all impossible to look away from and freeing readers from the false idea of how sex ’should’ look. For those of us who carry shame, it can be extremely liberating.” Read the entire profile here.
(Photo by Tyler Anderson)

“In our hyper-consumptive culture we value volume, the word prolific a complimentary ideal attached to a bursting bio. We fetishize endless bibliographies — books are misguidedly rushed out, memoirs announced in the weeks after death, star writers pulling together a haphazard manuscript because of an award or scandal-induced media moment. Long-awaited is a term littering press releases. Books have expiry dates and writers not consistently publishing eventually get ignored, the equivalent of literary death. Some of this has to do with the realities of marketing in a crippled industry, but more of it has to do with a cultural value of more being more, writers internalizing the demand because its so commonly equated to success. Add that to the fact that in the digital age, you’re only as good as your last link, and that restless itch to get something out pounds at one’s fragile patience relentlessly. At what point did we stop taking our time and start denigrating the process?”

Read the entire essay here.

“The facts of tragedy can be offensively clean and unadorned. I learned this a few days before Christmas, when a friend charged me with the task of disseminating the information that someone she knew had committed suicide. Each email I wrote and call I made was cold and direct: a chronological, bullet-point list of what and how, lacking why. It was an exercise in control, muting the reality of the thing and ignoring the clamour of emotional turmoil ringing in our ears like a bell. In the most extreme catastrophes, there is no other topic of conversation than the inconceivable thing at hand. Yet because it is impossible to face tragedy in every moment, we fill time with blandness as a coping mechanism. In everything that is said, we pretend to discuss something else, an inadequate pause before returning to the unresolvable subject. A successful narrative of fictional tragedy works in much the same way. Its plot points are so extreme that the actions and dialogue surrounding them require a pallid looseness, even tedium, to prevent the reader from recoiling in both repulsion and exhaustion.”

Read the entire review here.

The Walrus: How the literary establishment mistreats young, shameless writers like Marie Calloway

“Unregulated honesty is painted as juvenile tendency, as if with age comes the gift of selective concealment — to succeed in any serious literary endeavour, one must develop a cold distance even from the most intimate events of our lives. This necessity to step back from experience mirrors a valued coldness in human interactions; feel little, remain private, do not speak openly of the ugliness in one’s life. The fact is that a woman who publishes an in-depth study of her sex life is no more in need of attention than a man who publishes an in-depth study of twentieth-century literary criticism; it is a cultural dictation of value that defaults to her “neediness” and his ‘genius.’

Perhaps it is true that the ‘over share’ is a product of youth, but it is the element of youth that should be most valued, a time before so many of us develop the cynicism and mistrust that distances us from other human beings and makes us fear their disdain. While it is true that time and the labour it brings are essential to learning how to successfully tell a story, we shouldn’t be learning to eliminate our most personal experiences from the well of subject matter. Then, what are we truly learning other than how to be embarrassed? It is entirely possible that for each high-volume condemnation of a writer’s confessional frankness, there is a silent, thankful chorus of readers appreciating the liberating sincerity of it all.”

Read more.

Image via @kimlw

Madonna & Me will be published by Soft Skull Press in March 2012. In Madonna & Me, nearly 40 female authors including Cintra Wilson, Gloria Feldt, Caroline Leavitt, Bee Lavender, Wendy Shanker, and Susan Shapiro write about how Madonna changed their lives.

“Even those among us enamoured with the romance of printed word will find Ithaca a shameless glorification of gatekeepers and star-makers, packed with diatribes on how the book will conquer all despite a digital and corporate tide that consistently threatens it.” Read the full review at The Afterword.

“Ami McKay’s second novel, The Virgin Cure, is a finely crafted and remarkably researched tale of twelve-year-old Moth, a girl born into poverty in nineteenth-century New York, deserted by her father and sold into domestic work by her mother. Moth comes to understand that beauty is her commodity, and she finds eventual escape in a brothel that delivers virginity to well-paying men.” Read the full review at The Walrus.