"The Importance of Bitch Planet's Backmatter"

This article from Graphixia delves into the gloriously feminist comic book Bitch Planet and its "backmatter" pages, which include guest essays from writers and scholars, letters to the editor, faux advertisements for in-world products or spaces where fans can interact.

Read more here.

Personally, I think it's a brilliant approach. Structuring the backmatter as a forum of ideas gives people a way to engage with all or parts of the text without feeling like passive listeners. It gives authors and artists a way to talk about evolving story and visual elements in a casual space. And after the story presents tough ideas and images, the backmatter picks up that lead, and encourages people to consider what those stories mean in a larger world context.

Also, I LOVE seeing people talk about Kelly Sue and Val's amazing series - it gives me so much joy to know Bitch Planet resonates with so many passionate fans! Can't wait to see what happens next for Kam, Penny, and the rest of our badass ladies.

Happy Thursday,

CL

Image credit: Graphixia.

"The PEN Ten With Stephen Graham Jones"

Guest editor Natalie Diaz has a gorgeous interview with Blackfeet writer Stephen Graham Jones up over at PEN America. They talk obsessions, linguistics, writing process, and more. But I think this quote is my absolute favorite:

While the notion of the public intellectual has fallen out of fashion, do you believe writers have a collective purpose? To say the truth, or something in the arena of the true. Something that feels true. To carve down to what’s real, and then fold the reader into that spot for a couple hundred pages. To write for the people of today, not the ones who aren’t born yet, and not the ones from generations ago, who can no longer be impressed with your talent. To—to be one of the ones Plato would have kicked out of his republic, because we won’t shut up, because we won’t stop stirring things up, because we insist on rousing emotions and thoughts in people that are inconvenient for those in power. And to do all this without seeming to be trying to do all this. Mostly, if we have a collective purpose, it’s to dream on the page, such that others might subscribe not so much to that particular dream, but just to dreaming in general. To asking What if? That’s the most dangerous question. The most necessary question.

Read more here.

Last night, I couldn't sleep because I had a story creeping into my head. Let's hope we can all hit the page running today.

Happy Wednesday,

CL

Image credit: PEN America

Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 208, Louise Erdrich

Great interview with Louise Erdrich from The Paris Review:

There’s something very wrong in our country—and not just in the book business. We now see what barely fettered capitalism looks like. We are killing the small and the intimate. We all feel it and we don’t know quite why everything is beginning to look the same. The central cores of large cities can still sustain interesting places. But all across our country we are intent on developing chain after chain with no character and employees who work for barely livable wages. We are losing our individuality. Killing the soul of our landscape. Yet we’re supposed to be the most individualistic of countries. I feel the sadness of it every time I go through cities like Fargo and Minneapolis and walk the wonderful old Main Streets and then go out to the edges and wander through acres of concrete boxes. Our country is starting to look like Legoland.

The (Female) Picaresque Novel

There's a great article from the Los Angeles Review of Books about Louise Wareham Leonard’s autobiographical picaresque novel, 52 Men.

Leonard’s book is about the stories we tell other people. We tell these stories precisely because everybody has them: they make people laugh, and they uncover wounds over which we bond. We tell them to get revenge on those who hurt us, and to redeem experiences that pained us. We tell them to brag: somebody wanted us. And we tell them because they’re nostalgic reminders of lovers who were once close to us. But we also tell them for the pure narrative pleasure of it: relationship stories have a natural arc — beginning, middle, denouement, end — and characters we can sketch with a few deft marks. Romance makes writers of us all.

Read "Why Can't You Be Sweet?" here.