As this goes live, I should be landing in London. I used to live there, spending the better parts of 1988-90 in the city as a student, a squatter, a receptionist, a bartender, and a maid respectively. I considered London my spiritual home, despite the fact that much of my time I had no money for anything other than Consulate Menthols and tubs of taramosalata that had to last a week, and I often slept on the floors of pubs, with friends whose roommates were pissed off that I was there, on mildewy floor mattresses in buildings with no electricity, or occasionally in Regent’s Park, near the duck pond. That was then. Now, I’ll have my three kids with me. We’ll be staying with friends: the sort of friends who give you “the fourth floor” of their home to yourself when you visit. We’ll be going to see Matilda, and to the Picasso exhibition at the Tate British. I will take my daughters for high tea at a place so delightfully preposterous that it actually posts its tea etiquette online. This is strangely comforting to me. I’m happy to be staying with friends so completely different from anyone I ever knew in my London heyday (and, if I’m honest, anyone I hang out with here at home). It will be hard to miss my “old” London this way. The truth is, I doubt that London even exists anymore, although thank christ Camden Lot is still there, and so is The Latchmere Pub, where I used to work, although the former owner, my ex-boss, has been in prison for years.
Enough about London. The point is, I’ll be gone for three Sundays, so this is my last Round-up until July 8. However, we’ll still have original content every Sunday because friend of the Rumpus, Rob Roberge, is saving my ass by letting me serialize his memoir-in-progress while I’m gone. The first installment is up today, and there’ll be new excerpts the next two weeks. I’m a little obsessed with this memoir. Rob read some of it to my students when he was in Chicago for AWP, and they wouldn’t shut up about it for the rest of the term. Several overtly tried to emulate it in their writing, which gave me strange flashbacks to the late 90s when I was reading submissions for Other Voices magazine, and every story was trying to be Bastard Out of Carolina. What I mean is: I think Rob is onto something powerful here. The debut excerpt from Your Life in Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll was published on The Nervous Breakdown awhile back, but the project keeps exploding emotionally and conceptually with each new installment. I could gush a little more here but Stephen might have to smack me in the head. When I interviewed Rob for The Rumpus in 2010, I originally wrote such a sentimental little Introduction about him and one of my other Other Voices Books writers, Tod Goldberg, and how they became best friends through my publishing them in the same issue of the magazine in 1998, that Stephen had to tell me to tone it down. Of course, what I think doesn’t matter anyway. You can judge for yourself.
This gets me thinking about the concept of having a tribe. Lidia Yuknavitch talks about this in her memoir, The Chronology of Water, when she discusses meeting her lit-twin, Lance Olsen, and the rest of the FC2 posse. These days, the literary community is global thanks to the internet. Your tribe can live anywhere. There are larger tribes, and then overlapping inner circles inside the bigger circle. The Rumpus is a tribe of sorts, as are similar online lit communities. Many of us edit, write for, or certainly read more than one such site. Sometimes we feel incredibly intimate with people we’ve never met in person; we debate and share and confess together on comments boards, or we just start following everything someone writes, wherever they write, because their words resonate and matter beyond what we hear in the everyday. It can seem ridiculous under certain lights–how can someone you’ve never met be part of your tribe? But that’s what literature has always been all about, really: recognition. Sometimes a reader’s best friend–the person who saves their life–is a writer who’s been dead for 100 years. That’s nothing new. So maybe online culture isn’t that strange.
I don’t have to have introduced you to your best friend for you to score a serialization at The Rumpus. Emily Gray Tedrowe and Zoe Zolbrod have serializations forthcoming too. Come on, you know you want to. Fiction and memoir both welcome!
This trailer for The Beautiful Anthology postively rocked my world. Spoken word guru Rich Ferguson wrote the poem/lyrics, and they’re stunning. If you want to read the text, check it out here.
Have you been reading The Weeklings?
See you on July 8th!
