Twice a month, The Rumpus brings your favorite writers directly to your IRL mailbox via our Letters in the Mail program.
February 1 LITM: Venita Blackburn
Our next letter in the mail comes from Venita Blackburn.
Venita Blackburn is an award-winning author of the story collections Black Jesus and Other Superheroes (2017), How to Wrestle a Girl, (2021), and the debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, forthcoming in January of 2024. She is an Associate Professor of creative writing at California State University, Fresno.
The Rumpus: What book(s) made you a reader? Do you have any recent favorites you’d like to share?
Venita Blackburn: I grew up reading Encyclopedia books for children with famous figures that I loved. Hellen Keller was a fav. I was also raised Southern Baptist, and had lots of Bible stories to explore, which are really fascinating. I loved queen Salome. She’s the one that asked for John the Baptist’s head on a silver platter, I believe, and that probably connects to my pro-villain philosophy today. The more I learned about men, the more I knew she had her reasons, and all of us are not that far removed from acts of brutality when we feel justified, maybe not as stylish. I’m not defending the act, I’m just saying the indefensible can manifest within us all.
Right now, I’m reading a bunch of books some new, some old, some I’ve read and some I’m finally getting to, including Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel, which is a fun one about a young boxing girl. Your House Will Pay by Steph Cha is a SoCal classic about the LA riots. The Women Could Fly by Megan Giddings is a speculative drama that imagines the world if the Salem witch trials never ended. Love them all.
Rumpus: How did you know you wanted to be a writer?
Blackburn: I honestly avoided considering myself a writer for a long time because I thought there was no financial future in it. I had no interest in being a starving artist and no models for life as a career writer either. I always enjoyed writing though. It was a compulsion even as a child just learning to hold pencils. I could read very early as a kid too, and enjoyed language, the magic of it. I wrote story/poem things as early as elementary and middle school, but I didn’t commit to the vocation until late in my undergraduate studies when I discovered I had enough elective creative writing credits to turn into a whole English degree and I could abandon the stress and anxiety of being a business major. That was the big switch. I resolved to live what I thought would be a life of severe monetary restrictions for a different kind of liberation.
Rumpus: Tell us about your most recent book. How do you hope it resonates with readers?
Blackburn: My new book is a novel, my first novel titled Dead in Long Beach, California. It’s about a woman who discovers her brother dead from suicide and instead of telling anyone she begins responding to people as him with his phone. It’s also about our entire human history and our future. It has lesbian assassins. It has debt collectors in the future. It has wigs and gangsta rap. It’s told from the voice of a kind of librarian hive mind that has an anthropological fascination with humanity as well as a sort of thespian approach to history. It’s wild. I cried. I laughed.
February 15 LITM: Marisa Crawford
Our second letter in the mail comes from writer Marisa Crawford.
Marisa Crawford is the author of the poetry collections The Haunted House, Reversible, and, most recently, DIARY (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023). She is the editor of The Weird Sister Collection (Feminist Press, 2024), and co-editor, with Megan Milks, of We Are The Baby-Sitters Club. Marisa is the creator of Weird Sister, a website and organization that explores the intersections of feminism, literature, and pop culture, and co-host of the 90s rock podcast All Our Pretty Songs. She lives in New York.
The Rumpus: What book(s) made you a reader? Do you have any recent favorites you’d like to share?
Marisa Crawford: The first books I remember falling in love with as a kid were Judy Blume’s books—especially Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret and Just As Long As We’re Together—and The Baby-Sitters Club books by Ann M. Martin (I revisited this obsession as an adult in 2021 when I published an anthology, along with co-editor Megan Milks, of writing and art from BSC readers who are now adults.). And the terrifying tomes of Lois Duncan, like Daughters of Eve and Stranger with My Face—and Mary Downing Hahn’s Wait Till Helen Comes. As for recent favorites, I’m still thinking about Ada Calhoun’s Also A Poet, Danyel Smith’s Shine Bright, and Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby, and I am loving Myriam Gurba’s Creep.
Rumpus: How did you know you wanted to be a writer?
Crawford: I usually credit the 1991 Macaulay Culkin film My Girl for making me a writer. It’s about an eleven-year-old girl with intense anxiety who’s experienced a lot of loss and of course she is a poet. When I was a kid, seeing young women writing in movies was so appealing to me—Winona Ryder in Heathers confessing her darkest secrets to her dear diary, Winona again in Girl, Interrupted, Janet Jackson in Poetic Justice using poetry to make sense of her life. But also the books I read as a kid where I saw the ideas and feelings of young girls like me taken seriously and given space and attention. As soon as I read my first “about the author” page in the back of these books, I decided I wanted to be an author too. Even when I was super young writing was a way for me to get out of my head, ground myself, and grasp the world around me.
Rumpus: What’s a piece of good advice or insight you received in a letter or note?
Crawford: I’m a weirdo who still remembers certain poignant things that people signed in my middle school yearbook. Here are a few that I’ll recite from memory: Once a teenage boy with a vast comic book collection wrote something like, “In the years that come you’ll be asked to trade in your ideas for comfort.” And my friend’s mom who chain-smoked menthols while sitting on her kitchen counter wrote, “Follow your inner voice; it will lead you on the path.” Another kid with a sweet smile who let me copy his homework sometimes wrote, “Have fun, get boys, don’t go too far into the 70s and enjoy the 90s.” Who were these wise buddhas?
Rumpus: Tell us about your most recent book. How do you hope it resonates with readers?
Crawford: I’m very lucky to have two books that came out in the past six months—the most recent is The Weird Sister Collection from Feminist Press, which collects the best feminist literary and pop culture writing from the Weird Sister blog that I founded in 2014 along with new work. My third poetry book, Diary, was published last fall by Spuyten Duyvil Publishing.
I hope that readers of these books—and especially women, femme, queer, and gender-fluid readers—feel a sense of recognition that poetry can be messy and TMI and pop culture-y and feminist; that criticism can be playful, conversational, goofy, and experimental. That these modes of writing and engaging with the world don’t have to feel exclusionary. I hope that readers feel inspired to start the weird project they’ve been thinking about starting.
Rumpus: What is your best/worst/most interesting story that involves the mail/post office/mailbox?
Crawford: By far the most interesting story I have to offer related to a mailbox would have to be the sordid high mailbox drama of my middle school years. My sister was four years older than me and mixed up in some teen girl interpersonal hijinx that involved teenagers hanging out the windows of moving cars as they drove through suburbia, probably with their Sun-Ined hair streaming behind them, bashing with baseball bats or otherwise vandalizing the mailboxes of their foes. This spectacle culminated in somebody stealing the mailbox, wooden post and all, from outside my mother’s home. A single mom raising three kids on a teacher salary, my mom was like, you need to figure out who stole our mailbox and bring it back. Parents were called; accusations were denied. The mailbox mysteriously re-materialized under the cloak of night, and order was restored.
Rumpus: Is there a favorite Rumpus piece you’d like to recommend?
Crawford: I love Dear Sugar so much. Every installment of that column was so honest and insightful and beautiful. I bought the book for my mom and for my best friend from high school.
