Seeing yourself reflected in a writer’s incisive, witty, and weird ideas feels nothing short of miraculous, especially if you have ever felt excluded from mainstream definitions of what a writer or thinker should be. If you’re anything like me, these discoveries happen almost exclusively thanks to independent presses, zines passed hand to hand, or blogs tirelessly updated by invisible, benevolent editors who seem like guardian angels. Landing in your lap, this kind of writing quickly becomes a lifeline, a confirmation that our poetics, our philosophies, our criticism—that we, as thinking people—all belong and have something vital to say.
Starting in 2014, Weird Sister has offered its readers a space full of pieces that reframe canonical literature, question the categories enforced by mainstream publishing, and recommend the best writing that you have never heard of. Reading it feels like receiving an essay collection assembled by a close friend or your ideal mentor.
This February, Feminist Press published The Weird Sister Collection: Writing at the Intersections of Feminism, Literature, and Pop Culture (Feminist Press, 2024). Weird Sister Founder and Editor in Chief Marisa Crawford is a poet and essay writer who is no stranger to anthologies: she co-edited We Are the Babysitters Club with Megan Milks, which unpacked the legacy of the massively influential series. This new volume is similarly inviting, fierce, and clever. Seeing The Weird Sister Collection on a bookshelf, bound and radiantly joyful, is thrilling for anyone who, like me, searched for outsider art all of their teen years and found mostly spines announcing cis white male authors—those of us for whom the most prescient writing came held together by staples, or on WordPress sites. It’s a celebration of intersectional feminism, experimental writing, and the promise of great writers to come.
Over email and Google Docs, I asked Marisa Crawford about her experience forming and fostering literary community and the excitement of turning all of that digital wisdom into a printed book.
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The Rumpus: What do you see as the value of a literary community?
Marisa Crawford: Literary community is so vital for writers and for me personally. Without literary community, we would all be writing alone in our rooms and reading it aloud to ourselves. I could never get anything done without the support and inspiration of other writers.
Rumpus: You speak in the introduction about feeling driven to create a space where two spheres you enjoyed but often experienced separately—experimental literary criticism and feminist criticism—were examined side by side. How do you think a place like Weird Sister helps make that union possible?
Crawford: I encountered and existed within both of these spaces in academia in the forms of creative writing workshops and women’s studies classes in college and in grad school, but we didn’t talk about gender in creative writing workshops, and we didn’t talk about experimental writing in women’s studies classes. I spent a lot of time reading about feminism online and in print media on feminist blogs like Feministing and Crunk Feminist Collective, and in magazines like Bitch and BUST that brought a feminist lens to pop culture. At the same time, I was learning about what it meant to me to be a poet, and about new books and what was happening in the poetry world on lit blogs that had so much thoughtful discussion of books and poetry and experimental writing, but not much discussion of gender, race, class, and other social structures in relation to contemporary literature.
The union—or I should say unions—of feminist criticism and literary discourse totally existed before Weird Sister, of course. There were feminist literary anthologies like Home Girls and This Bridge Called My Back and No More Masks that came out of the 1970s and ’80s. In the ’90s, Michelle Tea and Sini Anderson founded Sister Spit, the first all-women, all-queer open mic in San Francisco, and slam poet Jessica Care Moore won the national poetry slam performing poems about Black feminism. In the 2010s, there were blog spaces like Delirious Hem and Montevidayo that explored social and political themes in poetry. VIDA: Women In Literary Arts was founded in 2009.
My point is that Weird Sister was just one iteration of a long line of feminist literary spaces and projects. It’s not that those spaces didn’t exist, but they felt too few and far between, and honestly, they still do. I think part of the answer as to whythis dearth of feminist criticism exists, especially in nonacademic spaces, has to do with resources, funding, and sustainability of independent media. When I started Weird Sister in 2014, the feminist blogosphere had been this hugely important movement. Feminist blogs were widely considered an entire wave in feminist history. But none of them had sustainable funding. I mean, these were some of the only places online where you could read smart, intersectional, and accessible gender and race analysis about the news. How were these spaces also supposed to cover books and pop culture with no funding? I learned so much from and owe so much to the independent feminist media of the 2000s, but I was also a weird feminist poet and artist who wanted to read and learn about experimental literature and art and creative, personal responses to pop culture. I wasn’t going to find that on these journalistic feminist blogs, because that’s not what they were for. And the lit blogs of the era were smart and funny and insightful, but they were mostly boys’ clubs with male editors and long rosters of mostly male contributors. I think I just craved a space that felt more relevant to me and people like me, so I created it.
Rumpus: Something that makes Weird Sister stand apart is the way that deep criticism and personal vulnerability exist side by side with joy and irreverence. How did you conceive of a tone when you were editor, or did you conceive of one at all? And how did you help tend it?
Crawford: Thank you so much for saying that. I think that I conceived of a tonality or style for Weird Sister in that I gravitated toward inviting the writers that I love and that inspire me to be part of it, and the style or tone of the blog formed organically out of that. The contributor guidelines Becca Klaver and I put together in 2014 say, “We want feminist cultural commentary that is critical, creative, incisive, and playful, sometimes all at once. The unique personalities and interests of our contributors will add up to form an eclectic house style.” I love writing that does all of those things! So, I really wanted a space with room for all of it—vulnerability, supersmart analysis that bordered on academic, pop culture commentary, personal essay, weird experimental forms, writing that was funny, writing that was all of these things at once—and I asked people to write for the blog that kind of represented that entire range. For the anthology, I wanted to be thoughtful about striking that tone accurately, because Weird Sister was never about cool, distanced academic analysis, and I didn’t want a book that felt that way either.
Rumpus: Reading through the collection, one thing that is immediately evident is how intersectional the pieces are. There is discussion of racial identity, gender identity, sexual identity, and more. What did it mean for you to set out creating an intersectional feminist space? How did you work to define that for yourself, and how did you put it into action? Do you have any advice for people trying to foster similar artistic communities now?
Crawford: For me, it meant being thoughtful in inviting writers from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences and offering a space for everyone to write about what they wanted to write about within an open set of ever-evolving guidelines. To me, creating an intersectional feminist literary community or space means recognizing how white cis straight women’s experiences have been given too much attention and focus in feminist conversations historically and still today, and that white, cis voices and stories, as well as white, cis appropriation of other people’s stories, are so insidious in mainstream and even independent media spaces. So how can I work to not reproduce that model as a white cis woman creating and editing a literary project? Weird Sister has definitely not been perfect in this sense, and I have learned a lot in editing it. But I would say that my guideline for myself and my advice for others in terms of curating and editing is to be open and let the work that’s created guide you, meeting the work where it is and being in service of it rather than trying to create a particular narrative or inserting yourself too much. In terms of community, I would say that a space that’s needed will naturally draw like-minded people who are craving that kind of space too. I craved more community and to be surrounded by smart, feminist people talking about smart things, so in that way, building this space was self-serving.
Rumpus: Reading through the collection taught me so much about writers old and new whose work I cannot wait to dive into. I’m thinking of the piece on Naiad Press, or your piece on the enduring relevance of Plath’s Three Women in today’s discussions about reproductive rights, or the authors who wrote about how they formed their poetics throughout their literary upbringing. Thinking back on your time as editor, could you share something you learned that has stayed with you?
Crawford: I think that’s the best part of being an editor and curator of a space like Weird Sister. What I’ve learned has spanned not just content: like, “Oh wow I get to edit this piece which means I get to read all these pieces with deep curiosity and learn about, like, the radical poetics of kari edwards, the gatekeeping around literary genius that keeps out writers like Sister Souljah who write stories about Black urban youth but lets in—with open arms—white cis men, or how these cis men treated their wives in the service of their so-called male genius (in the collection’s essay, “My Feminist Literary Grudges”).” And I just grew up reading all these white men, like, “This is what it means to be a writer!” On top of the actual content, other writers’ experiences of pop culture have been so eye-opening for me. I’m thinking of Aja Leilam Love’s piece about the absence of people of color in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or Flannery Cashill’s ode to Pretty Little Liars. But maybe most of all, seeing how everyone responds to and writes differently is so illuminating and inspiring; so many incredible possible models for how to write smart, important feminist work.
Rumpus: Weird Sister is a marriage of something very analog—a zine—and the digital technology of the internet. How did it feel to put these pieces into print? What meaning has that held for you?
Crawford: I think that print books hold a certain sense of legitimacy and posterity that an online space can’t, since online spaces are by nature sort of ephemeral and changeable. The impulse to start Weird Sister in the first place was, in part, an impulse to catalog and archive all these pieces of culture and commentary that were always floating around in different spaces on the internet, in print zines and books, and in our brains, so it feels really satisfying to have a portion of that work from the blog now archived in the form of a physical book. It enters it into the cultural lexicon in a different way, and it elevates it. It was really hard to choose what to include in the book because I wish I could have printed everything on the blog and could continue to! So much of feminist history is lost, and I, personally, have so much anxiety about that and am so grateful for feminist publishing projects like The Feminist Press that elevate, support, and archive feminist history through all the books they publish.
Rumpus: What is the power of looking at femme pop culture and taking it seriously? Do you see that as a radical act?
Crawford: Weird Sister as a project or in its mission was never specifically invested in “girl cultures” per se, but I think the sensibility of the blog was always kind of tongue-in-cheek, slumber party-esque, strewn with giant My Little Pony-hued gemstones and I’s dotted with hearts. Which is to say, an aesthetic that’s kind of unapologetically femme or feminine, because that’s who I am and how I tend to see the world, and I think it’s a playful and fun and unintimidating framework that can make literary and feminist writing feel more inviting for different kinds of readers.
I see Weird Sister not as a project that centers girl culture specifically but that aims to shift the center more generally away from a white cis male patriarchal gaze or standard. Like, we don’t have to prove ourselves to a cis white male overlord or gatekeeper. This space is taking for granted that all the various kinds of culture that that gaze and focus leaves out are, of course, important and central and worthy of our deep thought and critical attention—duh! I’m now thinking about two wonderful panels I attended at AWP this past year: the first was moderated by Rebecca Suzuki, Nora Carr, and others, about teaching in multilingual classrooms. During the Q&A, the panelists were talking about how, as students and as writers at large, we get to choose who our audience is [and] we don’t have to be writing anxiously trying to please a white male audience of “well actually”-ers eager to gatekeep away the ideas and the feelings and the actual language that is central to our experiences of the world. The other panel I’m thinking about was about writing trans sex, with Megan Milks, Denne Michele Norris, and others. The panelists were talking about how sex writing, and queer and trans sex writing specifically, has long been relegated to smut, but these writers and others are pushing back on the idea that sex writing is not or cannot be literary and high art. Basically, who are the arbiters of what is literary and important and worthy of study and deep thought? And why should we listen to them anyway? I think that kind of re-centering is radical, but it’s also vital for our survival and thriving and joy as writers.
Rumpus: Reading the “Calling on Our Feminist Elders” section, I kept thinking about how the writers you showcase are becoming, or have become, the new elder or wise voices over the course of Weird Sister’s existence.
Crawford: So, the section in the anthology called “Calling on Our Feminist Elders” looks at the work of canonical as well as undervalued feminist literary figures, including Zora Neale Hurston, Bernadette Mayer, kari edwards, Virginia Woolf, and bell hooks, through contemporary feminist lenses. I wondered if I could find a more playful or fun name for this section. Even the idea of feminist elders feels like a term that I probably would have rolled my eyes at when I first learned about feminism in my late teens/early twenties and wanted to define myself against what I perceived to be an overly earnest, humorless, un-fun second wave. But I have come to understand over time that we can’t dismiss the work of the feminist writers and thinkers that came before us because, like it or not, we owe everything to them—good, bad, and everything in between. And dismissing them for not being perfect does not honor the important work they have done to get us to where we are today. In fact, you could argue that their mistakes let us refine our feminism and our politics to be more inclusive and powerful. So it’s not “learning from our feminist elders” or “celebrating and exalting our feminist elders” but simply calling them up—maybe through prayer or maybe on a landline phone—and being curious about how their work might inform our present moment.
Lately I, like a lot of us, have been feeling so much despair and hopelessness at the state of this country and the world, and I think calling on our elders is instructional in these times. I think it’s also important to name that in the time since these essays were first written and their publication in this book, we’ve lost a number of these vital and groundbreaking feminist elders that the book references: Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Bernadette Mayer. This feels like a really palpable reinforcement to me of how our work is created on a continuum of history.
In her foreword for the anthology, Michelle Tea called it “a catalog of all the writers I want to know about, written by all the writers I want to be friends with.” I love this, and it also reminds me that the writers we are friends with today will be someone else’s “feminist elders” in a decade or two or even now. So what can we learn from that? What can we learn from each other? There are a lot of ways to answer this question, but I think about how we can be curious about each other’s ideas and engage in thoughtful discourse. This is literary history, folks; we are living it.
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Author photograph by Lauren Desberg
