Posts by author
Michelle Vider
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The Sad Girls’ Triumph
Emily Gaynor writes for Weird Sister on the performative aesthetic of Internet “sad girls,” who use their work to explore the boundaries of acceptable/unacceptable public displays of emotion for women: Performing sadness is a self-indulgent practice, and that’s part of…
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The Poetics of Wild Hundreds
I’m always telling stories, but I sort of fuck with the idea of thinking about myself and my work in a lyrical sense. Because that’s now how I’ve traditionally thought about myself. And it pushes up against the way the…
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Photography and the European Refugee Crisis
At JSTOR Daily, Jon Greenaway revisits Susan Sontag’s writing on photography (specifically in On Photography and Regarding the Pain of Others) through the lens of Europe’s current refugee crisis.
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The Writer and Social Media
Alexander Chee writes for LitHub on Elena Ferrante’s pseudonymous, social-media-free existence and the choices other authors have made to dis/engage with social media at points in their careers: Ferrante’s anonymity is something of a feminist project, also. No one is…
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Subverting the Immigrant Experience
In an interview with Bethanne Patrick at Lit Hub, Vu Tran discusses his novel Dragonfish and the idea of subverting the (othered) expectations of immigrant experience through conventions of genre.
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The Summer Melt Phenomenon
Kate McGee, a reporter for Austin’s NPR affiliate KUT, recently completed on a summer-long series titled The Months Between. The series followed three Central Texas graduating high school seniors to chronicle the phenomenon of “summer melt,” where college-bound grads (often…
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Writing Better Diverse Books
But between publishers’, readers’ (audiences!), editors’, writers’—and, it turns out, MFA students’—definitions, the term “immigrant fiction” has become a muddle, a catchall phrase to describe anything that appears “non-American,” foreign in some way. Bix Gabriel writes for Guernica on what…
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Rewriting Friendship and the Family
At Longreads, Jessica Gross interviews social scientist Bella DePaulo on her research into the underreported popularity of non-nuclear living arrangements. DePaulo’s research also delves into the particular emergence of friendship as a building block of social living in the 21st…
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Teaching the Diaries of the Holocaust
Alexandra Zapruder writes for Lit Hub on her two decades of work collecting diaries written by teenagers and young adults during the Holocaust, as well as teaching about the wide variety of experiences captured in those diaries.
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The Volcano that Defined the 1816-7 Art Scene
“The year without a summer,” as 1816 came to be known, gave birth not only to paintings of fiery sunsets and tempestuous skies but two genres of gothic fiction. The freakish progeny were Frankenstein and the human vampire, which have…
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The New Science Fiction
The stories we tell ourselves can help us understand, and maybe even adapt, to this new world. But the dour dystopias and escapist fantasies of our current science fiction diet just won’t do. We need something new: a form of…
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The (Im)Purity of Language
At JSTOR Daily, linguist Chi Luu makes a case for emphasizing grammar rules that follow popular usage, rather than the pedantic standards set by centuries-dead classicists. Here are the plain facts: many of these pop grammar rules… were magically pulled…