Posts by author
Theodora Messalas
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Native Writers to the Front
Over at Electric Literature, Nicole Reber interviews Elissa Washuta about her experience as a Native writer navigating indifferent and tokenizing responses to her work, and the hybrid nature of her own writing style.
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Queering the Canon
For VICE, Lindsay King-Miller examines the literary tradition of retelling and reworking classic stories and the importance of bringing queer arcs in particular to our old standbys: Revisiting a story gives us an opportunity to explore universal experiences from the…
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Arm’s Length
With a deep understanding of colonizing narratives, Emma Bracy at Hazlitt assembles historical and personal snapshots to form a record of the ongoing dehumanizations that have led to this continuing moment of white violence against black and brown peoples: My…
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We Tell Ourselves Stories to Tell Ourselves Stories
It’s not like we can all launch a Kickstarter or write a book—there’ve been hundreds of books about the border, and we still have the same problem. So I get angry, and perhaps it’s less about my feeling that all…
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Declared Fit
My affective response is not appropriate to the questionnaire. I drop tears on it. My face is hot and red above it. My body is full of the wrong kind of information. Not data. Not paper print out. The typed…
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All Talk, No Action
Marlon James, author of A Brief History of Seven Killings, pens an essay for Lit Hub pointing out the meagerness of diversity as a meaningful end goal for creative communities. He critiques the repeated use of diversity panels, as they merely…
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Extremely Fine and Incredibly Whatever
Almost as notable as an artist’s work nowadays are the comments and speculative personas that arise around them on the Internet. Jonathan Safran Foer is something of a perfect storm, having attracted the disdain of the public without seeming fazed…
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Notes from the Underground
For Hazlitt, Hugh Ryan attempts to document the many personas of mid-1900s drag performer Malvina Schwartz, bringing color to the landmarks and styles of a queer world that sometimes threatens to be forgotten. Ultimately his work illustrates the piecemeal nature…
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Talk Literary to Me
The artist statement is not just a representation of what you are working on, but an intervention in what you are working on. If you start saying, I aim to do this and not to do this, maybe it keeps…
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The Story of A New Name
Earlier this week, Aaron Brady wrote presciently in his column for The New Inquiry about the ethical implications of revealing Elena Ferrante’s identity. He pointed out that in searching for her “real” identity, reporters were forgetting that one of the greatest things…
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Bittersweet Symphony
Though it’s clichéd and maladaptive to cast mental illness as the wellspring of great writing, to write about one’s life honestly often means writing about one’s mental illness. In an essay for Catapult, Colin Dickey writes lushly about his experiences with…
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Intervening in the Everyday
For BuzzFeed Reader, Tamerra Griffin speaks with Claudia Rankine—author of Citizen and recipient of one of this year’s MacArthur Genius fellowships—about police violence, forms of protest, and how she would have woven these topics into her acclaimed book had she been…