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I don’t ever do anything from a place of fear—which is an odd place for me to be in because I have anxiety—but I have to [step into places of discomfort] because that’s where growth happens. If you’re comfortable, you’re not growing.
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You stood and put your hair up. It made you a different man. You got hard and decided you were why.
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Co-editors Bruce Owens Grimm, Miguel M. Morales, and Tiff Joshua TJ Ferentini discuss FAT AND QUEER.
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For as long as I can remember, I wanted to be strong, to be tough. I didn’t want to be soft.
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I’d crossed a line and owned a new secret life. There was no going back.
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“It doesn’t matter your gender or your sexual orientation; you can disorder your eating.”
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Savannah Sipple discusses her debut collection, WWJD AND OTHER POEMS.
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Zighelboim almost has to break the form into pieces in order to speak; a fourteen-word poem is really only the echo of a sonnet.
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When she called out for floor performance I knew this would not be my day.
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We don’t like to think that love traffics in the same biases that shape our culture—but of course it does.
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Anne Helen Peterson discusses her new book, Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman, her writing process, and academia.
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The body is a complicated thing, not only in the way it is perceived by others but also in the way we perceive it ourselves.
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It’s about greed; it’s about taking only the best part of things, the cream off the top, the fat. And this taking of the fat has reached a crisis point in America—a critical mass, if you will.
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I didn’t usually consider how the binge felt. I just ate until I couldn’t eat anymore.
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The more secrets I wrote about, the fewer I wanted to keep. And the more secrets I made public through my writing, the more I gained.
...moreLindy West on what it was like being a fat bride, and the public politics of private acts: But “beauty” is a fraught concept. There’s an awkward three-way tension between wedding culture and feminism and fat acceptance – because of what “acceptance” demands of women in our culture, a lot of fat activism takes the […]
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Why couldn’t I accept my body for what it wanted to be? It’s what I harped on the rest of the world to do.
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When I think of sitting at the kitchen table as a child eating dinner, I don’t have memories of luscious homemade foods.
...moreI remember meeting with my thesis advisor in my final week of college. I was the thinnest I’d ever been, a size 12. Starvation shrank my stomach into a fist. I felt dizzy, but I felt light, and that was all that mattered. Still, I was quietly devastated when, instead of complimenting my research and […]
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According to your average weight-height chart, I’m “obese”: six feet tall and 250 pounds. I should be, according to these charts, somewhere between 140 and 180 pounds. I tell my wife this and her look askance suggests that either I am what they say, and she’s worried; or “they” are crazy. I think the latter […]
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