August 2009
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"I started mulling over the idea of niceness in women's poetry after three different
men -- from different generations, who knew me in different capacities -- read
the manuscript of my first book and each responded with some variation of,
I
really like your poems, but they're not very nice. I can't imagine Eliot's
editor telling him that
The Waste Land was great, but it wasn't very
nice -- niceness is, predominantly, a cultural expectation of women.
by
Courtney Queeney
"It seems like learning a bit about physics might be mind-expanding for me,
might keep me from intellectually settling or stagnating. Even though part of
me feels like I'm betraying my nine-year-old self. I can see her there, unfortunately
clad in a purple minidress, weeping and consciously wishing pestilence and disease
on whoever invented fractions. Sneaking into the bathroom to read Twain's essays
and eat pudding-in-the-middle cake. She would hate me for thinking about doing
any math when I have the option to make some nachos and watch
Raising the
Bar. Then again, my nine-year-old self was kind of more like Samuel Johnson
-- trapped in unhappy circumstances (in my case, thankfully, not Anglicanism,
crushing debt, tuberculosis scrofula, testicular cancer, or gout, but still,
it wasn't good) that made me a little stodgier than I am now."
by
Elizabeth Bachner
"There is much that readers can discover about other cultures, but I've tried
not to be too prescriptive about that aspect of the book. I include only a few
such observations in the chapter introductions and leave the majority of the
idioms to stand on their own. I love the thought that readers can discover their
own cultural connections, resonances, and meanings."
by
Selena Chambers
"He fantasizes about touching Roger: "I see a hand, as though not my own, beginning
to move through the air beyond the red line [meant to keep visitors a safe distance
from the apes]. Tapping at the very edges of that tensile web Roger has woven
between us, just waiting for him to fully awake to who I am and then take me
in, his warm, musky scent melding now with the rusty essence of my own spilled
blood, and that inner voice still droning 'Go on… and on… it's a fine way to
die'." Later in the book, Siebert returns to the death theme: '[Roger] could
kill me so easily that it somehow only heightens my desire to let him.'"
by
Barbara J. King
"I think in a lot of my work, I define myself as a very happy feminist. I'm
very interested in gender and how it affects life choices, just how gender affects
things, and I think it does to a large extent. I've spent quite a bit of time
in the US. I love to watch, and I never mind my own business. I love people's
stories, the stories of women in the US. I'm interested also in immigration
and how complicated it is. Because sometimes the story of immigration we get
in the US is of someone coming from Mexico who's slipping across the border,
and there's a big struggle. It's sort of ridiculous."
by
John Zuarino
"My subject is often this place, however you define it: I live there, vote there,
pay taxes there, drink the water -- which makes me, like any other citizen,
part of the modern history of the region. At the same time, I'm an American
writer -- always was, always will be, no matter where I live. My language is
English, my sensibility has been shaped by my American background, my audience
is mostly abroad, and I have no illusions about my place in the local literary
landscape. It's strange to say, but the longer I live in Israel, the more American
I feel."
by
Mya Guarnieri
"It is no surprise that there are a lot of nonfiction titles on birdwatching.
It is after all an inexpensive, exceedingly healthy and endlessly fascinating
hobby that certainly would see a resurgence in lean economic times. But birds
appearing in fiction is less expected and yet birdish titles are everywhere
on the literary shelves. Even though birds have little or nothing do with the
novels themselves."
by
Colleen Mondor
