Interviewed by Literary Arts, Mel Wells

The wonderful and wicked smart, Mel Wells, sent me some interview questions. I’m so grateful for the opportunity to talk about Unchaste.

“What was your inspiration for the creation of Unchaste Readers?’

‘I’ve always wanted to be involved in a community of women artists, but I’d envisioned living on the land in yurts and having composting toilets. Running a reading series is a lot easier and just as fun. I’m also dead serious.” Read the rest of the interview here.

Learn more about Mel Wells here.

Important Words

From this interview in the Paris Review. I know the Paris Review has done some unjust, unfair things, sure. They also did this interview with Elena Ferrante, and these words are words to consider when considering women’s contributions to literature and literature, in general.

“INTERVIEWER

Do you think female fiction is constitutionally weak?

FERRANTE

Not at all. I’m talking about my adolescent anxieties. For obvious historical reasons, women’s writing has a less dense and varied tradition than male writing, but it has extremely high points and also an extraordinary foundational value—just think of Jane Austen. The twentieth century, besides, was a century of radical change for women. Feminist thought and practice set in motion the deepest, most radical of the many transformations that took place in the last century. I wouldn’t recognize myself without women’s struggles, women’s nonfiction, women’s literature—they made me an adult. My experience as a novelist, both published and unpublished, culminated, after twenty years, in the attempt to relate, in a writing that was appropriate, my sex and its difference. But if we have to cultivate our narrative tradition, as women, that doesn’t mean we should renounce the entire stock of techniques we have behind us. We have to show that we can construct worlds that are not only as wide and powerful and rich as those constructed by men but more so. We have to be well equipped, we have to dig deep into our difference, using advanced tools. Above all, we have to insist on the greatest freedom. Writers should be concerned only with narrating what they know and feel—beautiful, ugly, or contradictory—without succumbing to ideological conformity or blind adherence to a canon. Writing requires maximum ambition, maximum audacity, and programmatic disobedience.

This is the interview link here

 

Unchaste Samiya Bashir and Others Wrote about Literary Activism

Samiya writes, “Literary activism, to me, looks like opportunity. Looks like loving attention, like curiosity, like inquiry. Looks like the supportive sharing of eyes, ears, hands, minds, hearts, and tools. Looks like being willing to be wrong, to be outdated, to be educated, to learn something new from someone different and strange. There are so many important voices who never get the chance to find their greatness, shut down as they are by the insistence upon a dominant aesthetic even when we all know that mimicry can be deadly.”

Click the link to read more by her and other distinguished writers.

These words are important. This work is important.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2015/08/what-is-literary-activism/

 

Unchaste KBOO

Podcast available! I have no words for my gratitude for all that was, is, and will be Unchaste. Unchaste is Mazel – place, time, what we have to give. It is hallowed ground. It is fire. It is seven words, ain’t it. It is words that are too small to express love. It’s broken windows and bruises. It’s rising. It’s the side of Voice and Revolt. It’s hurting men’s feelings. It’s apple flesh and witches and queens. It’s risk. It’s what’s going on externally, internally, and earth-wise. It’s letting out rage. It’s being travelers. It’s calling on those who will help us. It’s protest. It’s lonely. It’s realities. It’s close. It’s opposing sanitized change. It’s affecting change in the conversation. It’s not exclusively peaceful. It’s nuance. It’s being too loud, wearing certain things, being provocative. It’s showing up messy. It’s a serpent in a basket. It’s consentual.

It’s here!

Featured Readers:

Lavinia Maglicco:  Lavinia Maglicco has been dancing and writing all her life. She explores embodiment in her studio, Equipoise – enlightened exercise and can be reached at www.epoise.net. She’s working on a book about dance.
Tessara Gabrielle Dudley:  Tessara Dudley lives in the rainy Pacific-Northwest, writing poetry and personal essay from the intersection of working class Black queer disabled life, and hoping her art will help to build a better world. Her first published piece, an examination of transit and travel as a Black woman, went up on Black Girl Dangerous in 2014. In addition to freelance writing, she recently founded a small press. Tessara can be found on Facebook,Twitter, and http://tessaradudley.com

Kalimah Abioto is a writer, filmmaker and all around creator from Memphis, TN.  KalimahAbioto.com

Melanie Alldritt:  Melanie Alldritt has been published in Perceptions and The Gravity of the Thing. When she’s not writing she is procrastinating her homework and adventuring in Oregon or wherever else the day takes her.
Nadia Martinez Chantry:  Mujer, madre, maestra. Nadia Martínez Chantry lives in each of these roles, moment by moment, day by day. She is a survivor with a simple daily goal; to find,  amplify, and honor her own strength as a woman, a mother, and a teacher.
Lidia Yuknavitch:  Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of several books, including the Chronology of Water and Dora: A Headcase. She is the recipient of the Oregon Book Award – Reader’s Choice and a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association award. Her most recent book The Small Backs of Children: A Novel, published by Harper will be out July 7th of this year.

Jenny Forrester:  Jenny Forrester has most recently been published in the Listen to Your Mother anthology, published by Putnam and is the curator for The Unchaste Readers Series

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