BURN PILE: "Climate Change, Sexual Politics, and a Pinch of Humor" by Jake Bienvenue

Welcome back to Burn Pile, friendly readers.

If you don’t know, today marked the beginning of the global climate strike. Women and men in over 150 countries will be marching in protest against sluggish political systems whose policies have not reflected the urgency of the issue at hand, which is planetary ecological catastrophe. As writers and readers, we are beginning to be confronted with the prospect of constructing and consuming narrative in the face of a future which might not remember us. Here is an interesting article by Omar El Akkad over at LitHub about what stories might survive climate change. In it, El Akkad asks questions about what roots narrative when we’re losing the ability to anchor our memories to the land. And if that seems a little glum to you, Elizabeth Putfark wrote an article for LitHub about maintaining humanity in the face of global anxiety. Both are well-researched, precise, and, to varying degrees, helpful. Most importantly though… organize. 

While we’re on the topic of political subversion, go check out an interview over at ElectricLit with Mona Eltahawy, the author of The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls. Also on ElectricLit is a transcript of Jacqueline Woodson’s address to the recipients of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Awards, a foundation which supports emerging women writers. The title of the address is “We Are Writing Against Our Own Erasure.” It’s chilling. As an aside, the space between paragraphs up there might lead one to conclude that sexual politics and climate politics are somehow different issues. They are not. 

But anyways, courtesy of McSweeney’s, here are five reasons to stop what you’re doing and write a dystopian feminist novel. Here is a letter to all the women who die first in horror movies, brought to you by ElectricLit. And finally, here is a riot of a piece from McSweeney’s which lists quote unquote honest job postings in academia. Probably good to end this one with some humor.

Go out and change the world. 

BURN PILE: "Literary Drama and the Coming of Fall" by Jake Bienvenue

The rapid coming of autumn was heralded this year by at least a couple of contentious happenings in the lit-sphere.

Many of you may be familiar with Instagram influencer Caroline Calloway. Or, if you’re like me, you hadn’t before this week. For those who haven’t found their way onto the media platform, Calloway has over 795,000 followers. This massive following led to a reported six-figure book deal--a deal which dissolved under mysterious circumstances. Earlier this week, Natalie Beach, Calloway’s friend and former ghost-writer, wrote a tell-all article in The Cut about the would-be literary celebrity. Whatever your opinion on the spat, the media attention it has garnered invites questions about the dynamic between social media and the publishing industry.

And if that doesn’t satisfy your thirst for drama, National Book Award-winner Jonathan Franzen wrote a contentious article in The New Yorker about the global climate crisis. In it, Franzen implores people to give up the pipe-dream of halting the process of planetary destruction. A novel take from the critically-acclaimed novelist. 

Well, let’s move on from that. It’s fall, and that means books in general, and spooky books in particular. If you’re an Agatha Christie fan, go check out a fascinating article about the mystery author and Post-Capitalism on LitHub, written by eminent philosopher and critic Slavoj Žižek. Or, if you want to write horror like Shirley Jackson, check out some advice from the author, also on LitHub. If you’re still not satisfied, consider showing up for ElectricLit’s Edgar Allan Poe-themed festival in October. 

To take a detour into the humorous while remaining within the spooky Victorian mindset, go take a peek at Colin Heasley’s mock-article in ElectricLit about writing queer characters in the Victorian era without getting censored. And to leave you with one last little bit of humor, Jessie Gaskell wrote a hysterical article in McSweeney’s titled “I’m Just the Guy to Write Your Female Empowerment Series.” 

And happy fall, folks. 

BURN PILE: Hey! Who are you, anyway? Art, heart, and smoldering questions about reality and writers.

Who are you when you write? Where does the line blur between the identity of an author conjuring wordworlds, and the persona of their voice as written? How does the reader perceive the two (or more?) voices, and how do they relate to them?

    In the spirit of identity crisis, let's celebrate the late Eleanor Hibbert’s birthday. Primarily a novelist, Hibbert’s 1993 obit in the New York Times provides a long list of pseudonyms: Eleanor Burford, Elbur Ford, Ellalice Tate, Victoria Holt, and Jean Plaidy. “She never revealed her maiden name or age,” the piece reads. “Two of her publishers listed conflicting birth years, 1906 and 1910. For years the true identity of the writer behind the three [most successful] pseudonyms was a tightly guarded secret in the publishing world.”
     More recently, we have “Dear Sugar,” the eclectic advice column at The Rumpus — the columnist’s identity revealed as Cheryl Strayed only after Wild took off. (You can find Sugar/Strayed's fabulous and famous WLaMF column here. Mind you, it’s NSFW, but all the more powerful for it.)
     JT LeRoy and the enigma of hoax versus pseudonym has pestered truth seekers since the ‘90s. Read backstory on the nonexistent JT at The Guardian, then meet the author behind the mystery in the documentary Author: The JT LeRoy Story. While you’re bingeing instead of writing, indulge in the moral horror of The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, the film made while the world believed JT was real. (Both are streaming on a device near you.)
     Meanwhile, the saga continues: Kristen Stewart and Laura Dern are at work on a film about Savanna Knoop, the woman who played (in real life) the writer who didn’t exist: “A Behind-the-Scenes First Look at Kristen Stewart and Laura Dern in JT Leroy.”

Truth, Love, and Answers may seem in short supply these days, but art — no: ART — can lead us to Heart in an unjust world. Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings gives us a look at the words of LeRoi Jones, writing as Amiri Baraka, in a “lyrical manifesto for largehearted living.” Jones reminds us “We have / each other, and the / World…” Art speaking truth to power, right? (Yes, please and thank you.) Read the articles linked within, and at the end of the page, too. 

Last note for the day: A Burn Pile thumb goes up for Lit Hub’s feature piece, “Where Are the Likes? Coming to Terms with Being a Writer on Social Media,” in which Nick Ripatrazone wonders whether our friends clicking love buttons for our successes means anything when it comes to connecting to our work… “Congratulations on publishing a poem is a second’s worth of action; reading and understanding that poem is a real commitment.”

A big CutBank thanks to all of you. Don’t forget to be kind. Don’t forget how much the world needs you. Be generous with your art, your heart, and your energy!

PS: Coming soon: Our regular feature, All Accounts and Mixture, will be presenting new works for you in the next weeks. Keep an eye out for it! 

BURN PILE: Hemingway's Hoarder, Two Interviews, and a retrospective on Yogi Berra and his verbal idiosyncrasy

Hemingway was a pack rat. Some selections from his extensive papers are being shown at the Morgan Library & Museum, including, but in no way limited to, this annotation of a letter from F. Scott Fitzgerald: “Kiss my ass/E.H." From The New York Times.

About crowdsourcing annotations and Alice in Wonderland. From the New Republic. 

A deep dive into Hamlet’s body type. Would it change your perception of the play if Hamlet happened to be fat? Is that a question you never even considered? Somebody at Slate did. 

Eileen sits down for an interview with Ben Lerner for the Paris Review. Also, in room 223 of the University of Montana Liberal Arts building, there’s a picture of Eileen Miles sitting on a toilet. 

"There’s nothing more ambitious than a young poet. You feel omnipotent. You’re on the upswing of bipolar. And that enrages older poets—which, to a certain sensibility, only makes you want to be more vapid and fame obsessed and glib."

Ben Marcus and George Saunders sit down for an interview with essayistic questions and answers, in the process challenging every  student of writing. As Ben Marcus puts it: I ask, among other things, for students to envision the short story in fifty years. To think about skipping ahead and writing that story now. From Granta. 

And in conclusion,with Yogi Berra's death this Tuesday, we've lost one of the most linguistically interesting Americans in recent history.

A list of 35 of his most famous malapropisms, courtesy of the New York post. 

My personal favorite: He hits from both sides of the plate. He’s amphibious. 

Don’t be quick to label the late Berra as a simpleton. As an article from The Economist points out, he had a more plastic and humorous idea of language than others. 

"Mr Berra would have chuckled at being taken so seriously by a language columnist. But he also was clearly having a laugh at those who took him so literally. He knew his reputation, and enjoyed it. His name is so synonymous with verbal gaffes that many sayings are falsely attributed to him. Or, as he put it, “I never said most of the things I said.”