Kate Beaton’s a favorite artist and storyteller of mine and many others. She’s known for her comedic work but has also done some longform biographical comics, like this series she published in 2014.
She is dealing with the tragic loss of her sister and I don’t know what to do, as a fan and online person. I expressed my sympathy and my condolences, also online. I feel like going back to read her work is all I can do.
Kate Beaton’s a favorite artist and storyteller of mine and many others. She’s known for her comedic work but has also done some longform biographical comics, like this series she published in 2014.
She is dealing with the tragic loss of her sister and I don’t know what to do, as a fan and online person. I expressed my sympathy and my condolences, also online. I feel like going back to read her work is all I can do.
Render Song
If I woke up in Antarctica, would you come for me? Down there in the middle. The magnetic fields are weakest at the poles, so it’s strange that I would go to them. A bird knows not to fly over that sort of anomaly.
“I’m here for some reason, I don’t know,” that’s what you said. You wore the short green dress with a belt around your waist. Your hair was short that winter, “half the length and twice the comfort.” When we sat on the balcony and watched the boats, you also said, “we’ll never be rich, but we’ll be happy.” I would never wander too far with any intention. You knew my intention was rarely intentional.
When we danced, it was a loose shuffle. It was late by then and the songs were chosen to reinvigorate us. Our souls, maybe? Souls full of dance and booze. Your hands were the soil, your eyes the sun. I lingered in them like a pelican in a sanctuary lagoon. “Weird,” I know. Your smile was the softest moon. “Shut up.”
I woke up in Canada once, not sure if you heard. It was in Vancouver, the north bit near a ferry terminal. The radio was set to a local jazz station and my eyes were on the verge. There must have been twenty cars ahead of mine. I felt each of us straining on the edge of a continent, holding back before the drop into the sea. Our fingers pressed into the cushioned walls between us. In seven days, I would fall asleep again. You’d be gone and I’d fall into the quiet place before you.
Is it seven days in a week? What if it was a thousand? A thousand days to indulge in feathered travel. We could have gone to Barbados, or Moab. We could have seen those seven wonders. “They’re not that great,” you said, “but it’s worth seeing what the fuss is about.”
In your heart, I died. In my heart, I’m cloudless. We walked home with the air around us frigid and the air between us a river’s roar. My foot, your knee, my neck, your ribs. “It’s just a fold of skin,” you said, but I traced the space between your arm and hip looking for a miracle or two.
Render Song
If I woke up in Antarctica, would you come for me? Down there in the middle. The magnetic fields are weakest at the poles, so it’s strange that I would go to them. A bird knows not to fly over that sort of anomaly.
“I’m here for some reason, I don’t know,” that’s what you said. You wore the short green dress with a belt around your waist. Your hair was short that winter, “half the length and twice the comfort.” When we sat on the balcony and watched the boats, you also said, “we’ll never be rich, but we’ll be happy.” I would never wander too far with any intention. You knew my intention was rarely intentional.
When we danced, it was a loose shuffle. It was late by then and the songs were chosen to reinvigorate us. Our souls, maybe? Souls full of dance and booze. Your hands were the soil, your eyes the sun. I lingered in them like a pelican in a sanctuary lagoon. “Weird,” I know. Your smile was the softest moon. “Shut up.”
I woke up in Canada once, not sure if you heard. It was in Vancouver, the north bit near a ferry terminal. The radio was set to a local jazz station and my eyes were on the verge. There must have been twenty cars ahead of mine. I felt each of us straining on the edge of a continent, holding back before the drop into the sea. Our fingers pressed into the cushioned walls between us. In seven days, I would fall asleep again. You’d be gone and I’d fall into the quiet place before you.
Is it seven days in a week? What if it was a thousand? A thousand days to indulge in feathered travel. We could have gone to Barbados, or Moab. We could have seen those seven wonders. “They’re not that great,” you said, “but it’s worth seeing what the fuss is about.”
In your heart, I died. In my heart, I’m cloudless. We walked home with the air around us frigid and the air between us a river’s roar. My foot, your knee, my neck, your ribs. “It’s just a fold of skin,” you said, but I traced the space between your arm and hip looking for a miracle or two.
Little reminders of how weird this career can get.
Little reminders of how weird this career can get.
So, while for some reason everyone here is engulfed in one of tumblr’s periodic debates about whether or how to police writing done largely by women for women for free, in the world of contemporary fiction there’s a meltdown going on right now over men who get paid for writing literature, and the men who give them money and prizes for it.
Specifically, Junot Diaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and This Is How You Lose Her, has been accused by multiple Latina writers of a wide range of asshole behavior toward them, ranging from sexual assault to verbal abuse to deliberately trying to destroy the careers of women who challenged him on any of it. This story is complicated by the fact that Diaz recently published an essay in The New Yorker in which he writes about being sexually abused as a child and the effect it had on his sexual and romantic life as an adult. It’s a good essay, and it was greeted with universal admiration; but now, the possibility arises that it may have been an attempt to pre-empt the critique he knew was coming. Mary Karr has also pointed out that Diaz is more vulnerable to these charges because he’s Latino; the literary world has known for years that Karr was abused and stalked by David Foster Wallace, author of the critically acclaimed mega-novel Infinite Jest, who suffered no consequences fbecause, Karr says, Wallace was white. For all of these reasons, it’s worth pointing out up front that what Diaz is charged with doing is not unique amongst contemporary American male writers; and when you go farther back in time, things get worse. Just off the top of my head, William S. Burroughs shot and killed his wife Joan Vollmer and Ernest Hemingway was an abusive husband.
Below, I’m going to talk about men, writing, and the history of contempt for not only women writers but women readers.
So, while for some reason everyone here is engulfed in one of tumblr’s periodic debates about whether or how to police writing done largely by women for women for free, in the world of contemporary fiction there’s a meltdown going on right now over men who get paid for writing literature, and the men who give them money and prizes for it.
Specifically, Junot Diaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and This Is How You Lose Her, has been accused by multiple Latina writers of a wide range of asshole behavior toward them, ranging from sexual assault to verbal abuse to deliberately trying to destroy the careers of women who challenged him on any of it. This story is complicated by the fact that Diaz recently published an essay in The New Yorker in which he writes about being sexually abused as a child and the effect it had on his sexual and romantic life as an adult. It’s a good essay, and it was greeted with universal admiration; but now, the possibility arises that it may have been an attempt to pre-empt the critique he knew was coming. Mary Karr has also pointed out that Diaz is more vulnerable to these charges because he’s Latino; the literary world has known for years that Karr was abused and stalked by David Foster Wallace, author of the critically acclaimed mega-novel Infinite Jest, who suffered no consequences fbecause, Karr says, Wallace was white. For all of these reasons, it’s worth pointing out up front that what Diaz is charged with doing is not unique amongst contemporary American male writers; and when you go farther back in time, things get worse. Just off the top of my head, William S. Burroughs shot and killed his wife Joan Vollmer and Ernest Hemingway was an abusive husband.
Below, I’m going to talk about men, writing, and the history of contempt for not only women writers but women readers.
This is my knee, since she touches me there. This is my throat, as defined by her reaching. I am touched—I am.
— Natalie Diaz, from “isn’t the air also a body, moving?” to Ada Limón, published in The New Yorker
From January through September of 2017, the poets Natalie Diaz and Ada Limón conducted an inspired and collaborative correspondence. The resulting poem-letters reveal, as most missives do, their writers’ lives, but also a time and a place. Read (and listen to) their correspondence here.
This is my knee, since she touches me there. This is my throat, as defined by her reaching. I am touched—I am.
— Natalie Diaz, from “isn’t the air also a body, moving?” to Ada Limón, published in The New Yorker
From January through September of 2017, the poets Natalie Diaz and Ada Limón conducted an inspired and collaborative correspondence. The resulting poem-letters reveal, as most missives do, their writers’ lives, but also a time and a place. Read (and listen to) their correspondence here.
