The Literary Life of Connie Converse
On her own, Converse created great and complex work, but what might the canon look like today if she found an audience in her lifetime? If she created in communion with other great art?
Like a Sky Inside – Jakuta Alikavazovic
Alikavazovic’s writing is contemplative and digressive, roving like the insatiable gaze of a consummate museum goer.
At a basic level . . . houses are like corsets for the characters to break out of; they are stuck exploring and returning and opening doors over and over until something within them or within the world is sorted out and overcome.
In each of your holes I find an invitation—an invitation to the party of the limitless, in spite of it all. Tell me more.
There was, for a time, genuine class mobility—jobs for people who really didn’t expect them, who pursued their studies out of burning interest—out of trust and faith in what they did not know.
Writing Snakeskin taught me to remain open to the world around me—honestly, a pretty important trait for any memoirist—and to allow meanings to shift.
The Museum of Human History – Rebekah Bergman
Bergman emphasize[s] that our obligations are to those living, no matter how important the dead are. We must choose to be present with those around us.
The 1980s HIV/AIDS epidemic narratives . . . essentially whitewashed the problem and privileged the lives of white gay men . . . Those narratives also infiltrated the publishing industry at the time: the only book-length narratives by a single author to have been HIV-positive, and probably later died of AIDS, were written by white, gay men.
The relinquishing of niceness is a difficult task, especially if you have been socialized into it forever. Learning how to be small took all of my girlhood, learning the opposite will take all of my adulthood.
The following playlist is humbly submitted for your listening pleasure from Full Stop, your full service literary journal. We used to invoke the immortal and ominous words of Prince Buster, “Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think,” but having recently moved to Scotland I’ll invoke the immortal and precise words of Linton Kwesi Johnson, “Inglan is a bitch, […]