Greetings, Humans.

Well, we’re in it, aren’t we? Deep in the shit, the scrum, the trenches, getting muddy and bloody, and I don’t know about you, but my sleeves are rolled up and my war paint is on. It’s hard not to feel like you’re getting attacked on all sides when you’re getting attacked on all sides. But here’s what I’m gonna do:

The same shit I’ve always done.

Nothing has changed about the way I do my work as a librarian, as a writer, and as a community member. I write the truth, I exercise my right to free speech, I love and care for my community. I am seeking and sparking joy like my life depends on it, because it does. Excuse me while I become downright ungovernable.

And you too, are you becoming joyfully, arrogantly, downright governable? Are you exercising every inch of your rights to make sure everyone knows they can’t be taken away?

They want to tire us out, steal our joy, and make us pay for every free moment of our lives. So I am finding rest between action, leading with joy (very easy when you work with little joy factories, aka other people’s kids), and opting out of every corporate structure possible.

Use your library card. Shop second-hand. Buy local. Make art. Grow a garden. Find your community. Put your phone away. Listen to Kendrick and turn the television off. Show up when it matters. Make fun of them. Mock them endlessly and laugh.

With that, I am back on my bullshit with this newsletter to bring you a must-read from Namrata Poddar on decolonizing the novel, a recommended book on laughtivism (activism, but funny), and a new resource for your toolbox by way of the Print Run Podcast, a podcast run by two of my favorite anti-capitalist-but-working-the-system literary agents out there, and their discussion what this all means for art making.

Ready? Let’s gossip.

Must Long-Read

“Decolonize the Novel:
Writing Against Western Strictures of Realism”
by Namrata Poddar
for Poets & Writers

(**PDF linked below if you don’t have a PW digital account)

Border Less was received generously by its readers, who appreciated in general the novel’s play with form. In the United States, though, a couple of questions came up often in my conversations with literary gatekeepers, informed readers whose opinions hold power to shape the larger response to a book… What I heard in these re- current questions was the assumption that a “real” novel is one that maintains continuity of narration and perspective, one that focuses on and pursues until the closing note the protagonist’s inner journey. What I heard here was the assumption that a real novel is the realist novel.

So begins Namrata Poddar’s excellent essay in the most recent Poets & Writers about her experiences publishing a debut novel that centralizes non-Western modes of storytelling (fragmentation, multiple voices, no A-B-C plot line) in the capitalist American publishing system that has a strict view on what constitutes “correct” storytelling and thus predicts economic success.

How did the novel, known to be the most versatile of narrative forms, congeal here into such a bordered form? In other words, how did the contemporary American novel become synonymous for so many with the modern realist novel? Who do these literary borders serve, and what’s at stake if we don’t ask these questions?

With precision, Poddar calls out the strictures of the publishing system, how it can stifle creativity, how the rise of American MFA programs coincided with the downgrading of any novel considered literary if it doesn’t pertain to the realist domestic space. Large novels, collaborative, communal pieces that focus on global affairs rather than the personal headspace of one individual seem increasingly difficult to publish with the Big 5 because the audience has been groomed to expect a linear plot line, a single hero, and the solving of a personal problem rather than the focus on a collective issue.

How many “minority” writers routinely abandon their novels because the forms available to or legitimized for them do not suit the stories they are trying to tell? In my community of aspiring and published authors, I know too many. And I ask myself, often in vain: Whose voice speaks loudest in their heads when aspiring novelists convince themselves that their manuscript is best laid to rest?

Poddar the “countless erasures” by stories untold because the novels were either abandoned by the Western market or pre-emptively abandoned by the writer in deference to the Western market. Hers is a call to Western readers to read bravely, widely, expansively, and to all writers to write the same—to write in reclamation.

It’s hardly surprising to see realism find its strongest legacy in American literature today. That said, my point here isn’t that realism doesn’t produce compelling storytelling. It couldn’t have served power for this long if it didn’t. My point is about the countless erasures enacted by the hegemonic forms of storytelling and its many gatekeepers. My point is about the soft violence of narrative, that in its vast potential to silence dissenting voices, upholds and fortifies imperial violence. This violence is nowhere as immediate and forceful as the mass slaughter of children, starving or bombing entire families off the face of Earth. Yet as a brown woman writer, I haven’t been able to look away from the subtler form of narrative violence that lasts for generations if not centuries, and at some point it stops needing the colonizer to do the work for empires. If narrative is inextricable from power, my point is about the ways in which narrative erases many of us and a few of the many ways in which we reclaim it.

And because we’re fighting the power here, I’ve placed this full piece linked as a PDF here.

The Librarian Is In!

Laughing our way to revolution with
Blueprint For Revolution
by Srdja Popovic

Toolbox: Print Run Podcast

I love Print Run podcast. Brought to you by Erik Hane and Laura Zats, two literary agents who became their own form of ungovernable and broke out with their own Headwaters Agency in Minnesota, their episodes break down what the hell is happening in publishing from an insider’s perspective but with an anti-capitalist, worker-centered lens. They were recently on an extended hiatus because Erik had a new baby, but they are back with weekly episodes, each more powerful and insightful than the last.

I especially enjoyed their comeback episode about the demise of BookTok, Twitter, and other social media spaces publishers were using as scapegoats to not do their jobs of actually promoting the books they published.

Put in your queue and get radicalized!