My book, Geographies of Identity: Narrative Forms, Feminist Futures was published in November of 2021, as we were heading into another disastrous Covid winter. So much of life was still happening away from crowds, a lot of teaching and many creative reading/publishing events largely held in zoom or asynchronously floating in cyberspace. Although everything was exhausting and overwhelming at that moment, it would be a long time before things would start to get better, and for me and so many others, the exhaustion accumulated. Even now, though much has been recovered, much has not. We’ve lost so much. Teaching and publishing worlds are not what they were. Life for many has not really gone back to pre-Covid “normal,” whatever that even was. We’ve also gained some things like different kinds of flexibility maybe or better online tools, maybe developed new ways of finding community because of zoom, and more. Personally, I also feel like I’m still always picking up pieces from some earlier version of my life, or parts that got waylaid during those Covid-intensive years. 

I didn’t have a reading or publication event for Geographies of Identity, haven’t done a lot of PR to share it too widely. But if you or your students are reading or thinking about avant-garde poetics, innovative prose writing by women, cultural and textual identity, narrative and experimental forms, you may be interested in delving in. Even better, the book is Open Access, so you can download it from the publisher, or from many academic libraries, for free. This link to the JSTOR version allows you to download individual chapters, and includes introduction and chapter summaries. The book is divided into three sections: Landscape, Crisis, and Possibility and each section includes a mini-introduction to the main concepts and ideas. The book’s initial introduction offers a historical overview feminist, avant-garde, and cultural poetics theories and practices in conversation with writers such as Rachael Blau Du Plessis, Julia Kristeva, bell hooks, Susan Stanford Friedman, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Judith Butler, Fred Moten, Harryette Mullen, and others. Here’s a summary overview of the book:

Geographies of Identity: Narrative Forms, Feminist Futures explores identity and American culture through hybrid, prose work by women, and expands the strategies of cultural poetics practices into the study of innovative narrative writing. Informed by Judith Butler, Homi Bhabha, Harryette Mullen, Julia Kristeva, and others, this project further considers feminist identity politics, race, and ethnicity as cultural content in and through poetic and non/narrative forms. The texts reflected on here explore literal and figurative landscapes, linguistic and cultural geographies, sexual borders, and spatial topographies. Ultimately, they offer non-prescriptive models that go beyond expectations for narrative forms, and create textual webs that reflect the diverse realities of multi-ethnic, multi-oriented, multi-linguistic cultural experiences.

Readings of Gertrude Stein’s A Geographical History of America, Renee Gladman’s Juice, Pamela Lu’s Pamela: A Novel, Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, Juliana Spahr’s The Transformation, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, and Layli Long Soldier’s WHEREAS show how alternatively narrative modes of writing can expand access to representation, means of identification, and subjective agency, and point to horizons of possibility for new futures. 

And from the Introduction:

For the purposes of grounding this project within current conversations about formally innovative writing by women — avant-garde, language-centered, feminist experimental writing, or non/narrative writing — I refer to The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry that examines “the work of modern and contemporary women writers who contest issues of gender, race, history, and sexuality in innovative poetic forms.” Elizabeth Frost is in part responding to studies of American poetry by women that “tended to focus on a poetics of personal experience, frequently grounded in identity politics” and subsequently “marginalized avant-gardism in feminist poetics” and she examines the work of poets who share a belief that language both shapes, and can take part in changing, consciousness. As she writes, “each [poet] weds radical politics to formal experiments.”

I’d love to know if you’ve used this book in your research or teaching, or if you know of colleagues or grad students who have used it. And let me know what you think: has it been helpful in some way? I’d be happy to talk more with you or your students, and I’d love to get some commitments for reviews: if you’d like to write a review, or know someone who would, I can get you a hard copy.

A Return to the Blog

I haven't written here since 2021. Looking back, I see a number of posts about Covid, or Covid diary writings, more than I remember having done. Lately I've thought about posting via substack, and then I thought, I'll come back to this blog and keep substack on the burner for now. That is all to say, I am always writing and 99.5% of it has not been and won't be published. Since Jan 2023 I've focused hard on getting back into submitting work for publication, I've organized my days with more time and discipline for writing, and I've accomplished a lot. At least in terms of words on the page, I've produced. In terms of publications though, very little has come out of the time and money spent on literary submissions (poems, flash and long creative NF essays). But because I spend so much time writing and thinking about writing, I want to do some of that here. I know that getting lots of rejections is supposed to be a kind of good news: "I must be submitting a lot to get so many rejections, yay me!" and that getting rejections that say they liked the writing, enjoyed reading the work, it went through many rounds of consideration.... but, we don't have a place for it, those are also supposed to be encouraging: keep sending! submit to those places again! it just takes perseverance! Sure, yes, I get all of that. And it's also in the end so discouraging. 

I have a long essay I've been sending out and revising and sending since late 2022 or early 2023. I mentioned my frustration with feeling like I don't know what else to do with that essay during an online writing workshop class recently, and the instructor talked about putting work down for a few months and then coming back to it, re-seeing it. I say things like that to my own students. I do it myself. And it's still hard, it's been many more than a few months, now heading toward the end of 2024 and that essay seems completely over, or I'm over it. I thought it was the start of a whole book project, and all summer I've been distressed about what it means that I can't publish that one essay, that I won't be able to write or publish a whole book of essays. 

But writing doesn't only mean publishing. Something else I've *learned* or more accurately been reminded of, during that same workshop class, is that writing takes a lot of time. A couple of the writers whose work we read came to talk to us during the class in zoom. They talked about how long it took from beginning to write the book--whether or not they realized it would be a book at that time--to when it finally was accepted for publication (and then finally in print). And, what's in the book may be different from earlier pieces published in journals. Although some collections of essays I've read include many that were previously published, some books may be written *as books* with less focus on publishing excerpts during the process. Which is to say, there are many paths. 

My goal (one of my writing goals) for the summer was to have a *clear* idea about how to proceed with this book project. I'm not sure I've got that, but I was just listing/organizing the many short and long essays I've been working on over the past couple of years. I have (tentative, preliminary) ideas about how they might fit together as a book. I have ideas for continuing to write--expanding pieces already begun, beginning new ones--and trusting in the process. Writing takes time, and over time one might be able to *see* the writing coming together. 

The long essay is about rivers and cottonwood forests in NM, about the ranch where we stay for a month in the spring, that we've traveled to for the past few years. Other essays in *the book* will be about MI, water, lakes, etc. and sometimes cherries. Here's a link to one short piece, "Linger Here," that did get published. Thanks for reading :)