After Geek Love became a best seller and earned nominations for the National Book Award and the Bram Stoker Prize, and after she had earned the admiration of early 1990s punk icons like Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love, Gus Van Sant, and Tim Burton, Katherine Dunn wrote for long stretches in the solitude of a large blue house in Portland, Oregon. Before that, in the 1970s, Dunn was recently separated from her first husband and wrote
Sheila Smith, Martha Scott, and Diane Stevens, arrested in a 1972 raid of the underground abortion service Jane. After Patricia Highsmith’s death in 1995, her friend, playwright and filmmaker Phyllis Nagy, committed to adapting The Price of Salt for film. Nagy expected homophobic resistance—Highsmith herself used a pseudonym when she published this classic lesbian love story—but the real barrier to financing was that it starred two women. Nagy kept the faith and, a mere twenty
Diana Goetsch. Photo by Svetlana Jovanovic Diana Goetsch is the author of eight collections of poetry and the “Life in Transition” blog at The American Scholar. McKenzie Wark talked to Goetsch about gender transition, writing through the body, New York nightlife, and her new memoir, This Body I Wore (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, May 2022). McKenzie: You were an established writer as a poet before you transitioned. How did that change your writing? Diana: In
The Thumb of Thetis Grasping him by one little foot to dip him in the mystic river, Thetis (how can she forget?) overlooks this: that where her thumb presses his flesh, he still is dry instead of drenched in deathless wet, hence subject to mortality. When her baby is a man, that tiny disc of naked skin will let the fatal arrow in. This is where the wound will come. One vulnerable spot is all
Gertrude Stein is one of the biggest, boldest, baddest, most audacious of all modern cultural figures. Born in Pittsburgh in 1874, she died in 1946 while undergoing an operation for stomach cancer in the American Hospital in Paris. I began to study her almost by accident fifty years ago—I was spending a year at Yale on a postdoctoral fellowship, and the Stein papers were in the Beinecke Rare Book Library there. As I sat with
The writer and critic Chris Kraus (I Love Dick, Social Practices, After Kathy Acker, et al.) lived part-time on northern Minnesota’s Iron Range for seven years (2013– 2020), researching The Four Spent the Day Together, a novel inspired by a series of violent methamphetamine crimes involving teenagers. The narrative is intercut with police reports, court documents, text messages, interviews, and monologues. This piece is one of several studies culled from social media accounts and conversa-
I met Jimmy and Troy at a Santa Barbara gay bar on a trip back home for my dad’s eyelid surgery. I had been back the month before, too, trying to score a job on the set of my My So-Called Life—the lesbian therapist who seduced me when I was sixteen arranged a meeting with one of the producers—but had returned to New Mexico when I got the call that the show was cancelled. Now
A singular bleating made it clear that Frances had not saved the lives of her goat’s three kids. She had woken to growling, scrambling, and was that gnawing? Before her thoughts could clarify, she had run barefoot onto the porch, grabbed the axe that sat by the woodpile, and descended into dark so total she relied on her body’s knowledge of the yard’s slope. She shouted, swung, tried to make herself monstrous. But the predator
A.M. Homes. Photo by Marie Sanford. When A. M. Homes was growing up in Washington, D.C., her teachers were skeptical that she’d successfully write a check, much less a book. She dropped out of high school and eventually found herself at Sarah Lawrence, where she met Grace Paley. Homes’s books—The Safety of Objects (1990), The End of Alice (1996), and Music for Torching (1999), among others—have been translated into twenty-two languages, adapted for film and
Summer Field Probably I made the sag in the barbwire where anyone could get through to the field, summers after the rancher moved the sheep off to better grazing. I got there when the wild rye and brome was high and the crickets swung too heavy for the yellow fray, not caring when their catapult levered my arms and chest. I collapsed on the dry stocks that gave way to my . . . Subscribers
