Things I've Loved This Week, the Atlantic Magazine Book Reading Kerfuffle, and Some Short Sentences
Also lots of magazine stuff in here...
Shout Outs
I was lucky to be interviewed for the Literary Mama podcast and apparently I didn’t like being a wife, among other revelations. You can listen here. Thank you to Amanda Fields (and the other lit mamas), who is the bestie of my bestie, Amy Shearn, for asking such great questions and creating such an awesome podcast about writers who also happen to be moms. I’m excited to listen to a whole bunch of these podcasts—there’s Catherine Newman, Amy Shearn, Grace Loh Prasad, and a lot of other badies.
My new poetry book, Heart Less, is now available at both the bad place and through my publisher Indolent Books. You can also request it for your local library (such a sweetheart move!) and/or order it from your local bookstore. There are two different covers to choose from which is a thing only an indie press can do for you I think, and all hail Michael Broder my publisher for allowing me such an extrvagance of choices.
Also, it’s time to preorder Amy’s new novel, Animal Instinct, and also Michelle Tea’s new magical spell book, Modern Magic: Stories, Rituals, and Spells for Modern Witches is out!
Pre-orders are super important because publishers decide whether a book is a success or failure on the basis of pre-orders. I know right, big five publishing is A WHOLE LOTTA UGH SOMETIMES but here we are! Pre-ordering helps writers so so much! Also, when you pre-order you usually get the book a few days before it even hits the stores and for nerds like us this is a treat.
Substacks I’ve enjoyed this week:
(because holy shit, Jane is back, you know Jane that made Sassy magazine that changed so many Gen X lives!Speaking of magazines did you know I wrote my dissertation about Seventeen Magazine and girl writing in the magazine from 1963-2003? Some day I hope to turn it into a book, but lately I’m too tired to think of writing books. Here’s a chapter from it that I turned into an academic journal article about the column “Trauamrama.” I don’t write a lot of those, but I can write them. I just don’t enjoy writing them super much.
If I ever write the Seventeen magazine book, I want it to be for a mass market audience and encapsulate all of our dreams and hopes for that magazine that many of us shared when we were little teens, and how it steeped us in ideologies that would forever shape how we viewed our bodies, faces, minds, hair, clothing etc…or what I’m now thinking of as The Ongoing Failure of the Project of the Self in Capitalism. Catchy right? A better title would be Our Seventeen. If you’re an agent reading this, please rep me and this book.
Not Seventeen, but close enough, and what a great photo.
I would have written my dissertation about Sassy but there weren’t enough issues to give me enough of a historical arc so that I could make, ahem, historical arguments. I have Jon Zimmerman, one of the best professors of my life to thank for that insight.
Amy I were texting the other day (well every day) about how weird it is that we destroyed print magazines only to reconstitute them over here on Substack. Kinda makes you wonder why we listen to our tech overlords so much, though writing without advertisement pressures on Substack is cool, but more money for writers is also cool and not as easy to come by here.
Speaking of which, I’d love it if you’d buy my a coffee or become a paying subscriber. I keep everything free here, but if you can pay a little or a lot, it would mean I could write and publish more here and also have enough money to take my cat to the vet for a leg x-ray. Maudlin but true, Pippi has a limp, and it’s likely arthritis but they want to do an x-ray and it costs 600$.
Update, nothing is broken and she does likely have arthritis and the whole thing cost 1000$ and the vet would like to give her a shot every month for pain which costs 160$. I will try to make this happen, and also getting her into the carrier once a month is going to be a kitty Hunger Games that nobody wants to experience.
Doesn’t it seem like most things cost ten dollars or 600 dollars these days? Like every food costs ten dollars now (box of cereal, gallon of milk, a meat, eggs) and every larger thing costs 600-1000 dollars (kitty leg xray, my electricity bill from August, jackets for everyone in the house, a colonscopy supposedly covered by insurance).
Did you hear AI is kinda failing, even on Wall Street. I enjoy this. We had an AI workshop yesterday at my faculty retreat that was the strangest chaos and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why we were doing what we were doing. I don’t think our workshop leaders could either, and I don’t blame them because it all seems like a real top down dream that only people who hate writing and thinking or for others to write and think would come up with.
Tannebaum published a brilliant scholarly article on assignments that help writing students (and really any student) stay engaged (and also surprise surprise tend to be AI proof), and I read it a few weeks ago and already plan on using a whole bunch of assignments.My friend Jonna Perrillo published this amazing essay in Slate about Banned Books and what’s really keeps teachers from assigning controversial books. It’s not quite what you think I bet. Not surprisingly, when I posted it on Facebook and Instagram, it was taken down by the dictator robots for being about free speech I guess.
Lastly, you might have read The Atlantic article about how kids in college don’t know how to read whole books anymore, but here is the real tea behind that story which is not what the magazine reported at all.
just wrote a great essay about what happened when the very same Atlantic writercalled her this summer to discuss kids and reading. Surprise, it’s doesn’t go how the Atlantic says it does.I have to admit, I was feeling that original Atlantic piece a little because a few of my students were freaking out about reading the novels in our novel writing class and I do wish my kid read more whole books at her school, but you know what kids read all kinds of books all over the place and it’s never as simple as The Atlantic says it is (so many damn times with that magazine). I’m looking at you Caitlin Flannagan from the late 90s to early oughts.
The last part of my Subby (the short sentences below) happened last week, but what the hell I have insomnia because I stayed up talking to my daughter about her insomnia. She’s alseep now and I’m awake. Ah parenting.
Just kidding with that photo, she’s 16! But sleeping!
Some Short Sentences
Yesterday as I sat in my car so as not to get a ticket, I prepped for teaching. We’re reading Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences About Writing and starting to practice our own. I use Klinkenborg as my heavy because he’s kind of bitchy and old-school in a way I’m not in the classroom, so I make him into the bad guy. He does get my students thinking about sentences in ways I can’t always. They also sometimes hate him, and I dislike that, so I might give up the book soon. Anyone else have an easy fun sentence level book they like that is not grammar obsessed?
Here are some of my short sentences from last week:
My car idles next to an abandoned parking garage.
I love ruins.
Ruins thrill me.
I come from a small city of ruins.
Horns aplenty on Lenox Road.
Mayor Eric Adams indicted.
Shame!
Ha!
Three highly qualified women ran against Adams.
They lost.
I’d rather turn a page than scroll.
Trucks bounce by on Linden Boulevard.
Write in your parked car.
My headache lives behind my right eye.
The COVID vaccine begets a small case of COVID.
Shorten your sentences, Carley.
Students, shorten your sentences.
Trimming is winning.
Fire escapes zig zag brick buildings.
Her shoulders ache.
The cat cries.
She preens.
Officer, no.
Google “dust mites.”
At night, I imagine dust mites reclining in Lazy Boy chairs.
Rats like to pee on each other.
Oh, rats!
In the nineties, a rat rumble exploded at my feet.
Time to leave the car.
Drink coffee.
Five train, don’t fuck with me.
Now you give it a try? Type in a short sentence in the comments about your current moment, obsessions, or areas of expertise. Don’t forget about imagery and good verbs!
Enjoy the typos!
xoxo
Carley
Hey, gimme the quiz!
What’s your boyfriend type?
Goth, rocker, greaser or hippy?
Gelly Roll pens smudged easily.
Adjusting our answers for the boyfriend we wanted.
David was a hippy.
Mikey, a greaser.
Sean was goth.
By 15 Seventeen was for kids.
Thank you for the shout out Carley! I would love the seventeen book, I read it religiously.