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The Accomplices LLC

Civil Coping Mechanisms / Entropy / Writ Large Press

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Monthly Archives

February 2019

Interview with Accomplice Rocío Carlos
Interview

Interview with Accomplice Rocío Carlos

by CCM February 27, 2019
written by CCM

1.   What’s your favorite song to dance to?
That depends. With my sister, any Sonora Dinamita song. At a family wedding, “El Sinaloense.” As part of a folklorico performance (I was a dancer, for 16 years), I love a good northern polka, a son jarocho or jaliscience. I like Blondie. And Prince. Pop and R&B and Hip Hop. I like that part of the night when you’re really sweaty and they bust out that really guilty pleasure and next thing you know you are touching your toes and shouting the lyrics. And when I’m home alone, I pretend I am an ice skater and twirl to Love on the Brain by riri.

2.   Describe your personal hell.
Watching my parents age.

3.   What’s something that always makes you laugh?
When Ana follows me around making a song out of whatever I’m doing. She writes good songs.

4.   You’re sucked into a bad movie and you have to choose a point in history to live out the rest of your years. What time do you choose and why?
History and the future all suck. So, I’d find the present again.

5.   What’s a gif that you can relate to?
Homer as a toasty cinnamon bun. I love getting under covers. SO. MUCH.

6.   You’re hit by lightning. What happens?
I get a cool new birthmark on the entire left side of my body. It looks like a purple firework. Also, I can now understand and speak every language in the world because the lightning scrambled my brain’s language center. So I have to hide this gift so the pentagon doesn’t disappear me and use me to decipher foreign intelligence. I have thought about this since I was a child : )

7.   It’s snowing outside, how do you feel?
Happy to be warm, inside.

8.   What’s a cat picture you can get behind?
Any picture of Scout my amazing sassy calico. Or do you mean like a famous cat. Whatever. Scout is famous.

9.   Where did you write most of your book? Why?
Here at home, outside in my yard or on my ratty blue couch covered in cat hair or at my wooden table.

10.   What are your struggles and strengths as a writer?
Um. Doing it. (Furrowing brows over here, trying not to be a sarcastic ass). I have a flair for impactful turns of phrases? A line that might haunt you a little? I’m bad at big picture stuff with a book-arc and such.

11.   Tell us a little about your writing process. What works, what doesn’t, what doesn’t but you still try anyway? jajajajajaja (me laughing in Spanish), like, people have a Plan? Okay, okay. I’ll get this preoccupation and it’ll eat away at my brain for a few months. Then I’ll start to try to articulate it to myself. Then I might write some stuff down. Then I’ll abandon it for months. Then someone who loves me will force me to re-engage it. Then, if someone asks to publish some or all of it I’m really screwed. Then I camp out on the couch, the table, outside in the yard with whiskey or a pop playlist or a box of tissues, swatting mosquitoes or freezing my ass off and crying and being sullen. Then my back is ruined and I have to go to the chiropractor and get strapped into decompression contraptions. So fun, writing books.

 


(the other house) by Rocío CarlosROCÍO CARLOS attends from the land of the chaparral. Born and raised in Los Ángeles, she is widely acknowledged to have zero short term memory but know the names of trees. Her other books include Attendance (The Operating System) and A Universal History of Infamy: Those of This America (LACMA/Golden Spike Press). She was selected as a 2003 Pen Center “Emerging Voices” fellow. She collaborates as a partner at Wirecutter Collective and is a teacher of the language arts. Her favorite trees are the olmo (elm) and aliso (sycamore).

February 27, 2019
Interview with Accomplice Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué
Interview

Interview with Accomplice Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué

by CCM February 21, 2019
written by CCM

1.      What’s your favorite song to dance to?
“This Must be the Place” by Talking Heads, though I sound like the perfect stereotype of someone in their twenties.

2.      Describe your personal hell.
An UberPool where the other passengers are wearing perfume.

3.      What’s something that always makes you laugh?
Susan Sontag shady frustrated interview/Camille Paglia’s maniacal response. If you haven’t watched, brace yourself for a life-changing video:

4.      You’re sucked into a bad movie and you have to choose a point in history to live out the rest of your years. What time do you choose and why?
Some time in Ancient Egypt. I don’t know, but if you have a society that lasts like 3,000 years, you must be doing SOMETHING right.
5.      What’s a gif that you can relate to?

6.      You’re hit by lightning. What happens?
Widespread tissue damage, cardiac arrhythmia, and loss of consciousness.

7.      It’s snowing outside, how do you feel?
Calm, a bit trapped, but in a good mood to read.

8.      What’s a cat picture you can get behind?
Any picture of my cats Beef and Panini. Here’s one:

9.      Where did you write most of your book? Why?
I wrote most of Losing Miami in my partially windowless apartment in Philadelphia, far away from Miami. Every so often, when I was home for vacation, I’d go to the beach to take notes. The beach, as it were, is the scene of the moving coastline and the potential sinking, even as it is the emblem of Miami’s potential for *fun*.

10.   What are your struggles and strengths as a writer?
I think I’m good at conceiving of a project’s ability to scale up or down, which means conceiving of a book’s contours comes easily to me. I think I’m a better book writer than I am a poem writer. I struggle a bit with making the individual parts of a book-machine (aka the poems) splendidly functional. Instead, I make them fragmented and unapproachable, so that one has to look across poems to find magic and meaning. A struggle and a strength!

11.   Tell us a little about your writing process. What works, what doesn’t, what doesn’t but you still try anyway?
I write late at night, usually in spurts. It’s a very undecorated scene of writing. I wish I woke up with the sun to write in longhand or some bullshit, but I really don’t. I open Microsoft Word after my partner has gone to bed and I try to spit something out. Eventually, something clicks and a book comes out. Hoorah!


GABRIEL OJEDA-SAGUÉ is a gay, Latino Leo raised in Miami, currently living in Chicago. He is the author of the poetry books Jazzercise is a Language ( The Operating System, 2018), on the exercise craze of the 1980s, and Oil and Candle(Timeless, Infinite Light, 2016), on ritual and racism. He is also the author of chapbooks on gay sex, Cher, the Legend of Zelda, and anxious bilingualism. He is currently a PhD candidate in English at the University of Chicago.

February 21, 2019
The Spring 2019 Catalog is Here!
AnnouncementBooks

The Spring 2019 Catalog is Here!

by The Accomplices February 15, 2019
written by The Accomplices

The full Spring 2019 Catalog is released today. Are you excited? We’re excited. Meow meow. Order your copies now!


Experiments in Joy
by Gabrielle Civil

MEMOIR / PERFORMANCE ART / BLACK FEMINISM / #RECURRENT

More Details / Amazon / BN / Indiebound

Gabrielle Civil’s Experiments in Joy celebrates black feminist collaborations and solos in essays, letters, performance texts, scores, images, and more. Following her explosive debut Swallow the Fish, Civil now documents her work with From the Hive, No. 1 Gold, and Call & Response—whose collaborative Call inspired the title. The book also features her solo encounters with artists and writers, ancestors and audiences. Here you will find black girlhood, grief, ghosts, girls in their bedrooms, lots of books, dancing, reading, falling in love, fighting back, and flying. With lots of heart and the help of her friends, Civil keeps reckoning with performance, art and life.

Civil has made a book into a performance space and living archive. Words dance and bodies speak: together they invent languages of keen pleasure and ardent thought… Read, watch, listen and dream. Be transformed. —Margo Jefferson, author of Negroland: A Memoir


Losing Miami
by Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué

POETRY / BILINGUAL / ENVIRONMENTAL / #RECURRENT

More Details / Amazon / BN / Indiebound

Losing Miami is an experiment in grieving the potential loss of Miami to rising sea levels. What are we losing if we lose Miami, a seemingly impossible city formed out of Caribbean migration and the transformation of language? This book asks how we cope with loss at such a grand scale, all while the world continues to rapidly change.

In Losing Miami, Florida figures as the locus for family, exile, and climate change in this beyond-book, which commemorates and elegizes the id-beauty of the state. Like Eduardo Galeano, Ojeda-Sagué speaks in fictions and dreams and hurricanes in order to capture the myriad currents that shape the geography and history of the state, particularly in the Cuban-American community that he describes with tenderness and acuity in an inspired approach to inscription. —Carmen Gimenez Smith, author of Cruel Futures


Letters to My City
by Mike Sonksen

POETRY / ESSAYS / LOS ANGELES / WRIT LARGE

More Details / Amazon / BN / Indiebound

The poems and essays in Letters to My City combine two decades of field experience, research, personal observations, and stories told to the author, a third-generation Los Angeles native, by his grandfather and other family members, to interrogate all sides of Los Angeles, its streets, its people, its neighborhoods, as a means to examine the postmodern metropolis.

In innumerable essays and performances, frequently in public schools, he has opened a new generation’s eyes to LA’s extraordinary history of underground and underdog cultures. What Whitman was to Brooklyn, Poet Mike is to contemporary LA. —Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz


Psychopomps
by Alex DiFrancesco

MEMOIR / CREATIVE NONFICTION / TRANS/LGBTQ / CCM

More Details / Amazon / BN / Indiebound

Psychopomps follows DiFrancesco on the search for family, marriage, relationships with other trans people, attempts to build community, and for the elusive link to ancient beliefs about the special spiritual role of the trans individual in society.

Psychopomps is a collection of essays that examines not just the ways in which we are torn apart, but more importantly, the ways we knit ourselves back together. DiFrancesco has a deft hand with language and a keen insight into herself and others, and this collection captures what it means to be young and bent toward justice in this moment in time.

–Sarah Einstein, author of Mot: A Memoir

 


(the other house)
by Rocío Carlos

POETRY / BILINGUAL / MEMORY / GHOSTS / #RECURRENT

More Details / Amazon / BN / Indiebound

(the other house) is a book, a poem, a book of poems, that is also ghost document and prenatal correspondence. It was written as the author read through the draft of a manuscript for The Yellow House, by her friend, the poet Chiwan Choi. Ghost because it is a letter of the dead to the dead, but prenatal because the manuscript it addresses hadn’t been published yet. Her notes and questions eventually became a conversation with the text itself, with the speaker of the poems, with no one in particular, with the dead, with old lovers, with her own work, and with the author herself. This book is a response, a map, a thread of hauntings, a reconstructed memory of loss and the body, language and desire.

The Other House is less a blueprint and more of a map, a legend, and a history of a home assembled piece by piece from a language made from mismatched tongues. Carlos refuses convention at every turn. She takes your rigid expectations and returns them as polished stones. With Carlos, the shortest distance between two points is never a straight line. This book reminds me of everything I love about poetry.
–Joseph Rios, author of Shadowboxing: poems & impersonations



2019 Membership

Want all of the 2019 titles for one low price? For serious cats only. Get all of our 2019 releases (that’s 10 books!) for one low price of $100. (Books will be shipped as they are released in the spring, summer, and the fall, for a total of 3 shipments). Meowza!

Losing MiamiPsychopompsthe other houseLetters to My CityExperiments in Joy

[PLUS Entering the Blobosphere: A Musing on Blobs by Laura Hyunjhee Kim, Navigating With(out) Instruments by Traci Kato-Kiriyama, American Symphony: Other White Lies by Suiyi Tang, Between Appear and Disappear by Doug Rice, Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock by Hillary Leftwich]

Buy Now
$100
Includes shipping / For readers in the United States only

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February 15, 2019
Interview with Accomplice Gabrielle Civil
Interview

Interview with Accomplice Gabrielle Civil

by CCM February 12, 2019
written by CCM

What’s your favorite song to dance to?
In the studio: “Let’s Work”-Prince and “Vamos a la Playa”-Cibo Matto / this morning in my house “The Highway”-Tunde Olaniran because its groove makes me wiggle.

Describe your personal hell.
A chatty Lyft driver masking deep angst with descriptions of hot chicks.

What’s something that always makes you laugh?
The Muppets. Always.

You’re sucked into a bad movie and you have to choose a point in history to live out the rest of your years. What time do you choose and why?
 Right here. Right now. Let’s keep going. I want to be here when we win.

What’s a gif that you can relate to?
My body.

You’re hit by lightning. What happens?
My hair looks the way it did after that one hard perm in Detroit in my tween years. (The lye! the burn!)

It’s snowing outside, how do you feel?
Smug and pleased that I have moved to southern California where this is clearly not happening and I don’t have to dig out my car as I had to for many, many years.

What’s a cat picture you can get behind?
Hello Kitty. On a notebook with a matching pencil and eraser.

Where did you write most of your book? Why?
A whole bunch of places—Minneapolis, Detroit, Columbus, Dayton, Yellow Springs, Ohio, St. Louis, on an old farm in South Carolina with Lewis, visiting Rosa in Trinidad, Andrea’s sublet in LA in the summer where I could see palm trees and sunsets. I travel a lot and have moved a lot over the last five years. So this book is a mixtape of people & places.

What are your struggles and strengths as a writer?
Too brainy/ mushy/ academic/ nerdy/ earnest/ abstract/ dense/ poetic/ too black/ not black enough/ too much information/ too private/ too controlled/ self-aware/ refusing to be just one way or one thing/ questioning & yearning. Those are my struggles and my strengths.

Tell us a little about your writing process. What works, what doesn’t, what doesn’t but you still try anyway?
I strive to write to and from the body. I strive to connect writing and performance and life through a chronicle of performance body that would contribute to and honor an archive of black women’s creative expression. I am aiming for the long game—the idea that somewhere at some point, some one who really needs it will find my books (like a leaflet in that poem by Adrienne Rich) and that the words there, the images, will make a difference. I scribble in notebooks. I type on a screen. I put sheets of paper down in a room and move them around with my hands. I hustle and floss and cajole people to read my stuff now with my third eye open to the future.

 


Experiments in Joy by Gabrielle CivilGABRIELLE CIVIL is a black feminist performance artist, originally from Detroit, MI. She has premiered fifty original solo and collaborative performance works around the world. Signature themes included race, body, art, politics, grief, and desire. Since 2014, she has been performing “Say My Name” (an action for 270 abducted Nigerian girls)” as an act of embodied remembering. She is the author of Swallow the Fish and Tourist Art (with Vladimir Cybil Charlier). She currently teaches Creative Writing and Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts. The aim of her work is to open up space.

February 12, 2019
Interview with Accomplice Alex DiFrancesco
Interview

Interview with Accomplice Alex DiFrancesco

by CCM February 7, 2019
written by CCM

What’s your favorite song to dance to?
“Untitled” from In The Aeroplane Over the Sea. I’m ’90s trash.

Describe your personal hell.
I have a recurrent fear of losing my ability to speak and form words, or anything messing with my brain’s language centers. I’m aphantasic, so most of my inner life and memories reside in words.

What’s something that always makes you laugh?
Iggy Pop singing “Surfin’ Bird” to his cockatoo, Biggy Pop

You’re sucked into a bad movie and you have to choose a point in history to live out the rest of your years. What time do you choose and why?
I’d go back to any time when New York was dirty and affordable. Now it’s just dirty. It was my home, and the first place that I felt embraced as a human, and where I felt that potential was everywhere. I can’t live there anymore, and I miss it all the time.

You’re hit by lightning. What happens?
I fall down?

What’s a gif that you can relate to?

It’s snowing outside, how do you feel?
Cold.

What’s a cat picture you can get behind?
My favorite picture of my evil cat, Sylvia.

 

 

 

 


Where did you write most of your book? Why?

A coffee shop in Little Italy, Cleveland. I lived in a really shitty apartment and I had a crush on the barista.

What are your struggles and strengths as a writer?
I wish I could quit poking myself in the eye with this ink pen.

Tell us a little about your writing process. What works, what doesn’t, what doesn’t but you still try anyway?
I wake up at 5 or 6 every day and write for about 2 – 3 hours. It’s before the internet and my phone and life bother me. There’s an incredible peace in being the only one awake, and looking up from your screen only to realize the sun came up while you were deep in your work.

 


 

ALEX DIFRANCESCO, author of Psychopomps, is a writer of fiction and nonfiction whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, Tin House, Brevity, and more. They are a 2017 winner of SAFTA’s OUTSpoken Competition, and were long listed in Cosmonauts Avenue’s Inaugural Nonfiction Prize. They have recently moved to Ohio, where they are still trying to wrap their head around “Sweetest Day.”

February 7, 2019
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The Accomplices LLC is a literary arts partnership and media company dedicated to amplifying marginalized voices and identities, particularly writers of color, through traditional and new media publishing, public engagement, and community building.


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be/trouble The Depression Between Appear and Disappear American Symphony Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock Entering the Blobosphere Experiments in Joy Psychopomps Losing Miami the other house Letters to My City I Don't Write About Race Coldwater Canyon Learning to afar Tom Sawyer ICON Hollywood Notebook

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