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nonfiction

Interview with Accomplice Gabrielle Civil
Interview

Interview with Accomplice Gabrielle Civil

by CCM
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.

Interview with Accomplice Alex DiFrancesco
Interview

Interview with Accomplice Alex DiFrancesco

by CCM
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.”

book
BooksNews

#CopingWith: 10 Essays & Interviews That Are a Gift to Your Mind

by CCM
written by CCM

Just because it’s nearly summer doesn’t mean it’s time for your mind to go on vacation, especially now. Here’s some essays and interviews that you should check out:

1. Julia Fierro – “The Secret to My Success? Antidepressants” (NY Times)
2. Brandon Taylor – “Being Gay vs Being Southern: A False Choice” (Lit Hub)
3. Catherine La Sota – “Late to the Party: Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar” (Electric Literature)
4. Alexis P. Williams – “Interview with Aziza Barnes: A Queer Black Poet’s Quest for Liberation” (Vice)
5. Toni Morrison – “The Work You Do, The Person You Are” (The New Yorker)
6. Kaveh Akbar & Kazim Ali – “Silence and Breath: Kaveh Akbar and Kazim Ali” (Asian Americans Writers Workshop)
7. Brandon Shimoda – “The Night Cafe” (Entropy)
8. Lucie Bonvalet – “The Future of Traumatic Memories” (Catapult)
9. Porochista Khakpour – “How to Write Iranian-America, or The Last Essay” (Catapult)
10. Kate Schapira – “On Political Change, Climate Change, and the Choice to Not Have Children” (Catapult)

Joanna C. Valente is the author of Sirs & Madams, The Gods Are Dead, Marys of the Sea, Xenos,  and the editor of A Shadow Map: An Anthology by Survivors of Sexual Assault.

Aaron Burden
BooksNews

#CopingWith: 13 Nonfiction Essays You Need to Read

by CCM
written by CCM

If you’re going to read anything, read these.

1. T Kira Madden – “The Feels of Love” (Guernica)
2. Sarah Gerard – “An Incomplete List of My Failures” (Hazlitt)
3. Libby Leonard – “How to Be with Others” (Volume 1 Brooklyn)
4. Morgan Parker – “How to Stay Sane While Black” (NY Times)
5. Mira Ptacin – “What Happens When You’re Pregnant in Prison” (Elle)
6. Esme Wang – “I’m Chronically Ill and Afraid of Being Lazy” (Elle)
7. Porochista Khakpour – “My Life in the New Age” (VQR)
8. Jayy Dodd – “Why I’m Scared of White Women” (The Establishment)
9. Aila Boyd – “My Life as a Trans Woman Teaching High School in a ‘Bathroom Bill’ State” (Broadly)
10. Jenny Zhang – “They Pretend to Be Us While Pretending We Don’t Exist” (Buzzfeed)
11. Kate Moore – “The Forgotten Story of the Radium Girls” (Buzzfeed)
12. Nicole Dennis-Benn – “Growing Up with Miss Jamaica” (Elle)
13. Margaret E. Jacobsen – “I’m Non-Binary, And Here’s How I Talk to My Kids About It” (Romper)

Joanna C. Valente is the author of Sirs & Madams, The Gods Are Dead, Marys of the Sea, Xenos,  and the editor of A Shadow Map: An Anthology by Survivors of Sexual Assault.