Writing
"Vierge Ouvrante, Opening Virgin" in Meanjin
"In these so-called pre-birth memories, there seems to be a universal vision of what the womb is like. Interestingly, when we feel unsafe or threatened in this life, we tend to want to return, and in some cases, attempt to re-create the conditions of the womb. We curl up into the foetal position. We crawl into the laps of our parents or embrace someone close to us. We purchase and wrap ourselves up in weighted blankets. Maybe we don’t leave the house for a day or two, spend the day in the clothes we slept in, the musty smell of our own bodies a comfort."
"It Was a Dog" in Granta
"A couple of days after she had gone to the hospital to have the baby, Renata’s mother called. They were ready to come home, she said. It was a boy.
A boy. Her father seemed pleased with himself. He poured the three of them glasses of wine to celebrate. ‘That poor child,’ her grandmother wailed. ‘He is cursed to this life.’
Secretly, however, she was happy. Little boys loved easier and were easier to love."
"In the Summer" in 3:AM
"The children bear only a slight resemblance to the father, who has a man face and a man body, saving for his pincer fingers. All three of them turn their sandwiches into a cascade of torn bread, and I pick up my sandwich and feed the man, who has been looking at me with the polite trepidation of a driving instructor. It is summer and I say: Don’t worry, I don’t eat in the summer."
"The Love of a Good Woman" in Catapult
"They said that they had been learning Spanish, and maybe they were in Mexico now, living free in shacks by the beach with the love of a good woman and a couple of kids."
"Always Elsewhere: On longing and Palermo" in Transnational Literature
"In returning to Palermo following a decade-long absence, the objects that had populated my childhood home – the Murano blown glass, the imposing grandfather clock, the seventeenth-century furniture, the gilt-framed artwork, the silver tea service – revealed themselves not as portals to an alternate life, but as tools of projected myth-making."
"The Kathy Acker That You Want: Reading I'm Very Into You" in Writing From Below
"We are hungry for the moment when the figure before us believes they have slipped from our gaze. We are especially hungry for this in our icons, whose very bodies become metonymic backbones within their work and our culture. Acker’s work plays with this idea, in both a reclamation of the body and an othering of that body. In the very publication of I’m Very Into You, we see the sacrifice of giving your body over to your art, and grappling with a public who believes they own stock in it."