A real dream come true to chat with Brad Neely about his funny and philosophical new book, You, Me, & Ulysses S. Grant, hero narratives, cults, and meat-bodies. Many thanks to Brad, and to X-R-A-Y for hosting the interview! For the whole shebang, click here.
Hey.
It’s me.
We made it to the end of the year, pals.
Last year was the first time I noticed that the coldest winter weather doesn’t coincide with the solstice, the shortest day (at least in the northern hemisphere). There are weeks of little light, and then weeks of bitter cold. Same for summer: the solstice brings the longest day and the most light, but I don’t feel the hottest heat until the following months. Maybe the weather is different where you live, but it was true for me again this year and I found something beautiful in that: how it looks doesn’t have to match how it feels. (And how it feels doesn’t have to match how it looks.)
As a writer, I tend to have long, slow seasons of output that no one sees. Eventually, months or years later—when I’m further away from the self who made the work—it (that self and that work) finally meets other people through publication.
The oldest poems in my forthcoming poetry collection, Cosmic Tantrum, will be eight years old by the time the book is out. It’s a collection I wrote years ago, burned to the ground (excepting those few old poems), and rewrote hoping to match the kind of winking melodrama of the title. It’s absurd and serious, like a life.
Here’s the official announcement screenshot, with a collage-border embellishment of my making. I’ve been in these before as an editor, but never for *~*~my own book, as the author*~*~
By the time I was given the okay to share the good news on social media, I had already known for several months that the book would eventually exist in the world. I’d had my private peak-experience solstice-y feelings about it before I could share the news with others. Maybe that’s the way. We are asked to hold and process so much on any given day—often so much pain and horror, so much to fight against and live alongside and through. I got to hold this joy and let it gestate a while, and now I’m glad to share it with you to pick up and set down again, or file away in your mind for a better time.
Because December is a month for accounting, beyond the book announcement, here’s What Else I Got to Share in 2023:
The Zürich-based art gallery Sgomento Zurigo commissioned a poem from me for their show, “Singalong,” featuring artworks by Ken Kagami and Anders Dickson. In addition to using the poem in the exhibition’s pamphlet, they hung it in the gallery!
My press-mate Michael Chang invited me to read a few poems at the launch for their poetry collection, Synthetic Jungle. Books Are Magic recorded the reading.
The Millions published my review/essay on Lucy Ives’s excellent novel Life Is Everywhere, Cyrano, Sarah Bernhardt, alter egos, and reality vs. “reality.”
Taylor Byas’s brilliant debut full-length collection, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times, which I had the pleasure of editing, was published in August and has already won the Maya Angelou Book Award and the Chicago Review of Books Award for Poetry!!
With Summer Farah, I co-edited Best Debut Short Stories 2023: The PEN America Dau Prize and wrote an intro about art as “content,” the writers’ strike, AI art as “a manifestation of an authoritarian fantasy: an ‘artist’ that can’t say no, and works for free,” and how these winning stories are the result of each writer’s choices and refusals. This year’s prizewinners were selected by judges Venita Blackburn, Richard Chiem, and Dantiel W. Moniz. The winning writers are Dailihana E. Alfonseca, Ren Arcamone, Sonia Feldman, Stephenjohn Holgate, Faire Holliday, Mengyin Lin, Verity McKay, Clara Mundy, Jo Saleska, Annabelle Ulaka, Lisa Wartenberg Vélez, and Patrick J. Zhou. You can read interviews with the winners here.
My essay on John Darnielle’s Devil House, homes with dirt rooms at their secret centers, and the nightmarescape of California real estate was published in Vol. 1 of the print edition of word west revue.
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s daring, touching, experimental memoir, Touching the Art, which I also had the pleasure of editing, was published in November. In a Between the Covers conversation with Mattilda, David Naimon describes the book in a way I love, as “speculative nonfiction,” a “beautiful gesture against, I think, the inevitability of history.”
After many years of submitting work there (by postal mail!!), I was really honored to publish a poem in ZYZZYVA. “Baby Island” appears in their Fall Issue, No. 126.
In honor of the Gemini Full Moon (and because I’m a Gemini Rising 😈 ), my tarot teacher Jeff Hinshaw invited me as a guest on their podcast, Cosmic Cousins. Jeff did deep reads of a few of my poems and explained how they relate to my astro chart, which was pretty sick.
I’m slowly making paintings that correspond with my poems, with excerpts of the text pasted on, zine-style. I partnered with a local print shop that will print and ship any ordered through my website.
And I read and edited over a million words this year in client projects—about 1.36 million across developmental edits and editorial assessments for novels, memoirs, story collections; copyedits, cold reads, and proofreads of novels and narrative nonfiction; book proposals; and misc. excerpts, essays, and stories.
I hope December is treating you as well as it can, and that you can linger for a while in this between-time of the end of the year. Wishing you catnaps (in lieu of hibernation) and hearty foods. Now that the shortest day has passed, each day offers a little more light.
If you enjoyed this newsletter and want more, sign up for my Substack here.
If you’re looking for feedback on a completed book-length manuscript, stuck-in-the-middle book-length manuscript, or individual story or essay, I’d love to work with you. You can fill out my contact form here.
It was an absolute honor to work on this collection with Taylor Byas, and I’m so glad everyone else can read it too and be floored by the power, grace, and agency of these poems. Taylor takes familiar forms and turns them on their heads, bends and sculpts them into something inevitable but surprising. Through it all, a clear picture emerges—of Chicago, of Black girlhood, of reclaiming the stories.
Inspired by The Wiz, this debut, full-length poetry collection celebrates South Side Chicago and a Black woman’s quest for self-discovery—one that pulls her away from the safety of home and into her power
I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times takes its inspiration and concept from the cult classic film The Wiz to explore a Black woman’s journey out of the South Side of Chicago and into adulthood. The narrative arc of The Wiz—a tumultuous departure from home, trials designed to reveal new things about the self, and the eventual return home—serves as a loose trajectory for this collection, pulling readers through an abandoned barn, a Wendy’s drive-thru, a Beyoncé video, Grandma’s house, Sunday service, and the corner store. At every stop, the speaker is made to confront her womanhood, her sexuality, the visibility of her body, alcoholism in her family, and various ways in which narratives are imposed on her.
Subverting monolithic ideas about the South Side of Chicago, and re-casting the city as a living, breathing entity, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times spans sestinas, sonnets, free-verse, and erasures, all to reimagine the concept of home. Chicago isn’t just a city, but a teacher, a lingering shadow, a way of seeing the world.
*A NATIONAL BESTSELLER*
Shortlisted for the Maya Angelou Book Award
The Millions, A Must-Read Poetry Book of Summer
“A buoyant blast of South Side love and ache, conversing with Gwendolyn Brooks and Carl Sandburg, finding room for Harold’s Chicken and Claudia Rankine.” —Christopher Borrelli, Chicago Tribune
“In prose both heart wrenching in one line and hilarious the other, Byas paints a portrait of life in Chicago with all of its ups and downs.” —Sam Franzini, Our Culture Magazine
“A literary descendant of fellow Chicagoan Gwendolyn Brooks. Like Brooks, the 27-year-old Byas turns the everyday aspects of life into the exuberantly extraordinary . . . Her collection is a love letter to the city that made her—and to her own journey of self-discovery.” —Diamond Sharp, Chicago Magazine
“With vivid imagery and a staggering wit, Taylor Byas paints portraits of her childhood on the south side and the city in warm hues . . . Byas etches out the beauty in the most mundane parts of Chicago with a reflective eye . . . I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times offers a weighty contribution to Black Chicago’s poetry legacy.” —Reema Saleh, Chicago Reader
“This impressive debut is a celebration of Chicago’s South Side, telling the story of a Black woman’s quest for self-discovery. Every poem is alive with the beauty and intimacy of growing up in the city . . . [A] stunning achievement whose lyricism echoes some of Chicago’s greatest poets, including Gwendolyn Brooks and Eve L. Ewing.” —Michael Welch, Chicago Review of Books
“It is impossible to understate the breadth and skill that Byas demonstrates throughout I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times . . . This collection is further proof that Byas is one of the most important voices in American poetry . . . We are experiencing a legend in the making.” —The Poetry Question
“[An] ecstatic debut . . . These nuanced and complex poems offer unforgettable snapshots of Black life in a vibrant city.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“The poet uses her strong voice to deliver evocative, richly described snapshots . . . In this promising work, Byas tells an intimate story of growing up.” —Booklist (starred review)
“My fellow Chicagoans, rejoice. Taylor Byas’s poems are visually stunning and formally inventive. They give us more proof that everything dope does indeed come from Chicago.” —José Olivarez, author of Promises of Gold
“So many of the greatest poets in the American tradition have been Chicago Black women and this debut collection is an announcement that one more has joined that proud tradition. Byas’s work unfolds with tender attention to all sides of life in the Black metropolis. From mulberry trees to daisy dukes to candy ladies to liquor stores, this work sings of the city that raised me in an authentic way, with a careful formal attention befitting the lineage of Gwendolyn Brooks. This is a work to cherish.” —Nate Marshall, author of Finna: Poems
“In The Wiz, Dorothy finds the song of Oz and follows it down the road, easily—Taylor Byas unearths that spirit-music, too, in her stunning debut, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times. These poems illuminate Chicago, the body, the sweat of condensation on the Kool Aid cups cooling in the heat on a summer day in technicolor memory and careful music. It is the Chicago that’s there all along among the emerald streets, the self that is always there, the loud and frightening sparkle of a father’s memory, and the sharp edge of a lover’s rough touch. It is the shades of love blooming, green, across the South Side of Chicago. In fresh, inventive, and living formal verse and free verse, Taylor Byas paints the golden path, brick by brick, and we ease on down it.” —Ashley M. Jones, author of Reparations Now!: Poems
“Some collections attempt to build new worlds. Others return to old worlds and write them anew. Byas’ dive into the familial and the familiar is an intimate project, one that questions motherhood, love, and mourning in tandem. All this, in a Chicago that shole ain’t what this world tries to make of it. Taylor’s Chicago flexes and bristles and brims with life. In Byas’ work, Chicago is a/the world, one reimagined as a clever, raw, and beautiful character. Clever, especially so because Byas uses a vast toolbelt stocked well with forms and voice(s) and smirking candor. She tells us of and tells us the truth. Byas writes, ‘what we want has so little room to grow,’ yet all the while, makes room, makes room, makes room. Move out the damn way already!” —Aurielle Marie, author of Gumbo Ya Ya: Poems
What is the point of communicating if no one is willing to hear you—if people talk over you, negate you, subtract you from whichever room you’re in? Lucy Ives’s latest novel, Life Is Everywhere, introduces us to the protagonist, Erin Adamo, on page 40, lets us spend some time with her, then directs our attention to the contents of her bag for 250 pages before returning us to her life. By the time Erin enters the story, we have already read a 14-page history of botulinum toxin and spent a while in the perspectives of substitute professor Faith Ewer and Faith’s nemesis and co-teacher, Isobel Childe. So when Erin first appears, we expect her to recede again, which is what everyone else expects of her.
But Erin lingers, irritating several characters throughout the book. No one seems to enjoy contending with her presence. They want her gone as quickly as possible, or to be someone else, or a blank slate to reflect the self-affirming story of their own superior intelligence, worldliness, style, etc. When Erin visits her parents, they’re furious that their guest is Erin and not Erin’s husband—but they’re also delighted to have an emotional punching bag. Characters are repeatedly enraged by Erin’s lack of presence, which just makes them want to squash her flatter, into nothing. How can Erin possibly communicate if she is negated every time she tries? How could anyone?
French actress Sarah Bernhardt, who is cited briefly in the novel, offers one option for being heard: cultivate an air of defiance, becoming larger than life, undeniable. Born to a Dutch Jewish courtesan and an absent father, she did not come from institutional power but became an institution herself. She had—or sculpted—the kind of outsized personality that made this possible: sleeping in coffins, pressuring her paramour to rewrite Shakespeare for her starring role in Hamlet, feeding her pet alligator “too much” champagne. But such excess isn’t always a viable option: Erin expects to be ridiculed for drawing any attention to herself—and her expectation is correct.
Another way to be heard is through disguise, a double life. Shed the you-ness that everyone’s familiar with, so that your words can flow unimpeded by other people’s preconceptions of the person uttering them. Perhaps the most famous example of this is the play Cyrano de Bergerac, written by Sarah Bernhardt’s lover, Edmond Rostand. (Ives herself is a fan; the play features heavily in the afterword to her 2019 novel Loudermilk: or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World). Cyrano is set in seventeenth-century France and follows two men who fall in love with the same woman, Roxane, and join forces in their efforts to win her love. Christian is handsome, but dull; Cyrano is a swashbuckler and a devastating wit who knows how to speak romance—but he has a big nose, so obviously nothing is going to work out for him. Christian is the face of the operation; Cyrano feeds him his lines and writes romantic letters on Christian’s behalf. Like two kids stacked in one giant trench coat, the pair becomes, briefly, a mecha-wooer.
(Thanks for reading the beginning! For the rest of the essay, please visit The Millions.)
Watching the end-of-year lists roll in from authors I admire, on the one hand, I feel like I didn’t publish much this year: a few poems, a book review. But it was gratifying to see so many books I had a hand in finally enter the world as beautiful, tangible objects meeting a brand new audience of readers. It’s also been a year of beginnings. I launched a newsletter mid-year, and started a business. I think it’s easy to feel like things we can make happen for ourselves “don’t count” or matter less, but lately I’ve been thinking of lighthouses, how they send out a glow that helps people orient themselves and find the glow’s source.
I’m grateful to the online journals that published my work this year, and to the amazing authors whose work I had the pleasure of editing, and/or who I had the honor of supporting in-house at Soft Skull and Catapult.
High-Risk Homosexual by Edgar Gomez, published 1/11/22. This hilarious, beautiful memoir on fighting machismo and finding joy in queer spaces was reviewed in the New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Lambda Literary, and On the Seawall, with other press at Entertainment Weekly, Vogue, TODAY, NBC News, the Los Angeles Times, and Oprah Daily,. And it’s sweeping the end-of-the-year best-of lists at Goodreads, HipLatina, Buzzfeed, and elsewhere.
I got to talk about High-Risk Homosexual at Publishers Weekly on 1/28/22, celebrating Edgar and their book being selected as an American Bookseller’s Association “Indies Introduce” title.
Path of Totality by Niina Pollari, published 2/8/22. This poetry collection, on the sudden and devastating loss of a child, is incredible. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly said “Pollari writes with straightforward, heartbreaking clarity. These poems are unflinching and powerful.” The New York Times selected Path of Totality as a best poetry book of the year.
MONARCH by Candice Wuehle, published 3/29/22. This novel, at the intersection of trauma psychology, Y2K aesthetic, and occult academia, received rave reviews at NPR (and was named an NPR best book of the year), ZYZZYVA, Chicago Review of Books, and the Wall Street Journal, with other press at NYLON, CrimeReads, Cleveland Review of Books, Luna Luna Mag, and Spin. MONARCH is also a contender in the 2023 Tournament of Books!
The Red Zone by Chloe Caldwell, published 4/19/22. This candid, funny, searingly honest memoir on PMDD was well received in reviews at the Washington Post, The Rumpus, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and Full Stop, with other press at AutoStraddle, the Cut, Electric Literature, BBC, and Thinx, and more.
Two of my poems— “APPLICANT MUST HAVE” and “LOCAL BEAST, KIND OF A LITTLE BITCH, ACTUALLY” were published at HAD on 5/1/22.
I launched this newsletter, Curiosity & Ritual newsletter, on the summer solstice, 6/21/22 :)
Death by Landscape by Elvia Wilk, published 7/19/22. This essay collection on plants, fiction, journalism, boundary-blurring, and the anthropocene was reviewed (and starred!) at Publishers Weekly, the New York Times, The Nation, and The Atlantic, with other press at The Paris Review, n+1, LitHub, CRAFT, The Creative Independent, and BOMB.
Normal Distance by Elisa Gabbert, published 9/13/22. This poetry collection on paradoxes and the tragicomedy of needing always to contend with time was reviewed at Publishers Weekly, Ploughshares, and Poetry Foundation, with other press at New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, LitHub, Chicago Review of Books, and The Slowdown with Ada Limón.
Best Debut Short Stories 2022: The PEN America Dau Prize, edited by Yuka Igarashi and me, with winning stories selected by judges Sabrina Orah Mark, Emily Nemens, and Deesha Philyaw, published 9/20/22. Catapult published a roundtable interview with the judges and PEN America interviewed all twelve winning writers. Other press at Debutiful, Book Riot, and LitHub. An excerpt of the book—Yuka’s & my co-written intro—ran at Hobart.
My poem, “I Could Signal Dominance in Email Correspondence as Trained But the Concept Is Offensive and I’m Baby” was published at Hobart on 9/27/22, with many thanks to guest editor Taylor Byas.
After I dispatched my 9/21 newsletter, my beautiful friend Jeff Hinshaw invited me to record myself reading it for their podcast, Cosmic Cousins. The episode aired on 9/25/22.
The Tiger and the Cage by Emma Bolden, published 10/18/22. This softly fierce memoir on endometriosis and the misogyny of modern medicine received great reviews at Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and LitHub, with other press at Shondaland, Motherly, Poets & Writers, BuzzFeed, Catapult, Electric Literature, Hazlitt, and Salon.
Annnd after ten years of freelance editing around whatever else I was doing, I officially launched my manuscript-consultation business as an LLC on 10/31/22, a nice Halloween birthday.
At the tail end of 2022, on 12/27, The Rumpus published my review of Elaine Hsieh Chou’s novel Disorientation, one of the best books I read all year.
See you all in 2023!