July is International Zine Month! Read a zine! Make a zine! 

This isn’t a feminist/literary link, but NPR has been doing important coverage of the Trayvon Martin case.

Some time ago, Broad! linked to this essay on the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope on our Facebook page. It made me revisit a piece that Rookie published about the stereotype. Both have got me thinking a lot about the significance of the MPDG trope. As someone who, full disclosure, plays the ukulele and really likes to wear thrifted dresses and bake stuff, I appreciate this insight from the Rookie article: 

“My point is, likening real-life women to MPDGs is offensive. It implies that our habits and interests are affectations designed to attract dudes so we can improve their lives. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl does not actually exist—she is by definition a fantasy. We should restrict the use of the phrase to when we’re criticizing one-dimensional characters in fiction. Otherwise it’s just another way to put women down.” 

Safety Pin Review is literary journal that will not only publish your flash fic/short prose poem online, but will also have someone from their “collective network of authors, punks, thieves, and anarchists” wear it as a patch for a week and document people’s reactions! I think it’s neat. 

In a somewhat similar vein, check out these 10 Guerilla Poetry Projects!

On the feminist/political front:

Wendy Davis is incredible.

And Ruth Bader Ginsburg is notoriously so.

At Autostraddle: queer equality must run deeper than marriage equality and the blow to the Voting Rights Act is a critical blow to civil rights.

On the literary front:

An interview with the excellent Roxane Gay.

Fund socially conscious science fiction lit!

Bookworms cope better with “disorder and uncertainty.” 

Queer literary journals Them and Plenitude Magazine both have submission deadlines next month.

And on the Beautiful Things front: America in rivers. 

VICE Draws Ire by Staging Female Author Suicides Annalisa Quinn, NPR 
Trigger Warning: suicide

The stylist and set designer are women. The models are women. But many famous male writers have committed suicide — David Foster Wallace, Ernest Hemingway, Hunter S. Thompson, just to name a few. So why is this spread women only? Is this meant to imply that women are the weaker sex, are frail, are beautiful in their frailness?

I have so many feelings about this piece/this debacle/these issues. I’m not ready to try to articulate them yet. 

To counterbalance that with some actual good art: a lovely story at Recommended Reading:

      Orange is the type of place they recognize. Its downtown is good-natured, doors open, doesn’t judge. There are old people holding hands, and there are children with faces like cherubic peach pies. There is a church on nearly every corner. The cars all stop at the crosswalks and wave pedestrians across. Nobody is in a hurry, but nobody is lazing about either. There aren’t any palm trees. There are maple trees and sycamores. There are valley oaks, blue oaks and black oaks, cottonwoods, aspen trees. She is so sick of palm trees, she thinks, that she could puke. She is so sick of parking lots and freeways and outdoor malls. She is so sick of the dry, flat expanse and how palm trees are just these stupid pillars, holding up the blanched, hot, stupid sky. “I love it here. It makes me want to bake lemon bars,” she says as they walk down the sidewalk. 

 At Tin House: a long-form essay in which Robert Boswell uses the story of how he met his wife to demonstrate different methods of characterization. 

There is a Mystery Book Artist in Edinburgh. 

Heather showed me these Portraits of Grandmas and their Cuisine from Around the World. I think it’s the best thing I’ve seen all week. 

Happy Friday! 

Brittany introduced me to an interesting new writerly blog, MFA Day Job. From their description:

Some of the writers featured here love their jobs. Others are just getting through the day. Some wake up at four a.m. to write, and some squeeze writing time in every few weeks. Some don’t have paying jobs, but depend on parenthood or volunteerism to create balance in their lives. What they have in common, besides a misunderstood terminal (it’s terminal!) degree, is a creative outlook and a belief that their educational background, despite the doomsday warnings, is not a liability.

The New York Review of Books on Wikipedia’s literary subcategories, and their implications.

Bitch Magazine compiled a list of female-hosted comedy podcasts. I’m not familiar with many of these podcasts yet- or comedy podcasts more generally- but this is really relevant to my interests as a broadcast media geek/feminist/human.