xTx - A tiny, hardcore story collection of brutal, ugly and beautiful: A part of me inside a part of you but you didn’t know it yet

xTx, Normally Special, Tiny Hardcore Press, 2011.

"Listen: For better or worse I read a ton of books, & I am treated to the growth of presses, the sophomore-slump of authors, the brush of writers with greatness & the heavy sink of a hole in a book that opens & will not shut up again. So when you read what is a book that is a book like xTx’s Normally Special, it is important to write of it where everyone can see, & where people can learn to read the words that are words that mean so much.
from ‘The Girl Who Doesn’t Know She Has Everything’:
A part of me inside a part of you but you didn’t know it yet. Not then. Instead, you kept on crying whenever you felt so lonely it made you want to swallow pills, cut yourself, say yes to boys. If you had known I was there, waiting to be born, maybe it would have made a difference. But you didn’t. It wasn’t time. You had to keep falling down. You had to endure everything that would eventually become scars.
I reviewed xTx’s chapbook from Safety Third Enterprises here at BigOther, & while I shortly stated my enjoyment of that chapbook & the words that xTx uses, reading Normally Special is seeing that chapbook amplified, exploded, opened up like a star blooming.
from ‘Marci is Going to Shoot Up Meth With Her Friend’:
I know that no matter how cute I would be or how pretty you thought I was, you wouldn’t reach across to touch my face.
If all I want is lying beside you and you not wanting that moment to stop, even with more than enough clothes on, is that not such a small wish that could be granted?
The stories in Normally Special are artfully connected, linked by thin chains like those we hang around our necks with wrecked-love at their center. The book moves fluidly, shapes as it goes, & doesn’t ever leave us feeling severed. If Roxane Gay’s editing is to blame for this book, then glory be to her reader-eye. Or if this is just where xTx is headed, hoorah, I love following these blooded tracks in the sand. & if this is what can be expected from Tiny Hardcore Press, I am game to read the next & the next & the next. Understand that this is bone goodness wrapped in massacres of lovely, & if I wasn’t before, I am now an official fan of xTx." - J. A. Tyler

"There are, on occasion, tiny things that make huge things happen in the world: the lump of plutonium in Little Boy, the butterfly that flapped its wings in Africa and caused Hurricane Katrina, the first fish that realized it could breathe air. And most recently, xTx’s book Normally Special.
There are many things I could say about this book. But if I was allowed only one thing, it’s that xTx has the gift of the perfect moment. This is a special gift. She understands how to take what other writers might write as an entire scene, and whittle it into the precise, devastating moment that gets at what can break a reader wide open.
To call these moments brutal would be an understatement, but they are also kind. They treat a reader with a tenderness you wouldn’t expect, with breastplate split so open, a pumping fist on your heart, a violence necessary to sustain life.
I keep thinking of the atomic bomb. I am in a loop. Something so terrible, so awful, and yet, it was dropped twice, both equaling a body count of over 200,000 people, but doing so saved hundreds of thousands more lives than they cost–a kindness in all that devastation, an end and a hope to something that had been so horrible for so long." - Chris Newgent

“It is difficult to masturbate about your father, but not impossible, as it turns out.”
“I am the Champion of Failure.”
“What I do remember most though, are the fireflies and how she proved that they were real by squishing one across her palm. It left a fluorescent streak. It made me feel like screaming.”
“On my way down I’d wonder if I would ever be found and how nice it would feel to be looked for.”
Raw is the first word that came to mind. And for the debut collection of fiction from Tiny Hardcore Press, that seems about right. Roxane Gay in all of her wisdom and courage has published Normally Special, a tiny, hardcore book of flash fiction by the always powerful xTx. It would be too easy to dismiss this work as sensational, as simply shocking, or existing only to titillate. No, these tiny daggers leap off the page speaking emotional truths, fearless in their desire to show us how the world can be when people are not seen, when daughters are abused, and what these women turn out to be later in life, these memories of innocence lost, these moments of victimhood, turning dark caresses into ownership, into shattered lives that exist nonetheless.
Reading these stories, I found myself thinking that I hope to God these things never happened. The voices spoke with such authority, such pain and surrender, that the words shook me to my core. Does it add to the experience, this idea that maybe something really happened? Does it make it that much more painful to watch, these masturbatory fantasies about fathers? In the end it doesn’t matter, not really. What matters is the reality on the page. The gut punch, one fisting after another, beauty held up to the light, and then destroyed, trust betrayed in brutal exactitude, childhood lost forever.
Even in the daily rituals, the words add up to something heavy, something ugly, and yet, the kind of words that must be uttered every day in dysfunctional homes everywhere. In “The Importance of Folding Towels” a husband berates a wife in front of a crying son. It is not difficult to be moved by the final words:
“Little Sam, still crying, now at my leg, it’s in his arms, his arms go up, my arms are folded, my fists are clenched.
‘Do it.’ Slam. He throws a towel. At my face.
‘Mommy has to fold a towel now, son.’ Slam.
Sammy doesn’t understand and neither do I. I decide to get this over with. I fold the towel. I fold the towel. I keep folding the towel. I fold all of the towels I can. I fold every towel in the world.”
Who hasn’t had a fight with their spouse, their lover, the littlest thing rapidly becoming so much more than that? The way the dishwasher is filled, the way the clothes are put away, the way the toothpaste runs over the sink. It is a simple moment, a lesson to be learned, a preference that is being ignored. But it’s not this fight at all, it’s everything, it’s everything added up and the sum total is the death of the relationship, a withering love that will not be doctored, held together by a glue called children.
There are so many moments in this slim volume of words, openings that grab you by the shirt collar, endings that slap you in the face, everything in the middle more than you wanted to know, and yet, you do not look away. To witness these things is to have knowledge, and with knowledge there is power. This will never be my reality, this will never exist on my watch, this damage is what’s wrong with the world, and these things need to be seen.
One of the longest stories in the collection “She Subjected the Sun” is also one of the most compelling, and with a slight infusion of fantasy, of science fiction, this magical reality paints a surreal picture of a future that will never come to pass. Unless, it’s already here:
“The auction was hours over. The Coveted were made ready and released to their Keepers. The Buyers, who could now relax, settled in around the edges of the room, boasting their profits to one another behind the backs of hands, taking care not to sit near any of the Dispatchers. A confetti hum rose and fell as tense excitement built in the dim; the testing had begun.
Mine took me with an owner’s grip to a stool at the bar. I sat, hands folded, eyes down. I knew to be quiet and become small (Canon 14) as he went through my documents, asking me several questions about similar subjects; a drilling. He gave only what he wanted. I took it, which was my place (Canon 17).”
The Canons scattered throughout this story are a powerful chorus, voices echoing, filling the air, subservience, surrender, and freedom. Added up they create a dystopian society where the rules have changed, where existence is only at the hands of your Keeper:
“We stop at the Processor before exiting.
‘Papers, please.’
My Keeper hands him a thick folder and the Processor scans the pages within, shooting glances at me as he reads.
‘Looks good,’ he says, closing the folder. He eyes me again.
‘Okay, let’s code her. She one for the cages? We offer transport help if you need it.’
‘No. She’s gonna be a Subjected. My cages are full enough already.’
My heart leaps and untwines at the sound of the word, ‘Subjected.’ My future has been classified. I can walk this path, I think. I hope he is not too cruel in his needs. Even if he is, I must endure. I am a Subjected now."
Throughout the process, the screening, the testing, the Subjected knows what is coming. She enjoys parts of the subjugation, a heat between her thighs as he inserts his thumb into her mouth. Who has the power here, who controls the actions, the results? Is it the dominant or the submissive? The final words:
“My Keeper drives the transport into the out of doors where the world is blazing with daylight. I surrender my eyes to the sun; holding my breath as the burning blindness reaches its peak then retreats. I am proud. I have beaten the sun.”
Normally Special is compressed, it is reduced to a salty strength, the fat and fluff boiled off, stripped down and left before us glimmering and tainted and alive. There is a beauty in this book as well, the voice of someone who has not given up, who wants to be heard, to be seen, and in the end, to be loved. It’s what everyone wants, in one way or another, this redemption, this sense of worth, of being special. Do not pick up this book if you are riddled with falsities, do not preen or pose or pretend. Respect the work here, open yourself up to it, and let it fill your veins with ice and fire, surrender to the truth on the page." - Richard Thomas

"Travel. Read. Keep traveling. Keep reading. Riff. And so it is with Normally Special by xTx from the Tiny Hardcore Press. There was travel and there was read and there was this well received and much buzzed collection by its mysterious author, and as we read it we thought the stories here are fleet of foot and flash, sometimes slamming and sometimes tender, or wanting to be, and providing a survey of sorts of both the female experience, violence, burgeoning sexuality, marriage, and parenting, the latter of which we definitely don't see enough of, but also of female writers and styles, some Margaret Atwood here, a touch of Mary Miller realism there, a splash of Kim Chinquee, and as all the pieces swirl around, leaving the reader at time breathless, other times sad, we couldn't help but think that ultimately, these are stories about control, losing it, wanting to gain it, fantasizing about it, having it ripped away, and maybe worse of all at times, having it imposed on us, even in small, but terribly cutting ways, such as the protagonist in "The Art of Folding Towels," who is never going to get it right, can't get it right, won't get it right, because there is no right and never will be." - Ben Tanzer

“It is difficult to masturbate about your father, but not impossible, as it turns out,” begins one story in this collection, voiced by a woman who feels certain that the workable image she finally manages to manufacture is “made up. It’s not any kind of fucked up memories dredged up from some forgotten, deeply buried incidents.” “I am pretty positive,” she adds. “I mean, there were other things, but never with my dad. I am pretty positive about that.” Incest is presented, on the one hand, as an extreme of masturbatory fantasy—a challenge of the onanistic imagination—and, on the other, as a formative trauma, standing as seeming pretext for the voraciousness of sexual desires or, at least, the calloused competitiveness of setting out to jill oneself off to “difficult” material. Violence and lust, violation and physical need, the vague warren of childhood memories and the hot rabbit hole of the adult moment—all these are churned together in one afternoon’s solitary act.
We are knuckle-deep here in the deeper themes of Normally Special: horror casting the die of later identity, emotions skulking in the shadowy realm “somewhere between sex and fear,” and, finally, the knotty entanglements of the relationships between parents and children. Incest plays a recurring part in this last theme, but it is only a part; for every story involving a rapist uncle or the claustrophobia and olfactory hallucinations experienced when a father calls his daughter “princess” over the telephone, there are stories here, too, from the point of view of a mother, about, to some extent, being a mother, even if some of these mothers pack machetes into beach bags. We are among women in these pages, and while the writer who calls herself xTx makes forays into fantastical horror, even the dreamlike irrational reality of Kafka, as with Kafka, the theatrical setup is meant to reveal the banal; metamorphoses or ghost stories or parable-sounding tales about mice or moles all stand as diagnostic devices for our more “normal” domestic lives. For xTx, the “special” quality of a figure skater fallen in the midst of traffic or the extended sadism of a vacation-theme daydream are all, under their bells and whistles, “normal.” As with the masturbateur rigorously contemplating her father, the “fucked up” isn’t a category apart, not something “special” or out there, a province solely for the institutionalized, the broken, the guest stars of daytime talk shows; rather, what xTx’s characters find as they grind themselves deep enough into their desires is that they are all fucked up, have all been fucked up. The rest, for these women, is postscript.
Some of these women load up on throwing stars while some design theme dinners in the hopes their son will eat. Others clench tight and fold the towels as ordered or retreat into imaginary exertions of force on a world they so utterly cannot control. But the idea of violence carried out in an “almost sexual motherly way” is so different from that carried out by men—the violence of fathers and faux uncles and creepy neighborhood guys, the raging violence of wild gangs.
The success of xTx’s narrators, her voices, is how surprised they are, despite everything. These are innocent voices, contemplating their scars. Yes, innocent voices narrating their masturbatory experiments, their rapes. And what they speak here is both the initial experience of bafflement at how fucked up the world is, how the world fucks people up, and, as they age, mature, raise children, their continuing bafflement, with, as one character says how “very, very useless” all defenses are, how terribly and terrifyingly unsafe the world is. Even masturbation—the private indulgence of fantasy—is not safe.
In one of the shortest and strongest stories, the white-hot “Fireflies,” the characteristic xTx narrator looks back on one formative night, a night devoid of high trauma. Maybe there’s a highway accident, or a near accident, but mainly there was just a bar in an Ohio town, a “pretty good-looking Podunk guy” who gets over eager but not overly aggressive. “I coaxed him back up to my mouth with something about saving the best for last or something probably lamer or more clever and then I don’t remember but I escaped,“ she writes. Instead, this night takes on such special resonance because of all the later nights—not spoken of here—that followed in its wake, because of the fact that “the lessons that were learned that night are remembered but not necessarily practiced,” and because, in this regard, that night in Ohio takes on a special significance, an initiatory moment, the horny Podunk juxtaposed with the first experience of fireflies, with learning “that fireflies were real, which, when that happens to you, feels like anything magical could really exist.” Except it is also, of course, the inverse. Here is a girl in a bathroom of a bar in Ohio, innocent, staring down at the head of some horny Podunk as she guides him up and away, but here, too, is that girl years and years later, speaking in these pages, staring into the abyss that she first caught a distant glimpse of that night in that bar bathroom.
The subjects at the heart of Normally Special are ugly, horrifying. The author’s gift is to portray this horror slant-wise. Moreover, the women who have endured and are enduring this horror, the women who speak here, are also remembering—re-feeling, viscerally, as in the haunting story about insects and Ohio—what it was like to not yet know, to be “pretty positive” about the world, seeing magic in fireflies and simple pleasure in ice cream. They are, also, still seeking pleasure, and—as in the story of the girl masturbating to what she’s pretty sure are manufactured memories of her father masturbating to her—experiencing such pleasure as a complicated amalgam of their pasts. Sexual pleasures prove treacherous navigation; these are intimate stories charting examples of such steering—stories of hard-learned lessons and stories of enduring practice." - Spencer Dew

"xTx, the anonymous author of Normally Special, a collection of stacked and striated stories, is sickeningly and beautifully aware of her subject's presence at the front of a metaphorical classroom.
The opening story, "For the Girl Who Doesn't Know That She Has Everything," predicates her position at the front of the class. Part assertion of authority over the endearingly maudlin little student(s), and part affirmation of support and love, it yanks the reader into the sort of uncomfortable second person address that we are all becoming more comfortable with by the day. This sort of claustrophobic vignette announces to the reader (and rightly so) that there will be no jumping off. No respite. No shying away. And no letting go of these narratives for a very long time. It signifies that the reader is now under her direction. We don't know exactly who we are or what part we will be playing, but we are too compelled to leave our seats.
There is play of projection throughout the book. It's most striking in the story "The Honking Was Deafening." The narrator details a scene of a fall in a crosswalk by a Chinese figure skater. xTx infuses the moment with a cinching reminder of one of the gnarliest veins in the book: the Daddy. The narrator says, "I knelt beside her and she smelled so beautiful and I thought, nobody here that is watching us, none of these people knows this, about her lovely smell." The Daddy of this book doesn't notice, and whether he is the Daddy of the skater, the narrator, the author, or our own is moot. She notices the smell, the sweet smell of this skater in "bubblegum pink, silver sparkle leotard," and so do we. I say the smell was sweet, but the word xTx uses is "beautiful." Here there is room for interpretation. Here we are not limited by specific description. Left to my own devices, this Chinese figure skater smells like a transsexual stripper named Foxy on stage at The Garden in Des Moines, Iowa, because it was the first and last place I smelled beauty. This give and take of the visceral is perpetually at play. "The Honking Was Deafening" twists this experience as it ends with "a 'don't fuck with me' resonance" in the voice of the skater. This hits the heart with a dart of fiery time-released poison. This pain is untouchable. The poignancy of some moments can never be translated from one's experience to another.
The book slices deeper with "The Mill Pond" and the heart-lacerating search for authenticity. It inflicts fresh puncture wounds exploring the already battered theme of the impossibility of escape, specifically the escape from the environment, and the bulge of a pubescent body. Tinkerbell, the narrator of "The Mill Pond," is racked with the ever-burgeoning self-awareness of a preteen. She grapples for a hold on the motivation behind her own search as she seeks out the elusive meaning behind the millpond. She doesn't "know why they call it a mill pond because there is no mill." She says that "maybe there was one there back in the 1800s or something."
Tinkerbell searches for "relics" and "ruins," envisioning "wooden beams with iron spikes," along with other uninviting glimpses of old. Her mind flashes like a computer screen scrolling through a slideshow of Google images of mills. The message in this piece is murky but pungent. Dignity is a myth, a fairytale. Old things like mills, and ponds, and lecherous neighbors only appear to "look dignified, even though they were just old pieces of something bigger." The static nature of adults seen through the eyes of this narrator forces the reader to choke on the sin of disuse and the shameful sameness of adults. What a disappointment are adults, mired in stupidity and hypocrisy. What a huge, fucking disappointment. We agree. While xTx is our temporary, metaphorical teacher, we can agree.
Even though it's not possible for alleviation to come from the hands of another, we can do it for ourselves -- at least according to my therapist. Even though reading this book, reading every word of this riveting book, will maim you, I highly recommend this experience. Guaranteed to set the standard for unsettling books you'll read this year, but read it anyway. It will be okay. She is here. Our teacher is here. For a time we are not in front of our own classes but are visiting the innermost hallowed classroom of xTx. We are in her building. We are a part of her class. "I" am in her class. Open up and read. We no longer need to stand outside like the tiny child on the cover of this tiny book. She is in. Our teacher, xTx, is in. We are welcomed. Let the inculcation begin." - Sara Gerot

"Normally it takes something special to get me excited when it comes to new literature. xTx’s debut collection, Normally Special, is one of those rare pieces of work. Almost all of the twenty-one collected stories have never been published before. The collection, released by the new outfit Tiny Hardcore Press (headed by HTML Giant contributor and PANK co-editor Roxane Gay), is a kick to the groin and a fist to the gut all in one. This 96-page book packs quite a punch and offers the reader a glimpse inside the genius of one of the truly talented writers out today.
The only problem is that I don’t know the author’s real name. If I did I’d write to him/her and congratulate them for restoring my faith in modern literature as well as for inspiring me to become a better writer myself. This is one of those works that not only excites every nerdy bone in your body, because its wordplay and placement of phrases are top notch, but it actually makes you jealous that you weren’t able to produce something of this caliber.
My favorite story is “A Brief History of Masturbation.” Its pure honesty and dry wit take this taboo subject and flash a large spotlight on it as if xTx were manning a prison guard tower. But all of the stories in this collection are equally equipped with gut-wrenching honest observations or beautifully thought-out details that give the reader a front row seat to the character’s lives.
“Marci is Going to Shoot Up Meth With Her Friend” is another great story. At its core is a longing for the reciprocation of love. Unlike many love stories this one doesn’t seem to get bogged down in the trivial bullshit heavy fantasies of what love is and should be. Instead, the story moves forward with brutal speed that requires the reader to follow along or risk being left behind.
I now know my words won’t make you love me.
But I will keep trying because every wall in the world is waiting for the impact of my head.
The blood is still no consolation. Can you believe that?
I could go through each story and run through my favorite lines, but then you’d be left reading a 96-page review.
The language used throughout the book is varied yet consistent. xTx’s words are brutal yet beautiful in the way they flow seamlessly with one another. If I had to make a comparison I would immediately look to another contemporary author, the amazingly talented Blake Butler, author of Scorch Atlas. xTx is unique in that the stories being told are done so with a refreshing sense of honesty and not even a morsel of self-doubt. What makes this collection great is the author’s controlled craziness. In that I mean no matter how many emotions are being conveyed or how crazy a character may seem, xTx is always in control, always striving for something greater; namely a story that conveys what it means to be human in today’s society.
My only complaint with this collection is that some of the stories feel as though they were abruptly cut short. As much as the brevity of the pieces added to its immediacy and instantaneous impact, I would’ve liked to see some of them fleshed out a bit longer to add some more emotional layering, thus giving the reader more complex characters.
My advice: go and get the book for yourself and see what all the fuss is about. Normally Special is just that–a special rendering of normal events. A deceptively simple juxtaposition, because it’s clear that this collection was meant for those willing to abandon their preconceived notions of storytelling. So go in with an open mind, and you’ll surely be thankful that you did." — Patrick Trotti

"My title really ruined that oxymoron belonging to xTx's latest story collection "Normally Special." I've not read too many contemporary writers with nom de plumes, but of them, I like xTx best.
Frankly, I wasn't so sure that'd be the case. I mean, xTx reads like the title of a Vin Diesel movie (fitting, since he too is operating under a nom de plume, thank god). Happily, there's where similarities end because xTx doesn't tell stories as they might be by The Diesel. She tells visceral stories that make you feel something, sometimes something terrible (an emotion you weren't sure you understood / weren't sure you were capable of having), but, hey, if that's the effect, that's the effect. And these effects are enviable.
I've actually enjoyed the pocket-size quality of a lot of these various indie books I've gotten my hands on of late. (They make for great, surreptitious reading while I'm at work, for example.) Others, which I'll have further comments on, no doubt, are Ethel Rohan's "Hard to Say" "Artifice 3" (a great indie literary magazine), "Big World" by Mary Miller and "AM/PM" by Amelia Gray.
These are books by lesser known but equally worthy writers as those you'll find in prominent places like The New Yorker, Paris Review, Harper's, Granta and so forth. A Patrick Somerville to match a Gary Shteyngart, a Roxane Gay to match a Z.Z. Packer, a near-every late 20s-early 30s female writer (namely, Alissa Nutting, Amelia Gray, Lindsay Hunter, Jill Summers, Faith Gardner, Mary Miller, Frank Hinton, Ethel Rohan and, of course xTx) to match Karen Russell and Tea Obreht, a Michael Czyzniejewski to every Stephen O'Connor. And you get the idea. I like and have read many contemporary authors of all persuasions / categorizations. I refuse to concede that the better known ones are of a higher literary caliber. If anything I might say the opposite is the case. (I know, I know, how very provocative / controversial of me to side with what is presumably the anti-establishment (the independent publishers) but then again sort of its own smaller, niche establishment in its own right. Well, I'm siding with somebody! Dammit!).
All right, the point is xTx. Her stories fill you with grit, ask you to get gritty, enjoy making you feel like you're being abraded by something especially coarse. And I grant that this might sound a little tongue-in-cheek, but that's only because I have trouble expressing these types of emotions. (Yep, admitting a little vulnerability here, folks.)
My favorites of "Normally Special" were "Standoff" - which I was on the verge of tears reading, but I didn't cry mostly because of manliness and mine being what it is. But the story is fucking powerful sad. I loved it. The mother and son relationship is tortured by all kinds of emotion, by guilt and by loss and by uncertainty. "She Who Subjected the Sun" is an ambiguously dystopian vision, one in which we are able to understand women have been returned to a state of subjection, or more so, really, made to desire being made subjects, perfectly docile, welcoming their subjection. It's something akin to a normative imposition of the sex slavery trade.
Many of my other favorites were colored by a kind of ambiguity. Maybe it was ambivalence, ambiguous ambivalence. It got me to thinking and to feeling, which I like." - Matt Rowan

"Normally Special, published this year by the newly established Tiny Hardcore Press, can be divided into two categories, mostly on length, although that simple difference in word count also marks a diversity of voice and story complexity. This is not to say that the shorter stories in Normally Special are in some way less vibrant than the longer stories. They work instead as intense little flashes of voice or scene that mark an important beat between the fuller, longer pieces.
The shorter stories and flash fictions in Normally Special take up with subjects that often make a reader unsteady: sexual violence, incest, female masturbation, abuse, brokenness. Unlike other fictional negotiations of similar issues, however, these pieces are never long enough to move the reader out of the initial moment of discomfort. The narrator of xTx’s stories appears to revel in opening wide an unpleasant subject, beckoning the reader right into the heart of the pain, and then skipping town on exactly the most unnerving emotional tone.
In “Father’s Day,” a young woman is on the phone with her father, wishing him a happy day while the memories of his abuse silently complete her side of the conversation. The story is not only difficult because of its explicit treatment of the subject,
“Bye, dad.” He’d always be the opposite of melted and I’d never feel like a princess. Even when he’d call me princess soft and soft, then louder and louder as if he were trying to make it true.
…but because it also begs the question as to why this woman would call her father in the first place. Why do they still have a relationship? What other layers of brokenness has this narrator left out? That ambiguity explodes this very short piece into a hinted story of far-greater implications.
The narrators of these short pieces are worth commenting on because there is very little differentiation between them—all first person, all with a similar emotional tone, and all concerned with the pain, aches and losses from a related set of categories. This harmony gives the collection a real sense of unity as well as gives the reader a feeling that these are all the fictionalized abstractions of one person’s experience. In this way, the reader becomes an authorized voyeur of the narrator’s confessions and revelations. This intimacy is both unnerving and a source of the collection’s appeal.
The longer stories, however, because of their ability to involve more detail and real narrative complexity, do not create the same narrator-confessor/reader-voyeur impression. Despite also working from a first-person narrator, these stories each create a separate and distinct narrator negotiating a unique fictional landscape, alive with its own set of difficult questions.
“The Mill Pond” is a story of childhood loneliness and abuse, although the abuse is conveyed to the reader through guarded reveals, obliquely told in the defeated tone of Tinkerbell, the story’s 13-year-old, overweight narrator. Tinkerbell spends her time staring at the sky above a small pond in her neighborhood, agonizing over her ugliness and looking, in a bored, uncommitted way, for the ruins of an old mill. Those ruins become a metaphor for the kind of change that Tinkerbell is looking for in her life. “The Mill Pond” is a painfully accurate snapshot of that particular moment of adolescence when a person begins to worry that life may never, in fact, get any better.
The most fascinating of the longer stories is “She Who Subjected the Sun,” a frightening alternate reality involving sexual and other forms of slavery. There is a strong echo of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale in this piece but the echo is of a wilder, starker, more explicit kind. Atwood tells the story of a woman who was not much different, finally, than her readers and who was then easily praised for her bravery in rebellion against the dark system that controlled her. xTx turns the reader’s expectations upside down by writing a woman who finds a form of pleasure in her subjugation. She is horrified and terrified but she is also wholly conquered:
When the gun goes off there are reflexive screams from many of the Coveted, but not me. I am still busy with my mouth and tongue. “Good girl,” he says, praising my focus. I want to smile, but cannot. I know my Trial Master would be proud. More Dispatchers begin making some of the failed Coveted succumb and I don’t react. Their Buyers will be upset. I am again thankful I didn’t scream.
“You are doing well.” He pulls his thumb out of my mouth and rubs its slick wetness all over my lips, pushing them like clay, smearing them slippery. I close my eyes and make no attempt to stifle a moan.
He sees this. He knows. He laughs. “I have made a good investment.” And then, “Your testing is over.”
It is a deeply unsettling story, one which raises questions about violence in sexual relationships, about oppression in a general way, but also about the human ability to find pleasure in pain when this is the only kind of pleasure on offer.
And finally, just a word on “An Unsteady Place,” one of the best pieces of the entire collection. This is the story of a family away at the beach, at what should be a happy and relaxing vacation. But the mother begins to experience a disturbing disconnect from her children, her husband. xTx expresses the woman’s alienation in a series of surreal images and a story which becomes increasingly like a gruesome fairytale:
At the table, mottled beaks open wide revealing teeth spirals that wind crooked in rows upon rows and I know it’s not food they want. It rots before them piled and stacked hiding sailboats, crabs, and coral. I think it might be me they want, but even that I am not sure of. Nothing tender has come from them. I have not seen it. Have not looked for it. Have not given it.
Finally, what binds these two categories of stories together is their defiant femininity, perhaps not the first adjective that comes to mind with respect to Normally Special, but in its most basic sense, it is the truest description of the collection. These are women’s stories, extremely intimate with what it feels like to be a mother, a daughter, a sister, a lover. Most of the experiences that xTx explores, however, are the negative ones. The ways in which the world makes it difficult to be a woman. This is the painful territory of Normally Special, and although its darkness makes reading the collection an often disconcerting experience, the honesty and carefulness with which these stories present their difficult truths transform that disquiet into a form of sincere admiration." - Michelle Bailat-Jones

"I’ve been a fan of xTx’s work for a while, and I’ve really enjoyed watching her great talent develop into this sure-handed, deeply-felt style that rubs bloody raw and and yet feels oddly compelling, oddly comforting–like the relief after a boil is lanced. The pieces included in Normally Special are without a doubt her best yet, I’m sure in part due to the excellent editorial instincts of Tiny Hardcore Press editor Roxane Gay. And I have to also give Roxane props for recognizing this raw and screaming talent and putting it in its own little and lovely book.
But of course the majority of the credit belongs to the brain of Ms. xTx herself. And it is a strange and monumentally understanding brain. I’ve read reviews that express some terror of the author, in a joking way of course, but I found the anger and panic and denial and desperate unhappiness and sometimes desperate happiness in these stories to be absolutely refreshing rather than terrifying. The excess of emotion often coincides with or causes a certain kind of unattractiveness, perceived or real, that’s usually not quite polite to write about in books today. Women are supposed to be beautiful when angry–they’re not supposed to have snot running down their faces and wear striped shirts that don’t fit over their fat bellies. They’re supposed to be confident/angry, not scared/falling/panicked/flailing/angry. They’re not supposed to be sometimes smothering, sometimes wildly inappropriate, sometimes indifferent as mothers or lovers or both.
In short, women are supposed to have their shit together nowadays. And in xTx’s stories, they mostly don’t. Nobody does. Which is not only refreshing, it’s truth-telling. Not just about women, but about everybody’s deep dark falling-apart-insides. Inside everyone is a place where a little girl hides in terror or a child watches a mother with nothing but disgust. In “Because I am Not a Monster,” the xTx writes, “I will never find you. Don’t worry. You are safe. Unless you do not want to be safe.” We’ve all got parts that are ugly and scary, and xTx specializes in guided tours through these parts and places, for those who would dare to follow her.
As she writes in “Things I Could Tell You,” she wants, desperately, to tell us the things we aren’t supposed to tell about. She takes our hand and helps us understand that even in these places, sometimes even in the ugliest actions, words, and emotions, there can be love. There can a be a kind of brief respite, a grace that releases us, even just for a moment or a second or a year. There can be pain and sadness and broken people but even there, a story worth telling, a voice worth hearing. A pain worth feeling because even caught in its teeth you might be glad to be alive. You might be glad to be you, even in all your ugly." - Amber Sparks

"I had never heard of xTx or any of her writing when Mike gave me a copy of Normally Special and said, "You'll like this, it's really freaky." An introduction like that not only sparked my curiosity more than most conceivable things but made me compare xTx's writing to what was perceived to be my taste in literature. The verdict is that Mike was right, I did like Normally Special, and my reaction was directly related to its high content of freaky (see also off-kilter, bizarre, uncomfortable, queer, and "wtf"). This book is the first of California-based writer who publishes under a pseudonym in part because she's written a lot of things she's described as too fucked up for people in her real life to read. Learning this was curiosity-sparker number two. Then I read the book, cried on pages 11-12, and from pretty much there on felt an extremely wide spectrum of emotions including humbled, warm, disconcerted, embarrassed, empowered, and hungry. xTx explores loneliness, violence, and sexuality when they appear in the most unlikely of situations. Her characters are multi-layered and are, for the most part, total freaking weirdoes. This collection of short stories tests the limits of what we can empathize with and is successful if at the very least for its ability to simultaneously shame and make champions out of its readers. More specifically, after I read this book, I realized what a freak I am. And that I kinda like it.
"An Unsteady Place" appears in the second half of the book and is about a woman vacationing with her husband and children at a beachside rental. The house they stay in is nautical-themed down to the handles of utensils. The idea of a fail-proof vacation with a perfect family is supposed to seem unsettling in this context, especially after the speaker says in what I imagine to be a pretty deadpan voice, "There is no way to make a mistake here." This is pretty much setting up everybody in the story for failure, and sure enough, a few pages later our protagonist can't look her children in the eyes because she's convinced they are turning into sea creatures that will devour her alive. She counts the starfish decals on the walls incessantly, and when she gets the same number everytime, the normalcy of that seems to drive her further into madness. "An Unsteady Place" is an example of a time where xTx creates a character who goes completely crazy for what seems to outsiders as irrational reasons, if they even notice the growing psychosis in the first place. Another example is in "The Mill Pond," which deals with a totally different kind of outcast, a chubby, pre-pubescent girl cursed with a bitterly ironic name - Tinkerbell. She toes the edge of what it means to feel sexual, and her underdeveloped sexuality, especially in relation to the polluted motives of the adult world around her, feels disturbing, if not ominous. Without making any kind of negative connotation about sex in general, this story, like "I Love My Dad. He Loves Me.", draws parallels not between sex and being sexy, but sex and estrangement from other humans. Something is really weird and sad about Tinkerbell laying on her back in the sun, pulling her shirt up to her "boobies," and rubbing her belly, alone with her thoughts. I thought for a second that I felt sorry for Tinkerbell and her contemporaries but this reaction was probably just a defensive one. You know how sometimes you pity or hate a quality in someone else because you actually just see it in yourself? I felt this way about Tinkerbell, which I think is a pretty cool/ intense reaction for a writer to get out of a reader. We surprise ourselves by never feeling better off or more sane than these characters, even when they are doing things like fantasizing about a boy named Fritos stabbing himself 33 times in the belly. Other than being compelling and often charmingly relevant, the characters xTx creates in these stories are remarkable for a reason I didn't fully understand until "I Am Not a Monster," the last story in the book. This story's title and most of its first page sound like a character statement of a suspiciously unreliable narrator. But then the narrator says this:
"I am the most timid of monsters. They have removed me from my position within their ranks citing words like fail, coward, reject, weakling, useless, stupid, worthless, dumbass. I tried to hang within their monster ranks, I did. I do. I try every day. It's a reenlisting of a reenlisting of a reenlisting. Every day I think, I am there and every day they kick me out. They make me go back to my life. They know what I know and that is, I have too much to hold on to so I cannot truly be a monster."
I think it's amazing how this character, despite functioning as a complete social outcast, is even a freak perceived by the rest of the freaks. The "freak elite" perhaps. Because she (I assume she is a "she," there is something astoundingly feminine about the majority of narrators in this book), has "too much to hold on to," she cannot fully embrace and be open with her nonconformity. She is certainly a monster, but in a way less tangible way than being green and slimy and living under your bed. That would make things too easy for her. Instead she must privately deviate from the average human emotions, desires, and fantasies. You can't pick her out of a crowd because she looks exactly like everyone else. Only she understands how fucked up she truly is, and this understanding brands her perpetually alone. "I Am Not a Monster" was a perfect end to Normally Special for me because I felt this really exciting catharsis where I was reminded of so many other characters in the book and how they are all secret freaks in the same strange, lonely, undisclosed way. I also started thinking about other secret freaks I know. I thought of Dexter and Dennis Cooper's George Miles. Monsters with pretty brown hair and healthy relationships with their dads. Chubby comic-book readers or young mothers at beachside vacation rentals. Anybody whose weirdness goes completely unsuspected by everyone else, and maybe even by themselves. xTx has said in interviews that she writes under a pseudonym to protect the people in her real life from seeing this ugly, dark, societally "wrong" side of her. It's like under the guise of this alternate persona, her inner freak is unleashed, free to be as wild and disgusting and honest as her characters wish they could be.
Anyways, if that's not incentive enough to read this book, then maybe I should mention its size. It's small enough to fit in my purse, which is so small that I can't carry around a normal wallet anymore. It's cute. It's a cute, unassuming, strange little read." - Phoebe Glick

"First you notice it's small. On the cover there's a bright red shirt, a lemon yellow dress, a picture of a really clean city street. Even small—because of it, maybe—the book's an object you want to touch, open and inspect. The whole thing fits in your pocket.
In some ways, xTx's collection, Normally Special, wants to emphasize this compactness. The stories are brief, and the observations precise. Yet on finishing, it seems as if you've been asked to peer through a microscope only to find some highly complicated system, a series of disparate parts interlinked by swaths of sharp emotion. The voice slowly overwhelms you. xTx's sentences expand way beyond the brevity of the pieces. Whether because of the peculiarity of the observations or the acoustics on which they are carried, sentences like "My mom won't buy me new tank tops because she thinks forcing me to wear tops that are way too small for me is a motivation for losing weight" and "It is difficult to masturbate about your father, but not impossible, as it turns out" and "I keep him home from school and make him nest with me in a fort of blankets. Pillow walls pile around us; soft protective," build into a stunningly poignant inspection of the narrators' inner lives. Normally Special ignores the double irony of its tiny size and pseudonymous author and allows us to become uncomfortably close with the women who tell these tales.
While most of the stories are short, there is a smattering of longer pieces. Three stories in particular, "Standoff," "She Who Subjected the Sun," and the final piece, "Because I Am Not A Monster," allow xTx to work outside the compact and impressionistic mode that dominates the book. In a story like "She Who Subjected the Sun," a depiction of a strange dystopia where women are auctioned into a variety of degrading roles they must play for their new "Keepers," xTx shows the potential of her imagination, where her personal and at times disturbing themes are given room to develop.
Many pieces reveal some insecurity or attempt by a narrator to make sense of her interaction with both the world and herself. The best of these, "I Love My Dad. My Dad Loves Me" and "A Brief History of Masturbation," tend to be short and episodic. They also are some of the most powerful pieces in the book. Both serious and funny, these awkwardly salacious stories complicate not only the narrators' experiences but also the readers' voyeurism. They may leave you feeling like the narrator at the end of "A Brief History of Masturbation," who, when trying to masturbate to an image of an abusive uncle from years before, simply says, "It made me feel bad and good at the same time."
These narrators live difficult lives, both physically and emotionally, often brought about by the strains of domesticity. These stories tease out the worries of mothers, children, lovers, and the alone. Still, these often painful dynamics are buoyed by a voice that's equally angry and playful, longing and confused, and at its best, both intimate and familiar.
Normally Special is a small book. It fits in your pocket. Be careful when you open it: The sentences, the images, they're stronger than you suspect. Once open, you'll have a hell of a time putting them back inside." - Gavin Pate

"I was delighted when this tiny book arrived in my mailbox a couple days ago, and I ate it up, licked my fingers, flipped the pages, and then returned to the shelf to look through the whole thing again and suck up all the little crumbs. xTx's stories floor me. Her plots are struggles, brutal, feminine, painful, but told from the point of view of real survivors. The tone is masterfully balanced. Experiences may be excruciating for the narrators in these stories, they may be abused and confused and even losing their minds, yet they persist and appreciate the beauty beyond - and in - perversion and darkness.
Things I also love about these stories and others I've read of hers: unlikely phrasing and plots that seem to creep up insidiously and choke the reader by surprise. "Because I Am Not a Monster" exhibits xTx's perfect control over her reader so well, a hypothetical journey-not-taken by a perhaps-psychotic lover a coast away from lover/victim. "I Love My Dad, My Dad Loves Me" is wonderfully unsettling in its insistence. "An Unsteady Place" eroded into surrealism so gracefully I hardly noticed it happen.
Some phrases I loved:
"But I will keep trying because every wall in the world is waiting for the impact of my head."
"...the tangle of emotions that tightroped somewhere between sex and fear."
"His bare feet make tiny tracks that the sea licks away at crooked intervals. It is like he is being tasted and savored."
"The home of this house is strictly a facade. It's like I can see bone, blood, and skull through razor cuts in a perfect face: a whore in a habit."
"...when I retreat their laughter sounds like the scream of a kite string cutting the wind."
"I came out and saw them lying there in the dark and their legs were splayed like their arms were splayed across a store window but completely beautiful and easy to hurt, in that, I could do anything to them if I wanted to."
"'One must try,' I told you after my arms were as empty as your expression."
And lots more.
Her prose bites and hurts. The narrators feel so close it warms. This book is stunning and worth buying and the stories worth revisiting. This is the first publication coming out of Roxane Gay's Tiny Hardcore Press and I hope it's only the first of more little lovely books to come." - Faith Gardener

"xTx is a very visceral and raw writer. So much is going on beneath the surface of these stories and it's often ugly and vicious, even if the surface appears relatively still.
I've never been a member of the cult of the sentence[1]. After all they are parts of a whole. A bunch of beautiful sentences that refuse to add up just don't matter in the end. But what writer doesn't go crazy for a beautifully constructed sentence?
xTx has a number of those, particularly the story, The Mill Pond, which is sentence after sentence of wow:
"She says this in a voice that I would like to punch."
"I stare out the window in the direction of the mill pond and his voice becomes cicadas."
"We would talk about things that people talk about when they don't really have much to say to each other, water treading things."
Some stories I wished were more sustained, less fragmentary. Perhaps if they went on longer they would be more difficult to take. People do bad things to each other. Men do bad things to women. xTx made art of this fact and it's really good." - Rion Amilcar Scott

"xTx has two books published Normally Special and Nobody Trusts a Black Magician. She has been published at Lamination Colony, Metazen, Word Riot, and a million other places. I don’t actually know if xTx is a human being or a hamster but her book made me have a lot of emotions. Her stories “Standoff” and “The Mill Pond” show an amazing understanding of the craft of writing but at the same time they don’t lose emotion.
Who are some of your favorite authors and describe why you like them? But also what writers have influenced your style?
- I always feel like I’m going to take a bullet for admitting this but, whatever. I’m not going to lie so I can fit in with the cool kids. The mainstream authors that always come to mind when I am asked this question are Stephen King, Chuck Palahniuk and Jonathan Ames. Stephen King because I started reading him when I was super young and the stories he told blew my mind. I loved the evil versus good and the ugly and the weird and the scary he always brought. I love Chuck because that shit is fucked up good, yo; his stories, his characters, the detail, the uniqueness, the strange. I can never get tired of Chuck. I like Jonathan Ames because he’s so honest, self-deprecating and funny.

But to be honest, after I devoured all of their books, I really haven’t read these guys in a handful of years. Especially since I discovered the online lit scene and started reading all the zines that were out there and finding out there were ‘regular’ people out there making words that could also blow me away.
The books/authors that have blown me away recently are: Paula Bomer/Baby & Other Stories, Rachel P. Glaser/Pee On Water, Lindsay Hunter/Daddy’s, Danielle Evans/Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, and Alissa Nutting/Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls. Amazing books…all of them.
I can’t really say that any writers have influenced my style, at least consciously. I mean, maybe years of reading King and then Chuck put me in a place that savors the fucked up, dark and magical. Or maybe that place was always there and King and Chuck found them. If anything, being exposed to so much online literature taught me that there are so many ways to write and so many ways to tell a story and that gave me the confidence to trust in how I wanted to write things even if I felt that maybe it was the ‘wrong’ way.
Do you think that you are a minimalist or someone that just gets to the point?
- I don’t know. Do I just get to the point? Am I a minimalist? You tell me. I tell stories the way I tell them because that’s how I felt they should be told. Should I be adding more words? More detail? Silicone? I guess I don’t feel my writing is minimal. If what I write is not full of fluff or filler it is not something I do consciously, it’s just how I decided that bread should be baked that day.
How do you usually write, do you make notes, edit a lot, write on a type writer and then put it on a computer, write at night, what is your method?
- My writing usually starts with something/anything that hits me in the nuts on an emotional level. That could be a song, a phrase, a feeling, a news story, an experience, a photo or a baked potato lying on the sidewalk. It’s anything that gets really loud inside me and I know I have to “do something with it.” It has to “become something.” If I am by a computer, I’ll write that thing down in a word doc or I’ll email it to myself. If I’m not by a computer, I’ll voice memo it into my phone and write it down later. If I have time to write, I’ll just start writing with it. See what comes. Usually it will come out in a flow of maybe a paragraph or two or three and then I’ll put it away, take it out, write on it, put it away, take it out, write on it, etc., until it’s done.
I do most of my writing when I come in early to work and on my lunch hour and on weekends. I try to sneak in some writing during weeknights but that’s hard because of my television addiction.
I am a slow writer and I like to get every sentence and every word ‘right’ before moving on to the next sentence. I can spend my entire lunch hour on a paragraph. It’s frustrating.
I use a computer mostly. I write longhand in a notebook when I don’t have my computer.
I like how in “Standoff” it features a mother. I have seen almost no literature on the Internet that features what it is like being a mother. The story really blew me away, the idea of the existential mother story. I don’t think that has really been done often the way you did it. Could you supply some information on that story, some background, how long it took you, maybe if you cried while writing it?
- The background on that story is a friend of mine telling me how her in-laws repetitively complained to her that their grandson (her son) was too thin. They would bring it up on every visit, which were many, and would question her about what she was feeding him or if she was feeding him. They were her in-laws so she really couldn’t tell them to fuck off. They never would complain to their son, his dad, only to her. I felt bad for her because her son was skinny but he did eat and it was like they were deliberately attacking her motherhood. It got me thinking about maybe a situation where a son was starving and about the helplessness of a mother to fix something like that. About supposedly having control— because as a parent you are supposed to be in control—but at the same time having no control because, short of force feeding, one has little control of what another person puts into their mouth. Then I had to think of a reason that maybe would keep a child from eating and that’s when I thought about the father dying. It just created this double-whammy of emotion for this poor woman who had the bad luck of me writing her into this story of mine. How long can a widow and a mother be strong before she just gives up and wants to sleep in a fort made out of blankets? That’s the story Standoff tells.
It’s funny you asked about crying while writing it. I didn’t, though I remember being very sad while writing it; sad for the helplessness of the mom and how lost she was. But I actually didn’t cry over this story until I watched Michael Filippone read it during his video review of it on his book review blog, Wingchair Books. (www.wingchairbooks.com) I actually was moved to tears in at least four spots while he read it. It was odd, I mean, since I had written it and had written it so long ago, I didn’t think it would move me like it did. It felt, sort of, conceited and wrong, like masturbating to a picture of myself or something.
Could you give an explanation why you are so private. It seems strange, everyone under 30 seems obsessed with putting all of their lives on the Internet, and then there’s you, keeping your privacy.
- The irony is that I do put my life all over the internet. I just do it in a slightly creative and ambiguous way. I might not give specifics, but it’s out there in one way or another; through my blog, twitter, through my stories and poems. In a sense, I might actually give more of my life to the internet than I give to my actual life. I just don’t assign my legal name to it is all.
The easy answer on why I am so private is because since I started blogging back in 2002 I’ve written a lot of fucked up shit that I don’t want people in my real life knowing about. I’ve written a lot of private feelings, a lot of them ugly and a lot of them dark. There is a freedom in being able to do that without having repercussions. I like not having to use a filter. If I used my real name I’d probably filter the shit out of a lot of things I write. I think. I guess. I assume. I mean, I’m just not sure how that would affect the finished product.
In “I love my Dad” you go very deep. I really can’t imagine going much deeper than that. Do you live your life in this deep manner or are you, say if we met in person, very normal and polite. Because I know writers when you meet them, they are crazy emotional and all over the place. What impression would a person have if they met you in person?
- The fine people I met at AWP this year could probably answer this better than I could. I would say that I am far from a crazy, emotional, deep, writer person. I think most people that meet me think I am nice and funny and stupid and normal and polite. I do not wear all black and hide inside bulky sweaters. I have no tattoos or facial piercings (anymore).
I think that the impression people would get if they met me would be that they couldn’t believe I wrote a story like that Dad story, but then, after hanging out with me over time, they might believe it after all.
How did you feel about Catherine Lacey’s article on HTML Giant
- http://htmlgiant.com/craft-notes/fear-bravery-of-pseudonyms/#disqus_thread.
I liked that she liked my book and I didn’t have a problem with her assumptions about me. I mean, with this blatantly fake name I write under, I think it makes people believe I am hiding terrible things and maybe I am. Maybe I’m not. I just think that the thoughts she wanted to get across didn’t come through clearly and maybe that’s what got everyone going in the comments section.
It was interesting to see all of the comments and thoughts about writing under pseudonyms; the pros and the cons.
Had I known I would’ve had any sort of ‘success’ with my writing I might’ve chosen a better fake name, one that didn’t draw so much attention. xTx was a stupid accident.
How do you feel when you are in a grocery store?
- I feel like a part of a bigger whole when I go to the grocery store. It’s sort of like the same feeling I get when I use a public restroom at a large sporting venue or an amusement park with all of the people going in, shitting and pissing and going back out again. It’s something we all do. It makes me feel connected. I smile more at people in the grocery store than I do in a lot of places I go to. We are all there with our carts filling it with things for our lives.
You repeat words a lot. Like in “The Mill Pond” you write, “I feel like a stripe. I am a stripe.” Is there something that influenced you to do this or did this just come about naturally?
- Any time I repeat words it’s because I am trying to evoke something; usually a mood or a feeling or a pacing/rhythm. It usually just comes organically. Not something I set out to do, it just becomes something that feels right for the story.
In the example you gave it is more specific to the character’s self-worth. First she feels something and then she decides, separately, that is what she is. If she had stopped at just feeling like a stripe that is one thing. She takes the extra step at resigning herself that that is what she is. For example, “I feel like a loser,” is different than saying, “I feel like a loser.” And then, “I am a loser.”
On page 21 of Normally Special” there is a paragraph that starts with, “Even though my touch knew better,” did you cry while writing that. I mean, that paragraph it just breaks the heart. I have been walking around since I read that paragraph just thinking, “God, what a paragraph.” I think there are moments in art that are just so perfect, so heart breaking. Like the solo in Jimi Hendrix’s All Along the Watch Tower, or the end of the video for Johnny Cash’s Hurt, or that scene at the end of “On the Road” when the old man says, “Go moan for man.” When the Will of the human spirit, maybe the animal sprit, the primitive spirit that goes back the jungles of Africa, the Apacha hunting the buffalo, the spirit of the Romans riding their horses across Europe to conquer it. That thing, deep down in us, that is universal, and stretches across culture and time. When I am trying to say, what did you feel like when writing that?
- Wow, Noah. Wow. Okay. Well, to answer your question, I felt like I had lost someone while I was writing that. I had to get into that space of what it would be like to wake up one morning with someone you love, someone that you thought you’d be spending the rest of your life with, lying dead next to you. It wasn’t a pretty place. I felt horrible for her and I never want to be her. I don’t want anyone to have to be her. That’s what I felt like." - Interview by Noah Cicero

"In ten words (no more, no less), describe Normally Special.
- A tiny, hardcore story collection of brutal, ugly and beautiful.
If you could choose a different name, what would it be?
- Deathrock Jones.
Tell me how “Little Girl in Yellow in Soho” represents your stories.
- I can’t get enough of this photo. Maybe that’s what I want people to feel about my book. It’s a fascinating photo that prompts a lot of questions, a lot of wonder. Who is that little girl? Why is she so all alone on a city street? Where are her parents? That cute yellow dress means she is so obviously loved, but yet she stands alone. Abandoned? The way she is framed in that huge doorway makes her appear even more tiny and vulnerable. There is a faceless man in the foreground wearing a color that makes bulls charge. There’s a contrast there, between him and the girl that evokes…something. I think this cover captures a lot of the themes of Normally Special.
(Special thanks to my homeboy, Robb Todd, for capturing this moment and letting me use it for my cover. Word Lyfe)
You can only have one best friend. So which one is it and why?
- A year ago that would’ve been a hard question, now it is easy: Roxane Gay, because she is the other half of me.
‘Standoff’ is one of the best stories I have read lately. How much of you do you put in your stories?
- While that’s not something that can be adequately measured I’d have to say it’s somewhere between all of me and most of me.
Before the testing, what Trial brought the most tears?
- The one that involved mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers.
How beautiful was the last Tinkerbell sound you heard?
- It was so beautiful it made me pause. A Tinkerbell sound from a wind chime I couldn’t see delivered to me on a summer afternoon. There’ s a quiet place in the wind where a sound like that sound carries, where it floats, and that was equally as beautiful, the way it came to me.
At 10 p.m. what words do you enjoy?
- Mermaid, shattered, clandestine, tenuous, flotsam, scurrilous, transgendered and black.
When do the starfish count more than 33?
- Never. They are always 33. She doesn’t know that and even if she did, she’d still keep checking to make sure.
What are two things you can not tell me?
- 1) Who I love. 2) Who I live for.
This is a no-fat collection. Describe your editing process.
- I write one of two ways: In an initial burst with relative speed throughout or one inch at a time. Unfortunately, nine of out ten times, it’s mostly the latter; especially on any of the longer pieces I write. The reason for this is because I am constantly editing. I continually go over what I’ve just written until I feel it’s “right.” I have to pick exactly the right words, phrasing, tone, rhythm for each sentence and I have to make sure each sentence has the right words, phrasing, tone and rhythm for each paragraph and then I have to make sure each paragraph has the right words, phrasing, tone and rhythm for each chapter and then I have to make sure each chapter has the right words, phrasing, tone and rhythm for that story. It’s maddening. It’s time consuming. It drives me nuts. I hate it. Make it go away. I want to write like a river.
In ten words (no more, no less), describe your next project.
- A dark, mysterious, strange journey full of magic and suffering." - Interview by bl pawelek
xTx, Nobody Trusts a Black Magician, Not A Punk Rock Press, 2009.

“The stories I enjoyed most were written in first and second person—violent yet sweet, beautiful but ugly and reflecting both love and a yearning for things we want but can’t have.”– Roxane Gay

“What I felt come through these lines was a blatant and at times vulgar lust that was employed to mask her underlying need for love.”–Jason Behrends

“There are no pieces in [NTaBM] about which I am ambivalent: half the book is hysterical, the other half disturbing.”–Laura Ellen Scott

“Holy shit. These are some amazing words.”–Barry Graham

"I looked at it when it was released and read a couple stories but I was, to be honest, kind of nervous because I didn’t know if I was going to read something that might bother me and I didn’t want anything to change my opinion of the writer . I finally decided to stop being a baby and of course the title story is not even remotely about what I thought it was about and it also uses the word “fuck” approximately 111 times so it is, of course, excellent. Before I get into the book, I’ll note that it is available in multiple formats including MP3s so you can listen if you don’t like to read but you’re reading this so you probably do… like to read.
xTx’s writing is quite interesting in how she creates this really raw intimacy with her writing and tells stories that are easy to relate to, stories that are naked, honest and express the desires and anxieties many people have but often don’t acknowledge. I read an interview with Zachary German on HTMLGIANT where he said he finds the ordinary very exciting and I see that exciting ordinary in this chapbook. These stories take very ordinary situations and reveal big, extraordinary moments within them like in “Losing the Pee Argument,” where she writes, “I looked like one of those magazine covers where the famous star poses nude, but you can’t see anything because she’s cockblocking you with her pose,” and it’s a simple line, really, but it creates, for me at least, that perfect moment of recognition. We’ve all seen those poses. The stories I enjoyed most were written in first and second person—violent yet sweet, beautiful but ugly and reflecting both love and a yearning for things we want but can’t have. So many of the stories in this chapbook are love letters, but the good kind. In Black Friend, which really should be heard because it sounds cool, I got a little tense again because I wondered what the story would be about but there’s interesting, witty stuff going on with language and wordplay. I laughed and then I felt uncomfortable and then I thought, “Is this how white people think?” and then I laughed some more. There were a couple stories I didn’t get like Christmas Eve which didn’t seem to fit with the rest of the collection but other than that, Nobody Trusts a Black Magician hits all the right notes. I printed it out and that’s huge for me. Paper is serious. As an aside, I’ve never seen a black magician or a girl magician for that matter. They might be like unicorns." - Roxane Gay

"Here is a collection of non-traditional character snapshots, often vulgar, often disturbing, and always appreciated for its unwillingness to dodge moral conflict. xTx’s Nobody Trusts a Black Magician beautifully relies on shock to entice the reader, offering visceral descriptions of subject matter not often tackled, even among the non-profit micropress word, from which this collection comes. xTx is not shy, and it’s damn hard not to love her material for that very reason.
Each story has a stark, matter-of-fact tone reminiscent of a Noah Cicero work, and often carries bizarro sensibilities in terms of subject matter. But, neither of these descriptions should deflate the moments of poetry peppered throughout the collection. In “Saving the Meat,” a very plausible reality sets the story’s tone, laying out a basic plot about one character’s confusion over another character’s insistence on saving a few small leftover meat slices from her dinner. But the final lines pierce the calm reality:
On the drive home, I make a silent plan to save the slices. Come midnight, penlight in mouth, I’ll jump over the razor wire and come courageous (pg. 9)
This juxtaposition of the absurd with the real is what gives Nobody Trusts a Black Magician its power. Take this section, from “So Much of the Same,” which showcases xTx’s skills collectively (brackets mine):
I want to lie next to you in a bed covered in four-day-old sweat, male and female cum, and wine [the disturbing]. Lying there I want to fight over the same breath with you [the emotionally arresting]. Eyes closed, lips so close to touching. Sun rising then setting. Getting lost. Drowning [the poetic]. (pg. 10)" - Caleb J Ross

Orange Alert Interview

Read it
xTx, He Is Talking to the Fat Lady (Digital Chapbook w/Audio), Safety Third Enterprises

“xTx’s collection is a no nonsense, no remorse, study of lust, love, and hate. In 11 stories she covers the spectrum of human emotion all expectorated with a deft hand and a crooked smile.” – Ben Spivey

“xTx’s poetic stories utilize the modernist’s love of language and sub-conscious dreamlike visions to say very real things about pain, abuse and desire. There is an urgency to these stories, as if they needed to be told. As the reader, how wonderful to feel that need, that purpose; these stories are the opposite of empty.’ – Paula Bomer

"It will rip your head off." - HTMLGIANT



xTx and Mel Bosworth, Shudder Pageant

„Shudder Pageant is a collaborative multi-media flash novel (as opposed to “micro-novel” – a novel told in 140 character increments) by a couple of young and edgy authors who are probably too good for their own good.
The plot of the story is a spiral, not linear, account of three friends; Jacob, Sophie and Cody, whose lives are irrevocably altered by the enlistment of Cody’s brother Brody into the Army Reserves. The spiral of events downward (as it turns out) is mirrored in destinations like hospital floors and street gutters before the thread spins out. And it is back along that thread that the pageant of shudders parades.
“The more broken one bucked wild horse on the bed, red foam spurting from his mouth like water from a pinched garden hose.
First nurse leaned back, the leather strap straining damp on her palms.
‘Get the fuck over here and help me!’
Second nurse flicked the cigarette through the window. In the distance, explosions hung in the sky like angry memories. She passed the bed of the less broken one. He’d been awake for 10 hours now but hadn’t spoken a word. The 33 stitches through his lips were thick and sloppy, the result of an overtired and fawning young medic.
He whimpered like a broke-leg pup. Second Nurse frowned deeply.
She knew his time would come, and when it did, she’d be the one holding his hand.”
Xtx and Bosworth have seamlessly woven their interpretations of the three main characters with the perspective of peripheral characters who bear witness to the slow drop out of the primaries; into a story that feels as if it could have been culled from a fevered, attention span challenged Denis Johnson dream. In just a few minimalist pages, the collaboration draws out violence, crime, drug addiction, broken families and broken loves all stemming from a bleak but familiar landscape:
“At first it was awkward, Brody was different…quieter. But even later, after he acclimated as best he could to his temporary civilian life, he still wasn’t the same. It was a different version of Brody, like someone had taken who he was, washed it several times, and put it back inside him.
His parents put on faces and avoided any discussion about how things were going “over there.”
They never said ‘Iraq.’”
What the collaborating authors have created here is an Ouroboros of narrative structure, a story that essentially gives birth to itself, coming together in the psychic connection between Cody and Brody, whose destinies are irreversibly intertwined and manifest in a two headed mutant which Cody keeps animated (or not) in a jar he keeps cradled close to his bosom and drug habit.
The surreal sense of events spiralling out of control is punctuated by an evolving chorus that runs from “We’re real people doing real things” which runs out to the past tense “I was a real person doing real things,” as if these characters are trying to convince themselves of something that isn’t quite genuine, or even entirely true.
Shudder Pageant is a little online miracle, a multi-medium flash novel in spoken or written form that is absolutely free to everyone, and yet weaves the “NOW” of both evolving literature and the reigning cultural paradigms into a post-modern fable that feels simultaneously unreal and immediate. Bosworth and xtx demonstrate that they can function as one unwavering and unblinking voice, and one can only hope that they continue to move literature in a direction that is this honest, accessible and revelatory through future collaborations.“ - Crow Reviews

Read it (pdf)

“They are all human. Sometimes ugly, vile, quizzical, loving, but always indelibly human”: an interview with Mel Bosworth and xTx


In Elephant Summer (pdf)

xTx's web page