Megan Milks, Kill Marguerite and Other Stories. Emergency Press, March 2014.
Kill Marguerite and Other Stories collects thirteen risk-taking stories obsessed with crossing boundaries, whether formal or corporeal. Narrative genres are giddily mongrelized: the Sweet Valley twins get stuck in a choose-your-own-adventure story; Mean Girls-like violence gets embedded within a classic video game. Protagonists cycle through a series of startling, sometimes violent, changes in gender, physiology, and even species, occasionally blurring into other characters or swapping identities entirely. One woman metamorphoses into a giant slug; another quite literally eats her heart out; a wasp falls in love with an orchid; and a Greek god impregnates a man’s thigh with a sword. More than just a straightforward celebration of the carnivalesque, though, these fictions are deeply engaged, both critically and politically, with the ways that social power operates on, and through, queer bodies.
The stories in Megan Milks’s Kill Marguerite are pure force: they norm deviance, make violence effulgent, ungender and regender sexualities. Each story is a kitsch throwback to back in the day when reading was a fun choose your own adventure, or, these stories are not just carnal, not just animalistic, not just girly: they’re amphibian, our full corporeal tenderized to satisfaction, which is to say—hot.- Lily Hoang
Genre conventions are commonly thought of as restrictive rules, but in these stories Megan Milks shows that these conventions can be agents of perversion, both glaringly porous and ridiculously invasive. Over the course of the book, Milks invokes and employs the genre conventions of fan fiction on, for example, Kafka’s Metamorphosis and teen comedies, then mixes in young adult novels, video games, choose-your-own adventure tales, epistolary novels, gothic tales, family romances, and “traumarama” entries, until this melee of genres interrupt each other, parasite each other, distort each other. The result of this romp is absurd, grotesque, parapornographic, violent, gurlesque, but most of all hilarious in a dead-pan kind of way. - Johannes Göransson
Wittig’s Lesbian Body goes superfreak in this celebration of excess, this inquiry into boundarylessness, this exercise in genre-fuck, this slug-and/or-be-slugged fest. In a collection whose voices range from hard-boiled to hyperbolic to hysterical, Milks seriously probes the implications of social constructionism: we’ve made a monster (albeit sometimes hot, albeit sometimes queer) of the sexed body, individual and politic. Somehow, happily, Milks keep it comic too. Lots of parts and effluvia, no gratuitous grossness! - Alexandra Chasin
Megan Milks’ debut collection is a fearless romp through the post-avant wasteland of fictions both Lynchian and Homeric. Milks puts Shelley Jackson’s The Melancholy of Anatomy through a cement mixer, grinding out tales as sure to delight as they radically defamiliarize. Here, Sweet Valley Twins gets a reboot finally worthy of the world their YA books helped to make weird. Milks is a master of the absurd grotesque, and Kill Marguerite is her powerful annunciation. - Davis Schneiderman
Kill Marguerite and Other Stories mixes pop culture, Greek myth, queer feminism and childhood nostalgia into a gory and gorgeous mess. I got my hands dirty digging into Megan Milks’ sanguine collection of short stories. This prose oozes. This prose dripped perversely into my consciousness and stuck. Only a steady and sagacious writer like Milks can make paddling through this kind of muck so absolutely pleasurable.- Amber Dawn
I read the title story of this totally awesome experimental collection last night, drunk before bed, and fell in love. The premise of the story, which writes middle-school like a violent video game, sounds much flatter than the execution, which is full of throbbing hearts in plates of brownies, rope swings, jet-packs, sarcastic chime usages and successive deaths and resurrections of the main character. The key is to live hugely into every second of the cleverness, using the synthetic-reality premise to amplify the true and real, and that's just what Milks does.- Valerie Stivers-Isakova
The possibility of Sweet Valley High twins Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield having incestuous sister-sex with each other never occurred to me when I was a kid and living for those books, even though half the joy of reading them was a desire for violation when faced with all that phony perfection. I always wanted something sexual or terrible to happen, more than a kiss or someone having her bikini top untied in the pool. (The other half of the appeal was jealousy—oh to be 5’6”, blond, and have sparkling aquamarine eyes and a twin sister! Pulchritude amplified.)
So, I am grateful to author Megan Milks, who in her debut story collection, Kill Marguerite and Other Stories, writes in a letter from Elizabeth to Jessica, “I want to spend the evening watching you get yourself clean. I want to shave my head and lie in bed with you all day long. I want you to tell me you love me more each time you look into my eyes. Tell me I’m what your hands were made for, what your mouth was made for.” It’s hilarious, wonderful, mixed-up, and just how I–and probably all the other dirty-Barbie-players out there–feel about these icons. Do we want to be them, fuck them, destroy them? All at once?
Decades after being obsessed with the books, all I had to do was see the story title “Twins” and read the first words “Dear Jessica,” to know just who it was about. The letter ends with Elizabeth entreating Jessica to break down the wall between their bedrooms and collapse the distinction between them, ends on the word “collapse,” actually, a nice touch that’s been kicking around in my head since reading the story last week. The Sweet Valley girls are collapsed into all of us, a bit of gender-identity DNA that, in the second Sweet Valley story in the collection (“Sweet Valley Twins #119: Abducted!”), runs amok in brainless automated loops.
Milks’s debut from Emergency Press is full of such lovely, thought-provoking arrangements of form and content. These are genderqueer girl stories of the most awesome kind, taking the basic narrative of boys, youth, sex and identity, scrambling them with their influences (pop music, porn, sexual fantasy, teen magazines and books, even video games), and then destroying them in gory pornographic explosions.
For example, the story where a young woman has sex with a giant slug, after going on what seems like a bad internet date. It’s hard to tell what the date is like, since the narration shows us primarily her violent S/M fantasies while the date drones on. (“It is a good thing she wore her bitch boots tonight. It is a good thing she dressed prepared. She will take out her pocketknife and flip up the knife part and she will tickle him with the blade slowly, deliberately…. At her command he will get on his hands and knees and enjoy the rug burn, you pathetic motherfucker. Patty is a vicious cunt in bondage gear, with a whip and not afraid to use it, slave.”). She secretly orgasms while kissing him (his tongue is described as being like a slug) and then goes home, where the narrative takes an unapologetic turn into the ero-guro, and she fucks a real slug.
Repulsive, hilarious, hard-to-read, not-hot, yet I keep thinking about it.
“As he moves forward, he shoves her camisole down, the thin straps breaking, and flattens both breasts with his weight, his belly gripping and releasing her nipples rhythmically.”
“Slug kisses Patty until Patty can’t breath. Slug is in her nostrils and in her mouth. Slug’s mucous drips down her throat and fills her lungs.”
Finally Patty turns into a slug and they fuck with two cocks, slug-style, hanging from a tree.
I am of the sensibility to think that the awesomeness of this needs no explanation or further justification. But as someone who writes some ero-guro myself, I think/suspect that there will be an American renaissance of this weird-o Japanese genre, probably is already, and that contemporary ero-guro is a response to the pornification of sex. Displacing sex into someplace unusual is a way to make it visible without falling into the conventions of porn, which, through sheer weight of cliché, now make so much about sex invisible. Also, in another sense, even when it’s sexy, porn is gross. A masturbatory foray onto Google brings up the equivalent of a face-full of slug, once you click the image button, before you find the photos you like. We’re all doing it, so why not take the slug and work it in?
On the most basic level, though, I love this story because everything about it undermines the norms of dating and heterosexual sex.
Every story in the collection has some similar innovation, usually a structural or formal way to present the familiar in a new light. In “Kill Marguerite,” the title story, heroine Caty is in a middle-school-hell of BFFs, mean girls, and bullying, along with rope swings, sucking face, spelling bees and “fat little blubbery boobies.” The surprise is that it’s written like a video game, where on successive screens Caty is killed by a neighbor’s mini-van while she’s riding her bike, dropped into a reservoir where she “hits her head on a rock and there she goes, one of her hearts explodes,” and so on. The usual social mayhem is much improved by jet-packs, grenade launchers and the humorous use of chimes.
The premise reminds me, slightly, of Trisha Low’s The Compleat Purge which, as compendium of her yearly suicide notes, is another book where the heroine dies at the end of every chapter. If this is something bubbling around in the collective unconscious, it feels like an accurate representation of identity for the fragmented, multiple-incarnation lifestyles of Internet-age humans. The video-game violence in “Kill Marguerite” also gets at the emotional reality of middle school, where a humiliation in front of popular kids can truly feel like a death sentence. (Not that any such thing ever happened to me, or like I’d know).
Another way Milks realistically ruptures identity or, to put it another way, messes with the rules of fictional narrative, is the authorial intrusions in some story lines. Milks plays fast and loose with the third wall, addressing the reader, lying, writing dreams. In “The Girl With the Expectorating Orifices,” she says, “One night the woman whose body was a citadel did not text me back. Then the woman whose body was a citadel texted me back. I write this to make it happen. She has not texted me back but I want her to. To make the story real. And it worked. She has texted me back and I have texted her back and so on.” The story is the real thing, maybe the only thing, and by making it up, we make it true. We also speak more honestly to our reader (or achieve the illusion thereof) when we admit there’s an author back there, telling stories.
No one could realistically rupture anything, or speak meaningfully about modern identity, without sampling—narrative, myth, plays, other books, pop songs, video games, popular media, fiction, friends’ stories, memoir—and Milks uses all of these forms. In addition to her wonderful destruction of Sweet Valley High, there’s a collection of queer-culture vignettes from friends based on the Seventeen magazine Traumarama column (with an extreme tampon anecdote so revolting I might never forget it), that again reinvents the original. As a Seventeen reader, I found the column to be generic and conservative in its predictable hetero dilemmas (eeek! a boy! I’m embarrassed! what if I menstruate near him!?), but seen in the light that gay kids are just as goofy and body-phobic as straight kids, the column becomes the reassuring and equalizing presence it was meant to be.
The sampling is part of a deliberate strategy of genre-mashing, a bold ploy to collapse the walls between everything, not just Elizabeth and Jessica’s rooms. Can you put Seventeen and Sweet Valley High in the same collection as a story about slug-fucking, and a play starring Odysseus (the story “Circe”)? Can you go allegorical and unreal in one story, and just plain normal in another? (“Floaters” about an asshole comedian picking on his girlfriend, was the only story that seemed to be set in plain-old-reality.) I liked the concept, but wasn’t convinced that all the mash-ups worked. As a fan of rule-breaking, I hate to say that there are rules–there aren’t, really–but there is a point at which dropped threads stop resonating at other levels, and you’ve just got a mess. Some of the outliers, like “Circe”, “Floaters” and a story with an anthropomorphized wasp and and orchid, didn’t feel coherent with the whole, or incoherently-coherent, either, and I felt like I was being asked to read everything she’d written that she liked, rather than a collection of themed stories. It’s a small point, but one that’s stopping me from raving about the sheer unstoppable genius of the collection as a whole, which was where I thought I was going a few stories in. Basically, though, she had me at “Dear Jessica.” - Valerie Stivers
Kill Marguerite by Megan Milks is a genre-bender that fuses gaming, pop culture, social dysfunction, and identity crises, all while exploring nostalgic forms of narrative in ways that’ll make your heart explode. Literally, into a tomato, as in “Tomato Heart,” a story that allegorizes love and relationships into a ripe red fruit:
“My heart burst out of my chest. It popped through its arterial fence, it surged through my lungs and my rib cage, and ejected itself through various nervous tissues and muscle fibers with a final rip through the hole I had made in my skin… I was more fascinated than alarmed- fascinated because my heart, now visible to the world, looked remarkably like a tomato.”
Every story has immediate impact and her prose will make you tremble, quiver, then laugh out loud. She writes one of the most incredibly unique love stories in “Earl and Ed,” a relationship between a wasp and an orchid, deftly balancing the boundary between the visceral violence of physicality and the chaotic juggernaut of desire- a theme that resonates through many of the stories. One of my favorites is the eponymous “Kill Marguerite” where she tackles high school angst through the structure of a videogame narrative. Caty must Kill Marguerite or die herself, and she has three lives to achieve her goal. There’s bonus levels, icons, extra lives, a jetpack, a Super Pitfall like rope swing. But the impetus isn’t a high score or rescuing some lame prisoner. It’s to navigate her way through the turbulence of youth and friendships, her desire to assert herself versus the peer pressure of real-life Goombas and Bowsers. There is no princess in another castle. It’s a dichotomy of philosophies in that life isn’t a game, even though it is. Caty’s voice feels authentic; confused, confident, conflicted; a splurge of thoughts warring within her. A feeling we’d like to relegate to high school, when in fact, it hounds and haunts us into maturity. Milks’s reminds us of our jealousies, our defeats, and our attempts at triumph, stirring those together against the backdrop of retro-gaming.
If there is one story was stole my retro-tomato-heart, it had to be “Twins.” On the surface, it’s a struggle between two sisters trying to distinguish themselves. “The book says you do these things because creating chaos in the relationship gives you a sense of freedom from the stifling confinement of intimacy.” But then, things take on a sinister turn as the narrative shifts to a second person “you,” and you see their teacher, Mr. Bowman, “reach up to his head, grab his ears, and peel off his face! You are Elizabeth Wakefield. And your English teacher is an alien.” The book then breaks out into a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure that, seriously, is worth the price of admission on the entire collection. I used to be obsessed with the Choose Adventures and went through every permutation of every book I could get my hands on. This case was no different as I kept on making different choices that either left me dead or as a savior in paradoxical victory that could be reverted with one wrong decision. - Peter Tieryas
The other day, I Googled “slug sex.” It was and wasn’t my fault—wasn’t, because I was reading Megan Milks‘s debut collection, Kill Marguerite, and I wanted to check some facts. But, also, I should have known: of course Milks got all the slimy biological details right. Throughout these phylum-hopping tales, truth is consistently stranger than the fictions we typically construct around desire—perhaps even as strange as desire itself.
Take Patty, the protagonist of “Slug” and apparently a quiet woman being driven home from a bad date. As we come to see, however, the guy is really just bland prey for her gender-bending S&M daydreams—fantasies so increasingly graphic and grisly that they become humorous before they can become truly horrible. There might not be a man on earth who can fulfill them, but fortunately her room is soon entered by the ultimate phallic figure: a giant slug, “six feet of pure muscle.” Their violent romance suggests that proclivities denounced as unnatural might in fact be perfectly so, in another part of the animal kingdom.
Full of barely-double entendre, “Slug” takes the conventions of erotica and supersizes them. The microscope zooms too far in; the mechanics of genre are pushed into view, blurred and set wriggling. Milks repurposes a number of familiar forms this way throughout Kill Marguerite, including young-adult serials, choose-your-own-adventure books, and the anonymous confessionals of teen magazines.
The title piece begins as a tale of bullying among ordinary exurban preteens, although there are some weird interruptions: “The sky opens and flashes red” when protagonist Caty senses her tormentor’s presence, and later “one of her hearts explodes.” We’re not just in a young-adult novel, we’re also in a video game, and the heroine must gulp down frog hearts in science class and collect weapons hidden in trees if she is to conquer mean-girl Marguerite.
The figure of the teenage girl focuses many of Kill Marguerite‘s preoccupations: the good-girl/bad-girl dichotomy, the sudden emergence of strange desires, and, especially, the unstable, changeable body. Elsewhere in the book we meet, for instance a wasp and an orchid who fall in love, contrary to the habitual promiscuity of their ecosystem. We meet a sort of Swamp Thing-as-Freudian-analysand, saddled with a stern father who is also a lover, friend, and infant. We meet a woman with a tomato for a heart, a girl with a talent for producing various effluvia in bulk, and even Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield of Sweet Valley, CA, who merge into each other in various ways depending on which forking path the reader sends them down.
There’s something classical about these often-incestuous metamorphoses; certainly, there was something queer about that Greco-Roman world of myth in which the boundaries between god and human and animal and plant were so slippery. So it’s hardly surprising when the Greek gods themselves drop into several stories. In one short piece, Hephaestus attacks a bickering father and daughter with his sword; naturally, the two get stitched up and head home to dinner, before realizing that the god has impregnated both of them. All this highlights a family dynamic that may seem quite close to queer readers’ own experience: “My father has always been a homophobe. The knowledge that his immortal child was born with the sword of another man, and the ugliest of gods to boot, is simply too humiliating. This is what we had been arguing about in the first place: why I was so unfeminine, and couldn’t I be normal. I had said I don’t like being penetrated. He had claimed to dislike it as well.”
After all the carefully wrought grotesquerie, it’s almost a surprise how well Milks works in a more traditionally naturalistic mode, analyzing relationships between mortals. The allure of the title character in “Dionysus” is clear even if you just take her as the hard-partying bike kid the more straitlaced narrator falls for: “Around bars and in streets, in alleys, Dionysus swirls, administering the night. She blurs the edges of people, her own borders smeared. I tend to maintain myself. So we were in love.”
It’s also surprising, given the vast range of modes on display, how very well Kill Marguerite maintains itself as a unified work; tracing the veins that run from piece to piece is part of the fun. The consistently disciplined prose does nearly as much to this end as the shared themes, sometimes calling to mind the similarly wry and precise Lydia Davis. This collection establishes Milks as a writer who can do just about anything but who will, one expects, keep doing the bidding of her macabre but humane imagination.- Daphne Sidor
Rewriting the Adolescent Narrative: Megan Milks on “Kill Marguerite”
By Anne Yoder
I first encountered Megan Milks’ work when we were both fledgling critics for PopMatters. Her writing stood out as intelligent, daring and quite promiscuous in its range of ideas. She went on to found the zine “Mildred Pierce” and contribute to the avant-lit blog Montevidayo. And I’m still reading her today.
Milks’ stories in her debut collection “Kill Marguerite” draw influence from cultures both high and low, from Homer and Joyce to video games and teen magazine columns. They never sit quietly, but rather unsettle convention and defy expectation. In fact, the moment you think you know what’s happening, the story opens into an unexpected black hole, thrusting you into a passage that devours and reconfigures expectations.
Many of the stories in “Kill Marguerite” play with structure—what draws you to changing the short story as a form in ways that often incorporate pop culture and genre conventions anew?The short story is my playground [...] My interest in popular forms and genres derives from this interest in constraint and revision. Popular narratives are of course typically very limited in the kinds of identities and experiences they produce. At the same time they are malleable and subject to revision (see fan fiction). In repurposing forms like teen mag columns and video games, one motivation is the desire to queer these forms. (I mean “queer” as a method of challenging both compulsory gender and heterosexuality.) “Kill Marguerite” implants a feminized mean-girls narrative into a masculinized video game structure, refusing the gender-specific presumptions of both genres.
Are you trying to rewrite the narrative of the young girl?Oh—sure! That’s a really terrific synopsis of the book, actually. Like so many of us, I grew up internalizing the dominant narrative of the young girl as the pretty girl, the skinny girl, the good-sometimes-bad girl, the ideal reader of Seventeen magazine. (Of course all of these girls are white and affluent, too.) Even though I was also listening to Ani DiFranco and Tori Amos and Hole, it was like I just couldn’t recognize alternative ways of existing as a girl-assigned person in my environment. So yes, I suppose rewriting these young-girl narratives of the eighties and nineties is one way of producing an alternative adolescence that more readily accommodates queerness, masculinity, fatness, violence and the grotesque.
What literary influences were significant to you as a teen reader? Which do you still hold dear now?I love this question—absolutely, all of these genre/YA influences have informed my work. When I was a teen (and younger), I read everything that was available at my public library. I would bring home thirty books a week (I think that was the limit) and read read read. I read a ton of YA series books, alongside horror and fantasy, and— how could I forget—V.C. Andrews. So many lurid narratives! A ton of Stephen King and Clive Barker, as well as Christopher Pike, Piers Anthony, “The Baby-sitters Club,” “Sweet Valley,” “Nancy Drew.” As part of the Tori Amos fan community, I was introduced to Neil Gaiman and the world of comics. I went through a Michael Crichton phase, too—I remember being made fun of for nerdily reading ”Jurassic Park” while walking the half-mile to and from the bus stop. I was also reading Joyce, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Poe—very few women writers, sadly, though I did love Jane Austen. Faulkner was my number one—especially “The Sound and the Fury,” which blew my mind.
Your characters’ bodies emit slime, vomit, tears, feces, blood and more. It seems that the stories revel in the woman’s body as leaky vessel—at times grotesque, at others aroused. Why this obsession with fluids?I’m obsessed with fluids because I’m obsessed with shame, and the body is often a site of great shame—while at the same time rejecting shame. There is something very threatening still about the grotesque leaky “feminine” body, especially as opposed to the closed, impenetrable “masculine” body. Many of the stories are interested in the transgressive, heroic properties of the grotesque female body. Others actually cut against the feminization of the grotesque. Some of the leaky (and penetrable) bodies are (hetero) masculine bodies—the figure of the father, for instance, gives birth, is impaled, etcetera, in a number of ways.
Sexuality in this collection crosses all boundaries of incest, S&M, masturbation and hermaphrodism—can you explain the sexual polymorphism throughout these stories?Sure! I’m interested in producing new queer forms of sexuality by thinking about sex away from identity categories, and away from the limitations of the sexed human body. Like, I want to re-biologize the human body, creating new bodies that exist outside of the binary-sex/gender system. One of my characters gives birth from their esophagus, another turns into a giant slug. Fiction is magic!
Megan Milks: The TNB Self-Interview
Nope. Not even going to deliver an anti-joke here. But I’m interested in comedy, for sure, especially the comedic grotesque and “stupid” writing. My fiction definitely has a sly side. Lots of deadpan humor, the occasional very bad pun. Plus talking insects, acts of gods, and winkingly insincere morals.
You claim to be a feminist but your book title’s all like….kill this girl. Whyyyyy?
I am a feminist AND my book’s title is all like kill this girl. The title story is nonrealist, and Marguerite (the story’s antagonist) is really a Mean Girl caricature. “Kill Marguerite” adopts a video game reality in order to legitimate physical violence (among other things). It’s kind of a corrective to fat-girl-gets-bullied narratives in which compassion and the moral high ground win out in the end. In this story, Caty (the fat-girl hero) doesn’t get compassion or the moral high ground, she gets weapons and extra lives.
A lot of my fiction, “Kill Marguerite” in particular, explores gender anxiety, internalized misogyny, and female-female competition, etc. I think most critical explorations of gender and power can be considered feminist.
Kill Marguerite is a carnival of forms: the book contains a choose-your-own-adventure story, a video game narrative, an unstageable play, a story that appropriates Seventeen magazine’s “Traumarama” section, a slam poem (that’s not really a slam poem), an illustrated children’s tale (that’s not really an illustrated children’s tale)…other stories involve stand-up comedy, body horror, Greek myth. Tell us about your relationship to form and genre.
I’m a genre fiend and a thief, and a formalist at heart. To a certain extent, all of the stories in Kill Marguerite tackle the same goddamned things (compulsory gender! compulsory heterosexuality! the limitations of the sexed/gendered human body! freedom v. constraint! sameness and difference in binary relationships!) over and over again, approached through different narrative structures.
One formal approach that pops up a couple of times is combining forms/genres that are typically gendered “masculine” and “feminine,” in order to destabilize those categories. “Kill Marguerite” does this by importing this more “feminine” or “feminized” standard YA problem novel storyline into a video game structure (a genre that largely presumes male players). Similarly, “Sweet Valley Twins # 119: Abducted!” brings together choose-your-own-adventure novels, which, back in the day, presumed a male reader, and the Sweet Valley Twins franchise (designed for girls). But why must space travel and Jessica Wakefield’s keen fashion sense be mutually exclusive? So I wrote a CYOA starring Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield, as a way to defy these genderings. The twin to that piece, “Elizabeth’s Lament,” is an uncomfortable love letter/monologue in which Elizabeth expresses her ugly feelings for Jessica using lyrics from Tegan and Sara songs. I think those pieces are the pop-iest of the book. There are also some stories that stage a war between myth and reality; that adopt surrealist or fabulist modes; and so on.
Looks like you’ve got a couple of collaborative pieces in here, too. Tell us about those.
I wrote “Floaters” with my great friend Leeyanne Moore—this is the second story we’ve written collaboratively. The first, “Alma, Age Twelve: Assistant Babysitter and Future Failed Suicide” (published elsewhere), was originally Leeyanne’s abandoned story that we developed and revised together a couple of years ago. “Floaters” (published in Kill Marguerite) grew out of a story I started in the first/only workshop Leeyanne and I took together way back in 2003. Amazingly Leeyanne remembered it and suggested we take it up as our second collaboration. So we did. Leeyanne and I have amazing collaborative energy and I’m very grateful to her for co-writing this story with me—it’s about a stand-up comic who is using his sets to vent about his bulimic girlfriend. It’s a mean, mean, very painful story and I think it scared us both as we were writing it.
“Traumarama” is a more expansively collaborative piece, in that it emerged largely from conversations with friends and partners who helped shape the concept of the piece—a few of them actually contributed their own experiences in their own language. That piece takes up the form of Seventeen Magazine’s “Traumarama” section, which collects “real girls’” most humiliating experiences. My version stretches the form to accommodate a broader diversity of genders and sexualities, and a wider range of experiences, some much more intense and, frankly, traumatic, than what you would find in Seventeen.
And then there’s all the bodily fluids and effluvia. Can you just not get enough?
Can’t seem to. Shlurp.
What’s next for you?
I’m very excited about a new literary blog venture that I’m involved with, Entropy, masterminded by Janice Lee and Peter Tieryas Liu, which is going to cover all sorts of lit/culture stuff, including video games, scifi and fantasy, graphic novels and other paraliterary modes as well as experimental and indie lit, really all over the place. Launching soon! Also at work on a novel.
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