Cartoonist Ed Luce on Creating Comics and Promoting Body Positivity
“I’m still dedicated to writing and drawing stories that I haven’t really seen in comics, especially queer comics, that I think need to exist.”
Bob Smith: On Religion, Life with ALS, His Love of Nature, and His New Book ‘Treehab’
“I want a God who’s not meaner than I am.”
Adam Haslett: On Masculinity, Being Fearless, and the Power of Ambiguity
“Imagine Me Gone is the most personal book I’ve written, since I used the fact there is mental illness in my own family more directly than I have in anything else.”
Kaitlyn Greenidge: On Her New Novel ‘We Love You, Charlie Freeman’ and Writing Fully Realized Characters
“I think anyone can write any experience as long as they recognize that experience as part of the human condition. The problem arises when a writer uses a character’s social positionality as shorthand or for street cred.”
Gary Indiana: On His New Book ‘I Can Give You Anything But Love’ and the Impossibility of Happy Endings
“There aren’t any happy endings! We die! How could anything have a happy ending? Life is pessimistic because we die!”
“Bendova Like I Told Ya”: Big Freedia and the Healing Power of Contradiction
Ease with contradiction would appear to be a kind of puckish response to systemic disenfranchisement
Author Quintan Ana Wikswo on the Limitations and Power of Labels
“Primarily, I wanted to see if I could write a book in which issues of love, erotics, desire, and sex could be momentarily liberated from conventional categorizations of gender identity.”
Jonathan Galassi: On Publishing, Poetry vs. Prose, and Meeting Your Literary Heroes
“I chose to write about publishing because it’s the world I know best, and because I wanted to leave a record of a way of working that really is gone now.”
Kevin Coval, Quraysh Ali Lansana, and Nate Marshall: On the Queer Aspects of Hip Hop
“I think the reality of hip hop is that women and queer people and a lot of folks who we think about being in the margins have always been at the center of the culture.”
John Keene: On Hidden Histories and Why Writing Against Official Narratives is Queer
John Keene spoke with The Lambda Literary Review about his new book,Counternarratives, hidden histories, and merging fiction with reality
Yarrott Benz: On Revisiting a Harrowing Adolescence and Writing His New Memoir ‘The Bone Bridge’
“Whether I like it or not, the story of The Bone Bridge is the defining story of my life.”
Maggie Nelson: On Writing ‘The Argonauts’ and Doing Justice to Queer Happiness
“On one level, I tried to do something I hadn’t done before, which was use the book as a holding container for sentiments of love and happiness […]”
Mark Merlis: On His New Novel ‘JD,’ His Writing Process, and the Autobiographical Details in His Work
“I don’t know how other people work, but all my work is trial and error. You start out on the path to the book you think you want to write, and you may run into a dead end—like the dumbest rat in the maze—or you may find an opening to a vista you never imagined.”
Helen Humphreys: On Her New Novel ‘The Evening Chorus,’ Her Creative Process, and the Solitary Act of Writing
“I struggle with writing because to write well you have to remove yourself somewhat from the life around you. It is a lonely business.”
Shelly Oria: On Her New Collection ‘New York 1, Tel Aviv 0,’ Her Favorite Queer Writers, and the Power of Literature
“I’ve always thought that one of the biggest gifts literature offers us is the ability to hang out in another person’s mind. I mean, it’s a basic human fantasy, isn’t it?”
Brontez Purnell: On His New Book ‘The Cruising Diaries,’ Silencing the Critics, and the Joys of Writing About Sex
“I like writing in a way that can sometimes be dark yet still be generous to the human condition…”
