Hello! Thank you!
Thank you so very much for signing up for Difficult Fun! I’m really excited to officially launch on August 5 and I’m grateful to you for signing up. I’m already really enjoying putting different letters together and have gotten some incredible authors ready to chat with me here.
Today I’ve got some recommended readings for you + some bonus material. See you next week :)
Sensitive Material by Sasha Geffen (Real Life Mag)
Sasha Geffen is an enormously talented and generous fellow music writer who released their first book Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary earlier this year. Come to “Sensitive Material” for beautiful writing that examines failures of perception and technology in collision with the realities of gender, stay for lines like, “Tumblr nixed not only porn but classical paintings of nude women, portraits of entirely clothed women, and even depictions of Jesus, famously rendered throughout history on the cross with her titties out.”
Mind Fuck: Writing Better Sex by Melissa Febos (The Sewanee Review)
This isn’t an instruction manual so much as it’s a meditation on avoiding prescribed societal narratives to sex. Even if you’re not interested in ever writing about sex, I think anyone can find usefulness in this essay because it encourages thinking beyond the norm. The opening, about writing, then writing again, five sentences on the same topic—and then doing it again and then again—sounds super worthwhile to me.
I use something similar to the exercise Febos describes with my WriteGirl mentee. When she isn’t sure how to approach what she wants to write about, I have her free write a list of everything that comes to mind about the memory, moment, etc. then, when time’s up, she picks the most interesting entry point and free writes about that. Then I have her pick the most interesting entry point from there and so on until she’s beyond unstuck.
PS: There’s a quote in this essay from the late writer Nancy Mairs, whose writing on mental and physical health and the ordeal of being a woman, so to speak, was extremely personal and unflinching. It’s a lifeline. Write it in your diary and repeat it daily.
If you, like me, love Martha Wash and CeCe Peniston, and want to see them get their flowers, then this piece is for you. This piece also invoked what I thought my experience with nightlife was going to be when I was growing up. (In reality, there were a lot more rusty nails and illegal indoor smoking but that’s for the memoirs.)
Also: Before NKOTB, It Was Black and Brown Boy Bands That Paved the Way in Rolling Stone, an excerpt from Maria Sherman’s Larger Than Life: A History of Boy Bands from NKOTB to BTS, which was published yesterday!!
Do you need some music? Here is a mix from my longtime co-conspirator and friend John Twells called FEMBOY HEATERS which features a personal fave Siete Catorce, conceptual genius Ariel Zetina and much much more in the ways of dark euphoria airhorn
I’ve got another little bonus: this Tin House Summer Workshop panel on the craft o short fiction that happened this past Saturday featuring Rion Amilcar Scott, Lesley Nneka Arimah, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. (If you’ve followed me on Twitter for awhile, you may have noticed I obsessively tweeted his short story collection Friday Black, which belongs in the pantheon The Sellout and Sorry to Bother You but also has some of the realest writing about working in a mall I’ve ever read.)