Let's just go ahead and declare it the year of Roxane. Seriously. Her novel, An Untamed State, (which I was psyched to procure a copy of at this weekend's Muse) is getting rave reviews and her upcoming book of essays Bad Feminist, is going to break the internet, IMHO. You can also find her tweeting about all the things.
I got a chance to attend a session with Professor Gay at this week's Muse conference, hosted by Boston's Grub Street. The Brutal Languages of Love was fun, real, and insightful: not surprising. One of the most valuable lessons I took from the session was the question of mixing love and politics. A fellow conference attendee asked Ms. Gay how she navigates this challenging territory. "I am a woman and I write. That is a political act. But I don't let politics stop me from writing what I want to write," Ms. Gay said. She reminded us that politics should be organic to the work.
Want an example? Read Gay's "North Country," which is included in the Best American Short Stories of 2012. I am almost rendered wordless in the face of explaining the beautiful intricacies of this story.
Confession: I am a Women's Studies minor dropout. It was my senior year and I knew the last few courses to fulfill the minor would be dark and hard and twist my twenty-one year old brain like taffy, so I gave up and took fun classes like "The United States" instead. It is very important to know all of the state capitals. Women's Studies frustrated me; I guess I'm a bad feminist. It was assumed that we would complicate (verb) our lived experiences (what other kinds of experiences are there?) by making the personal political. I was happy to board that train. But it was always a one-way ticket. We never examined things in reverse.
That's what I love most about this story. The politics are organic. Kate is a Black woman living on the Upper-peninsula of Michigan, working in an all-male department as a university professor. She's deeply unhappy with her surroundings but we also learn that Kate sought this desolation to escape a previous trauma. Are gender, race, and class at the heart of this story? Absolutely. But so is Kate's broken heart. The political becomes very personal in "North Country" and that's why I love this story.
