Worth A Listen: Carmen Machado on Code Switch

[raven_cromwell]

Carmen Maria Machado's In The Dream House has been on my radar since Amal raved about it in December. Memoir about queer domestic violence, told as though it were snippets of different fiction genres, sprinkled with a fair bit of historical and cultural context was something I was immensely here for.

And the interviews I've found have all reinforced the impression of the jacket copy: that she's thoughtful and thought-provoking, articulate both because she's confident in the areas she can rightfully take confidence in, and thoughtful and nuanced about how her sitting at the nexus of specific kinds of privilege and marginalization means she can't and shouldn't try to represent all marginalized communities.

I think my absolute fav of everything I've found is this NPR Code Switch conversation I'd been marginally aware of Code Switch, and it's a podcast I intend to keep more of an eye on: the producer and host were as incisive and thoughtful as their guest.

Interview runs the gambit of topics, providing us just enough book snippets to wet our appeetite, but clearly constructed by folks who'd read and so wanted to cover ground less trod. My GOD, the discussion about the trials of three-dimmensional representation. The show's thematic throughline really is that. Starting with how the word ~representation~ has become so bent, both by discourse but also by the dearth of work by marginalized folk, so that one person's work is expected to be all things to all people in that community. Moving through how exposing your dirty laundry both grants a gift to those in-community suffering similarly, and makes it a weapon to be turned against you. The pressure of creating in a space where one thing's expected to be everything, and trying to show that you've only hollowed out the first room, only opened a door for others to hollow out more and different ones behind you.

There's also some beautiful meditations on memoir: I'll never do Carmen's entire speech justice, but there's a line in the book about how her childhood "tenderized her like a porkchop" for the abuse. She uses that, within the interview's context, to discuss granting in-memoir glimpses of her childhood. How story never is simply the recounted situation: never exists in vacuum, and how teasing out the influence of what came before can almost be harder than recounting the travail itself.
Fuck, it's a phenomenal interview I can't rec highly enough.

Comments

[delphi]

Thank you for linking to this! I've been behind on my Code Switch listening and might have missed it otherwise. I knew Carmen back in her fandom days, and it's been wild and amazing to see the places she's gone since.

[raven_cromwell]

WOW, had no idea! Carmen had been in fandom; where'd you encounter her? (Also, gaaaah it's just such a thought-provoking podcast, and def one I'll be going back through the episode back-log to find intriguing listens. I should've guessed that you would've been a fan! ;)

[delphi]

It's possible we knew each other on Livejournal, but I feel like she might have been a new f-list addition after I joined Dreamwidth, and I followed her for a few years - so maybe 2009 to 2012-ish? I actually don't remember her writing fanfic, but she was one of those people whose feedback made you want to roll over and light a cigarette. She blogged about her experiences going through the Iowa Writers' Workshop, which was a huge eye-opener for me about how the literary fiction world really works, but which were also incredibly thoughtful and entertaining as you can imagine.

(And Code Switch really is great! I found it a couple of years ago because Gene Demby was/is a frequent guest panelist on Pop Culture Happy Hour. I go longer between Pop Culture Happy Hour these days since the format changed, but I've stuck with Code Switch.)

[raven_cromwell]

Gaaah, it was such a revelation, when RP partner started the MFA, what disdain lit publishing had for genre fiction, which's I imagine def a throughline in Machado's Iowa workshop blogging. And just how utterly grueling lit fiction was--the hyperfocused expectations, and not only disdain but bafflement for anything genre-influenced, to the point she couldn't get any sorta useful feedback. I ended up being the crit partner who did the job of the in-MFA peer-group, because revisions were required, and the entire class was just staring like: we have no idea how to deal with this. It was one hell of an experience by proxy, and I can just imagine that if the atmosphere was similar, there'd be a minefield for Carmen to humorously skewer.

[delphi]

Oh wow. That's not entirely surprising, given some things I've gleaned from a friend's MFA (she herself is also very derisive of genre fiction), but I can only imagine how frustrating that would be.

The thing that really struck me when I was reading those blog posts was how much everything was being arranged for the participants, well beyond my own grad school experiences with networking. I don't want to misrepresent what she wrote, because this was years ago and I'm working off vague memories, but I took away that it wasn't just encouragement when the class was told that they were next literary giants - it was a statement of fact, or maybe a statement of intent. Beyond the honing of craft was the individual connection to editors and agents, the introductions to the current titans, the assurance that any publications would result in attention from the right reviewers, and a pipeline into the author-in-residence programs that are some of the few options that give a person a financially viable way to devote serious time to a long-term writing project.

I was a little naive. I knew that the literary world was full of people whose parents were publishers or who were supported by a wealthy spouse, but I had still believed that a significant number of authors who became a big name on the back of one or two literary novels (as opposed to the cumulative fame of working genre authors who publish frantically) had started their careers simply by submitting one brilliant manuscript to the right publisher. It was eye-opening to realize that so much literary success wasn't reactive in response to a work thrown out to the world, but a proactive "hiring" of candidates into an established system waiting for them to fill it.

That's not to say the success is unearned, especially in the case of someone like Carmen who honed her talent to such a wickedly sharp point and brings a much-needed perspective and voice to the conversation. I just hadn't appreciated prior to that how small and insular the literary world really is at that level.