Prig is one of those words that we should bring back. This impulse for safety can be used, institutionally, to justify cultures of surveillance, and, interpersonally, to produce yourself as the person who gets to articulate all the judgments and go around being an absolute prig. In Times Square Red, Samuel Delany talks about safety and safe neighborhoods, and he says, No, actually, I would rather have danger. At the same time, it is also the case that this desire for safety can become a way to control and judge other people. I wanted the tonal sharpness of the narrative to serve as a warning: Do not entirely trust this woman she's here being mean about content warnings. The book’s narrator, who is writing these poems, is undoubtedly writing them in a scathing tone. If I were to write fanfic, which I actually have never done, it would be Eugene Onegin, or maybe Don Juan: Fanfics of immoral literary works, verse narrative by awful aristocrats. I've always wanted to write the kind of book that people would read when they were hungover.ĬtThe framing device of the book is that the narrator has posted the poems we’re reading on a fanfic site, and they have content warnings like “love,” “trans men,” “folding chairs,” “morality,” “world music,” and “pedagogy.” The first one is tagged: “creator chose not to give content warnings.” Is the book poking fun at the conventions that have congealed around notions of harm and safety?ĬFThe book is kind of a Eugene Onegin fanfic. Diana told me that she'd reread the book on a hangover. In an interview I did with Cecilia, she talked about writing her book as letters and said, “You can't just write into the air, you have to write to someone.” So I wrote to this list.Įntertaining an audience keeps you honest. How did having real-time readers and responses shape its writing?ĬFI sent it to an email list: old technology. For the occasion of The Call-Out’s upcoming release, we retreated to her solar (a room, she explains, where you go to be alone).Ĭharles theonia Would it be outrageous to describe The Call-OutĪs a morality play about the dangers of morality?Ĭat Fitzpatrick It does have a lot of dialogue! I'm not a terribly moral person, but a lot of the people in this book think they're doing the right thing and it doesn't work out very well.ĬtThe book came into the world in serial increments. Fragility is a state of risk: When one is in the spiky, brittle position of asserting the self, it doesn’t take much to slip and cut another person up.Ĭat and I met almost ten years ago at a trans poetry workshop she facilitated in a DUMBO office building, and we have been making each other cocktails ever since. Even as they make a series of lesser and greater messes, the book urges us-in meter-to care about them, not least the ones blustering to conceal the fragile newness of being early in transition. In this spirit, Fitzpatrick gives her characters space to be as righteous, manipulative, and recriminatory as they are charming, vivacious, or brimming with questionable opinions about Roman history. The Call-Out's rhyming drama unfolds across New York City and the outskirts of the Philly Trans Health Conference: Trans life proliferates, unstoppable, on the edges of medicalization and cultures on the lip of a Straw-Ber-Ita can. After one young trans woman pushes past another’s boundaries in a bar bathroom, a call-out post rounds up a ragtag response team: A porn star-gay healthcare provider, an aspiring novelist, a grouchy, self-styled trans elder, and a sex-shop clerk meet in an attempt to remediate the offending party. In The Call-Out(Seven Stories Press), a new novel in verse by poet and Littlepuss Press editor Cat Fitzpatrick, queers adopt an alternate approach that is, perhaps, no less ritualistic: the accountability process. The aristocrats of Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin resolved conflict with a duel at dawn (or whenever the combatants could be bothered to show up to their fate).
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