Weird Girl Lit is now a marketing category and reallllly popular one. Which is…weird. But I don’t feel bad about it (mostly because there are Actual Things in the world to feel about it and people finding more books they love isn’t one of them even if it’s intrinsically linked to capitalism).

In case you don’t know what Weird Girl Lit is, loosely I’d say it involves a female (or female-adjacent) narrator (or main character) whose relationship to the world has gone a little awry. Perhaps she’s alienated from her own body, domestic life, her language, or some combination of all that.

The prose tends toward the uncanny rather than the realist, though this isn’t a rule in any way. There’s often an interest in the grotesque, the abject, the hungry, the dissociative. Familiar things will often stop feeling familiar and vice versa. At its best it’s a contemporary inheritor of the Gothic, surrealism, and a specific strain of twentieth-century modernist interiority. At its worst it’s a girl being sad in an apartment, though one can argue that’s more, well, Sad Girl Lit which I wrote about here:

Reader Poll

In any case, if you go online elsewhere you’ll easily find lots of Weird Girl Lit reading lists, so why do I need to put one together? Well, I think a lot of the stuff out there is repetitive and overwhelming of a certain kind/type/culture. It’s also super American and often gender-exclusive. There’s so much fantastic literature out there once we let go of certain bounds, primarily for many of us these are genre and country (when it comes to books and the authors we’ll read).

So this reading guide hopes to be a bit different. Besides novels, I’m also sharing poetry and short story collections that, to me, fall under Weird Girl Lit, as well as hybrid words. Aaand you’ll find some books below that aren’t strictly by female-identifying authors because why should something like Weird Girl Lit be inhibited and encumbered by societal constrictions or even, by the supposed limits found in its own name?

Alright, here we go! And of course, please feel free to add your own in the comments and let me know what you’ve already read, loved, (or even, gulp, disliked!

Novels

☆ Pre-1950

• The Book of Margery Kempe — Margery Kempe

• Nightwood — Djuna Barnes

• Good Morning, Midnight — Jean Rhys

• Tropisms — Nathalie Sarraute

• Two Serious Ladies — Jane Bowles

• Rebecca — Daphne du Maurier

☆ 1950–1980

• The Naked Woman — Armonía Somers

• The Vet’s Daughter — Barbara Comyns

• Cassandra at the Wedding — Dorothy Baker

• The Woman in the Dunes — Kobo Abe

• The Passion According to G.H. — Clarice Lispector

• Ice — Anna Kavan

• Dark Spring — Unica Zürn

• The Wall — Marlen Haushofer

• Malina — Ingeborg Bachmann

• Sula — Toni Morrison

• The Lesbian Body — Monique Wittig

• The Hearing Trumpet — Leonora Carrington

• Eva’s Man — Gayl Jones

☆ 1980–2000

• Cassandra — Christa Wolf

• The Piano Teacher — Elfriede Jelinek

• Sphinx — Anne Garréta

• The Notebook — Agota Kristof

• Poor Things — Alasdair Gray

• Sexing the Cherry — Jeanette Winterson

• A Gujarat Here, a Gujarat There — Krishna Sobti

• Hotel Iris — Yoko Ogawa

• O Caledonia — Elspeth Barker

• I Love Dick — Chris Kraus

• The Virgin Suicides — Jeffrey Eugenides

• The Autobiography of My Mother — Jamaica Kincaid

• Amulet — Roberto Bolaño

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☆ 2000–2021-ish

• Fledgling — Octavia Butler

• My Heart Hemmed In — Marie NDiaye

• The Vegetarian — Han Kang

• The Seas — Samantha Hunt

• Frontier — Can Xue

• The Hunger Angel — Herta Müller

• White is for Witching — Helen Oyeyemi

• Our Lady of the Nile — Scholastique Mukasonga

• The Taiga Syndrome — Cristina Rivera Garza

• Pyre — Perumal Murugan

• Untold Night and Day — Bae Suah

• Annihilation — Jeff Vandermeer

• Fever Dream — Samanta Schweblin

• Memoirs of a Polar Bear — Yoko Tawada

• Little Star — John Ajvide Lindqvist

• Hurricane Season — Fernanda Melchor

• Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl — Andrea Lawlor

• Freshwater — Akwaeke Emezi

• Pink Slime — Fernanda Trías

• Tomb of Sand — Geetanjali Shree

• The Employees — Olga Ravn

• Sorrowland — Rivers Solomon

• Sterling Karat Gold — Isabel Waidner

• Ultramarine — Mariette Navarro

• Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch — Rivka Galchen

• Slewfoot — Brom

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☆ Current

• Lapvona — Odessa Moshfegh

• Bunny — Mona Awad

• When Women Were Dragons — Kelly Barnhill

• Monstrilio — Gerardo Sámano Córdova

• Big Swiss — Jean Beagin

• Hunchback — Saou Ichikawa

• Discontent — Beatriz Serrano

• Mary — Nat Cassidy

• State of Paradise — Laura van den Berg

• Audition — Katie Kitamura

• Thirst — Marina Yuszczuk

• Rejection — Tony Tulathimutte

• Goddess Complex — Sanjena Sathian

• Perfection — Vincenzo Latronico

• Midnight Timetable — Bora Chung

• The Hounding — Xenobe Purvis

• Tetra Nova — Sophia Terazawa

• She Made Herself a Monster — Anna Kovatcheva

• The Lamb — Lucy Rose

• A Good Person — Kirsten King

• Hexes of the Deadwood Forest — Agnieszka Szpila

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Short Story Collections

☆ Pre-1980s

• The Lottery and Other Stories — Shirley Jackson

• The Street of Crocodiles — Bruno Schulz

• Panics — Barbara Molinard

• The Complete Stories — Clarice Lispector

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☆ 1980–2000

• A Kitchen in the Corner of the House — Ambai

• The Bloody Chamber — Angela Carter

• Thus Were Their Faces — Silvina Ocampo

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☆ 2000–2020-ish

• Skin Folk — Nalo Hopkinson

• Magic for Beginners — Kelly Link

• St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves — Karen Russell

• Mouthful of Birds — Samanta Schweblin

• The Complete Stories — Leonora Carrington

• Vertical Motion — Can Xue

• The Visiting Privilege — Joy Williams

• Fen — Daisy Johnson

• Insects Are Just Like You and Me Except Some of Them Have Wings — Kuzhali Manickavel

• Apple and Knife — Intan Paramaditha

• The Most of It — Mary Ruefle

• What is Not Yours is Not Yours — Helen Oyeyemi

• Where the Wild Ladies Are — Aoko Matsuda

• Cursed Bunny — Bora Chung

• Daydreams of Angels — Heather O’Neill

• The Doll’s Alphabet — Camilla Grudova

• The Houseguest — Amparo Dávila

• Her Body and Other Parties — Carmen Maria Machado

• What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky — Lesley Nneka Arimah

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☆ Current

• Gods of Want — K-Ming Chang

• Evil Flowers — Gunnhild Øyehaug

• A Kind of Madness — Uche Okonkwo

• Shit Cassandra Saw — Gwen E. Kirby

• Entry Level — Wendy Wimmer

• The Girl Who Cried Diamonds — Rebecca Hirsch Garcia

• White Cat, Black Dog — Kelly Link

• Ghostroots — Pemi Aguda

• Mouth — Puloma Ghosh

• Ninetails — Sally Wen Mao

Poetry Collections

☆ Pre-2000

• Collected Poems — Chika Sagawa

• Ariel — Sylvia Plath

• Extracting the Stone of Madness — Alejandra Pizarnik

• Transformations — Anne Sexton

• The Descent of Alette — Alice Notley

• Autobiography of Red — Anne Carson

☆ 2000-2020-ish

• Alphabet — Inger Christensen

• Dark Matter — Aase Berg

• Ossuaries — Dionne Brand

• Ban en Banlieue — Bhanu Kapil

• Given — Arielle Greenberg

• Flemish — Caroline Knox

• Autobiography of Death — Kim Hyesoon

• Measures of Expatriation — Vahni Capildeo

• Discipline — Dawn Lundy Martin

• Someone Else’s Wedding Vows — Bianca Stone

• Arrow — Sumita Chakraborty

• Sea and Fog — Etel Adnan

• Wound from the Mouth of a Wound — torrin a. greathouse

• God’s Green Earth — Noelle Kocot

☆ Current

• Mirror Nation — Don Mee Choi

• Perverts — Kay Gabriel

• And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight — Lynn Xu

• Villainy — Andrea Abi-Karam

• Judas Goat — Gabrielle Bates

• What good does it do for a person to wake up one morning this side of the new millennium — Kim Simonsen

• Iguana Iguana — Caylin Capra-Thomas

• Oracular Maladies — Sophia Terazawa

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Hey everyone, I’ve been sick for quite a while (just a cold but it never feels like just a cold does it?) after my daughter got over an ear infection the past week. On top of that, we’ve been back and forth between places and are also packing to go to different places. I’m also just a few weeks away from my 31st birthday as well as my first ever short story published in print (Island Magazine thank you!!).

And yet, I feel sort of creatively stuck. I’ve been wishing (like I used to when I was a kid) for a writerly anti-mom (uber-mom?? ultra-mama!) figure who’s part witch and all librarian to go all tough-love on my ass and just…kind of magic away my problems. Since I don’t have this (quite the opposite, alas), I decided I’d just do it for myself. What else is being a writer for, after all?

And because I hadn’t sent y’all something for a while, I thought I’d share it with you too! Here goes:

1. Writer’s block is real and you should respect it. Toni Morrison said this, and she’s smarter than whatever productivity bro told you to push through. Sometimes it’s blocked because it’s not ready. Walk away. Read a book. Stare at the ceiling. The thing will come when it comes.

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2. Reading counts as writing. I’m serious. If you spent six months doing nothing but inhaling novels and poems, you’d come back to the page a better writer than if you’d forced yourself through six months of joyless morning pages. Stop feeling guilty about the book in your hand.

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3. Finish the bad thing. I know it’s gone sideways. I know you’ve lost the thread. But if it flows when you sit down, freakin’ finish it anyway. A drawer full of half-drafts teaches you less than trying to fix a finished mess.

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4. Your jealousy is useful. When you read someone and feel that specific sting in your chest — hey, that’ s a beautiful thing, ya goon. That’s your taste showing you what you want to do. Don’t you scroll past it! Sit with it, with them, those gorgeous unattainables. Figure out what they did and how they got there. Emulate the shit out of good stuff.

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5. Nobody cares about your routine. The cabin, the special pen, the 5am alarm. Process-fetishism is procrastination in a pretty cardigan. You can write on your phone in a parking lot. Write with your mascara-tinged tears, for all I care.

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6. Most writing problems are structure problems. You’re fussing with sentences when the real issue is that your piece doesn’t know where it’s going or the form it wants to take You’ve got the wrong entry point, or you’re burying the thing that matters on page five, or you’re circling the same idea three times without realizing it. Zoom the fuck out.

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7. Write the thing that scares you. The one you keep circling. The one you think about in the shower but won’t put on paper because wHaT wOuLd PeOpLe ThInK!? Ugh, that’s so never ago. My dear, people rarely think. Who are these people anyway? I can bet you they’re not thinking about you, at the very least.

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8. Your first draft is supposed to be humiliating. If you’re not a little embarrassed by it, you’re probably editing while you write, which means you’re not actually reeaalllly drafting. Let it be bad. Let it be real reaaaal nastay. That’s it’s whole existential purpose.

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9. You don’t need permission. No, really. You don’t need an MFA or even a publication credit, not a single byline my friend, and nor a mentor tapping you on the shoulder (though this right here could be that if you need it!). You just decide you’re a writer and then you do the work. It’s unsatisfying and it’s true.

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10. The publishing industry’s opinion of your work has almost nothing to do with its quality. Books get rejected for market reasons, timing reasons, vibes reasons, reasons that have nothing to do with whether the writing is good. Some of the best books I know took years to find a home. Some of the worst sold at auction. This industry is chaos. Write anyway.

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Note on Art: This painting1 by Hwang Hyeyoung shows a girl who becomes her own house, or maybe the house becomes her—legs sprawled on the grass, eyes peering out from the rooftop. I found this while looking for something that felt like the inside of a writer's head. I love also the concrete letters above the doorway: DREAM. The dream is real and alive and mysterious and a kind of warning yet also a promise. Be the dream itself, dear writer.

Look, I love Plath. We all love Plath (probably??). She’s sort of the gateway drug of serious poetry and deserves to be so. & yet if the shining beacons of your “dark female writer” shelf are The Bell Jar and Ariel, my friends, come on over here. The tradition Plath belongs to is so much wider and wilder and weirder than the culture lets on, and you deserve it ALL!

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If you love Plath’s rage — that oh so agonizingly controlled fury:

• Anne Sexton ✦ Plath’s literal workshop buddy, but messier, more confessional, less interested in impressing you. She’s an enigmatic witch who’ll pull your heart out (yes, that’s a compliment).

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• Louise Glück ✦ Moves through rage, grief, love, nature, tragedy, and a kind of seething power that both laughs at your face but also appears to kiss you—capeesh?

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• Bhanu Kapil ✦ Born in England, rooted in the Indian diaspora, writing at the intersection of trauma, migration, and the body. Her work is formally radical — part poetry, part essay, part ritual.

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• Lucille Clifton ✦ Wrote about being Black, being a woman, being in a body with a seething yet gorgeous ferocity that hits harder than most people’s screaming.

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If you love the precision — that feeling that every word was placed with tweezers:

• H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) ✦ Can make a Greek myth feel like it was happening in your living room.

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• Wisława Szymborska ✦ Polish Nobel laureate who wrote about ordinary things — a cat, a photograph, a number — with surgical philosophical precision and sly humor.

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• Eunice de Souza ✦ Goan-Indian poet who wrote sharp, wry, devastating short poems about Catholicism, family, and being a woman in Bombay. Totally underread outside India.

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If you love the darkness — the depression, the obsession with death, the void:

• Ingeborg Bachmann ✦ Austria’s great postwar poet. She wrote about the violence embedded in language itself, in love itself. Devastating and prophetic.

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• Sarah Kane ✦ A playwright, but her final work 4.48 Psychosis is essentially a long poem about the mind consuming itself. Not for the faint of heart.

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• Alejandra Pizarnik ✦ Argentina’s answer to the confessional poets, writing tiny, devastating poems about silence and annihilation. Wildly underread in English.

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• Han Kang ✦ The White Book is grief rendered through a catalog of white objects — salt, snow, blank pages — each one circling the death of a sister who lived two hours. I fucking adore this book which feels so weird to say, considering the book, but goddamnit that’s how I feel!!

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If you love the mythology — Plath turning herself into Lady Lazarus, Medusa, Electra, the moon:

• Marina Tsvetaeva ✦ Russian poet who lived like a myth and wrote like one. Passionate, excessive, and absolutely uncontainable on the page.

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• Olga Broumas ✦ Rewrote fairy tales from inside the women trapped in them. Feminist mythmaking at its finest.

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• Anne Carson ✦ Autobiography of Red retells a Geryon myth as a queer coming-of-age story, The Beauty of the Husband uses Keats to autopsy a marriage. She makes mythology feel like something that’s happening to you right now.

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• Joyelle McSweeney ✦ Contemporary poet doing something genuinely new with the grotesque, the baroque, and the necropastoral. Plath through a funhouse mirror.

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• Lucie Brock-Broido ✦ The most maximalist poet of the last thirty years. Every poem is a gothic cathedral of language. She makes Plath’s imagery look minimalist.

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• Meena Alexander ✦ Indian-American poet who wrote about displacement, memory, and the fractured self with lyric intensity. Illiterate Heart is a good entry point.

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• Maria Zoccola ✦ Helen of Troy, 1993 drops Helen into the American South — Appalachian housewife, Piggly Wiggly shopper, woman who leaves and comes back on her own terms. Affairs start on the internet and end in a Perkins restaurant. It’s mythmaking in reverse: epic scaled down to domestic, and more deliciously dangerous for it.

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• Ariana Reines ✦ Poet, playwright, and practicing astrologer. Mercury and A Sand Book treat language itself as a divinatory act. If Plath’s Taroc pack came to life and started writing poems, it might sound like this

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If you love the autobiographical daring — the feeling she’s telling you something she shouldn’t:

• Mary Karr ✦ Memoirist, but Viper Rum and Sinners Welcome are poetry collections that bring the same ruthless self-examination. She’s funny about it too, which Plath rarely was.

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• Theresa Hak Kyung Cha ✦ Dictée is a Korean-American masterpiece that mixes memoir, history, and myth in a way that refuses to be any one thing. Formally the most radical book on this list.

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• Jenny Zhang ✦ Her poetry collection Dear Jenny, We Are All Find is messy, bodily, immigrant, funny, and disturbing — confessional writing that doesn’t care about being elegant.

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If you could just eat up all the damn(ing?) vibes om nom nom:

• Ada Limón ✦ 24th U.S. Poet Laureate writing about the body, nature, and grief with Plath’s intensity but more warmth. A perfect next step.

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• Natalie Diaz ✦ Language that moves between English and Mojave, between the body and the political, with a physicality that pins you to the wall. Also, damn sexy at times.

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• Victoria Chang ✦ Obit is a collection of poems structured as obituaries for everything she lost during grief. Formally inventive and emotionally devastating. Also The Trees Witness Everything is to die for.

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I must confess, I don’t use Spotify much. I’m kind of big on self-hosting, so I have my own music (as in, artists and albums I’ve handpicked for myself) on Plex and audiobooks on Audiobook Shelf and that’s where I get my creative auditory stimulation from, so to speak. But another place I do spend a lot of time on is, well, right here—Substack!

For better or worse, a large part of my life is linked to Substack. Through work, personal projects, and the magazines I edit, I sort of live here (or so it feels sometimes). So, I thought I’d try and do a Substack Wrapped for myself, looking back at 2025 to the best of times and the worst of times.

Well, a note on the worst. I don’t like ripping on other folks’ work…ahem…publicly. If we hang out in person and pass some tea and snacks around, I promise you’ll get my entertaining oft-cynical ass to fess up and drop a bunch of hot takes, but let’s just say I believe in some type of old-school class and a sense of grace and just plain old social decorum. Plus, why spend time riffing on what you hate when you can glorify what you love! (Okay, sometimes the former’s more fun, but you get what I mean).

Still, as far as the “worst” goes, I’ll say this: it’s been increasingly difficult to find work that feels genuinely exploratory, that takes real risks, that exists outside the algorithm’s preference for easily digestible takeaways.

I know a lot of folks also hate Notes on here, but I do understand why Substack implemented them. And yet, the obviously AI-gen’d Notes that masquerade as human thought on here are just…ubiquitous and annoying. Don’t get me started on the generic “great post!” comments and the clawing-at-the-metrics-ladder nature of some of the interactions.

Then again, so much of this just comes with being on a social platform, and though many of us might have forgotten, it also just comes with coexisting…on a planet…with other individuals. Some of us are weird, some of us are stupid, some of us are annoying, some of us are all three or some combination of the three plus any number of other descriptors at some time or another. So…I guess I wish more of us could adapt (adopt??) a more balanced, “middle-way” type approach when it comes to such things. And then, you know, move on to the good.

Let’s do that, then. Move on to the good.

Total posts read ✦ 339

This one’s easy to calculate for me, and I’ll explain why. Last year, I jam-packed my saved posts folder for Substack app, utterly overwhelming myself. So, at the beginning of 2025, I decided I’d read one at least Substack post everyday. Just this morning, I finally got around to reading this lovely piece:

SubMakk

You're Writing a Book. So Stop Writing a Movie.

We’re in a golden age of TV (if not quite a golden age of full-blown cinema), so I don’t blame anyone for consuming a vast proportion of their narratives on screens. But so many issues I address with my writing students stem, I suspect, from subconsciously internalizing what works on the screen and trying to make it work on the page…

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6 months ago · 1233 likes · 24 comments · Rebecca Makkai

5 Favorite Substacks

I’m a bit of a sucker for rankings but I feel like they ultimately play to our lower desires (not meaning sexual here haha, talking in a more spiritual sense I suppose). So, while these are the five Substacks I definitely read the most this year and thereby one can reasonably say they are my “favorite” Substacks on here, please know I’m not ranking them from best to least or whatever. Each of these is phenomenal and you should spend time with these writers words!

Dear Head of Mine

An editor's weekly newsletter about books and other things

By Sean deLone

I’ve said it before and I'll say it again, how doesn’t have thousands upon thousands of readers is beyond me. Well, I guess I can surmise why — he doesn’t pander or speak down to you and he definitely doesn’t try to be flashy and trendy. His Substack is deeply valuable to any writer at any stage of their career, and yet it isn’t just teeming with useless AI-gen’d advice posts and hacks. Honestly, I wish more of Substack was like this!

How to Glow in the Dark

Book publishing advice and community for authors of fiction and nonfiction, written by the agents at Neon Literary.

By Anna Sproul-Latimer

has got such a stirring and charming voice that I’d probably read a the recipe for making gray rocks from her. Alongside that, she delivers no-bullshit posts full of useful information for authors with insights into the publishing world (something I’m actively researching myself, as some of you already know).

Counter Craft

fiction craft, publishing demystification, weird books, other things

By Lincoln Michel

For all the conceit of Substack being a home for writers, it’s actually been quite difficult for me to find writers on here whose Substacks aren’t…sigh…boring? ’s Substack is the opposite of whatever kind of boring Substack you can conjure in your head. With each post, one thing is shiningly evident: he really gives a fuck about literature. And I like that. I like when people don’t just come on here to bitch and snitch…when they genuinely, deeply fucking care.

Footnotes and Tangents

Slow reads of great books. Book guides and a reading community to help you get more from the best stories.

By Simon Haisell

I’ve never met in person, but I feel like I know him for some reason. And I sense he might be one of the nicest British dudes around. Plus, it makes me super psyched to see him as one of the top 10 Literature Bestsellers here on Substack because what he’s offering is something very close to my own heart: a way to read beautiful literature slowly and thoughtfully.

ONLY POEMS DAILY

Wake up to a poem every day & slip into a slower, sweeter life.

I can’t help it if the newsletter of the lit mag I created is also one of the best ones on this platform, okay? Every single day, we send out a beautiful poem into the world…and I feel like that’s one of the noblest ways to start a day…open your eyes, take a breath, read a poem and enter the world.

11 New Substacks I’ve Discovered

Perhaps like any other art-obsessed writing and reading fiend on here, I do a silly dance in my head whenever I find a particularly striking, new (to-me) writer on here. So, below (and again in no particular order), are some of the posts I came across on here that led me to discover more wonderful Substacks:

Tumse Na Ho Paayega

How to live an intellectually rich life

Go to the main page of Wikipedia…

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a year ago · 8676 likes · 279 comments · Utsav Mamoria

Lurker

A Folk Horror Crash Course

What could Yellowjackets, Florence + The Machine’s upcoming album Everybody Scream, and the Christmas special of Detectorists possibly have in common? Beyond release dates within the last five years, each seems to indicate something of folk horror’s trickle down into more mainstream media. No longer, it seems, is the genre confined to art house producti…

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7 months ago · 629 likes · 38 comments · Lizzie Bickerstaff

Derek Thompson

Everything Is Television

A spooky convergence is happening in media. Everything that is not already television is turning into television. Three examples…

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7 months ago · 2254 likes · 36 comments · Derek Thompson

Story Notes!

How Hayao Miyazaki builds a story

Hayao Miyazaki tells stories like no other director. Each element of the story is a direct representation of Miyazaki’s thoughts put to paper, unbridled by words or structure. In this way, his films offer a rare window into his inner world, and the entirety of production takes on the spirit of its director…

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2 years ago · 2548 likes · 26 comments · Wren Petkov

Delivery & Acceptance

Merchants of Culture: A Conversation With S&S Editor Yahdon Israel

I wanted to chat with Simon and Schuster editor Yahdon Israel after reading his refreshingly frank interview with Merve Emre for her excellent (and I’m not just saying that because she’s a client) series “The Art of Editing.” I particularly loved how Yahdon reframes how we should think about …

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7 months ago · 218 likes · 39 comments · Alia Hanna Habib

Final Ghoul

Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein and the Death of Ambiguity

When speaking to Waterstone’s about his latest feature film, Frankenstein, Guillermo del Toro stated: “there’s a teenage Protestant girl inside this Mexican, Catholic boy”. He meant it, I think, as a gesture of reverence. An admission that beneath his baroque monsters and gothic tenderness lies a streak of moral earnestness. For years, del Toro has clea…

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6 months ago · 993 likes · 93 comments · Neave Glennon

Craft by Vera Kurian

What if things are happening but your story is still boring?

CRAFT is a reader-supported email newsletter about the nuts and bolts of fiction writing and the world of publishing…

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6 months ago · 28 likes · 7 comments · Vera Kurian

Past the Dragon

The Most Disappointing Fantasy Novel to Ever Break the Genre

What do readers want from a good Fantasy book…

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a year ago · 440 likes · 86 comments · Clifford Stumme

Beyond the Bookshelf

To preserve depth and freshness in our lives, we need privacy

Navigating the passages between books and being…

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6 months ago · 35 likes · 9 comments · Matthew Long 📚⚓ and Esha Rana

Adam Walker

The Fall of the English Department

The mid-twentieth century was the golden age of the university English department in the U.S. Up until the 1990s, the average English major would have studied nearly every major work from the medieval period to modernism, from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf. Today, most English majors can graduate without a sense of literary history. Many programs don’t requ…

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6 months ago · 343 likes · 44 comments · Adam Walker

weird medieval guys

The coolest medieval woman you've never heard of

Christine de Pizan (and her dog)weird medieval guys is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber…

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3 years ago · 4866 likes · 64 comments · weird medieval guys

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Stop trying to squeeze your writing into current trends, and for fuck sake stop trying to predict the next ones. Maybe you were meant for fame—moderate to grand, or maybe you were meant for obscurity, or any of the valences in between. It really doesn’t matter. Write because you can’t help it, because it’s a haunted house you keep volunteering to go back into. On a long enough timeline, we all fade away. Trust that your words will find their readers.

If you’re waiting to feel inspired, you’ll be waiting for a long time.

Write in the notes app while crying. Scribble in a physical book. Bang away on your poor keyboard. Write on the fucking walls, literally (there’s a reason all kids feel the compulsion to do this). Write in a meeting. Write when you’re tired, bored, deeply unlovable. Write sentences you don’t understand yet.

Drafts aren’t precious. Your neuroses are not sacred. No one cares about your perfection. They’ll care though about what if anything you made them feel.

Why do you think you need to get published by a certain date or age or arbitrary deadline? Time is obsolete in the face of art. When it comes to literary ambition, at the core of it, all that should matter to you is your craft. The rest, as they say, goes with god.

All your favourites wrote absolute trash at some point. You’re not special, nor above revision.

Write badly. Read good books. Write a little better. Read better books. Keep going.

What the hell are you doing reading so much writing about writing (yes, including this right here)? Go engage with some real literature, enter the worlds, stop trying to decode what works and reverse-engineer it or some such, just live inside those books for a while, and then get to work.

You’ll never write like anyone else, thank God.

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Look, I like productivity tools and book-reading apps and the Apple Watch’s perhaps only useful ability to track steps and sleep patterns just as much as the next person. Still, it’s important to fiercely hold on to what makes us human.

So, in the age of apps and algorithms, here are six old-fashioned ways that are helping me find what to read next…with perhaps less exactitude but certainly more wonder.

1. Find out who your local authors are. Libraries and indie bookstores will generally have local-author nooks where they exclusively keep books published by authors who live in the area or are from there. Pick up those books and find something that strikes you. If you, like me, are living somewhere that you aren’t a “true local” in, just remember…none of us are truly local anywhere and simultaneously we are all from the same place.

2. Follow your favorite writers’ influences. You can do this by just reading directly about who your favorite writer’s favorite writer was OR, a bit more fun, is picking up your favorite books and looking in the Acknowledgements section to find the who they thank. Usually, a few of those wonderful people will be writers themselves who would’ve been more directly involved with your favorite writer’s work than their own favorite writer might ever have been^.

3. Ask a librarian to surprise you. I promise you that your librarian is a nice person. I promise even if they look grouchy, they’re not. I promise you they’d be pleasantly taken aback with your tech-drowned ass walking up to them and saying these words: O dear keeper of the library, please guide me to my next book. Okay, you don’t have to be as weird as me, but like seriously…librarians are awesome and have boundless knowledge. Avail yourself to their wisdom.

4. Pick up something from a free library. If you live in a small town, these shouldn’t be hard to find. If you’re a city-mouse, then idk drive to a small town or go visit your mom and walk around the neighbourhood and find one. The free libraries in my neighbourhood are so interesting — you’ll get the usual ratty Tom Clancy book or a manhandled Daniel Steele (again, the book, obvs), but you’ll also find amazing classics (I just found a beautiful hardcover 1st edition of Beloved last week!), old Book of the Month copies, and a host of other possibilities. Those little doors are portal begging to be unlatched.

5. Go up to strangers who are reading a book and ask them if they like it. I started a whole project in Toronto two years ago of photographing strangers reading books in public (always with permission), and the short conversations I had with them were lovely. In any given day, I’d end up with at least five pictures and at least one new book to check out. And let me tell you, if I — as a neurotic loner ultra-freaky introvert — can do this, then my friend you can do some part of it too.

6. Judge a book by its cover. And the first page. Don’t read a single review. Kill your impulse to look it over on Goodreads. Avoid the blurbs on the back (which tbh are often hilariously bad at convincing anyone to get anything). Think, if only for a moment, how the book feels in your hands…what it makes you think when you look at that cover — are you disgusted at how bad it is, are you enamored with the simplicity of it, do you want to tattoo the design on the back of your head — then open it just to the first page (of the actual story/writing) and read it. Is this a voice you want to spend some time with (even if you later abandon it)? Ask yourself, and find an answer.

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#1. Write what no one wants to read.

I once had someone1 tell me that readers “don’t really want stories about sad moms anymore.” Every piece I’ve written since has been haunted by a mother or by some connection or motherhood or daughterhood, either written in the voice of one, or clawed out of the wet underside of another’s grief or joy or a mushy messy mix of both. I don’t think I’m trying to prove anything, not really. But I do think our writing ought not to be dictated by transient trends or even expert opinions. And often what people need to hear isn’t, on the surface, what they want to hear.

#2. If a sentence feels too long, let it keep going.

Writers might often get told not to write run-on sentences. I mean, it’s one of the first things they teach you in like, grade school English. And now, apparently, run-ons are bad because people have neither the attention span nor the intellectual acumen to really, say, trace out a Marquezian or Woolfian sentence. But fuck it — some thoughts deserve to spill and some truths can only be said if they arrive breathless and late, running down the stairs with one sock on and a hand ever lightly on the railing and someone yelling after them, no time to stop, no time to make it pretty, just the urgency of the thing trying to be said before it disappears.

#3. Let that one strange thing stay.

The talking crow. The goat with a haunted memory. The moment where the sun folds in half and nobody notices. Maybe a strict editor would cross them all out and scrawl “confusing” in big, red letters. But it’s not confusing. I mean, maybe it is — sure, but also…maybe it’s magic. Either way, for me, sometimes it’s just mine and that’s fine…it’s enough. So now I tend to leave at least one of my extra-weirds2, in an edited draft. They’re my charm against anyone who thinks clarity is more important than wonder.

#4. Write about what you don’t understand.

“Write what you know” has always felt like colonial logic to me — obsessed with borders … ownership … pinning stories to individual experience instead of collective memory, myth, dream, desire... Look, I refuse to pretend I’ve figured it all out. I often write what I don’t know how to say. I wrestle with pen and page alike. I start things without endings, not even half-formed ones. I drag meaning through the dirt until it splits open and ferments. That’s…that’s kinda the whole “job”, right?!

#5. Never wait to be ready.

There’s always someone more qualified. More published. Less afraid. But I’ve learned that if you wait until the work is perfect, you’ll die3 quietly with a manuscript in your Google Drive and a poem on your tongue no one ever hears. So I send the email. I pitch the idea. I submit the weird little poem with its literary limbs all frankenstein’d together. Or I hit publish. At times out of that just-being-done-with-it-ness, or a pressing probably-faux urgency…but, I think (I’d like to believe) at the root of it…love. For myself, my purpose (or what I think it is…writing…of some sort). As well as my perhaps foolish belief that someone, somewhere, is ready for my particular kind of chaos.4

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You hit publish or post & the silence that follows is louder than a rejection. It’s not that people hated your work, it just slipped through the cracks without even the dignity of a no.

& that hurts. More than we admit.

Because artists — despite all our wildness & resistance — are not immune to that stubborn feeling of wanting to be seen. We crave community, but we’ve been trained to believe that community equates to a following acquired through content.

Still, at the heart of it, we want someone — somewhere — to feel lit up or wrecked or slightly more human because of something we made.

& yet…

We were not built for these algorithms, nor for the humiliating calculus of attention. We were not meant to turn our souls into content calendars. We were never supposed to watch our own so-called failure in real time, pixel by pixel, painted in red hearts & artificial bookmarks & false little paper-airplanes of “shares”.

Social media has done something brutal to artists. Especially the tender & weird, obsessive, hopelessly-in-love-with-the-moon ones. We arrived here looking for proof we aren’t alone, & instead we’ve become consumers of our own selves, our own success or the echoing silence.

We learned to refresh instead of rest.

To scroll instead of dream.

To watch the numbers climb or stall or vanish, & read meaning into every metric like they were tea leaves.

But this is a lie.

The truth is quieter, slower & harder to market. The truth is that making something —anything — is still holy. Process is still sacred. Art still matters even when no one claps. Most of the great artists in history died in obscurity. & that’s just the ones we know about.

What you create is allowed to be forgotten by the world & still remain an inexorable part of the world.

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Here’s 13 reasons why you should keep making art even if no one gives a shit:

1. Because you are a little god every time you make something that didn’t exist before.

2. Because not everything that helps us see is meant to be seen.

3. Because you are not a factory, you are a forest. Some seasons are quiet. Some seeds bloom late.

4. “Because right now there is someone out there with a wound in the exact shape of your words.”1

5. Because even if it’s been said before, it hasn’t been said by you.

6. Because art laughs at borders & outlasts civilizations.

7. Because sometimes the only way out is through a song.

8. Because it’s alchemy: the artist’s loneliness, wonder, pain, joy, they way they see the universe…transformed into something a small world anyone can hold.

9. Because the act of making art rewires you on a cellular level. You leave the page different than when you arrived.

10. Because what feeds the spirit was never meant to feed the machine.

11. Because art has long been forged in the dark. Shadows help us distinguish existence from illusion.

12. Because you deserve to see yourself away from the eye of the world.

13. Because you were made for more than survival.

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So what if no one gives a shit?

Give a shit anyway.

Give so many shits you build a garden from them.

Make compost of the silence. Grow strange flowers.

Make art.

& add your own reasons to that list, grow it like a monstrous phantom limb, be weird, be crazy, write, create, sing, love.