Call for Submissions: Rape Culture and the Poetics of Alt Lit

The past year has seen increasingly high-profile news stories about sexual assault, rape, and emotional abuse at the hands of the boys' club that tends the gates of the Alt Lit community. Many have written eloquently on the controversies surrounding Stephen Tully Dierks, Tao Lin, Janey Smith/Steven Trull, and others. But few have dug deep into the literature of the Alt Lit movement to understand what--if anything--the aesthetics and poetics of the movement have contributed to Alt Lit's disastrous perpetuation of rape culture.

This is an open call for submissions of critical essays about the literature of Alt Lit (or other literary movements), personal essays that go beyond a recounting of events to address the wider trends and/or propose solutions to the persistence of rape culture, conversations or roundtables, and calls to action. The selections will be curated and posted on Delirious Hem by me, poet and teacher Sarah B. Boyle. 

Please submit your answers to the questions of why Alt Lit seems especially vulnerable and/or conducive to the dynamics of rape culture, whether Alt Lit isactually more conducive to the dynamics of rape culture, and what we as artists can do--in action, in art--to expose and dismantle rape culture. My hope is to create a dialogue that produces varied answers to these questions:

• What is Alt Lit? How do various genders perform within its literature?
• Why has the Alt Lit scene become such a flash point for sexual and emotional abuse, rape, and the perpetuation of rape culture? Do the gender dynamics in the writing of Alt Lit writers perpetuate rape culture? Or does the writing just reflect (and reinforce) the reality of the wider world?
• Alt Lit writers are often anonymous, yet characters are named after real people (i.e., Haley Joel Osment in Tao Lin's Richard Yates; everyone in Peter Bd's We're Fucked). What happens when real people become characters in someone else's story? How does this conflation of real people and literary characters influence people's behavior in the world off the page/screen? How does it change the reader's interaction with the text?
• Are female and male "confessions" privileged equally in Alt Lit? How does this compare to the wider world of literature?
• Alt Lit is (de)centered around numerous websites. How does the isolation of internet culture affect the writing and the writers themselves?
• How has the Alt Lit community reacted to the many women who have told their stories of rape and abuse? Is this exceptional or more of the same old, same old? Are literary communities' reactions to rape culture evolving?
• What is the future of Alt Lit? What do you think it should be?
• How do any of these questions apply to any other literary movements, present and/or historical?
• What do we DO to combat rape culture in our art and in the real world? What can we do in the real world and in our art to combat rape culture?

Responses will appear on Delirious Hem on a rolling basis throughout October. Submit works of up to 3000 words along with a brief bio to rapeculture.and.altlit [at] gmail [dot] com. Send your finished pieces or start with a pitch--whatever works best for you. Please submit by October 30th for consideration. 

Lastly, a link round up, for your reference. There are many more smart pieces out there, so this list is by no means comprehensive.

• Sophia Katz's essay about abuse at the hands of Stephen Tully Dierks: We Don't Have to Do Anything
• Follow ups to "We Don't Have to Do Anything"
• Gawker sums it up: Hip Alt Lit Writer Quits Public Writing Career After Rape Accusations
• Alt Lit is Dead--Burn the Corpses, Salt the Bodies
• Dianna Dragonetti on his own experiences: Alt Lit is Not So "Alt"
• The controversy spreads to Tao Lin: Alt Lit Icon Accused of Statutory rape as Hipster Scene Falls Apart
• The Alt Lit Scene's 'Dirty Little Non-Secret'
• A dissenting voice: An Open Letter to the Internet
• Sarah Certa takes Elizabeth Ellen to task: From the Mouth of a Survivor
• A (just) slightly older incident in the Alt Lit scene: Broets: We're Not Your Props
• Background on Alt Lit: The Pillars of Alt Lit
• Reports from the Field, at VIDA

Call for Submissions: Physical Culture, on Feminism & Fitness

From the editors of the next DELIRIOUS HEM feature, a call for submissions: 

This is an open call for submissions for an online and print anthology about women and fitness/exercise co-edited by me (Elizabeth Hall) and the lovely Amanda Montei. The online portion of the project will appear at Delirious Hem late this summer followed by a print anthology with a tentative 2015 release.

The goal of the anthology is to chart a modern physical culture from a broad range of perspectives. We are especially interested in exploring the intersections between feminism and fitness. We feel the topic is ripe for interpretation and re-interpretation. In that sense, we are not only interested in texts that explore our current physical culture, but ones that also reformulate and re-conceive it.

We are as interested in pieces about yoga and dance as we are urban bike culture and guerrilla street fitness, or any way a woman might choose or refuse to “work,” live in, or care for, her body. We hope to see texts that tease us, poke and prod, and interrogate the very meaning of “fitness” and/or complicate accepted narratives and norms of exercise and female empowerment. We welcome all forms—poems, short stories, nonfiction, scholarly texts, works of historiography, collaborations, interviews, whatever.

Send up to 5 poems or up to 5,000 words and a short bio to delirioushem1 [at] gmail [d0t] com by July 25th, 2014. 

414 ('Twas like a Maelstrom, with a notch)

'Twas like a Maelstrom, with a notch,
That nearer, every Day,
Kept narrowing its boiling Wheel
Until the Agony

Toyed coolly with the final inch
Of your delirious Hem—
And you dropt, lost,
When something broke—
And let you from a Dream—

As if a Goblin with a Gauge—
Kept measuring the Hours—
Until you felt your Second
Weigh, helpless, in his Paws—

And not a Sinew—stirred—could help,
And sense was setting numb—
When God—remembered—and the Fiend
Let go, then, Overcome—

As if your Sentence stood—pronounced—
And you were frozen led
From Dungeon's luxury of Doubt
To Gibbets, and the Dead—

And when the Film had stitched your eyes
A Creature gasped "Reprieve"!
Which Anguish was the utterest—then—
To perish, or to live? 

Emily Dickinson

We're working on some new ideas for features. Check back soon.

DAY 26 * KAREN WEISER * ANNE WALDMAN

KAREN WEISER has several books and chapbooks, most recently To Light Out, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010. Her next book is forthcoming from the same press in 2015. She is an Assistant Professor of English at New Jersey City University. Karen reads her poem, Secret Bound.



Karen Weiser reads from Gossamurmur by ANNE WALDMAN. Waldman is an American poet. Since the 1960s, Waldman has been an active member of the Outrider experimental poetry community as a writer, performer, collaborator, professor, editor, scholar, and cultural/political activist. She has also been connected to the Beat poets. (from Wiki)

DAY 25: Marisa Crawford and Seth Landman

Marisa Crawford reads her own poem. She is the author of the poetry collection The Haunted House (Switchback, 2010) and the chapbook 8th Grade Hippie Chic (Immaculate Disciples, 2013). Find her work online at marisacrawford.net.

Maris Crawford reads Seth Landman. Landman lives in Massachusetts, and is a member of the Agnes Fox Press collective. His book, Sign You Were Mistaken, was published by Factory Hollow Press in 2013. 

DAY 24: W.G. Sebald and Erin Virgil

W.G. Sebald was a German writer and academic and the author of three books of poetry: For Years Now with Tess Jaray (2001), After Nature (1988), and Unrecounted (2004)  Erin Virgil reads W.G. Sebald's poem "Timetable." 








Erin Virgil reads her poem, Hermitage. Erin Virgil is a poet and essayist living in northern Colorado.  She has an MFA from Naropa University and her work has been published by Wolverine Farm, Fast Forward, Colorado Life Magazine, Indigo Ink.  She has books forthcoming from Monkey Puzzle Press and from Dancing Girl Press.  She keeps up a literary sort of blog at emvlovely.wordpress.com.