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• Her Body and Other Parties Graywolf Press (Minneapolis, MN), 2017

1.  Her body and other parties : stories LCCN 2017930115 Type of material Book Personal name Machado, Carmen Maria. Main title Her body and other parties : stories / Carmen Maria Machado. Published/Produced Minneapolis, MN : Graywolf Press, 2017. Projected pub date 1710 Description pages cm ISBN 9781555977887 (alk. paper) Library of Congress Holdings Information not available.

• Fantastic Fiction -

  Collections
  Her Body and Other Parties: Stories (2017)

   
  Anthologies edited
  Year's Best Weird Fiction (4 Book Series)
  The Long List Anthology (2015) (with Usman T. Malik and David Steffen)
  Year's Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 2 (2015) (with Michael Kelly, Kathe Koja and Usman T. Malik)
  Grave Predictions (2016) (with Drew Ford)
  The New Voices of Fantasy (2017) (with Peter S Beagle, Brooke Bolander and Jacob Weisman)

• Wikipedia -

  Carmen Maria Machado
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  Carmen Maria Machado
  Occupation
  Writer
  Language
  English
  Nationality
  American
  Genre
  Science fiction, fantasy, horror
  Notable works
  Her Body and Other Parties
  Notable awards
  National Book Award finalist
  Years active
  2011-present
  Website
  www.carmenmachado.com
  Carmen Maria Machado is a short story author, essayist, and critic frequently published in The New Yorker, Granta, Lightspeed Magazine, and other publications. Her story collection Her Body and Other Parties was published in 2017. A finalist for the National Book Award[1] and the Nebula Award for Best Novelette, her stories have been reprinted in Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best Horror of the Year, and Best Women's Erotica.

  Contents  [hide] 
  1
  Life
  2
  Education and career
  3
  Writings
  4
  Bibliography
  5
  References
  6
  External links

  Life[edit]
  Carmen Maria Machado was raised by her parents in Allentown, an hour north of Philadelphia. Her father was the son of two immigrants, with his own father coming to the United States from Cuba at the age of 18.[2] Machado's grandfather worked in the US Patent Office and met his future wife when she immigrated to the U.S. from Austria after World War II.[2]
  Machado says her writing has been influenced by Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, Angela Carter, Kelly Link, Helen Oyeyemi, and Yoko Ogawa.[3] In particular, Machado says she was heavily influenced by Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, which was given to her to read by an "insightful and amazing English teacher" when she was in the 10th grade of high school.[4]
  Machado lives in Philadelphia with her partner.[5]
  Education and career[edit]
  Machado earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and has received fellowships and residencies from the Michener-Copernicus Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the CINTAS Foundation, the Speculative Literature Foundation, the University of Iowa, the Yaddo Corporation, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts.[6]
  Machado also attended the Clarion Workshop where she studied under authors such as Ted Chiang.[3]
  She is currently the Artist in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania.
  Writings[edit]
  Machado's short stories, essays, and criticism have been published in a number of magazines including The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review, Tin House, Lightspeed Magazine, Guernica, AGNI, National Public Radio, Gulf Coast, Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications. Her stories have also been reprinted in anthologies such as Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2017, Year's Best Weird Fiction, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best Horror of the Year, and Best Women's Erotica.
  Machado's fiction has been called "strange and seductive" while also noting that her "work doesn't just have form, it takes form."[7] Her fiction has been a finalist for the Nebula Award for Best Novelette,[8] the Shirley Jackson Award,[9] the Franz Kafka Award in Magic Realism, the storySouth Million Writers Award, and the Calvino Prize from the Creative Writing Program at the University of Louisville.
  Her story collection Her Body and Other Parties was published by Graywolf Press in 2017. It is a 2017 finalist for the National Book Award for fiction.[1]
  Bibliography[edit]
  "Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order SVU" (novella, The American Reader, May 2013)
  Her Body and Other Parties (short story collection, Graywolf Press, 2017)
  House in Indiana: A Memoir (Graywolf Press, 2019)

• Carmen Maria Machado Website - https://carmenmariamachado.com/

  Carmen Maria Machado's debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, is a finalist for the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize, and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize. She is a fiction writer, critic, and essayist whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, Guernica, Electric Literature, AGNI, NPR, Gulf Coast, Los Angeles Review of Books, VICE, and elsewhere. Her stories have been reprinted in Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best Horror of the Year, Year’s Best Weird Fiction, and Best Women’s Erotica. Her memoir House in Indiana is forthcoming in 2019 from Graywolf Press.
  She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Michener-Copernicus Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the CINTAS Foundation, the Speculative Literature Foundation, the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, the University of Iowa, the Yaddo Corporation, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She is the Artist in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, and lives in Philadelphia with her wife.

  Awards
  Won: Bard Fiction Prize / Richard Yates Short Story Prize
  Finalist: National Book Award / Kirkus Prize / Calvino Prize / Nebula Award / Shirley Jackson Award / Franz Kafka Award in Magic Realism / storySouth Million Writers Award
  Longlisted: Tiptree Award / John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer / Hugo Award

  Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015 Selection / Best Horror of the Year, Volume 8 Selection / Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2017 Selection / Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 2 Selection / The New Voices of Fantasy Selection / Year's Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 4 Notable Story / Pushcart Prize XL: The Best of the Small Presses Honorable Mention / Best American Essays 2016 Notable Essay / Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 Notable Story / Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2017 Notable Story
  Best-Of Anthologies

  Fellowships & Grants
  The Elizabeth George Foundation / Speculative Literature Foundation Diverse Writers Grant / CINTAS Foundation Fellowship / Michener-Copernicus Foundation / The Wallace Foundation

  Residencies
  Headlands Center for the Arts / Hedgebrook / Millay Colony for the Arts / Playa / Spruceton Inn / Wurlitzer Foundation / Yaddo

• Paris Review - https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/10/03/pleasure-principles-interview-carmen-maria-machado/

  Pleasure Principles: An Interview with Carmen Maria Machado
  By Lauren Kane October 3, 2017
  At Work

   
  Her Body and Other Parties is Carmen Maria Machado’s first collection of short stories, but Machado is no novice: her writing is prolific and varied, from essays on higher education and retail consumerism, fiction on clairvoyance and the afterlife, and criticism on Leonora Carrington and Game of Thrones. In Her Body, Machado flexes that versatility as her characters navigate the emotional landscapes of love, sex, and grief within the contexts of pandemic narratives and ghost stories. Throughout each of the book’s eight stories, Machado uses elements of the fantastic as a vehicle for better understanding the complications and challenges of reality.
  Machado and I spoke over the phone at the end of August, as she was preparing to start the semester at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is the artist in residence, and just before her collection was named to the longlist for the National Book Award for Fiction and as a finalist for the Kirkus Prize. Our lively conversation took us from Victorian England to Law and Order and a lot in between.
   
  INTERVIEWER
  Let’s start at the beginning. What prompted you to start writing?
  MACHADO
  I have been writing basically my whole life. My family read to me a lot, and my grandfather’s Cuban, so there was a lot of storytelling in our household. I learned about stories through that oral tradition and through reading, and as soon as I was able to pick up a pen I was writing “books” and “stories” and sending them to publishers. I found Scholastic’s address in The Baby-Sitters Club and sent a letter saying, Here’s a chapter of my novel. Please let me know if you would like more of it.
  I wrote constantly, poetry and prose. For a while I wanted to be a doctor, but only because I was reading a lot of books about doctors. When I got older, I thought I wanted to be a journalist for a while. But I always returned to writing fiction. It was a stable thing in my life, and it was just luck that it was natural for me. But I feel like it was pretty late that I decided I wanted to be a writer, with writing as a part of my identity, as opposed to somebody who writes. 
  INTERVIEWER
  Was your early writing encouraged? And were there writers or books that especially influenced you?
  MACHADO
  Oh, there were so many different teachers. I had an amazing tenth-grade English teacher, Marilyn Stinebaugh. I was always cranky about the required reading. I would get so mad about the books we had to read in English class because we read a lot of Hemingway, and I fucking hate Hemingway. And then one day she came in with books from her personal library that she thought I would like—One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day, The Awakening, some Henry James. I went home and read them and my mind just broke open. In college, I took writing classes and had a wonderful teacher, Harvey Grossinger, who told me my work was interesting and thought I had a lot of potential. Even after I left school, he and I would still email, and he would send me notes on stories I was working on. Then once I got to Iowa, everybody was so open and generous and gentle, but also encouraging and smart. I’ve been incredibly lucky.
  INTERVIEWER
  What makes a story start to form in your head?
  MACHADO
  It can be an image or an idea, it can be reading about something. Right now I’m working on a new project, and there’s a lot of historical material in it. So right now I’m doing a lot of reading, and when I locate the right historical detail there’s a chain reaction in my brain—I can see how it all fits together. But it’s not magic—I just have to set myself up to be as open and responsive to stimuli as I possibly can be. If it’s in my wheelhouse, I notice it, and I tuck it away. There’s always something I’m chewing on. Whenever I’m writing a story, it’s coming from something that’s on my mind, so I’m just drawing from my own constant internal chatter.
  INTERVIEWER
  What sorts of things are in your wheelhouse right now?
  MACHADO
  Recently I was reading about the Moberly–Jourdain Incident. It happened at the turn of the century in France. Two women were walking along together and both believed they had encountered a time slip. They thought they had entered into Marie Antoinette’s court. They claimed to have seen people in fancy dress, including Marie Antoinette, and they wrote a book about it. There are different theories about what might have happened to make them both believe that they’d had this experience. Some think they were Victorian ladies just really bent out of shape by, you know, repressive Victorian society. Some thought that they had encountered a real fancy dress party and didn’t know what they were seeing. And some described it as a lesbian folie à deux. I love their story—it’s so weird, so liminal. The queer angle interests me. I feel like it’s really ripe for something. When I see or hear about something and my brain files it away, I know I need to write about that.
  INTERVIEWER
  What draws you to that space between reality and the fantastic?
  MACHADO
  It’s very close to how I actually perceive the world, but turned up to a higher degree. I don’t actually believe in ghosts and angels, I don’t believe in anything really supernatural, but I’m attuned to what they could look like in the real world. My imagination is very vivid, and I feel like life is a little surreal already, so when I’m writing from my own experiences, I’m really just pushing the situation in the story slightly further than what I perceived in reality.
  INTERVIEWER
  Do you think that ties back into growing up on stories as a child, having that cultivation of imagination at a very early age?
  MACHADO
  Totally. When I was a kid, I used to apologize to my furniture if I was leaving for a long time. I would explain that I had to go on a trip, but I would be back. I think I had seen Pee-wee’s Playhouse and was convinced that they were all alive and that they would try and eat me if I made them upset. That sense of play was never squashed. For a lot of people it does get squashed, or it’s not exercised, so it atrophies. But artists, especially writers, have to invoke that sense of play. If you don’t have it, you can’t really create anything interesting. Even in my day-to-day life, when I’m out doing errands or whatever, that sense of playfulness and the potential for story is very alive. And that’s good—it makes writing easier, because I feel like I never stray very far from that weird, surreal space.
  INTERVIEWER
  Sex factors heavily into your work without overwhelming it. How do you approach it in your writing?
  MACHADO
  I’m really interested in writing about sex. I feel like it’s not often done well, and it’s sometimes done outrageously. I also get annoyed when writers are afraid to show pleasure. I’m tired of reading really dreadful sex scenes where everyone’s miserable and then eventually maybe one person has a reluctant orgasm. I thought, What if I tried to have a scene where people had sex and it was great? My characters do have sex in varying emotional states, and with various results. I took a class at Iowa with Allan Gurganus, and he picked my story to talk about in class—it was a very different version of “Real Women Have Bodies”—and he really liked that there was sex in it. He said, You should always give your characters a roll in the hay—they work hard, they deserve it. Which I thought was so funny. I tell my students that party scenes are really important in fiction because a party scene can go in any direction. Sex scenes can be similar. You’re putting characters together—what happens as a result?
  I also like treating sex as a thing that happens. I wanted the sex to be mostly uncommented upon, just a part of the story, a part of the characters’ lives, as sex is in real life. I have characters in this book who have sex with both men and women, and I wanted the queerness and the liquidity of the sex to be uncommented upon also. It’s not a big deal—it just is what it is. Sometimes people describe “The Husband Stitch” as erotica, and I like erotica, but that’s not erotica. The story is not serving the sex, the sex is serving the story.
  INTERVIEWER
  What about horror? Elements of horror underlie most of your work in this collection.
  MACHADO
  Horror is one of my favorite genres because it’s so limber. In some ways, it’s regressive—it’s still very male and white. The fact that Get Out was so big this year is amazing but also unusual. On the other hand, horror can be a very transgressive space. It reflects so many of our anxieties and fears. When you enter into horror, you’re entering into your own mind, your own anxiety, your own fear, your own darkest spaces. When horror fails, it’s because the writer or director isn’t drawing on those things. They’re just throwing blood wherever and seeing what sticks. But horror is an intimate, eerie, terrifying thing, and when it’s done well it can unmake you, the viewer, the reader. That tells us a lot about who we are, what we are, and what we, individually and culturally, are afraid of. I love the ability of stories to have spaces in them where the reader can rush in. That is the work I am most interested in, and that is the work I am most interested in writing.
  INTERVIEWER
  “Especially Heinous” is a strange ride through almost three hundred reimagined synopses of Law and Order: SVU episodes. Where did the idea for that piece come from?
  MACHADO
  In 2009, I got swine flu. I was living in California, in a little cottage by myself. I probably should have gone to the hospital, but I was so sick that I couldn’t. I couldn’t do anything. I had a fever for three days and was hallucinating. But right before I got so sick, I couldn’t function, I had turned on Law and Order: SVU on Netflix, and they had just started that feature where the next episode would automatically start playing. So the show played in the background as I burned with fever and dragged myself to the bathroom to lie in the shower to cool down because I was so hot—or maybe it was cold, I don’t remember. I’m just glad I didn’t die.
  I joke that the emotional root of that story was being in that hallucinatory fever state while I was watching the show. But years later, I was in a very bad place in my life, and I was coping by writing a lot. I was also watching a lot of TV, including Law and Order: SVU. My initial idea was to rewrite the existing episode descriptions in slightly surreal versions. So I looked up the little capsule descriptions of the episodes, and I was trying to manipulate them to make them surreal, but it was too restrictive. Then I realized that all the titles are one-word titles. And what if I just use the titles? I put only the titles all in a row, and then just started writing and imagining Benson and Stabler. Something about having the titles to hang onto—I was able to swing through them like monkey bars. I wrote the story, surprisingly, in a pretty straightforward way. I was thinking about sexual violence, how we talk about and portray sexual violence, and I got to funnel all these thoughts into one piece. The story took forever to sell, which I get, because it’s strange, and also incredibly long, but I felt really good about it. I felt proud of it, like I was stretching my legs as an artist.
  INTERVIEWER
  Your nonfiction pieces are strikingly vulnerable. Do you feel that vulnerability in your fiction as well?
  MACHADO
  Some stories more than others. I have definitely cried while writing some stories, or cried while writing parts of them, because it’s been me accessing something very intimate and personal. It’s hard to admit that, because I don’t want to be sentimental in my work. I’m trying to cut that emotion with formal experimentation or with bluntness. I’m trying to walk that line, and it’s hard. Part of it is that I am very aware of my role as a female writer, and that makes showing my vulnerability twice as dangerous because I’m assumed to be soft. So to write in a way that’s revealing is almost reinforcing that idea, and I struggle with that. I mean, in my fiction, obviously it’s fiction, but there’s emotional honesty there. That’s really important to me, too.
   
  Lauren Kane is an editorial intern at The Paris Review.

• Millions - http://themillions.com/2017/09/our-world-is-straight-up-surreal-the-millions-interviews-carmen-maria-machado.html

  Our World Is Straight-Up Surreal: The Millions Interviews Carmen Maria Machado
  By David Nilsen posted at 6:00 am on September 26, 2017 0

  The literary world has been waiting for a Carmen Maria Machado collection for several years, and in October, Graywolf Press will oblige with the release of Her Body and Other Parties, a collection of Machado’s haunting, graceful speculative stories that has been longlisted for a National Book Award. The Internet became aware of Machado in 2014 when her story “The Husband Stitch” was published by Granta. “The Husband Stitch” was something new altogether, and went on to be nominated for a Shirley Jackson Aware and a Nebula Award, among other honors. Every new story by the Iowa Writers’ Workshop grad has further stoked anticipation.
  Machado’s stories take place in a version of our real world that has been subtly distorted. Identities blur, women become invisible (literally), and lonely individuals seek intimacy at the end of the world. But these events don’t occur in some alternate science fiction reality; Machado’s spaces are recognizably our own, forcing us into the emotional upheavals of their protagonists. Machado’s writing is both vulnerable and fearless, in complete control even as her characters lose control entirely, and she wields her unique voice to explore identity, marginalization, mental health, and what intimacy looks like in the light and shadow of all three.
  We recently had the chance to talk over email about benevolent sexism, urban legends, and her writing process.
  The Millions: “The Husband Stitch,” first published in 2014, seemed to be the story that made the Internet perk up and really pay attention to the name Carmen Maria Machado. It’s the story that opens Her Body and Other Parties. What has been the significance of that story and the response to it on your career as a writer and the formation of this collection?
  Carmen Maria Machado: I always tell people that they should write the stories they want to see in the world, and that’s advice I try to take as well. I was nursing “The Husband Stitch” in my heart for a very long time—not that structure or narrative specifically, but the emotional arc. I thought a lot about benevolent sexism as a powerful and damaging force, and realized it was a critical note I needed to strike in Her Body and Other Parties. And then, one day, I had the story structure to tell it in a way that felt faithful to my own musings.
  Of course, the explosion of interest around that story, and the persistent love of it, is really encouraging to me. I never imagined when I was writing it that it would have that kind of power and longevity. I’m not sure there’s anything more exciting or rewarding as a writer. But I don’t think it has much to do with me as an artist, particularly—rather, I think it was a note that needed to be struck. I think people were hungry for it.
  TM: Your comment about benevolent sexism brings up a powerful piece of writing that was one of the first things I ever read by you: your essay “A Girl’s Guide to Sexual Purity” for L.A. Review of Books. My wife and I both grew up in the Evangelical purity culture (and have since left the faith), and the essay spoke to a lot in our own pasts. While Christian purity culture is never mentioned in “The Husband Stitch” (the story takes place well before the emergence of that late-20th-century movement), it grows from the same soil from which that movement would later mushroom. Was that connection on your mind during the writing of this story? How does your background in the Christian purity culture impact your writing?
  CMM: I think it serves as a constant reminder to me of what happens when people are not vigilant about the narratives young women absorb about themselves and their bodies and sex and sexuality—how catastrophically damaging they can be. I don’t think I can solve that problem single-handedly or anything, but I can provide an alternate narrative for those who need it.
  TM: There’s this fascinating way you intertwine innocence and betrayal in that story without obscuring either. They are separate threads, braided together here—desire that is beautiful and desire that is toxic—and the reader can trace both throughout. Your use of so many old folk tales and urban legends—stories we all passed around among our friends as spooked kids and teenagers—takes the reader back to a more open, unprotected age, and then they’re confronted with the ugliness of patriarchal entitlement. Can you tell me a little about how that story came about? What ties those old legends together, and what made you flip them on their heads here?
  CMM: I was a Girl Scout for almost my entire childhood, and when we went camping I really loved the part where we told scary, theatrical stories around the campfire. I enjoyed hearing them, and I was really good at telling them. The version of “The Green Ribbon” I heard at that age—which is the one famously retold by Alvin Schwartz—has stuck with me ever since; I don’t know why. (I’ve been trying to explore this very question in an essay.) It’s possible that I was fascinated by the question of the ribbon itself—how did it get there? How did she go her entire life without disturbing it?—but there was something about the ending that really distressed me. Alfred asking and asking and asking, and Jenny relenting on her deathbed. Was she trying to fuck Alfred up as her final act on this earth? Was she just tired of saying “no?” Why did she give him what he wanted? Like the best folktales, the story was spare enough that a reader could project all sorts of things into it; the flatness serves as a kind of scrying pool for whoever is looking inside.
  And, so years later, when I was at a residency in New Hampshire, I sat down and found myself combining several ideas: a sex-loving, midcentury housewife, the story’s title—which I’d learned about from my OB-GYN nurse aunt—and the woman with the green ribbon. I revisited all of those questions, to try and find my own answers.
  The secondary urban legends and stage directions didn’t come until later drafts. When I went to go add those secondary stories, I consulted Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark trilogy. I flipped through the pages until certain stories spoke to me as ones that could stand one of her retellings. I think urban legends (and folktales, and fairy tales) have this way of showing us what we already know to be true, and I wanted these narratives to reflect that fact.
  TM: For you, the speculative elements in your fiction seem to be a way to subtly tug and pluck at the strings of reality on a very personal level. How did you get started writing speculative stories, and how do these elements play in your imagination as a writer?

  CMM: I get “into” stories in a number of ways, but a lot of my ideas come from observing what’s around me and pushing into it a little. My wife and I play this game where we’ll see something and I’ll lean over and suggest a fantastic alteration to it. For example, we’ll see a little kid playing with her reflection in a large window, and I’ll say to my wife, “What would happen if the reflection stopped following her?” I do this in my own head, too, and sometimes I’ll stop talking mid-sentence and my wife will say to me, “Are you getting an idea right now?” as I run for paper and pen. (Or, if I’m driving, I’ll say, “I’m about to say some weird sentences to you, please text them to me.”)
  When I teach, I talk to students a lot about “play,” and how that critical part of your young imagination can be snuffed out if you don’t feed it and take care of it. There’s been a lot of good and interesting writing about this idea of nursing one’s creative subconscious—I’m particularly fond of this essay by Kelly Link—and I think it’s an element of craft that doesn’t get touched on enough. Before plot or dialogue or even character, the mind needs to be observant, nimble, playful, and curious around the world around it. Without that, fiction is DOA.
  TM: I’ve found Kelly Link’s thoughts (the essay you linked to) about writing from our obsessions, no matter how trivial they seem, to be tremendously helpful. Do you similarly maintain a list of these obsessions for yourself, as Link does?
  CMM: I do! I make lists of obsessions, of fears, of images that strike me, of phrases that might make good titles, of potential formal constraints, of stories only I think I can tell, of memories, of sentences that come to me, of settings that give me a thrill…list-making is so satisfying, and such a useful way of cataloguing what’s going on inside my head.
  TM: A number of your stories are only one degree separated from our present reality. A plague is wiping out humanity, or women are becoming incorporeal for no discernible reason, but otherwise the characters and settings are, for lack of a better word, normal. They’re what we’re all living every day, and then this awful warping occurs. What does that method open for you when you’re writing a story?
  CMM: As a young woman, I did read some secondary world and/or portal fantasy (Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, the Narnia books), but my absolute favorite work presented a familiar world with tweaked fantasy, science fiction, and/or horror elements: A Wrinkle in Time, the work of Lois Duncan, Behind the Attic Wall, all of Louis Sachar’s books, John Bellairs. I was not leaving for another world; instead, I was being shown potential avenues of perception in my own world. I don’t think this is, like, aesthetically superior or anything, it’s just what tickled my own imagination. I think it created in me an acute sense that magic could be just around the corner. And quite frankly, so much of our world is just straight-up surreal—look at the current political climate, for example—that this kind of worldbuilding often feels very natural to me.
  TM: Who are some writers, past or present, who inspire you creatively?
  CMM: I’m particularly indebted to a certain generation of 20th-century writers: Shirley Jackson, Angela Carter, Jane Bowles, Lucia Berlin, Patricia Highsmith, Lois Duncan, Ray Bradbury, Gabriel García Márquez. But there is also an incredible line-up of contemporary folks who have shaped me into the writer I am: Kelly Link, Karen Russell, Helen Oyeyemi, Alice Sola Kim, Kevin Brockmeier, Nicholson Baker, Bennett Sims, Sofia Samatar, Alissa Nutting. And I’m discovering more every day: I recently finished Anne Rivers Siddons’s The House Next Door and Kathryn Davis’s Duplex—the first novels of those writers I’ve ever read—and I feel like my imagination is firing on every cylinder.

  TM: Your book’s title directly reveals a theme that weaves through every story in the collection: women’s bodies, the ways they both serve and betray these women (or are used by others to do the same), the ways they are both pleasured and violated. Can you tell me a bit about that theme and how is defines so much of this collection?
  CMM: I am singularly obsessed with the body; even my interest in the mind is rooted in the body, since the two are inseparable from each other. I’d be lying if I said this interest didn’t stem from my relationship with my own body: with moving through the world as a fat, queer, not-quite-white woman, experiencing physical ailments and struggling with mental illness. My mind is housed in my body; my body is flawed and also falls outside of specific culturally-acceptable parameters and is also actively oppressed. It experiences pleasure and brings me joy and it suffers; I fight against it and love it and accept it and loathe it. How better to grapple with these contradictions than write a book about it?
  TM: Full disclosure: I have never seen a single episode of Law & Order: SVU. I wasn’t sure what to expect going into your story “Especially Heinous,” which creates a fictional episode listing for the show’s entire run. I found it absolutely fascinating. What was the inception of that novella, and why did you choose such an unusual structure?
  CMM: I often tell people that its root was years before, when I’d spent a severe bout of swine flu in front of a Law & Order: SVU marathon, and drifted in and out of feverish consciousness in front of my computer. Whether or not that’s the actual place where it began, during my second year at grad school, I had the idea of writing a story using a television show as its anchor. I initially toyed with idea of taking existing episode capsules from IMDB and simply altering them toward fantasy, but I realized pretty quickly that this format was far too limiting. I did, however, notice that Law & Order: SVU only had single-word titles, which seemed to be as good a jumping-off place as any. The story came together pretty quickly after that—the titles provided a kind of mental springboard, and I bounced between plotlines and pulled everything together. Up until that time it was the longest singular project I’d ever written. (I should add that I intend the story to be readable to folks who haven’t seen Law & Order: SVU; but if you have, there might be some small Easter Eggs you can enjoy.)
  I think the structure works for this story for a few reasons. First, we’re very accustomed to marathoning TV nowadays, what with Netflix and other online streaming services, and so in some ways this is like a Netflix marathon from hell. The format also allows the pleasure of cutting one-off “episodes” with continuing storylines, which taps into the reason people enjoy shows with formulas like Law & Order to begin with. This structure doesn’t work for everyone—I received the meanest workshop letter in my entire MFA from a student who very much disliked every element of this story, and derisively referred to it as “fanfiction”—but obviously some folks respond to it very strongly. I don’t mind writing aesthetically divisive work; on the contrary, it’s a real pleasure.
  TM: In “The Resident,” you toy with the trope of the misunderstood madwoman forced together with other, “saner” folks (Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House came to mind), but in this case you redeem her from that relegation to insanity. That story seemed to come from a very personal place?
  CMM: When I workshopped a very early version of this story, a reader said, reluctantly, “I tire of ‘madwoman in the attic’ stories.” I felt bowled over by this note, because I, too, dislike sexist tropes about mad women, particularly mad lesbians, and here I’d created a story that centered around them. So I asked her, “What happens if you want to write a first-person story about a woman with mental illness? What do you do then?” She just shrugged.
  So I had this massive, sprawling story that felt important to me but ran up against this trope, and I didn’t know what to do about it. As someone who has mental illness—acute, debilitating anxiety—I’ve always been very interested in trying to snatch back narratives that have seemingly been taken away from me. So I decided during my many rewrites—and there were many!—to try and address this idea more forcefully. I reasoned, as long as the story took on these tropes, and she had agency and intelligence and context, she could be as mad as she needed to be. (I should add that I don’t begrudge the note that led me down this path—it was, in fact, critical to the story’s development.)
  It also helped that I did a ton of editing for this story under my editor Ethan Nosowsky’s guidance. Many of the other stories in the collection were functionally finished by the time Graywolf bought the collection—they’d been published elsewhere, and had already received thorough edits—but “The Resident” had never seen anything except that very early workshop. Ethan gently told me he thought this story would need the most work out of the entire book, and he was right—we went back and forth on it for ages. There was even a period of time I didn’t think it would appear in the collection at all. Ethan is brilliant, and also not prescriptive—he simply looked at each draft and suggested to me where he thought my subconscious was leading me. And then one day, it all snapped into place.
  TM: What’s next for you after the release of Her Body and Other Parties?
  CMM: I recently sold a memoir to Graywolf—House in Indiana—which will be coming out in 2019, so next year I’ll be revising that. I’m also at work at a ton of other projects—a new story collection, an essay collection, and a few different novels, though whether or not those take is yet to be determined.
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• Hazlitt - https://hazlitt.net/feature/being-woman-inherently-uncanny-interview-carmen-maria-machado

  ‘Being a Woman is Inherently Uncanny’: An Interview With Carmen Maria Machado
  By Lyra Kuhn
  The author of Her Body and Other Parties on writing the fantastical, existing in the periphery and blueprints of the past. 
  Related Books

  Interview
  September 19, 2017

  Lyra Kuhn
  Lyra Kuhn is a writer based in Prague, Czech Republic.
   

  A wife refuses her husband’s request to remove the green ribbon tied eternally around her neck. A store clerk realizes there are girls sewn into the dresses she sells. A woman recalls her sexual encounters as a plague consumes the world.
  The world of Carmen Maria Machado is bright and bizarre, full of magic and haunted places. Much of Machado’s short fiction centers on the unexpected, the swerve into the night vision of a woman who is really a witch and just remembered to tell you.
  In Machado’s debut short story collection Her Body and Other Parties (Graywolf Press), recently nominated for a National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize, she weaves the real with the fantastic until the ordinary becomes sinister and the other way around. 
  Lyra Kuhn: When did you first become interested in fabulism?
  Carmen Maria Machado: I think my interest in fabulism has come to me in stages. As a child, I was drawn to fabulist writing through kid’s lit—fantasy (A Wrinkle in Time) and science fiction (Ray Bradbury) and horror (Lois Duncan, John Bellairs), cut with metafiction (Sideways Stories from Wayside School) and absurdism (Roald Dahl).
  As a teenager, I was lucky enough to have a particular teacher who gave me books to read from her personal library, like One Hundred Years of Solitude, which was my first exposure to magical realism.
  And I had a third, important stage right after I began grad school, and fellow students began recommending writers to me who have since become the backbone of my personal canon: Kelly Link, Karen Russell, George Saunders, Nicholson Baker, Helen Oyeyemi, Alice Sola Kim, Sofia Samatar, Shirley Jackson, Angela Carter. This final stage was the push I needed for my own work; I realized these were the types of stories that spoke the most intensely to me, and reflected something I wanted to do in my own fiction.
  How does your identity as queer and Latina affect your writing?
  I think writing is inextricable from the body; there’s no such thing as pure reason, pure intellect. My body, my identity, is a lens through which I can view the world and reflect it back in my work. This is true for every artist.
  Do you think the body is a source of horror? Do you think bodies can become haunted? 
  I do! Bodies are terrifying; they’re powerful and fragile, bloody and imperfect, uncanny, impressionable vehicles that carry our minds from birth until death. And of course they’re inherently haunted. Haunting is a kind of impression; a lingering effect from a physical act like a shoeprint or a cloud of perfume left the in air. In the same way, bodies carry trauma and choices of our ancestors. Our DNAs are blueprints of the past.
  Is there a particular approach you take when writing a fabulist story, an alchemical process of sorts? 
  Not really. Most stories come together in the same way for me—in pieces, images, impressions, and concepts that I have to gather together into something cohesive. Whether or not the story is fabulist is pretty incidental to the process.
  There is an image in the book that hasn’t left me for some time—when the narrator from the story “Real Women Have Bodies” first describes the disease that makes women disappear, then later realizes the terrible secret about the dresses in the shop. Where did the crux of this story come from?
  At the Coralville Mall, right next to Iowa City, there was a black-walled, seasonal-prom-dress store called Glam. I walked past it one day, and thought Wow, that’d be a great setting for a story. I’d been mainlining a lot of fabulism around that time—I think I’d just finished Karen Russell’s St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves—and so I tried to imagine what kind of horrors could happen there. I don’t know how I arrived at the faded women being stitched into the dresses, but I imagine it had to do with the fact that the dresses already looked like they were occupied by invisible bodies. The story unfurled from there, though it’s old enough that it was heavily rewritten on a sentence level before appearing in Her Body and Other Parties.
  How do you move between the real and the unreal in your stories?
  I don’t think of them as particularly separate; the scrim between them is barely there. So it’s not difficult: I look at the world around me and push into it, just a little.
  Why do you think so many women writers turn to the uncanny, such as yourself, Kelly Link, Karen Russell, and so on?
  I think there are probably lots of reasons, but one of them is that being a woman is inherently uncanny. Your humanity is liminal; your body is forfeit; your mind is doubted as a matter of course. You exist in the periphery, and I think many women writers can’t help but respond to that state.
  You’ve said before that you have an obsession with lists. Could you make a list of stories or books that have had a great impact on you?
  Sure! Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and The Lottery and Other Stories, Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, Kelly Link’s Stranger Things Happen and Magic for Beginners, Alissa Nutting’s Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, Karen Russell’s St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, Nicholson Baker’s Mezzanine and Vox.

• Powells - http://www.powells.com/post/interviews/powells-interview-carmen-maria-machado-author-of-her-body-and-other-parties

  Powell's Interview: Carmen Maria Machado, Author of 'Her Body and Other Parties'

  by Jill Owens, October 26, 2017 9:39 AM

  Photo credit: Tom Storm Photography

  Her Body and Other Parties, the new story collection by Carmen Maria Machado, is one of those books that is almost impossible to believe is a debut, particularly by a young author. Inventive, dark, playful, authoritative, and exciting, these stories will knock you off-center and linger in your brain. The collection includes a brilliant reimagining of "The Green Ribbon," which is also a tour-de-force weaving of ghost stories and urban legends; an inventory of hook-ups that gradually reveals something grim reshaping our world; and an extraordinary, disturbing, and hilarious story made up entirely of fictional descriptions of Law and Order: SVU episodes. Throughout, the stories in Her Body and Other Parties display a wholly original talent. 

  Others agree — the collection is shortlisted for the National Book Award, and is garnering a ton of critical praise. Jeff VanderMeer raves, "Her Body and Other Parties is genius: part punk rock and part classical, with stories that are raw and devastating but also exquisitely plotted and full of delight. This is a strong, dangerous, and blisteringly honest book.” And Ben Marcus writes, "Carmen Maria Machado writes a new kind of fiction: brilliant, blindingly weird, and precisely attuned to the perils and sorrows of the times." We are very proud to have created a special hardcover edition of Her Body and Other Parties for Volume 70 of Indiespensable. 

  Jill Owens: What was the process of writing and collecting these stories like? Were some written much earlier than others? 

  Carmen Maria Machado: They were written over five years. The oldest, “Difficult at Parties,” was written in 2011, when I was still in grad school, and “Eight Bites” is the newest one, and that one was written in-between the first and second rounds of submissions from my agent to publishing houses. So the first round of submissions didn't even have “Eight Bites” in it because I wasn't finished with it, and then it was like, okay, since we're doing another round of submissions, let's include the story in there because it really fits the whole shtick. 

  Jill: How did you choose the order?

  Machado: My editor and I talked about that, because the order in the book is not the order that it was sold in. It was his idea to open with “The Husband Stitch,” which really surprised me, because for a long time that story was towards the end of the book, which started with “Difficult at Parties.” So we had a long conversation about it. I really wanted to open with a story that just jumps right in; one that goes to town and says, Here we are. 

  I wanted the Law and Order story to be in the middle, because it felt very much like a hinge. I had spoken with Kevin Brockmeier, a former teacher of mine, and that was his suggestion, to think about the book being like a mix-tape, and he liked the idea of that story being in the middle. 

  So that's how I determined the order, and then — after a while of trying to figure out the last story — I said to my editor, despite being about a rape, “Difficult at Parties” is the most optimistic. It ends on a note of optimism. So I wanted to put that at the end, as the final beat of the book, for the reader to rise a little out of the suffering. 

  So that was how we came up with the order, as a group effort. But I'm really pleased with the order; I think it really works. To be frank, I hadn't given it much thought before, and so it was nice to think about it in a purposeful way.

  I really wanted to open with a story that just jumps right in; one that goes to town and says, "Here we are."

  Jill: I think it's fantastic. It’s really surprising to me that “The Husband Stitch” didn't originally begin the collection. It feels inevitable as the opening story to me because it's just like, boom! You're in it. It has such a strong voice.

  Machado: I think my work can be very polarizing, which is fine, which can be good, but I also have this anxiety about alienating people, so I liked the idea of easing into the book a little more. But my editor was like, No. We're not going to do that. [Laughter] 

  So I said, You're right. We don't need to do that, we don't need to hold anyone's hand. Let's just go in guns blazing. And that's what we did.

  Jill: Speaking of “The Husband Stitch,” what was your experience with scary stories and ghost stories while growing up? 

  Machado: Like every other millennial [laughter], the work of Alvin Schwartz was a centerpiece of my childhood. When his books came out in the ’80s and early ’90s, they were slightly before my time, but in the ’90s they were like the most banned books of the decade, because of the illustrations in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.  

  But I loved them. I loved being scared, and I loved scary books. When I was in the second grade, I think, I borrowed a Goosebumps book from a classmate — it was Night of the Living Dummy — and I read it and had nightmares for weeks; I wouldn't let my parents turn the lights off at night. My mom was like, This is ridiculous. No more scary books for you. But I really wanted them. 

  I actually gave an interview a couple of weeks ago and I was describing this to the interviewer and he said, “So you like books that change your temperature.” I like books that change my temperature. I love that feeling of being so viscerally affected by something. Even as a young kid, I was really drawn to that feeling. I was also a Girl Scout, so I did a lot of campfire storytelling. [Laughter] I really liked hearing the stories, but also telling them. 

  The green ribbon story is actually not from the Scary Stories series. People think that it is, but it's from In a Dark, Dark Room, one of Schwartz’s books for younger readers. Alvin Schwartz had a ton of books. He was an incredibly popular folklorist for children. So I was really into all those books, and I liked telling scary stories, and in those Scary Stories books, there were instructions. So for the story about the liver, for example, at the end you were supposed to grab the person next to you and say, “YOU have it!” and scare the shit out of them. Which is exactly what I did, because I really liked that, and I made another Girl Scout cry. [Laughter] 

  I just really loved everything about it, which is weird because I'm kind of a fraidy-cat; but I also loved being scared, so I had this back-and-forth. That's just the way I am. I'm very anxious, but I also seek out experiences that make me anxious. I don't know what that says about me. [Laughter]

  Jill: The narrator in “The Husband Stitch” names several of her favorite stories. What were some of yours? 

  Machado: I obviously liked the green ribbon story. I was really drawn to… There was this urban legend. Do you remember the hand-licking story? It was something like a girl is scared, and she puts her hand out for her dog to lick, to be comforted, but later she finds out that someone else was in the house, who murdered the dog and put up a sign that read, “Humans can lick too.”

  Jill: Ah, I heard a different version of that one! That's funny. 

  Machado: It's funny, because I keep getting asked questions about fairy tales, and I am interested in fairy tales, and I do write about fairy tales, but I think that these urban legends, these other scary stories, represent a distinctly American folklore that is very interesting to me. 

  Jill: I'd forgotten about the story about the young girl and her mother in Paris — which the narrator calls "of all the stories about mothers, the most real." Can you tell that story and talk about why you wanted to focus in on it?

  Machado: Sure. The basic arc of that urban legend is: A girl goes to Paris with her mother, they check into a hotel, her mother doesn't feel well. They call a doctor, who comes to the hotel and sends the daughter away with some arcane instructions in another language. She's instructed to go to a certain place where the doctor's wife is making pills, and it takes forever, and when she returns, the cab driver takes a long time, doubling back down the same road several times. When she finally gets back to the hotel, the clerk claims not to remember her, the room where her mother was staying is empty, the furniture is all different, and everybody's like, You were never here. 

  The end of the original story is that her mother had some kind of communicable disease, like the plague, and the doctor didn't want to cause a citywide panic, so he orchestrated this plot to get the daughter away so they could get rid of the mother's body (she had died) and make everyone swear that she had never met them before. 

  Which is horrifying! [Laughter] As I'm retelling it, it's like that's the most horrible thing. It's weird and implausible, but it’s also just terrifying, this orchestrated plot to undermine your sanity. I feel like, for women, that is true all the time.

  In my book, in the story that I tell, that could be what happened. It could be that she figures out what happened to her mother, or that she spends the rest of her life wandering around believing that she's crazy, or that she invented her mother and has completely lost her mind. 

  I was really interested in that story from the perspective of gaslighting, in society and by society, sort of "for the common good."

  Jill: It emphasizes how women are not believed or listened to — which is echoed in the narrator's experience of the toes among the potatoes at the grocery store (which is such a great, creepy image). That's something that's always relevant, but feels particularly so right now.

  Machado: Yes, right.

  I think that's what makes all writing good, right? You're approaching something in a very specific way, so that even if somebody is like, "Oh, I know this experience," it's being seen through fresh eyes. That's really hard.

  Jill: How do you think about form, in general? Several stories in this collection have unusual and interesting forms — how do your stories find their correct shapes?

  Machado: It really depends on the story. I feel like some stories come out fully formed, and others come from the form. So in “Inventory,” for example, the idea that I had was quite literally like, what if the story was all sex scenes, a list of this woman's lovers, and then another story in the background? And then I wrote it that way. So that was like, I have an idea! And then I wrote it. [Laughter]

  “Especially Heinous” was similar, where I had this idea for the form, and then once I got the rhythm, I just wrote the whole thing. So the stories were actually informed by their form, and they weren't arbitrary forms — they speak to some quality of the story and the plot. I think that can be a problem people have, where they come up with a very innovative form, but the content of the story doesn't fit it, which is not good. 

  I've also tried to use form and failed. I workshopped “Eight Bites” one time, and I remember people saying they expected it to have a weird form, because it's called “Eight Bites,” but it's a pretty straightforward story, structurally speaking. I had tried something, but I could never make it work. Sometimes the story doesn't want it and resists it. Other times I'll be like, I wonder if I can make this story, and then I'll rethink the form later. But I feel like some stories demand a more unusual structure, and others don't. It's a matter of figuring out what the story requires.

  Jill: I was going to ask you how you decided to do that with “Inventory,” layering one story on top of another. That layering happens in many of your stories — it almost reminds me of the way poetry works. How do you think about that aspect of your stories?

  Machado: It's funny that you say that, because I don't think of myself as a poet. In terms of that story, I often refer to one of my favorite movies, Children of Men. The thing that I really love about that movie is that some of the world-building happens in the background and is never clearly seen, and so every time I rewatch that movie I feel like I see new details. There's something I like about that very cinematic way of thinking. 

  I was a photography major in college; I think very visually. It's important to me to think about things visually, as well as with sound. So I had that image in my mind of a foregrounded narrative, and something happening with a sort of moving, scrolling background. It's different, because fiction and movies are not the same form, but it was interesting to me to try to use that effect in some way. 

  It really was very much like, I wonder if I could do this, and then, Yes, I bet I could. Who's going to stop me? [Laughter]

  Jill: In terms of visual elements, there are so many incredibly realistic details in your stories, integrated into the more surreal elements, like the inventory of food in the fridge in “Mothers”; the women going to Canada who dub the narrator “the protector of Maine” in “Inventory”; and too many things to count in “The Resident.” How do you think about the balance between intensely sensory and realistic detail and the surrealism that's also in the stories?

  Machado: I like fiction in all genres, from realism all the way to high fantasy and everything in-between. But for me, the work that most reflects the way that I think about the world is a sort of liminal fantasy, where you have a recognizable world, a recognizable situation, and then there are these holes punctured in reality. That, to me, reflects the way that I think about the world. It makes sense to me. It's not much of a leap from thinking about a thought I'm having or a situation I'm trying to work through in fiction to some sort of supernatural element. That just really makes sense to me.

  Jill: “Especially Heinous” — my lord, what an amazing, inventive, funny, and wonderful story. How on earth did that one come about?

  Machado: Well, so I'm a big Law and Order: SVU fan. [Laughter] I think about it a lot, as I think about all of the media that I consume. I watch it intensely, and my wife will walk into the room and I'll pause it and be like, Here's 10,000 thoughts I'm having about this show. [Laughter] 

  I was interested in trying the form. I wanted to try writing a story that had a symphonic structure where lots of microfictions build into a larger story. Then I had this idea of a TV show — so I thought of Law and Order: SVU, and thought I could try taking the existing episode descriptions on IMDB and altering them to be surreal. That was my first idea. 

  But when I started, it was too limiting. Having to work from the actual episode descriptions was too much. So I thought, What if I dropped that and just used the titles as a jumping-off point? So the titles in that story are all the actual titles of the episodes.

  Jill: I just realized that this morning.

  Machado: Most people don't realize that. You wouldn't know unless you started looking into it. But yes, those are the real titles. The nice thing about that — it's not true anymore, there was a shift, but back then, all of the episode titles were one word.

  So when I had them, they became these comfortable monkey bars to hold onto — I could swing over to this one, or swing over to that one. And I wrote that story more or less linearly, from beginning to end. As I could see the next title, I thought, Oh, that'll work with that plot line, or work for that other one, and I sort of blazed right through it. I mean, it's pretty long, but it was pretty linearly written. 

  And it did this structural thing that I wanted it to do, which was great. I took it to class at Iowa — I took it to Kevin Brockmeier, and he was incredibly helpful in his thoughts about what was and wasn't working. I worked on a fuller version of it the next year. Then I tried to sell it for eight years and I couldn't sell it, because it was so weird and long and no one knew what to do with it, until The American Reader, which was a wonderful magazine, decided to take it. So it ended up working out really beautifully. 

  I wanted it to be a vehicle to speak out loud all of the feelings I have about shows like Law and Order: SVU, which is so morally complicated in the way that it both addresses and fetishizes violence against women. “Especially Heinous” ended up being this very useful thing that I could pour all of my feelings and my thoughts into. It was tremendously fun to write.

  The work that most reflects the way that I think about the world is a sort of liminal fantasy, where you have a recognizable world, a recognizable situation, and then there are these holes punctured in reality.

  Jill: In “The Resident,” the narrator says: "I was reminded, for the umpteenth time, of Viktor Shklovsky's idea of defamiliarization; of zooming in so close to something, and observing it so slowly, that it begins to warp, and change, and acquire new meaning." The narrator then describes, really beautifully, examining the foot of a refrigerator as a child and having that phenomenon occur. She says that process is useful for her writing — I imagine it is for yours, too. How do you think about defamiliarization in your work?

  Machado: That scene was taken verbatim, quite literally out of my own experience, as you can imagine. [Laughter] When I learned about that theory, I was like, Oh! That's what that's called! [Laughter] I didn't know there was a name for it.

  As a kid I was obsessed with that idea, of lying down and seeing something from a different perspective and getting kind of lost in the weirdness of it, even if it was a thing I'd seen a million times. I think that's what makes all writing good, right? You're approaching something in a very specific way, so that even if somebody is like, Oh, I know this experience, it's being seen through fresh eyes. That's really hard.

  I was talking earlier about fairy tales, and the retold fairy tale as its own genre, which is something people do all the time. What's interesting is that I think people who retell fairy tales are not always looking at them with new eyes. They're sometimes just changing something around. I think about my favorite example of the genre, The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter, which is a gorgeous retelling of Bluebeard that throws everything about the original story into chaos. And it's so beautiful and fully realized. It really makes you think about the original story in a whole new way.

  That's what you want, right? That sense of, I'm approaching a thing that I thought I knew entirely, but in fact I'm seeing it and I don't recognize it at all. I think that's the job of the writer, or really any artist. So defamiliarization has been very important and interesting to me since I was a child, but now I have the intellectual underpinnings to back it up. [Laughter]

  Jill: It’s kind of a stepsibling of the idea of the uncanny.

  Machado: Totally! Absolutely. The idea of the uncanny is that something that should have been hidden has been exposed. Anyway, that's Freud's version of it — something that had been concealed has now been revealed. There's that sense of disorientation, or dream logic, like you're returning to the same place you were before. There's a dreaminess to it. I'm very interested in the uncanny, as a style and as a way of approaching work. 

  Jill: Something I thought was funny in “The Resident” is the narrator's imaginary answers to interviews. "Pickled things and shrimp” — are those the things in your fridge that you want Lynne Rossetto Kasper to come up with a recipe for?

  Machado: [Laughter] I don't do it very much anymore because I'm lucky that I get to work really close to home, but when I did a lot of driving… While I was living in Iowa, I dated someone for a while who lived in another state, so I was driving to see this person all the time, and I was in the car a lot. Sometimes when I was super bored, or if I wanted to turn off the radio because nothing I wanted to listen to was on, I would totally imagine being interviewed. [Laughter] 

  I don't know if it was just me. I would narrate out loud answers to questions I imagined receiving, which is such a weird thing to do. The character in “The Resident” — obviously she's different from me in many ways, but I feel like I pumped my neuroses into her and then amped them up to, like, a thousand. So I loved the idea of her giving these interview answers. 

  Lynne Rossetto Kasper's not even doing that show any more. I do like the new guy a lot, though. I really do think he's great. But I fucking love The Splendid Table. [Laughter] If I could listen to that show all day, I'd be so happy. My wife and I will have it on while we're driving and I'll just be moaning over the food that she's describing. [Laughter] It sounds so good.  

  So that was a fun little way to integrate things from my own life, and things that I love. I think one of the coolest things about being a fiction writer is that the shit that's on my mind and the things I think about and that fill my days can all go into my work. That's really cool.  

  I spoke with Carmen Maria Machado on October 18, 2017. 
  ÷ ÷ ÷
  Carmen Maria Machado’s work has appeared in Granta, The New Yorker, Guernica, Tin House, NPR, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for a Nebula Award and a Shirley Jackson Award, and was a finalist for the Calvino Prize. She lives in Philadelphia with her wife. Her Body and Other Stories is her first book.

• Bomb - http://bombmagazine.org/articles/the-form-vampire-an-interview-with-carmen-maria-machado/

  The Form Vampire: An Interview with Carmen Maria Machado by Liza St. James
  “Our bodies are graveyards of cells, the source of art, inherently finite, constantly decaying.”

  Preeti Vasudevan opens Nov 2-4, 7:30pm
  Oct 2, 2017
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  Lidia Yuknavitch by Porochista Khakpour

  The first story I read by Carmen Maria Machado was “Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order SVU.” The novella’s inventive structure and indelible images—the unforgettable doppelgängers, the ghostly presences of girls-with-bells-for-eyes—were an apt introduction to the writer’s powers. Borrowing from the tropes of speculative fiction, Machado takes on even the most rigid, seemingly closed forms (like estate sale inventories or TV capsule descriptions), and inhabits them as though they were living systems, subverting them to her own ends. The worlds of her seductive stories, whether post-pandemic or ostensibly made-for-entertainment, reveal the uncanny of our own, and then some.
  In Machado’s debut story collection, Her Body and Other Parties (Graywolf Press), relationships among and within bodies are as complicated as we’ve ever felt them to be. One character chronicles an apocalyptic pandemic through her own sexual history, another is haunted by her flesh incarnate after a weight-loss surgery, and another rents a “DVD from a company that advertises adult films for loving couples,” only to realize she can hear the actors’ thoughts. Parts of the collection read like dreams or hallucinations, others like sex in its myriad variations, and some manage to conjure up those 3:00 a.m. fits of panic that feel as though they’ll last forever.
  Liza St. James Her Body and Other Parties was also the title of your graduate thesis, even though only three of those stories became part of this collection. Did the title function as an organizing principle as well, to help decide which stories wouldn’t make it into the collection?
  Carmen Maria Machado It’s funny. The title is older than the majority of the stories in the collection, but it did end up being something of an organizing principle for the entire book.
  LSJ How did you arrive at it?
  CMM I was trying to name my thesis, and a friend recommended I pick a story title from the collection that encompassed the whole of the book. None of them quite fit. But I started playing around with the titles and mashing them together, and eventually shoved “Difficult at Parties” and “Real Women Have Bodies” together. I really liked the words “bodies” and “parties.” I was also thinking about Ted Chiang’s collection Story of Your Life and Others, in which “and Others” has the double meaning of “other stories” and “other lives.” So then it became Bodies and Other Parties. Then I realized that women’s bodies were the focus of my obsession, so it became Her Body and Other Parties.
  LSJ The “Other Parties” takes on those kinds of double meanings, too—a body of people, or outside agents. There are so many resonances of both bodies and parties throughout. What are the “parties” for you?

  CMM I always talk to my students about party scenes, and how if you need to break something open, write one! Because parties are wild and full of people and bad behavior and you can mash lots of characters together—it’s like a chemistry experiment. So yeah, the collection has literal party scenes. But I also like to think of parties and bodies as being double-edged swords—parties can be fun, exciting, delicious, memorable, amazing, but they can also be long, hot, terrifying, vomit-inducing, boring, stressful. The body is also a source of pleasure and suffering, both from yourself and from other people. They’re liminal spaces, thin membranes separating day and night, birth and death, etc. They both, by definition, will end.
  LSJ In a wonderful passage from “Difficult at Parties,” the narrator in the bath tub recalls a time when she imagined herself a carrot: “I remember a small version of myself, sitting in a hotel hot tub and holding my arms rigid against my torso, rolling around the churning water. I’m a carrot!” Do you have any tips for the rest of us who have trouble knowing where our bodies end and the world begins?
  CMM The boundaries are hardly fixed. The state controls several aspects of our bodies. We leave pheromones in the air for other people to respond to. Our bodies are graveyards of cells, the source of art, inherently finite, constantly decaying. They are the accumulation of genetic lines that have survived this long. They carry trauma like they carry cancer. There’s a kind of peace in understanding and accepting this state of liminality.
  LSJ Given the various “parties” throughout the collection, I was surprised when I looked back at “Mothers” and realized that The Dinner Party wasn’t named in the story.
  CMM Yeah, I refer to The Dinner Party in “Mothers” but never name it.
  LSJ Though you do give a lot of names in “Mothers,” and the prose in that section is so lush. The “major and minor arcana” list. It was really exciting to get to.
  CMM Despite that story being very intense, writing that middle section of “Mothers” was really pleasurable. I got to let loose with my best/worst habits. The major/minor arcana is a real-life idea. I have a dear friend who is very, very Catholic, who I’ve known since we were three, and for a while she was blogging about eating “liturgically,” that is, preparing meals according to the saints’ days. So, for background, if a saint has a particular fruit associated with her, you might put that fruit into a pie or something. I’m not religious at all, but there’s something magical about the idea of hanging the ins-and-outs of your days on the lives of long-ago mystics. I’ve always had this idea of making a big book of personal saints, sort of like the one in that story. When I wrote that bit I got to actually imagine what that book might look like, if it existed.
  LSJ When I got to that list I felt turned on by it, like I’d been waiting for it.
  CMM I love that.
  LSJ Do you have a list of possible saint candidates?
  CMM The list in the book, for sure. I’m constantly saving Wikipedia pages of people I learn about. Like, the women of the Moberly-Jourdain incident. They’re not scientists, just ladies who may have had a lesbian folie à deux and thought they slipped through time. Oh, and Katherine Johnson—she was this really important mathematician who worked for NASA. Rita Mae Brown. Dorothy Allison. Ana Mendieta. Octavia Butler and Maya Deren.
  LSJ Your characters act on intuition, instinct, and dreams in a way that feels fresh and powerful. How much would you say this reflects your writing process?
  CMM A lot of my characters’ thoughts and flights of fancy are reflections of my own head, and I can’t really articulate where they came from. There’s a bit in “The Resident” where she has a dream that she’s talking to her wife, and they have this exchange about eggs and legs and the forest. I came up with that just walking in a forest. I could not tell you for the life of me where it came from; it just showed up. I liked it so much, I stuck it in there.
  LSJ In “The Husband Stitch,” the narrator sees toes in the potato aisle, “pale and bloody stumps, mixed in among those russet tubers.” Her parents don’t believe her and so she begins to doubt herself: “As a grown woman, I would have said to my father that there are true things in this world observed only by a single set of eyes.” Do you have tips for others invested in sharing true things, whether unseen or seen only by their own sets of eyes?
  CMM Truth rings true to people who are familiar with that truth. Women, for example, are more inclined to believe other women who have survived sexual violence or abusive relationships—not just because of a general political principle, but because they’ve most likely experienced it or know someone who has. You can’t control for that, right? You can’t force something to resonate for folks who don’t know what you’re talking about, because of privilege or circumstance or anything else. You can only tell your story.
  LSJ Your stories have taken on various forms—a crowd-funding campaign, an inventory, TV capsule descriptions, numbered lists, selected objects from an estate sale… How do you come upon those forms?
  CMM I call myself a “form vampire.” I’m really interested in what they can do for me. Whenever I see a non-fictional structure, I start to think about how I might be able to use that form for fiction. Sometimes I try things and they straight-up don’t work (which isn’t the fault of the form; I just haven’t found a way in). But when they work, it rings like a bell.
  LSJ I’m not sure I’ll be able to divorce the word bell from eyes now.
  CMM Ha!
  LSJ Speaking of non-fictional structures, on a Guernica panel last spring you mentioned that writing “Eight Bites” before “The Trash Heap Has Spoken” helped you work through some of your thinking for that essay. What is the relationship between fiction and nonfiction for you? Does one help us understand the other?
  CMM I think I’m working through material with fiction before trying to tackle it with nonfiction. I don’t know why, but that’s what my brain needs.
  LSJ ”Real Women Have Bodies” deftly evokes the scarcity of jobs, labor inequalities, student debt, the rigidity of beauty standards. How did you arrive at the disappearing women?
  CMM That story started from its title, which was my attempt to play with the phrase “real women have…” curves or whatever. As I wrote and revised, I realized it was part ghost story, part pandemic story. I loved the idea of setting this hot, burgeoning relationship in the midst of a gender’s genocide. It just felt… right. Right and real.
  LSJ And even as they’re disappearing, the women pose a kind of threat. In “The Resident,” someone tries to write off the narrator’s work as a trope, as the “madwoman in the attic” or the “mad lesbian.” I’ve noticed more conversations around the gendered use of “crazy” lately. Is this a critique you’ve encountered?
  CMM The only time I ever tried to workshop (a relatively different form of) “The Resident,” a fellow writer said that she “tired” of the madwoman-in-the-attic trope. I took this critique very seriously, because of course I’m invested in disrupting stereotypical narratives—or, at the very least, not perpetrating them—but I kept wondering: what happens if you’re a woman and/or a lesbian, and you’re interested in writing about mental health? Am I somehow obligated to only write good and flattering stories about the demographics to which I belong? So I decided to address this very directly in the story. The fact that the protagonist is given so much interiority, and so much space, and in first-person, seems important to the project of overcoming this problem; closer to Wild Sargasso Sea than Jane Eyre.
  LSJ The narrator in “The Resident” takes up residence in her own head and imagines its furnishings: “What if you colonize your own mind and when you get inside, the furniture is attached to the ceiling?” How do you imagine the furnishings of your own body?
  CMM I see myself like a glitzier version of a woodland house; Falling Water with higher ceilings. I’m imagining stone floors, stone and wood walls, ornate furniture, taxidermy, books, Tiffany lamps, a nearby lake or river. A very large dog, like maybe a wolfhound, draped over a red brocade fainting couch.
  LSJ The body acts as a kind of house throughout this collection. In “The Husband Stitch,” the narrator says to her son that her body “couldn’t house another” child, and then, “You were a poor tenant, Little One […] and I shall revoke your deposit.” In “Mothers,” the narrator overhears her father tell her brother: “You never live with a woman, you live inside of her.” How do you understand these body-as-host relationships?
  CMM The mind and body are both two halves of a whole and also two discrete entities. Sometimes your body gets away from your mind; your mind can also get away from your body. They occupy each other. I think this is why I find ghost stories, haunted house stories, and possession stories so compelling—it’s a literalization of that state.
  LSJ Many of the stories in this collection have stories folded into them and threads carried throughout. What lets you know the length of a story while you’re working on it?
  CMM I try to let stories be the length they’re going to be. “Inventory” is so tiny, and “The Resident” just kept getting bigger. I wondered for a while if it was going to turn into a novel. I read my drafts out loud to myself a lot, so it’s pretty easy to tell when a story’s length is working, or when it feels draggy or over too quickly.
  I do love tiny embedded stories, though. They’re some of my favorite narrative pleasures.
  LSJ An index card plot point of C––––– M–––––’s novel reads “Lucille’s girlfriend breaks up with her because she is ‘difficult at parties.’” I love little nods like this—at what point did you add it in?
  CMM That’s a deliberate leftover from when I tried, briefly, to link these stories. I was getting anxious about selling this collection, and I didn’t want to wait to write a novel to put it out into the world, and thought, “Maybe they’re connected?” They’re not, and I’m glad I didn’t push that line of revision too hard, but I did like the idea of the author in “The Resident” briefly referring to other stories in the collection, as if they could, possibly, be plot lines in her imagination.
  LSJ Do you always know where you’re headed with a story?
  CMM It’s about 50-50. Some stories come out with their shape set to go. I recently wrote a draft of a new story where I had brackets for every plot beat, and then I had to go in and write the scenes. That’s an ideal situation, because the writing process is a little more putting-in-the-work than exploring-in-the-dark. The latter is a really different process.
  LSJ One of the things I love most about your writing is its attention to acoustics. It feels, as William Gass famously put it, “by the mouth, for the ear.” Do you wait until you read aloud for those kinds of music-related concerns?
  CMM Both my initial writing and line-level revision is directed by the music of the prose. Often I’m saying the sentence out loud as I write, and when I come to a place where I know the sound that needs to be there, but not the word itself, I just insert brackets with the general beat so I can return to it later. It’s definitely at the forefront of every step of my process.
  LSJ Could you speak to this line in terms of rhythm, inspiration, and revision: “Back in Bad’s bed, in the good bed, as she slid her hand into me, and I pulled and she gave and I opened and she came without touching herself, and I responded by losing all speech, I thought, Thank god we cannot make a baby.”
  CMM I’ve always been interested in trying to mimic specific physical experiences with prose, and here I’m doing (or trying to do) just that. This sentence rocks back and forth on its heels (bad/good, slid/pulled, etc.). It’s full of alliteration (bad, bed, back) and hard consonant endings (-d, especially). It starts with sex and ends with a strange but adjacent thought. It’s simultaneously physical and cognitive. It’s sex, in other words. Or at least that was the goal.
  LSJ I reread “The Resident” on my way to a residency, and I can’t get over the severed roadkill’s mysterious return. Could you speak to the genesis of that?
  CMM In the initial version of the story, I had this idea about a distortion of time, and the way that I’d illustrate it would include her hitting an animal—actually a squirrel—and finding part of its body under her car, and then the missing part of it near her studio weeks later. Then I went to a residency in Oregon and had something—maybe an owl?—leave half a rabbit on my studio doorstep. So I turned the squirrel into a rabbit, and I left the uncanny sense of time distortion because, why not?
  LSJ What did you do with the half rabbit?!
  CMM I just left it there! I didn’t know what to do. Eventually something dragged it off. There was a lot of wildlife out there. A hawk got stuck in my air-drying laundry. Nature is horrifying.

  Liza St. James is a writer and translator from San Francisco. An editorial assistant at Transit Books and assistant editor of NOON, she is a teaching fellow at Columbia University.

• Literary Hub - http://lithub.com/carmen-maria-machado-on-campfire-stories-and-queer-teen-touchstones/

  Carmen Maria Machado on Campfire Stories and Queer Teen Touchstones
  Talking to the Author of Her Body and Other Parties
  October 6, 2017  By Claire Luchette
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  Friends don’t let friends go without Carmen Maria Machado. A dear one sent me “The Husband Stitch” last year when I was in a fight with fiction, and by the time I’d finished the story, all had been forgiven. Fantastic and funny and strange, Machado’s writing expands our understanding of what’s possible in a story, on the level of both form and content. Her work plays with genre, captures the bodily absurdities of being a woman, and it’s built of sentences so fine you want to read them aloud and applaud.
  Originally published in Granta, “The Husband Stitch” is now the first story in Machado’s debut collection, Her Body and Other Parties (Graywolf). The book has been praised and celebrated, and the accolades from book folks keep pouring in—the collection’s been named a National Book Award Finalist and a finalist for the Kirkus Prize. I e-mailed with Machado about her work and the art that excites her. 
  Claire Luchette: “The Husband Stitch” is a fantastic blend of folklore, horror, and surrealism. I was obsessed, as a kid, with Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, which your story draws from. When did you first come across Schwartz’s work?
  Carmen Maria Machado: Like so many Millennials, those books were an integral, nightmarish part of my childhood—the illustrations attracted and repulsed me, and I was also really into the story’s read-aloud instructions. I was a Girl Scout, and when we went camping or did some kind of bonfire, I loved telling the stories I remembered from that series (complete with grabbing the nearest girl at the story’s climax and shouting “YOU HAVE IT!”). They definitely sparked an interest in horror as a genre, and that interest has lasted for my whole life. 
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  CL: I love the role of lists in your work—some stories use series of images to show time passing, and other stories, like “Inventory” and “Especially Heinous,” are structured as lists. How do you intuit when a list story is complete?
  CMM: There’s a sense of finality—an emotional arc coming to a close. Someone at a panel I was on once described it as “selecting an endpoint that honors your feelings.” That advice is a bit more New-Agey than I normally prefer, but I have to concede it makes a lot of sense. I think when you start writing, it’s more difficult to know when a story is “done” because you don’t know who you are as a writer yet. Part of coming into yourself is being more in tune with that part of yourself, and I think it gets easier to tell when something is done. (Or, at least, it has for me.)
  CL: I’m always interested in what stories looked like before they ended up in a book. It’s hard to remember that a writer’s first draft may have looked very different from what’s published. Which of the stories in HBAOP required the most revision and reworking? What did earlier versions look like?
  CMM: The two stories that had the heaviest revisions were “Real Women Have Bodies” and “The Resident.” “Real Women Have Bodies” is plot-wise more or less the same, but it’s such an old story I had to really revise it on a line level to get it to a place where I felt satisfied that it matched the other stories. “The Resident,” on the other hand, was a hot mess when Graywolf bought my book. It was the only story that had never been published or edited in any way.
  The biggest problem was I didn’t quite know what “The Resident” was about, so there were just a lot of plot threads and dead ends that didn’t quite add up to anything cohesive. My editor, Ethan Nosowsky, was brilliant. He basically said that he didn’t know what the story was about, either, but he was pretty sure I did underneath all the chaos. So he told me what he was noticing—what he thought my subconscious had tucked away in there.
  I spent weeks on the story—and I was at a residency, so it was weeks for, like, 8 hours a day—and then one day, I was taking a shower and it all clicked together. The earlier version of the story had more or less the same plot, but there were all kinds of weird scenes that came about because I was imagining the story as a set of plot points being moved around by an author—me. (*wavy fingers* Metafictional!) But I ended up scrapping that idea entirely, trimming and tightening the story, and thinking more about the themes of how women—especially queer women—can write about themselves and mental health without falling into a stereotype ditch. That, I think, was what my subconscious was trying to do all along. It just took a while to rise to the surface.
  CL: What work has been getting you through 2017?
  CMM: Mostly bashing my way into a bunch of new essays and short stories and sketching out ideas for some longer projects. I’ve also been slowly taking notes for the next draft of my memoir, which is coming out from Graywolf in 2019.
  CL: What art has been getting you through 2017?
  CMM: Beauty, cynicism, horror: What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah, White Dialogues by Bennett Sims, The Merry Spinster by Mallory Ortberg, Sour Heart by Jenny Zhang, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life by Samantha Irby. Bojack Horseman, Rick and Morty, Jane the Virgin. Get Out.
  CL: You recently tweeted that you wish you could play Kesha’s song “Hymn” for every queer teen ever. What books or stories you wish you could give to every queer teen ever?
  CMM: Weetzie Bat, Rubyfruit Jungle, The Price of Salt, Annie on My Mind. When I read these books as an adult, I remember wishing that someone told me when I was younger that folks were publishing books about queer characters long before I was born.
  CL: Which writers of the body do you find instructive?
  Lidia Yuknavitch, Roxane Gay, Leslie Jamison, Dodie Bellamy, Jenny Zhang, Samantha Irby, and Maggie Nelson.
  CL: I loved your essay “O Adjunct! My Adjunct!” How does teaching inform your writing?
  CMM: The neat thing about teaching is, even if you’ve lectured on a story or topic a thousand times, new students will come in with new questions that make you look at the material in a new way. At least once a semester, my students and I will be having a conversation about craft or genre and it’ll spark an understanding or idea about something I’ve been mulling over. I think I’d love teaching even if it didn’t inform my writing—I find working with students to be incredibly exciting and satisfying—but it’s certainly a nice bonus.

Her Body and Other Parties

264.32 (Aug. 7, 2017): p48.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
* Her Body and Other Parties
Carmen Maria Machado. Graywolf (FSG. dist.), $16 trade paper (264p) ISBN 978-1-55597-788-7

Machado creates eerie, inventive worlds shimmering with supernatural swerves in this engrossing debut collection. Her stories make strikingly feminist moves by combining elements of horror and speculative fiction with women's everyday crises. Machado builds entire interior lives through sparse and minor details, turning even litanies of refrigerator contents and free-association on the coming of autumn into memorable meditations on identity and female disempowerment. Queerness permeates these tales, shaping the women and their problems, with a recurring focus on the inherent strangeness of female bodies. These bodies face an epidemic of inexplicable evaporation ("Real Women Have Bodies"), linger as distorted masses beyond weight-loss surgery ("Eight Bites"), or gain the ability to hear the thoughts of actors in porn ("Difficult at Parties"). "The Husband Stitch" makes explicit the hidden sexuality of creepy urban legends. In "Especially Heinous," Machado rewrites 12 seasons of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, riffing on the titles as she imagines Benson haunted by victims, Stabler beset by domestic drama, and both competing with more efficient doppelgangers. Machado's slightly slanted world echoes our own in ways that will entertain, challenge, and move readers. (Oct.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
"Her Body and Other Parties." Publishers Weekly, 7 Aug. 2017, p. 48. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA500340323&it=r&asid=c74e8bf5d9bef93cbf5b15f8b1294c04. Accessed 2 Nov. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A500340323

Machado, Carmen Maria: HER BODY AND OTHER PARTIES

(July 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Machado, Carmen Maria HER BODY AND OTHER PARTIES Graywolf (Adult Fiction) $16.00 10, 3 ISBN: 978-1-55597-788-7
Machado's debut collection brings together eight stories that showcase her fluency in the bizarre, magical, and sharply frightening depths of the imagination.Each of the stories in this collection has, at its center, a strange and surprising idea that communicates, in a shockingly visceral way, the experience of living inside a woman's body. In "The Husband Stitch," Machado turns the well-known horror story about a girl who wears a green ribbon around her neck inside out, transforming the worn childhood nightmare into a blistering exploration of female desire and the insidious entitlement that society claims over the female body. "Especially Heinous" turns 12 seasons of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit into a disorienting, lonely, and oddly hopeful crime procedural crammed with ghosts and doppelgangers. "Difficult at Parties" depicts a woman trying to recover from a sexual assault. She watches porn in the hope that it will help her reconnect with her boyfriend and discovers that she can somehow hear the thoughts of the actors on the screen. Women fade out of their physical bodies and get incorporated into prom dresses. They get gastric bypass surgery, suffer epidemics, have children, go to artist residencies. They have a lot of sex. The fierceness and abundance of sex and desire in these stories, the way emotion is inextricably connected with the concerns of the body, makes even the most outlandish imaginings strangely familiar. Machado writes with furious grace. She plays with form and expectation in ways that are both funny and elegant but never obscure. "If you are reading this story out loud," one story suggests, "give a paring knife to the listeners and ask them to cut the tender flap of skin between your index finger and thumb." With Machado's skill, this feels not like a quirk or a flourish but like a perfectly appropriate direction. An exceptional and pungently inventive first book.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
"Machado, Carmen Maria: HER BODY AND OTHER PARTIES." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA497199744&it=r&asid=9497b554ce7f03ae96fb6742cad305bd. Accessed 2 Nov. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A497199744

"Her Body and Other Parties." Publishers Weekly, 7 Aug. 2017, p. 48. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA500340323&asid=c74e8bf5d9bef93cbf5b15f8b1294c04. Accessed 2 Nov. 2017. "Machado, Carmen Maria: HER BODY AND OTHER PARTIES." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA497199744&asid=9497b554ce7f03ae96fb6742cad305bd. Accessed 2 Nov. 2017.

• New York Times Book Review
  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/04/books/review-her-body-and-other-parties-carmen-maria-machado.html
  Word count: 1045

  Fairy Tales About the Fears Within
  Books of The Times
  By PARUL SEHGAL OCT. 4, 2017
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  Alessandra Montalto/The New York Times
  She has been decapitated twice, had her right arm sawed off once and been smeared with paint too many times to count. No public monument has faced such steady abuse as the statue of Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid perched on a large rock in a Copenhagen harbor. Among her most faithful assailants have been feminist groups protesting her as “a symbol of hostility to women.” In 2006, they attached a dildo to her hand, in honor of International Women’s Day.
  There might be no better illustration of the lasting, unsettling power of fairy tales. Despite efforts to sanitize them or give them a feminist slant, a whiff of something disreputable lingers, something slightly kinky. “Children know something they can’t tell,” Djuna Barnes wrote in “Nightwood.” “They like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!”
  “Her Body and Other Parties,” by Carmen Maria Machado, is a love letter to an obstinate genre that won’t be gentrified. It’s a wild thing, this book, covered in sequins and scales, blazing with the influence of fabulists from Angela Carter to Kelly Link and Helen Oyeyemi, and borrowing from science fiction, queer theory and horror.
  Published just this week, “Her Body and Other Parties” was released in the wake of its success: It’s been named a finalist for the National Book Award and for the Kirkus Prize, and its publisher, Graywolf, has already gone back for a third printing. Not since Karen Russell’s “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves,” in 2006, has a debut collection of short stories from a relatively unknown author garnered such attention, or deserved it more.
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  The eight fables in Machado’s book all depict women on the verge. A wife struggles to keep her husband from untying the mysterious ribbon she wears around her neck. The victim of a violent assault discovers she can hear the thoughts of the actors in porn films. Two women make a baby together — or do they? The book’s novella-length centerpiece, “Especially Heinous,” rewrites almost 300 episodes of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” arguably the dominant fairy tale of our time, with its ritualistic opening riff, the women in distress, the tidy resolutions.
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  Carmen Maria Machado
  Credit
  Tom Storm
  Machado is fluent in the vocabulary of fairy tales — her stories are full of foxes, foundlings, nooses and gowns — but she remixes it to her own ends. Her fiction is both matter-of-factly and gorgeously queer. She writes about loving and living with women and men with such heat and specificity that it feels revelatory.
  Everything returns to the body in these pieces: the “one-beer-deep feeling” of holding a baby; sex so good you feel “like a bottle breaking against a brick wall.”
  But if Machado is strong on pleasure, she’s better on despair, on our rage at our bodies — for their ugliness and unruliness, their excess and inadequacy and, worst of all, their temerity to abandon us altogether.
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  The strongest and scariest story here, “The Husband Stitch” — look up the term if you dare — follows a character through marriage, childbirth and childrearing. Running parallel are the gossip and ghost stories she hears about unlucky brides, unlucky pregnant women, women who got in the wrong car, who trusted the wrong doctor, married the wrong man, married the right man. “Stories have this way of running together like raindrops in a pond,” the narrator thinks. “Each is borne from the clouds separate, but once they have come together, there is no way to tell them apart.”
  In the old myths, women were fenced in by forests, towers, spells. In Machado’s work, cautionary tales are all that’s required. Fear keeps women in line. Their own minds act in the place of moats.
  Fairy tales were meant to inoculate us against dread, or so the theory goes; to offer children controlled exposure to frightening things — to jealousy, to adult sexuality. Terror in doses. Even Angela Carter, who claimed with characteristic relish that her work “cuts like a steel blade at the base of a man’s penis,” wrote some joyous endings. In her telling, Red Riding Hood and the wolf make the loveliest couple.
  Machado offers a more complicated solace. She doesn’t contain our terror, she stokes it and teaches us about it.
  We see what her characters cannot — that some of the scariest monsters come from within. And learning to identify what to fear, and to fear the right things, can be a kind of power.
  “Life is too short to be afraid of nothing,” Machado writes. “And I will show you.”
  Follow Parul Sehgal on Twitter: @parul_sehgal
  Her Body and Other Parties
  Stories
  By Carmen Maria Machado
  245 pages. Graywolf Press. $16.

• Village Voice
  https://www.villagevoice.com/2017/10/14/carmen-maria-machado-turns-terror-into-high-art/
  Word count: 1250

  Carmen Maria Machado Turns Terror Into High Art

  by Hannah Gold
  October 14, 2017

  "Her Body and Other Parties" is haunted by Carmen Maria Machado's fictive fever dreams
  Illustration by Tim Liedtke
  The first time someone recommended Stephen King’s Misery to me, they said I’d like it because it’s “about the writing process.” Misery tells the story of Paul Sheldon, a serial romance novelist trying his hand at crime fiction, and a crazed homebody fan named Annie Wilkes, who abducts and tortures him into writing another of his Victorian melodramas for her. King has said of Wilkes that she represents his ’80s cocaine addiction (“Annie Wilkes is cocaine,” King once told Rolling Stone). Well, King had his personal allegory, and I had my own visceral reaction: This is one of the first books I remember reading specifically to figure out what it’s really like to be a writer, and the fears it promotes are of deadlines, a readership, and women’s bodies.

  It’s the early, undoing “lessons” like these that make me extra thankful for the stories in Carmen Maria Machado’s debut collection, Her Body and Other Parties. Though sketched with the lineaments of horror, these stories strive not to reheat cold psychopathies, but to gently reflect back the kinds of fears, passions, and persuasions that aren’t often coaxed to the surface, because they almost go without saying. Or could—especially if you happen to be a woman with a body (as are all of Machado’s first-person narrators).
  As such, Machado’s eight creepily poignant stories, many of which are stained with supernatural elements, are much more given to portraying ghosts than monsters. In “Eight Bites,” a female narrator with a buoyant sense of self gets extreme weight reduction surgery, a procedure so common in her family it seems to her congenital. The story’s title refers to some garbage the woman’s mother fed her growing up about how eight bites of food is all one needs to “get a sense of what you’re eating,” the gustatory equivalent of a crime scene outline in chalk.
  After the surgery is performed, the woman is visited in her home by a spectral creature who never again leaves. It’s described variously as “one hundred pounds, dripping wet,” as sounding like the scurrying of mice, and “a body with nothing it needs.” The brilliance of the story is that the apparition is never better defined, or always exactly as well delineated, as the woman’s awareness of what violence she’s wreaked upon her body or why; a light-headedness pervades the tale, a ghostly hunger.
  Another story, “Real Women Have Bodies,” occupies a stitch in time where the world seems much as it does today, only women have begun disappearing in an unfamiliar manner: the slow fade. “The first victims—the first women—had not been seen in public for weeks,” writes Machado, milking the line between lost souls and shut-ins. Both are stories of women phased out of their own lives; they misplace their selves, but not all at once.
  Three weeks before Her Body hit the shelves it was long-listed for the National Book Award (it’s since made it to the shortlist, too) and it’s easy to see why. With her first book Machado has already emerged a master of several beloved genres (horror, fantasy, magical realism), combined with a varied, empathetic exploration of female embodiment, in particular physical and emotional threats (mostly from men), sexual pleasure (mostly from women), disordered eating and other illnesses, and child-bearing.

  Carmen Maria Machado
  Photo by Tom Storm
  Though this is Machado’s first book, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop graduate has been publishing short fiction for several years (some of the pieces in the collection were previously published in Granta and The American Reader). Her essays and criticism (an extravagantly moving personal essay in Guernica, for instance, on unapologetically fat women called “The Trash Heap Has Spoken”) also often reevaluate genres of embodiment through storytelling. Of course, Machado’s is not the first book to grapple with and reframe some of these experiences. Her work could be placed in conversation with a host of fiction writers who inscribe the walls of such stories with fairy-tale magic—Angela Carter, Kelly Link, Alexandra Kleeman, Aimee Bender, and Lesley Nneka Arimah come to mind. But there are stories here too that possess a courageous and indelible originality. At the center of the collection lies “Especially Heinous,” an extremely pleasurable trapdoor in the form of a hilarious, cockeyed genre drag that blends Law and Order: SVU recaps and gothic horror lit. The story is composed of 272 knife-twist “episodes” of a few lines (if that) each, and spins out into a surrealist satire that manages to both revel in the show’s addictive pace and rage against the entertainment value of violated women. Stabler still leans upon his insufficient theories, Benson goes on her bad dates; aside from that, this parody of the iconic procedural adopts a funhouse mirror effect, taking up more and different space so as to become uncannily recognizable.

  In one vignette, we get this floating image: “The unlocked front door, though which any neighbor could wander, would have been an afterthought, but there was no thought, after”; in another, a description of a girl who “knelt herself to death off a Brooklyn rooftop.” These details exemplify one of Machado’s sharpest talents: her ability to crank a horror story out of a few sentences or phrases. The one-liner episodes (they’re each preceded by clever titles) may do it the very best, for instance: “‘Mercy’: The gunman lets all of the hostages go, including himself.” And this one, which is actually more of a fairy tale: “‘Penetration’: ‘No.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘No.’ ‘No?’ ‘No.’ ‘Oh.’”
  “The Resident,” Machado’s writer’s-cabin-in-the-woods parable, also flaunts the narrative tropes it deftly undermines. In it, the partially named narrator, Ms. M—, approaches and attends an artists’ residency, ominously named Devil’s Throat, where she aspires to make serious headway on her first novel. There the protagonist is haunted by homesickness for her wife, her lack of connection with the artists residing in the other cabins, and her own ambitions. But something else frightens her, too, and she comes down with a series of psychosomatic maladies, aggravating theories, as if to fight it back. “I considered that I had died in that room with its drapes and pulls,” she says, “and that the me who bent over my keyboard day after day was a ghost who was tethered to her work regardless of the fiddling details of her mortal coil.”
  Then later, her condition not having improved, she asks, “What is worse: being locked outside of your mind, or being locked inside of it?” And, as if anticipating the reader’s mind, the next line goes: “What is worse: writing a trope or being one? What about being more than one?” What’s worse is that one who asks these questions in the first place has experienced each of these states, and this is writing generous enough to sift through all of them, and those that hover between definitions, and those that have vanished by morning.
  Her Body and Other Parties
  By Carmen Maria Machado
  Graywolf Press
  248 pp.

• Los Angeles Times
  http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-carmen-maria-machado-20170929-story.html
  Word count: 1112

  Carmen Maria Machado's 'Her Body and Other Parties' reclaims the female body in subversive, joyful ways

  Carmen Maria Machado, author of "Her Body and Other Parties." (Tom Storm Photography)
  Ellie Robins

  Something is happening to women’s bodies.
  In Carmen Maria Machado’s debut short story collection, “Her Body and Other Parties,” women evaporate, are haunted after gastric surgery, literally lose their heads and chart an apocalyptic pandemic through their sexual encounters. Their every experience is expressed through the body, in ways both natural and supernatural but always, on the deepest level, true.
  The collection is that hallowed thing: an example of almost preposterous talent that also encapsulates something vital but previously diffuse about the moment — no doubt why Machado has been longlisted for the National Book Award and named a finalist for the $50,000 Kirkus Prize for her debut. This is bodily fiction, written for and within a culture that’s rediscovering the body: through today’s feminism, with its new frankness about women’s bodies (as when legions of women called Mike Pence to tell him about their periods) and through the broader cultural shift toward valuing the experience of the body in the moment.
  Carmen Maria Machado reads at Skylight Books on Oct. 5 at 7:30 p.m. »

  That shift has already been articulated in literature this year, though nowhere as pointedly as in Machado’s stories. Narrator Christine burns a story of rebellion into her skin, turning her body into a site of resistance, in Lidia Yuknavitch’s post-apocalyptic novel “The Book of Joan.” In Catherine Lacey’s “The Answers,” protagonist Mary suffers bizarre physical symptoms that can be cured only by a form of holistic bodily manipulation, and Amelia Gray’s “Isadora” is a fictional biography of the dancer who wished to awaken the world through her body. In Han Kang’s “The Vegetarian,” published in English translation in 2016, a woman stops eating meat and is subjected to a series of violations.
  The collection is that hallowed thing: an example of almost preposterous talent that also encapsulates something vital but previously diffuse about the moment.

  This, well, body of bodily work by women — with Machado’s stories in pride of place — expresses nothing short of a realignment of consciousness. The movement is both a triumphant, feminist reclamation of the flesh and a new assertion of the body as the origin of experience and meaning.
  It’s a triumphant reclamation, yes — but things still happen to these bodies that are unwanted, stolen, violent. In Machado’s stories, reclaiming the female body doesn’t mean ignoring the damage so often done to it but rather subverting the narrative that allows this damage to define the body.
  The collection’s longest story, “Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order: SVU,” is a glorious example of such narrative subversion. Structured around the first 12 seasons of “Law & Order: SVU,” it takes the show’s main characters, episode names and series format to twist an entirely new tale in which the detectives are driven to the brink, haunted by their own doppelgangers and by the multiplying ghosts of raped and murdered girls. “Give us voices. Give us voices. Give us voices,” the ghosts chime at Det. Benson as she cowers under a pillow. Machado recasts “Law & Order: SVU”: from titillation at sexual trauma to a story about the way sexual violence sickens a culture, in which victims and survivors are not ephemeral plot devices but agents, central, ever-present.

  In Machado’s stories, reclaiming the female body doesn’t mean ignoring the damage so often done to it but rather subverting the narrative.

  Machado is a master of such pointed formal play, of queering genre and the supposed laws of reality to present alternative possibilities. The collection’s opening story, “The Husband Stitch,” retells the old ghost story of the woman with the ribbon around her neck, whose husband’s lifelong curiosity about the ribbon is satisfied when, finally, she permits him to untie it and her head rolls to the floor, outing her as undead all along. In Machado’s imagining, the ribbon isn’t a zombie’s trick but a condition of womanhood: “It’s such a bother, isn’t it?” another woman says of her ribbon, swearing and crying. The narrator is a parody of heteronormative perfection: sexually compliant, domestically dutiful. The ribbon is her only secret, and she’s killed by her husband’s refusal to let her keep it. It’s a horror story in which the monster is heterosexual relationship — a dynamic that holds in several of these stories.

  Meanwhile, Machado’s women often love women easily and well. The collection doesn’t just reframe pain, it also contains the joys of the body. Machado writes erotica under the pen name Olivia Glass; her stories are shot through with sexual pleasure, which her characters experience hungrily, “like [they’ve] been waiting for permission.” In a sense, Machado herself grants that permission, or rather shows that it was never needed. “Where are the women writing and publishing novels and stories that are full of explicit sex that aren’t being marketed as erotica or woman’s fiction or romance?” Machado asked in a 2015 interview with Electric Literature. In “Her Body and Other Parties,” Machado sings it: women (in fiction, in the world) are free to enjoy full sexual lives.
  “Do you ever worry about writing the madwoman-in-the-attic story?” asks a self-satisfied, female “poet-composer” in “The Resident,” a story set at a writing residency. The question-insult comes immediately after a reading of the protagonist’s work. “You know. That old trope. … It’s sort of tiresome and regressive and, well, done. … And the mad lesbian, isn’t that a stereotype as well?”
  Which versions of womanhood are women allowed to write? Is there a duty to write only stories of self-possession? “Everything is crazy to you,” the story’s protagonist replies. “By whose measure? Well, it is my right to be crazy, as you love to say so much. I have no shame. I have felt many things in my life, but shame is not among them.” In “Her Body and Other Parties,” Machado reveals just how original, subversive, proud and joyful it can be to write from deep in the gut, even — especially — if the gut has been bruised.
  Robins is a writer and translator who lives in Los Angeles.

  Carmen Maria Machado's "Her Body and Other Parties." (Graywolf Press)
  “Her Body and Other Parties”
  Carmen Maria Machado
  Graywolf Press: 248 pp., $16 paper

• Slate
  http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2017/10/carmen_maria_machado_s_her_body_and_other_parties_reviewed.html
  Word count: 1118

  Grimm Meets Law and Order: Special Victims Unit

  Each era has its own fairy tales to teach kids what a princess looks like and what monsters to fear. The stories in this stunning debut collection are ours.
  By Nora Caplan-Bricker

  Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker. Photos by Thinkstock and Unsplash.
  E
  very era has its own fairy tales—fables that teach children what a princess looks like, and what monsters they should fear. According to the short stories in Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado’s exhilarating debut collection, a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction, our foundational myth might be Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, in which violence against women is everywhere and its entertainment value is infinite. Or it might be the triumphant trajectory of the weight loss narrative. Or porn.
  In eight searingly original stories, Machado uses the literary techniques of horror and science fiction to expose the truth about our modern parables: that they’re as grotesque and enchanting as any classic fairy tale. In one story, a police detective is haunted by ghosts with bells for eyes; in another, a survivor of rape acquires the ability to read porn actors’ minds. Machado deftly repurposes more traditional imagery, too, including witchy sisters, magic ball gowns, and—the collection’s most self-aware narrator—a woman with a green ribbon tied around her neck. This book is hardly the first to rewrite the old tales from a feminist perspective, a project that has attracted writers from Anne Sexton to Angela Carter, and from Helen Oyeyemi to Leslie Jamison. That these fairy tales functioned as prisons for women—taught them to be princesses lest they become crones, to stay in their towers for fear of what lies outside—is a truth earlier generations long ago divined. But Machado follows the seep of such stories far below the level of consciousness. Can you know that something made a mark on you, she led me to ask myself, and yet not know what it left behind?
  In one story, a survivor of rape acquires the ability to read porn actors’ minds.
  Fittingly, many of the women in this collection are yarn-spinners themselves, including the woman who wears a green ribbon in the opener, “The Husband Stitch.” Interspersed with her own story of marriage and motherhood, the narrator tells the urban legends she’s heard all her life about women who strayed from the straight and narrow, and often paid the price. As her own wedding approaches, the narrator remembers the stories of unlucky brides; after her son’s delivery, she recalls warnings about bad doctors and births gone wrong. (The titular “husband stitch” is the subject of many a real-life cautionary tale.) The tales collecting in her mind are “like raindrops in a pond,” she muses; try as we might to trace their paths through our psyches, “once they have come together, there is no way to tell them apart.” No matter how many stories the narrator collects, it seems she has not heard the tale that inspired her own, about a woman whose husband begs for the one thing he can’t have: permission to untie the green ribbon around her neck.
  Like all of Machado’s characters, this dutiful mother is the owner of a riotous, ravenous body. “I once heard a story about a girl who requested something so vile from her paramour that he told her family and they had her hauled off to a sanatorium,” she says. “What magical thing could you want so badly they take you away from the known world for wanting it?” Machado brushes past taboo to treat women’s sexuality with frankness and lyricism. Many of the desires pulsing through the collection, as well as its most poignant love stories, are queer.
  The supernatural roams free in these pages, but the most blood-curdling horrors are always true. In the brilliant novella Especially Heinous, Machado rewrites the real synopses of 272 episodes of Law and Order: SVU, transforming the familiar world of the show into a kaleidoscope of ghostly girl-children, enigmatic doppelgangers, and angry demons. The story pulls the reader into the subterranean spaces of trauma: A mysterious heartbeat thunders beneath the streets of New York City, and the ubiquitous rape and murder of women connect us all as tangibly as the subway.

  The body is the site of women’s vulnerability in this collection, but it is also the primary source of their joy. In a story called “Inventory,” which chronicles a plague’s slow sweep across the planet, the protagonist learns that physical contact transmits the disease. “If people would just stay apart,” another woman tells her, then breaks off: This is a post-coital exchange, and they are naked and entwined. Ignoring the warning, the narrator finds love with another survivor whose laughter “tripped pleasure down the stairs of my heart.”
  In another story, rich with the sensuous details of domesticity and motherhood, a woman is disturbed by the not-yet-fused top of her baby’s head, “like a piece of fruit gone bad … like the soft spot on the peach that you can just plunge your thumb into.” She adds, “I’m not going to, but I want to, and the urge is so serious that I put her down.” Later, she spends the violent impulse on a piece of cured salmon: “I make a mark deep in the flesh with my finger, and something inside of me is sated.”

  These daring stories are deeply feminist, but never dogmatically so, slipping into the murky places where we begin to fear our desires and desire what we fear. They suggest that the deeper we venture into our own psyches, the less—and less clearly—we are able to see. In “The Husband Stitch,” the narrator’s encyclopedic memory of things that go bump in the night fails her only in the instance where it seems she herself was the girl at the dark edge of the lake. Her own past is “a classic” she’s heard somewhere before, and she tells tales to close in on the things she can’t name. For these women, to spin a story in your own words is to begin to understand—if only in glimpses—what that story has done to you. This may explain why feminists have historically been so fascinated by fairy tales. As the speaker says in “The Husband Stitch,” Machado’s “may not be the version of the story you’re familiar with. But I assure you, it’s the one you need to know.”

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