Contemporary Authors

• Dahlia Season: Stories & a Novella Manic D Press (San Francisco, CA), 2007
• Mean Coffee House Press (Minneapolis, MN), 2017

1. Mean https://lccn.loc.gov/2017012422 Gurba, Myriam, author. Mean / Myriam Gurba. Minneapolis : Coffee House Press, 2017. 175 pages ; 21 cm PS3607.U5485 Z46 2017 ISBN: 9781566894913 (softcover) 2. Dahlia season : stories & a novella https://lccn.loc.gov/2007010565 Gurba, Myriam. Dahlia season : stories & a novella / Myriam Gurba. San Francisco : Manic D Press, c2007. 190 p. ; 23 cm. PS3607.U5485 D34 2007 ISBN: 9781933149165 (trade pbk. original : alk. paper)1933149167 (alk. paper)

• Weird Sister - http://weird-sister.com/2016/03/14/5504/

  QUOTE:
  I’m a teacher, I teach of all things PSYCHOLOGY, and I’m not full time right now so in the afternoons I have a small cave, it really is cave-like, that I use as a studio/office and I go in there and do what I gotta do. I’ve also started doing this thing where I drive to the Mojave desert, rent a cheap ass motel room, forget my humanity, become one with the desolation, and write. I go jogging every other day. I eat irregularly. I have no pets or children to prevent me from manifesting my wildest dreams. I used to have pets. They’re dead."
  ← Rah! Rah! Roundup
  10 Images of Women Writing on Screen →
  by Gina Abelkop | March 14, 2016 · 10:00 am
  ↓ Jump to Comments
  It’s Kinda Creepy Because I Am: An Interview with Myriam Gurba

  Myriam Gurba

  When I read Myriam Gurba’s Painting Their Portraits in Winter last year I got that special book-soul-mate feeling that the best books give you, a sense that someone really GETS you, and the universe. Because I can never love anything without going full fangirl, I knew I had to reach out to Myriam for an interview, which– lucky you!– you get read below.

  Myriam Gurba, Ms. Gurba, if you’re nasty, is a native Santa Marian. She attended U.C. Berkeley thanks to affirmative action. She is the author of two short story collections, Dahlia Season and Painting Their Portraits in Winter. Dahlia Season won the Edmund White Award, which is given to queer writers for outstanding debut fiction. The book was also shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award. Gurba is also the author of two poetry collections, Wish You Were Me and Sweatsuits of the Damned. She has toured North America twice with avant-garde literary and performance troupe Sister Spit. Gurba’s other writing can be found in places such as Entropy.com, TIME.com, and Lesfigues.com. She creates digital and photographic art that has been exhibited at galleries and museums.

  ***

  Gina Abelkop: My first question has to be about one of my favorite things about your writing: your sense of humor. It’s silly, smart, biting, and joyful even in stories and poems that are emotionally taut. How and on what teeth was this sense of humor cut? Who are some of your favorite humorists and what is it that you love about their humor and/or work?

  Myriam Gurba: My sense of humor was primarily sculpted by the sickest people I know: HELLO MOM AND DAD. My dad likes to joke about the horrific, like free-range children and customer service, and by example, he taught me that these are the things you are supposed to laugh about. My mom is different. She’s more elf than human. She doesn’t say funny things; she says things funny. For example, she’ll tell a story about getting into a car accident but she’ll refer to her car as her mystique since she actually drives a Mercury Mystique and her story will take on this exciting, Daliesque quality because imagine a normal conversation about a car accident but replace the word car with mystique. My parents, however, aren’t into queef jokes. In fact, I’m not even sure they could name a queef though I’m certain they’re familiar with the sound. In high school, I was socially attracted to girls who got accused of being unfeminine since they were funny and gross and so they shaped me, too. Boys accused me of not being feminine and of having too big of lips. My favorite funny people are people I know. My boyfriend makes me giggle. When I have low blood sugar and am surrounded by whites, everything gets hilarious. I appreciate humor that is gross, goofy, self-conscious, and, above all, humiliating. As far as publicly funny people go, I like Carol Burnett, Gilda Radner, Cardi B, Kristen Wiig pretending to be Bjork, Peter Sellers, Cheech Marin, Chris Rock and angry teenagers.

  GA: You’re the author of two full-length books, Dahlia Season and Painting Their Portraits in Winter, in addition to numerous chapbooks and zines. In what ways did your storytelling shift between your first two books, and what purpose do you find your chapbooks/zines serving as they stand between these larger collections?

  MG: When I wrote Dahlia Season, I wanted to write a story with a certain kind of protagonist. So in that sense, it’s purely character driven. Character was the only thing that mattered to me. I hadn’t read a book about a middle class NOC (nerd of color) steeped in being goth and I wanted to read about this girl and so I DIYed her. I feel like Painting Their Portraits in Winter is an extension of that because much of that sensibility remains but the writing in Painting is more mature and form-wise, much weirder. Like I hope it would be Desiree’s, the main character in Dahlia Season, favorite book. Or at least a book she’d finish or keep on the toilet tank. My first chapbook, Wish You Were Me, is filled with experiments. Maybe they’re poems. I wrote many of the pieces with the intent of writing unpublishably about subjects that are stupid and worthless. Like bad-tasting vaginas. It was my earnest attempt at being as shitty and off sides as possible on purpose. You really discover a lot about yourself when you do that and I recommend we all experiment with being shitty. I self-publish a lot of stuff, too, because it keeps me busy and if I’m not busy, I’m not busy.

  Painting Their Portraits in Winter by Myriam Gurba

  GA: “Petra Páramo” is one of my favorite stories from Painting Their Portraits in Winter; how did you conceive of this ghost girl? (When I imagine her as I’m reading I see the girl in your author portrait on the back of the book, which I imagine is you as painted by your abuelita.)

  MG: I came up with her because I wanted to write a feminist response to the novel Pedro Páramo which is told from the point of view of ghosts, one in particular, and, of course, he’s a dude. I love the ghost-as-narrator trope and love movies and books where that’s the case and again, female narrators are a minority and dead female narrators are an even smaller minority. Once I came up with the idea of an amnesiac ghost of color telling a story, it just felt like I was playing as I wrote about her. I put her in a make-believe/real forest and then let her show me what her journey would be as she left. Would she find her way to reality? Her story is very much not a hero’s journey but a dead heroine’s journey. The structure differs markedly.

  That’s really cool that you imagine that painting on the book cover as the ghost. That’s a portrait of me at age 5ish which my abuelita did paint. It’s kinda creepy because I am.

  GA: If you could have your work distributed in any format, what would it be? Imagine a franken-format if it doesn’t yet exist!

  MG: I think my ideal format would involve an ambush. I’m not necessarily sure how that would manifest concretely but I’m leaning towards some type of candid camera scenario that would embarrass my audience.
  Myriam Gurba Madonna self portrait from "MEriam"

  from “MEriam”

  GA: You currently have a selection of your self-portraits, titled “MEriam”, up at the Museum of Latin American Art’s “Who Are You?” exhibit in Long Beach, CA (up until March 13). These portraits, which you call “digital colonialism,” remind me of your work in that they combine this tender, human earnestness and sharp critique with raucous humor. How did you begin making these portraits, and how have they changed over time? How do you pick which scenes/images in which to insert yourself? In what ways do you see your texts and these images interacting or playing off one another, if at all?

  MG: I AM SUSCEPTIBLE TO YOUR FLATTERY.

  I started making these images when my friend’s mother died and I was helping out with funeral-related business and other things. The images were meant as a distraction from all the sadness but I quickly got addicted to making them and the phrase “Who else can I become?” started frenziedly popping into my head all the time. Suddenly, I could be all these things I couldn’t be before because of my body. Having a body can be such a downer but art lets me escape from it. I do have an awful relationship with my body. I’d love to not have one. I’d love to be so many other things other than a human body. I’d rather be mayonnaise than flesh. Many of the images that I choose for this “project” are formative cultural icons. For example, in high school, I watched a lot of trashy talk shows since they were among the queerest things on TV so I’ll transform myself into talk show host Sally Jesse Raphael and act inquisitive. I also really like becoming dead people but with a slightly surprised look on my face. I have a picture of myself as Sharon Tate where I look very concerned because you know. Also, I have one of me as Scarlett O’Hara and I’ve got a who, me? But I’m Mexican look.
  Myriam Gurba ET self portrait from "MEriam"

  from “MEriam”

  Myriam Gurba Rose McGowan self portrait from "MEriam"

  from “MEriam”

  GA: One of your current projects, as often see in your Instagram posts, is comprised of a series of letters to Gertrude Stein. What is your interest in Stein in this context? In what ways is she (or the idea of her) or her work generative for you?

  MG: Well, the bitch is problematic and I’m drawn to the problematic. I started writing the Stein letters as my marriage was crumbling the way a croissant falls apart when you dunk it in hot coffee and FORGET ABOUT IT.

  I can get really shy about my feelings so instead of telling a living human being about them, I was like maybe I should tell Gertrude Stein. Which is fun because I kind of don’t even like her, she was so stuck up, but that’s kind of what I also find attractive about her. I am drawn to/repulsed by snobs. Also, there’s something hard about her writing but its also unfettered and I like forcing myself to interact with and grapple with hard language.

  Her syntax is a trip. Its so simple but she finds a way to make it hard. That, to me, seems like the essence of queering. To take something that might otherwise be really simple and make it HARD AF. Lol.

  So, I started writing all these little missives to Gertrude Stein and the thing is, she listens. She has to. She’s dead. And I was like, oh my god, she’s such a good FRIEND. And then I just got really into writing them because she’s like god. Gertrude is always there.

  I wrote a creative meta-analysis of the process of writing to Gertrude. It largely takes place at Hooters. You can read it here.

  GA: Who are some of your favorite contemporary artists and writers, and what is it that you find moving or engaging about their work?

  MG: I’m super into art and writing by queers, women, and people of color. I kind of think white dudes need to just retire from making culture for a while so that reality can be rehabilitated. That said, who is rehabilitating culture through their art and writing in a way that needs to be talked about and then talked about more? Maggie Nelson’s writing is the shit. Full of body and unique visions of love and family making. Not afraid to look at sadness, shit, and buttholes. Wendy Ortiz’s writing is killer and important and she reinvents memoir with so much ELEGANCE its like how can you write about horror with such ELEGANCE? Oh, that’s right, you’re a goddess, that’s how. Trinie Dalton’s writing is the shit because there’s really not much out there that is weirder but in a super accessible way. Nikki Darling’s poetry is too much and her poems are women. Imagine being able to create a gender through verse. Nikki can. In terms of artists who are making non-word things, I’m constantly thinking about Ana Mendieta and Francesca Woodman. They feel contemporary even though they’re dead. Jenny Holzer because she makes you pay attention to words in a way that transforms their wordiness. Molly Soda for how the internet becomes her, I hate to say it, but playground. Kate Durbin for her shameless interest in the princesstual. Grace Miceli. Allyson Mitchell. Miriam Klein Stahl. Big fat yes to Erin Markey as a performance artist and national treasure. I’M HELL OF INTO THE ART HOE MOVEMENT WHICH ENCOURAGES TEENS OF COLOR TO INSERT THEMSELVES INTO KEITH HARING PAINTINGS.

  GA: What does your day-to-day life schedule look like, and where/how do you make time for art-making?

  MG: I’m a teacher, I teach of all things PSYCHOLOGY, and I’m not full time right now so in the afternoons I have a small cave, it really is cave-like, that I use as a studio/office and I go in there and do what I gotta do. I’ve also started doing this thing where I drive to the Mojave desert, rent a cheap ass motel room, forget my humanity, become one with the desolation, and write. I go jogging every other day. I eat irregularly. I have no pets or children to prevent me from manifesting my wildest dreams. I used to have pets. They’re dead.

  GA: Your chapbook Richard is forthcoming from Birds of Lace (insert self-tooting-horn) this year. If you were making an abstract painting to express the text, which colors/shapes would you use and why?

  MG: The painting would actually come on a canvas known as an XL sweatshirt. Lana Del Rey’s face would be in the middle, blue smoke curling out from between her fake, sausage lips. Marijuana leaves would dapple the fabric. Looking at this sweatshirt would make people happy, sad, and high. Dope.

  ***

  The ebook of Painting Their Portrait

• The Normal School - https://www.thenormalschool.com/blog/2015/10/1/a-normal-interview-with-myriam-gurba

  QUOTE:
  "What makes me write, and what makes me create in general, is literally a compulsion that I’ve always had. There’s a tension that I carry with me, and the only way that I can serve that tension and anticipation and anxiety is by making something. Frequently it’s writing. My brain is obsessed with language and doing things with language, and chopping words apart, and sentences apart, and narratives apart, and putting them back together in ways that couldn’t fit."

  A Normal Interview with Myriam Gurba
  October 1, 2015

  By Monique Quintana

  Monique Quintana: Family, women in particular, seem to be the pulse of your new short-story collection. How did you come up with the title, How Some Abuelitas Keep Their Chicana Granddaughters Still While Painting Their Portraits in Winter? It’s also the title of the first story in the book.

  Myriam Gurba: It’s kind of tongue in cheek because it’s so long and pedantic, and it delves into the heart of the story immediately. This grandmother who’s capturing and creating culture through art and folk art, I think, links all the stories. That’s why I appreciate the title so much, and I also really wanted to evoke the identity of the Chicana in the title, to ground the short stories in a canon of Chicana literature.

  MQ: I did see that first story as an interesting means of entering the collection. I immediately saw the family thread, but I also saw that it would be very female centric, which I appreciate. I myself have fond memories of my mother and grandmothers telling me really sinister stories, mostly to keep me out of trouble. Who were the storytellers in your own family and what did they teach you about story?

  MG: The storytellers in my family were mostly women, and the storytelling that happens in my family tends to be the strongest in Mexico. When I was a kid I would get to go to Mexico a lot more frequently. The generation of storytellers is dying; we’re losing them year-by-year. But I do have an aunt who loves to host gatherings. She’ll put out wine, and everyone will sit in a circle, and the elders will take turns spinning yarns. One of the fun parts for me is that they’ll each have their own version of a story, so one will tell their version of the story, and then another will contradict her, and say, “No, you got it wrong, here’s the real version of the story,” and that will provoke a new story, and you could be there for hours fully entertained by storytelling. Their storytelling tends to be really melodramatic, kind of spooky, but also funny. Those are my favorite flavors in storytelling. My dad tells a lot of stories too, and so immediately in my household, that’s where a lot of stories came from, from my father. He’s more of a formal storyteller than the sort of folksy, natural, organic storytellers.

  MQ: I definitely saw elements of chisme in the collection, a merging of the grotesque with humor. I want to talk a little about your first book Dahlia Season. I do see the differences in the collections; of course, the first being that Dahlia Season is a collection of short stories and a novella. When I read that book, it felt very much like a lament for L.A. The narrator is the first story “Cruising” talks about what a real California beach looks like. I was really taken with that whole idea. Living in California’s Central Valley, a lot of people get surprised when they visit. It seems to shatter their preconceived notion of California. Can you elaborate on the idea of a “real California,” and what kind of California you are most interested in writing about?

  MG: I’ll start by saying that I have a lot of different muses that influence my work, and one of my chief muses is California. I love California. To me, California isn’t so much a place, as it is a spirit or an entity. I’ve always had this intense relationship with California. I remember being a little girl on the playground after it rained and smelling the earth, smelling California, and loving the smell, and finding it so delicious that I was compelled to put dirt in my mouth because I wanted it to be a part of me. I would pick rocks off the ground and I would suck them because I wanted the flavor of the earth so much; I seriously wanted to consume it. I’m in love with California.

  I don’t ever want to leave California. I’ve been all over the United States and nothing compares to California, and I have fantasies about dying in California and being buried here, so I can become part of it physically. California is dazzling because it’s so many things simultaneously. It holds so many worlds that other regions of the United States cannot. Other places cannot contain these concentric universes. L.A. County alone holds universes. If you travel block to block, neighborhood to neighborhood, the change that you can see geographically and ethnographically occurring is wild. In Long Beach where I live, we have a block that is entirely populated by Cambodian refugees, and then the next is Black folk, and the next block is Mexican families, and one Salvadorian family, and a Japanese family. Our state is so culturally rich; and not only that, it’s also geographically rich. Everything that you want geographically you can find in California. Any geographic encounter you would want to have, you can have it in California, and it’s within driving distance.

  MQ: California definitely feels like a microcosm of the universe. I was really taken with that concept in Dahlia Season, the real California vs. illusions of California. You continue the idea of illusions in Painting Their Portraits in Winter. As a reader, I was constantly questioning what is real and what is not. This book seemed to me like a lament for those living in the in-between. We see that happening in Dahlia Season, but it’s further explored in the new book. We really see the conflicts that arise when different generations of family come together. Borders, both literal and metaphorical, punctuate these stories. Can you talk about how the characters in the book live in those marginal spaces?

  MG: You’re definitely on to something in describing the liminal spaces that exist for the characters and creatures in the book. I think a lot of the stories read as myth and allegory. Myth is rooted in reality, and an attempt to explain reality by using truths to enter the world of fiction. Myths really straddle fantasy and reality in that sense. Myths are not fully real, but they are an attempt to explain the world as it is. Myths and allegory run through a lot of the stories. As you were saying, the book is really woman centric. I don’t think I did that intentionally, but I appreciate literature that puts men on the periphery. Frequently in literature, and in film, we experience creation through the male gaze, but to me, the female gaze is much more compelling. It’s something that I relate to far more. This collection is written from the female gaze. You’re forced to experience things from the female gaze to engage with the stories. If you identify as a woman, you are automatically in a liminal space, you are automatically marginalized, and so the liminality becomes a byproduct of all the stories. Female creatures that are non-human also populate the stories. The sort of fantastical quality of some of the creatures, like the Aztec demons, gives them an even greater sense of liminality, and those creatures reside in a space of liminality, that sort of Goth in-between space that Gloria Anzaldúa wrote about so evocatively in Borderlands/La Frotera: The New Mestiza.

  MQ: I really liked how children are characters in the story. Children’s voices are always stifled in society. These are also children that will grow into women. As female children, we see the many intersections of marginalization. We see how the female body is made into a monster. Two of the characters are very young sisters. So, with that, I was pleasantly surprised when I realized that the stories are connected and working within the same family. How did go about arranging the stories as they appear in the book?

  MG: I’m going to talk a little bit about children and mothers, and then go into how I arranged the stories. I’m typically really annoyed with writing about children, and writing from the point of view of children. Typically, it feels so sanitized, and doesn’t treat children as fully realized characters; they tend to fall flat. They tend to be dancing around children’s capacity for evil, or their burgeoning sexuality, or their banality. Children have those things too. They tend to be idealized in literature, and they don’t have fully embodied voices. I really wanted to experiment with that idea through characters. In transitioning to a conversation about mothers, I wanted to explore the grotesque relationship between mother and child, and I also wanted to explore the concept of the childless woman, or the barren woman. She’s somebody who is misunderstood, or treated as unnatural, and I wanted to take the childless woman, the barren woman, and the woman who killed her children, and sort of normalize her, and put her at the forefront of the story, so that the reader could empathize with her, so she’s not this strange thing or this monster, that her monstrosity is normal; her monstrosity is something that could become acceptable as a reader. Typically, in media, women who kill their children are presented as violating the ultimate taboo, but women violate this taboo every day. So it can’t be that taboo, if infanticide by mothers is so common. So, that’s why I was drawn to writing about motherhood in that particularly vile and grotesque way, and in a destructive way.

  As far as the order of the stories, I instinctively felt like the story with the grandmother teaching her granddaughters should go first. I staggered the stories according to tone, because I wanted different notes to be struck, so the stories could play of one another in an almost musical way. The first story is epic in a small sort of way, and the next story to me is a sillier, funnier, smaller story, and the next story, “E = MaChismo2” is spookier and gets sad, and “Georges Bataille Look Into My Eye” is funny and silly. I wanted to provide the reader with some breathing room, instead of stifling them with the same tone over and over again; give them different tones so they could take a break from the spooky, so they could go to the funny, and then take a break from the funny, and go to the mythic, and then go from the mythic to the folksy. I think I was paying most attention to tone in the organization of the stories.

  MQ: It made me think of when I was a kid and my family was really into horror films. We’d watch something like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and then we’d watch something funny so we could get to sleep that night. That marriage of the macabre and comedy seems to be ingrained in the Mexican-American family. That was something I noticed about the arrangement of the book. I always got a respite from the horror, which I found compelling and it kept me reading.

  MG: We usually think that tragedy and comedy are opposite sides of the mask, but to me, the relationship between horror and comedy is much tighter. To me they’re almost the same thing, like fraternal twins. If you push horror a little further, it becomes comedy.

  MQ: It does seem that all comedy stems from laughing at the miseries of other people.

  MG: All comedy is a violation; it’s a breaking of a rule. The more breaking of a rule, the funnier something is. That’s also what horror is, the breaking of a rule. I think the horror in my work is influenced by southern gothic literature, where the horror and grotesqueness is disturbing to some readers, but there are also readers who find the humor in it, because it’s so hyperbolic. I have started to think of Painting Their Portraits in Winter as an apo-gothic book, as a Chicana gothic book.

  MQ: I definitely see echoes of Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor in the book. What I appreciate about your book is that it’s relevant to my experience as a woman of color, so thank you for that. I’d also like to ask about the form of the book. You’ve written poetry, short stories, flash fiction, and a novella. I think that you could make the argument that Painting Their Portraits in Winter could be called a novel-in-stories. How do you decide what form you want your fiction to be called?

  MG: I’ve heard from a couple of people who explained that because of the reemergence of the characters, the collection reads like a novel in a very odd way. It wasn’t necessarily my intention to do that, but I liked that that occurred accidently, and I think it adds a complexity that I didn’t realize to the work as a whole. My publisher identifies my work as belonging to a sort of literary form. I find it really hard to discuss what form a lot of my writing takes. As you’ve said before, my characters are very liminal and I see my form as very liminal too. A lot of my stories exist between forms. Something that may seem to be flash fiction could also be interpreted as a prose poem.

  I’m challenged by that question. I think that a lot of my writing is hybrid writing, and I haven’t developed the language to classify what it is that I do. I like that about writing. It makes me feel free. I don’t have to conform to any sort of length, or style. I let the story tell me what it is. A lot of that is instinctual. I’m a very emotional and instinctual writer. I know there are other writers who are more cerebral, who will plot and structure. I can’t do that. I find my writing becomes very stiff if I try to give it a skeleton. The way that I visualize myself writing is like when you watch a wasp or a bee building a home with that weird cellulose. It looks like they’re vomiting and they soon they have a hive. That’s how I visualize myself writing. It’s like I’ve been vomiting material and before I know it, I’ve created the structure. I’m thinking, it’s inhabited now, and I didn’t think it was going to look like this, holy shit.

  MQ: Connected to the idea of form, I’d like to explore the idea of audience. Your story, “Chihuawhite,” is about a Mexican Goth girl, a Moth. I really connected to that story. I’ve been reading Anne Rice since the sixth grade, and my closet has been a black hole for as long as I can remember, so I totally got that girl. What effect does your audience have on how you craft characters? Are you writing with a particular girl in mind?

  MG: Sometimes I do, and sometimes I don’t. I usually feel like I’m just writing for myself. I’ll get really taken by an idea, and I’ll become obsessed, or fall in love with the idea. Something will really disturb me about the idea. When an idea gets that kind of emotional response from me, I can’t rest until I do something with it. There is also a particular kind of reader that I do write for. It’s a version of myself that I know exists, because I’ve seen them multiplying. It’s a girl or a woman, who’s Latina, nerdy and bookish, and has a tradition of macabre, not only from her culture, but from just growing up as a girl. Sarah Silverman once said, being a woman is like living in the world’s slowest horror film. You experience horror over and over and over again. That’s the girl I’m writing for. The one who has invested interest in those things. I imagine myself and the girls I knew who would hole up in their room, and burn candles, and paint their fingernails black, and listen to creepy music, and want to read a book about somebody like themselves having adventures, and not finding anyone like that in literature because there are so few characters that are nerds of color, especially female nerds of color. I feel like the big book about a nerd of color was The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz. I thought, holy shit, this is a book entirely fixated on the nerd of color.

  MQ: That book definitely lingered with me too. We don’t usually get a lot of intelligent characters of color in white narratives. Ultimately, it takes a person of color to write about that nerd of color experience.

  MG: Another writer that does this is Felicia Luna Lemus. She writes about nerds of color. Another person is Christy C. Road. She does graphic novels. The thing about Junot Díaz’s work is that although it’s beautiful and amazing to read, you’re constantly getting slapped with his dick while you’re reading.

  MQ: [Laughs] Yes, it’s very male centric.

  MG: If you’re willing to push the dick out of your face, and then prepare for that fact that it’s gonna come slap you again, then you can be at peace with his work. But’s that’s going to happen. There’s this super macho element that you have to be willing to stomach.

  MQ: I’d like to return to the idea of ghosts as female figures, like the looming figure of La Llorona. Ghosts are very pervasive in the collection. What do you think makes for a good ghost story?

  MG: One of my favorite things in the world is to hear good ghost stories. I urge people to tell me ghost stories. If there’s a context for telling stories, like a blackout or a lockdown, I’m always the person that says, “Let’s tell ghost stories.” If we’re all experiencing hyper-awareness, then the story becomes that much better. I love all kinds of stories. I especially like ghost stories that involve female ghosts and ghosts that carry some kind of message, because then the stakes are heightened. Ghosts with a message are a key ingredient for a ghost story, and also a ghost that brings with it an element of danger and death, a ghost that’s an omen for impending tragedy. Then we’re wondering when that tragedy is going to affect the characters in the story. The first ghost I was introduced to was La Llorona, so she occupies the highest stake in my mental pantheon on ghosts.

  MQ: She was definitely my first, too. So, I love how your stories are imprinted with women who are icons of Chicana feminism like La Llorona and Frida Kahlo. I’ve personally come to view Kahlo as a modern day La Llorona because her art speaks to the immense pain of being a woman and living in the in-between. Traditionally, La Llorona has been perceived as the bogeyman of Mexican culture. How do you think your stories complicate this idea?

  MG: In the story “Chaperones,” women’s destructive nature is celebrated as much as women’s creative nature. I feel that the destructive nature of women in downplayed and not honored, and I wanted to honor a woman’s capacity for violence in that story. When people tell their children the story of La Llorona, it’s very much a warning: “behave, or you’ll encounter this woman.” I wanted to represent the encounter as something potentially exciting for people. The character who’s narrating “Chaperones” is describing her excitement, wondering if La Llorona could be the psychopomp that takes her into another world, and maybe that passage could be pre-death, but maybe that passage could be something macabre, but exciting at the same time. And almost eroticizing it, in an almost lesbian context, mixing sex and death together, and the idea of this girl trying to sleep and fantasizing about La Llorona. So adding an erotic element to her complicates the narrative.

  MQ: We talked about how you the title of the book is a code for Chicana-identified women. I find that my own Chicana identity grows and changes, as I grow and change as a woman and a writer. How would you define your Chicanisma at this very moment?

  MG: At this very moment, I feel connected to my childhood encounters with the word Chicana. My father introduced me to the word. He told me I was a Chicana, and explained to me what the word meant, and then I adopted that word as my own. I introduced myself that way, or reflect on myself using that word. It’s always been a word that I’ve carried throughout my life, and I feel like it’s a gift from my father, and it’s a very specific word for a very specific identity. I’m the child of Mexican parents, but I was born in the United States. Having that ancestry gave me a very particular perspective, and puts me in a really liminal space where there are times when I feel fully embodied as an American, and there are times when I feel fully embodied as a Mexican, and there are times when I feel disembodied, and I feel neither of those things. For me, being a Chicana is having to navigate the paradox of being fully embodied and disembodied at the same time, as an American and as a Mexican, and then having the outsider experience of being a woman added to that mix.

  MQ: Your stories are both joyful and macabre. We could use those two words to describe the very act of writing and being a writer. What keeps you writing?

  MG: What makes me write, and what makes me create in general, is literally a compulsion that I’ve always had. There’s a tension that I carry with me, and the only way that I can serve that tension and anticipation and anxiety is by making something. Frequently it’s writing. My brain is obsessed with language and doing things with language, and chopping words apart, and sentences apart, and narratives apart, and putting them back together in ways that couldn’t fit. My brain is always trying to simulate a problem. It feels like an addiction. I do feel there’s something that verges on mental illness with creative people; let me modify that, with artists. I had this conversation with a friend the other day. A creative person can sit down and write a story and enjoy writing the story, and then they’re fine with never writing another story again. An artist will die if they never get to write another story. I feel like I fall into that category. It’s almost like a pathological drive. I have to do it. If I don’t do it, I’m dead. For a lot of artists that I’ve talked to, that’s how they experience life.

  MQ: You’re compelled to do it, no matter how painful it is.

  MG: The only analogy that I can think of, where you’re compelled to do something so unnatural is addiction. It’s like a mental illness with a really great byproduct.
  Myriam Gurba lives in Long Beach, California where she writes. She has toured North America several times with the legendary literary and performance troupe Sister Spit. She is trying to write for TV. She is part white. Follow her on Twitter at @lesbrains

  Monique Quintana is a Master of Fine Arts candidate in fiction at California State University, Fresno. She serves as associate fiction editor for The Normal School Online and is the president of the Chicanx Writers and Artists Association.

• Emily Books - https://www.emilybooks.com/authors/gurba-myriam/

  Myriam-Gurba

  MYRIAM GURBA lives in California and loves it. She teaches high school, writes, and makes “art.” NBC described her short story collecting Painting their Portraits in Winter as “edgy, thought-provoking, and funny.” Her first book, Dahlia Season, won the Publishing Triangle’s Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. She has written for Time, KCET, and The Rumpus. Wildflowers, compliments, and cash make her happy. ​

QUOTE;
gritty memoir exploring gender politics and growing up mixed-race Chicana
With its icy wit, edgy wedding of lyricism and prose, and unflinching look at personal and public demons, Gurba's introspective memoir is brave and significant.
Gurba, Myriam: MEAN
Kirkus Reviews.
(Sept. 1, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Gurba, Myriam MEAN Coffee House (Adult Nonfiction) $16.95 11, 7 ISBN: 978-1-56689-491-3
A gritty memoir exploring gender politics and growing up mixed-race Chicana.Gifted experimental writer Gurba (Painting Their Portraits in Winter, 2015, etc.) takes a hard look back at her adolescent and early college years in Southern California. A self-described "early-onset feminist," the author is deeply invested in and intimately aware of the construction of identity. As she explores with wry humor the history of her attraction to women--"I grabbed a magazine and realized boobs were the best thing ever....I was eight but I knew what I wanted"--and how the unique blending of her mother's Mexican heritage with her father's Mexican-Polish roots framed her "Molack" ("Mexican" and "Polack") worldview and influenced her studies at the University of California, she also tells the harrowing story of Sophia Castro Torres, another Chicana, whose fate was less kind. Early in the narrative, which unfolds in spare prose vignettes, Gurba writes, "guilt is a ghost," and she admits that she is haunted by the memory of Sophia, a migrant worker who was raped and bludgeoned to death on a baseball diamond in Gurba's hometown. The author not only feels compelled to bear witness to the horrific end of an innocent woman who supported herself picking strawberries and whose life was further erased by the media by being dubbed "a transient"; through the use of inverted chronology, she also slowly reveals her own struggles with PTSD--"the only mental illness you can give someone"--as a survivor of sexual assault by the same perpetrator who killed Sophia. Positioning herself as "the final girl," the one in horror movies who "gets to live" but "understands that her job is to tell the story," Gurba attempts to break down walls of indifference, whether through form or probing content. With its icy wit, edgy wedding of lyricism and prose, and unflinching look at personal and public demons, Gurba's introspective memoir is brave and significant.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Gurba, Myriam: MEAN." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2017. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A502192169/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=0f92191f. Accessed 18 Apr. 2018.
1 of 6 4/18/18, 12:04 AM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Gale Document Number: GALE|A502192169
2 of 6 4/18/18, 12:04 AM

QUOTE:
whip-smart and creative, caustically funny and wise
ith unconstrained, inventive, stop-you-in-your-tracks writing, Gurba asserts that there is glee, freedom, and, perhaps most of all, truth in meanness.
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Mean
Annie Bostrom
Booklist.
114.4 (Oct. 15, 2017): p9. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Mean. By Myriam Gurba. Nov. 2017.192p. Coffee House, paper, $16.95 (9781566894913); e-book, $16.99 (9781566895019). 813.6.
Gurba's (Painting Their Portraits in Winter, 2015) whip-smart and creative, caustically funny and wise essays make up an insightful memoir of growing up, getting an education, and discovering her art and queerness as a mixed-race Chicana girl in 1980s and 1990s California. She knew, as a Mexican-Polish preteen that she didn't fit the mold. "Young people of color are supposed to enjoy looting and eating trans fats, not sustained silent reading." She wondered why the junior-high teacher who saw a male classmate molest her didn't say anything. Later, at Berkeley, she noticed that her work was influenced by Henri Matisse and Gertrude Stein, though she hated them both. Sophia, a woman murdered by a man who had assaulted college-age Gurba just months earlier, forever linking them both, haunts Gurba thoroughout the book. With unconstrained, inventive, stop-you-in-your-tracks writing, Gurba asserts that there is glee, freedom, and, perhaps most of all, truth in meanness. "My stream of consciousness is very judgmental. My subconscious is and always will be a mean person."--Annie Bostrom
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bostrom, Annie. "Mean." Booklist, 15 Oct. 2017, p. 9. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A512776037/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=c41aa80e. Accessed 18 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A512776037
3 of 6 4/18/18, 12:04 AM

QUOTE:
an edgy collection of short stories and a novella, which explore a seldom-charted literary landscape.
Gurba is obviously a fearless writer, who is willing to chart new terrain. So despite its limitations, the collection provides a glimpse into a truly original collection of characters and their lives.
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Dahlia Season: Stories and a Novella
Nisa Donnelly
Lambda Book Report.
15.3 (Fall 2007): p20+. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2007 Lambda Literary Foundation http://www.lambdaliterary.org/lambda_book_report/lbr_back_issues.html
Full Text:
DAHLIA SEASON Stories and a Novella Myriam Gurba
Manic D Press / $14.95
ISBN-13: 978-1-933149-16-5 Paperback, 190 pp.
4 of 6 4/18/18, 12:04 AM

http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Myriam Gurba's first book. Dahlia Season, is an edgy collection of short stories and a novella, which explore a seldom-charted literary landscape. Set against a backdrop of queer goth, the collection offers a rare glimpse into a world in which the characters are never quite what they seem to the casual viewer, who transcend the obvious, and who step beyond stereotypes and preconditions. The stories are populated with trannies, reinvention, rejection of all that is conventional, and the walking wounded who expose their scars both physical and emotional. The characters are strange, yes, but their stories are familiar reflections of how those who traverse roads outside society's generally accepted norm survive and even thrive.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Gurba, a Chicana writer from Southern California, who has Tourette's Syndrome and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, carefully peels back the layers to expose the inner core of her characters, weaving them closely to her own life story. While the closeness lends undisputed authenticity to parts of the collection, especially when the stories deal with the nuances of Gurba's neurology and its manifestations in daily life, it is also the greatest weakness.
Like many emerging authors, Gurba has gravitated to the first-person voice in this collection. Sometimes it works beautifully: "Before I was born, my abuelita had dreams about me ... my abuela swears she saw me in the dream as a boy, a pale boy with big, blue eyes ... There was something wrong with me ... That scared my grandma. She was scared I was a malcreada, born of evil--my mama needed to be cleansed ... They were scared so in order to cheat destiny they gave me a name that they hoped would protect me ... Esperanza, 'Hope.'" More often, though, the first- person voice is limiting because it does not easily enable the author to translate for the reader, or to answer the pressing question of: Why? Consequently, much of the collection has a raw, unfinished quality that is difficult to overlook. Gurba is obviously a fearless writer, who is willing to chart new terrain. So despite its limitations, the collection provides a glimpse into a truly original collection of characters and their lives.
Nisa Donnelly has won Lambda Literary Awards for her novel, The Bar Stories, and for the anthology, Mom. She lives in northern California.
Donnelly, Nisa
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Donnelly, Nisa. "Dahlia Season: Stories and a Novella." Lambda Book Report, Fall 2007, p. 20+.
Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A172052384 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=bc7a6398. Accessed 18 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A172052384
5 of 6 4/18/18, 12:04 AM

QUOTE:
These bleak circumstances doused in Gurba's stark wit linger past the book's final passages.

http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Mean
Publishers Weekly.
264.38 (Sept. 18, 2017): p63. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Mean
Myriam Gurba. Coffee House, $16.95 trade paper (160p) ISBN 978-1-56689-491-3
Gurba (Painting Their Portraits in Winter) forays into experimental nonfiction with this coming- of-age memoir that recounts deep trauma with remarkable swerves into humor. In brief, generally chronological but isolated stories, Gurba depicts how she slowly became aware of her racial and sexual differences during her childhood. Growing up in the 1980s in Santa Maria, Calif., as the daughter of a Mexican mother and a Polish-American father, she was acutely aware of prejudice, which she describes with a child's disbelief in irrational unfairness. When Gurba has to stay with her white neighbors and the mom makes her what she calls a Mexican casserole, Gurba is intrigued but later fumes that she had forced down a "casserole whose nationality was a lie." As she grows older her sensibility takes on a harder edge. She converts fraught situations into poetic, moving critiques, such as her meditation on the Catholic saintly tradition of extreme fasting and her sister's anorexia: "By fasting, a girl ascends a throne made of bone. She stares into the face of the divine and beyond. She finds that infinity has no caloric value." Gurba maintains her wry tone even when she pivots to discussing her sexual assault by a stranger. Her dark humor isn't used for shock value alone, offering instead a striking image of deflection and coping in the face of real pain and terror, such as when recounting being raped, she describes her humiliation upon realizing she's wearing her period underwear: "Girls know what I'm talking about," she quips. These bleak circumstances doused in Gurba's stark wit linger past the book's final passages. (Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Mean." Publishers Weekly, 18 Sept. 2017, p. 63. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A523623370/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=cde0de8f. Accessed 18 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A523623370
6 of 6 4/18/18, 12:04 AM

"Gurba, Myriam: MEAN." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2017. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A502192169/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=0f92191f. Accessed 18 Apr. 2018. Bostrom, Annie. "Mean." Booklist, 15 Oct. 2017, p. 9. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A512776037/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=c41aa80e. Accessed 18 Apr. 2018. Donnelly, Nisa. "Dahlia Season: Stories and a Novella." Lambda Book Report, Fall 2007, p. 20+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A172052384/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=bc7a6398. Accessed 18 Apr. 2018. "Mean." Publishers Weekly, 18 Sept. 2017, p. 63. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A523623370/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=cde0de8f. Accessed 18 Apr. 2018.

• Rain Taxi
  http://www.raintaxi.com/dahlia-season/
  Word count: 643

  QUOTE:
  A highly cohesive collection, Dahlia Season unfurls with a refreshing view of Latina identity; Gurba never shies away from delving into the complexity of modern ethnic American culture.
  DAHLIA SEASON
  A feast of life and culture, Dahlia Season may earn Gurba a place on the list of accomplished Latina writers like Julia Alvarez, Christina Garcia, and Sandra Cisneros.
  Myriam Gurba
  Future Tense Books/Manic D Press ($14.95)

  by Jacklyn Attaway

  Desiree Garcia remembers 1992 as the Year of the Crazy Girl: while jumbled images of Heidi Fleiss, Lorena Bobbitt, and Amy Fisher were splattered on the television, she painted her nails black, listened to Bauhaus, and resisted urges to jerk and randomly shout “cunt!” Desiree, the off-beat Chicana narrator of Dahlia Season’s title novella, is a goth girl, a budding lesbian, and an obsessive-compulsive with a touch of undiagnosed Tourette’s; she not only struggles with her own fears of being a severely disturbed person, but also has a knack for attracting the mentally unstable. Indeed, crazy girls (and boys) appear throughout Myriam Gurba’s debut story collection, set in early ’90s Southern California.

  Herself a former high school misfit, Gurba portrays her characters beyond their yearbook photos. With candid warmth, she seems to flip the pages of memory back to her youth, expertly depicting the desires of two SoCal street gang girls named Angel Malo and La Dreamer. She also deftly describes a Mexican hippie boy with a limp who casts a love spell on his American cousin and a Long Beach girl with a penchant for cross-dressing and gay cruising. Gurba’s characters may be strange, but they never stray into sideshow stereotypes. With honesty and humor, the author creates a believable world of hybrid subculture and youth turmoil.

  Dahlia Season is overflowing with teen angst: in “Just Drift,” an indomitable high school student with a scheme to raise his English grade finds himself faced with a pregnant girlfriend; in “Primera Comunión,” a tomboy finds herself condemned by fate (and an overly superstitious family) to be evil. There are girls with first crushes on girls and girls who are cutters in both “White Girl” and the title novella. But what makes these recurrences pleasurable is the sense that Gurba’s characters are operating in the same space. Sisters from “White Girl” reappear in “Dahlia Season” but with different names; Cholo boys from “Just Drift” become pedestrian gangsters in “Primera Comunión.” The Black Dahlia, famous murder victim and flower, appears in both “Cruising” and the title novella as a symbol of dark womanhood.

  A highly cohesive collection, Dahlia Season unfurls with a refreshing view of Latina identity; Gurba never shies away from delving into the complexity of modern ethnic American culture. For instance, in the title novella, Desiree’s parents send her to Mexico hoping the trip will instill in her their Hispanic values, but the girl’s dark makeup and witch boots confuse her Mexican relatives. When Desiree returns to the U.S. with a new appreciation (or fetish) for her Mexican heritage, her death-rock friends tease her for braiding her hair and listening to mariachi records.

  Just as she portrays Desiree as a cultural hybrid, wearing Christian icons of bloody martyrs and painting her face to look like the DC Comics interpretation of Death, so does Gurba interweave English and Spanish slang, creating a distinct voice with a conversational tone. A feast of life and culture, Dahlia Season may earn Gurba a place on the list of accomplished Latina writers like Julia Alvarez, Christina Garcia, and Sandra Cisneros.
  Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore
  Purchase this book at your local independent bookstore.

  Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2007/2008 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2007/2008

• Lamda Literary
  https://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/memoir/12/21/mean-by-myriam-gurba/
  Word count: 777

  QUOTE:
  Myriam Gurba’s memoir Mean is an exploration of girlhood, and the violence that lurks in its midst. The book chronicles Gurba’s sexual assault as well as her coming of age as a queer, mixed-race Chicana growing up in Southern California. Gurba approaches these topics with ample doses of dark humor, and I found myself both laughing and cringing from page to page.

  ‘Mean’ by Myriam Gurba
  Review by Liz von Klemperer
  December 21, 2017

  Myriam Gurba’s memoir Mean is an exploration of girlhood, and the violence that lurks in its midst. The book chronicles Gurba’s sexual assault as well as her coming of age as a queer, mixed-race Chicana growing up in Southern California. Gurba approaches these topics with ample doses of dark humor, and I found myself both laughing and cringing from page to page. Gurba’s experience as a spoken word poet shines through in her colloquial quips and clever turns of phrase. It’s not an easy feat to inject wit into such a heavy subject matter, but Gurba does so with tact.

  Although Gurba is the book’s protagonist, Mean is also dominated by the presence of Sophia Castro Torres, a migrant worker who was raped and murdered on a baseball diamond in Santa Maria park near Gurba’s childhood home. Gurba’s story is in part one of survivor’s guilt, as the same man assaulted her the summer after her first year of college. Torres appears throughout the book like a ghost as Gurba deals with her own PTSD and sexual assault trauma. Mean is an ode to Torres, a retelling of a life and death that was minimized. In this sense, the book’s title acts as a double entendre, as it not only references ill temperament but also points to a desire to convey, to signify. Gurba’s mission is not only to tell her story but also to give meaning to a story that was sorely misrepresented and underreported by the media. Mean begins with a play-by-play of the night Torres died, and ends with a reflection on her life and death.

  Mean is also a field guide for how to exist in the hetero patriarchy, and meanness plays a critical role in this navigation. For Gurba, meanness is a defense mechanism, a way to operate in a world that so often alienates and harms. “Being mean makes us feel alive,” Gurba writes. “It’s fun and exciting. Sometimes it keeps us alive.” Meanness is also an empowering celebration of girlhood. When Gurba and her friends play hooky in high school, for example, meanness manifests in their flippancy and blatant disregard for rules and authority. As Gurba and her friends drive and smoke weed out of a car window, she comments that “adrenaline and female bonding can overwhelm almost anything.”

  Gurba subverts the trope of the “mean girl,” which has played a significant role in recent popular culture. The cult classic film Mean Girls, for example, portrays girls as catty. Their meanness is a result of their own insecurities and narcissism. Gurba offers an alternative narrative in which meanness, hardness, and bluntness are valid and valuable responses to patriarchy, oppression, and violence. Victims are not portrayed as weak or helpless. They are fierce, and sometimes they are cruel. Gurba is unapologetic when she looks back on bullying kids on the playground: “We act mean to defend our clubs and institutions,” she writes. Later she says, “being rude to men who deserve it is a holy mission.” Meanness is a way to dish back to the world what it doles out. Gurba draws an ultimate distinction, though, between different types of meanness, saying, “but I’m not so mean that I’ve ever raped anybody…that’s a special kind of mean.” She does not let us forget who the real offenders are. The title of the book in some ways acts as a tongue-in-cheek misnomer. Is her behavior really meanness, or is it a logical defense mechanism adopted out of necessity? Is it a way to gain power?

  Meanness is alive in this book not only as a philosophy but also as a linguistic tactic that drives her work. The phrase “Somewhere on this planet, a man is touching a woman to death,” for example, is biting and brutal. There is no subtlety or euphemism here, only stark realities. In Mean, Gurba is offering readers an alternate take on victimization and trauma.

  Mean
  By Myriam Gurba
  Coffee House Press
  Paperback, 9871566894913, 160 pp.
  November 2017

• The Rumpus
  http://therumpus.net/2018/01/the-rumpus-interview-with-myriam-gurba/
  Word count: 2386

  QUOTE:
  Gurba’s prose is dark and sparse, potent yet playful. She combines different registers and rhythms, and weaves together threads of different kinds of privilege, whiteness, sexual assault, and trauma.

  Setting aside Time for Magic: Talking with Myriam Gurba

  By Maria Anderson

  January 10th, 2018

  MEAN, a series of vignettes released by Coffee House Press in November 2017, is a memoir in which Myriam Gurba explores how it felt to grow up as a queer Chicana in Southern California. Gurba had a Mexican feminist mother and a half-Polish father, and a mother tongue of English, Spanish, and some Nahuatl. The story begins with the rape and murder of Sophia Castro Torres. Years later, Torres’s ghostly presence continues to make itself known, and Gurba has made her peace with this. “It’s okay for ghosts to exist through me,” she writes. “It has to be.”

  Gurba’s prose is dark and sparse, potent yet playful. She combines different registers and rhythms, and weaves together threads of different kinds of privilege, whiteness, sexual assault, and trauma. You get the feeling Gurba would be a good stand-up poet: “I looked down at her Brussels sprouts. They looked cold and evil. They looked like American presidents.”

  Recently, I corresponded with Gurba, who has also written a short story collection called Painting Their Portraits in Winter, by email.

  ***

  The Rumpus: You begin with a quote from Jenni Rivera, a singer and entrepreneur who grew up in Long Beach: “Lo mejor que te puedo desear es que te vaya mal.” “The best I can hope is that things don’t go well for you,” is how I’d translate this. Can you tell me about Rivera?

  Myriam Gurba: I like this question very much. It gives me the opportunity to share the accomplishments of an artist who died young and goes unrecognized beyond the Latin American Spanish-speaking world in a way that Selena Quintanilla is not. And, by the way, the cult of Selena Quintanilla troubles me in the same way that Frida [Kahlo]’s cult troubles me. Both cults tokenize at the expense of SO MANY OTHER FEMALE ARTISTS.

  Anyhow, Rivera sang and recorded banda music, which is male-dominated, and her music often dealt with social issues from a frequently devalued perspective: a woman’s. The lyrics you cite and correctly translated come from MEAN‘s opening epigraph. I appropriated them from Rivera’s hit “Inolvidable,” which, in English, is “Unforgettable.” The lyrics narrate how unforgettable and INCREDIBLE the song’s protagonist is and how her past lovers will never be able to escape their memories of her. The lyrics also suggest that her lovers mistreated her and that her escape from them is a triumph. Because of their inability to appreciate her, she wishes them ill-will in a characteristically cheeky Mexican way.

  I chose these lyrics because they a) focus on memory’s role in preserving and overcoming pain, b) celebrate feminine strength and triumph over machismo, c) communicate morbid Mexican humor, and d) are the type of music I later describe in my narrative during moments when I feel haunted by the ghost of a dead Mexican woman. I wrestle with these leitmotifs throughout MEAN.

  Rumpus: Your collection opens with “Wisdom,” an essay about a woman, Sophia Castro Torres, who was walking through a baseball diamond and was brutally attacked and raped. Sophia haunts the narrator throughout the book.

  Gurba: I start with the murder of Sophia Castro Torres because had this event not occurred, MEAN would not have been written. Her murder, and my attempt to make meaning out of it, are MEAN‘s engine.

  Rumpus: Writing MEAN seems, to me, a way of celebrating female triumph over machismo. You’re telling Sophia Castro Torres’s story, you’re talking about your own rape, and other incidences of unwanted sexual contact that occurred throughout your life. Does writing these instances down and sharing them with others feel like a celebration of sorts?

  Gurba: That’s interesting. It doesn’t “feel” that way to me but that’s probably because my writing doesn’t “feel” very good to me after I’ve written it, edited it, and then edited it some more. In fact, I feel a lot of revulsion toward my writing and dislike rereading it, especially once it’s in print. To me, the chronicling of those events is an inventory and inventories are seldom celebratory. There might, perhaps, be something celebratory in MEAN’s tone, especially when it swerves comedic. I value laughter a lot and, as a result, I’m willing to pay a high price to laugh or to make others laugh. Maybe that’s where the felicity or joyousness you’re noting comes from. The tone. I didn’t, however, set out to write a triumphant, celebratory work. That seems presumptuous and too athletic for my taste.

  Rumpus: Do you feel as though arranging and describing these memories helped you to overcome pain?

  Gurba: No. Writing does not numb, comfort, or soothe me. It does the opposite. It tends to excite me and reinscribe pain. It doesn’t function as exorcism.

  Rumpus: Food appears often in here. Bulgarian yogurt, French fries, cool dessert parfaits, corn, “Mexican” casserole, kielbasas in tortillas. Is this deliberate? What are your feelings about food?

  Gurba: The food mentions are not deliberate. Food is a complicated subject for me. Food brings joy, satisfaction, and conflict. Eating disorders plague my family. Their consequences have been painful, expensive, violent, and deadly. You haven’t lived till you’ve watched a woman die of starvation.

  Rumpus: What was your process for writing MEAN? As a high school teacher, did you work on the book mostly during breaks, or were you writing during the school year?

  Gurba: I started writing MEAN in 2010. I wrote it during the school year (before and after work), on the weekends, on breaks, and during summers. It went through many iterations. I don’t know that I’d call how I write a “process.” Process seems too methodical. I guess in some ways the process of writing MEAN was like dating. I carved out time to get to know my story and let my story get to know me. We felt each other out. When you set aside time for magic, sometimes it happens. Sometimes, it doesn’t. Discipline and tenacity help magic happen.

  Rumpus: Do you try to cut yourself off from the Internet to create mental space? Did you have any writing rituals for this book?

  Gurba: The Internet is the best and worst thing to happen to writing. It makes it so easy to quickly satisfy a lot of curiosity but it dampens curiosity for the same reason. It removes the obstacles that used to make hunting for knowledge sexy. I don’t have Internet at home, so that helps. I try not to peek at the Internet (through my phone) when writing, but I don’t have very good stamina. I did burn some cheap incense while writing MEAN so I guess that was a ritual. I wrote part of it with a stolen crystal nearby, too. I wrote part of it in a desert motel by Joshua Tree. I wrote parts of it at particular kitchen tables, too, and choosing those tables felt ritualistic. I also wrote some of it with chickens pecking at my feet.

  Rumpus: Do you keep a notebook?

  Gurba: I do keep a notebook, but I also compulsively take notes in my phone. Topics that I recently took notes on include sex, the Empire State Building, cologne, and freedom. Looking at my handwritten notes sometimes weirds me out because my handwriting looks so much like my mother’s.

  Rumpus: How much revision do you do?

  Gurba: A ton. Revision is my reason for living.

  With MEAN, I would print the whole manuscript and then pin the pages to a corkboard and retype it, line by line, and refine it as needed. I think of that process as akin to a rock-polishing machine. I’m the machine and I keep feeding myself rocks till they come out smooth enough.

  Rumpus: Do you do this with short stories as well? Do you ever tire or grow bored of typing the words out again, or feel as though you’re overexposing yourself to the sentences? I’m thinking of how, when I try to retype short stories from paper copies, that I sometimes feel as though it’s harder for me to see what’s on the page for a while afterward.

  Gurba: I sometimes do this with short stories but less frequently. I see things in hardcopy that I miss if I only see words on screen. I do get sick of the words, but I like to see everything spread out because I get a sense of scale that is missing from screen. Going over each sentence many, many, many times gives me incredible intimacy with sentences, especially their rhythm. The rhythm and music of words matter a lot to me and it only takes one misplaced word to spoil the music. Working with a manuscript with that kind of intimacy is kind of like taking a magnification mirror to your pores. Its horrifying but it shows just where the problems are. Of course, I do get bored of the words after a while. I take breaks from them so that we can breathe. And by the time I’m done with my umpteenth regurgitation, I hate the words. They become flavorless chewing gum. Like how really old gum gets once it starts disintegrating in your mouth. Gum that’s lost its elasticity and feels like a sweater.

  Rumpus: What’s your favorite historical moment to think about?

  Gurba: I’m working on a book about California at the moment. I don’t have one specific moment though I often think about a moment which occurred before I was born: my great grandfather’s “kidnapping” of my grandmother and subsequent “incarceration” of her at a Catholic orphanage with orders that her mother not be allowed to see her.

  Rumpus: Your grandmother was kidnapped—how did this happen? How did she end up at the Catholic orphanage?

  Gurba: The kidnapping and the California project are unrelated. I’m writing about California because I want to write about place. As for my grandmother, her parents were fighting. So, to punish my great-grandmother, my great-grandfather took the kids and stuck them in an orphanage. He paid to have them kept there. They lived in really nice quarters, away from the other orphans. They ate non-orphan food. They had a piano. It was terrible, but also mildly luxurious.

  Rumpus: How are you going about researching this project?

  Gurba: Traveling. Reading. Collecting oral histories. Visiting archives. Consulting historians. The usual.

  Rumpus: One of the most striking moments in MEAN was when your teacher made eye contact with you when your classmate, Macaulay, was touching you under the table. What a coward. I wonder about these moments of cowardice. Are there moments like this that you’re finding in this new project?

  Gurba: Not yet. But I’m sure I’ll get there.

  Rumpus: Do you have a recipe for dissolving the patriarchy? Do you think it’s possible?

  Gurba: I’m not hopeless about patriarchy’s dissolution and if one considers the last one hundred years of American history, amazing things have happened to expand women’s freedoms. I am an openly queer, biracial woman who has owned property, gotten gay married, gotten gay divorced, worked as a school teacher, published three books, and voted. This could not have happened in the not-so-recent past, so for those who say change is impossible: NO, it is absolutely possible. The future is unwritten. There is no singular recipe for patriarchy’s dissolution. Its dissolution will take many chefs and many recipe books. Or, perhaps I should say WO-many chefs. Lol.

  Maria Anderson is from Montana. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Missouri Review, The Iowa Review, Big Lucks, and The Atlas Review. She is an editor at Essay Press. More from this author →

  Filed Under: Books, Rumpus Original
  Related Posts

  What I’ll Tell My Children: On Being ‘F***Able’ under the Regime of President-elect
  It’s All about Positionality: Talking with Kayleb Rae Candrilli
  Reinventing Motherhood and Re-Dreaming Reality: Talking with Ariel Gore
  Ready for Change: Discussing Sexual Assault with SafeBAE
  “Language Orthodoxy,” the Adichie Wars, and Western Feminism’s Enduring Myopia

  Other Cool Stuff

  National Poetry Month Day 17: Tiana Clark
  Renovating Reality: A Remembrance of J. D. McClatchy
  The Thread: Look What You Made Me Do
  National Poetry Month Day 16: Sandra Simonds
  FUNNY WOMEN: Introducing Femail, the Email System for Women

  Hello

  Welcome to The Rumpus! We’re thrilled you’re here. At The Rumpus, we’ve got essays, reviews, interviews, music, film, fiction, poetry, and comics. We know how easy it is to find pop culture on the Internet, so we’re here to give you something more challenging, to show you how beautiful things are when you step off the beaten path. The Rumpus is a place where people come to be themselves through their writing, to tell their stories or speak their minds in the most artful and authentic way they know how. We strive to be a platform for marginalized voices and writing that might not find a home elsewhere. We want to shine a light on stories that build bridges, tear down walls, and speak truth to power. What we have in common is a passion for fantastic writing that’s brave, passionate, and true (and sometimes very, very funny).

• Bitch Media
  https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/mean-myriam-gurba-book-review
  Word count: 453

  No More White Girl Tales “Mean” Reimagines Memoirs for Women of Color
  by Kristin Sanders
  Published on November 13, 2017

  Book Reviews{ Emily Books/Coffee House Press }
  Released: November 14, 2017
  $16.95
  Rating starstarstar Buy it now

  Read it »

  This article appears in our 2017 Fall issue, Facts. Subscribe today!

  Myriam Gurba’s Mean is a brutally honest memoir about sexuality, race, gender, and trauma in a small town. Although it tells Gurba’s story, the book blurs traditional conventions of the memoir genre by weaving in poetry, feminist theory, and cultural criticism.

  Mean is for the I Love Dick crowd, but it’s decidedly more for the fans of the Toby, Devon, and Paula plotlines added to the TV series that uplift queer voices and women of color. These new plotlines expose the white heteronormativity of Chris Kraus’s novel and how ready audiences are to hear sharp cultural criticism from women of color and LGBTQ folks.

  Enter Mean, which offers a lot about Gurba’s Mexican-Polish background, childhood, family, and playground race wars. Soon, we’re learning about the first boy to touch her—under her desk in junior high while the teacher looks away. Thus begins, for Gurba as well as for most women, a lifelong desire to be deemed beautiful and likable and to be safe from harm, which proves to be a heartbreakingly difficult feat—or, as Gurba writes, “Somewhere out there […] a woman is getting touched to death.” For Gurba’s sister, this desire manifests as an eating disorder, which the writer tenderly examines in relation to religious fervor. And Gurba’s ability to feel safe is shattered by a sexual assault the summer after her first year of college.

  Mean is a reflection on the ways women heal from such trauma. Sexuality, art as “one way to work out touch gone wrong,” and feminism exist as possible paths of healing; some of the best parts of the book are Gurba’s explorations of these paths, like when she takes an art theory class, discovers Hannah Wilke, and begins making her own art. Mean is also a meditation on why evil exists, and how being mean is survival tactic—a theme explored via the rape and murder of a Santa Maria woman, Sophia, whose story is inexorably interwoven with our heroine’s.

  Steeped in the complexities of identity—queer identity, hyphenated-American identity, Chicana identity, sexual-assault-survivor identity—Mean, with its dark humor, vivid sensory descriptions, and acerbic criticism of white America’s racial myopia, couldn’t be better timed. If this is the literary future, perhaps it will save us all.

• Pank
  https://pankmagazine.com/2017/10/04/myriam-gurbas-mean-traverses-vast-world/
  Word count: 703

  Myriam Gurba’s MEAN traverses a vast world
  Posted on October 4, 2017

  (Coffee House Press)

  BY NICHOLE L. REBER

  —

  It’s hard to say which quality makes Myriam Gurba’s Mean such a stellar read. Her dark sense of humor? Her unique perspective as a queer Chicana from California? It could also be her structure. She compels the reader through her nonfiction novel without letting us merely settle into the book as entertainment. Instead she engages our intellects, which makes an altogether enjoyable experience.

  Gurba weaves topics together in the forms of found poems, prose poetry, news reports, memoir, and lists. Once we’ve connected enough strands we see patterns emerging: racism, misandry, class, and sexuality.

  The story begins with a young, petite Latina with long clothing walking in a Little League baseball diamond at night. A man follows her, chases her then bludgeons and rapes her. News reports leave her nameless, call her a transient. Gurba finds out this woman’s name is Sophia (Torres) like Sophia the capital of Bulgaria, like Sophia Loren, like the Sophia in the Bible; she’s 5’2” and Mexican, and the young migrant worker had already had a rough life before it came to a close there in Oakley Park, not far from Gurba’s house. It’s what the two women have in common that allows readers to connect the strands Gurba weaves into a larger picture, especially in the chapter “Strawberry Picker,” where we see race, misandry, and class.

  “Sophia is always with me. She haunts me.

  “Guilt is a ghost.”

  Guilt ties in to the multiple meanings of privilege Gurba shows us. Daughter of a Mexican teacher/mother and half-Mexican school administrator/father, she and her siblings enjoy a middle-class life. There’s a large gap between her family and the Mexican migrant workers who pick produce in the California fields. Privilege, she intimates, isn’t just for whites.

  Privilege doesn’t, however, equal invincibility. It couldn’t save her sister or Gurba herself from eating disorders. Nor could it shield her from the grade school classmate who repeatedly molests her and fellow female classmates; or the history teacher who, despite witnessing the boy’s actions, does nothing. Nor could it shield her from having an unfathomable empathy for Sophia Torres.

  Not all is tragedy though. The author’s sense of humor gives this book an equal amount of levity. Sometimes that means taking pot shots at race and gender: “Of course an elderly white dude taught anthropology,” she writes in the chapter “Nicole.” “Who better to explain all the cultures and peoples of the world than he who is in charge of them?”

  Sometimes humor means taking pot shots at sexuality, eating disorders, feminism, misogyny: “Good girlishness resists pleasure. Good girls prove their virtue by getting rid of themselves,” she writes in a Catholic-heavy chapter. “Death by anorexia is a fail-safe sexual-assault prevention technique,” a line that reverberates like a nail-studded boomerang later in the book.

  Gurba continues to bust balls, provoke, and raise readers’ eyebrows throughout the book, and she traverses a vast world. She takes us from the Japanese style of art known as Ukiyo-e, her great-great-grandfather’s role in a 19th-century Mexican revolution in support of Communism, and masturbating to the Diary of Anne Frank. She makes us ponder what would make an appropriate gift for the grave of the rape victim. Even Michael Jackson makes an appearance.

  Read Mean for its humor and stimulating structure. Read Gurba for her unique perspective and literary stylings.

  —

  Nichole L. Reber picked up a love for world lit by living in countries around the globe. She’s a nonfiction writer and her award-winning work has been in World Literature Today, Ploughshares, The Rumpus, Lunchticket, and elsewhere. Read her stories on a Chinese cult, wearing hijab in India, and getting kidnapped in Peru at http://www.nicholelreber.com/.
  This entry was posted in BOOK REVIEWS, Features and tagged chicana, Coffee House Press, Mean, Myriam Gurba, Queer. Bookmark the permalink.

• 4 Columns
  http://4columns.org/milks-m/mean
  Word count: 1174

  Mean
  M. Milks

  “Being a bitch is spectacular”—memoirist Myriam Gurba confronts a world of sexual abuse.

  Mean, by Myriam Gurba, Coffee House Press, 175 pages, $16.95

  • • •

  “Being mean makes us feel alive,” Myriam Gurba writes in her new book, the memoir Mean. “It’s fun and exciting. Sometimes, it keeps us alive.” Rooted in her experience growing up a queer mixed-race Chicana in a world structured by whiteness, straightness, and misogyny, Gurba’s particular meanness is confrontational, deliberate, and very, very funny. She goes for the throat, then bats the reader playfully on the head.

  Mean follows two volumes of short fiction, most recently, Painting Their Portraits in Winter. Whether working with Mexican folk tales (like La Llorona, the weeping ghost mother, whom Gurba imagines crossing the border into the US in “The Chaperones”) or Sylvia Plath (in “The Time I Rewrote the First Two Pages of The Bell Jar from a Melodramatic Chicana Perspective and Named It The Taco Bell Jar”), the warmly irreverent stories in these collections bridge both cultural traditions and fictional modes. Gurba, who has toured with Sister Spit, Michelle Tea’s troupe of queer writers, is also known as a dynamite performer, delivering wit and audacity in equal doses.

  Mean is pure Gurba: brazen, ballsy, and grinning. But Gurba’s first memoir is also poised to be a breakout book—a work that, like Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water, will likely catapult its author out of the small world of experimental-ish short fiction and into a much larger readership. Gurba’s memoir fuses realism, fabulism, and formal experimentation with elements of true crime, refashioning the genre into something singularly new. Equal parts vulnerability and provocation, the book is a poem by Judy Grahn performed by Sarah Silverman to the tune of Margaret Cho’s “I Wanna Kill My Rapist.”

  Structured in loosely sequential sections of irregular length—some very short riffs, some longer chapters—Mean begins and ends with the story of Sophia Torres, a young woman who was raped and murdered by the same man who had earlier sexually assaulted Gurba, in the summer after her first year of college. In between, Gurba covers a lot of ground, charting her own coming of age: from growing up “Molack” (Mexican Polack) and becoming aware as a child “that white people are white people and that that’s not necessarily a good thing” to dealing with her sister’s anorexia in high school and discovering feminist artist Hannah Wilke in college. What stitches all this together is Gurba’s burgeoning awareness of the pervasiveness of sexual abuse in the world around her—and her cultivation of meanness as a response to it.

  “Being a bitch is spectacular,” Gurba asserts, before launching into a discussion of what she calls “the queer art of being mean.” Drawing on drag culture as depicted in the film Paris Is Burning, she offers a crash course in shade, a “high art.” Gurba’s own mean streak shows up most often through broad comedy (broad as in bawdy, and broad as in female-centered) and language play.

  Her gleefully crass images arrive with a jolt: cunts are described as “chipmunks”; a running teacher’s “breasts dog-paddled in her muumuu.” She produces similarly indelicate effects with diction, often cramming her sentences with deliberately clunky language: she and her classmates “Hitler Youthfully” obey the teacher; a stylist “Joan of Arcly” cuts her hair. Popping up absurdly in otherwise taut sentences, these awkwardly formed adverbials call attention to themselves with a smirk. Other word choices produce more unnerving effects. For example, in the very first scene, in the midst of imagining Sophia’s rape and murder in lyrical prose, Gurba swaps in the word “corn” for “penis,” inserting an uneasy tackiness into an otherwise sober moment: “His slack corn slides out of her.” The word choice insists on ugliness. It’s wincing and painful. It hurts to read.

  If Gurba’s sentences can be elegant, they rarely stay that way for long—they’re invariably uglified or camped with an abrupt tonal shift. In this way, Gurba’s mean streak unsettles not just social but aesthetic propriety. If the dominant mode of literary prose is realism characterized by quiet, meaningful details, Gurba goes for vulgarity and volume. Occasionally her riffs fall flat for me—there are a couple of AIDS jokes that I don’t exactly disapprove of but maybe just don’t get. This, though, is part of her project too: to trace the limits and effects of bad taste.

  In exploring the possibilities of meanness, Gurba distinguishes it from other forms of cruelty. “I’m mean,” she writes, “but I’m not so mean that I’ve ever raped anybody. . . . That’s a special kind of mean.” Throughout the book, Gurba describes a world shaped by the ubiquity of sexual violence: “Rape is in the air. Rape is in the sky.” She grew up near Michael Jackson’s Neverland, we learn; her rapist was tried in the same court that Jackson was. A classmate’s father is accused of molesting children, including, potentially, the classmate who molested her in junior high. Even Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” she tells us, “was originally a kind of rapey song meant to be sung by a guy.” Gurba makes connections between all these instances of abuse.

  As she does so, she also captures the heady thrill of adolescence: of ditching school in the company of other (mean) girls, of coming into her own as a baby dyke and young artist at Berkeley. The memoir’s middle third sags a bit as it moves through high school and into college with slice-of-life scenes (her friend’s youth group, dorm move-in) and some very short sections (a sentence summing up a summer in Mexico, for example) that are entertaining if restlessly lightweight. But when they get supplanted by the shock of assault and its aftermath, of course we want them back.

  “Guilt is a ghost,” Gurba repeats several times. Hovering over the book’s burbling laughter is Sophia’s ghost and Gurba’s survivor’s guilt. The riffs keep coming, but they’re laced with injury and rage. Henri Bergson famously described laughter as “a momentary anesthesia of the heart,” a coldness that is pure intellect. Gurba’s comedy is sometimes that—deploying detachment as a kind of survival strategy. More often her punch lines are punches, and they land.

  M. Milks is the author of Kill Marguerite and Other Stories, winner of the 2015 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Fiction and a Lambda Literary Award finalist, as well as three chapbooks, most recently The Feels, an exploration of fan fiction and affect. Milks is fiction editor at The Account, and editor of the books The &NOW Awards 3: The Best Innovative Writing, 2011–2013 and Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives.

• Out
  https://www.out.com/art-books/2017/11/16/myriam-gurba-mean-girl-extraordinaire
  Word count: 230

  Myriam Gurba, Mean Girl Extraordinaire
  Myriam Gurba, Mean Girl Extraordinaire

  The queer poet's debut "nonfiction novel" argues that nastiness can offer us catharsis.
  By Maris Kreizman
  Thu, 2017-11-16 18:46

  “I want to be a likeable female narrator. But I also enjoy being mean,” writes Myriam Gurba in her poetic debut “nonfiction novel.” With Mean (Coffee House Press), she succeeds marvelously. Drawn to the sacred and the profane alike, Gurba is so funny recounting her education in and out of the classroom that even when she’s at her darkest, it’s hard not to laugh. Her response after a Sunday-school teacher is caught molesting students: “I wondered if his lessons on Sodom and Gomorrah had been interactive.” A self-described Molack (a mix of Mexican and Polish ethnicities), Gurba grew up gay, brown, and angry in a middle-class town in Northern California, where injustices occurred like they do in most places—often. She’s a rape survivor herself, and as she veers from biting vignettes to poignant verse and back again, she shows reverence for both saints and bitches, arguing that nastiness can be more than just a defense mechanism. In a cruel world, it sometimes offers us the catharsis we need to keep going.

  Mean by Myriam Gurba is available now via Cofee House Press.
  Tags: Art & Books

• Electric Literature
  https://electricliterature.com/the-real-world-made-me-come-out-to-my-mom-5e460d0c2742
  Word count: 2208

  ‘The Real World’ Made Me Come Out to My Mom
  But it couldn’t make me stop falling in love with white girls
  The Real World: San Francisco

  I listened to Billie Holiday on certain school nights. With my underwear soaked in period blood, I crawled across my bedroom carpet. I got intimate with it. I knelt at the stereo. A cassette spun on the tape deck. Blues filled the corner. I fell to my side and curled my body around an invisible ball of feelings that was tethered to me as if by an umbilical cord.

  A pretty heroin addict from long ago was singing to me. She was voicing how it felt to be in love.

  She was voicing how it felt for me to be in love with a white girl. “You’re my thrill. You do something to me. You send chills right through me. When I look at you. ’Cause you’re my thrill . . .”

  “You’re My Thrill” expressed every emotion I felt for this white girl, and it didn’t matter that a whole bunch of time and space existed between me and Billie Holiday. Her delivery proved to me that she understood how crazy in love I was with this girl I’m not even going to bother describing. All the white girls I fall for are the same. They’re all Michelle Pfeiffer. Or James Dean. None of them have been Nina Simone. None of them have been Richard Pryor. None of them have been Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. Only Billie Holiday could voice my yearning. She was dead. That seemed fitting.
  This essay is excerpted from “Mean,” by Myriam Gurba. Purchase the full nonfiction novel here.

  This white girl who I French-kissed went to Catholic school with me. She kept her things in a locker by the chapel. The pimple on her chin turned me on. Every part of her turned me on. We touched titties and tongues in her bedroom. We bit each other. Her hands bruised my arms and flanks and we tasted one another’s blood. We crawled through moonlight into dark, wet tunnels and felt each other’s necks. She listened to Zeppelin. She had her flaws.

  I enjoy saying that my father forcing me to mow the lawn and use the leaf blower turned me gay. I also blame MTV’s The Real World. Do you even know what The Real World was? It was reality. It was a tv show where a bunch of fairly good-looking people with conflicting identity politics were put together in a house, plied with free alcohol, and filmed giving one another lectures and HPV.

  The San Francisco season premiered at the same time I invited the white girl of my dreams over for enchiladas. Pedro starred as the gay cast member. That was a thing in the ‘90s— the gay cast member.

  Like me, Pedro wasn’t white. He was light skinned but not white; there’s a difference. Pedro dated a black guy. He had a handsome face and spoke with a Cuban accent. When had a Cuban on tv last been so popular? It had to have been Ricky Ricardo. Pedro was dying of AIDS. He was doing it better than Magic Johnson.

  Pedro had beef with one of his roommates, Puck. Puck was a white guy of the worst type: a white guy with a bicycle. He delivered things on his bike. He was a bike messenger. He reveled in being disgusting in a very “boys will be boys” kind of way, and the show’s editors dedicated a segment to his grossness. They juxtaposed this grossness against Pedro’s AIDS-y gentility.

  All the white girls I fall for are the same. They’re all Michelle Pfeiffer. Or James Dean. None of them have been Nina Simone. None of them have been Richard Pryor.

  A scene opens with Pedro being interviewed. In an accent similar to Mom’s, he says, “I really have a big problem with Puck. I’m fixing myself a bagel with peanut butter and I’m getting really into it.” Cut to Pedro in the kitchen. Sensual R & B plays as he slices a bagel. The musical choice suggests that gay Latinos sexually interact with everything. Sticking a knife into a bagel is erotic for us.

  We don’t see the fingering happen, but we see Puck walking out of the kitchen, seemingly chewing, and over his shoulder Pedro calls, “Did you stick your finger in the peanut butter?” Cut back to the interview, where Pedro confirms that yes, Puck stuck his finger up his nose and then fingered the peanut butter jar, licked his digit, and went on with his straight life. Puck denies his crime. The tapes are replayed. They vindicate Pedro.

  Puck totally did it.

  Watching this drama made me hungry for a bagel. It also made me wonder if Pedro ever got so frustrated he wished he could give Puck AIDS.
  Queering Gender, Queering Genre

  On being both, neither, and trying to still exist
  electricliterature.com

  In college, I met a conservative gay writer with HIV.

  He was dating the roommate of this boy I was having experimental sex with, and once he walked into their sparely furnished living room while I was hanging out on the couch in sweats and radiating viral heat.

  My immune system was fighting something fluey. I could feel coughs growing inside me.

  The writer strode toward me. I remained seated. He reached out his hand and said, “Hello, I’m Andrew.”

  “Hello,” I replied to the Englishman I already knew to be Andrew Sullivan. “I’m sick.”

  In a tiny way, I felt powerful. Powerful enough to kill Andrew Sullivan by coughing on him.

  In a tiny way, I felt powerful. Powerful enough to kill Andrew Sullivan by coughing on him.

  Andrew Sullivan made a yikes face.

  He waved at me in place of a handshake and paced to the balcony. There, his date, a gorgeous white boy, was waiting, leaning against the railing. Andrew Sullivan put his hands around the swimmer’s shoulders. He pressed his chest against the boy’s back, HIV positive to HIV negative.

  Pedro’s accent soothed me. His beauty soothed me. The high stakes of his life so inspired me, they almost made me want to have AIDS. But I think being in love with a mean white girl was enough. She was my AIDS.

  The Real World: San Francisco had a gay. The Real World: Los Angeles had a lesbian. The roommates found out when she wore her “I’m Not Gay But My Girlfriend Is” t-shirt to shoot pool.

  Pedro partly made me come out to Mom.

  If he could argue with a bike messenger on international TV about sticking his finger in peanut butter, the least I could do was acknowledge that I was bonkers for a white girl.

  Scarlett O’Hara, Lana Turner, Divine. White girls. Baltimore drag queens make the prettiest white girls.

  White girls are the Holy Grails of Western civilization. I wish they could be replaced with something else. Let there be a new grail. Let that grail be a dead Mexican woman in a long dress. Let her name be Wisdom.

  Let her ghost unmoor the hero’s journey. Let the ghost whisper her sibilant name. Let her breathe it right into your mouth.

  White girls are the Holy Grails of Western civilization. I wish they could be replaced with something else. Let there be a new grail.

  I still hang out with white girls. I still hang out with ghosts.

  When do you think white girls will go extinct? We are more than a decade into the twenty-first century, and I see no indications of their decline.

  There are still plenty of them to feel inferior to. There are still plenty of them to get high with. The last one I hung out with hates men.

  She lives with her partner on a street with a funny name. Something like Cerulean or Imbroglio.

  The white girl delivers marijuana. Unlike Puck, she uses a Honda. One of her clients is a high school teacher who invites her to sit at her kitchen table. The teacher will pack a bowl and ply the white girl with weed, peppering her with questions about transgendered womanhood. Since the white girl is kind of new to her job, she feels like she has to humor the teacher. She can’t stand it, though. She’s not a teacher. The teacher is.

  The white girl and I are pharmaceutical sisters. I take estradiol twice a day and progesterone once a day to supplement my failing ovaries. I take spironolactone to fix the mess my adrenal glands make. The white girl takes these same hormones and androgen blockers for other reasons. Mainly, it’s because her ovaries exist on an alternate level of consciousness. She’s trans.

  When do you think white girls will go extinct?

  We squatted on her tiny stoop together. The night sky gave us a whole bunch of black to stare at. Her cat pranced along the lawn. With cautious paws, she crept toward my feet. She crouched as if she were going to come at me and then leapt back and darted into the grass.

  Her tail twitched. Its tip seemed to have been hacked off and then peeled. “What happened to her tail?” I asked.

  The white girl said, “Bob accidentally slammed the door on it and she tried to yank it out and ripped the fur off. When Bob opened the door, it was just bones and blood. He felt so bad.” The white girl shook her head. Her strawberry-blond curls bounced.

  She crossed her legs and tugged her miniskirt toward her knees. “We had to put a cone on her because she kept chewing it. It’s healing now. It looks way better.”

  We stared at the cat. I wondered what the raw tail would have tasted like. I considered the default: chicken.
  Support Electric Lit: Become a Member!

  Members have access to year round submissions and over 275 stories in the Recommended Reading archives
  electricliterature.com

  The cat twitched her nub.

  The white girl asked, “Want some?” She held out a smoldering J. “No thanks.”

  The cat frolicked. The white girl asked, “Do you like acid?” “I’ve never done it,” I said.

  “Oh, I love it,” she said. She scrunched her curls and sang acid’s praises. It was her favorite.

  After she finished telling me about some trip she went on using experimental drugs, I told her, “One time, in junior high, this boy gave me a tab. Since it was wrapped in foil I thought it looked like jewelry, so I kept it in my jewelry box. That way my parents couldn’t find it. It just blended in.”

  The white girl reached for her curls. She scrunched. “Coke makes me so horny,” she said. “I love coke.”

  The white girl reached for her curls. She scrunched. “Coke makes me so horny,” she said. “I love coke.”

  We wandered back inside her house. The soft recessed lighting made me feel like we were in a peach. I was sitting on the carpet, hating my body. To my right, a huge flat-screen played a music video. White girls in swimsuits ran on a beach, showing off their peaches. The white girl’s endless legs hung off the couch. Her fingers curled. Purple acrylics scratched her thigh, tattooed with the word misandry to express her hatred for the male sex.

  This tattooed thigh makes her the ultimate woman.

  Baby rocks tumbled from a plastic sack that she tipped over her phone. They hit the screen and she set the phone down on the glass-topped coffee table. Swiping, she pressed a Costco membership card to the rocks, flattened them, and made little white beaches. She raked the plastic across them and chopped.

  She snatched a dollar bill off a closed laptop and rolled it into a tight tunnel. Leaning over, she placed the money between her nostril and the whiteness then dragged it along the beach. The beach vanished.
  About the Author

  “Myriam Gurba lives in California and loves it. She teaches high school, writes, and makes “art.” nbc described her short story collection Painting Their Portraits in Winter as “edgy, thought-provoking, and funny.” She has written for Time, kcet, and The Rumpus. Wildflowers, compliments, and cash make her happy.”

• The Kansas City Star
  http://www.kansascity.com/entertainment/books/article199649684.html
  Word count: 2589

  QUOTE:
  has written a memoir that is just a little bit different — or maybe a lot — an in-your-face account of the young life of a mixed-race Chicana who identifies as queer, who has known prejudice, the anguish of her own sexual assault and an unshakable haunting by others she knows have been victims.

  ‘Mean’ author wields a potent weapon against trauma: Humor

  By Steve Wieberg

  February 12, 2018 10:24 AM

  Updated February 13, 2018 06:55 PM

  Myriam Gurba was always a little different, a little more direct, a lot more brazen.

  “My mom told me this story about my childhood,” the California-born writer says, “about how she’d take me to parties and things like that, and I would approach adults and start chit-chatting with them and telling them stories. And she noticed that the stories I would launch into were often violently grotesque — funny but also grotesque — and she was concerned that, as a little girl, I would engage in that kind of behavior.

  “Then, one day as I was launching into one of these performances, she saw that I had a look of gleeful expectation on my face. And she realized I was entertaining myself, setting people up to be the punchline. They weren’t expecting someone to talk to them that way, especially a little girl. And at that point she stopped worrying about me. She thought, ‘OK, this is my daughter’s hobby. She’s just a weirdo.’

  “I’ve always been kind of an aggressive person,” Gurba says, “someone who likes to roughhouse not only physically but also intellectually.”
  Breaking News

  Be the first to know when big news breaks

  And so she has written a memoir that is just a little bit different — or maybe a lot — an in-your-face account of the young life of a mixed-race Chicana who identifies as queer, who has known prejudice, the anguish of her own sexual assault and an unshakable haunting by others she knows have been victims.

  Gurba was molested by a classmate reaching beneath her desktop during a junior high history class, an act her teacher saw and, for whatever reason, chose to ignore. She was raped in broad daylight during a summer home from college, her torment compounded by guilt when she discovered that her attacker went on to assault others and beat one of them to death in a park.

  “I’m unqualified to tell the story of Sophia Torres,” Gurba writes of the murdered woman, a 35-year-old migrant worker who shared her Mexican heritage, “but since she’s dead, so is she.”

  Gurba_Mean_9781566894913

  Therein is the weapon — dark, biting, occasionally uncomfortable humor — that Gurba wields repeatedly in the book, heading off any descent into despair. She doesn’t shy from the horror of the attack on her in 1996 and the one on Torres a few months later. But she isn’t cowed by it. And she won’t be identified by it.

  “There’s a certain style and a certain tone that a lot of writers use when treating assault or dealing with scenes of sexual assault,” she says. “Typically, it’s a very sort of streamlined, almost scientific play-by-play. Or there’s almost a solemnity and a reverence for the event, as if it’s something so horrible that it needs to be discussed in nearly religious terms.

  “I was interested in doing neither of those things. I was interested in using humor, especially humor that might rate as kind of tasteless. I had not seen that done.

  “I’m drawn to humor. I like vulgarity and obscenity. I would say I have a kind of campy sensibility, I always have, and it seems strange to me that a person would have to turn off who they are in terms of style in order to honor the (conventional) representation of sexual assault.”

  Gurba writes in bursts of short sentences and tosses in pithy asides — “Of course an elderly white dude taught anthropology. Who better to explain all the cultures and peoples of the world than he who is in charge of them?” — lending further punch to “Mean.” A certain meanness, if you will.

  The book has been described as autofiction, a sort of fictionalized biography, and Gurba doesn’t reject that characterization. She reconstructed conversations from her childhood, for example. How could she have remembered them verbatim?

  “Every time we access our memories, we change them slightly. And so, by the time one is writing about events that happened 20 years, those memories have been so manipulated that you have to accept there’s going to be a fair amount of dirt on them that modifies their truth,” she says. “It’s not an intentional modification. It’s simply the nature of memory, that memory is imperfect.”

  Everything in the book, she says, is “as true as I can make it.”

  Gurba, a graduate of the University of California-Berkeley who now lives and teaches high school in Long Beach, also is the author of two short story collections and two poetry collections, as well as articles for Time, the online magazine Entropy and other outlets. She recently discussed “Mean,” her approach to writing it and the experiences that went into it. Excerpts are edited for length.

  Q: You’re 40, and presumably have a lot of life left to live. Why a memoir now?

  A: I hadn’t necessarily intended to write a memoir. I was more interested in conducting experiments with literature … writing about sexual assault in ways that were very different from the conventions I was accustomed to reading.

  I think it allows one to develop a more intimate understanding of sexual assault. Treating it as if it’s an event that requires incredible solemnity, almost religiosity, turns it into something sacred, and I don’t think we should treat it as something sacred. That gives it more power than it deserves.

  I think if we use humor to write about, talk about and tell stories about traumatic events, especially sexual traumatic events, we can get closer to the truth of the event because the humor serves as armor. It pulls you away from emotion, and pulls you into your intellect.

  Q: You write, “Art is one way to work out touch gone wrong.” Were you looking for catharsis in writing this book?

  A: Not so much catharsis. That suggests relief. To me, it’s more about confrontation. It’s so unpleasant to have to relive the experience of being sexually assaulted, especially when you haven’t invited the memory — it just sort of ambushes you and surprises you in a way that the assault ambushed and surprised you.

  Art becomes a space, like humor, where you can get really intimate with horror and terror and violence. But safely. You can relive it through the artwork, and it doesn’t get the better of you. … There’s an aliveness that comes from facing it.

  Q: Still, you’re haunted. The book, as you see it, is part ghost story.

  A: The kind of haunting I describe is very metaphoric and emotional. It’s not as if I’m actually seeing ghosts, but there’s a sense of intrusion. One hasn’t necessarily invited these memories or these reflections, and yet here they are.

  I talk about how, on occasion, I find myself doing things and don’t understand why. One is listening to radio stations that I wouldn’t listen to. They’re Spanish-language stations, and I don’t listen to banda music. Or norteno. But I’ll find myself listening and wondering if Sophie Torres listened to music like this. Am I doing something that she would have wanted to do had she lived?

  Q: What was it about her murder that so deeply affected you?

  A: Several things. One was that she has these similarities to me in terms of gender, ethnicity and race. She was Mexican; I’m Mexican-American. We were both youngish women at the time (of our assaults). We were both walking alone when we were attacked, and I think there also might have been similarities in the way we were dressed. That’s all very eerie.

  However, I’ve had such a fortunate life in comparison with her. I happen to have been born to two professionals who were incredibly invested in what kind of education I was going to have, who made sure college was never something I’d even question, that none of my physical needs would go unmet.

  It horrified me that this woman did not receive that — she was born into poverty, she came to the United States and experienced the murder of her boyfriend while she was here, she fell into depression and then was murdered in the ugliest way possible. It’s sort of like she’s a foil for who I am.

  That made me feel incredibly guilty. Not only did this woman have (an awful) life. She also had (an awful) death, and that death could have mine. Maybe it would have been more cosmically just had that death been mine.

  The other thing I felt incredibly guilty about was not having been able to somehow help the police apprehend him. His continued freedom in the months after he assaulted me allowed him to assault other women and murder one of them.

  Q: It’s impossible not to notice that “Mean” was released last November amid the Me Too movement. Are you pleased that it’s part of the national discussion about sexual violence, albeit it in a less conventional way?

  A: It’s absolutely coincidental. … I would not use the word “pleased” because I feel like there’s something very grotesque about the book falling into this moment. Like, “Oh my God, we’re talking about rape and I wrote a book about rape. This is perfect.” I can’t allow myself to feel that because it feels almost like a celebration of rape.

  I also think Martinez’s assault (of Torres), that’s so different than what’s being discussed. We’re pairing sexual violence with murder in this case. That bumps it into a different playing field.

  Q: Talk about your writing style. It’s apparent that you don’t feel confined by conventions.

  A: I like things that are a little weird. When I encounter a rule, my first impulse tends to be: OK, how can I break it? It’s one of the most fun things anybody can do, right?

  The other thing that I think enabled me to write in an experimental style like that is I’m not the product of an MFA (Master of Fine Arts) program. I emerged from a group of writers who were at one point centered in the Bay Area, largely in San Francisco, and a lot of them were outsider writers in a sense that they did not spring from the academy. They’re not these sorts of well-groomed MFAs.

  They taught themselves writing and came out of, like, an open-mic scene where one really had to connect very viscerally with the audience in order to make sure their work was alive. That sensibility affected me quite a bit and shaped the way I write.

  Q: You leave out, or only briefly reference, some important life experiences that seem notable by their absence in a memoir. Coming out to your parents. Your former marriage. How do you draw the line on what to include?

  A: I think coming-out stories are very scripted and very stale, and I’m not interested in them. I don’t find them very interesting, and I don’t think they hold a lot of water. I think most people actually come out over and over and over and there’s no big unveiling. It’s more of a gradual unveiling. I had to come out to my mom three or four times in order for it to stick. So which one was my coming-out moment? Same thing with my dad.

  As far as my partner, I left her out of the book because telling that story was something I didn’t have the skill to do because it would have complicated everything else so much. And it would have suggested a love story and, at the time at least, I had no interest in telling love stories.

  Steve Wieberg, a former reporter for USA Today, is a writer and editor for the Kansas City Public Library.

  An excerpt

  From the chapter “Spring Semester 1997” near the end of “Mean” by Myriam Gurba, published by Coffee House Press. Gurba, then a student at the University of California-Berkeley, remains haunted by the man who raped her less than a year earlier.

  The day was gray. I jogged along College Avenue, toward Rockridge. Mozart jogged with me.

  Mozart is the sound of civilization and its decline.

  We sprinted past bungalows, a laundromat, and the Catholic church that looked like a Soviet-era construction. Trees had shed large leaves you could have swaddled a large baby in. They gave the sidewalk bedding. If, from behind, someone struck me with a bat, the leaves would have cushioned my fall.

  In front of a two-story house with a menorah large enough for a crucifixion on the lawn, invisible arms encircled my waist. They held me.

  I stopped, half-expecting my pants to be pulled down.

  I turned around.

  No one was there.

  My finger rolled along the volume dial, turning it up.

  I took a step and another and I was jogging, but the hands, which I knew were not real, returned. I ripped off my headphones and spun around.

  The memory of him wanted to run with me.

  I wanted to run with Mozart.

  Join the discussion

  The Kansas City Star partners with the Kansas City Public Library to present a book-of-the-moment selection every six to eight weeks. We invite the community to read along. Kaite Mediatore Stover, the library’s director of readers’ services, will lead a discussion of “Mean” by Myriam Gurba at 6:30 p.m. March 13 at the UMKC Women’s Center, 5120 Rockhill Road. Gurba will join the discussion via Facetime.

  If you would like to attend, email Stover at kaitestover@kclibrary.org.
  Suggested for you
  Comments
  Videos
  1:21
  Fans got meet George R.R. Martin, sit on the iron throne
  2:40
  Unique wins Ulit poetry slam-off

  View More Video
  Books
  Facebook could be forced to pay billions of dollars over alleged violations of Illinois biometrics law
  Commentary: Facebook likes us. It really likes us
  DC Entertainment publishers talk about redefining Superman at 80
  Commentary: This new Facebook job posting is cause for concern
  Facebook terror accusers say Zuckerberg testimony bolsters suits
  Books

• The Kansas City Star
  http://www.kansascity.com/entertainment/books/article206587749.html
  Word count: 1185

  Myriam Gurba’s ‘Mean’ memoir a tough but rewarding read

  By Kaite Mediatore Stover

  March 23, 2018 01:53 PM

  Mean in a good way

  For a book about situations in which women have absolutely no control, readers admired the controlled prose of Myriam Gurba in her slim memoir, “Mean.”
  Read more: ‘Mean’ author wields a potent weapon against trauma: Humor

  Recently attendees of the FYI Book Club gathered at the UMKC Women’s Center, a warm and welcoming space, to talk about Gurba’s genre-blending book about multiple rapes in one young woman’s life. Gurba’s memoir is a deft fusion of true crime, ghost story and memoir. Readers were impressed with how the author used elements of all these genres to craft a powerful and disturbing story in this #MeToo era.
  Help us deliver journalism that makes a difference in our community.

  Our journalism takes a lot of time, effort, and hard work to produce. If you read and enjoy our journalism, please consider subscribing today.

  Gurba’s memoir opens with the rape and murder of an immigrant woman in a park not far from Gurba’s home. The woman was not identified in a news report and this fact stuck with the author, who was sexually assaulted by the same man. Gurba freely admits to having a gleefully gruesome sense of humor. She uses this quality liberally in her story of the ghost who haunts Gurba as she’s trying to make sense of her own trauma and life as a mixed-race queer Chicana.

  Lisa Timmons of Overland Park felt driven to keep reading. “At times I wanted to put it down and didn’t want to continue, but if Gurba is able to put these experiences on the page, then I, as a reader, need to go along with her. I found inspiration and admiration from Gurba, and I’m glad I read her book.”

  Leigh Blackman of Prairie Village noticed the emotional intensity of the book. “It was a disturbing, tough read. Gurba says she’s an angry person, but she’s angry in a humorous way. She’s very self-aware and controlled and her writing is controlled. She tightly describes the horrible scenes and then tells the reader ‘the rest is left for me.’ That was very powerful for me, that Gurba wanted to keep something for herself.”

  mean book cover

  The forceful story resonated with Judith Reagan of Kansas City, too. “The only problem I had was telling myself this was real and not fiction. It kept crashing into my head when I realized what was happening.”

  The book stayed with Seth Emery of Kansas City. “I loved it. I was totally blown away by her anger and that tongue-in-cheek presentation. Gurba eviscerated rape culture and how acceptable things are that are devastating to young and old people.”

  Lemuel Kimes of Kansas City observed the carefully concealed trauma in the book. “I read it with my social work hat on. People who write about their trauma, they worry about trying to express what happened to them. It speaks to the power of writing. For anyone who takes this risk, it’s cathartic and healing. Gurba would say something deep and profound and then add humor! To be able to do that when a lot of people would be devastated and ruined; she didn’t let that define her.”

  There were lesser offenses present in the book that Natalie Millard of Kansas City pointed out. “I really enjoyed those subtleties. Gurba drops in that her dad calls all the women in the family a bitch at one point or another. She’s not calling out her dad as a misogynist, but the more subtle aspects of the ways women are disrespected by the men they are surrounded by.”

  One reader didn’t care for the writing style and this led to a conversation about the way people tell stories of personal ordeals.

  Brenda Bethman, director of the UMKC Women’s Center, admitted, “I wanted to like it, but I found the writing to be pretentious and pseudo-poetic.”

  Blackman and Reagan agreed. “It’s not beautiful writing, but it is powerful,” Blackman said. “It didn’t flow. It was staccato,” mused Reagan. Millard differed: “I love this vignette style in books. Especially for memoirs when you tell stories you don’t remember. You remember a highlight reel or weird random things.”

  Emery called attention to the random single sentences that would interrupt a scene. The group talked about how people tell the stories of the emotional times in their lives. “An odd fact or arbitrary thought always makes it into our disturbing personal stories,” one of the readers said.

  Readers liked the unusual element of a ghost figure and how Gurba used that of the murdered woman, Sophia Torres, as an unseen character. One reader mentioned that as the “last girl standing,” Myriam gets to tell the story and asked if the author did a good job.

  Blackman said she had mixed emotions on this point. “But I think it was Gurba’s empathy that forged a connection. I don’t think the author was exploiting Sophia. The book had to have Sophia. It would have been less of a book without her. It’s Gurba’s way of trying to process the situation.”

  Timmons agreed. “There would have been more of a disconnection. Sophia was a thread that pulled the stories together, and the author made it more cohesive and easier to relate to both women.”

  Emery reached this conclusion, “A part of Gurba probably feels that ghost. You can go to therapy and read all the books, but to rid yourself of that little tinge? It never goes away. That’s the guilt and ghost Gurba is talking about.”

  Join the club

  The Kansas City Star and the Kansas City Public Library present a book-of-the-moment selection every few weeks and invite the community to read along. To participate in a book discussion led by the library’s Kaite Stover, email kaitestover@kclibrary.org. Look on the FYI page on April 14 for the introduction to the next selection, “Dear Fahrenheit 451: A Librarian’s Love Letters and Breakup Notes to the Books in Her Life,” by Annie Spence.
  Suggested for you
  Comments
  Videos
  1:21
  Fans got meet George R.R. Martin, sit on the iron throne
  2:40
  Unique wins Ulit poetry slam-off

  View More Video
  Books
  Facebook could be forced to pay billions of dollars over alleged violations of Illinois biometrics law
  Commentary: Facebook likes us. It really likes us
  DC Entertainment publishers talk about redefining Superman at 80
  Commentary: This new Facebook job posting is cause for concern
  Facebook terror accusers say Zuckerberg testimony bolsters suits
  Books

• Pure Wow
  https://www.purewow.com/books/mean-book-review-myriam-gurba
  Word count: 314

  books
  This Badass Memoir Defends ‘Mean Girls’ Everywhere
  By
  Sarah Stiefvater | Nov. 20, 2017
  This Badass Memoir Defends ‘Mean Girls Everywhere
  Cover: Coffee House Press/Background: Twenty20

  Myriam Gurba, a spoken-word performer, visual artist and writer, had an isolating, at times traumatic adolescence. But as her new memoir, Mean, proves, she’s one of those people with an innate ability to take everything bad and turn it into something beautiful, even funny.

  In poems, prose, news reports and lists, Gurba, a mixed-race Chicana from California, recounts being intensely aware of prejudice—both intentional and not—from a young age. Like, for example, when a white friend’s mom prepared a “Mexican” casserole, as if coding dinner with a nationality would be endearing. This sense of otherness was magnified when Gurba discovered, at age eight, that she was queer.

  Throughout, she looks back on the tragedies of her life—from being sexually assaulted to watching her sister struggle with anorexia. But most things come with a side of dark humor. The assault is mitigated by the fact that she was wearing her “period underwear.” Later, as an adult visiting the Supreme Court, she jokes about wanting to split a can of Coke with Clarence Thomas.

  Moreover, as she sees it, being “mean” is actually a way to speak to both humor and pain, a tiny act of rebellion against racism, misogyny and homophobia. “We act mean to defend our clubs and institutions. We act mean because we like to laugh. Being mean to boys is fun and a second-wave feminist duty. Being mean to men who deserve it is a holy mission. Sisterhood is powerful, but being mean is more exhilarating.”

  To which we say: Bring on the mean girls.

  RELATED: The 38 Best Memoirs We’ve Ever Read

• New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/books/review-mean-myriam-gurba.html
  Word count: 1706

  QUOTE:
  scalding memoir that comes with a full accounting of the costs of survival, of being haunted by those you could not save and learning to live with their ghosts.
  There’s not a trace of piety, however. “Mean” calls for a fat, fluorescent trigger warning start to finish — and I say this admiringly. Gurba likes the feel of radioactive substances on her bare hands. She wants to find new angles from which to report on this most ancient of stories, to zap you into feeling. She hunts for new language, her own language, to evoke the horror and obscene intimacy of sexual violence.
  An Account of Surviving Assault Mixes Horror and Humor

  Books of The Times

  By PARUL SEHGAL DEC. 19, 2017
  Photo
  Credit Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times

  In slasher films, there’s a famous convention in which the last woman alive faces down the killer — Jamie Lee Curtis in “Halloween,” for example. Film theorists call her the “final girl.” She lives in order to tell the story.

  Myriam Gurba is a self-professed “final girl” and “Mean” is her testimony: a scalding memoir that comes with a full accounting of the costs of survival, of being haunted by those you could not save and learning to live with their ghosts.

  As a college student in the 1990s, Gurba was assaulted by a man who went on to attack several other women, gruesomely raping and killing one — an itinerant worker named Sophia Torres. “She wound up dead. I mostly didn’t,” Gurba writes, in her signature deadpan. “I’m unqualified to tell the story of Sophia Torres, but since she’s dead, so is she.”

  Arriving as it does in the thick of the #MeToo movement of women bringing forth their stories of abuse and harassment, this book adds a necessary dimension to the discussion of the interplay of race, class and sexuality in sexual violence. Gurba is queer, and half Chicana, and she turns over what it means that she, her attacker and Torres share ethnicity.
  Continue reading the main story
  Recent Comments
  BioProf December 27, 2017

  After my best friend and two others were shot and killed by her psychotic son here three years ago, a wise woman friend said that there are...
  BGZ123 December 24, 2017

  Haven't read the book, but based on the review the memoirist made it her own and got it just right. Present the facts. Laugh sardonically....
  Susan Fitzwater December 24, 2017

  My goodness! What a book. I have read that for a man or woman subjected to physical torture. .. . .the world is never the same. I am...

  See All Comments Write a comment

  There’s not a trace of piety, however. “Mean” calls for a fat, fluorescent trigger warning start to finish — and I say this admiringly. Gurba likes the feel of radioactive substances on her bare hands. She wants to find new angles from which to report on this most ancient of stories, to zap you into feeling. She hunts for new language, her own language, to evoke the horror and obscene intimacy of sexual violence. “Somewhere on this planet, a man is touching a woman to death,” she writes. “Somewhere on this planet, a man is about to touch a woman to death.”
  Photo
  Myriam Gurba Credit Dave Naz

  Humor is usually her electric prod of choice. “A stranger chose me to rape. There was no nepotism involved,” she mock-boasts. “Stranger rape is like the Mona Lisa. It’s exquisite, timeless and archetypal. It’s classic. I can’t help but think of it as the Coca-Cola of sex crimes.” Having provoked uncomfortable laughter, she swivels into seriousness. “After a stranger ambushes you and assails your private parts, everything becomes new. Everything is reborn. Everything takes on a new hue, the color of rape. You look at the world through rape-tinted glasses. You understand that you live in a world where getting classically raped is possible and that classical rapists lurk everywhere.”

  She becomes paralyzed with fear. P.T.S.D., she notes, is the only mental illness you can actually give someone else. She imagines she sees her rapist everywhere — at the supermarket absently squeezing the hot dog buns. She diets and exercises to the point of sickness (“death by anorexia is a fail-safe sexual-assault prevention technique”).

  In a way her attacker is everywhere. She can’t escape him or the ubiquity, even the mundanity, of sexual threat. (Her rapist, she says, “looked so average it horrified me.”) Gurba grew up in California near Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch. He was a major employer in town, and there’s the suggestion in the book that he prowled video arcades “determined to taste what was there.”
  Newsletter Sign Up
  Continue reading the main story
  Book Review

  Be the first to see reviews, news and features in The New York Times Book Review.
  You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services.

  See Sample Privacy Policy Opt out or contact us anytime

  The judge and prosecutor from Jackson’s trial for molestation served in the murder trial of the man convicted of murdering Torres. On and on, Gurba uncovers these links: A childhood classmate who molested her and several other girls was himself a victim, she discovers, of his baseball coach, an especially prolific local predator. “My catechism teacher, a white nun with sky-blue eyes, taught me that god is omnipresent,” she recalls. “Rape is everywhere too. Rape is in the air. Rape is in the sky. Rape is in the Bible. Rape happens at the neighbor’s.” She can’t resist a grim little joke: “Rape gave birth to Western civilization and maybe your mom.”

  The book keeps revolving between these poles of horror and humor, sometimes wobbling on its axis. Gurba is addicted to terrible puns, and they get worse and more numerous as the book goes on. I had to brace myself against their onslaught — embarrassing plays on “Rambo” and “Rimbaud,” “memories” and “mammaries.”

  It’s not that the jokes are inappropriate or in bad taste — it would be a form of madness to ask for good taste in a book about rape, and I’m all for Gurba’s more opulently offensive humor, even when it makes me a little queasy. It’s the lack of care that’s so puzzling, especially in a book so attentive to language.

  Worse, the compulsive punning and jokiness distract from the book’s more ambitious possibilities — and its most interesting tension. Gurba has said she had no intention of “performing” her victimhood in this book, and indeed she holds some of the details of her attack close; she doesn’t want to offer them up for our consumption or titillation. But she’s oddly cavalier about the suffering of others. “Mean” begins with an imagined look up Sophia Torres’s skirt, and moves into a grisly moment-by-moment recap of how she was chased and mutilated and murdered. There are instances in the book when Gurba doesn’t even refer to Torres by name — just as a defiled corpse.

  It’s not just Torres. There’s some relish in the evocation of the deaths of Virginia Woolf (“I wanted to know how many rocks it had taken to weigh her down”) and the artist Ana Mendieta (“The other day, as I was cleaning my bedroom, I decided, for fun, to act out Mendieta’s murder”).

  It feels as if Gurba is drawn to these details not from ghoulishness but from a need to make her own suffering and fear feel more real to her. The book’s clear forebear is “The Red Parts,” Maggie Nelson’s book about the murder of her Aunt Jane. I wished Gurba had wrestled with, as Nelson does, what it means to use a dead woman, a stranger, in this way: as a blank slate on which to project her fantasies and fears. There’s an admonishment on the second page of the book, too quickly forgotten: “We may feel that because we are privy to the wreckage she belongs to us too, but she does not.”

  Follow Parul Sehgal on Twitter: @parul_sehgal.

  Mean
  By Myriam Gurba
  175 pages. An Emily Books Original/Coffee House Press. $16.95.

  A version of this review appears in print on December 20, 2017, on Page C4 of the New York edition with the headline: A Memoir of Survival, Mixing Horror and Humor. Today's Paper|Subscribe
  Continue reading the main story
  Trending

  Barbara Bush, Wife of 41st President and Mother of 43rd, Dies at 92
  San Francisco’s Big Seismic Gamble
  Sanctions Flap Erupts Into Open Conflict Between Haley and White House
  A Southwest Airlines Engine Explodes, Killing a Passenger
  Mike Pompeo, C.I.A. Director, Is Said to Meet With Kim Jong-un in North Korea
  The Nurse Who Took a Very Different Route to 2nd Place in the Boston Marathon
  Mattis Wanted Congressional Approval Before Striking Syria. He Was Overruled.
  U.S. Moves to Block Sales by Chinese Telecom Equipment Makers
  Editorial: Scott Pruitt Has Become Ridiculous
  Starbucks to Close 8,000 U.S. Stores for Racial-Bias Training After Arrests

  View More Trending Stories »
  More in Books

  Go to the Books Section »

  Books of The Times
  After Disaster, Japan Seals Itself Off From the World in ‘The Emissary’
  Books of The Times
  Scorching, Sophisticated New Work From Two of America’s Leading Poets
  Fiction
  Jo Nesbo Sculpts ‘Macbeth’ Into Shadowy Crime Noir
  Nonfiction
  James Comey Has a Story to Tell. It’s Very Persuasive.
  By the Book
  James B. Comey: By the Book
  Q. & A.
  Tell Us 5 Things About Your Book: Disarming Humor in ‘Heads of the Colored People’

• Pacific Standard
  https://psmag.com/social-justice/when-being-mean-is-a-revolutionary-act
  Word count: 1198

  When Being Mean Is a Revolutionary Act
  In her new and radical memoir, Myriam Gurba discusses reclaiming political power through the art of nastiness.

  Rebecca Stoner
  Nov 21, 2017

  playground

  (Photo: Victor Trovo Afonso/Flickr)

  "I know I can be mean, but I also want to be likable. I just don't want to be so likable anyone wants to rape me," writes Myriam Gurba in Mean, her new, radically experimental memoir published this month. The book is a study in the utility and limits of niceness, especially when it comes to being a nice girl—and the political power of being mean.

  Mean is an untraditional coming-of-age story, haunted by the spirit of Sophia Castro Torres, a Mexican "transient" raped and murdered by the same man who would later sexually assault Gurba. A visual and spoken-word artist in addition to being a writer, Gurba uses the visual and aural qualities of words to push her prose in unexpected, sometimes-hilarious, sometimes-disturbing directions.

  From a young age, Gurba, a queer, Polish-Chicana girl growing up in a small Southern California town, has noticed the shifting meanings of the word "mean." Reading a children's collection of the lives of saints, she observes that bad things befell the pious and saintly with startling regularity. "Villagers lit them on fire. Pirates and aristocrats raped them. Barbarians cut their breasts and noses off. It seemed the nicer you were, especially in the Middle Ages, the meaner the world was."

  Gurba discovers that the fifth grade—much like the Middle Ages—doesn't necessarily reward virtuous victims. After taunts of "wetback" set off a playground race war, Gurba finds herself in the awkward position of being commanded to apologize to the white girls who spat out the racial slurs. By correctly labeling them racists, she has set off a flood of tears. It's a childish recreation of a scene that women of color face all too often: When they implicate white women's racism, they're suddenly cast as the mean ones, for having caused white women to experience feelings of guilt and shame.

  A few years later, Gurba discovers that a similar predicament awaits those who draw attention to sexual harassment and assault. Though she longs to call out the boy who molested her during her seventh-grade history class, she "sensed that if I yelped, I'd look liked the bad guy, [so] I obeyed [his] shh. I swallowed my chance at rescue."

  Gurba's schooldays educate her in what she describes as "the queer art of being mean." She learns that being mean can be a form of solidarity, as when you call someone whom your friend hates a "cunt." It can be self-defense, and a way to reclaim the stereotypes thrust upon you—a strategy sorely needed in the face of casual racism and homophobia, as well as the sexual violence she encounters. Being mean, she discovers, is fun. Sometimes, Gurba writes, it "keeps us alive," especially in the aftermath of her sexual assault.

  Gurba's use of the word "queer" is a reminder that minority social movements, including queer activist groups like ACT UP, have often been smeared with some variation on "mean." In 1990, following a massive protest at St. Patrick's Cathedral, the New York Times called ACT Up "rude [and] rash," their tactics "a mixture of the shrill and the shrewd." Black liberation movements from Martin Luther King Jr. to Black Lives Matter have been characterized by the government and the mainstream press as aggressive and extremist. As King observed in his "Letter From a Birmingham Jail," niceness doesn't go very far in taking power. "We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was 'well timed' in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation."

  Reclaiming meanness, therefore, is a political act. At their sharpest, Gurba's small acts of meanness highlight the cruelty of pervasive, systemic racism, misogyny, and homophobia. She particularly enjoys making fun of white girls, like the one who attempts to save a parking spot during move-in day on the crowded streets surrounding the University of California–Berkeley. "The white girl looked at something beyond us, at something we couldn't see. Maybe the white privilege fairy," Gurba writes. "She was steadfast in her colonization."
  Mean.

  Mean.

  (Photo: Coffee House Press)

  Though she struggles with an eating disorder following her assault, Gurba latches onto meanness as a politically and emotionally attractive alternative to the victimhood and passivity expected of good girls. Gurba observes that saints like Blessed Columba saved themselves from sexual violation by self-abnegation in the form of anorexia. "Death by anorexia is a fail-safe sexual-assault prevention technique," she notes drily.

  "'Being mean' not only affords unique pleasures to the speaker or writer, but is a crucial rhetorical weapon of the politically excluded," writes Amber A'Lee Frost, the writer and podcaster who coined the term "the dirtbag left." If meanness can be a weapon, it's useful to ask who the weapon is directed against—and whether Gurba's barbs always hit their intended target. There are certain instances in Mean where I couldn't discern any kind of political usefulness to a jab, or when a particular jeer came off very badly—"The shower heads in our locker room were pointless," Gurba writes at one point. "They had as much use as the showerhead in Oświęcim. That's Polish for Auschwitz."

  "Mean," of course, also means to signify or indicate. "When we say fuck you, we don't want it to be experimental," Gurba wrote in an essay exploring the dearth of experimental Chicana literature. "We want our fuck yous to be real." But in Mean, Gurba deploys formal experimentation in the service of her fuck yous: Her short, deceptively simple sentences, connected by rude puns and odd jumps in logic, make her observations and dismissals pop.

  Some of her chapters are the length of a single blunt sentence; others are lengthier explorations of sainthood, queer sexuality, and Spanglish, among much else. The variations in chapter length interrupt the linear flow of a conventional memoir, punctuating her story with moments of resonance from Sophia's life, and from the lives of feminist artists like Ana Mendieta. Gurba uses these ostensible interruptions to underscore what these women have in common: Each has been, or is believed to be, the victim of gender-based violence. (Many art-world feminists believe that Mendieta's husband, the notable sculptor Carl Andre, murdered his wife by throwing her out a window. He was acquitted of the crime.)

  Interruptions are rude: Gurba points out that ghosts, like Sophia and Mendieta, are discourteous creatures, always breaking into the otherwise pleasant lives of rapists, murderers, and even their survivors. "Guilt is a ghost," she observes. "Guilt interrupts narratives. It does so impolitely. Ghosts have no etiquette. What do they need it for?"

  Tags
  GhostsMemoirsCaliforniaMyriam GurbaLGBTQBooks

• Los Angeles Review of Books
  https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/ghost-touches-myriam-gurbas-mean-and-sexual-violence/
  Word count: 1815

  Other People’s Children, Part 3, or Ghost Touches: Myriam Gurba’s “Mean” and Sexual Violence

  By Jonathan Alexander

  DECEMBER 11, 2017

  MYRIAM GURBA’S Mean opens with the brutal rape and murder of a young homeless Mexican woman named Sophia. It’s a startlingly rendered scene, spare and painful. It’s also an unusual choice for a book that seems to be a memoir; instead of offering a story, however painful, from her own life, Gurba disturbs us with a deadly violent sexual assault on another woman.

  And yet this opening might be the most appropriate choice Gurba could have made. For while she quickly moves to relating her own tales of sexual abuse and exploration, she never lets us forget that an embodied life is always full of the impress, imprint, and pressure of other bodies. Some of those bodies we invite; some thrust themselves upon us. She tells us, for instance, of Mr. Hand’s history class during which, on the verge of adolescence, she sits quietly while the boy in the neighboring seat sticks his fingers between her legs every day and molests her. Mr. Hand, ironically named, never lays a hand on her himself, but he notices the molestation one day — and quickly averts his gaze.

  All of a sudden, Gurba’s early experiences and Sophia’s murder are connected, a perverse continuum, a grotesque slippage into each other. Gurba plays with the perversity of molestation as a grisly linking of bodies and hands across time and space, here referencing the abuse of a young boy by an older man:

  If molestation is a circle, a circle of life, then isn’t the hand of every molester working through the hand of every other molester? It’s fair to say that Mr. Osmond’s hand was working through Macaulay’s hand just like the Eucharist is no longer bread during Mass; it’s Jesus coming at you through a cracker.

  Sexual abuse is never an isolated event. It’s always part of a larger cycle of sexualized violence against young bodies, often female, and against the defenseless. The quick turn to religious imagery recalls the Catholic Church’s silence around its numerous pedophilia scandals while also drawing our attention to the abuse seemingly sanctioned at the heart of the Christ story: a father willingly sending his son to die. That story, itself, recalls an earlier version in which the same god demands the sacrifice of his servant’s son as a test of loyalty.

  All of these sacrifices create a cultural heritage of violence against children, condoned while a teacher looks away as another child learns to abuse his peers. For Gurba, that heritage creates ghosts, which serve both as metaphor and materiality throughout Mean — both the stories of abuse permeating our culture and the spectral sensations of unwanted hands pressing on vulnerable bodies. Gurba grapples with these ghosts, fearing them but also wanting to listen to them. More disturbingly, at times, she is unable to turn away from the stories they tell: “Some ghosts listen to the radio through the bodies of the living. They use us to conduct pain, pleasure, music, and meaning. They burden us with feelings that are both ours and theirs.” Gurba’s body becomes the live wire, twitching unexpectedly as shocks of recognition connect her experiences to others, inviting her perversely to enjoy the moments of pain shared, of burdens carried together.

  One of the more difficult dimensions of reading Mean is the sense one gets of a life spoiled, damaged, likely beyond recovery. The loss is poignant. Gurba recounts growing up with a Mexican mother and half-Mexican dad, both professional people, the father himself an educator. They were not poor, perhaps thinking that their lives would be somewhat insulated from abuse. If anything, they were on a trajectory away from damage. At least that’s the phantasmatic hope of the emerging middle class. So how did this happen? Why could they not have protected their daughter? Gurba doesn’t ask this question, but it lingers in the background as you read. And then you recall the Weinstein scandals, the pervasiveness of abuse in the shadows of an industry where the klieg lights otherwise shine brightly.

  And yet Gurba persists. She writes. As she puts it, “Art is one way to work out touch gone wrong.” But this isn’t a simple formula. Art doesn’t banish the ghosts. If anything, her process eschews the Freudian formula of repression and sublimation and instead embraces Abraham and Torok’s “introjection,” the particularity of the life story, the slow, steady, and painful working out over the course of a lifetime the afterlives of unwanted touch. The work of working out is never done. Introjection is the right word here, suggesting internalized projection, the deep interrogation of self that simultaneously honors the specificity of one’s abuse while also seeing in it the narratives of the all-too-many who have also been abused.

  Language becomes the artful manner through which Gurba can articulate the particularity of her experience while connecting it to the abuse that others, like Sophia, have suffered. Mean is full of wordplay as language slips and slides through short sections, mostly narrative, but also frequently poetic, sometimes outright poetry, including a shaped poem and several lists. But Gurba’s is never language play just for its own sake; her words always bend back to the lives, bodies, and psyches damaged by abuse: “Did you know PTSD is the only mental illness you can give someone? A person gave it to me. A man actually drove me crazy. He transmitted this condition.” The mind is turned inside out, internal conditions transmitted through external contact as Gurba’s off-hand metaphor literalizes being driven crazy.

  One of the most arresting ways that Gurba offers us her stories is through her play with chronology. The narrative is largely chronological, but not quite. We see her as a child, growing up, going to Berkeley, exploring various love interests. We know that she experienced sexual assault and trauma at some point, if only because the book begins with Sophia, but also through hints dropped here and there. It takes us a while, though, to get to Gurba’s rape, and the details, as she admits, aren’t fully forthcoming. She honors her privacy. But then she reveals, over halfway through the book, that the man who raped her also murdered Sophia. The implication, left like a burnt taste in our mouths, is that Gurba could easily have been killed.

  Beyond bearing witness to Gurba’s abuse, we are also invited by this book to consider the formal role of chronology in memoir, in the offering of an account of trauma. In Gurba’s hands, the interruption of straight chronology serves more than just rhetorical or dramatic effect; it foregrounds the burdens of memory on the body. And not just her own painful memories, but the ghosts of all of those abused: “Guilt is a ghost. Guilt interrupts narratives. It does so impolitely. Ghosts have no etiquette. What do they need it for? There is not Emily Post for ghosts.”

  Mean demands our attention not only as a painfully timely story, but also as an artful memoir. It bears striking comparison to Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water, a book about its author’s own tale of abuse, and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, a delicious recounting of its author’s own complex erotic intimacies. Like both writers, Gurba turns the complexity of her story into art, claiming that “[w]hat matters is a woman making art out of everything she was born with.” But Gurba makes a distinction between what she was born with and what has happened to her since. While Yuknavitch and Nelson seem to trust a bit more in the recuperative power of art, sifting the self through aestheticized language, Gurba seems a bit less sure of recovery: “I’d anticipated squeezing a catharsis out of this pilgrimage, but I should’ve known my dreams of closure would remain dreams.”

  No closure. I was reading this book while also reading David Ferry’s Bewilderment and his extraordinary translation of Virgil’s account of Orpheus going through hell to get back his lost love, his innocence, his Eurydice. On the way out of hell, he can’t help but look back and loses everything but his art, through which he spends the rest of his days bemoaning his loss until torn apart by the drunken bacchantes. There’s a lesson here. If we go through hell, perhaps best not to look back too much. But Gurba looks, and asks us to look with her. Ghosts will continue to speak to her. She might not have a choice, and Gurba seems at peace with that as an existential condition: “It’s OK for ghosts to exist through me. It has to be.” It has to be. That’s not quite reconciliation. It’s certainly not closure.

  Mean is a powerful, vital book about damage and the ghostly afterlives of abuse. If I have one quibble with it, it’s that the title remains a bit opaque to me. Gurba claims at one point that “[b]eing mean makes us feel alive. It’s fun and exciting. Sometimes, it keeps us alive.” That meanness takes a decidedly gendered turn at points:

  We act mean to defend ourselves from boredom and from those who would chop off our breasts. […] Being mean to boys is fun and a second-wave feminist duty. Being rude to men who deserve it is a holy mission. Sisterhood is powerful, but being a bitch is more exhilarating. Being a bitch is spectacular.

  I don’t in any way want to take away or malign the power of bitchiness, or even meanness for that matter. But I rarely saw Gurba as mean. On a holy mission, yes. Justly angered and outraged, yes. But mean?

  Then again, maybe she is. Maybe it’s mean to demand that we listen to the ghosts that can’t help but speak through her, that we are invited to experience vicarious pain, that we are challenged by the pain of others. And that’s a meanness that isn’t small. But it’s a meanness that is all too unfortunately necessary.

  ¤

  Part one of “Other People’s Children” can be found here. Part two can be found here.

  ¤

  Jonathan Alexander is Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. His most recent book is Writing Youth: Young Adult Fiction as Literacy Sponsorship (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017).

• Lesbrary
  https://lesbrary.wordpress.com/2015/09/15/danika-reviews-painting-their-portraits-in-winter-by-myriam-gurba/
  Word count: 304

  QUOTE:
  This is a book with a heartbeat, as alive as if the words were put down in blood.
  Myriam Gurba shows incredible skill for language, and even when I wasn’t completely following the plot, the lush sentences were enough to dive into.
  if you enjoy rich, dark storytelling, definitely pick this one up.

  Danika reviews Painting Their Portraits in Winter by Myriam Gurba
  SEPTEMBER 15, 2015 ~ DANIKA @ THE LESBRARY
  paintingtheirportraitsinwinter

  This is a book with a heartbeat, as alive as if the words were put down in blood. Probably a macabre first impression of a book, but one that I think really fits Painting Their Portraits In Winter. This is a collection of short stories, some interlinked and some freestanding, rooted in Mexican culture and storytelling both in Mexico itself and in the US. Queerness isn’t at the forefront of most of these stories, but when it does come up, it always feels spot-on to me.

  I reach into Andrew’s coffin. My fingers touched his. I appraised them. They felt chilly, stiff, and anti-climactic, like omens of my future attempts at compulsory heterosexuality.

  Death does play a major role throughout this collection. Oddly enough, having read this not long after Falling In Love With Hominids by Nalo Hopkinson, both books contain a story about a ghost living (mostly) unseen and unnoticed in the physical world, and they both made for fascinating reads.

  Myriam Gurba shows incredible skill for language, and even when I wasn’t completely following the plot, the lush sentences were enough to dive into. I don’t feel like I can do justice to this book, but if you enjoy rich, dark storytelling, definitely pick this one up.

  Share this:

• Offing
  https://theoffingmag.com/offsite/painting-their-portraits-in-winter-short-stories-by-myriam-gurba-out-today/
  Word count: 211

  QUOTE:
  The stories deal with the supernatural feminine and the supernatural feminist big time
  Death lurks around every comma.
  Painting Their Portraits in Winter, short stories by Myriam Gurba, out today!
  MANIC D. PRESS

  By Feliks Garcia, Offsite Editor

  Painting Their Portraits in Winter, a new collection of short stories by The Offing contributing editor Myriam Gurba, is out now from Manic D. Press.

  The collection invokes Mexican folktales and ghost stories, straddles borders, and navigates through feminine/feminist identity while “creating a new kind of magical realism that offers insights into where we come from and where we may be going.” In a recent interview with The California Journal of Women Writers, Gurba described the themes of the anthology:

  The stories deal with the supernatural feminine and the supernatural feminist big time. They explore misogyny and they channel misogynistic ghosts. Death lurks around every comma. There is also a lot of fruity symbolism.

  Gurba’s previous work includes Dahlia Season (Manic D.), Wish You Were Me (Future Tense), and, winner of the Eli Coppola Memorial Chapbook Prize, Sweatsuits of the Damned (Radar Productions).

  VISIT WEBSITE: HTTP://WWW.POWELLS.COM/BIBLIO/62-9781933149905-0

Word Count