What books or stories you wish you could give to every queer teen ever?ĬMM: Weetzie Bat, Rubyfruit Jungle, The Price of Salt, Annie on My Mind.

So he told me what he was noticing-what he thought my subconscious had tucked away in there.ĬL: You recently tweeted that you wish you could play Kesha’s song “Hymn” for every queer teen ever. He basically said that he didn’t know what the story was about, either, but he was pretty sure I did underneath all the chaos. My editor, Ethan Nosowsky, was brilliant. The biggest problem was I didn’t quite know what “The Resident” was about, so there were just a lot of plot threads and dead ends that didn’t quite add up to anything cohesive. It was the only story that had never been published or edited in any way. “The Resident,” on the other hand, was a hot mess when Graywolf bought my book. Which of the stories in HBAOP required the most revision and reworking? What did earlier versions look like?ĬMM: The two stories that had the heaviest revisions were “Real Women Have Bodies” and “The Resident.” “Real Women Have Bodies” is plot-wise more or less the same, but it’s such an old story I had to really revise it on a line level to get it to a place where I felt satisfied that it matched the other stories. It’s hard to remember that a writer’s first draft may have looked very different from what’s published. When did you first come across Schwartz’s work?ĬL: I’m always interested in what stories looked like before they ended up in a book. I was obsessed, as a kid, with Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, which your story draws from. I e-mailed with Machado about her work and the art that excites her.Ĭlaire Luchette: “The Husband Stitch” is a fantastic blend of folklore, horror, and surrealism. The book has been praised and celebrated, and the accolades from book folks keep pouring in-the collection’s been named a National Book Award Finalist and a finalist for the Kirkus Prize. Originally published in Granta, “The Husband Stitch” is now the first story in Machado’s debut collection, Her Body and Other Parties (Graywolf). Her work plays with genre, captures the bodily absurdities of being a woman, and it’s built of sentences so fine you want to read them aloud and applaud. Fantastic and funny and strange, Machado’s writing expands our understanding of what’s possible in a story, on the level of both form and content. A dear one sent me “The Husband Stitch” last year when I was in a fight with fiction, and by the time I’d finished the story, all had been forgiven.

Friends don’t let friends go without Carmen Maria Machado.

Carmen maria machado the resident