randomWalks

Bookslut | An Interview with Michelle Tea

If you were to teach a college course in literature, what would you require your students to read?

Well, absolutely Eileen Myles. Diane di Prima, her life as well as her work. I would make them read Darcey Steinke's Jesus Saves, just to traumatize them a bit with reality. Let's throw in Dorothy Allison as well. Let's have the course be the female experience in literature. Contemporary female experience. Well, white contemporary female experience. But I want more than that anyway. Herculine Barbin: being the recently discovered memoirs of a nineteenth century french hermaphrodite. So incredible. Stephen Elliot's A Life Without Consequences, about growing up a ward of the state of Chicago, in and out of group homes, on the street. The Race Traitor anthology which challenges notions of whiteness and was sort of mind-blowing for me, having been raised in a very racist environment and constantly searching for new ways to unlearn and to understand that experience. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar for sure and why not some poems too. I would teach the poetry also of Meliza Banales. Donna Allegra's Witness to the League of Blond Hip Hop Dancers. Kathryn Harrison's Thicker Than Water. The scraps of text in the art of Raymond Pettibone. The surreal erotica of Ian Philips. Marci Blackman's Po Man's Child. Dodie Bellamy. ArieI Gore's teen memoir Atlas of the Human Heart. I guess I would throw in Nickel and Dimed, for all my problems with that book. We would talk about the problems. And The Outsiders, of course. Doesn't that sound like the best class?

Yes.