Pages Falling Out

[susanstinson]

I got interviewed last week for a book on fat and stigma that will be coming out from NYU Press (which is also publishing The Fat Studies Reader). I'll let you know when it's published. It is a powerful thing for me that the author, Amy Farrell, who I had met when we both presented in the Fat Studies track of the Popular Culture conference a couple of years ago, has read all of my books. It was a pleasure to talk with her. She asked me about poems from Belly Songs that I wrote more than twenty years ago, bringing the emotional resonance of that work to life again with the intensity of her engagement. Before she came, I went out on the porch and got out the ladder to reach the boxes with my books about fat. I spread them out all over the table and the couch: chapbooks of poems, Panza Monologues from Texas, copies of FaT GiRL (Bertha making vegetable pudding -- yum!) and Size Queen, Fat and Proud, so many books by people I know or have met or may never meet. The weight of them is something. Among them was Shadow On A Tightrope, which was the first fat liberation book I ever read, read so hard that its pages are falling out, like my copy of Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

Comments

[scarlett-heartt.livejournal.com]

Shadow on a Tightrope is amazing. I borrowed it from my uni library and found it so inspiring.

[susanstinson.livejournal.com]

That's so great that you found it. I see from your profile that you're in Australia. So now I'm curious, have you ever seen any of my novels? The three that are published all center on fat women's lives.

[scarlett-heartt.livejournal.com]

I have never seen them in a bookshop and I actually ordered two from booktopia.com.au and am waiting for them to arrive : )