Mik Everett's Blog |
Mik Everett is a 22-year-old writer living in Longmont, Colorado with her better half, their two children, and their dog, Rigby. |
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NotesOK, I can’t share any of the unpublished poems here that I am preparing for submission, but I have one line to share with you…
“Silently reciting stanzas like rosaries”
Sorry, it’s my baby, just had to show it off :)
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Getting a poetry manuscript ready for submission— Terrifying! I’ll let you know more when I know more…
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(Source: aurielleomega, via vishual)
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Notes"A woman from the audience asks: ‘Why were there so few women among the Beat writers?’ and [Gregory] Corso, suddenly utterly serious, leans forward and says: “There were women, they were there, I knew them, their families put them in institutions, they were given electric shock. In the ’50s if you were male you could be a rebel, but if you were female your families had you locked up."Stephen Scobie, on the Naropa Institute’s 1994 tribute to Allen Ginsberg (via thisisendless)
FUCK
(via femmeboyant)
I’m just frozen. Absences of women in history don’t “just happen,” they are made.
(via queereyes-queerminds)
(Source: fuckyeahbeatniks, via aliensputum)
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Notes I’m better than cool, Mike Jeffries.I’ve been thinking about this whole A&F scandal, and the more I think about it, the more I notice something under my skin that I just can’t scratch away. The reason it bothers me so much, I think, is that when I entered high school as a freshman, I desperately wanted to be able to wear A&F clothing. I couldn’t afford it. I could probably fit into them, but only their largest sizes (as they don’t carry anything above a Large, my size 8 was the upper limit of fatness in A&F world), and that would never do. As far as I was concerned, all the cool kids had A&F, and I didn’t, and I wasn’t cool.
What bothers me the most is knowing that Mike Jeffries wanted me to feel that way. He wanted the kids who could buy A&F to feel cool, and he didn’t want anyone less cool than them being able to wear his clothing. I was one of those ‘less cool,’ and he wanted me to know it.
As an adult, I have always assumed that there was an adolescent immaturity to my belief that ‘all the cool kids’ had A&F. There was a self-centered and fundamentally flawed worldview that led me to believe I wasn’t cool because I didn’t own any A&F. I manufactured this grand juvenile conspiracy in my head, to convince myself I wasn’t good enough, but it was something I all made up. No one was out to get me. The cool kids weren’t laughing at me behind my back. There wasn’t, really, any difference between me and them.
And now I find out that 14-year-old-me was right. A&F, specifically Mike Jeffries, wanted me to feel that way. He wanted me to feel like less so that the ‘cool kids’ could feel like more. He wanted them to feel like there was a difference between them and me, and by proxy, he wanted me to feel that difference. The cool kids were laughing at me because Mike Jeffries told them to.
My freshman year of high school, A&F jeans were the Holy Grail, because Mike Jeffries told the cool kids they were, and even though I wasn’t cool, I was listening. Well, I couldn’t afford them and I didn’t want to wear the largest size anyway. So I did two things. I started babysitting and I stopped eating.
My freshman year of high school was a roller coaster that you don’t want to hear about, but on the first Thursday of June in 2006, seven days after my freshman year of high school ended, I had a heart attack on my driveway at about 8 in the morning. I had lost 40 pounds my freshman year.
A month of therapy later, I had gained 10 pounds back, and I bought a size 4 in A&F jeans. They cost me $80 and my cardiac and mental health.
Every time I see another link or another dumb quote from Mike Jeffries, I have to resist the urge to take it personally. I think to myself, it’s not about me. But it is about me. It’s about every kid who thought they were uncool because they couldn’t fit into or couldn’t afford A&F jeans. It wasn’t just an adolescent sense of unfairness; Mike Jeffries went out of his way to make sure that certain adolescents felt like they were worth less than others. As if high school wasn’t hard enough as it was.
I hope he knows that for every kid who feels ‘cool’ because they have his clothes, there’s 10 who are left feeling uncool. Well, I may have been uncool, but I was also so much more than cool. I was intelligent, I was headstrong, I was determined, I was tenacious. And Mike Jeffries made me believe that those things didn’t matter because I wasn’t cool.
This isn’t about a bunch of teenagers feeling left out because they’re overweight or poor. This is about Mike Jeffries intentionally telling them that they are worth no more than that.
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Notes If you can’t find a book written in your community, it’s NOT because no one in your community has written a book; It’s because no booksellers in your community are stocking local lit.You shop at local businesses. You eat locally-produced food. Why not read local literature?
~Keep more of your money in your community.
~Reduce fuel pollution associated with shipping.
~Support local authors, editors, and publishers.
Things you can do to show support for local lit:
~Ask your local independent bookstore to carry more local lit.
~Ask your local library to carry more local lit.
~If you have a favorite local author whose books you usually buy from Amazon, contact them and ask if they’ve asked about stocking their books at local bookstores. If they can’t, ask about buying their books directly from the author. This way, more of your money stays in your community than if you bought through Amazon.
~Tell your friends about your favorite local authors.
~Tell your friends about the importance of reading local lit.
Check us out on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/readlocallit -
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Point of clarification: Upcoming novel “Eleven” is not the manuscript alluded to in my last post. Two separate works.
That is all. Good-bye.
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NotesFor those of you who don’t know I am putting together a manuscript of poetry right now. It will probably be short, no more than 70 pages or so. It may wind up being a chapbook if I have to cut it down much. It is about my experiences in homelessness. 70 pages of poetry about homelessness is probably not at the top of everyone’s reading list, but I’m truly hoping to open some eyes with this book.
Unfortunately, my computer decided to go beserk (‘shut down’ isn’t the right term— It just straight-up decided that my Word program didn’t exist) and I lost about four pages of poetry that hadn’t been saved. It’s not a lot, but anything is enough to make a writer panic.
Well, I sat down, and I typed them all back up again from memory.
In my moment of panic, I seemed to have forgotten that they were not poems constructed at a computer. They were composed in my head, each stanza memorizes, reworked, memorized again, on nights when I tried to fall asleep in the cold.
(“But you’re homeless in May,” you say. Yes, well, we had a fucking blizzard in May. What of it?)
Anyway, now I am going to write a poem about that.
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And today, I begin research for my next novel: Eleven.
More details to follow. Hopefully.
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Notes"Writers are, in a way, very powerful indeed. They write the script for the reality film. Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million pairs of Levis to both sexes. Woodstock rises from his pages. Now if writers could get together into a real tight union, we’d have the world right by the words. We could write our own universes, and they would be as real as a coffee bar or a pair of Levis or a prom in the Jazz Age. Writers could take over the reality studio. So they must not be allowed to find out that they can make it happen. Kerouac understood long before I did. Life is a dream, he said."
