#lesfigues

Or the original English here.

That Which Remains: A Collaboration in Reading

Whelp. Coyote has a home. It doesn't feel real yet. I found out only a little bit before the announcement was made. Les Figues is so awesome, and I'm more than thrilled to be doing this particular book with them. The first Les Figues title I read was Dies: A Sentence by Vanessa Place, which she gave me after a long conversation she and I had in a weird wine bar in Chicago. I had just started grad school. I was a nervous little ball of energy and she was patient with me. She'd come to read at a gallery I was getting to know, and I was working as an unpaid associate editor for the magazine that put together the event. I videotaped the reading and put the video on the magazine's blog and on YouTube. To this day, people leave outraged comments in response to that video. With regularity, I get vitriolic emails about it. Mostly from men. Mostly from men who scream misandry and bitch in the same sentence. Vanessa is a powerful performer and poet. She is also a lawyer. She affects a room, and that affect lingers. We talked after that reading and she gave me her book and I read it and got lost in it. I ordered more Les Figues titles: Amina Cain's I Go To Some Hollow, Lily Hoang's The Evolutionary Revolution. I reached out to Amina, and we became friends. I met Lily briefly in a friend's hotel room. This contest is judged anonymously. Your name is not attached to the manuscript. I remember submitting so many months ago and thinking, Maybe. Just maybe. But probably not.