Author Archives

Em Perper
Bookseller, writer, editor.

Revisiting the Vibrancy of Deaf Culture: A Reading List

Updated 7/17/18: Over the weekend, an astute reader noticed a reading list I wrote in 2015, “Deaf Culture and Sign Language,” which purported to celebrate Deaf culture, didn’t feature any pieces written by d/Deaf or hard-of-hearing authors. I apologized. I should have elevated the stories of Deaf people directly, rather than those speaking on their behalf. My editors and I decided the best course of action was to update this list to make it more representative and inclusive, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to rectify my mistake. Many thanks especially to Sara Nović for her advocacy and reading recommendations and to Katie L. Booth for her idea-bouncing and guidance.

1. “At Home in Deaf Culture: Storytelling in an Un-Writeable Language.”  (Sara Nović, Lit Hub, June 2016)

Sara Nović writes about living at the intersections of three languages and how different facets of her personality manifest in each one:

What does it mean to be a writer whose language negates the possibility of the written word? On one hand, perhaps this is part of its pull—I exist in the present in ASL because the anxieties of my work are bound up in another language. On the other, writing, books, the things I have loved most since I was small, are at odds with my body. On days like today, when writing is difficult, this feels like a loss. The one language in which I am fully comfortable I cannot write, not exactly. But without it I would certainly be a lesser storyteller.

2. “How the Deaf and Queer Communities are Tackling Oppression Together.” (Alex Lu, The Establishment, June 2016)

Alex Lu, a Deaf-queer academic, presents a compelling argument for the increasing interdependence of the queer and Deaf communities. I especially appreciated Lu’s analysis of the impossibility of (white, straight, cis) interpreters’ objectivity. Read more…

The Evangelical Fervor for Amish Romance

Photo: Marcy Leigh

There is an inherent paradox in the popularity of Amish-centric novels, or “bonnet books.” “Plain” communities, like the Amish, disparage modern capitalism and the trappings of wealth. But the authors of Amish & Mennonite romance novels aren’t apprehensive, apparently–they have millions of readers, and therefore, a great deal of money. Their admiration for the Amish lifestyle, then, goes only so far, and is superficial at that. In “More Titillated Than Thou,”  Ann Neumann draws on her childhood memories of Lancaster, the findings of inspirational-lit critics, and her knowledge of evangelical purity culture.

While some books may chronicle a young heroine’s agonizing decision to leave the Amish community (or join it), the choice is always an intensely personal one—a matter of knowing God’s purpose for her, not of mulling over the long-standing theological premises the community is based on, like nonresistance, pacifism, and conscientious objection. In actual Amish country, these demanding faith commitments count for far more than this or that individual believer’s spiritual journey. Many Amish and Anabaptist believers have paid for these theological premises with their lives—as children in these communities learn in their typically thorough religious instruction in Amish or Mennonite tradition. Even the everyday burdens of Amish life, such as birthing and feeding an average of seven children, are either unaddressed in Amish fiction or transformed glibly into blessings.

Many readers have told ethnographers or commented on blogs that they are drawn to Amish fiction because the books are “clean,” lacking even the most subtle forms of titillation, another accommodation to evangelical culture. Obviously, the nation’s 90 million evangelicals are having sex, but their community’s preference is to pretend that they don’t—and certainly not outside the bonds of heterosexual marriage. The preferred way to quarantine women’s bodies from illicit ideas and physical contact is not to address male-female power dynamics, provide sex education, or even bolster women’s agency, but to “protect” women, hide them away, and shame their sexuality. The world depicted in Amish fiction is a projection of these strictures. It is the ultimate purity culture.

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Art, Activism & Faith: The Life of Corita Kent

Photo: m kasahara

When I visited the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh last spring, I arrived on the last day of a retrospective of the art of Corita Kent. My interest in feminism, faith and art meant I’d encountered Kent’s artwork before, but only briefly and only online. The opportunity to see her work in-person was a gift. Strolling through the silent Warhol with several of my closest friends felt more like church—inspiration, community, big ideas that transcend time and space—than church itself. What I felt in Corita Kent’s work was love. Love radiates out of her collages and her words and her rules. She gave so much of herself in her lifetime, and her art reminds us to give of ourselves, too.

Someday Is Now, the Kent collection I viewed at the Warhol, is on display in Los Angeles at the Pasadena Museum of California Art. I implore you to visit before its closure in November, if you have the opportunity. At the LARB, Sasha Carrera, the former director of the Corita Art Center, explores the fascinating life and work of this oft-ignored figure in American art history.

The work of Immaculate Heart College — Corita’s prints, student paintings, and Sr. Magdalen Mary’s raucous confabulations of texts and images known as the Irregular Bulletin — won fans in art circles but disturbed more conservative Catholic tastes. Around this time, the mid-1950s, the cardinal requested that Corita discontinue depicting the Holy Family; she had become enamored of the Abstract Expressionists and Color Field painters and, over time, expanded her idea of what constituted religious art. In a 1977 interview with Bernard Galm, she says, “anything that was any good had a religious quality.”

Once Corita’s social conscience was awakened, these ideas became intertwined with her art…Indeed, her art changed rapidly in the 1960s. By 1964, Corita’s lettering had shifted into great graphic jumbles of words and color. An admirer of Pop Art’s incorporation of ordinary objects, Corita began using billboard signs, bread wrappers, and pop song lyrics — the urban landscape of Los Angeles served as raw material for her prints…In her work, Wonder Bread wrappers became Eucharist wafers.

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Lisa Frank and Growing Up in a Beautiful World

The magazine Foundations takes you behind-the-scenes of the contemporary art world. The most recent headliner? Lisa Frank, eponymous creator of the aesthetic crucial to ’90s schoolkids, based on Pop Art and hyperrealism. Interviewer Carly Mark and Frank sat down to discuss the longevity of the Lisa Frank brand, as well as her childhood exposure to fine art and her work ethic.

Carly Mark: It is crazy to think about because you have such variety. I was looking through a stack of sticker books and every single one was different with a variation of designs inside.

Lisa Frank: But that’s why we’re so hot still today. There are some companies that have been hot forever but all of a sudden are dead right now. The same image has been plastered on hundreds and hundreds of products but the consumers are not stupid.

Also believe it or not, the consumers with less money have a keener eye than the ones with more. Consumers with less money only have so much to spend. For this reason they are critical and want to buy the best of the best. I’ve always appealed to the masses because, I felt so lucky to grow up in a beautiful world, and believe just because someone has less money, why should they not be offered the best of the best, as well?

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On Learning & Losing Language: A Reading List

Photo: Mark

Language shapes every facet of our lives—how we communicate, how we act, how we feel. When we can name something, we feel comfort and security (think of the medical diagnosis, the new baby’s name). We feel relief: common gestures while haggling in a marketplace, cognates in a textbook. Without language, we are lost. But what happens when language gets lost—violently uprooted by colonialism, for example, or dissipated in the annals of time? Can language be reclaimed? These six articles explore how language is disseminated, preserved, decoded, and, ultimately, cherished.

1. “How an Artificial Language from 1887 is Finding New Life Online.” (Sam Dean, The Verge, May 2015)

Lernu! When L.L. Zamenhof invented Esperanto in the late 19th century, he hoped it would erase language barriers and bring about world peace. Today, Esperanto is gaining traction in the digital language-learning community due to its enthusiastic adherents, relative simplicity and logical structure. Read more…

The ‘Artificial Intimacy’ of Reporter and Subject

Photo: Ali Wade

What “The End of the Tour” dramatizes—why it will be added to journalism professors’ curricula—is the seduction phase of the profile-writing process…the very structure of the reporting process, with its enforced proximity, can engender a precarious intimacy, even while the ultimate purpose of this intimacy—an article that is to be written by one participant about the other—is never forgotten.

Any reporter may fleetingly fall in love with his or her subject during the process of researching a magazine profile…But for the work to be any good, the writer’s greatest libidinal pleasure must be discovered afterward: when the back-and-forth is over, and the recorder has stopped recording, and one is alone at the keyboard at last.

— Rebecca Mead lauds Jesse Eisenberg’s portrayal of journalist David Lipsky in the new film “The End of the Tour.” While working on a project for Rolling Stone, Lipsky accompanied literary paragon David Foster Wallace on his publicity tour. In the film, Eisenberg captures the quintessence of the profile writer—the tics, motivations, and rapport—and underscores the challenges of getting too close to a subject.

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Our Sex Education: A Reading List

Here are nine stories about modern-day sex education and our history with bad sex ed classes.

1. “John Oliver Eviscerates American Sex Ed–But the Reality is Even Worse.” (Dianna Anderson, Rolling Stone, August 2015)

Ready to get angry? In a recent Last Week Tonight segment, John Oliver lambasted abstinence-only sex education, which features celibacy as the only method to prevent pregnancy. Dianna Anderson, feminist blogger and author of Damaged Goods, goes in-depth on the sorry state of sex ed in the United States. Thanks to Title V, tens of millions of dollars are funneled toward conservative teaching methods that do more fear-mongering than educating. Recently, the House of Representatives ratified a bill that will give even more money to abstinence-only “education.” This is federal and state funding, not private revenue. And parents who want their kids to have a holistic, comprehensive sex education in their schools face a bureaucratic nightmare. Read more…

How Suicide Girls Has Thrived For 14 Years

Photo: El Freddy

Don’t call them alternative: Missy Suicide carved out a niche online for “the sexiest, smartest, most dangerous collection of outsider women in the world”:

She called the site Suicide Girls: “I hated the word alternative. Nobody lived in these John Hughes compartmentalized sects of people anymore, with the squares and the punks and the goths. I felt like alternative was the worst — like, alt to what?” She adopted the phrase “suicide girls” from Chuck Palahniuk’s book Survivor, where it’s used to describe “girls who chose to commit social suicide by not fitting in.”

Photo sets are the site’s centerpiece and consist of anywhere from 40 to 60 photographs. They must start with the model fully clothed and end with them fully nude; nudity begins in the first third of the set. Sets have to be consistent, with the same location and concept throughout. But what makes them particularly unique is that the models, not the photographers, are the ones quite literally calling the shots.

“I used to say we had a thousand applications a month,” says Missy, “but about six months ago I asked if that was still right and was told it’s actually 25,000 a year. Just the other day, I heard it’s about 30,000 now.”

Julia Rubin reports at Racked.

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Raising Our Gender Fluid Four-Year-Old

“Is that a boy or a girl?”

My child is what you might call gender non-conforming, or gender fluid. You could also call it being a kid. She’s OK with the female pronouns, but she consistently requests short hair “like a boy.” The haircut seems to throw people off most of all, because it does look very much like a typical boy haircut. And if she is mixing what you would consider “boy” clothes with her gold shoes? It seems to really confuse people…

When you have a child who wants to dress a certain way, or play with a certain toy, and you tell them they can’t because you’re worried what someone else might think, or because you are uncomfortable with it because of your own gender bias – you’re essentially modeling that the child should view themselves externally. That how they see themselves is not as important as how others see them. That’s not the message I want to send to my children.

— Author Erika Kleinman explains why she and her husband aren’t pressuring their youngest child to fulfill stereotypical gender norms at Role Reboot.

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A Reading List for My 25-Year-Old Self

Photo: Omer Wazir

This week I’m turning 25 and have decided (based on anxiety attacks and several recent horoscopes) to say what I really want: to pursue writing seriously. It terrifies me, because I’m having the following thoughts: 1) now it’s no longer a secret and everyone will see me fail; 2) my best writing samples are several years old; 3) so many folks I know who are younger and far, far more talented than me are Living Their Best Lives Now, and I feel hopeless in the face of so much talent. What do I have to offer? What can I say that hasn’t already been said?

But then I read something, and I realize I do have opinions and original thoughts. I can contribute to a larger conversation. I only need to commit to my potential and take risks. I need to contact the folks who’ve made offers I was too scared to accept, and I need to seek out these opportunities for myself. I need to believe in my value, and I need to hold myself accountable.

This list is a birthday gift to myself and, I hope, of use to you, too. It’s a mix of practical advice for freelancing, things that make me feel good, and examples of excellent writing. I included advice from professional women who get shit done, slideshows, links to YouTube videos, interviews with my favorite celebs, and other stuff. (Oh, and a post from Arabelle Sicardi’s Tumblr that makes me cry and is always open in my tabs.) Read more…