BY ALEX MARZANO-LESNEVICH ILLUSTRATIONS BY KEITH NEGLEY
Fueled by the Grappling Writing is notoriously hard. And writing about, as author Melissa Faliveno calls them, “spaces of uncertainty,” makes it even more so. In this conversation, Faliveno talks with Bowdoin professor and writer Alex Marzano-Lesnevich about the struggle—and the satisfaction—that comes from the process of interrogating our obsessions and each other, and of writing our way in the world through stories. IN FALL 2020, as the country was gripped by a series of unprecedented reckonings, Bowdoin students took a creative writing class designed to have them commingle their thinking about the political questions raging through the country and the personal changes in their own lives. Taught by Assistant Professor of English Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, the class— The Personal (Essay) Is Political—took its name from the canonical 1970 Carol Hamisch essay, “The Personal Is Political,” and featured works by classic and contemporary writers, including James Baldwin, June Jordan, Jennine Cápo Crucet, Kaitlyn Greenidge, and Melissa Faliveno, author of the essay collection Tomboyland, who visited the class electronically. Tomboyland was the first book from writer and filmmaker Joey Soloway’s publishing imprint, and was named a best book of 2020 by NPR; the New York Public Library; O, the Oprah Magazine;
and Electric Literature. Announcing plans for their imprint in February 2018, Soloway said, “We live in a complicated, messy world where every day we have to proactively re-center our own experiences by challenging privilege.” Like Soloway’s production company, the imprint would be directly named for its political aspirations: Topple. At the time, Soloway’s words were seen as a response to #MeToo, #TimesUp, and the global reckoning with gender inequality. But of course, by the time the imprint actually began publishing, far more reckoning was happening, with structural racism and with inequality laid bare by the pandemic. Tomboyland entered the world during that upheaval. In January 2021, at a turning point in presidential administrations and as the global pandemic raged on at ever-escalating levels, Faliveno and Marzano-Lesnevich shared the following exchange.
