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What appeals to you about social media? And does it inform your writing and teaching? I appreciate the connections offered by social media. You’re also a formidable presence on social media-particularly Twitter, even as other prominent authors like Sherman Alexie and Lindy West have abandoned it. It’s all quite challenging but in the most satisfying way.ĭo you consider yourself primarily one kind of writer, say, an essayist who writes fiction sometimes, or do you take more of a Renaissance-woman approach to your work? I’m a fiction writer who dabbles quite extensively in other genres.
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Screenplays, well, you have to think more visually and like comics, in terms of scene. Memoir requires an uncomfortable amount of vulnerability. Short stories are challenging because you have to tell a big story in a relatively small space. And with Marvel, I also have to think about continuity within the Marvel universe. With novels, it’s: How do I tell a story in a longer format that offers depth and texture and holds the reader’s interest for hundreds of pages? In comics, it’s thinking about story in terms of scene and then breaking scenes down to panels. What are the different challenges and rewards of working in each medium? Storytelling is storytelling, I have learned, so I write in a lot of different genres.
ROXANE GAY NEWSLETTER PLUS
You have published work in so many formats: novels, books of essays and short stories, a comic book (Marvel’s Black Panther: World of Wakanda, with Ta-Nehisi Coates and Yona Harvey), plus an upcoming memoir and a screenplay. Gay took a break to talk with American Libraries about social media, her many projects, and the role of libraries throughout her life.
ROXANE GAY NEWSLETTER HOW TO
Gay made headlines earlier this year when she pulled a third manuscript, How to Be Heard, from Simon & Schuster to protest that publisher signing then-Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos. Her short-story collection, Difficult Women (Grove Press), was released in January, and Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (HarperCollins) is due out in June. The much-in-demand author spent the spring crisscrossing the country on book tours and speaking gigs, including a keynote session at the Association of College and Research Libraries conference in March.