Hi and welcome to this week’s Lez Liberty Lit!

At Lit Hub, Rosa Boshier writes about how nostalgia can be a way to connect with home in the diaspora:

“In today’s literary landscape of millennial ennui and technological takeover, the use of nostalgia and cultural memory is often written off as sentimental. Critics, mostly white, tell writers that readers are no longer interested in the past, and can only be provoked by the post-human possibilities of the future. Nostalgia is seen as a disease that deforms the present.

But when it comes to diasporic narratives, nostalgia is not simply the act of remembering, scholar Farzana Akhter tells us. If my preteen passage to the US taught me anything, it was that nostalgia is a response to the conditions of the present. Rather than an impediment to living in the present, nostalgia is a necessary tool to survive it. In America, we are told to assimilate or go. So, then, nostalgia comes to symbolize a free zone, an autonomous imaginary where we can reclaim a sense of non-stigmatizing specificity.”

Horror lives in the body.

At Lit Hub, Veronica Scott Esposito writes about picking up Janet Mock’s work for the first time, how misogyny impacts trans women in specific ways and how to dismantle it.

“We must learn to become conservationists of memory. Otherwise, this damage we have done to our planet will cost us our past,” writes Omar El Akkad at Lit Hub:

“We are about to lose so much. The next few decades will see the disappearance of countless glaciers, coral reefs, animal and plant species, miles and miles of coastland. The places in which our stories took shape will become entirely changed, and the changes will birth new stories, a new telling of forgotten pasts—ghost towns rising out from the bottom of vanishing lakes, secret histories written into the rings of severed trees. In this moment of monumental import, this apex of a turn beyond which lay our survival or eradication, climate change is going to render our past as unrecognizable as our future.”

“This is what humanity looks like. Each day we remember that our work is our gift and our tool for creating change—that with this gift comes deep responsibility. Not to write what sells but to write what matters. To write against our own erasure. To write so no one should ever feel like they’re walking through this world unseen. And unnamed,” writes Jacqueline Woodson at Electric Literature.

Obviously women poets write about the body.

Hopeful climate fiction? In this economy?

“[I]s fandom becoming as toxic as politics?”

Here’s how book publishing works financially for authors. Spoiler alert: often it doesn’t.

Here’s how to save a wet book.

Read these books about the climate emergency. Read these books this autumn and these. Read these hilarious books by women. Read these books about the circus. Read these novels about women getting revenge. Read women in translation. Read these books about being queer where it’s illegal.

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