Carol Guess's Blog

I'm excited to share my new website with the world! This will replace my blog, so I won't be posting here in the future. Enjoy! 

 "Alternative Teaching Modalities in Hell" is obviously not based on memos I've been receiving biweekly for over a year now. Enjoy.

Here's a short story in Tupelo Quarterly about people in power behaving badly. Fiction, of course. "The Body Politic" is a collaboration with Susanne Antonetta. We are holding space in our imaginations for change, hope, and survival. 

Here are three new poems co-written with Rochelle Hurt in Bear Review. All three poems are from our recently completed manuscript, NonMom Courts the End. 

Ulysses, Jana Koehn

I also have new short fiction co-written with EJ Colen in Coal Hill Review. This is called "The Double Cross" and features highly realistic imaginary babies. 

"Memorandum of Understanding Regarding Teacher Replacements Should the Worst Outcome Occur"

Here's a new poem, "Non-Endings," co-written with Rochelle Hurt in trampset . We're almost done with our prose poetry manuscript NonCompendium. Meanwhile, Susanne Paola Antonetta and I have written our first collaboration. Our friendship spans 20 years, so celebrate with us and read our short story "The Desk"  in Tupelo Quarterly. 

How are you? I mean, how are you really? Send me an email and let's catch up. You can also follow me on Twitter, where I like things, which is what you do. I'm here: @carolannguess
While I've been pandemic-ing, I've also been busy. Thanks to Big Other  and John Madera for inviting me to join the conversation on Jamming Their Transmission, alongside Davis Schneiderman and Tony Trigilio for Podcast Episode #14, Life During the Contagion.
I'm thrilled to announce that Girl Zoo , my short fiction collection co-written with Aimee Parkison, has been nominated for the 2019 Big Other Book Award for Fiction. It's an honor to be included on such a stellar shortlist. Check out the nominees here. 
Western Humanities Review recently published three stories from Girl Zoo online here, including "Girl in Ransom Note," one of my favorites. Hungry for poetry? Here are three new poems in  Superstition Review,  co-written with Rochelle Hurt, from our manuscript-in-progress.

Stay tuned for future updates! I have short fiction forthcoming in Tupelo Quarterly, poems in Juked, hybrid work in Hotel Amerika, and lots of work-in-progress.
As ever, be well. C

On Thursday, November 14th from 5-6:30pm I'll be reading with several colleagues at Western Washington University in the Wilson Library Reading Room. Hosted by our undergraduate literary magazine, Jeopardy, the faculty showcase is always a fun event, free and open to the public. Join us!
And since my blog readership is now largely located in Ukraine and Russia (thanks for sending my stats sky high!), here's a handy "Guide to the Impeachment Drama: Major Players Edition," in case you're having trouble keeping track of So. Many. Names. Meanwhile, my dear friend N wrote a beautiful essay about activism amidst the zombies of Big Tech. Find it here in The Longing is the Compass. 

Thanks to Fiction Southeast for inviting me to share my thoughts on writing "Girl in Doubt," one of the stories in my short story collection Girl Zoo (co-written with Aimee Parkison). You can read "Girl in Doubt" here and my process piece here. Earlier today I guest lectured in a seminar on Critical Animal Studies. I was reminded again of the weight of the word zoo, of the role humans play in capturing, detaining, and confining wild animals. Of what it means to believe that animals exist for you, instead of with you. Of the way humans forget that we, too, are animals. New footage taken of northern and southern resident orcas should be a reminder to everyone that sentient beings don't belong in captivity. Watch here. 
Andrew Trites / University of British Columbia / from The Seattle Times

Hello friends! Hello people monitoring this blog! I don't know if I should be flattered or freaked out or amused, but following my recent participation in an entirely legal, respectful political protest, I discovered that my usual blog page views had shot up to 676 in one day, largely coming from Russia. So hi, new friends. I'm glad that you found my blog, and hope you enjoy my poetry and fiction! If you are queer, I hope my writing gives you hope. If you're a bot, maybe I'll title my next book Troll Farm. This incident reminds me of a fascinating conversation I had with my students a week ago about the loss of privacy in the age of the internet. We had a delightful, animated conversation that felt a little odd and scattered, until I realized we were all talking about different concepts of privacy. I was thinking about literal physical privacy. Being alone in a room. Studying in the library. Writing in a diary no one else would ever read. Sharing a photograph with one other person. My students, however, were all talking about privacy settings. About the difficulty or ease of choosing who sees what on shared devices or platforms. Their concept of privacy assumed an audience; for them, privacy meant starting with an audience, then filtering it out. For me, privacy meant being alone, or sharing something with just a few people. The concept of strangers was included in my students' idea of privacy. Strangers were always there; it was just a question of when to filter them out. I don't move through the world with a great deal of nostalgia; I tend to focus on present day pleasures and problems. I'm not particularly sentimental. But I miss certain forms of privacy, including both solitude and the gift of choosing when to share time, words, and affection with one person. I'm not on Facebook because I don't trust the company's politics or surveillance tactics, so finding that my scruffy, old school blog had been visited by a team of bots was disheartening. I wish I could pretend all 676 page views were LGBTQ folks in Russia newly discovering my writing, but while I'm an optimist, I'm not a fool. For you readers, an update: I'm writing feverishly, working on several collaborations at once, including a series of science fiction stories and a manuscript of prose poems. The urgent, joyful need to create is stronger than the fearful, destructive need to monitor, manipulate, and control. Maybe it's time to re-watch The Lives of Others.