Camille Roy (1)

Two short passages from Honey Mine:

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But what could my case possibly be, given that the prospect of verifying any of these family stories is unbearable, as well as irritating? I’ve given up. That’s my “case.” I don’t care what the truth is – not enough to pursue it, anyway. I’m registering something more vague – a sort of cloud at the center of my story, which is where I’ve spent most of my life.

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One observation emerges from this which seems worth pointing out. Silence is show more one way of negotiating the unacceptable. Transgressive romantic fantasy is another. They’re tools for managing the survival of self – the first maintaining it, the second an act of invention. But you can’t separate the tools from their context, in personal necessity, social power, and class. show less

Nearly fifty essays compiled by the creators of the online journal, Narrativity. The book promises, in its back cover copy, to represent writers "from Tijuana to Montreal," and sure enough they're there: the overall thrust of the book, however, is Bay Area through and through, and readers' enjoyment of the book will likely vary proportionately to how much mileage they can get out of that particular scumbling-up of aesthetics and theory and personal experience and politics that the San show more Franciscan literary scene has been reliably producing for a generation now. I tend to enjoy that stuff, but this collection is a mixed bag, in part because of the length restriction: averaging only about five pages apiece (a remnant of their Web origins), many of the pieces are able to squeak out a provocative line of inquiry, but very few develop fruitfully beyond that. This leaves the book feeling like a kind of intellectual snack food: often tasty, but not particularly nourishing. show less