Vivek Shraya's Blog
February 10, 2019
December 1, 2018
I’m Afraid of Men – Best of 2018 lists
Thrilled to see I’m Afraid of Men on The Globe 100 as well as features on Quill & Quire‘s Best Books Covers of 2018 list, Bookriot‘s Best Audiobooks of 2018 list, and Flare Magazine and Toronto Star‘s holiday gift guides–all this week!
October 28, 2018
October 26, 2018
The Rumpus
“A rhetoric that is often used to gain acceptance for difference is “we are all the same,” which has always been deeply frustrating to encounter, and so much of my work is about resisting this idea of sameness. Why is that the only way for humans to accept each other is by believing at the core we are all alike as opposed to celebrating the fact that we are all different, that it’s difference that makes humans beautiful?”
Full interview here.
October 24, 2018
October 23, 2018
The Paris Review: “Toward Creating a Trans Literary Canon”
Featuring even this page is white.
“Shraya’s poems, in their direct, critical stare, turn back the telescope on the white gaze.”
October 18, 2018
New interview in The Georgia Straight
“So often when readers engage with memoir or nonfiction or personal narrative, there’s still a healthy distance that the reader is able to preserve because…these narratives are in first person,” explains Shraya. “So a reader can slip in and out, and sort of disengage as they choose—put the book down, go to the washroom. For me, it felt really important that the reader was right there with me. If I was going to do the work of sharing this narrative, I really wanted it to feel like that the reader was just as accountable to me.”
Read full interview here.
September 24, 2018
September 21, 2018
New music video: “I’m Afraid of Men” Remix by Too Attached (feat. Peaches)
“…The video is striking and sombre when we are introduced to plastic and, importantly, Shraya wrapped in that plastic. My pop cultural frame of reference immediately went to Laura Palmer from Twin Peaks. But this is not fiction: it reads as a very real comment on what happens to trans women and men. News stories or viral posts about the deaths of the trans men and women who have been murdered often miss the vital context of them as living, breathing humans.”
Full interview and video on Noisey.
