#doreen st. felix

[chronicles-of-glow]

Women whose style inspires me

Claire Saffitz

Alison Roman

Jia Tolentino

Doreen St Felix

Rebecca Zlotowski

Greta Gerwig

Jhumpa Lahiri

Zadie Smith

Margaret Zhang

Caroline Issa

[finishinglinepress]

Finishing Line Press has partnered with a Writing Retreat in Greece! Calling for Applications! Apply now

https://www.rosemaryshouse.org (include the code FLPXRH in the "where did you hear about us" section of the application in order to receive priority consideration of your application.)

Writing Residency Opportunity: Calling For Applications

Join us for a life-changing writing workshop residency at Rosemary’s House, in a location that the ancients used to call “phlegra” or “land of fire” in Greece. With the support of esteemed mentors you’ll hone your craft in the company of just 13 select writers from around the world.

Whether you are working on a novel, memoir, play, musical, collection of poems, screenplay, pilot, or other genre-bending pursuit, this is an opportunity to propel your progress alongside a group of exceptional peers.

Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis and will close on May 1st, 2023.

(Apply before April 1st, 2023 to receive a tuition discount)

2023 Spring Schedule - Click your selected date below to learn more and apply:

We believe in multi-genre workshops, so you are welcome to apply to any of the residencies below.

June 4-11 Mentor Ryan Calais Cameron

Credits include: Paramount, Sky Studios, West End’s Bush Theatre, Royal Court, BBC3, C4, Edinburgh Untapped Award; Ryan is also a prolific actor featured on multiple shows including BBC’s “Luther”

Jun 12-19 Journalist & Essayist Doreen St. Felix

A renowned writer from Brooklyn, NY, Doreen is featured in: The New

Yorker, MTV News, The Times, Vogue, Pitchfork, The Fader, Forbes “30 Under 30”,

Huffington Post’s List “The Most Important Writing from People of Color in 2015”

August 24th-31st Mentor Rebecca Abrams

Oxford University, MJA Open Book Award, Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, Amnesty International Press Award

September 1st-8th Mentor Sally Bayley

Oxford University, Royal Literary Fund Fellow: Oxford Brookes University, Radio 4’s Book of the Week, The Spectator Book of the Year

September 9-16 Playwright, Screenwriter, and Lyricist Jake Brunger

“Love Sarah” #1 New Zealand’s Box Office, #5 in Netflix Top 10 Films, West End’s Ambassadors Theatre, Old Vic Theatre, staff writer for multiple shows including an Emmy-Nominated Animated TV Series

September 17-24 Writer, Poet, & Essayist Jenny Zhang

Pen/Bingham Award for Debut Fiction, LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award, O. Henry Award, published with Lena Dunham’s Lenny Books via Random House, worked as a staff writer for HBO and Facebook, currently adapting her work “Sour Heart” into a feature-length film for A24 (Moonlight, Euphoria, Everything Everywhere All At Once)

Click Here to Apply Now and include the code FLPXRH in the "where did you hear about us" section of the application in order to receive priority consideration of your application.

With limited spaces available on each residency, we're looking for motivated and talented writers who are ready to harness the opportunity that this experience provides.

If you have any questions, please reach out to apply@rosemaryshouse.org

[djjazzy3]

‘Black women are not your mammy, America.” “We’re not superheroes. White supremacy and patriarchy do not work in our interest. We saved ourselves.” “Black women are not political mules to be used every time a mediocre white candidate needs to win.’

[etimaetteumoh]

waiting in earnest for Doreen St. Félix’s eventual pivot to beauty writing

[marisatomay]

the brett goldstein interview on keep it this week is a delight very recommend it

[steveyockey]

I actually rather enjoy the Boys. I don't like all of the stuff about it cause it's far from perfect but I genuinely think it's tackled some interesting concepts about superheroes and the corporate world. I'm also glad we don't see too much of the sexual violence in the end cause there is a lot of it in the comics. I do feel icky (at best) about the Deep cause I feel like we are supposed to start to feel bad about him (to some extent) and it's a no from me. [Spoiler] The whole congresswoman being a supe and purposely resembling AOC was a choice for sure.

I do find it hypocritical that Kripke does all of that commentary about corporate world when 1. He is using Amazon to make this show and 2. He has an after show with the cast and crew to delve deeper into the world of The Boys like dude you just made fun of Vaught for that in the ep and you're doing the same thing? What's not clicking?

Anyways to me it's an entertaining show to turn my brain of to and kinda enjoyable to watch in era that is over saturated with superhero shows but not much more than that. It did attract a pretentious fanbase tho, I'll give you that

What is it that you don't like about The Boys? Would love to hear your thoughts!

honestly when I watched it I was like lit up with the fury of a thousand suns mostly because I found the treatment of becca deeply upsetting but like with this much distance I really have no piercing insights since most of what I retained is shapes and colors. it’s bottom of the barrel cultural hot takes on political moments that have already happened, basically a blackpilled newsroom. I’m sure kripke on some level would be flattered by that comparison since it makes him aaron sorkin and you know what? sure. the boys is maybe the most successful tv show amazon has ever made so I’m fairly confident bezos doesn’t lose sleep over what it says about corporations and anyway you would never be allowed to actually air something that would count to me as meaningful critique on that platform. I stand by my previous statements that anything at all courageous said or done on the boys was first said or done by stuckys. I don’t turn my brain off for any tv except yugioh.

[parkersmood]

"A few years ago, while making a documentary on black artists, Syms noticed that the presence of non-black crew members made her subjects behave differently. She now shoots her films herself. For “Incense, Sweaters, and Ice,” Syms asked her mother, her aunts, and her grandmother if she could interview them about their emotional and geographical journeys in America. They were amused by the request. “They don’t value their stories,” Syms said, neutrally. She is averse to the idea that art about black lives must advance proprietary narratives of extraordinary struggle and resolution; instead, she sees art in the “boring” details of ordinary life. “That’s how I feel when I talk to my grandmother about sharecropping,” she said. “She’s not theorizing it. It’s not a story. I tried to stay true to that feeling.” Recently, people have been asking Syms if she might make a television show. “Unless I can get that Shonda package, I don’t want to fuck with it,” Syms said, referring to the network producer Shonda Rhimes, who is known for maintaining an impressive creative control."

“How To Be a Succesful Black Woman” Doreen St. Felix interviews Martine Syms for The New Yorker (July 2017)

[gonegonegonebabygone]

There are women so imaginative, so sexually vanguard, that the body is secondary. They can make an erotic fantasy out of much more exciting materials.

Doreen St. Felix, “The Erotics of Missy Elliott”

[jarrettfuller]

06.09.17 Friday Links

A collection of links, articles, and other ephemera I stumbled upon this week but never posted anywhere. For more links, I keep a running list of everything I read on reading.am.

Hasan Minhaj's new one-man show/stand up special Homecoming King hit Netflix a few weeks ago and it's really, really good. Doreen St. Felix has a great review of it in The New Yorker. (I'm finding myself drawn to this standup style that's more like one-man show with over-arching narratives and complex choreography and performance. Mike Birbiglia was the first show I saw like this, but other recents like Chris Gethard's Career Suicide and Neal Brennan's 3 Mics are great additions to the genre.)

I enjoyed this short profile on Hiro Murai, the director of my favorite show of last year, Atlanta, and one of my favorite episodes of Legion. It's nice to hear his transition of music videos to narrative and the influence of David Lynch and Japanese cinema to his own aesthetic.

The New Yorker's email newsletter pointed me towards this 1997 essay from Adam Gopnik on Fredrick Law Olmsted's transition from journalist to landscape designer. Olmsted is most famous for designing Central Park, but I had no idea he worked as a writer for years before moving into design.

Wesley Morris, who continually writes some of my favorite commentary, on Bill Maher's big mistake: "Nobody asked me to write about Ms. Griffin — perhaps only because a lot of Americans are clinging to the idea that we need a sense of moral dignity, that it’s all we have. No matter what some people might wish for the president, we can’t wish that. Not on Instagram, not anywhere. We just can’t. We understand the harm of Ms. Griffin’s transgression. But we’re not sure what to do with affronts to race like Mr. Maher’s."

Here's a nice chat with Robert Caro as he nears the end of his epic LBJ biography: “I don’t want anybody to write a book with my name on it but me, I’ve written an awful lot on power and as I say, I’m not rushing this last book. I’m trying to do it the same way as my other books. And I don’t want people to think that something is written by me when it’s not.” Caro's The Power Broker is probably my all-time favorite book and the first LBJ volume is on our shelf — hoping to finally start it later this year.

The University of Reading is staging an exhibition on the work and influence of Emigre magazine. Would love to see this show!

In continuing the slow end of an era, Mickey Drexler has stepped down as CEO of J. Crew after fourteen years. This follows the resignation of the company's creative director Jenna Lyons earlier this year. Drexler will be replaced with West Elm president James Brett.

James Poniewozik is the The New York Times television critic but I love his writing on politics — or perhaps more specifically, the spectacle of politics. Here’s his reality television analysis of yesterday’s Comey hearings.

[notchainedtotrauma]

Not all bodies are pedestaled on a myth the way white women’s fragility is, a myth of fragility sustained politically, legally, and socially at the expense of black and brown women and people. Silence has preserved my body and ensured my safety more times than I can count, and during the times that I had to speak out, either for the safety of other people within the predator’s range or for my sanity, I chose to speak to women, in quiet, closed places.

Doreen St Felix

[unusualmodesofresistance]

Safety is always at the expense of policing black bodies, because again, neither whiteness nor blackness exists in a vacuum. If quirkiness is eccentricity or white-girl-weird, then it’s about making new movements, tics, and they can be affectations, that are peculiar but never seen as threatening. Black people are often forced to keep making old movements, in our bodies, speech, the way we live, because the space for whiteness to see us as safe if we’re unpredictable barely exists.

Doreen St Felix

[vagablonde]

So Addictive finds Elliott disembodying, abstracting, and playfully obscuring the way we might think of, or even desire to see, a body in heat [....] Her seduction consists of remaining fully clothed in a bedazzled denim getup, popping her head off her body, and doing a two-step while he looks on, confused but aroused.

Doreen St. Felix

[therumpus]

At the 2017 Grammys, Beyoncé invoked her plushness and her power. She remembered, coalescing discrete ethnic memories into a fabulist picture of black continuity. The lyrics to "Love Drought" melded into the iconography, as did the liquidity of the serene sound: "You, you, you, you and me could calm a war down." "Sandcastles," the ballad that always seemed a bit mismatched to the rest of the album, finally made sense in this fertile, golden space.

At MTV, Doreen St. Felix writes gorgeously about Beyoncé, her power, her inspiration, and her spirituality at this year’s Grammys.