Jessica Anne and Long Day Press on Making Sex with My Family
In Conversation with Lindsay Hunter on I'm a Writer But
Welcome to I’m a Writer But, where writers discuss their work, their lives, their other work, the stuff that takes up any free time they have, all the stuff they’re not able to get to, and the ways in which any of us get anything done. Plus: book recommendations, bad jokes, okay jokes, despair, joy, and anything else going on that week. Hosted by Lindsay Hunter.
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Today, Jessica Anne (Sex with My Family) and Joshua Bohnsack of Long Day Press talk about collaborating on this short, vicious, beautiful book; cows; maintaining rawness in the work; Jessica’s theater background informing her writing; endings; Long Day’s forthcoming manual on muskrat removal (!); and more.
From the episode:
Jessica Anne: “I had a crush on Long Day Press—I love their books, and I saw that they were reading. And I thought, ‘I think the fertility chapter of [my longer manuscript] Finite Jest stands alone, and I’m going to call it Sex with My Family and see what they think.’ So I sent Josh these fertility sections, and they liked it.”
Joshua Bohnsack: “We’re pretty hands-on. This is maybe one of the first times that I thought, ‘Let’s utilize the space of what a book can be. This is a short manuscript, so we can fill it up with whatever we want,’ and that includes pictures of Jess’s ovaries.”
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Jessica Anne is Neo-Futurist, Lit & Luz artistic associate, author of A Manual for Nothing, and Visiting Lecturer at Roosevelt University.
Long Day Press is a Chicago-based novella and chapbook publisher. Since 2015, they have published boundary-pushing work with an emphasis on emerging Midwestern writers.
