Quinn Latimer
When I was a little girl, my mom—consummate feminist and literary mother par excellence—gave me Tatterhood and Other Tales, an anthology of feminist folk tales whose cover sported a soot-cheeked minx gamely beating back a gang of trolls with a wooden spoon. Published by the Feminist Press in 1978, Tatterhood was one of a slew of anthologies that emerged in the wake of the women’s rights movement to combat the patriarchal Brothers Grimm and Disney party line. But employing fairy tales for activist means was nothing new. In Weimer Germany, fairy-tale collections like the pungently titled Proletarischer Kindergarten (1921) were Writing fiction about September 11 is an activity rife with hazards. According to a character in Donald Breckenridge’s You Are Here, a story about that day “could be read as sensational because the event was.” Though this observation may sound proactively defensive, it is the entirely sincere quandary at the center of this novel, which takes as its subject not only the seismic event of 9/11 but the very act of writing about it. At once a play, a short story, and a novel “loosely based on the production of a performance that never happened” (this claimed by a character “Thank you for asking me to submit to your magazine, / Dead Fluffy Coyote, / but I haven’t been writing much poetry lately. / I’ve been rockin’. / Or, I should say, rockin’ again.” In the swaggering opening lines of The Virgin Formica, Sharon Mesmer lays out its central conceit: that poetry is the least of her concerns––she’s been livin’ and will continue to do so, regardless of what the academic peanut gallery has to say about it. Often flowing down the page in lanky, listlike columns, her profane and funny poems venerate the vernacular and the blue-collar through rhapsodizing