Inferno (a poet’s novel)

Last Sunday at the Like A Boss panel, Emily asked Will Schwalbe, Alexander Chee, Heidi Julavits, and Doree Shafrir to share their insights on mentoring. The panelists offered stories about being mentors, having mentors, and how those experiences have affected them. No one tried to give mentoring a strict definition.

“I could go for about a month without working. That was the amount of debt I could float.” — “Eileen Myles,” the narrator of Inferno (a poet’s novel)

Portraits of bohemian poverty are a dime a dozen. Describing your crappy apartment, elaborately painful relationships and the earlier, cuter stages of alcoholism is a way to show that one is suffering for one’s art and is therefore good at both.

My girlfriend got me an Eileen Myles t-shirt at this Sister Spit event in Oakland, it’s black with big purple letters reading “YOU’VE GOT THE STYLE EILEEN MYLES.” I wore it for the first time in Palm Springs to a Dinah Shore White Party which is a party where everyone wears white. And Dinah Shore is this gross annual lesbian “weekend” for girls who want to fingerfuck in swimming pools, oil wrestle in wet t-shirts, drink their faces off and scream at each other in public. All the lesbian websites send reps to Dinah Shore so we were there like a bunch of pasty nerds at a football game, and I was there in my black pants and black Eileen Myles t-shirt at The White Party and then suddenly everything turned black and then I wasn’t anywhere anymore.