Nine Books About Your Life:

In our Nine Books About Your Life series, authors are invited to talk about nine types of books that have had an impact on their life. Their responses give us a glimpse into their relationships with their books and other people’s books. In this installment, we speak with Alex Carrigan, author of May All Our Pain Be Champagne: A Collection of Real Housewives Twitter Poetry (Alien Buddha Press, 2022).

First Book
I think the first books I was ever really into were the Magic Tree House series. My mom said I was always into reading when I was younger. She claims I taught myself how to read and that I could read before entering Kindergarten. Magic Tree House was the sort of fun, fantastic, educational children’s book series I could get sucked into. My mom talked about how we once went to Barnes & Noble to buy the latest book, and by the time we got home, I had finished the book. I think it was the sign that I would be a fast reader and one who would always love to read whole books in one sitting, like I do nowadays whenever I have to read a book for review.

Most Cherished Book
I think the books I cherish the most aren’t prose or poetry books, but a bunch of Chas Addams comic collections I have that belonged to my maternal grandfather. He died when I was in elementary school so I never got to have a lot of time with him to talk about artistic or intellectual interests (although I’ll be forever grateful for the time he took me to a train convention because he knew I was a train maniac), but I feel like these collections of macabre New Yorker comics will always be something I can look at and find a connection with him. I didn’t know these comics were where The Addams Family originated, and these comics were so different from the newspaper comics I used to read, so I feel like it helped me develop a somewhat warped sense of humor.

Most Perplexing Book
Great Expectations is awful. I’m sure this isn’t a hot take, but I hated this book when I was forced to read it in high school. I can put enough distance from my horrible experience reading it to see the merit and impact, but overall, I think it’s massively overrated and amazingly boring. It didn’t help that the teacher who was teaching it to me humiliated me so badly in class one day I broke down crying at my desk, so I can only associate it with that awful memory. But even for the limited amount of Victorian-era literature I’ve read, I just can’t fathom why anyone would truly love it or hold it in high regard. I’d rather set myself on fire while wearing a wedding dress than read it again.

Life-changing Book
This might be a weird one, but Battle Royale by Koshun Takami massively changed my life for the better. I know it’s an odd choice, being a Japanese novel from before the new millennium about 9th graders being forced to fight to the death on an island, but I read it when I was fourteen and it was before Hunger Games was a thing, so I was definitely in my edgy teen phase and got hipster cred for liking it. But it was also just an exciting, dense read where there was so much care and attention put into a large cast of characters. It’s not the best book ever, but my love of the book did bring me to an online roleplaying site inspired by the book that I’ve been a part of since 2011. That site helped me meet some of my best friends in life and helped me get into so much more movies, anime, music, and more. I wouldn’t have grown so much as a person without Battle Royale, so I owe it so much.

Most Underrated Book
I read The Surprising Power of a Good Dumpling by Wai Chim last year because the author was on Australian Survivor and some of my Australian friends from the roleplay site told me her YA books were awesome. I decided to order it because I was #TeamWai for most of that season, and I ended up reading it while traveling to my grandmother’s funeral. It’s a very touching, somewhat difficult YA book to read about a Chinese-Australian girl who’s dealing with a number of challenging things in her life at once, from her mentally ill mother to her absent, workaholic father, to her first romance with her coworker. It’s an experience completely different from my own, but I found myself sucked into Anna’s tale as she tried to keep her head up while dealing with more than any teenage girl should deal with, especially while I was also dealing with the loss of my grandmother. I feel it’s a YA book more teens should read and there are a lot of kids who can relate to the story, so I hope it finds its way into American middle and high school libraries somehow.

A Surprising Book
It came up at my job recently, but Remapping Wonderland was a book I reviewed last year in Quail Bell Magazine that I realized has stuck with me longer than I realized. It’s a short story collection from Alternating Current Press where authors of color rewrite classic fairy tales. Some move their stories to different cultures, others modernize them, some come up with entirely new stories that very loosely follow the fairy tale. I think what surprised me was that I never thought I’d be so proud to own a fairy tale book, but even when I was reading it for review, I was constantly talking about how incredible some of the pieces in it were and found myself with almost too much to write about. I feel like it’s the sort of book I’d read to my grandchildren someday, so I think it’s one I’ll hold onto as long as humanly possible. 

Your Most Recent Book
I published my first chapbook of poetry in March with Alien Buddha Press called May All Our Pain Be Champagne: A Collection of Real Housewives Twitter Poetry. It’s a series of cento poems, or collage poems, created using text from the official Twitter accounts of sixteen current and former members of the Real Housewives TV franchise. How it came to be followed a very strange series of events, and I feel like I have to list it in bullet points to illustrate what had to happen to make this happen:

• Learned what a cento is from a submission from an anthology I’m working on.
• Saw The Daily Drunk’s call for submissions for their theme “The Real Housewives of Flavortown.”
• Decided to make a cento for that call based off Erika Girardi because she’s facing legal issues for alleged embezzlement and her Twitter is hilarious and awful.
• Got rejected for that call, sent the Erika poem off to other literary publications.
• Got it accepted by Bullshit Lit Mag, which published it online on April 7.
• Decided to make another poem with Erika and Jen Shah, another Housewife facing criminal charges.
• Got encouraged by my mom and sister who love Real Housewives and decided to just keep making more of these poems to submit because they’re fun to make and these women are wild.
• Got two more poems accepted by Red Ogre Review and Alien Buddha Press for their What’s the Deal with the Alien Buddha? Vol. 2 anthology.
• Sent the completed chapbook to Alien Buddha once completed.

It seems like a weird series of events, but it was a surprisingly laborious process to make this book. I looked over every US Housewife’s Twitter account (I didn’t do the international versions because I needed to cut it off somewhere) to see if I could generate a poem. This meant I looked at over 100 accounts and probably read over 1,000 tweets just to make sixteen poems. But it was a surprisingly worthwhile project in the end. It was a fun challenge to see if I could turn these famous-for-being-famous women into modern day philosophers. Some of the poems come off like villainous monologues, while others are tracts for female empowerment, and then some are just bizarre ramblings about what they’re eating and watching on TV (a lot of these women watch and live tweet about The Masked Singer for some reason).

I really hope people pick up a copy and find hilarity and depth in the collection. A few people I know who read it without watching the shows said they felt like they got who these women were and felt like they could enjoy it without knowing. Hell, I never actually watched a full episode of any version of the show before I started making the book. I just lived in a house with fans of the series who would often watch the show while I was in the room and was into enough adjacent pop culture that I knew enough of the franchise to be motivated for such a project. I think this silly little chapbook is one that will change my life in ways I can’t imagine right now, so I’m proud to have created it.

Your Next Book
I’m working on so many things at once! My friend Rachel Head and I decided to put our friendship to the test by creating a literary group called House of Lobsters Literary, where we’re trying to put together an anthology of literature about the art of drag. We’re accepting submissions until June 30, and we’ve already gotten some amazing pieces. We’re still looking for a publisher, so we hope to find one before the end of the year.

As for my personal writing, I have gotten a lot of poetry published in the last year, so I’ve compiled a few of my published and unpublished works into a chapbook manuscript. I’ve queried a few places and submitted to a few contests, so I hope to hear more about that this year.

Also, for NaPoWriMo, I’m repeating my Real Housewives collage poems with an even bigger one. I’m trying to create thirty collage poems in thirty days, but the Twitter subjects are RuPaul’s Drag Race contestants. It’s a lot more challenging, if only because while Real Housewives was searching a desert for an oasis of content, Drag Race is more like finding a desert island in an ocean of content. You can check my Twitter (@carriganak) to see how this is going, and hopefully when that’s done I’ll have a chapbook’s worth of content there.

Plug a Book
As a reviewer, I feel like I find too many people who more people should find out about. It’s honestly too difficult to choose just one, so I think the easiest thing to do would be to focus on one publisher whose authors have impacted me. I’ve been reading books from CLASH Books for a few years now and have reviewed a good number of them, and pretty much all of them have been bangers. I could recommend so many books, but I’d definitely start with the CLASH works by Charlene Elsby, Kim Vodicka, Greg Mania, Lindsey Lerman, Holly Lyn Walrath, Tea Hacic-Vlahovic amongst their wide catalog. You’ll cover a wide range of emotions reading these works, and it makes me want to see what else they will release.