As She Shuts Down Bookslut, Jessa Crispin Doesn't Mince Words

Well, the final issue of Bookslut has arrived! Editor Jessa Crispin talks about the decision to shut down the journal at Vulture, and she's beyond refreshing: "There’s always space to do whatever you want. You won’t get as much attention, but fuck attention. Fight for integrity."

More from Crispin's conversation with Boris Kachka:

A couple of newspapers refused to use the word Bookslut, and so did your parents. Did you ever regret the name?

No, fuck them! I was working at Planned Parenthood — at the time, it was like a babe space. One time my co-worker gave me a pap smear during a meeting. It was just a weird commune mentality, so it didn’t occur to me, honestly, that it might be a problem. Why wouldn’t you be totally comfortable with your co-worker swabbing your cervix?

You still edit a literary journal, Spolia. What will become of that?

I haven’t decided yet. I mean I have to pay translators and I have to pay the designer and all that kind of stuff. I’m not a very good businessperson.

You’re pretty well-known for your tarot sessions; your book The Creative Tarot was widely written about. That must pay pretty well.

It does! It’s doing okay.

Does it get in the way of writing time?

No, it helps the writing. Most of my clients are writers coming with creative problems. To talk through somebody else’s creative problems makes you more perceptive about your own. Plus it’s a nice break. It helps you get out of your head.

Speaking of that, Spolia’s mission statement deplores “personal essays” where writing is reduced to “self-expression.” But so many Bookslut essays were first-person — which I thought was meant as an antidote to professional criticism.

Right, The New York Times Book Review was “I am God.” There wasn’t a sense of the personal. At the time, I wanted more about what a book means to us without dragging authority into it. Now it’s overcorrected, but for example, there was an essay in the Walrus recently that was like, “Stop talking about yourself in reviews!” I don’t think that’s thoughtful either. There’s a way to do it and be smart about it.

Check out the April and May 2016 issues of Bookslut on your way out--there's a review of John Godfrey's The City Keeps: Selected and New Poems 1966-2014 (Wave Books, 2016), and a worthwhile essay about Simone Weil's late politics and philosophy, particularly as read in On the Abolition of All Political Parties. Nicholas Vajifdar concludes the piece with a rather apropos inquiry:

In other times and places, in Europe and India and Asia, saints and saints manqués were set out among us, visible, not as a rebuke or a boast but as an illustration that there is a world elsewhere. Writing can teach much the same lesson, if it wants to. Books by the dead, pamphlets by the bizarre, rantings by Weil and Weil-like beings, brave and persnickety journals like this one: these point a way out of the daily predicament.

But -- what if they leave us?