Sara Jaffe

Come join us for an evening with Jibz Cameron AKA Dynasty Handbag as she chats with Sara Jaffe (@allhooknochorus ) about her memoir: HELL IN A HANDBAG! After their conversation, we'll open it up to Q&A, then a book signing and photo opportunity. ❤️‍🔥 A freak’s freak, iconoclast performance artist Jibz Cameron is best known for her multimedia act Dynasty Handbag, an alter ego lampooning the tragic absurdity of heterosexuality, queerness, the female body, capitalism, depression, art making, and life itself. With her debut memoir Hell in a Handbag, Cameron traces her warped and inspired perspective from a childhood spent with hippie clowns on the broken-down commune scene of Northern California, to making morbid zines as a teen in the East Bay punk scene, to in-your-face experiences of misogyny in New York City’s avant-garde theater scene, to the grisly birth of Dynasty Handbag and her droll evisceration of contemporary life. An engrossing and swiftly paced story as candid as it is wise, Hell in a Handbag is an immersion in unhinged queer genius. 👜 Jibz Cameron is a writer, performer, visual artist, and actor. She is most well known for her multimedia performance work as alter ego Dynasty Handbag, which has spanned over twenty years. 🎵 Sara Jaffe is a writer living in Portland, OR. Hurricane Envy, a short story collection, is out now from Rescue Press. 🎟️ 𝗧𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗹𝘆 𝗳𝗿𝗲𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗻𝗱, 𝗯𝘂𝘁 𝗥𝗦𝗩𝗣𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗱 👉 𝗣𝗿𝗲𝗼𝗿𝗱𝗲𝗿 𝗮 𝗰𝗼𝗽𝘆 + 𝗥𝗦𝗩𝗣 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸𝘀! 👈 📍Where: 4555 N Williams Ave ⌛When: 5/10 @ 6:30P ‼️As always, events are sober, sensory-friendly, and 𝗺𝗮𝘀𝗸𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗿𝗲𝗾𝘂𝗶𝗿𝗲𝗱. Find our full accessibility statement on our site ✅ Testing highly encouraged prior to attending! (You can pick up a test from us for free) Image description: On a green background, the text "Jibz Cameron x Sara Jaffe" below a horizontal logo of Always Here Bookstore. On the left, a picture of the cover of HELL IN A HANDBAG. On the right, a portrait of the author. Below, a portrait of Sara Jaffe. Below that, the text "5/10 @ 6:30P"

So much gratitude to and love for the people and places that made this east coast trip such a sweet whirlwind. To the dear friends new and old who showed up, and @rescuepress and @brickbatphilly and @hivemindbookstore and @sklimnagem for the mini-tour. You all have made me and HURRICANE ENVY feel so welcome in the world. Huge love to @nadiacannon for creating the conditions to make it all happen.

Mid-Atlantic mini-tour coming on up! Maybe I’ll see you at @rescuepress AWP off-site in Baltimore or @brickbatphilly with @sklimnagem and rad others or @hivemindbookstore in Brooklyn w Megan again??

✨ Author Event ✨ Monday, March 9 7p Megan Milks & Sara Jaffe Reading, conversation and book signing FREE to attend. RSVP 🔗 bio 🐄 🌀 🐄 🌀 🐄 🌀 🐄 🌀 🐄 🌀 🐄 🌀 🐄 Join us at Hive Mind Books in Bushwick for a queer literary double header! One night only: the incomparable, the stupendous, the not-to-be-missed Megan Milks and Sara Jaffe are teaming up to present their brand new books, Mega Milk: Essays and Hurricane Envy. After the reading and conversation, both authors will sign copies of their books. ABOUT MEGA MILK A sparkling, funny, and often wrenching portrait-in-essays on the dairy industry, queer intimacy, family, fluidity, whiteness, and cows. For decades, Megan Milks has wondered what it means to share a last name with the classic white American beverage. Now, Milks takes on their namesake subject in all its dimensions, venturing into the worlds of small dairies, bovine genetics, and manure while also turning their eye on their family and themself. The resulting essays connect the dots between human lactation, Big Dairy, being queer and lonely, climate change, transmasculinity, the bull semen industry, the milky roots of white supremacy, and the best practices for giving and receiving a hug. With Mega Milk, Megan Milks confirms their place as one of our most exciting queer thinkers and writers. ABOUT HURRICANE ENVY The stories in this collection explore the textures and tensions of contemporary life, pressing on our ambivalence, how we belong to but differ from the world around us. Characters struggle to be perceived by others as they perceive themselves—as an authentic artist, a “good white person,” a legitimate parent. Jaffe brings her keen eye and her formal ingenuity to subjects that range from queer parenting, to the rise of the algorithm in the music industry, to gentrification and institutional claims on art, to post-punk culture, anti-Zionist Jewish identity, the rhetoric and realities of American safety. 🐄 🌀 🐄 🌀 🐄 🌀 🐄 🌀 🐄 🌀 🐄 🌀 🐄 Hive Mind Books Queer Bookstore & Coffee Shop 219 Irving Avenue Bushwick (L) Dekalb (M/L) Myrtle-Wyckoff (M) Knickerbocker #authorevent #booksigning #queerbookstore #brooklyn #bushwick

Hey friends, I’ve recently updated my editorial services page. Please share and send folks my way! And hey if I’ve ever offered you some useful writing feedback and you feel like sharing in the comments, I’d love it. Thank you!! Link in bio.

What a night!!!! The notes and noise we needed. Thank you so much to Jenny, Ilyas, TJ, and Marisa, and of course to @picapdx , so good always at bringing us together. Btw if you haven’t checked out the EARTH TO YOU compilation featuring these and other incredible guitarists, link is in my bio!

Such an incredibly special night at @wfmu ‘s Monty Hall celebrating the EARTH TO YOU comp with Bill Nace, Emily Robb, and Ava Mendoza. The stuff of guitar dreams. Thanks so much to all the performers and FMU and @scottwilliams2989 for helping it happen.

In just a little over a week (Monday 1/26!) I will be in conversation in NYC @ptknitwear with @tillwhentillman whose work means the world to me—from her newest books to her older ones to the ones I was incredibly lucky to shepherd into being with New Herring Press. Can’t wait.

On January 31, join writer Sara Jaffe with eight of her favorite guitar players—former comrades and new favorites—for “EARTH TO YOU,” a musical compilation in response to Jaffe’s short story of the same name. The performance features Ilyas Ahmed, Marisa Anderson, Jenny Hoyston, and Tara Jane O’Neil, who each contributed tracks to the compilation, as well as a reading by Jaffe and possible special guests. Tickets are on sale and going fast! Link in bio ✨ Photos courtesy of the artists #picapdx #whattodothisweekendpdx #portlandlivemusic #portlandmusicscene #portlandmusicians

Sara Jaffe, ex-guitarist for the early-00’s punk band Erase Errata, follows her first novel Dryland with a collection of superb short stories, Hurricane Envy. The story “Earth To You” portrays the 27-year-old acupressure therapist Helen’s guitar-playing origins. She learns equally from an awkward teenager trying to earn some cash as she does from the enigmatic West, self-taught and chaotic. Helen ultimately rejects proper technique, preferring instead raw sonics and experimentation. Jaffe invited eight of her favorite guitarists to create pieces inspired by the story and compiled them in Earth To You: Guitar Players Respond to a Short Story About a Guitar Player, now available on @bandcamp . The tracks range from plaintive to destructive, all sounding as if recorded on an old walkman in a dusty bedroom. The half hour album is tight, fiery and focused. At times primitive, other moments nuanced, always concise. [See the three paragraphs in second image] Many of Hurricane Envy’s stories are directly about music, and some use sound as a sensation-generating tool. Jaffe describes a pebble as “calm, but not without noise” in “Pockets.” She repeats “my baby” fifty-two times in “Baby In a Bar”, accenting the prose’s rhythm like kick drum hits. “Earth To You” and its coinciding album are enjoyable as single entities but work best as a multimedia experience. Read, then listen, or read and listen at the same time. If the album is the noise, the story is the body. -Ben Holt UPCOMING EVENTS WITH SARA JAFFE: The East Coast event for EARTH TO YOU will be at @wfmu ‘s Monty Hall on Friday January 23 with Bill Nace, @avamendozamuzak and @ahumancertainly . Jan 26 6:30pm: A reading @ptknitwear (NY NY) with @tillwhentillman Portland event for the EARTH TO YOU compilation with @iilyasaahmed @marisaandersonmusic @hoyston and @tarajaneoneil on January 31 7pm at @picapdx .

Two books I read and loved recently, NIGHT NIGHT FAWN by @jordyrosenberg and THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF H. LAN THAO LAM by Lana Lin. Both exploding with possibility of what fiction and nonfiction, both respectively and bothwise, can do. FAWN carving a world with its causticness and humor and the pressure of its negative spaces, AUTOBIOGRAPHY with its ingenious taking up of Autobiography of Alice B Toklas and so much love, might be the most romantic book I’ve read. Both of these books deeply politically engaged in different ways, both ways I so admire. What a bright way to end a variously tragic year.

You guys, this one is a really big deal, teenage-dream level one for me. The East Coast event for the EARTH TO YOU comp will be at @wfmu ‘s Monty Hall on Friday January 23 with Bill Nace, @avamendozamuzak and @ahumancertainly . FMU is the source of much of what I am and it means so much to bring my writing and music selves together there. Tri-state pals I hope you can make it!! Link for tix in bio