Chavisa Woods' Books

"This Book is tight, intelligent, and important, and sure to secure Woods a seat in the pantheon of critical twenty-first-century voices." —  Booklist

"[Things To Do When You're Goth in the Country is a] collection of eight uncompromising stories set in rural Illinois. In visceral descriptions of decay, boredom, and limited opportunities, (...) Woods’s characters struggle to eke out an identity, as they confront the bleak difficulties of their lives and persist in surviving."
- Publisher's Weekly

“You can say that these stories seem like they were ready made for a post 2017 election but they were written during the Obama presidency; the experience of America that many people have woken up to in the last six months is the America that has been happening since the beginning of this country. Chavisa Woods writes with vision and experience from “this moment between” delivering us into the world that’s always been here.”  — Electric Lit

"Think of Woods as a literary exorcist, calling out certain entities that possess rural America: isolation, working-class poverty, drugs, incarceration, military dogma, and evangelical religion." — The Rumpus

"I can’t think of any other book that captures the essence of America the way this collection does—it is nuanced and provocative, heartfelt and funny and wise."  
—Lambda Literary Review

"Woods' tone brings a certain frankness that makes everything from the banal to the patently ridiculous seem utterly believable."- Pop Matters

"These are weird tales, well-told, deliciously funny (...)What most haunts the protagonists assembled in these excellent stories is a sense of guilt, the dark side effect of American exceptionalism."- DecomP Magazine

Things to Do When You’re Goth in the Country.
Woods, Chavisa (author).
May 2017. 224p. Seven Stories, hardcover, $23.95
 (9781609807450). 

Chavisa Woods' Things to Do When You're Goth in the Country is part Flannery O'Connor, part Kelly Link: darkly funny and brilliantly human, urgently fantastical and implacably realistic. This is one of the best short story collections I've read in years, and it should be required reading for anyone who's trying to understand America in  2017." —Paul La Farge, author of The Night Ocean (Penguin)

“Things to Do When You're Goth in the Country” (Seven Stories Press, 2017; 200 pages) paints a vivid image of the bizarre characters that live on the fringes in America’s heartland. They don't do what you expect them to do. These aren't typical stories of triumph over adversity, but something completely other. It's "Murakami meets the meth heads" says National Book Foundation award winner, Samantha Hunt. "Reader, you have never before seen anything like this." 

The eight stories in this literary collection present a brilliantly surreal and sardonic landscape and language, and offer a periscope into the heart of the rural poor. Among the singular characters, you'll meet: a “zombie” who secretly resides in a local cemetery; a queer teen goth who is facing ostracism from her small town evangelical church; a woman who leaves New York City once a year to visit her little brothers in the backwoods Midwest, only to discover they’ve been having trouble with some meth dealers and UFOs that trouble the area. In the backdrop of all the stories are the endless American wars and occupations, overshadowed, for these characters, by the many early deaths of their friends and family, that occur regularly for a whole host of reasons.

 

Things to do When You're Goth in the Country Excerpted in LitHUB

Chavisa Woods breaks down the essential books for class-conscious readers who like their literature dark and rural

Iwas born and raised in a small, rural farm town, and was a queer punky goth teenager. So, I know what it’s like to simultaneously feel right at home, and yet, totally alien. But the country is ripe with all sorts of contradictions. It’s a place of natural abundance, but many country-folk are just scraping by. The country is peaceful, but it is also known for unregulated violence. The country is a place of extreme isolation, but it is also a place where anonymity is impossible. Everyone knows everyone else’s business. People who live in the country are thick. And if you’re an outsider coming in, you are made quickly aware that everyone knows, you’re not from around here, are you?

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