Woods’ (Things to Do When You’re Goth in the Country, 2017) unshakable memoir is a list of 100 incidents of sexism that she’s experienced in her three decades of life. The chronologically arranged accounts are plain and profound, allowing the actions to speak for themselves, and range in length from a paragraph to a few pages.

In her introduction, Woods explains that this is just one woman’s collection of indignities, and reminds readers that all the trans, queer, and cis/straight women they know have hundreds of their own to share. Between the covers are violent little boys on the playground, predatory high-school teachers, ex-boyfriends who resort to stalking, grown men masturbating at public beaches, and repugnant male roommates who refuse to wear pants. Incredibly, a rich portrait of Woods’ life as an artist and a lover prevails through all of the horror.

Even focusing on sexism, she claims her identity as so much more than a survivor. In the haunting conclusion, Woods reminds readers that there is no such thing as reverse sexism in a world where women are so systematically oppressed, citing gender comparison statistics about rape and homicide. Brilliant and simple, this is sure to advance understanding of a topic of intense national reckoning.

— Booklist

Woods’ writing is deep and dynamic. Her characters are complex and never sink into the ease of generalizations. She spares no experience in her representation of modern America; it is a rare work of literary fiction that fully showcases the rich and diverse American populace. The stories establish instant, distinct voices, much like Roxane Gay’s recent Difficult Women (2016), and fans of Miranda July’s fiction will relish the wily creativity of Woods’ plots. This book is tight, intelligent, and important, and sure to secure Woods a seat in the pantheon of critical twenty-first-century voices.

—  Booklist

 

 

 

 

"Approach all unpleasant tasks in life as a performance art piece,” declares an unnamed 16-year-old goth in Woods’s collection of eight uncompromising stories set in rural Illinois. In visceral descriptions of decay, boredom, and limited opportunities, Woods (The Albino Album) besieges her coming-of-age characters with drugs, guns, jail, pedophilia, and teen pregnancy. (...) As Woods’s characters struggle to eke out an identity, they confront the bleak difficulties of their lives and persist in surviving.
- Publisher's Weekly

"Told with and wit and gravitas, Chavisa Woods’s Things to Do When You’re Goth in the Country provides humane snapshots of outsider communities often overlooked in contemporary fiction." -Lambda

 

Chavisa Woods' Things to Do When You're Goth in the

Country Leads Readers Deep into Rural America 

By Evie Hemphill

Ask southern Illinois native Chavisa Woods where her startling plots and characters come from, and the short answer is her imagination. But as weird and wrenching and "out there" as they may seem, her stories also scream real-life Midwest.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

GO Magazine Reviews Chavisa Woods Debut fiction, Love Does Not Make Me Gentle Or Kind

 

What Woods brings to each of her stories is a startlingly acute emotional description of her characters as they grapple with loss, trauma, and identity—whether sleepwalking through their memories, or perched, wide-awake and hawk-eyed, on the outskirts of town.

 

 

Chavisa Woods’s picaresque novel-cum-LP follows Mya, the nickname of a girl with an unpronounceable name, as she romps across the landscape of sideshow America. Orphaned after accidentally feeding her mother to an albino tiger. (...) While Woods creates a sympathetic character in the wise yet feral Mya.

A review by Sara Rauch

The Albino Album

It’s a new vision of America. Seriously.
This book will grab you by the throat and not let up for 550 pages and when you’re finished you’ll wish you were back in its jaws.

 

Chavisia Woods' prose explodes the connection between patriarchal tyranny and fascism. It is within that spectacle of explosion that the contemporary American Zeitgeist becomes illuminated. . Love Does Not Make Me Gentle Or Kind is as much an indictment of the ignorant and sadistic among us as it is of the collective atmosphere of indifference that nurtures the same. 

The Brooklyn Rail Prose Round Up on Woods' Love Does Not Make Me Gentle or Kind

 

Most gripping are stories that, like real dreams, institute close connections between reality and fantasy.

 

 In "The Bell Tower," Woods brings a deftness and lightness of touch to a situation seemingly impossible to depict. A young woman falls in love, and mates with a bull buffalo. Scene after scene that might have been ludicrous is made magical. The two "elope," taking her lover's herd with them. The narrator comments, "He was the only leader I ever fully trusted, and the only lover I have ever kept. When I became tired, he carried me on his back. When I was injured, he licked my wounds."

Not all of Woods’ stories contain fantasy. Some are straightforward, observant realism, usually telling the stories of young girls, often social-outcast lesbians, raised by abusive fathers and ineffectual mothers. Pieces such as "The Smallest Actions" chillingly describes the kind of temporary amnesia younger children experience when an abusive dad passes through a period of parental affection

In Woods' most striking manipulations of form, she presents texts that are purely realistic, until the very last paragraph, when they brutally swerve into fantasy. "Mr. Bunny," for instance, describes a man who is eagle-eye alert to evidence of disrespect. It would be classified first-rate realism if not for a sudden burst of fantasy in the denouncement.