Daily Inspiration: Meet Michelle Tea

Today we’d like to introduce you to Michelle Tea.

Hi Michelle, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Always writing since I was a kid, I began to take it seriously as a practice when I moved to San Francisco in 1992, at 21. The city was alive with open mics poetry events every night of the week, in bars and coffee houses and art spaces. Writing had been complicated for me, because I didn’t want to invest time in something that didn’t have a larger life or purpose, and I never thought I would write a book or be able to get one published. After a year of college I’d dropped out, unable to pay and not understanding how to get help around that. So these open mics gave me a venue to share my work, they kept me writing so that I could partcicp0ate in this community of freaky writers, they gave me a writing community and even functioned as a provider of critical feedback as I sensed what poems landed with the audience and which didn’t by the silence or noise during my reading, and by the compliments I did or didn’t get after. Many of the writers I met in this scene are or were lifelong comrades – Ali Liebegott, Bucky Sinister, Beth Lisick, Justin Chin.

In 1994 Sini Anderson, a dancer and slam poet from Chicago, moved to town wanting to start an all-girl open mic. The city badly needed this; I loved the wild west vibes of the open mics, but they contained a lot of misogynist men reading shitty work. Also, I knew the raucous environment would be too intimidating for lots of female or femme writers to bring vulnerable work to. Harry Dodge at the Beaded Lady Cage, where all queer ‘girls’ wound up when they landed in SF, put Sini in touch with me, telling her I knew the poetry terrain and could suggest who she could feature at her open mic. We really connected, and she asked me to just co-host it with her, and Sister Spit was born. It ran as a free, weekly all-girl open mic for two years, and we got to feature folks like Eileen Myles, Mary Gaitskill, Bambi Lake, Harry Dodge and so many others.

Burned out, we quit the open mic for a couple years, during which I played drums in the band Dirt Bike Gang. Even though we were NOT GOOD we still were able to have the heady adventure of touring the west coast, crashing on stranger’s floors and enjoying #vanlife. My band was super dysfunctional, so when we got back to SF I quit, but I kept thinking about touring. If my shitty band could do it, wouldn’t a van full of actually brilliant writers be able to do it even better? I brought the idea of a Sister Spit tour to Sini and she loved it. We put the names of all our favorite writer friends in a hat and pulled them out. We pulled out too many, but it set a precedent – for the next there years we would pick too many names for the summertime Sister Spit tour, always requiring us to have multiple vehicles (failing 70s vans, borrowed parental minivans), and our shows would be too long. But the would loved us. Sister Spit stopped in 1999, though I brought it back in 2007 as Sister Spit: The Next Generation, in order to bring new crews of younger writers on the road alongside icons like Dorothy Alison, Eileen Myles and Justin Vivian Bond. Me and Sini still sometimes take the show on the road, if we’re invited.

During this era I’d befriended Eileen Myles, my very favorite and most influential writer. She tricked me into sending her some of my writing, saying she was going to show it to a literary magazine or something. Really, she was sending it to Chris Kraus, the editor of Semiotext(e)’s Native Agent series, a cult obsession that has published Eileen, Chris, Cookie Mueller, Lynn Tilman, Ann Rower, all sort of counterculture authors i was obsessed with. When Chris asked is I had a book, I realized that the many short pieces of memoir I’d written could be divided in two – one full of stories about growing up and coming of age in New England, another real-time vignettes about my life in San Francisco. The first pile wound up becoming The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America; the second, my second book, Valencia, which won the Lambda Book Award for Best Lesbian Fiction the year it came out.

From there, I was able to keep publishing, always finding my way to different presses, often through the help of friends or my own personal connections. The Chelsea Whistle, like Valencia, came out on Seal Press back when it was an independent, lesbian-run publisher. Rent Girl was published on Last Gasp of San Francisco, who were comfortable doing illustrated novels and, as a book distributor, noticed that people had been buying my books. My poetry collection, The Beautiful, wound up on Manic D Press, helmed by Jennifer Joseph, who had long hosted the most popular open mic in the city. My first novel, Rose of No Man’s Land, landed with an independent literary press that has since gone under, placed there by a friend who also published with them. My Chelsea Mermaid trilogy – Mermaid in Chelsea Creek, Girl at the Bottom of the Sea and Castle on the River Vistula, wound up with McSweeney’s after I mentioned it to Vendela Vida at a party. Eventually I got an agent and began publishing with the ‘big five’ – books like How to Grow Up, Modern Tarot and my upcoming Free Love: Adventures in Marriage and Polyamory. But I’ve continued to published with independent presses as well, such as The Feminist Press, who took a chance on my speculative memoir Black Wave, my novel Little F, and published a collection of my essays that won a pretty great award from a prestigious organization currently being boycotted for having shitty policies around Palestinian liberation and the genocide in Gaza.

While while writing and publishing I’ve also continued the work begun with Sister Spit – finding platforms for marginalized queer writers, writers whose work was too real, raw and perverse to find a home in more ‘gay friendly’ literary spaces. For 13 years I acted as Founding Executive Director of RADAR Productions, a queer literary non-profit that hosted countless events and tour and ran a queer writing retreat where we hosted folks like Maggie Nelson, Thomas McBee and Myriam Gurba. My final act before leaving as ED was to create Drag Queen Story Hour, which my successors implemented and which has become an international sensation. I ran an imprint, Sister Spit Books, with City Lights, publishing work by Ali Liebegott, Beth Lisick, Lenelle Moise and others. Later, I created the Amethyst Editions imprint at The Feminist Press, bringing out work from Brontez Purnell, Julian Delgado Lopera, Ariel Gore and others. The imprint continues to publish experimental queer work though I no longer operate it.

In 2023, with arts worker Beth Pickens and author/designer Brooke Palmieri I launched DOPAMINE Books, and innovatiive publishing collaboration with my very first publisher, Semiotext(e). Piggybacking on our parent press’ catalog and distribution, we are a non-profit that is fully self-funded and we make 100% of our own decisions. We publish three books a year by authors such as Vera Blossom, Jibz Cameron and L Scully, as well as annual themed anthologies featuring writing from folks such as Kate Bornstein, Rachel Yoder, Marcia Chatelain and many, many more.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Struggles are mostly if not entirely economic. It is a giant hustle even today. But I am so proud of eveything I’ve put out and have helped find its place in the world.

Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I wrote mostly memoir/autofiction, and even my fictional works are heavily influenced by the life I’ve lived. My books contain themes such as queerness, sex work, goth, drugs, sex, alcoholism, Polish mermaids who swear like Polish truck drivers, working class/low-income experience, longing, sexual abuse, family, family-making, sobriety, tarot, magic, queer teenaged runaways, the apocalypse, music, all sorts of stuff. I’ve also published some children’s books – Astro Baby and two related kids’ astrology books, Libra and Scorpio. Also a drag queen story hour inspired book ,Tabitha and Magoo Dress Up Too. I’m most proud of being able to publish in a variety of genres with so many different cool publishers.

Are there any apps, books, podcasts, blogs or other resources you think our readers should check out?
I mostly use apps for incredibly basic things like finding directions or buying movie tickets or ordering food or buying second hand purses. The books that help me live my best life are the boos that keep me inspired, wanting to write and thinking new thoughts. Right now I am deeply obsessed with Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race Traumatophilia by Avgi Saketopoulou. Its about perversion as the natural state of our sexuality, and the way that sexual overwhelm can shatter the ego and create very deep experiences – among other things! I love my friends’ Substacks – Clint Catalyst, Beth Lisick, Bucky Sinister, Ali Liebegott’s Dad Bod and Carley Moore’s My Subby. Hannah Rose Winston’s The Clown Show.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.michelle-tea.com
• Instagram: @MichelleTeaz

Image Credits
Faryl Amadeus