← The Shit No One Tells You About Writing
The Shit No One Tells You About Writing
The Stories We Tell Ourselves to Make Them More Palatable
00:33:06
Author Interview Sarah Chihaya
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- [00:00]
Carly Waters
It's a new year and time to get fresh eyes on your work in progress. Are you looking for beta readers, some of whom might potentially become writing group members down the line? Are you wanting to be matched up with those writing in a similar genre and or time zone so they can critique your work as you critique theirs? At the same time, your manuscript doesn't have to be complete to sign up for this 3,000 word evaluation. This matchup will be open to registrations from now until the 2nd of March, with the matchup emails going out on the 3rd of March. Always such an exciting day. For more information and to register, go to Biancamarae.com and go to the Beta Reader Matchup tab. And please spread the word. Even if you aren't joining the matchup this time, the more writers we have signed up, the better the matches will be.
- [00:57]
Bianca Murray
Hi there and welcome to our show. Shit, no one tells you about writing. I'm Bianca Murray and I'm joined by.
- [01:05]
Carly Waters
Carly Waters and Cece Lehrer from PS Literary Agency.
- [01:10]
Bianca Murray
Today's guest is a critic and essayist and the recipient of a 2023 Whiting Creative Nonfiction grant. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the Nation, New York Magazine, and the Yale Review, among other publications, and she is the co author of the Ferrante An Experiment in Collect of Criticism. She lives in Queens, New York. It's my pleasure today to welcome Sarah Chaya. Sarah, welcome to the show.
- [01:41]
Sarah Chihaya
Hi. Thank you very much, Jako. Thank you for having me.
- [01:45]
Bianca Murray
Yeah, it's wonderful to have you. So for our listeners, I'm just going to read the flap copy to you and then we're going to dive in because there's just so much to unpack here, both as readers, which I know we all are, because writers come to reading because they loved reading in the first.
- [02:00]
Sarah Chihaya
Sorry.
- [02:00]
Bianca Murray
Writers come to writing because they loved reading in the first place. So there's so much to love you both as a reader and as a writer. So I'm going to read you the flat copy for the book we're discussing, which is Bibliophobia. So have you ever read a book that complicated everything you believed in and forever changed the way you read the world? A book that made you sit differently in your own skin? This is what critic Sarah Chehaya calls a life ruiner. Sarah's life ruiner was the Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. Once she read it, she could no longer pretend not to notice how alien she felt as a Japanese American in a predominantly white suburb of Cleveland, and she set out on a quest for the story that would show her who she was and how to live in an inhospitable world. There were lots of scripts available, and she tried to follow them. Skinny athlete, angsty artist, ambitious academic, but a lifelong struggle with depression thwarted the resolution to every plot, and when she was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown, the world became an unreadable blank page. In the aftermath, she was faced with the question, can we ever truly rewrite the stories that govern our lives? Alternately searing and darkly humorous, Bibliophobia is a deft combination of memoir and criticism. Through a series of books including the Bluest Eye, Anne of Green Gables, Possession, A Tale for the Time Being, and the Last Samurai, Chihaya interrogates her cultural identity, her relationship with depression, and the necessary and painful ways that books can push back on the reader's who love them. And for those of you who've listened to recent shows in which we've discussed, like, how much living how much heavy lifting is the reader expected to do compared to how much heavy lifting is the author compared to do? We've recently been having a lot more of these conversations, which is why I'm especially excited to chat with Sarah today. Sarah, can you kick us off by reading us a few pages from the book, please?
- [04:06]
Sarah Chihaya
Sure. This used to be the very thing I loved about books. I loved that they were always there, and I loved the trust I had that there was a book for every need. But this love was complicated from the beginning. Reading was escapism of a kind, but not in the conventional sense. It was a way to get far away from my life and to feel not better, but simply different. Up until high school, I spent the hours between the end of school and the end of my mom's workday in our town's small public library. I roamed the shelves and picked books at random to read instead of doing homework sprawled on the floor in the aisles. Even though the old library was tiny and a surprisingly large part of it was devoted to the history of Hudson, Ohio, it still felt, curiously like infinity. All feelings that anyone had ever felt, good or bad, seemed to be contained there, a thought that was more terrifyingly exciting or excitingly terrifying than comforting. I am disturbed and irritated whenever I encounter the moralizing claim that the main point of reading fiction is relentlessly positive self improvement. Reading is good because it makes you good. To think of reading in this reductive way is insulting both to books and to their readers. Being good or becoming better? How can anyone think this is the limit of the literary imagination. This way of thinking also presses the act of reading into a kind of service. Even pleasure reading is so often put to work in public discourse, producing politically expedient or personally therapeutic sentiments. The very worst, writing about novels reduces them to factories for empathy and sympathy. But why should reading always have to generate something useful, whether it be heartwarming inspiration or ideal or liberal subjects? I want to think of reading not as productivity, but as a kind of produce something that grows in whatever unpredictable whale, sometimes smooth and beautiful and delicious, sometimes bitter and gnarled and thorny. I want to think with writers who, as Satalo Calvino writes marvelously in if on Winter's Night a Traveler produce books as a pumpkin vine grows pumpkins fruit for fruit's sake, not for the sake of whatever moral preserve or pedagogical jolly can be made of it. And I want to read as though eating whatever grows in those vines, an operation that is at once thoughtful and sensory, absorbing thought with one's whole body. Sometimes it is nutritious, sometimes it is poisonous. Sometimes, surprisingly often, is both. For better or worse, you are what you eat. The books that refused to be easily digested, the ones that turn up anxieties and fears you never knew you had, these are the ones that most strongly shaped my own experience as an adult. Looking back, they shaped even some of my earliest and clearest memories of reading both books and the world outside them. I've only recently come to see that my relationship with books has become, or always has been, an uncomfortable but necessary vacillation between love and terror, between bibliophilia and bibliophobia. There are two imaginary texts that have always been on my mind, stories that offer the comforting illusion of form in a formless life. The first is the Creation of the Source. Since I was a child, I have secretly believed that if I read enough, perhaps one day the right book would come along and save me. It is perhaps the closest thing I've ever had to a religious faith. It's like the fanatical conviction certain die hard romantics have that one day they'll just meet their person and life will surely begin. Through all these years and all these thousands of books, I've been looking for a text that would explain everything to me, by which I arrogantly mean myself and the world, and how these two things relate and in explaining, make clear the way out of the limbo I've always been stuck in. I have auditioned many books for this role over the years, and no matter how many of them don't Work out. I always believe that the next one will be it. The last page of that book would be the first page of my real life. But like all creation myth, it is inextricable from a story of destruction. For many, many years, I had the queasy feeling that my life was a book that was not very long and not terribly interesting. I was never sure where I was in the plotline and often felt like I'd lost my place. Whenever things got dark and muddled, a singular way to resolve the narrative suddenly got very clear. It could always just end. I'd find myself suddenly arrived at the last few pages and eager to tear through them, even as just a couple of days before, it seemed like there were many long, boring chapters left. It was a magical book. The table of contents could always shift. And the inevitable dinemo. The inevitable denouement. Sorry, the inevitable denouement could appear at any time. To say it had a plot is perhaps inaccurate because there was only one point I was certain of. The conclusion. I didn't know where the idea of suicide came from or when it came to me. It seemed inscribed in my pages from the start, as though it was one of the unspoken rules of the genre I was written in. Maybe it was the genre. It was never of Revelation, never a twist. I was always sure that the book of my life would be a short one. And the last word had been set in type the day I was born. These two stories needed each other. If I was, as I believed, headed inexorably towards this one ending, my only hope was to find the right book to wield before me and challenge my fate before I got there. This begins to make sense of why I was always reading with such vicious desperation. And maybe why the books that drew blood were also the ones that I kept closest. They were like talismans that, having taken something from me, might offer some protection in return. The books that frightened me showed me the bloodiest, most essential truths, hurt me in a way I needed to be hurt, showed me glimpses of the real self within. I loved them more fiercely because of it. The moments when I felt the life taking, life giving power of books only made me ask more of them than I should have. Books, like people, should not be asked to save us. It's not a fair demand, but perhaps some part of me also believes that I might need some darkness to fight darkness. I have come to understand that these myths are not myths at all. The book that would kill me and the book that might save me sadness in reading self harm and writing are the violent lifelong habits that have made me who I am. For me, being a depressed person and being a reader writer are knotted up in each other all the way back to the beginning. All my crises are scrawled in the margins of the novels I've read over and over again, sometimes to feel safe, sometimes to sink well fully into further despair. These are the books I want to read here to try and explain myself, knowing full well that explanation is impossible.
- [11:21]
Bianca Murray
Amazing, Sarah. Thank you so much. There were so many parts in this book that I just underlined and I was highlighting and underlining and highlighting because I think, and for our listeners as well, so much of this will resonate, you know, both as a reader and as a writer. This need to express ourselves, this need to feel understood, this understanding that it's kind of futile and what we demand of books is, in fact, too much. And I love how throughout the book, you weigh up all of these questions and grapple with this throughout. And when I got to the end of Green Gables part, I squealed, because that was the first book that I absolutely, desperately fell in love with. And I was this little kid from South Africa. I didn't even. I thought, you know, it was some magical place. I didn't even realize it was a real place in Canada. So can you take us a bit through when you decided to write this book as you approached it? I mean, you must have had quite a few books that you were like, these are the ones that define me. These are the ones that are life runners. How did you set about the process of going, okay, these are the books that I'm going to choose, and how will they fit the narrative arc or the theme of what I'm trying to say in each instance there?
- [12:35]
Cece Lehrer
Sure.
- [12:36]
Sarah Chihaya
It was very hard. It was. As you will know, and as any lifelong reader knows, it's very hard to narrow down and sort of winnow down the books that mean so much to you, because so many of them do. I had to. Writing this book was a process of sort of narrowing down what stories I had to tell and which stories I just wanted to tell. I think there's, you know, there's a version of it that's like twice this length, that has other chapters that I wrote and discarded for a long time. It had a very different, long beginning that was sort of meandering. A letter to a friend and also to myself about writing the book and how I had to write the book and blah, blah, blah. And that stayed with the book for about half of it. And then At a certain point, my editor was like, just this. Really, do we need to have this here? So it's. It's been a constant process of cutting down what I just was sort of wanting to tell and what I had to tell. And what has resulted is, I think, this sort of slimmest version of what I had to tell. And as a result, all of those chapters had books that went with them. And so I also had to lose those books as the chapters went out, which was sort of heartbreaking. There were, I think, because my background is academic, so I still have that kind of academic urge to, like, if I have a really good idea about a book, I want everyone to know or I want to sort of lay my claim on it. So part of me was also getting over that, the sort of desire to say everything that I could say at once. And I think it was. You know, it's like. It's a learning process of realizing that there's more time. I don't have to say everything at once. I don't have to articulate all of my ideas in one place. And there will be, hopefully, I'm knocking hopefully, other books and hopefully other places to state these things and other places to talk about the books that have meant a lot to me, whether they're here with you or things that I write in the future. So I've really narrowed down to the parts of the story that I had to tell. Being in the hospital and then what sort of took me there and what took me out of it. And as a result, every chapter is about a book. And so what ends up is just this sort of sampling of books that have mattered to me. But by no means is it all of them. For a long time, I really sort of wanted in my heart to write a chapter about Susan Cooper's the Darkest Rising, which was a very important book to me as a child, and it's still a very important book to me. I was just rereading it at Midwinter because I read it every year, and. And I couldn't really think of a story that went with it. It didn't go with a chapter of my life, maybe because it's been with me for so long. I couldn't think of, like, a. I've been sort of thinking of these chapters as movements, and I couldn't really think of a movement that went with that book that would go in this story. Maybe in the future there's another story that that book will go with.
- [16:00]
Bianca Murray
Yeah, that makes complete sense. And it's also interesting to me, how life ruinous can change as we change. You know, the same way they say you can never step into the same river twice because you are not the same person and the river is not the same. There's some books for me that were life ruinous for 10 years and when came back to read them again after 15 years, I had changed so much that the book no longer had that impact and it just fell flat. But some books really hold up. And isn't that incredible when after how many years you come back to a book and you're like, oh my God, it's held up.
- [16:34]
Sarah Chihaya
Yeah, it's really, I mean it's, it's a wonderful surprise. Sometimes it's sort of scary because you're like, have I not changed enough for this book to have changed? There's the part in Ellie Smith's Artful where she actually talks about that exact thing. She uses that Horizon says books, you never step in the same book twice because you are a different person. And that makes it a different book. It's a double edged sword. Sometimes it's wonderful to find that a book is the same. Sometimes you expect something different from it and, or from yourself and you think that should be different. Sometimes it doesn't live up to sort of what you, the pressure you put on it, what you thought it was. It makes you wonder sort of what if you're up to these things in the intervening five years, what are they up to? What is the book doing?
- [17:25]
Bianca Murray
Yeah, very much so. But sometimes I love how when I come back to a book, somebody who perhaps who I thought of as the villain or the antagonist, and as life changes you, you know, you start to view that differently because I know when I was young things were very black and white. They were either right or they were wrong and there was no in between. And the one thing that I've gotten more comfortable with as I've gotten older is, well, it's the gray areas, it's the uncertainty, it's the. Well, we can't really know for sure. And certainly when I come back to older books, I certainly come back with a bit more compassion and a bit more life experience, which is interesting. And something you said there as well is like the iceberg principle of writing. You know, just because you as the author know all these things doesn't mean all of these things have to go into the book. You know, a book should be like an iceberg. There's what you see in the book and underneath there's all these things that the writer knows and like you say, maybe they'll find their way into another book, maybe they won't, but it doesn't mean that everything, you know, has to be there. How as well, Sarah, did you curb? I don't want to say curb, but, you know, you come from academia and generally when I read fiction, and this is not fiction, this is memoir. But when I read works from people who have written in academia, the text is very dry, it's very matter of fact, it's stick to the facts, etc. But then how do you change that narrative voice and that entire approach when you are writing a memoir which demands that you not be dry and matter of fact and that you get into the messy emotions?
- [19:00]
Sarah Chihaya
I think there are a couple of answers to that. First, I think that I was never a great fit for academic writing. It was something that I sort of picked myself up for many years. I don't know. I've also said attention to detail. It's like a very specific kind of attention to detail that is not my forte and has sort of been a struggle for me as a, as a scholar. I, you know, I was trying to write a lot of bibliophobias about how I was trying to write an academic book at the same time that I never ended up finishing, that I worked on for 10 years and, you know, reached a point where I just had to sort of, at this point throw it out because it just, it contained so many sort of bad memories for me. And also, I think the thinking shows the anxiety that the, the book itself contains. Like, it's a very anxious book. And part of the anxiety is trying to prove that I'm smart enough or trying to prove that I know enough or trying to prove, you know, every page is really inscribed with this sphere that I'm not saying, I'm not answering every question that everyone could possibly have. And someone will say, well, you haven't read this book. And I'd be like, oh, no, you're right, you have me. Like, it's, it's. It was very worried about being found out and when. I can't speak for other academics, but the feeling that I had writing articles and writing that book was that that fear was always with me. I was always, I always felt like, like an imposter. It was a very sort of dramatic version of imposter syndrome where I always felt like I didn't. Everyone else knew something and I didn't know, you know, whether that was how to be an academic or how to do this kind of work. So that's part of it. Like I, I felt like I never really fit that mold.
- [20:57]
Cece Lehrer
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- [22:38]
Sarah Chihaya
Well I didn't get tenure so that also answers part of it. It was clearly not the right role for me and I think my first, my first book is a collaborative, creative academic book, is published by Columbia University Press and I think you can see in that one, you know, it specifically says in the introduction that it was written. It started as a summer project that four of us were doing together because we wanted specifically to get away from the kind of career demands that our, you know, profession put upon us. And so we wanted to have this kind of time to write a different kind of criticism that was more personal, that was looser, that was that had relationships in it that, you know, was not any of those things that you've noticed about academic writing. And I think that it was, you know, all of us who worked on the Ferrante book were feeling that kind of anxiety because we were junior scholars, all of us were peak tenure at that time. And so I think that's just to say that for a long time I've not been, you know, the right kind of writer to fit in an academic mold. And I say that, you know, that's changing now. Like the academic so called economic mold is breaking a lot now. There, there are many, so many more scholars who are writing creative, wonderful, interesting, weird books. And I think the more of that happens, the better because the more like good readers, smart readers like you, who are not academics, will be interested in reading what we do in scholarship. But it's, it's a process, you know, of changing from a profession that has certain demands having to do with tenure and having to do with research, etc. It's sort of slowly changing. So I always felt that I had something else to write. I had, you know, before I went to grad school, I was, I wrote some fiction and I was an undergraduate and I was a different kind of writer. And I always had this feeling that if I had the time and if I was a lad, I would write something different. And this book was really the first time that I've that I let myself sort of explore what I wanted to write or what I felt compelled to write on my own without any expectation from, you know, myself or for my profession. Like most of that pressure is. A lot of that pressure was self imposed. Like a lot of it was my own thinking. And I'm sure everyone who writes feels this, you know, my own thinking, that I'm not doing it right. Like I'm never going to finish my academic book because I just don't have it in me. And I had to get over that and just say, maybe I wasn't supposed to write that book. Like that's fine just because I had the ideas, like someone else can have them or maybe I'll write them in some different form later. But that was not the particular form that I should be writing or I could be writing in.
- [25:44]
Bianca Murray
Yeah, that's so interesting because so many authors that I chat with will say, oh, I wrote this book while I was cheating on another book. And they'll be like, it was so important to me to write book A, but I was really struggling with writing book A and I couldn't figure out why. So every now and again, I'd cheat with it with book B. And that was like my fun project that I didn't tell anybody about. So there was no expectation and there was no pressure on that. And then that's the book that ends up getting published. And I agree. I feel like so much pressure rights is put on ourselves. It's self imposed. It's this thing I have to publish before I'm 40, or I have to publish before I'm 50 or I have to publish for whatever reason. And sometimes it's just take a breath and just be like, why are you putting these self imposed, you know, deadlines and pressures on yourself? Yeah. And it, it, it's something writers do a lot of. Something I want to talk about when it comes to writing memoir is. So there's a line here, page 57, and it begins with, I've been lying to you. I've been avoiding the fact that. That they are events from my childhood that I remember as events clearly and factually. Not because I think they're bad things to talk about, but because I'm worried that in telling them, they'll be revealed as non events and then where would I be? And that for me is so interesting because when we approach memoir, we are always thinking about the unreliable narrator. How reliable is this person in telling their own life story, etc. And some people approach memoir as in, this is my truth, I'm not lying to you. This is how I remember it. And I love it when I just start to feel comfortable in a memoir and suddenly that gets put in and then I'm like, oh, interesting. So she's admitting that she was lying and how does that reframe things for me? Do I still trust her, etc. So I'm sure that was a very intentional choice there for you. Sarah, could you talk us through that?
- [27:41]
Sarah Chihaya
Sure. I wanted to get at the. I mean, everyone who. Everyone has this in life. Everyone has something they don't want to talk about, they're not sure they can talk about. And I think there is a style of memoir that is just like, I'm gonna go head on at the thing. You know, it's kind of an older style of memoir that's like, I've had this horrible experience and I'm going to tell you everything about it. You know, whatever. Whatever happened to me happened. And here it is. It just lays it all out. In the beginning and when I was writing this book, I was thinking that there was a kind of tension between what had to be told, the reason for writing a memoir, which I still feel weird about and don't really know if there ever is a reason for writing a memoir. The reason for writing my memoir was the occasion for this occasional prose was that I had been hospitalized for a nervous breakdown. And that's, like, I gather, an interesting event to some people. I don't know. But I. I mean, even what I just said sort of betrays attention. Like, I don't think of that as being interesting or worthwhile or worth telling a story about because it's just what my life has been like. Like, it's. It's been so interesting seeing the reactions. I've been doing what I should not do and. And reading some Goodreads reviews. But it's very interesting to see, you know, how some people have been like, this book is so raw. It's so hard. It's so difficult to talk about mental health or depression or suicide especially. But to me, that was in some ways, not the hardest part of the book. Like, the hardest part was admitting that it's a story at all. And because it just feels so ordinary to so many people and to me and to, you know, to the people in my life. Like, it's just every day is. Is like that. And, you know, so there's. I had a real confusion that I had to confront, and I wrote that line that sort of, I'm lying to you 1. When I was not sure, I was kind of caught between my editor saying, well, you have to get to the thing somehow, and myself being like, well, I'm. I'm telling you, I'm not sure what I should get to. Like, I don't know where the event begins and ends. And I think that's the thing about depression and a lot of mental illnesses, is that you don't know where it starts and stops. You just think, well, this is perfectly ordinary, but someone else might be like, this is crazy. Like, this is wild. I can't believe you're saying this. And so there are various moments in the book where I sort of draw myself up and say, well, I have to tell you something, because you won't stay with me if I don't tell you anything. But I also don't know what the right thing is to tell you. Like, I can tell you what happened, but I don't know for myself if that is, you know, significant or insignificant. I'm sort of the worst judge of that. So, you know, this book was a constant negotiation between myself being like, nothing is significant, and my editor or friends that I was Sort of in writing groups with telling me, like, these are the things that you need to talk about.
- [31:07]
Bianca Murray
Yeah, there was a line or a paragraph that also, you know, that made me really think it was a part. I can't find it now. Of course, I've marked the book up so much that I can't find anything that I wanted to find. But it was in telling these anecdotes to people about crazy things that happened, like in your childhood and things with your father. I think there was something about reimagining a world in which all of these things were begging him to pick them up and fling them across the room. And he was actually a kindly person by picking them up and fulfilling their destiny and flinging them across the room. And how we then retell history to ourselves to make it more palatable to. To be able to deal with the trauma of it. And then we tell these stories to other people in funny ways because we've now been able to turn it into something funny. And people will listen and be horrified and go, that actually isn't funny. That's actually really traumatic. And I think that's something that we, as all human beings, struggle with, but especially memoirists. It's saying, here is this thing that's happened. I've coated it with so much humor so that it isn't a shard of glass anymore. And then when you're writing the memoir, you've got to take all that coating off and you've got to confront the shard of glass.
- [32:20]
Sarah Chihaya
Right? Yeah. I think that's a really good metaphor for it because you. You blunt the edges. You find these ways to tell stories such that you can laugh them off and say they're not serious or didn't happen, or it also is, you know, it's complicated because often these stories are about people we love at the same time as being afraid of them. And the only way to deal with that, that tension is to say, well, it wasn't serious, or I'm not serious, or what they were doing was not serious, or whatever. And there are. I think part of that is also, you know, a way to be able to account for yourself without going too deep. Like, coming up with these funny stories can be a way of being able to talk about your childhood or whatever, whenever, whatever is traumatic to you and say, like, I can explain this part of my life to you in this way, and you'll never ask questions about it because it's just a funny story. And if something is just a funny story, you never ask more about It, Right. If something is a sad story, you ask more about it. If something is a complicated or a weird story, you ask, maybe ask more. But if something is just a sort of silly story or a funny story, then you don't. You expect that your listeners will not probe further into it the way that no one asks for like a deep analysis of a joke he is told, or hopefully no one asks for a deep analysis of a joke he is told. And so I think it's a defense mechanism, you know, to, to sort of keep these things that happen to us sealed in sort of narrative envelopes, right, where you can, you can say, like, I have a neat story that will start and stop at a certain time. And you know, there may be many things contained within it, but you have control over because you know it'll stop. And I think that's, you know, we all, we all do that. As you said, like, we all have our ways of kind of protecting ourselves from the edges of that, the shards of glass, but they can't last forever.
- [34:38]
Bianca Murray
Yeah, our podcast listeners are going to laugh because I always managed to bring everything back to the TV show Friends and there was an episode there where I think Phoebe dated a psychologist and he looked at Chandler Bing and he said, oh, I don't want to be there when the laughter stops. And that always resonates with me because there was a lot of laughter to cover up, obviously a lot of sadness in that character as well. Sarah, we've now run out of time. I could have chatted to you forever that I loved this book so much. For our listeners, we are linking to the book on our bookshop.org affiliate page. Get it there. You'll support an independent bookstore and you support the podcast at the same time. Sarah, thanks so much for being such a wonderful guest.
- [35:20]
Sarah Chihaya
Thank you so much, Bianca. It's been really fun.
- [35:23]
Bianca Murray
And that's it for today's episode.
- [35:25]
Carly Waters
I hope you'll join us for next week's show.
- [35:28]
Bianca Murray
In the meantime, keep at it.
- [35:29]
Carly Waters
Remember, it just takes one. Yes, it's a new year and time to get fresh eyes on your work in progress. Are you looking for beta readers, some of whom might potentially become writing group members down the line? Are you wanting to be matched up with those writing in a similar genre and or time zone so they can critique your work as you critique theirs? At the same time, your manuscript doesn't have to be complete to sign up for this 3,000 word evaluation. This matchup will be open to registrations from now until the 2nd of March, with the matchup emails going out on the 3rd of March. Always such an exciting day. For more information and to register, go to Biancamarae.com and go to the Beta Reader Matchup tab. And please spread the word. Even if you aren't joining the matchup this time, the more writers we have signed up, the better the matches will be.