An Evening with Stephanie Burt and Rachel Gold
by Patrick Coy-Bjork ’23
This past Thursday, I got to attend the wonderful presentation given by Stephanie Burt at the Dewitt Wallace Library. Dr. Burt, who is currently teaching at Harvard, was a professor at Macalester between 2000-2007. Since then, she has written and published several poetry collections as well as a book on reading poetry (cheekily titled Don’t Read Poetry). After being introduced by current English professor Rachel Gold, Stephanie read poems from her collections Advice from the Lights, After Callimachus, and For All Mutants. My biggest takeaway from the sharing of these works was the incredible passion Burt has for whatever she is writing about. Whether it’s trans and queer identity, neurodiversity, social justice, or cartoons, she writes with both delicate care and intense purpose, making it clear that the focuses of her work have strong personal significance to her.
Dr. Burt’s work spans a range of different subjects and parts of pop culture. The collection For All Mutants has an emphasis on poetry inspired by the characters of the X-Men series. Out of the poems she shared, a standout to me was “Entrapta Song,” a poem all about a character from the Netflix animated reboot of “She-Ra: Princesses of Power.” I’m a big She-Ra fan, and Entrapta is my personal favorite character, so it really resonated with me. Hearing the woos of all the fellow She-Ra fans in the audience when Burt first mentioned the series made me very happy. After reading a number of poems, she answered questions from the audience and recommended some of her favorite lesser-known poets like Monica Youn, Brandon Som, and Ashleigh Lambert (a Mac grad who was in the audience!)
After this, Rachel Gold joined Dr. Burt to present on the new webcomic they are writing together: Boys Against the Current. This is a retelling of the classic American novel The Great Gatsby, which just entered the public domain this year. In this webcomic, the Gatsby characters are written as queer and genderqueer, taking the subtext of the original book and making it a full part of the story. While using the basic plot framework from Gatsby, Boys Against the Current presents an entirely new, unique world and story. Boys takes place not in the roaring 1920s, but in the 2020s, so it deals with concerns of the present day and near-future. For example, most transport in the comic is done by boats rather than cars, as roads have sunk below sea level due to climate change. A detail I liked was that the famous “eyes of T.J. Eckleburg” billboard from the original story has now been re-imagined as a huge solar-powered laser in the sky.
Another interesting part of the updated time of Boys is that exposure to modern technology has also given many people in this world “vitalities”—i.e. individualized superpowers. According to Stephanie and Rachel, the vitality of the lead character (Nicola) is an ongoing mystery that we’ll have to read the webcomic to find out about! A few research assistants at Macalester have also been helping give feedback to Stephanie and Rachel as they write new episodes for the comic, giving the perspective of some college-aged readers. If any of this sounds interesting to you, Boys Against the Current is slated to be published by Pocket Comics in 2022, so keep an eye out for it!
Overall, I was so happy to attend this talk, and I’m excited to check out Stephanie’s poetry and the new webcomic!