“But when I
start to tell
them”: Celebrating
Aries Writers


March 22, 2022
︎︎︎A Good Used Book


In 1967, author and militant feminist Valerie Solanas gave a copy of her play to Andy Warhol in hopes that he might produce it. Titled “Up Your Ass,” it was the work she thought might save her… might make her a writer. Except that Warhol, who promised to look over the manuscript, then lost it instead - offering the enraged Solanas a $25 role in a different film for her trouble. A year later, she did what any Aries would do; she put on make-up, packed her gun, and went looking for him. 

Ruled by the planet of action, passion and war, Aries authors are the first: the fiery babies of the zodiac, the new growth of Spring, the unreliable narrators of all literature. They are as decadent as Kathy Acker and as obsessive as Nella Larsen, as powerful as Maya Angelou and as potential-driven as Samuel R. Delany. They, like Erica Jong or John Fowles, are hot until they are cold.

Their pens, burning with that urgent Aries energy, spread language like seed. The words of Flannery O’Connor and John Fante growing up like weeds between sidewalk slabs while those of Toni Cade Bambara and Octavio Paz swell like the thick roots that crack them - prolific and indiscriminate, angry and optimistic.

︎︎︎