Craft Capsule: Becoming Strange Again

Alex Dimitrov

This is no. 103 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I want a poem to be useful. Like a lemon or a hairbrush. Like a cup of coffee in the middle of the day. “Well, you should have been a hairbrush maker,” my friend who’s not a poet told me. I love being friends with people who don’t write. Sometimes they’re more in the world. They just get it. They have no time for bullshit or theory.

Most of being a writer is trying to figure out what to do with the twenty-three hours of the day when you’re not writing. Most of being a writer is fighting being stuck. Being in relationships seems easy in comparison. You just break up! You move along to the next person, the next thing. But what am I going to do, break up with myself? I would have done it years ago when I realized I can’t boil an egg.

Okay, so things I do to avoid being stuck. One summer, by the Alice in Wonderland statue in Central Park, I read Proust out loud, very slowly (but if you do this, you have to make sure no one is around). His sentences drive me insane. They’re so long and meandering. I like a short sentence! I’d take James Salter over Proust any day! But the thing about being stuck is, you can’t go to your obsessions. You have to try something you’re bad at. This is also how desire works. We want what we resist, what we are kind of repulsed by. Now, I don’t hate Proust. Are you kidding? I even have a photograph in Paris spread out on his grave wearing red Ray-Bans and cutoffs (I don’t know! I was twenty-five once!). But slipping into his sentences gives me anxiety. An anxiety that ends up being quite useful for my brain. Proust is the opposite of my sentence aesthetic. And I like opposites. I don’t like to relate.

Another thing I like to do is give myself the assignment of composing a line while I’m running or swimming. Mostly I’m running. I had a good month in L.A. where I swam every day but believe it or not I felt depressed! And depression being good for writing is a total myth and something people who don’t really write (or write well) romanticize. You have to feel some sort of way about life! A flat or downward motion does nothing. (Now the other thing I want to say is that L.A. is not a good city for depressed people. You really need New York for that. Being in a car is only exciting if someone else is driving you around.)

Anyway, when I’m running the reservoir in the park I turn one line over and over the entire run. Sometimes I don’t even get to composing the line. Instead, I’ll take a line I already know isn’t working, in something I’m revising, and flip it around. What you don’t have time for when you’re running is bullshit. I know when I’m lying to myself about something real quick. It’s sort of like when Didion says she used to edit with a drink before dinner. Things got hazy enough to see when she was bluffing. When I’m running everything around me gets hazy. But there’s this deep clarity in the center, where you can feel your breathing. And then you remember the poetic line is just that. Breath. Breath fused with language. Aesthetics. A surface. Who cares about meaning! Make it beautiful first.

This last trick doesn’t involve the park. Let’s get out of there. As you might have noticed, staying creative has something to do with confusing yourself. With becoming strange again. (You have to admit you don’t know what you’re doing! That maybe you never did actually!) For that, I like to send some part of a poem as a text to a friend. Though you have to make it pass. The goal is for them to feel like they’re not reading a poem. The goal is to get them a little jolted, a little excited, a little what the fuck about whatever it is. Just a weird text message! Just something you said.

I did this with so many poems in my new book, Love and Other Poems. I’d text people stanzas out of context because I wanted the entire thing to feel like I was talking to them at a bar. And when it didn’t work, I knew it. I got double question marks or “are you ok” or no response really. And I hate no responses! I’d rather be insulted to my face than stood up. Though when it did work, it felt so close to life. The poem and life were one thing. Just for a moment. There was no separation and I love that. I don’t want to be in life if it has nothing to do with art. So I trick myself. The way to avoid being stuck is to make something beautiful. The way to avoid being stuck is to make something beautiful and quite useless, too.

 

Alex Dimitrov is the author of three books of poems, including Love and Other Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2021), as well as the chapbook American Boys (Floating Wolf Quarterly, 2012). His work has been published in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Paris Review, and Poetry. He was previously the senior content editor at the Academy of American Poets, where he edited the Poem-a-Day series and American Poets. He has taught creative writing at Princeton University, Columbia University, and New York University, among other institutions. With Dorothea Lasky, he is the coauthor of Astro Poets: Your Guides to the Zodiac (Flatiron Books, 2019). Dimitrov lives in New York City.

Craft Capsule: Poem Written in a Cab

by

Alex Dimitrov

6.21.21

This is no. 102 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

So I’m stuck in traffic in a taxicab, which is typical and not just of modern life. Twenty-Eighth or Twenty-Seventh. I’m not looking up. I’ve resigned myself to being late to this meeting (I don’t want to go to) with a bunch of business people who have no ideas but plenty of fancy job titles. Who cares! You know the thing is, a poem can happen anywhere. That’s not the problem. The problem is you need a reader. The catch is you need someone you’re writing to. You can’t write to the air!

And of course I’m checking Twitter, I’m checking Insta, I’m checking the New York Times (help me). It’s just as uninspiring as these business people I’m about to talk to. I’m starting to think they’re all training us to be business people. To sell nothing. To keep lying for the clout. To just fake it. (No way! I’m not nearly that depressed with the world!) So there’s the traffic and the city. The new kicks I’m wearing. My black jeans. My black shirt. The usual irritations. All good poems start with irritation. This one having to do with how low my bank balance is and how wrong the decision to take a cab was. Not that it stops me from opening my Notes app and starting to work. I clock in right there. Twenty-First. Nineteenth. Okay, movement. Someone honking. Someone crying in front of Chase bank.

“To the people reading this poem—hello.” That’s the first line of my workday. That’s sort of when I realize I’m writing a poem in a cab and I go with it. What else can I do? After I write a line I look at it visually. Is it aesthetically pleasing? Is it too short or too long or too anything yet? I spend maybe a minute considering if the em dash is pretentious. I decide that it is! I decide to just keep writing because I have maybe another five minutes before I say bye to my poetry brain and go up twenty floors.

You have to steal time as a poet. You have to write poetry while you’re going to meetings and teaching five classes and crying at Nowhere Bar about some rejection again. The trick is not to feel sorry for yourself. The other trick is to resist everything that’s in vogue. To not be understood by critics. To not join schools or movements. To make what you want and explain nothing. Yeah well, I think I took my own advice after all.

Here’s the story. After that day I got stuck in a cab, I started writing a fourteen-page poem in the Notes app of my iPhone and only in cabs. That was the rule. Those were the limits. It was September 14, 2017. Sometimes I was alone. Other times I wasn’t. I had friends with me, I had dates, I had strangers that weren’t so strange a few hours in. Mostly I was sober. Other times not. But you know that’s what editing’s for. You have to clean your apartment to remember you have Helmut Lang boots you stole from a boyfriend one year! Discovering beauty is kind of an accident. And beauty is important. No matter what people tell you these days.

Anyway, at some point I started editing in cabs too. Usually this would happen in the daytime. My lines got very short. I could only write a short, skinny line because I was constantly moving. I felt overwhelmed! Well good, I thought. If you’re not a little overwhelmed by life, what do you have to say about it anyway. This was going to be the longest poem I’d written. And that’s exactly what happened. It took me close to two years to finish. Two years of cab rides which, really, I wish a grant would have paid for somehow.

I also had this crazy idea to put my number in the poem. Just in case anyone reading it felt as spontaneous as I did when writing. Sylvia Plath and the Confessionals? They didn’t have iPhones but let me tell you something, they wouldn’t do this. And since the book published I’ve received so many texts from strangers. Michigan and Ohio and New York. California and New Mexico and Texas. My favorite thing to ask is what their zodiac sign is and what they want most out of life. I hope everyone who’s said it out loud, or typed it out I guess, gets exactly what they want.

In August of 2019 I took the last cab ride and called this entire experiment “Poem Written in a Cab.” The next morning I was leaving for London for two weeks. When I took the cab to the airport, finally free of my project, I got out and said, “I’m done with this city. I hate it!” I smoked a cigarette outside the Delta terminal and watched a woman put her dog in a Louis Vuitton carrier. Psychotic and chic! I wish I was that dog. But I was only a poet. That hadn’t changed. I had a very long poem. I had the keys to my New York apartment. And even though London made me feel happy, I have to admit, I missed the bridges here. I missed the cab rides and writing my strange little poem. When I returned to New York I said, “Okay, this isn’t so bad.” You walk down the street. You go into a bar. You pretend you’re a new person again.

Read “Poem Written in a Cab”

 

Alex Dimitrov is the author of three books of poems, including Love and Other Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2021), as well as the chapbook American Boys (Floating Wolf Quarterly, 2012). His work has been published in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Paris Review, and Poetry. He was previously the senior content editor at the Academy of American Poets, where he edited the Poem-a-Day series and American Poets. He has taught creative writing at Princeton University, Columbia University, and New York University, among other institutions. With Dorothea Lasky, he is the coauthor of Astro Poets: Your Guides to the Zodiac (Flatiron Books, 2019). Dimitrov lives in New York City.

Thumbnail: Rafael Leão

Poem Written in a Cab

by

Alex Dimitrov

6.21.21

To the people
reading this poem, hello.
I want you to know
nothing bad will happen
as long as you’re here.
Every line you see
was written in a cab.
I’m on the FDR
in the middle of winter
and the sky is suddenly bluer
than Sundays in June.
There’s no reason for it.
No real science
to what will happen when
I get off at Chambers
and Broadway, wearing
gold and black sneakers
on my way to meet
a friend who is sad.
To my sad friends, hello.
For you I will be
a version of myself
I hardly remember.
I will be a lake
at the top of morning
some late afternoon into night.
And if you look away from
this page, to your right
there’s the world.
I am only trying to describe it.
I will likely disappoint you
like a long-awaited date
or like last call at a bar.
The people on Water Street
are leaving work now.
Walking to shops
and to restaurants
or of course to the water—
Manhattan, you are
my favorite island by far.
And I wouldn’t be a poet
if I didn’t tell you
about the bridges,
there are over two thousand here—
Brooklyn, Verrazzano,
George Washington—
partial hyperbole, partial admission:
I live here for the bridges at night.
It’s been so long
since I’ve taken a vacation
and some days I think,
how is that even possible,
how is this even my life?

I thought I’d be happier
and more handsome,
certainly better loved
and more stable
this late in the day.
But the secret with me
(as I’m sure with you too)
is that everyone thinks
I am fine. Doing great!
What’s the point
of saying otherwise
really. It’s so gauche
and betrays a self-pity
that probably means
you aren’t getting laid.
The mood in Union Square
reminds me of a feeling
I once felt in 1995.
The park looks perfect
and deceptively true.
A gorgeous blond
is smoking a joint
and reading, not
waiting for anyone
and refusing to look up.
Maybe he will
but it just doesn’t
seem like today
is the day to get
his attention.
He’s already turning
the page and so focused,
whatever he’s reading
it’s all that he is.
And just so you know
we’re in a different cab now,
in another month
with better weather—
goodbye to the past!
It’s important
to look at something
you can’t have
at least once a day.
Like the blond
a few lines up.
Perhaps you should
even touch it
or put it in your mouth.
When people kiss in public
it’s a sign you’re not alone.
Even if you’re not the one
being kissed, there’s something
obviously human about it.
And to be obvious is boring
except for real sentiment
or standing naked
in front of someone.
We’re all either kissing
or pissing on each other.
Everything in between
is too safe to comment on
and not poetry in the least.
Once I was 19
and now I’m 33.
I used to prefer autumn
but spring has made me an adult.
The silence on Charles Street
is charming, even though it’s
nothing like the silence I know,
which can’t be compared to
a street or anything modern
despite this being
a New York poem.
Still, I’m going to try
because what else is there to do
other than work
and down gin and tonics.
There’s a minute
right before the cab
drops me off
when I think—don’t stop,
take me anywhere else.
Just keep driving!
I have it all wrong.

I have it all wrong
but I’m somehow alive.
Some things never change
and why would you want them to.
Like Katz’s deli,
where I still haven’t eaten
but take comfort
in knowing it’s there.
Or the Flatiron building
where I’ve been once or twice,
and where my friend
Dorothea and I took photos
in an elevator and talked about
why it’s important
to keep going no matter what.
Poets are doing this constantly
and it’s one way of showing people
possibility is real and invented.
It has to come from the self!
It doesn’t just show up one day.
You have to leave your house
to make eyes with someone
over a kale salad. Sometimes
you have to dye your hair blond
to remember you’re truly a brunette.
Whenever I see people
crying on First Avenue
I think of the times
I’ve cried on First Avenue—
which is, by all standards,
a great avenue to cry on.
Like Janis Joplin’s
“Get It While You Can”
is a great song and one
that’s extended my life
on many occasions.
Not scientifically
but undeniably spiritually.
And stay with me now
as this is the part of the poem
where I’m trying to tell you
life is better than death
and more ridiculous too.
This is hard to know
given the day or the season,
but I have to trust myself
since I’m likely
the most neurotic poet
in the room, and maybe someone
you’ll know in another life
when we come back as dogs.
The thing is, the world
will continue without us
just as this poem will continue
even if there’s no one
to read what it says.
Please keep reading.
I care so much that you do.
I want to be in rooms
and cabs together,
listening to everything
that’s ever happened to us
until some point in the story
when all the details
are out of the way
and there’s nothing left to say
except the simplest things.
I don’t know what they are
but on Bleecker Street
at half past noon on a Wednesday
two boys are pointing
at a billboard
or studying the sky.
Whatever they’re thinking of,
it’s not about the end of the world.
One of them is wearing
an orange hat and the other
has a button on his backpack
that says “M E O W.”
Exactly! Only yesterday
I spoke to everyone like a cat.
Which is to say, I was mysterious
and pleasing to myself.
I stopped confusing
my body for a weapon
but my body has never
impressed me.
I’m Slavic, after all.
I don’t believe in
self-love, which is
a kind of American sadness
that often feels
desperate and dull.
It’s powerful to feel
you can change
even small things,
even things that don’t
seem to matter at all.
Like the arch of your eyebrows
or the color of your lips
(both of which,
now that I think of it,
are very important and real).
Like being at a party
and for less than a second
feeling like someone entirely new.
I have never wanted to be myself.
What a ludicrous obligation!
Having a fantasy
is the least sad thing there is
and the only thing
that gets me out of bed.
Which makes me think
I should sit down
and write a list
of my fantasies
or at least the things
I love about the world.
Maybe the list will be so long
I’ll call it “Love”
and turn it into a book,
allowing me to feel
justified in not taking more cabs
as a way to finish this poem.
In any case, whenever
I’m in California
I want to be in New York.
And whenever
I’m in New York
I’d rather be in London
because the rain is like light there,
it has this way of calming me down.
It’s 9:14 pm
and the cab I’m in now
is on West 8th Street
almost at the Marlton Hotel
where I’m going on a date.
I have no choice but to follow
my idea of romance,
which as it turns out
means checking my hair
on my phone, like a mirror,
and after too many drinks
telling a man that my favorite word
is bijou—French for jewel.
Haven’t I suffered enough
terrible dates! Couldn’t this
be the one that changes
my life and comes with
a house in the Hamptons.
I can never fall asleep
with a stranger in bed
unless it’s their own bed
and feels like the aisle seat
on a flight to Europe.
Which is to say—
there’s an escape!
Or at least a way
to attend to your needs.
There’s a freedom in hotel bars
when telling the bartender a secret
or switching up your drink
can remind you life isn’t over.
That maybe it’s just stalled for a while.
Usually my drink is champagne
or prosecco. Red wine
with my friend Will,
Diet Coke with Melissa,
and anything anywhere
with my longest friend
Rachel, who everyone knows
wears all black. Marya
does this lovely thing
where she asks for a glass of seltzer
and pours half of it in her rosé.
I really think she’s invented
something necessary,
she’s a Pisces after all.
And Deborah is classic.
I find her commitment
to cocktails an admirable choice.
I can never remember
which one exactly
because I’m always looking
at her hair, which has never
looked bad in the ten years
I’ve known her, and that’s glamour.
If I had to define glamour
that’s what I’d say it is.
Now there’s no smooth way
to make this transition
but I’m in another cab again,
weeks later, trying to remember
who that guy from the date even was,
or why I said I’d text but never did,
as it usually happens with me.
I’m very close to taking out a loan
because of these cab rides.
If any patrons or arts organizations
are reading this, feel free
to send me a check or give me a call.
My number is 248 760 3425.
I think one thing
people misunderstand about me
is how ironic I am
in almost every aspect of life.
I can barely put on pants
to smoke a cigarette
but I’m absolutely dedicated
to writing a good sentence.
I wonder what my mother is doing
at exactly this moment.
I wonder if the L train
has ever taken anyone
where they needed to go.
When I was younger
all I wanted was to be taken seriously.
A serious poet! Why not.
Now I realize being taken seriously
is as arbitrary as how long you live.
I would gladly trade wisdom for youth.
Or beauty. Or the way I stood
in the corner at parties,
always complaining how boring
they were, how we should have gone
somewhere else or maybe
shouldn’t have gone out at all.
Please go to parties, everyone.
Even if it’s just to see
people you dread
drinking very warm beer.
Sometimes there’s justice
in the world! And sometimes
you end up being
that dreadful person
drinking warm beer
and hating yourself.
I can’t believe my fare is
already 17 dollars.
We’re stuck in traffic
on 28th and 2nd
and I’m going to be late
but making it across town
with feeling, no less!
My driver just told me
he’s Russian and I said
“oh great, I’m Bulgarian,
where in Russia exactly?”
He found this absurd
because he laughed
and said “Moscow,”
and now he’s asking me
when it was that I came to America
and I’m telling him
in this roundabout way
how I was six and how
it was very hard on my parents
because we were poor
and I was the only one
who spoke English.
But I’ll leave that
for later. Or never.
I’ll leave you with a few
thoughts on the imagination
because the imagination
is a wild thought
and more honest
than biography.
What’s happened to us
is unimportant.
Terrible things
happen to people
all the time.
It’s about the day
and more than the day.
It’s everything between me
and my cab driver from Moscow,
getting me to my meeting
without a hint of panic or luck.
“How long have you
lived here,” I ask
and he says thirty years
which is crazy to me.
“Only twelve,” I tell him.
But I actually love this so much
because for a second I’m young
in this cab, or at least
someone younger.
There’s a loud bang
on Madison and I remember
that tomorrow’s my birthday.
Oh god. Once again.
November 30, 1984.
It’s been a while
and it’s been a lot.
It’s been romantic
but I definitely want more.
I have no plans
yet can easily make them.
There’s rarely enough money
but surely it’s possible
to walk down the street
and have coffee alone.
I put in my headphones
and listen to Nico’s
“These Days”
before my meeting.
It’s such a good song,
I can’t believe that it’s real.
So good in fact,
that for however long
I forget about everything.
New York is New York.
My life is decidedly mine.
Then I start worrying I haven’t
worn enough sunscreen
and will someday die of
cancer. I start worrying
I won’t die of cancer
but be forgotten and old.
I’m so dramatic.
I’m not even a poet.
I’m really an actor.
And almost at 34 now,
yes, I do think
I look great for my age.
I ate an egg and an orange
for breakfast. My beard
is quite long and still
very well groomed.
It’s incredible really,
even to me, who rarely
feels accomplished
or takes compliments,
that anyone can make it this far.

 

“Poem Written in a Cab” by Alex Dimitrov. © 2021 Alex Dimitrov. From Love and Other Poems, published by Copper Canyon Press in February 2021. Reprinted with permission of the author.

Craft Capsule: A Poem Called Love

by

Alex Dimitrov

6.14.21

This is no. 101 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Three months into 2017 I realized we were entering a period of cultural monotony. Daily doom, constant outrage, and the media and tech giants both cashing in on exactly the thing they were (supposedly) outraged about. Click here. Sign this. Keep tweeting. Don’t go offline. Forget about pleasure. Resign yourself to your phone, your laptop, your screen—everyone was exhausted. The cycle itself produced a kind of hysteria. And I don’t trust hysteria. One of the reasons being how unsustainable and uninspiring it is. Another being that historically it has ushered in sloppy thinking.

Logging onto social media became the most depressing part of my day. It was closer to advertising and propaganda than any real rhetoric or news. I’m not sure why but right around then I began to wonder what the role of the artist even is. And a year later, when nothing had changed, when the media enabled Washington and Washington enabled the media, when the tech giants surveilled us and we began to surveil one another—I wondered again. I wanted to offer something in place of hysteria and the didactic landscape of Twitter.

I once heard Marina Abramović give a talk at the Guggenheim in which she said that one role of the artist is to elevate the public spirit. I’ve always loved her work. Two things we share in common, other than being immigrants from the same part of the world, is that we’re both interested in duration and endurance in our creative work. I wanted to make something that returned people to their inner lives. I wanted to remind them about pleasure and the sensual mind. And I knew it would be difficult since online culture had become a place for the opposite. A place where we’re endlessly bombarded with opportunism and lack of nuance. What I had to do, I told myself, was find a container for something that occurred daily and was endless in form, like the internet itself.

The first line I wrote for what became the title poem of my book Love and Other Poems was, “I love opening a window in a room.” I decided that was the feeling I wanted the poem to evoke. I wanted possibility without abstraction. I wanted the poem to be a space where you could throw everything in, and not feel hopeless about that everything when you were done reading. I was also listening to a lot of The Doors. In one interview I read with Jim Morrison (Sagittarius), he says: “I’d like to do a song or a piece of music that’s just a pure expression of joy, like a celebration of existence, like the coming of spring or the sun rising, just pure unbounded joy. I don’t think we’ve really done that yet.” And so I began my poem with that in mind. It would be a list. A list of things I loved about the world. And maybe, as crazy as it sounded, I wouldn’t stop writing it. Maybe the poem could go on forever (“I am thinking that a poem could go on forever,” Jack Spicer wrote in “Psychoanalysis: An Elegy”). Although I did need to finish, as poems in physical books have to end, I decided I’d continue the poem on Twitter—the place I loathed—one tweet a day, every day, for as long as I was alive.

It was while writing the poem that I began to understand what Abramović meant by “elevating the public spirit.” That became my mantra and my aim. I kept the form and the language accessible because it was important to me that any person, even one who didn’t read or like poetry, might enjoy and understand the poem, should they encounter it online. And I wanted the poem to be encountered. That’s the main reason I brought it to Twitter and didn’t keep it solely in print. I hoped people could see themselves in some line or some future line I hadn’t yet written. But I’d made the commitment to write. There was no going back really. You see, I’m still writing the poem today.

 

Alex Dimitrov is the author of three books of poems, including Love and Other Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2021), as well as the chapbook American Boys (Floating Wolf Quarterly, 2012). His work has been published in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Paris Review, and Poetry. He was previously the senior content editor at the Academy of American Poets, where he edited the Poem-a-Day series and American Poets. He has taught creative writing at Princeton University, Columbia University, and New York University, among other institutions. With Dorothea Lasky, he is the coauthor of Astro Poets: Your Guides to the Zodiac (Flatiron Books, 2019). Dimitrov lives in New York City.

Craft Capsule: Night Call

by

Alex Dimitrov

6.7.21

This is no. 100 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

New York’s streets are everywhere in my poems. In February of 2014 I used the city quite literally. It was for a project called Night Call. The idea was to travel to strangers and read them poems in bed, or in the most intimate space of their homes. For many people this ended up being the kitchen or living room. For one guy, his balcony in Tribeca. Mostly though, strangers walked me right into their bedrooms and offered me a glimpse of their lives.

I’ve lived in New York for more than ten years. It still feels like the city doesn’t need me or know that I’m here. And to be honest, I like that. I’m a writer who thrives off resistance. That kind of pushback and being ignored excites me. In Night Call, I wanted to fuse that feeling with the intimacy of going over to someone’s apartment. Being in a person’s space is often more intimate than sleeping with them. It’s an alluring exchange: people showing you where they spend the majority of their lives. The poem is also an exchange. It’s like showing you a map to the interior though not the interior itself. The poem, to me, is a conversation between people.

I announced Night Call on social media and offered to do readings for anyone who didn’t know me. That was the catch, they had to be total strangers. They could be in any borough and had the choice of four separate Sundays on which we could meet. I’d leave my apartment around eight in the evening with poems and my phone. Nothing more. Maybe a pack of cigarettes (though I was trying to quit). Sometimes I didn’t know the gender of the person I was going to read to (based on their name) and I didn’t care either. I took the N and the R and the 6 and the B trains. Most of the readings were quick. Twenty or twenty-five minutes. Other times I wouldn’t leave someone’s apartment until two or three in the morning and I’d cab back, exhausted and exhilarated both. People offered me drinks, told me stories about their childhoods, affairs, the death of their parents. They took me up to their roofs, made me coffee, showed me things they had written or painted. One stranger cooked me dinner and told me she regretted both of her marriages. “Don’t get married,” she said. “There are more interesting things to do with people.” I’ll never forget the way she kept adjusting a silver pendant around her neck.

At the time I had a nine-to-five job and I’m not sure how I got up on those Monday mornings. Several major media outlets asked to cover Night Call but I declined. I’ve never written or talked about it before. It was private. My interest was to open up a new space between the reader and the poet and between the reader and the poem. I wanted to demystify both. I wanted people, in the privacy of their beds, to encounter the poem like a bedtime story (being read to having been one of the only pleasures of my childhood).

The poems I read were from drafts of my second book, Together and by Ourselves. The strangers in Night Call were the first people to hear it. It’s my favorite book I’ve written and my most personal, too. In some ways I wrote it to survive the change in an important relationship. It’s amazing the things people shared with me when I read them those poems. We usually sat across from each other on top of the bedspread, sometimes about one or two arm-lengths apart, sometimes for long stretches of time, often in silence.

For about a month, in the dead of winter, I went to the Village and Queens and Brooklyn, and almost to Staten Island once but it was too late at that point. Some people I read to ended up becoming my friends. I remember even those I haven’t seen again, which is most of them. I remember what they told me about their lives and I remember their faces. The poem is, of course, a place to remember. It keeps people’s voices and things right there, outside time. And those first hours after midnight, when Night Call would often take place, they feel outside time to me also. It’s a beautiful illusion. The imagination is the only real freedom. That’s what Night Call helped me remember. I had forgotten it too.

 

Alex Dimitrov is the author of three books of poems, including Love and Other Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2021), as well as the chapbook American Boys (Floating Wolf Quarterly, 2012). His work has been published in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Paris Review, and Poetry. He was previously the senior content editor at the Academy of American Poets, where he edited the Poem-a-Day series and American Poets. He has taught creative writing at Princeton University, Columbia University, and New York University, among other institutions. With Dorothea Lasky, he is the coauthor of Astro Poets: Your Guides to the Zodiac (Flatiron Books, 2019). Dimitrov lives in New York City.

Thumbnail: Guillaume Técher

Craft Capsule: What’s So Funny?

by

Kristen Arnett

4.26.21

This is no. 96 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I do not consider myself a craft expert, but I do consider myself an aficionado of the dumb stuff that makes me laugh. Television plots centered on easily solved miscommunications? Check. Dogs that look like they’re smiling? Oh yeah. Writing that asks me to unpack the joke, repackage it, and then try to resell it as a brand-new product? Oh baby, absolutely yes.

There is something compelling about the standard joke format. What is the “standard” joke, you might ask? The best way to describe it is to consider the Dad Joke. Think of puns and silly wordplay. Or the Man Walks Into a Bar format. It’s the knock-knock joke your weird uncle tells at a family barbeque, one you wind up telling your kids years later. It’s the joke that gets modified with each retelling. Its primary purpose is simply that: retelling.

How many ways can you write the joke and still get a laugh?

For example, when I was growing up, my family inherited an ancient computer from my elderly aunt. She had managed to download a virus before gifting it to us, so its main use became listening to an animated bird do an abbreviated stand-up routine. Pete the Repeat Parrot fluttered in vibrant green-pink-yellow, squawking his fool head off, desperate to tell you his one and only zinger. Here is that joke:

“Pete and Repeat sat on a fence. Pete fell off. Who was left?”

Obviously, the answer here (and the joke itself) is found in the Repeat. But the humor came from the trajectory of the experience: It was funny at first because hey, it’s an unexpected joke. After a while, it became funny because our parents got so angry every time the bird popped up and disrupted their work. Further down the line, it was funny for a different reason entirely: The joke embedded itself in the language of our family. “Stop being such a Pete the Repeat,” I’d say when my brother was being especially annoying. The joke expanded, more fascinating than the original. It became its own story and contained its own plot trajectory.

I think about this a lot in my work. How can I repackage the initial premise of a joke in more colorful wrapping and offer it up to the reader as something brand-new? Gifting them the same bit, but a different experience of it? Often this means I need to situationally experience jokes for the first time as my characters experience them. Humor is subjective; it requires background to understand how any person would receive something as funny. As I write, I understand that even if the joke isn’t funny to the characters in the scene, it retains humor for the reader.

Another example: the scene in Rebecca Dinerstein Knight’s novel Hex (Viking, 2020) in which a large mattress is unexpectedly delivered during a dinner party. It’s left awkwardly on the entryway rug and no one knows what to do with it. There’s the joke setup. Later on, a guest at the dinner party exits the entryway bathroom and trips over the mattress, which was not there when he initially entered. That is a use of the mattress in a different comedic way, yet it is still the same joke: weird mattress where it shouldn’t be. The party continues along with the mattress, which gets used as the site of further hilarity. There are drunken secrets told on it, even an impromptu karaoke dance session occurs on its quilted top. Same joke, repackaged and retold to great and hilarious effect.

When considering how humor can sit inside fiction, perhaps imagine it as the same strange and unexpected body wearing different disguises to a costume event. If you can get the joke to put on a fake mustache and successfully reenter the party they have already been kicked out of, perhaps it is worth letting them stick around a while longer. Let them spike the punch. See what other kind of mischief they can get into. I bet it is worth repeating.

 

Kristen Arnett is a queer writer based in Florida. She is the author of the novel Mostly Dead Things (Tin House, 2019), which was a New York Times best-seller, and the story collection Felt in the Jaw (Split/Lip Press, 2017). Her writing has also appeared in the New York Times, North American Review, Gulf Coast, Guernica, and McSweeney’s, among other publications. Her second novel, With Teeth, is forthcoming from Riverhead Books in June.

Thumbnail: David Waite

Craft Capsule: Body in the Mirror

by

Susan Stinson

3.22.21

This is no. 92 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

When I was an undergraduate, I saw a call for writing about fatness for the anthology Shadow on a Tightrope: Writing by Women on Fat Oppression (Aunt Lute Books, 1983), which became a feminist classic, still in print decades later. I was a young writer who very much wanted to be published. I had been fat all my life. I knew that the shape of my body had been central in defining the shape of my life, but I had no language for how to write or even think about that. The cultural tropes for fat women were virulently dismissive. I knew that they did not represent who I was. The hate language that was regularly shouted at me on the street didn’t either, but I didn’t know how to start to say anything else.

Soon after I graduated, I moved from Colorado to Boston. I got a job at a drugstore and started figuring out how to be a writer. I gave myself the simple assignment to look in the mirror and try to describe myself accurately and, to the best of my ability, without judgment. I chose to do this naked, but the exercise can be equally powerful if the writer is wearing clothes.

It proved to be enormously difficult, both emotionally and because I found that I had extremely limited options for language with which to describe my body. I have said elsewhere that it took participation in grassroots feminism and reading great poets (for me, Gertrude Stein and Walt Whitman) before I could find my belly with my hands and write that it was soft to the touch. Eventually, though, I got there. This is from a lyric essay in my chapbook of poetry and essays, Belly Songs: In Celebration of Fat Women:

My belly pours, hangs, moves, grows hair, shines in marks that fall like fingers curing up around its sides. I am loose, I hang. There are not enough names for the places where my fat gathers on me; there is belly, thigh, hip, chin, but no simple way to say soft-mound-between-breast-and-arms, or low-full-folds-that-are-sides.

I didn’t just observe my body. I also touched it.

I take my belly in my hands. It’s warm. My fingers feel cool, but quickly warm, too. It has a good weight, is soft. I sit very still, and feel the pulse in my thumbs, then find the pulse in the place of my thickest fat. It’s delicate and regular, there, yes, there, yes, there. It comes from the underside where my palms are resting, from the left half and the right half, from veins that curve out the with rest of me. This is not dead lard. It’s my body. It’s my living fat.

Writing Belly Songs opened a vein of literary exploration that eventually resulted in three novels. It changed the way I move through the world too. Having language for fatness—for that aspect of my body I had once understood to be too shameful to speak of—allowed me to begin to know, say, and be more fully who I am. All of that anguished silence was distracting. Living with less of it makes me more present for every other aspect of life. I’ve written about other things, but I know that I’m not done with this topic.

This exercise is useful for any writer. The body is the vessel for all sensory knowledge. Describing one’s physical self with accurate, nuanced attention is like plugging into an electrical socket. There’s a charge. If a writer runs into obstacles to finding language for his, her, or their specific body, then the strategies that arise from grappling with that, or even just touching it lightly, can be revelatory. It has been for me.

 

Susan Stinson is a writer, editor, and teacher. She is the author of four novels, including Spider in a Tree (Small Beer Press, 2013) and Martha Moody (Spinsters Ink Books, 1995; Small Beer Press, 2020). Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Curve, Lambda Literary Review, Seneca Review, and Kenyon Review Online. She is also a recipient of the Outstanding Mid-Career Novelists’ Prize from Lambda Literary. Born in Texas and raised in Colorado, she lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Thumbnail: Oscar Blair

Craft Capsule: Queer Characters Who Behave Badly

by

Peter Kispert

2.15.21

This is no. 88 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

It did not occur to me, while drafting the stories in my debut collection, I Know You Know Who I Am (Penguin Books, 2020), that they might ever become a book. I had not considered anyone would ever read or judge or enjoy or review my writing, beyond some appearances in literary magazines. After a few years of writing stale straight characters, I had finally begun to write queer stories featuring queer people, who to my great relief felt alive on the page. Late at night on my bed, a dim bulb flickering in the kitchen, screen light white on my face, I conjured it all up, and let my heart lead. In my fiction, I tried to articulate the truth.

But the “truth” felt slippery, uneasy. My queer characters, as I found them, were often a mess of wiring: self-sabotage, deception, jealousy, rage—crackling in ways that risked flame. In various ways, in different stories, I can still recall the experience of channeling these things as I wrote. Underneath the elation of finishing a story, I wondered: Why am I writing this? I sometimes feared my rendering of queer characters who behaved badly would be confused as an endorsement of that bad behavior, but nonetheless the work consumed me.

While revising I returned to the question of why my queer characters were behaving badly. I held my ear to each scene to see if I could hear a human sound inside. I didn’t want to presuppose that these characters were liars, but many shared a painful compulsion for self-betrayal. It did make me wonder: Does a writer make decisions on the goodness or badness of their characters, and why? How?

One reflex I noticed in drafting was to complicate a one-dimensional character by working away from either direction. This character is “bad” and so should have “good” characteristics. This character is “good” and so we must find a flaw. But I found this approach yielded rote shattered vases, reminiscent of my two-dimensional straight characters, and tended to render in a kind of permanent sketch. A more holistic, embodied approach—without judgment—transported me into their lives, which rang with a conditional joy I found exquisitely rich. I had to let them breathe.

Many of the stories in my book feature a protagonist or narrator whose deceptions serve a great self-betrayal. They must be masculine enough, or successful enough, or have friends because they don’t, or even merely have histories that suggest these things, in order to be or feel deserving of the love they chase. Often the lies become the stuff of these characters’ undoing. They mean the best but fail in their pursuit.

It is sometimes suggested that we write to free ourselves, but this has never interested me. The great freedom of the page was that I did not have to run from what I felt, or once had. Acknowledgment of complexity felt like a kiss. Fiction, stories, had been where I went to be honest, through queer characters who had begun to habituate, at times compulsively, their desires to betray themselves. Imposing a sense of goodness on a character flattened them, suffocating a tenderness and kindness that I found my characters do often possess too. In the middle of Indiana, in the middle of the night, I trained my gaze on only what felt true. From that feeling, eventually, the book emerged.

 

Peter Kispert is the author of the debut story collection I Know You Know Who I Am (Penguin Books, 2020), which was selected as a Best Book of the Year by Elle and a Best LGBTQ Book of the Year by O, the Oprah Magazine. His stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in GQ, Esquire, them, Playboy, and other publications. He is finishing work on his first novel.

Thumbnail: Evie S.

Craft Capsule: Creating a Seasonal Writing Practice

by

Khadijah Queen

1.4.21

This is no. 84 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

The pandemic, social uprisings, and a volatile political climate—superimposed upon family and work responsibilities, as well as health challenges—has made a regular writing practice impossible over the past ten months. Essays I pitched early in the year didn’t materialize, and only a handful of terribly sad poems arrived in usable condition. The one longform piece I did finish—a zuihitsu that appeared in Harper’s—was about the pandemic, written in April and May as I worried terribly about the health and safety of family members who were sick, and some who are still frontline workers. As a relatively prolific writer, with six published books since 2008 and four more currently in various stages of completion, I’m trying to see my current lack of time and energy to write as a side effect of all that’s happening in the world, but I don’t want to give up on a regular writing practice. To that end, I want to reenvision possibilities for that practice while taking into account the new reality. 

This isn’t the first time I’ve had to adapt to complicated circumstances; I’ve tried many different kinds of writing practices over the past two decades. My early years of writing consisted of recording lines on my lunch breaks and during lulls at my day jobs, and a few minutes in my car before entering the house in the evening. When my son got older, I somehow managed six years of a daily writing practice, usually a half hour at 5:30 AM with a cup of tea and a blueberry muffin. When I had an emergency appendectomy in 2015, my writing routine tanked as I recovered. Slowly I built back up to weekend flurries, and that lasted long enough for me to complete my fifth book. Then I wrote during intensely concentrated weeks and months for three and a half years of doctoral study, resulting in one book of poetry, the first draft of a memoir and a 270-page critical dissertation by the end of 2019. After all that writing, all I wanted was a break, so I took a couple of months. Then the pandemic happened, and the writing—didn’t. As a person who really needs an intentional writing routine, I felt at a loss. 

How, with mounting caregiving, health issues and work responsibilities, would I fit in regular writing time? I struggled for months, until I hit upon the one thing I hadn’t tried yet—seasons. Thinking in terms of seasons avoids the specificity (and requisite pressure) of calendar dates and days of the week. A seasonal practice could preserve writing goals more gently and flexibly. It might include thematic prompts—write about lightness and travel in summer, or perhaps reflect on freedom; focus on renewal and revisit the pastoral or the aubade in spring; delve into darkness, list modes of comfort, and maybe address grief in winter; autumn writing might spotlight transformation and beauty. Autumn is my favorite season. I love wearing knee boots and turtleneck sweaters and leather gloves, love the early October riot of color in the trees. You can of course define for yourself what each season means. Collect keywords over the year that can provide lasting inspiration. 

Let’s also pause here and define “writing goals.” For me that’s mostly meant books, and that hasn’t changed. But I’ve had to think smaller when it comes to productivity even as I continue to envision larger projects. To avoid becoming overwhelmed, maybe I’ll choose a single element to work on, such as order, or beginnings and endings. For a seasonal practice, choosing writing goals that can be adjusted as needed, and granting yourself the easement of non-specified time to work, seems more than reasonable right now.  

If you have an impending deadline in early February, maybe you’ll work only on the coldest days, when outside pursuits aren’t accessible. In summer, if you enjoy writing outside like I do, choose the sunniest days to work on a patio, or at a socially distant café. If you have a deadline that isn’t urgent, try softening it. Make one date—or date range!—for a first draft, another for draft two, another for draft three. After each draft, especially if it’s spring, buy yourself fresh flowers. Get as much done as you can, then reward yourself with an evening walk or morning drive, weather permitting. These are just a few basic suggestions, and you can adjust goals (and rewards) as you go along. I happen to like dark chocolate, so that’s my default treat. Make a list of yours and have it ready along with those seasonal keywords. I firmly believe we need as many reminders as possible that part of the work of writing is allowing for mental space, for infusions of beauty, for intentional nourishment—physical and otherwise. During these incredibly challenging times, I would wager that flexibility rules the day. Don’t abuse grace, of course; communicate clearly and continue to commit to due dates with integrity, but also make use of kindness—given, and received.

 

Khadijah Queen is the author of six books, including Anodyne (Tin House, 2020) and I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On (YesYes Books, 2017). Her writing has also appeared in American Poetry Review, BuzzFeed, Fence, Poetry, and Tin House, among other publications. Holding a PhD in English from the University of Denver and an MFA from Antioch University, she teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and for Regis University’s Mile High MFA program.

Thumbnail: Oliver Hihn

Craft Capsule: Writing Hot

by

Jordan Kisner

11.30.20

This is no. 80 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

When I was a writing student, a professor once commented to me that my writing was a little intense. I don’t remember exactly what he said, and he wasn’t unkind, but it was something like “Your writing is always at eleven,” or “Your writing is always just so hot-blooded.” 

This comment elicited a mixed reaction at the time. I wasn’t proud. I didn’t sense that this was a compliment. He was giving me a note: Learn to tone it down sometimes. It felt respectful in its way, as if he were saying, “Okay, you can write like your hair is on fire, but make sure that’s not the only thing you can do.” Which is a good and teacherly thing to do, to discourage a student from leaning too heavily on the thing that feels good, to point out tics and habits. But as a young writer—a female writer, a queer writer—to hear an older male professor note that your work is unrelentingly intense can set off a clamor of questions, insecurities, suspicions, irritations, doubts, shames. This is maybe especially the case when the young writer is writing (as I was) about her own life and self, the source of this overmuchness. 

So I was a little embarrassed, concerned that “intense” was code for melodramatic, maudlin, tacky, purple. Childish. Overfeminine. Hysterical. But also, I wanted to be an intense writer. What was the point of writing if it wasn’t vivid and compelling, if it wasn’t transporting, if it didn’t make you rock back in your seat? I wrote then, and write now, I suppose, to express an intensity to the condition of being, an aliveness that feels full and bewildering. 

After that, though, I spent several years trying to write in a way that was hot-blooded, or full of feeling, but also somehow cool. Writing that was fierce and ardent while being unimpeachably in control of itself. I’ve tried a few ways to do this over the years. The first, maybe, we’ll call The Didion method: Bury feeling in a near-hysterical radiance of detail or texture when describing absolutely mundane things like sock brands; directly reference imminent emotional breakdown (or past breakdown) in prose so deadpan and commanding it seems like possibly a complex joke. Then there is what we might call The Nelson: Go straight to eleven, get poetic and hot about sex, love, heartbreak, pain, and then stave off accusations of mawkishness with theory and academically rigorous discussions of the sex. 

I love both these methods—and Joan Didion and Maggie Nelson—but lately I’ve been thinking about what you lose when you insist on cooling down your prose. Early this summer I had a conversation with Ocean Vuong on my Thresholds podcast during which he spoke about his reclamation of prose that some might dismiss as purple. “I am interested in using a style that a lot of men have deemed too prissy for them to use in the present,” he told me. “It feels like drag to me—to be extra! There’s too much glitter because we want to be blindingly present and seen.” He was speaking about the historical moment when emotional and beautiful writing was deemed feminine and therefore less worthy, and the way that as a [queer] man he might begin to excavate and subvert that. He reminded me, also, that you can find fun and even joy in just going ahead and writing at eleven, writing hot, writing like your hair is on fire—to be blindingly present and seen.  

 

Jordan Kisner is the author of the essay collection Thin Places (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). Her writing has also appeared in the Atlantic, the Believer, the Guardian, n+1, the New York Times Magazine, and the Paris Review Daily. The recipient of fellowships from Pioneer Works, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and Art Omi, she is currently a fellow at the Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas. 

Thumbnail: Dmitry Bayer

Craft Capsule: On Becoming a Pop Star, I Mean, a Poet

by

Chen Chen

11.2.20

This is no. 77 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

1. I started to write poetry because of a secret that I had trouble sharing even with myself.

2. I continue to write poetry because, in the fifth grade, my short story about a pregnant witch living in Venice received the following peer critique: “You do know it takes nine months for the baby to grow inside the mom, not two?” I write poetry because I wish I’d responded, “You do know this is a witch baby???” 

3. I knew I would always be a poet after a barely audible “goodbye” in the doorway of a tenth-floor apartment. How there was no elevator and it was the middle of summer and I had to walk down and down those stairs. 

4. I wake up craving poetry because Sawako Nakayasu once said, “I work mostly in poetry because it claims to be neither fiction nor nonfiction, because it acknowledges the gap between what really was or is, and what is said about it.”1 

5. Poetry because French class, Russian class. Because Mandarin and English and Hokkien at home. Because English. Because I learn and learn, then forget so much Mandarin. Because I forgot all my Hokkien2 by age seven. Poetry because my first-year advisor in college, a professor of Russian Studies, asked me why all my three-page Tolstoy responses were so late. “Go on,” she said, “give us your narrative.” Poems because I loved how her prompt was a comment on the expected form of my response. Poet because I said, “Time management’s an issue,” which really meant I wanted every paper to be about everything and I wanted Takeshi Kaneshiro’s character in Chungking Express and I wanted Takeshi Kaneshiro and was rewatching the film over and over and Googling stills. 

6. In eighth grade I began writing poetry outside of school assignments because I couldn’t keep imitating Robert Frost. I kept writing poetry because it seemed no one else with a secret like this looked like me.

7. Poet because I am a failed musician. Failed painter. Failed scientist obsessed with the moon.3 Failed gymnast, though once I was very, very good at cartwheeling. Poetry because my favorite scenes in Power Rangers were when, instead of running, they all backflipped and backflipped to where the fighting would take place.

8. The violence of the state. The silence of the h in French words, like homme. How violent, many homes. To ask, “Where is home?” as if it’s ever a simple question. To say, “I have a home” as if it’s an unremarkable statement. To say “I have” in Russian, you use a genitive construction that translates to the awkward English, “At me there is.” At home the adults asked, “Why did you get an A-?” in three different languages; there were no questions about whether I would ever start hating myself for what and whom I loved.   

9. I continue to read poetry because it seems every poem has a big secret at its core and I always want to know if it’s a big gay secret. Because Anna Akhmatova wrote, “Sunset in the ethereal waves: / I cannot tell if the day / is ending, or the world, or if / the secret of secrets is inside me again”4 and that seems pretty gay to me. Because Denise Levertov wrote, “Two girls discover / the secret of life / in a sudden line of / poetry”5 and that sounds definitely gay. 

Because for years I had to settle for subtext and total projection. 

Because when I found Justin Chin’s Bite Hard in a college library, I glanced at just one poem then added the book to my stack to check out. Because I moved it to the middle of the stack, as if hiding it from both the sky and the ground. Because I was so moved to see both “Chinese New Year” and “ex-boyfriends” in one poem. Because was it hide or protect, and do I know the difference now? 

10. In English, I still have trouble with lie versus lay, which I always feel ashamed to admit, though I know English is a troublesome, troubling language that makes one want to lay down, to lie one’s body on its side till all one’s lies have tumbled out from one’s head and belly, and are lain out like one single shadow-body of a liar on the grass. 

11. I started off as a fiction writer. 

12.  I started as a reader of fantastical literature, a writer of both fantasy and science fiction. I started on the playground, telling friends that the jungle gym was a spaceship and we’d better hurry onboard before it took off: “Danny, you’re new to the cause, like me. Amanda, you’re the chosen one, our only hope.” I couldn’t get enough of the galactic, magic, any-kind-of-epic mission; the dueling-with-lasers-or-wands journey. I acted them out, wrote them down. 

Moments of poetry occurred in my stories when I stayed too long in the pocket dimension of an emotion; when I strayed too far into the magic of an image; when I mismanaged the time and leapt through the wormhole/plot-hole back to my implausible Venice and its witch baby. Poetry erupted when I couldn’t keep performing the narrative I was supposed to—that of a boy who liked Amandas, not Dannys. 

13. Looking back, dueling with lasers or wands sounds definitely phallic. 

14. I became a poet after my friends no longer wanted to play the games we made up. After they decided to only play games that would help them grow up. But growing up, for me, meant no longer just playing at, dancing around what I desired. And some days I wanted to grow up. And some days I wanted to die. 

15. I had to Google “coming out.” I had to Google “lie vs. lay.” I had to Google “gay and Asian” and found mainly what white men had to say about bodies like mine. I had to Google “gay Asian American literature.” I had to Google “queer.” I had to Google “fag.” I had to search for one sentence with “I” that eventually I could say out loud. 

16. Poems became my favorite way of telling stories because poems can tell a secret and talk about telling that secret and along the way become another secret.

17. Of course, all this can and does happen in other genres too. And when I write poems I’m drawing on aspects of fantastical fiction, autobiography, realist fiction, standup comedy, Tolstoy as much as Takeshi Kaneshiro, TV shows that got way too many seasons, and elements I don’t want to be able to name. In recent years, lots of prose poems and lyric essay–esque pieces have been showing their blocky faces to me. And very recently, a teensy spoonful of fiction. To call myself poet just makes the most sense, personally, creatively. Poet is where I feel freest to do this and that and wtf.

18. Some nights I just want to be an international sex symbol/pop star with Grammy-worthy vocal chops but still a ton of totally relatable habits, like eating bread. I envy the pop song that can end simply6 by repeating its chorus over and over, slowly fading out yet also burrowing itself into your ear. 

19. A barely audible “hey” in the collapsed year. The violence of state-sanctioned language. My own unbroken, snowy silences. To ask “Where is home?” as if there is one answer. To write home in a poem, like a poem could be a home—is this happy or sad? Strange yet not uncommon, to weep with and into joy. A form of power, a kind of language: to weep and disobey silence. My favorite silence is a space for thought, is spaciousness. A wormhole named Maybe. A parallel galaxy called Another Way. 

20. I continue to poet because now I have all these poet friends who’ll text me to ask what poems I’m writing and I have to start writing again so they’ll stop bugging me and I never want them to stop. 

I continue to poet because I’m not satisfied with the definitions behind, the narratives around “coming out,” “lie vs. lay,” “gay and Asian,” “gay Asian American literature,” “queer,” “fag.” I am always trying to say the everything I’ve lived, am living, but I never want to feel like I’ve said it all. 

For years I believed poetry was the only place where I could be all my selves, any self. I wrote, trying to answer the question, “How can a poem hold the myriad me’s and realms and loves and ferocities and shards and velocities—this whole multiverse that the life cannot, yet?” But can a poem do this? A book of poems? Is poetry a place? 

I am a poet because I ask poetry to do too much, and then it does it. 

 

ENDNOTES

1. From a working note that prefaced a set of Nakayasu’s poems published in How2
2. Except what my parents call each other. 
3. What joy! Poets! Not caring one bit how annoying we are when we go on and on about the moon!
4. “A land not mine,” translated by Jane Kenyon in
From Room to Room (Alice James Books, 1978). 
5. “The Secret” in
O Taste and See (New Directions, 1964). 
6. With the best pop music, this is no simple feat; the chorus has to be excellent.

 

Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017), which was longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry and won the Publishing Triangle Thom Gunn Award. His work has appeared in many publications, including Poetry and the 2015 and 2019 editions of The Best American Poetry. He has received a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Kundiman and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at Brandeis University as the Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence. 

Thumbnail: Romain Gille

Craft Capsule: We Are All Translators

by

Jenny Bhatt

9.21.20

This is no. 73 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Literary translation is about being a close reader in the source language and a skilled writer in the target language. Of course, a language is not merely words, phrases, idioms, diction, and syntax. Languages contain entire cultures within them, entire ways of thinking and being, too. Those of us who translate other writers’ works do so because we want to dive deep and fully immerse ourselves in another world—to pay attention to more than the literal content and preserve the emotions, cultural nuances, and humor from the source to target language.  

This is not unlike how, as readers and writers, we seek to inhabit the worlds of fictional characters. We are all translators. The process of reading involves translating and interpreting the writer’s meaning and intent. The process of writing involves interpreting and giving voice to our own thoughts, which are guided by the things we have read, seen, heard, and experienced. As Mexican poet Octavio Paz famously wrote, “No text is entirely original because language itself, in its essence, is already a translation: firstly, of the nonverbal world and secondly, since every sign and every phrase is the translation of another sign and another phrase.”

Due to the accretions of traditions and culture over centuries, it is not possible to seamlessly transpose two languages when translating. Similarly, due to our conditioning and subjectivity, it is not possible for two readers to read the same text entirely the same way. And it is not possible for two writers to create entirely the same story. A single piece of writing can have multiple acceptable readings and translations due to the flexibility of language, suppleness of imagination, and versatility of craft techniques. 

I was a writer before I became a translator. But I learned to appreciate linguistic, aesthetic, and cultural diversity more profoundly because of translation work. There are ten key practices of the discipline that pull me in each time:

1. Reading a work closely and repetitively to know it, sometimes even better than the original writer.

2. Listening to the tonalities, textures, rhythms, cadences, and diction in both languages to capture the writer’s voice as fully as possible.

3. Learning nuanced meanings of words and phrases in the target language by seeing them used with different specificity and significance in the source language.

4. Hunting for le mot juste that honors the complexities of both languages.

5. Discovering aesthetic reinterpretations of an original work to suit a new readership or audience linguistically, intellectually, and intuitively. 

6. Deliberating over the subtexts, cultural implications, and stylistic choices made by the original writer in the source language to recreate them in the target language without losing any literary merit.

7. Interrogating the politics of the writer, their text, and the source and target languages.

8. Meditating on the original writer’s themes to convey them with the proper intentions and emotions.

9. Deepening my understanding of the world, past and present, by transforming something foreign into something familiar.

10. Negotiating with what remains untranslatable.

With only one book of translation and a handful of shorter works completed, I am still developing these practices into technical proficiencies. However, as each translation project helps me hone and refine my skills, I am also leveraging these lessons more frequently in my reading and writing. Literary translation is, in the end, about actively co-creating a text with its original writer by adding more shape, context, nuance, and texture to it. Aren’t we all better off as readers if we learn to do the same? And aren’t we stronger writers when we draw from, build onto, and expand upon the world of literature that has come before us?

 

Jenny Bhatt is a writer, translator, and literary critic. She is the host of the Desi Books podcast and the author of the short story collection Each of Us Killers (7.13 Books, 2020). Her literary translation of Gujarati writer Dhumketu’s best short fiction is forthcoming from HarperCollins India in late 2020. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Literary Hub, Longreads, Poets & Writers Magazine, the Millions, Electric Literature, the Rumpus, and Kenyon Review. Having lived and worked in India, England, Germany, Scotland, and various parts of the United States, she now lives in a suburb of Dallas.

Thumbnail: Patrick Tomasso

Craft Capsule: Doors vs. Corridors

by

Will Harris

8.17.20

This is no. 68 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

During the pandemic, with so many doors locked and shuttered, I lived in the corridors of my house. Thom Gunn describes the corridor as a “separate place between the thought and felt”—a place of uncertainty, where thoughts are unformed and feelings suppressed. It’s probably not surprising, then, that the few poems I managed to eke out were meandering, confused, and muffled.

As the architecture of my house extended into what I wrote, I started looking for poems about houses—either set indoors or using the “house” as a metaphor for the craft of poetry. I was trying to work out what kind of house poetry should be, and how much confusion that house might be able to contain. Soon enough I turned to Emily Dickinson: 

I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –

I always read this stanza with the ironic hint of the estate agent in her tone (“Superior—for Doors” is particularly funny), which seems to mock the idea you could ever really compare poetry to a house. Though it can feel like using a conceit means committing to it entirely, here the analogy is loosely held, self-consciously tenuous: “If you look to your right, you’ll see some windows. How many? Numerous. And if you look down there, yup, superior doors. You won’t get that with Prose.” The lightness of tone is part of the image she projects about poetry. 

But I read it with another, darker Dickinson poem in the back of my head, this one taking the house less as a metaphor for poetry than for the poet’s interior life:

One need not be a Chamber – to be haunted – 
One need not be a House –
The Brain has Corridors – surpassing 
Material Place

These lines suggest that when you forgo “Material Place” and build your house in “Possibility” you open yourself up to a particular danger: being haunted. Where the other poem began with a confident assertion of habitation—“I dwell”—here the speaker expresses horror at the idea of being dwelt in: “The Brain has Corridors.” The tone is repetitious, fevered, as though the speaker has been running up and down their internal corridors for hours. The effect of this is compounded by the use of the impersonal pronoun “One” and that definite article before “Brain”—not my brain but the brain—which suggests a traumatic detachment from the body; and “surpassing,” hanging at the end of the line makes it feel like those brain corridors are only getting bigger, longer, more labyrinthine. 

What’s missing from the second poem is a door of the kind Dickinson thought made poetry so superior—and without one, there’s no means of escape. Door and corridor may sound related but there’s no etymological link between them. The word door comes from the Old English duru and has always meant the same thing. Corridor is from the Italian corridoio, referring to a “running-place.” They represent two forms of possibility, each reliant on the other: The door is a portal, signifying insight, while the corridor is an in-between place, signifying uncertainty and confusion. 

An important way to understand the corridor might be via the horror film in which a shadowy figure always seems to be lurking at the other end, or the protagonist is trapped, running down an endless dark passage full of locked doors. Where the corridor represents terror, the door is freedom.

*

During lockdown I also turned to Bhanu Kapil’s book How to Wash a Heart and stopped at this section:

When what you perform 
At the threshold
Is at odds 
With what happens
When the front door is closed,
Then you are burning
The toast 
And you are letting the butter
Fester.

The front door is where the internal becomes public, even if briefly. But in order for an act to be meaningful, what you “perform” at the threshold must have some relationship to what happens behind it. Kapil’s lines make me think of those people in expensive houses who voted to privatize Britain’s National Health Service last December and then stepped out onto their doorsteps this spring to clap enthusiastically in support of nurses and carers. They make me think of what the threshold can conceal. The door only has meaning in relation to the corridor.

In early July, Bhanu and I did a reading together on Zoom. She began hers by lighting a small candle. She had some shallots next to her that she’d picked from Wittgenstein’s garden in Cambridge. The effect of these gestures wasn’t just to welcome the listener in. It was to create an open space into which the poem could emerge, where we could meet it. In trying to harmonize inner and outer, in letting out what festers, the distance between our two screens fell away.

After the reading, I thought back to Dickinson’s haunted house poem. It’s driven by a claustrophobic fear of the internal. Even the “External Ghost” or hidden “Assassin” (other threats that feature in Dickinson’s poem) are less terrifying than the prospect of “self encounter.” The self is a more ambiguous, volatile element. It could stay hidden forever: “Ourself, behind ourself concealed,” reads one line in the poem. You might think you’ve turned a corner, the front door in sight, only to find yourself lost down another passageway. 

But this is only a nightmare if you’re looking for a door. The beauty of Kapil’s How to Wash a Heart lies in its openness: “I want to be split / Into two parts / Or a thousand pieces.” The self that’s been split into a thousand pieces has nothing to lose. What’s not whole cannot be broken. Likewise, the poem doesn’t have to form a coherent whole—a portal to insight. It doesn’t have to involve finding the right door and standing outside of it proudly. It can also mean walking the corridors, afraid and confused.

 

Will Harris is the author of the poetry collection RENDANG (Wesleyan University Press, 2020), which was selected as a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. He has worked in schools and led workshops at the Southbank Centre and currently teaches for the Poetry School. A contributing editor at the Rialto, he lives in London. 

Thumbnail: Kilarov Zaneit

Craft Capsule: The Authority of Black Childhood

by

Joy Priest

7.6.20

This is no. 64 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Outside / its case, the mind is a beehive / fallen in the wild grasses / of an abandoned playground.

— from “Ars Poetica” by Joy Priest

It’s January 2, 2020. I’m traveling by car with a painter back to the artists’ compound that I’m staying at for a seven-month residency—a blip-stage between the MFA I finished in May 2019 and the PhD I will start in August 2020, a deliberate detour in the longer academic-poet road on which I find myself. About it, slightly in mourning. Alone in study, but wholeheartedly wanting to be closer to the people in this poetry thing.

The painter has found a way to subsist outside the university engine, working in the residency office, leading Zumba classes in the morning, painting in her studio at night. We’re talking about what academia does to artists, and, as we’re riding—from Wellfleet back to Provincetown, at the very tip of the Cape, isolated at the end of the land—she says, “I really do feel like this chapter for me has been about unlearning.”

*

“Sometimes a moment of liberation is suspended by the tight grip of contradiction,” my friend Bernardo says, which captures this moment I have in the car with the painter, as well as the larger social context we’re sailing through like a tiny, mobile dot on the periphery of the U.S. map. I was liberated by the painter’s articulation but jealous that I hadn’t pulled it out of my subconscious first: unlearning. This had been my project for the first three months of the fellowship, but I’d thought I was wasting time because that project had not yet been named. Wasting time—a feeling shaped by the values of academia, a microcosm of our larger society and its ailing imagination, which burdens artists and writers with paradigms of productivity and surplus contributions to an inaccessible archive. I had been unlearning that.

*

Usually, when stuck in a vehicle, poetry-talk is boring at worst, frustrating at best. A Lyft driver or seatmate on a plane will inevitably ask, “When did you start writing poetry?” I find this frustrating because I haven’t yet crafted a creative approach to the question, but, more importantly, because such a question precludes the true answer.

*

I was a better poet when I was a child.

During the nineties in Kentucky, I was a child in solitude. There was a lack of artificial stimuli, my technology limited to a Sega Genesis that I spent more time blowing dust from than playing. My single mother was at work. The only other person in the house was my grandfather, a man in his seventies, who—I didn’t know at the time—was white. He defined our relationship with board games, puzzles, basketball, or boxing on a box TV set—the technology of his time. With his racist perspectives, he attempted to define my identity, which I didn’t yet understand, but felt, intuitively. 

In place of understanding, in place of the internet, I cultivated a practice in noticing. This is how I developed my approach to the page, before I had an awareness of “craft.” Poetry wasn’t what I did or what I started doing in a single moment from the past onward, it was the way I thought, who I had to be in my grandfather’s household, the way my mind worked to make sense of something.

There isn’t a single event that led to me becoming a poet. There isn’t a beginning to me writing poetry—there is only the beginner’s mind. This is what I find myself trying to get back to in my unlearning: the authority of a child’s imagination—what we possess before we are fully indoctrinated into adulthood and the accepted ways of making sense of things. 

*

I spent a lot of time outside of my grandfather’s house, in the backyard. My mind was a beehive. A chaotic, intuitive knot of thought-impulses that I needed to wrest apart, investigate, ruminate on, understand. I found myself watching the ants at ground-level, making a daily visit to the carpenter bees and their perfectly round holes in the rotting wood. 

When I was inside, I noticed the difference between my grandfather’s skin and mine. I knew my hair was more like the hair of darker people, who he was always saying bad things about. I knew that he didn’t want me to be like them, but I couldn’t understand why. I couldn’t understand why, but I could notice. I kept a record of these little noticings as a substitute for clarity around what I was noticing. This conversation with myself as a Black child supplemented what I learned, or what adults sought to teach me (what a white child learns or is taught by white adults). This practice of noticing, or overhearing, was my seminal craft approach. 

*

Pulling away the scaffolding of craft “knowledge,” which I’ve accumulated as an adult poet, has led me to this—notebooks full of little noticings and meditations, overhearings and mishearings, notions that haunt me, lines that keep coming up. Writing a poem this way becomes less strained: that accumulation of craft had become a cheesecloth through which I struggled to write. 

These little noticings are the only way I wish to start a poem, or any conversation about craft. It is how I get closer to an understanding of what something or someone—my imaginary friend, my ancestors, my intuition, the flora and fauna—is trying to tell me, and I embrace this as a spiritual craft as well as a technical one. It is my resistance to the limits of the U.S. popular imagination, which condescends to the childhood imagination in tropes and shorthand, which does not know, can no longer remember, what the child knows.

 

Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower, which won the 2019 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press in September. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in numerous publications, including BOAAT, Connotation Press, Four Way Review, espnW, Gulf Coast, Mississippi Review, and Poetry Northwest, and have been anthologized in The Louisville Anthology (Belt Publishing, September 2020), A Measure of Belonging: Writers of Color on the New American South (Hub City Press, October 2020) and Best New Poets 2014, 2016, and 2019. A doctoral student in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston, Priest has also been a journalist, a theater attendant, a waitress, and a fast food worker. She has facilitated writing workshops and arbitration programs with adult and juvenile incarcerated women, and has taught composition, rhetoric, comedy, and African American arts and culture at the university level.

Thumbnail: Dustin Humes

Craft Capsule: Notes From the Cutting Room Floor

by

Sejal Shah

5.18.20

This is no. 60 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

An essay collection consists of more than several pieces between two covers. There is always the ghost manuscript: what is cut, what has been moved, shaped, revised. In my first book, This Is One Way to Dance, there are notes at the end of the text—they are narrative, include sources for quoted material, acknowledge readers and editors, and are not numbered. This essay is another kind of commentary. Each piece rewrites what came before. In a way, I am still rewriting my book and its notes—notes to oneself, to one’s reader, you; they are a conversation. 

I wrote the first draft of this essay in longhand; later, I typed it. At some point, I began numbering my thoughts as a way of keeping track. When I cut and pasted different sections of the text, I preserved the original numbers to trace the movement of information. In doing so, I attempt to show my writing process in the tradition of visible mending.

1. In Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, there are footnotes. There are three epigraphs at the beginning, each on a different page (I love this, the space). Many of the footnotes lead to Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature. The chapters are short, sometimes only a page, and the footnotes don’t feel like an interruption, but pleasurable, recursive reading. There is an overture disavowing prologues. After the overture is a gorgeous prologue: “The memoir is at its core, an act of resurrection. Memoirists…manipulate time; resuscitate the dead. They put themselves, and others, into necessary context.” If I had read In the Dreamhouse while working on my book, I might have written a different prologue. So many beats to a book, architecture, a tonal range, a key. All of these elements are questions that ask: Who is your audience? To whom and how do I wish to explain myself?1 

3. Are prologues and codas forms of notes? Is an introduction?

20. Here is a ghost note, something I cut from the introduction of my book: “I grew up seeing and later studying with Garth Fagan Dance. A noted choreographer, Fagan is associated with the Black Arts Movement. Fagan technique draws from ballet, modern dance, and Afro-Caribbean dance. I learned: You could invent your own language. You didn’t have to fit yourself into someone else’s forms. You didn’t have to explain yourself.”

4. I wanted my notes to go before the acknowledgments, to be part of the body of This Is One Way to Dance. In the published copy, my notes follow the acknowledgments, per the press’s house style, which is The Chicago Manual of Style. I realize I don’t believe in style manuals.

17. Somewhere in a book (an introduction) or outside it (an interview), you will have to explain why you wrote your book. At each stage of the publishing process you use a different form: a proposal, a press sheet, a preface, a prologue, an afterward, a Q&A. Sometimes I still stumble. From the preface of Sonja Livingston’s memoir, Ghostbread: “I wrote this book because the pain and power and beauty of childhood inspire me. I wrote it selfishly, to make sense of chaos. I wrote it unselfishly, to bear witness. For houses and gardens and children most of us never see.” 

Part of me wants to never explain anything. Part of me worries I have explained too much and still missed what is most important. The settling and unsettling of the self. Navigating, meditating, mediating. Not identity, but movement. A book, through architecture or by words, must instruct the reader in how to read it. Both are important.

2. For a book review, I remember finding out, after already reading far into the text, that a glossary and notes existed at the back. This changed my reading of the book. With no table of contents and no superscript numbers, how would you know to look for notes and a glossary? Do you flip to the back of the book to see what happens, in case you die before you finish reading,2 in order to know what something means?

4. (a) My book ends with the last sentence of the notes: “And there are many reasons to dance.” 

5. I am talking to my friend Prageeta Sharma, a poet, about notes. She mentions Brian Blanchfield’s Proxies: Essays Near Knowing, which begins with a section called “[A Note].” Blanchfield writes, “At the end of this book there is a rolling endnote called ‘Correction.’ It sets right much—almost certainly not all—of what between here and there I get wrong. It runs to twenty-one pages. It may still be running.” This feels true to me about writing a book. Trying to right it, but in the end, it’s a series of notations and corrections, assertions and deletions. Traces.

6. The poet Rick Barot told me his second book had notes. Not his first and third. And not his fourth, the most recent, The Galleons. He says he is anti-notes now.3 I get that.

28. Are notes like parentheses? (Say it clearly or not at all.) 

7. The writer Michael Martone wrote a book called Michael Martone, and the chapters are written in the style of “Contributors’ Notes” and his contributors’ notes are stories. Contributors’ notes are stories we tell about ourselves; they are fictions. 

10. How are notes different than sources? I wrote notes for many of my essays, but not all of them. Notes were sometimes meant to be a place to credit sources, but they also became their own commentary. They sprawled. I credit writing prompts, editors, readers, and books. Some of that could have been folded into acknowledgments. I credited sources for titles and images. I wrote about the Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage during the time and day of our ceremony and why this mattered to me. Actually, that was a kind of afterward.

13. I am writing for the kind of people who read notes. Those are my readers, my people. 

16. (a) In my book there is a coda titled “Voice Texting With My Mother.” I did not title it a coda. At some point I lost track of what needed a classification or title and what could exist as part of the invisible architecture of the book.

18. In her short “A Note from the Author,” Tyrese Coleman writes: “How to Sit [a Memoir in Stories and Essays] challenges the concept that a distinction needs to be made when the work is memory-based, because memories contain their own truth regardless of how they are documented.” 

9. This winter I read Cathy Park Hong’s book of essays, Minor Feelings. I realized, when I reached the end of the book, I had been expecting notes. Her essays are muscular, theoretical, personal, and include history, cultural commentary, friendships, family, and literature—a whole essay on the artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and her cross-genre memoir, Dictée. It surprised me to learn I liked the lack of notes in her book. It meant theorists and sources were often foregrounded in the essays themselves. In Hong’s work I saw a different model—the essay as a “coalitional form.” A model that foregrounds voices and perspectives beyond the essayist’s own—one that she credits writers in the tradition of Hilton Als, James Baldwin, and Maggie Nelson. 

19. An introduction is like a toast at a wedding. No, I cannot satisfactorily address so many audiences—pivot—who is an introduction for? Why not just begin? Whose job is it to host?

27. I read the acknowledgments and the notes in most books. I want to know how a book came together.

22. Sometimes I skim the notes.

14. I have to be honest: I am intrigued by the idea of no notes. Maybe for the next book.

 

ENDNOTES

1. After I turned in my proofs last December, I read Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings. Hong writes about Myung Mi Kim, “the first poet who said I [Hong] didn’t need to sound like a white poet nor did I have to ‘translate’ my experiences so that they sounded accessible to a white audience…Illegibility was a political act.” Yes. I believe this.
2. What Harry does in
When Harry Met Sally.
3. [E-mail from Rick] “When I say I’m now ‘anti-notes,’ this mostly refers to my last book, 
The Galleons. There’s a lot of background research in the book, but I didn’t want a notes section to make the book seem like a ‘project’ book.  After all, my research for the book was driven by lyrical sentiment and opportunity—it wasn’t systematic…”

 

Sejal Shah’s debut essay collection, This Is One Way to Dance, will be published by the University of Georgia Press in June. Her writing can be found in Brevity, Conjunctions, Guernica, Kenyon Review, the Literary Review, the Margins, and the Rumpus. She is also the recipient of a 2018 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in fiction. Shah is on the faculty of The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University, and lives in Rochester, New York. 

Thumbnail: Judith Browne

Craft Capsule: Reading Backwards

by

Carter Sickels

3.30.20

This is no. 54 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

When I was getting my MFA many years ago, a member of the workshop passed on a piece of advice he’d once heard: Read your manuscript backwards. At the time, I didn’t pay much attention (he was a bit of a know-it-all), but the advice stuck with me, clanging around in my brain, and I’ve since turned to it when line editing and hammering out bigger structural issues.

Reading backwards doesn’t mean you read from right to left, or from the bottom of the page to the top. What I do is print out the manuscript, start with the top of the last page, and work my way back to page one. This exercise works differently for me depending on where I am in the process. When I have a final draft, reading backwards helps with line editing. When I read backwards, I use my brain in a different way, and it slows down my reading. I focus on the words, not the story, and spot repetition and unnecessary words.

Reading backwards has also helped me resolve structural issues and build narrative tension. I was struggling with a short story I’d been trying to write for months. It wasn’t working but I couldn’t figure out why. I let the manuscript sit and cool, like a hot potato; when I returned to it after a few more months, I tried the backwards reading trick. The ending of the story worked, but how did I get there? There were holes in the plot, and too much exposition that glossed over important information. The first-person narrator, so focused on his lover, never stepped up or revealed any insight into his own interior. I hadn’t written any scenes with him alone or with other characters. These backwards-reading discoveries helped me restructure and revise the story; I cut exposition, wrote new scenes, and rearranged the scenes I already had to amplify the tension. 

When I’m stuck I’ll try looking at the story from a fresh angle—whether reading backwards, changing the font, hanging pages on the wall or spreading them out on the floor. I read the entire manuscript aloud. I retype. These are all ways to trick myself into approaching the novel from a different place. Sometimes it works. And when it does, it’s like seeing the project with a new pair of eyes—catching what I missed, or discovering a hidden door that leads me to the true story. 

 

Carter Sickels’s second novel, The Prettiest Star, will be published by Hub City Press on May 19. He is also the author of The Evening Hour (Bloomsbury, 2012), which was a finalist for an Oregon Book Award and a Lambda Literary Award. His essays and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in various publications, including Guernica, Bellevue Literary Review, Green Mountains Review, and BuzzFeed. The recipient of the 2013 Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Award, Sickels has also earned fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. He is an assistant professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University, where he teaches in the Bluegrass Writers low-residency MFA program. 

Thumbnail: Amie LeeKing

Craft Capsule: Consulting the Tarot

by

Emma Copley Eisenberg

2.24.20

This is no. 50 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I was raised in a house of reason where there was no God, no witchcraft, no science fiction, no astrology, and certainly no tarot. These things were for the weak, and we were not weak. But I’ll never forget when I read Uncle Tom’s Cabin and it dawned on me why Tom prayed so much: He was just trying to get through the day. I was weak, I knew. To make it from dawn to dusk, I too needed all the help I could get. 

Tarot came into my life through the friend, the friend I lost, and it is the thing she gave me more than any other for which I offer her my supreme gratitude. To be fair, I acquired the deck itself—The Wild Unknown by Kim Krans—much earlier; I bought it on impulse late one night on the gushing recommendation of someone I’d met at a party. You are not supposed to buy a tarot deck for yourself, I learned later, perhaps because without the blessing of someone you love to imbue the paper and images with power, a deck of cards is just a deck of cards.

I cannot now separate tarot from the friend, and I cannot separate tarot from writing. She and I became friends during the period when the card of the moon, which according to my deck “encompasses the idea of the Wild Unknown,” was my near constant companion. She taught me how to do the simplest spread—past, present, future—and led me to Michelle Tea’s book on tarot, life, and writing, Modern Tarot: Connecting With Your Higher Self Through the Wisdom of the Cards. Past, present, future; beginning, middle, and end. My friend and I began to draw a single card to set the mood for our writing sessions together, held at a ramshackle coworking space in the neighborhood where we lived.

What I like about drawing a single card before writing is that it allows me a single place to put my feelings about that day’s words—all my fear that the words won’t come and all my fear that they will. Drawing a single card, the mother of pentacles, for instance, which offers an image of a deer and her fawn, gives me a door at which to knock when I can’t see any of that paragraph’s architecture. She excels in the home, the card says: Perhaps I’ll turn my scent diffuser on, or I’ll have a character bake a scone, or I’ll think about why some person in my book moved around so much from place to place. It’s not so much a place to start writing but rather a way to give the day’s writing a particular mood or scent or inflection. Draw the death card, which in The Wild Unknown simply means that “something in your life needs to end…something is trying to find closure,” and the idea of ending and closure will start bonking around in my brain until it hits something in my writing that needed either to finish or to begin. Each card is like a prompt I suppose, except instead of being wacky and contrived, it feels like a prompt I gave myself from the darkest recesses of my unconscious, a shortcut to the place I was trying to go. 

I drew a card every day while writing The Third Rainbow Girl, which explores a mysterious act of violence in Pocahontas County, West Virginia in 1980, the Appalachian community where it transpired, and my own time in the place as a national service worker. For nearly the entirety of the fifteen months when I was most actively engaged, sentence by sentence, in writing the book, I dreamed about murder—either murdering or being murdered—every night. Then every morning I went to the deck and chose a card. I am not exaggerating when I say that I chose the moon card almost every time, no matter how well I shuffled. The card’s overall theme: vivid dreams and fears. I read the card’s description so many times I can recite it by heart:

[The moon] is the shadow realm, the place where dreams, fears, and mysteries are born. Much darkness can linger here, and if you aren’t careful, this can lead to periods of anxiety and self-doubt almost as if you’ve lost your way in a house of mirrors. Many great artists have roamed this inner landscape. It’s where imagination and creativity drift freely upon the midnight air.

That about summed it up. Fuck the fucking moon, I began to say aloud each time I drew it. Fuck this fucking book.

But the moon would not be fucked and neither would the book I was writing; they would not go away until they went away and maybe not even then. Eventually, I finished the book and I lost the friend. I’m drawing new cards these days—a lot of pentacles, the suit of home and hearth. I hope I drift less and dig more in the next book, but of course, it’s not up to me. 

 

Emma Copley Eisenberg is the author of The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia (Hachette Books, 2020). Her writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, Granta, the Los Angeles Review of Books, American Short Fiction, the Paris Review Daily, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, and other outlets. She is also the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Wurlitzer Foundation, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and Lambda Literary. She lives in Philadelphia, where she directs Blue Stoop, a hub for the literary arts. 

Thumbnail: Altınay Dinç

Craft Capsule: Start, Stop, Change

by

Mimi Lok

1.12.20

This is no. 46 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

For many writers with long-brewing projects, starting a new year can stir up dread, excitement, grim resolve, or all of the above. Mid-January becomes a time of early reckoning: Have I stuck to my guns? Backslid already? Realized, aghast, that my goals were far too lofty? Resolutions are often focused on starting new things, but not enough is said about the value of simply carrying on, taking a moment to reflect on existing projects, and adjusting or even stopping the approaches that are no longer working. 

Whenever I feel stuck or overwhelmed with a writing project, I try to take a step back and ask myself three questions: What needs to start? What needs to stop? What needs to change? And then I make lists or action items in response to those questions. It might look something like this:

What needs to start? 

  • Write the scene or chapter you’ve been avoiding. Drink a shot of tequila and write the bloody thing. In one sitting. Tape over the delete button if necessary.
  • Admit that the work has reached the point where it needs to leave the house. Share it with the person who will tell you things you don’t want to hear but who will ultimately help you make it stronger.
  • Look farther afield for things that feed your creative brain and soul. Get your nose out of a book and get thee to an art museum, concert, or stand-up comedy show. It doesn’t have to be tangibly connected to your project, but it will wake up different parts of you and might even spark ideas.

What needs to stop?

  • Control. Release your characters from their toddler harnesses and let them do what they want to do instead of what you want them to do.
  • Narrator as bodycam. Stop treating your first-person narrator as a passive, disembodied set of eyes and ears, and turn them into an actual human being the reader can see, hear, and feel.
  • Procrastination. Specifically, the kind that’s rooted in a lack of interest and motivation rather than a lack of confidence. If some high power decreed you could only tell one last story before you died, would this be it? If the answer is “umm…,” then put this project aside and find the story that feels compelling and urgent to you, and that only you can tell.

What needs to change?

  • Point of view. Does it have to be the POV you’ve chosen? Why? What would happen if you changed it?
  • Scope. Recognize how you’ve been limiting the story and expand or shrink the world of your story accordingly. This could be related to the number of characters you want to focus on, or settings, or time periods. Or it could be about redistributing the amount of time spent with various characters and their world(s). See how it affects the intensity and focus.
  • Setting. How important is your chosen time and place to the story you want to tell? Would the story change if it were relocated, set in another time period?

The stop/start/change tool is something I’ve borrowed from my other life in the nonprofit sector (mostly in terms of assessing projects and organizational priorities), but which can be handily applied to other areas of life too: friendships, marriages, exercise routines, to name a few.

 

Mimi Lok is the author of the story collection Last of Her Name (Kaya Press, 2019), which was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. She is the recipient of a Smithsonian Ingenuity Award and an Ylvisaker Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Fiction Prize and the Susan Atefat Arts and Letters Prize for nonfiction. Her work can be found in McSweeney’s, Electric Literature, and Literary Hub, among other outlets. She is currently working on a novel. Lok is also the cofounder, executive director, and editor of Voice of Witness, an award-winning human rights/oral history nonprofit that amplifies marginalized voices through a book series and a national education program.

Craft Capsule: The End

by

Cameron Awkward-Rich

12.30.19

This is no. 45 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

When do you stop revising? How do you know when a poem is done? The short answer is that I consider a poem done once I have committed it to memory. I learned this from a revision exercise I borrowed from Danez Smith who, in turn, borrowed it from Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon. The exercise begins: Open to a blank notebook page or Word document and rewrite the poem you are working on from memory. Following this initial rewrite, Van Clief-Stefanon’s exercise contains a series of prompts intended to clarify what is important to the poem, what it needs more of, and what is extraneous. Even without the prompts, rewriting from memory can, on its own, provide such information; what you remember will usually turn out to be what is essential to the poem, whether that is an image, a narrative, a line-length, a sound. If you remember the whole thing, it stands to reason that the whole thing is essential. 

Poets often analogize the writing of poems to other artistic practices: sculpture, pottery, the making of boats. Embedded in each of these analogies is a different perspective on when to let a poem go. Has a particular affecting figure been etched from the raw material of language? Is the poem both beautiful and functional? Has it carried you—or will it carry your reader—somewhere new? But I tend to think of writing poetry as being less like art making and more like a biological process, like life making. Poetry is a place where I develop, a skin I make in order to make myself. Once I have outgrown it, I can examine the poem from all angles. I can learn new things about it and about who I became inside of it. I can polish its exterior, but there is no way for me to get back inside.

This account of poetry can seem like a rather dismal proposition, especially for those of us who give readings, who return again and again to poems that have already taken shape. It sounds like I am saying that the poem and I were briefly alive together and then, once it has been put down, the poem is no longer living. A reading, in this account, is nothing more than a display of dead language. But here is how I think about it: In the third episode of BBC’s Life Story, there is a vignette about hermit crabs’ elaborate, communal ritual of changing shells. Once a hermit crab has outgrown its shell, it does not simply discard it and move on to the next. Rather, it waits for a critical mass of its fellow travelers to gather and arrange themselves into a line by size order, so that they can transfer shells, one to another. The biggest crab moves into an empty shell on the beach, the next in line takes the big crab’s newly abandoned shell, and on and on down the line until everyone’s soft interior, hopefully, has new room in which to grow. 

What I like about using memorization as a diagnostic is that it says nothing about the “quality” of a poem, so it discourages thinking about revision as “fixing.” Instead, what determines whether a poem is finished is the relationship between us, the poem and I. This perspective on poetry helps me to grow, helps me remember that I can be done with something and that it can be imperfect—it can be a shell with a hole in it—but that it might be precisely what someone else is looking for. 

 

Cameron Awkward-Rich is the author of two poetry collections, Dispatch (Persea Books, 2019) and Sympathetic Little Monster (Ricochet Editions, 2016), which was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. He is a Cave Canem fellow and a poetry editor for Muzzle Magazine. He earned his PhD from Stanford University’s program in Modern Thought & Literature, and he is an assistant professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Thumbnail: Maximilian Paradiz 

Craft Capsule: Revising the Archive

by

Cameron Awkward-Rich

12.9.19

This is no. 42 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Several of the poems in my second collection, Dispatch, which comes out this week from Persea Books, are what I think of as the detritus of my academic book-in-progress about maladjustment in transmasculine literature and theory. In conducting research for this project, I have spent countless hours digging around in digitized newspaper archives, trying to get a feel for what it was like to live a gender-nonconforming life at other times in U.S. history. During the course of this work, I have repeatedly encountered traces of Black/gender-nonconforming lives that flicker in and out of the official record. Every so often I become obsessed with these traces. Mostly what surfaces is news of arrests—arrests for “cross-dressing,” discoveries of “cross-dressing” after arrest. Mostly what surfaces are dead-ends. 

One of the traces I came across: Lawrence Jackson, a Black person who was arrested in 1881 in Chicago wearing a dress and then fined $100. According to the newspapers, Jackson could not pay the fine, but tried to plead for alternate terms of punishment, suggesting that if the judge would accept a smaller fine—all the money they reportedly had, $25—they would self-exile by leaving Chicago forever. But the judge insisted on sending Jackson to jail because “a little punishment would be beneficial.” After this episode, Jackson seems to vanish from the official record, though months later this story, along with an image of Jackson, was reprinted in the popular, tabloid-like National Police Gazette. 

When I first encountered Jackson, I was a PhD student trying to write a dissertation. My first impulse was to put these traces of Jackson’s encounter with power to work in my academic writing—to use their appearance in the archive as evidence for an argument about the regulation of race/sex/gender at the turn of the twentieth century. But it turned out that I couldn’t do it—I lacked both adequate information and the desire to put it, put Jackson, to use. I wanted something from Jackson certainly—they would not leave me alone—but each time I tried to write about them, I was unsettled by the result. It was, in Foucault’s words, “impossible to…grasp them again in themselves, as they might have been ‘in a free state.’” All I could know of Jackson, really, was that they had once or twice been caught—arrested, documented on someone else’s terms. 

Eventually I gave up making an argument altogether and, instead, wrote a poem. It’s no surprise that poetry can be a place to work out our felt relations to traces of the past; the poem has always been where I go to develop a private language, to extend intimately beyond myself, and to stage an impossible, interior conversation. But I was surprised to find that poetry also allowed me to work through some ethical questions that had stalled my academic writing, questions like: What do I do with an archival record that exists only because a violence has occurred? What do I do with lives that, to cite Foucault again, “no longer exist except through the terrible words that were destined to render them forever unworthy of the memory of men”? What I wanted—what it was impossible not to want—from this encounter with someone like me in the past was a sense of historical continuity, a “we” across time. But what kind of “we” can I fashion if all I have are these “terrible words”? 

In writing the poem “Still Life,” I of course could not resolve these questions. But I could attempt writerly experiments that academic prose does not exactly allow. In particular, rather than attending to what happened—rather than being beholden to thinking of Jackson as evidence—I was free to roam inside my lyric room, to conduct a conversation, to put my life and Jackson’s life alongside each other, to imagine them free. 

In your own work, consider asking yourself: What are the traces of the past that will not leave you alone? Can you use those traces in order to imagine the ending to an endless story? Perhaps an ending other than the dismal one hinted at in the official record? What language in the archive is suggestive of these possibilities? What language in the archive is only used for the purpose of capture? Can you make even that language do something else?

 

Cameron Awkward-Rich is the author of two poetry collections, Dispatch (Persea Books, 2019) and Sympathetic Little Monster (Ricochet Editions, 2016), which was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. He is a Cave Canem fellow and a poetry editor for Muzzle Magazine. He earned his PhD from Stanford University’s program in Modern Thought & Literature, and he is an assistant professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Craft Capsule: Oblique Strategies

by

Kimberly King Parsons

7.15.19

This is no. 37 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

When I was getting my MFA in fiction, one of my favorite professors asked us to write a story using only single syllable words. At first this sounded awful—how could we possibly pull this off? It wasn’t easy, but very quickly it became a kind of game to me, an obstruction that brought out odd new rhythms. When we came back to class and read our stories aloud, it was a revelation. Every single student had done something striking and compelling. The sentences were strange and clipped, everyday phrases made fascinating. One student had something like “he who taught us of the past” to stand in for history professor. In my story, instead of an electrician playing checkers, “the lights guy played reds and blacks.” The formal constraint forced us to go beyond the easy, obvious choices. My professor stressed that this was a starting point, something to unlock us; there was no need to stick to these rules in subsequent drafts. Later, when I was revising, I found that because the work didn’t sound like me, I could brutally edit it. Now, more than ten years later, if something isn’t working in a story or chapter, I sometimes fall back on the one-syllable trick.

The weirdest approaches to process are the ones I find most helpful—the ones that have stayed with me the longest. There was the professor who encouraged his classes to narrate problematic scenes from the perspective of inanimate objects, animals, or the dead. A friend of mine takes the articles out of any story or chapter that’s giving him problems. He usually puts most of them back, but something about the extraction lets him see the work differently. There was another professor who forbade us from using adverbs, or giving characters first names, or starting any sentence with a pronoun—I loved his bizarre rules, even when I decided to break them.

When I’m writing I sometimes consult this strange little deck of cards called Oblique Strategies. Originally created in 1975 by painter Peter Schmidt and Brian Eno—yes, that Brian Eno, immensely talented musician, producer, and co-conspirator of the late David Bowie—each card has a single directive printed on it, a “strategy” for your creative process. These prompts are meant to assist with removing blocks, but the Zen-like aphorisms are more abstract than prescriptive (i.e., “Start at the end,” or “Emphasize the flaws,” or really strange ones like “Remember a time when you hid from something as a child.”) 

The deck my partner and I have at home is the updated 2001 edition, with a bizarre product description: “These cards evolved from separate observations of the principles underlying what we were doing. Sometimes they were recognized in retrospect (intellect catching up with intuition), sometimes they were identified as they were happening, and sometimes they were formulated. They can be used when dilemma occurs in a working situation…The card is trusted even if its appropriateness is quite unclear.” These mysterious abstractions are part of the charm. There’s now a version of the strategies available for free online, although I still prefer the physicality of shuffling through a deck. Two cards I selected at random just now read: “Disconnect from desire,” and “Go slowly all the way round the outside.” It all sounds a bit wacky, and that’s exactly the point. I find the further I lean into the weird, the easier is it for me to get back to work.

 

Kimberly King Parsons is the author of Black Light, a short story collection forthcoming from Vintage on August 13, 2019. She is a recipient of fellowships from Columbia University and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and her fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Best Small Fictions, No Tokens, the Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Her website is www.kimberlykingparsons.com.

Craft Capsule: “Unlikable” Characters

by

Crystal Hana Kim

7.25.18

This is no. 36 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

As writers we all have specific goals when creating our fictional worlds. Some writers value plot, others value humor. Some prioritize beautiful sentences or abstract ruminations about the state of society. When I write, my goal is to construct characters full of depth and complexity. I don’t need readers to agree with my characters, but to understand the why behind their actions. 

When I created Haemi Lee, the female protagonist of my novel, If You Leave Me, I focused on developing this complexity so that my readers would know her intimately. At the beginning of the novel, Haemi is a sixteen-year-old refugee during the Korean War, and by the last pages she is a thirty-two-year-old mother in 1967. By covering a wide swath of time, I want readers to watch Haemi survive, mature, fall in love, make mistakes, become a mother, and grapple with the difficulties of life in post-war South Korea. I want Haemi to feel as real as possible, which meant that she would have to be imperfect, flawed. As I wrote, I considered how she would behave as a daughter, sister, wife, mother, and lover. I considered her temperament. Growing up without means in a conservative time, there would be strict social and gendered guidelines placed on Haemi. I wanted her to bristle against those rules. The problem, I discovered, was that an imperfect female protagonist is often labeled unlikable. 

The first time I heard Haemi described this way was in workshop. I was surprised. It was a gendered remark, and I hadn’t been expecting it at the graduate school level. When did we ever question the likability of male characters? Complicating matters further, when did we question the likability of female characters when they were written by male writers? I simmered in silence as my classmates discussed Haemi Lee. (As the student being workshopped, I wasn’t allowed to speak.) Jisoo and Kyunghwan, my two male protagonists, were not always likable and yet the focus remained on Haemi. Why did she need to be likable when her male counterparts were not? Why were we concerned with the likability of women anyway? Who among us are always likable?

This conversation led me to consider the trope of the “unlikable female character.” I prickled at the phrase, the silly term that asserts female characters are valued for their docility and amiability. I decided that I couldn’t let other readers’ apprehensions about Haemi’s likability soften her. Haemi pushes against the social expectations of her time by not hiding her feelings, by wanting an education, and by speaking freely of the difficulties of motherhood. Haemi is giving and selfish, kind and callous. She is concerned with the welfare of everyone around her while also deeply concerned with her own happiness. If I succeeded in my writing goals, my readers will not always like Haemi, but they will feel deeply for her. They will want to guide her, argue with her, and root for her. 

When writing, our concern should not be a character’s likability, regardless of gender. As the writer, our focus should be on making the character feel true. When my students hesitate at revealing their character’s flaws, I encourage them to dig into the messy, ugly parts. Flaws are what make fiction interesting and realistic. Though we may not love our flaws, they are crucial for characters. When a student worries about the likability of their female characters in particular, this is what I tell them: We need more unlikable female protagonists to deepen the way we consider women in our society. Literature teaches us. Literature makes us question and broaden our understanding of the world. If “unlikable female” means a realistic, imperfect, complex woman, then we need to write as many of these characters as we can.

 

Crystal Hana Kim’s debut novel, If You Leave Me, is forthcoming from William Morrow in August. She was a 2017 PEN America Dau Short Story Prize winner and has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Hedgebrook, and Jentel, among others. Her work has been published in or is forthcoming from the Washington Post, Elle Magazine, Nylon, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is a contributing editor at Apogee Journal and is the Director of Writing Instruction at Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband.

Craft Capsule: Multiple Narrators

by

Crystal Hana Kim

7.18.18

This is no. 35 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Before I became a writer, I was first an insatiable reader. From Curious George to Little Women to The Lover, I can mark the trajectory of my development as a writer against my reading choices. A particularly memorable turning point happened when I was eight years old. While at the library, I came across a chapter book called Morning Girl. The cover showed a young girl with dark brown hair and bare shoulders swimming in the open sea, and I picked it up because of the striking image. As I began reading, I fell for Morning Girl’s lush, bright voice as she described her fondness for waking early and searching the beach for seashells. I felt keenly for Morning Girl when her parents favored her younger brother. I had a younger sister, and I understood the mean yellow streaks of jealousy. 

The shock came when I turned to the next chapter. At the top of the page was the name Star Boy. This chapter, I realized as I read, was narrated not by the titular girl, but her younger brother. I remember the confusion I felt and how quickly it was replaced with giddy wonder. Up until that moment, I hadn’t known that a book could have multiple narrators. Morning Girl tore writing open for me: For the first time I recognized that writers were in control of how the story was told and that the possibilities were endless.

I’ve gravitated toward novels with multiple narrators ever since, so when I started writing If You Leave Me, I knew I wanted to try this format. However, I needed to make sure having multiple perspectives would serve my goals. My central character was Haemi Lee, a sixteen-year-old refugee in Busan at the start of my novel. Did I really need the voices of her best friend Kyunghwan, her suitor Jisoo, her younger brother Hyunki, and eventually, her eldest daughter Solee? Thankfully, yes. After some examination, I realized that having multiple narrators allowed me to show the secrets characters were hiding not only from each other, but also from themselves. By alternating these voices, I was able to investigate how one event could be interpreted in various ways, depending on the character’s temperament and circumstance. For example, Haemi, Kyunghwan, and Jisoo all hungered in Busan during the Korean War, and yet their resulting traumas are each unique due to differences in class, gender, and family expectations. 

If You Leave Me spans sixteen years, from 1951 to 1967. Multiple perspectives also gave me the best means of capturing the landscape of Korea during this tumultuous time. Through my five alternating narrators, I was able to write about an ROK soldier in the Korean War; a college student in Seoul in the years afterward, when dictators ruled the nation; a factory worker forced to meet with a matchmaker; a mother yearning to escape her rural community; and a young daughter growing up in post-war Korea, when the vestiges of violence took on new forms.   

When my students say they want to write a novel with multiple perspectives, I’m secretly elated. However, I always remind them of the potential pitfalls. More voices may make your story feel fragmented, which can lead to readers preferring one character over another. In order to avoid this, it’s important to value each perspective equally. If you as the writer dislike one of your characters, the reader will feel that animosity in your words. The solution? Know your characters deeply on and off the page—know their desires, tics, fears, sexual preferences, favorite foods, secret dreams, worst habits. Develop them until you know them as intimately as a friend, in all of their complexities. In the end, I hope having multiple narrators in If You Leave Me enriches the reading experience. Haemi Lee’s voice is the center, but the four characters around her provide a lens not only into the larger history of Korea, but into Haemi’s complex, difficult temperament.

In my final Craft Capsule next week, I will talk more about Haemi and the necessity of “unlikable” female protagonists. 

 

Crystal Hana Kim’s debut novel, If You Leave Me, is forthcoming from William Morrow in August. She was a 2017 PEN America Dau Short Story Prize winner and has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Hedgebrook, Jentel, among others. Her work has been published in or is forthcoming from the Washington Post, Elle Magazine, Nylon, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is a contributing editor at Apogee Journal and is the Director of Writing Instruction at Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband.

Craft Capsule: Who Are You?

by

Crystal Hana Kim

7.4.18

This is no. 33 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

“When did you start writing?” Writers are often asked this question, and I’m always curious about the story behind the answers, the paths we take to find our vocations. As a child of immigrants, Korean was my first language. When I began elementary school, I found myself mentally switching between my mother tongue and English, trying to match vocabulary words across language lines. I soon found myself gravitating toward writing; with a pencil in my hand, I could take my time and express myself more clearly. In the first grade, I wrote about butterflies hatching for my beloved teacher, Ms. Benz. The next year, I wrote about a girl with short black hair who wanted to get her ears pierced, but whose Korean parents refused. I presented the story to my mother and father, hopeful and full of glee at my cunning. (Reader, they fell for it and let me pierce my ears.) “I’ve written ever since I was a child,” I say in answer to that question. But when did I find the stories I wanted to tell? That was a more recent discovery.  

As a sophomore in college, I took my first formal writing workshop. Somehow, over the course of my teenage years, my writing had changed. I no longer wrote stories that were rooted in my desires and questions about the world. Instead, I created characters without clear identities—their race, appearance, and backgrounds were murky, undefined. These young adults frolicked and fought on misty hills, drunk with mulberry-stained lips. I was trying to shy away from what I thought was expected of me. I didn’t want to be pigeon-holed as the Korean American workshopper who could only write about “Asian” issues. But I sensed that something was wrong with my characters: They were vague, flat, lifeless.Who is this girl?” a classmate asked. “Don’t be afraid to write about what you know,” my teacher said. 

At first I resisted these suggestions, digging deeper into my no-name characters without a clear sense of home. That is, until the summer break between my sophomore and junior year. One June evening I had dinner with my parents. Over a meal of galbi-tang, rice, wine, and ice cream, my parents recounted their childhoods. My father described catching grasshoppers from his neighbors’ field, of cooking them on a skillet over an open flame. My mother told me of staining her fingers orange with bong seon hwa flowers, which I loved to do during my summer visits to Korea as well.  

The next morning, I found myself still mulling over my parents’ stories. I imagined my father as a child, his lithe body running through high grass in search of those plump green insects. I loved that the act of staining fingers with flower petals, which my sister and I did every summer in Korea, was not only a family tradition, but a Korean one. These stories stayed with me all summer and through the fall, when my undergraduate classes resumed. This time in my fiction workshop, I wrote with greater purpose and clarity. I developed characters with a culture and history behind them. Better, I thought.

The more I wrote, the more I sought my family. When I began my graduate studies, I turned to my maternal grandmother. A fierce matriarch and gifted storyteller, my grandmother shared her life with me—she lived under Japanese occupation, survived the Korean War, and forged a life for her daughters in the years afterward. I absorbed these anecdotes, sometimes taking notes and sometimes just listening. 

When I began If You Leave Me, my debut novel, I knew I wanted to write about the Korean War. More important, I knew I wanted the main character to be a Korean woman who was strong, willful, intelligent, stubborn, and full of contradictions. I wanted a female protagonist that readers would love one moment and argue with the next, someone who felt as complex as our best friends and lovers do. I created Haemi Lee, a teenaged refugee living in Busan during the war. I rooted her story in my grandmother’s experiences, but I added my own desires and questions and fears until Haemi became a character of her own. 

It took me a few wayward years, but I eventually realized that writing about my culture does not confine me as a writer. Instead, my history provides a pool of memory for me to draw inspiration from. Now, when I teach creative writing, I emphasize this process for my students. I encourage them to value every part of their identities.

“Who are you?” I ask. “Tell me what you know.”

 

Crystal Hana Kim’s debut novel, If You Leave Me, is forthcoming from William Morrow in August. She was a 2017 PEN America Dau Short Story Prize winner and has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Hedgebrook, Jentel, among others. Her work has been published in or is forthcoming from The Washington Post, Elle Magazine, Nylon, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is a contributing editor at Apogee Journal and is the Director of Writing Instruction at Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband.

Craft Capsule: Tao Te Ching

by

Simon Van Booy

6.13.18

This is no. 30 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

The biggest little book in China is called the Tao Te Ching. One of its most famous sayings is Wu Wei, 無爲, literally, doing nothing or non-doing.

Whereas some people have used this to imbue passivity or laziness with spiritual significance, I think it has something to do with wholeheartedness.

The child at play does not stop to ask herself, “Am I playing?” She is not aware of time, nor constrained by it. Imagine you get so deep into writing, that you forget you are writing. The story just flows from you, through you, and out into the world.

How can you get to that place? Where the act of writing is so much of part of you, it’s effortless. A process of instinct rather than thought—

The first step is to give up the idea you will ever fail, or ever succeed. Prepare to serve only the needs of the story. Then move your hands, breathe.  

Have faith.  

Laugh.  

Cry.

Sleep.

Dream.

 

Simon Van Booy is the author of nine books and the editor of three anthologies of philosophy. His latest work for adults, The Sadness of Beautiful Things, will be released in October from Penguin, and followed up in November by his latest work for children, Gertie Milk & the Great Keeper Rescue, from Penguin Razorbill.

Craft Capsule: A Bird in the Sky

by

Simon Van Booy

6.6.18

This is no. 29 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Having a writing practice is like rowing out to sea in a small boat with a typewriter and sandwiches, hoping for the arrival of some strange bird in the sky. 

After a few hours you tell yourself, “It’s only been a few hours.”  

But when days pass with not even a feather, you wonder, “Am I in the right place? I should have brought binoculars.” You keep looking though—searching the empty sky for some sign, some intervention, a tangible indication that you’re good enough to write, educated enough, wild enough, rich enough, poor enough, sober enough, drunk enough, mystical enough, existential enough.  

Months pass. You’ve been rowing out to the same deep water for weeks and weeks. You’ve lost track of days. Seasons have changed. Where your hands once bled on the oars, there are calluses. You’ve survived heaving seas, blistering heat, and torrential downpours. 

At this point most people toss their typewriters over the side of the boat, and row for the safety of land. Without the bird, they say, nothing is possible.

But you remain in the boat, listening to yourself breathe, a film of salt on your skin. You sit down and pick up the typewriter, rest it on your sore legs, and start to imagine the story you once dreamed of writing. You don’t care about the bird anymore, the words are enough, the sentences are ropes you can use to pull yourself through the narrative.

Then suddenly you look up, there’s a dazzling light, like some mystical, winged creature with blazing eyes.  

As writers, we don’t wait for inspiration. Inspiration waits for us.

Don’t ever forget that.

 

Simon Van Booy is the author of nine books and the editor of three anthologies of philosophy. His latest work for adults, The Sadness of Beautiful Things, will be released in October from Penguin, and followed up in November by his latest work for children, Gertie Milk & the Great Keeper Rescue, from Penguin Razorbill.

Craft Capsule: Find Your Metaphor

by

Sandra Beasley

4.4.17

This is the seventh in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

A friend of mine, a poet, was trying to figure out what bothered him about a draft of my poem. “A poem should be like a wall,” he told me. “You build it brick by brick.” He pointed out that, in his opinion, key bricks were missing.

I didn’t share his vision, but I admired that he had one. I’ve come to value developing a metaphorical model for your genre. A model can help you identify your goals, name your struggles, and proceed toward success.

Perhaps you follow the lead of “stanza,” the Italian word for “room.” You come to think of each poem as a house. How do the rooms differ in function, size, and occupancy? Where does your central drama take place? What comprises your roof?

Perhaps you come to think of your essay as a harp. Each researched fact glimmers, an available string in a golden frame. But you can’t play them all at once. Only in choosing which notes to highlight, and how to sequence them, can you create music.

Personally, I always think of memoir as an egg. I’m protective of the inspiring memory, smooth and undisturbed in its surface. But I have to be prepared to break the egg. I have to make the idea messy before I can make a satisfying meal.

Perhaps your novel is a shark. Perhaps your villanelle is a waltz. Perhaps your short story is a baseball game. Don’t adopt my metaphors. Find one of your own.

 

Sandra Beasley is the author of three poetry collections, including Count the Waves (Norton, 2015), and a memoir. Her website is SandraBeasley.com.

Craft Capsule: The Egg in My Pocket

by

Christina Baker Kline

2.21.17

This is the first in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

As a project for school, my thirteen-year-old son, Will, spent several days carrying an egg around. His task was simple: Keep the egg from breaking.

The experiment was intended to show what it’s like to have a baby, to approximate the feeling of constant vigilance that never leaves you once you have a child. Ultimately, of course, it was supposed to make hormone-addled adolescents think twice before doing something stupid.

As a mother of three, though, I wasn’t convinced. A baby is nothing like an egg, unless it’s an egg that cries, wets itself, sucks on you constantly, and wakes you up four times a night. But as my son described the feeling of carrying his egg—he named it “Pablito”—I realized that it did remind me of something. “It’s always there,” Will said. “You can’t forget it or take it for granted. You feel protective and anxious all the time.”

Carrying an egg around is like writing a novel. No matter what else you’re doing, the fact of the novel is in the back of your mind. If you go too long without attending to it, you get nervous. It is always with you, a weight solid and yet fragile, in constant danger of being crushed. Like the egg, the weight of a book-in-progress is both literal and metaphorical. Within the accumulating pages, as inside the delicate eggshell, are the raw ingredients for something greater. Keeping it intact requires patience, time, attention—and, most of all, commitment. This concept applies to any stage of the process: The egg is both the idea that you nurture long before you begin to write, and the writing itself, which must be fostered and sustained.

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published this month by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

Craft Capsule: Deny the Accident

by

Christina Baker Kline

3.7.17

This is the third in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Jackson Pollock’s reply to an interviewer’s question about how he composed his paintings of “accidental” splatterings has stuck with me. “I don’t use the accident,” he said. “I deny the accident.”

The sheer bravado of this is thrilling, and as a writer I find it to be a useful way to think about my work-in-progress. When I’m putting words on the page it’s easy to second guess, to question the often-unconscious choices I make as I go: the trajectories of characters’ lives, shifts in direction and focus, minor characters who gain traction as the story moves forward. The editor in my head starts whispering: You’re going in the wrong direction. Why are you spending so much time on that character? You need to focus, get back to the story you originally envisioned, stick to the plan.

Over time I’ve learned to trust my impulses. Whatever else they may be, these unanticipated detours are fresh and surprising; they keep me interested, and often end up adding depth to the work. Not always, of course—sometimes an accident is just an accident. But believing that these splatterings on my own canvas are there for a reason, as part of a larger process of conception, gives me the audacity to experiment.

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published in February by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

Craft Capsule: Good Sense

by

Christina Baker Kline

2.28.17

This is the second in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

The problem of beginning…

The Southern novelist and poet George Garrett, who was director of creative writing at the University of Virginia when I was a graduate student there, always said that if you’re having trouble getting into a chapter or a scene you should use all five senses right at the start, preferably in the first paragraph. Touch, taste, smell, hearing, sight. Your scene will jump to life, and you’ll have an easier time falling into the dream world of the story.

On a related note, Gustave Flaubert kept rotten apples in his desk drawer to evoke autumn when writing scenes that took place in that season….

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published this month by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

Craft Capsule: Good Sense

by

Christina Baker Kline

2.28.17

This is the second in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

The problem of beginning…

The Southern novelist and poet George Garrett, who was director of creative writing at the University of Virginia when I was a graduate student there, always said that if you’re having trouble getting into a chapter or a scene you should use all five senses right at the start, preferably in the first paragraph. Touch, taste, smell, hearing, sight. Your scene will jump to life, and you’ll have an easier time falling into the dream world of the story.

On a related note, Gustave Flaubert kept rotten apples in his desk drawer to evoke autumn when writing scenes that took place in that season….

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published this month by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

Craft Capsule: Good Sense

by

Christina Baker Kline

2.28.17

This is the second in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

The problem of beginning…

The Southern novelist and poet George Garrett, who was director of creative writing at the University of Virginia when I was a graduate student there, always said that if you’re having trouble getting into a chapter or a scene you should use all five senses right at the start, preferably in the first paragraph. Touch, taste, smell, hearing, sight. Your scene will jump to life, and you’ll have an easier time falling into the dream world of the story.

On a related note, Gustave Flaubert kept rotten apples in his desk drawer to evoke autumn when writing scenes that took place in that season….

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published this month by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

Craft Capsule: Tolstoy’s Short Chapters

by

Christina Baker Kline

3.28.17

This is the sixth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Anna Karenina is more than eight hundred pages long. So why does it feel shorter than many three-hundred-page books?

As I read this novel recently I noticed that Tolstoy cuts his long scenes into short chapters, usually no more than two or three pages. This makes sense, considering it was published in serial installments, from 1873 to 1877, in the Russian Messenger. Tolstoy often ends a chapter in a moment of suspense—a door opens, a provocative question is asked, a contentious group sits down to dinner, characters who’ve been circling each other finally begin to talk—which propels the reader forward into the next chapter.

The psychological effect of these short chapters is that this huge book is easy to get through. Reading in bed late at night (as I tend to do), I’m tempted to put it down, but then I riffle ahead to find that the next chapter is only three pages long. And I really want to find out who’s behind that door.

Three pages. I can do that—as a reader and as a writer. 

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published in February by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

Craft Capsule: Visual Prompts

by

Christina Baker Kline

3.21.17

This is the fifth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

For many writers, visual and tactile stimulation is an important component of the creative process. William Faulkner used to map his stories on the wall in his study. If you visit Rowan Oak, his home in Oxford, Mississippi, you can still see the notes for his 1954 novel, A Fable, in his precise, small handwriting. Edwidge Danticat has said that she has an evolving bulletin board in her workspace where she tacks up collages of photos of Haiti and images from magazines.

I, too, have a new board for each book I write. When I’m starting work on a novel I gather scraps like a magpie. My Orphan Train board was covered with postcards from the New York Tenement Museum depicting the interior of an immigrant Irish family’s cramped apartment, a black and white photograph of a young couple at Coney Island in the 1920s, a map of the village of Kinvara in Ireland. I hung a hand-carved Celtic cross on a green ribbon and a stone shamrock on a red ribbon from Galway; a Native American dreamcatcher from Maine; a silver train pin from a New York Train Riders’ reunion in Little Falls, Minnesota. I tacked up note cards: “Food in Ireland 1900s” was one (“wheatmeal, hung beef, tongue, barley”). Another listed ideas I wanted to explore (“links between misplaced and abandoned people with little in common”).

For A Piece of the World, I included a print of Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World; photos I took, inside and out, of Christina’s home in Cushing, Maine; some Emily Dickinson poems (“This is my letter to the world / That never wrote to me”); and postcards of other paintings Wyeth did at the Olson house, including Wind From the Sea and Christina Olson (both of which make appearances in my novel). I photocopied sketches Wyeth made for his portrait of Christina. I even included a small handful of grasses I’d plucked from the field Christina sat in.

I find these idea boards fun to assemble and inspiring as I work. My mantra, always: Find inspiration where you can.

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published in February by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

An outline of A Fable on the wall of William Faulkner’s study at Rowan Oak in Oxford, Mississippi.

(Credit: Joe Bonomo)

Craft Capsule: Making Conversation

by

Christina Baker Kline

3.14.17

This is the fourth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Dialogue is hard to get right. It should sound like natural speech, but in fact it’s nothing like it. I like to send my creative writing students out to cafés and parks with notebooks to transcribe bits of overheard conversations. Then I ask them to type up these transcripts and turn them into dialogue between characters. Inevitably their written dialogue bears little resemblance to the overheard conversations. When you write dialogue you must eliminate niceties and unnecessary patter, and cut to the core of the exchange—unless the patter is crucial to the story, conveying a dissembling, depressed, incoherent, or boring personality. At the same time, it should sound natural, like something someone would actually say. The writer George Garrett called this dovetailing—trimming for verisimilitude and impact.

In direct and indirect speech, your characters should constantly be saying “no” to each other. Most of us (myself included) tend to avoid conflict in our real lives, but conflict is crucial in fiction. It keeps the story interesting.

Richard Price, in his novel Lush Life, allows his characters to talk and talk and talk. Price maintains a delicate balancing act; his characters’ words matter. What they say changes the direction of the story. But he never burdens his dialogue with exposition or forces it to convey plot points that don’t come up naturally. In Writing Fiction, Janet Burroway writes, “In order to engage us emotionally in a disagreement, the characters must have an emotional stake in the outcome.” Price’s characters are nothing if not emotionally invested.

Price’s dialogue is vital to the story because it moves the action forward. He constantly puts his characters in conflict with one another. Their conversations are full of surprises—self-revelation, inadvertent admissions, hearsay, evidence—and kinetic energy; they crackle with life. Real life.

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published in February by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

Craft Capsule: Making Conversation

by

Christina Baker Kline

3.14.17

This is the fourth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Dialogue is hard to get right. It should sound like natural speech, but in fact it’s nothing like it. I like to send my creative writing students out to cafés and parks with notebooks to transcribe bits of overheard conversations. Then I ask them to type up these transcripts and turn them into dialogue between characters. Inevitably their written dialogue bears little resemblance to the overheard conversations. When you write dialogue you must eliminate niceties and unnecessary patter, and cut to the core of the exchange—unless the patter is crucial to the story, conveying a dissembling, depressed, incoherent, or boring personality. At the same time, it should sound natural, like something someone would actually say. The writer George Garrett called this dovetailing—trimming for verisimilitude and impact.

In direct and indirect speech, your characters should constantly be saying “no” to each other. Most of us (myself included) tend to avoid conflict in our real lives, but conflict is crucial in fiction. It keeps the story interesting.

Richard Price, in his novel Lush Life, allows his characters to talk and talk and talk. Price maintains a delicate balancing act; his characters’ words matter. What they say changes the direction of the story. But he never burdens his dialogue with exposition or forces it to convey plot points that don’t come up naturally. In Writing Fiction, Janet Burroway writes, “In order to engage us emotionally in a disagreement, the characters must have an emotional stake in the outcome.” Price’s characters are nothing if not emotionally invested.

Price’s dialogue is vital to the story because it moves the action forward. He constantly puts his characters in conflict with one another. Their conversations are full of surprises—self-revelation, inadvertent admissions, hearsay, evidence—and kinetic energy; they crackle with life. Real life.

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published in February by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

Craft Capsule: Beware the Indeterminate “It”

by

Sandra Beasley

4.11.17

This is the eighth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Beware the indeterminate “it,” I often say, when fine-tuning a draft.

But that word is so convenient. “It” carries the football from the previous sentence. Whatever “it” you just defined, you’re sticking with it for another ten yards, right?

Except that you’re fumbling the play. Too often, relying on “it” dissipates your language’s energy. Circle every “it” that leads off a sentence. Revising to avoid these instances will force your verbs into action, and clarify your intent.

This is not a hard-and-fast rule. Sometimes an indeterminate “it” will remain, one that has earned its place on the field. The pronoun can be strategic—signifying not just gender neutrality but an absence of comprehension or known name, a fumbling toward meaning, the building of suspense.

In the right hands, “It” can be a potent force. Just ask Stephen King.

 

Sandra Beasley is the author of three poetry collections, including Count the Waves (Norton, 2015), and a memoir. Her website is SandraBeasley.com.

Craft Capsule: Deny the Accident

by

Christina Baker Kline

3.7.17

This is the third in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Jackson Pollock’s reply to an interviewer’s question about how he composed his paintings of “accidental” splatterings has stuck with me. “I don’t use the accident,” he said. “I deny the accident.”

The sheer bravado of this is thrilling, and as a writer I find it to be a useful way to think about my work-in-progress. When I’m putting words on the page it’s easy to second guess, to question the often-unconscious choices I make as I go: the trajectories of characters’ lives, shifts in direction and focus, minor characters who gain traction as the story moves forward. The editor in my head starts whispering: You’re going in the wrong direction. Why are you spending so much time on that character? You need to focus, get back to the story you originally envisioned, stick to the plan.

Over time I’ve learned to trust my impulses. Whatever else they may be, these unanticipated detours are fresh and surprising; they keep me interested, and often end up adding depth to the work. Not always, of course—sometimes an accident is just an accident. But believing that these splatterings on my own canvas are there for a reason, as part of a larger process of conception, gives me the audacity to experiment.

 

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published in February by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.

Craft Capsule: A Bird in the Sky

by

Simon Van Booy

6.6.18

This is no. 29 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Having a writing practice is like rowing out to sea in a small boat with a typewriter and sandwiches, hoping for the arrival of some strange bird in the sky. 

After a few hours you tell yourself, “It’s only been a few hours.”  

But when days pass with not even a feather, you wonder, “Am I in the right place? I should have brought binoculars.” You keep looking though—searching the empty sky for some sign, some intervention, a tangible indication that you’re good enough to write, educated enough, wild enough, rich enough, poor enough, sober enough, drunk enough, mystical enough, existential enough.  

Months pass. You’ve been rowing out to the same deep water for weeks and weeks. You’ve lost track of days. Seasons have changed. Where your hands once bled on the oars, there are calluses. You’ve survived heaving seas, blistering heat, and torrential downpours. 

At this point most people toss their typewriters over the side of the boat, and row for the safety of land. Without the bird, they say, nothing is possible.

But you remain in the boat, listening to yourself breathe, a film of salt on your skin. You sit down and pick up the typewriter, rest it on your sore legs, and start to imagine the story you once dreamed of writing. You don’t care about the bird anymore, the words are enough, the sentences are ropes you can use to pull yourself through the narrative.

Then suddenly you look up, there’s a dazzling light, like some mystical, winged creature with blazing eyes.  

As writers, we don’t wait for inspiration. Inspiration waits for us.

Don’t ever forget that.

 

Simon Van Booy is the author of nine books and the editor of three anthologies of philosophy. His latest work for adults, The Sadness of Beautiful Things, will be released in October from Penguin, and followed up in November by his latest work for children, Gertie Milk & the Great Keeper Rescue, from Penguin Razorbill.

Craft Capsule: A Form of Salvation

by

Simon Van Booy

6.20.18

This is no. 31 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

When you start thinking creatively, it’s like releasing a live animal—a new species of mischief that cannot be contained to just one area of your life. Creativity is not like a machine that can be switched on and off. And therefore it does not end when you stand up from your desk after a few solid hours of work.

Ever wondered why you feel the urge to roller skate through a shopping mall listening to Abba? Leave strange notes on the doorsteps of strangers? Eat apples standing up in the bath, naked, with the window open?

Now you know. Creativity is a form of salvation.  

If we could limit creativity to just one area of our lives—how would we ever manage to convince ourselves to climb back in the rocket, and blast off again and again and again, to those distant galaxies of unwritten narrative? 

And stop worrying about getting published. You write because you’re obsessed with telling a story in a way that no one else can. Focus on that. Only that. Everything else will take care of itself.  And, please, for my sake—don’t ever think buying a plastic skeleton from a medical supply store then holding it up to the window when people walk past is a waste of time.  

Being a writer means opening your whole life to creativity. It is a commitment to overpowering fear with imagination and compassion for yourself, as well as others. As a person who writes you’ll be a better mother, son, best friend, aunt, cousin, coach, or bank teller. Because learning to write is learning to see, and striving to see beyond is perhaps the only hope for our species.

 

Simon Van Booy is the author of nine books and the editor of three anthologies of philosophy. His latest work for adults, The Sadness of Beautiful Things, will be released in October from Penguin, and followed up in November by his latest work for children, Gertie Milk & the Great Keeper Rescue, from Penguin Razorbill.

Craft Capsule: Find Your Voice

by

Simon Van Booy

6.27.18

This is no. 32 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Would you agree that for the past forty years, automobiles have been evolving in such a way as they now all look alike? As though created from the same, basic mold? One of the most important things you can do for yourself as a writer is to find your voice. I don’t mean tone, which is another way of referring to how writing makes you feel. The tone of this piece for Poets & Writers is very different from the tone of my latest novel, or the tone of the philosophy books I edited several years ago.  

I’m talking about voice. My voice can be squeezed into a 19th century corset for one novel, or spewed from the bowels of a werewolf for another, but it’s essentially the same underneath.  

When I realized after writing a couple of early novels, that I hadn’t found my voice—that there was even something called a voice—I was devastated.  

Had my years of labor all been for nothing? If my goal was to be published then yes. A total waste of time. But if my aim was to grow as an artist and as a person, then I had reason to be proud of myself.  

Anyway, to spare you the same kind of pain, I’ve devised an exercise that will hopefully lead you closer than you’ve ever been to the fiery core of your own, utterly unique, narrative style.  

1. Pick five books (or poems) you love, and five books (or poems) you dislike intensely, for a total of ten works.

2. Read the first page (or poem) several times, then rewrite it in such a way that you think, in your opinion, it’s better. Sometimes this means changing the order of words, or cutting them, or adding to them, or changing the tone completely. Don’t worry about offending anyone, no one knows you’re doing this except me, and I won’t tell.

3. This exercise, if done properly should take a fair amount of time. Once you’ve completed it, you’ll start to get a sense of who you are as a writer, and how your writing voice differs from the voices of others. Rewriting sections from writers you love is perhaps the most fruitful, because instead of emulating—you’re forced to be different. We each love certain writers for our own reasons. Rewriting their work will illuminate the subtle differences between your voice and theirs. 

4. Once you find your voice, it will almost certainly evolve over time, the way we evolve naturally as artists. Look at the early work of Van Gogh, compared to his later work. Dubliners vs. Finnegans Wake.  Early Beethoven sounds a little like Hayden—while late Beethoven is characteristic of the sound we associate with him. The core will always remain. Your voice is a gift to the world, so find it, nurture it, develop it, work it like a machine, give it the freedom of a vine—but above all, share it. 

 

Simon Van Booy is the author of nine books and the editor of three anthologies of philosophy. His latest work for adults, The Sadness of Beautiful Things, will be released in October from Penguin, and followed up in November by his latest work for children, Gertie Milk & the Great Keeper Rescue, from Penguin Razorbill.

Craft Capsule: The Art of Research

by

Crystal Hana Kim

7.11.18

This is no. 34 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

When I began writing If You Leave Me, my forthcoming debut novel, I settled upon the premise quickly. Inspired by my family’s history, I knew I would open with Haemi Lee, a sixteen-year-old refugee living in Busan during the Korean War. Though the story was rooted in truth, I was eager to let my imagination take over. Scenes came to me fully formed: Haemi on a hill overlooking the makeshift shacks of her village; Hyunki, her sickly younger brother, walking to the market alone; a network of aunties whispering about the front lines, fear prickling their voices raw. Through Haemi and the characters around her, I wanted to explore how years of devastating loss and violence could warp a person’s psyche, body, and view of the world.

How would I write about 1950s South Korea, when I was born in Queens, New York, in 1987? I wanted to represent this period accurately, so I began intensive research. In the library, I took dutiful notes about that critical day on June 25, 1950, when the North invaded the South. I learned about the political climate that had catalyzed the start of the war. I jotted down the different weapons each army used, the timeline of events. As I gathered these facts, I started to see a change in my writing. I was more specific, surer about the world that Haemi, Hyunki, her best friend Kyunghwan, and her suitor Jisoo were surviving in. 

In my graduate school workshops, I was pleased to find that my research created a strong foundation for my novel. The dates and facts were clear. However, a new problem arose. In my critiques I saw the same question asked in various forms: What does this refugee village look like? What is Haemi wearing? What materials are the makeshift shacks made of? Though my readers were not confused about the circumstances of the war, I wasn’t yet conveying what it felt like to live in this tumultuous time. 

On my next trip to Korea I interviewed my maternal grandmother, who had been a teenage refugee during the Korean War. With a notebook in my lap, I asked her when she fled her home, what she ate on the journey south, what she wore, where she lived, and more. Back in America, I returned to the library. This time, I read ROK soldiers’ memoirs so that I could develop Jisoo’s and Kyunghwan’s experiences. I pored over photographs of civilian refugees, of the markets that formed during the years-long stalemate, and of the shacks constructed from corrugated tin, cardboard, and plywood. My sentences became richer, laden with sensory details. I lingered over descriptions of food, clothing, the buildings in Seoul, the fields in the rural outskirts of South Korea. In workshop I was able to anticipate my classmates’ questions about the physical world. The novel was coming together, I thought. I had finally done enough.  

Or had I? The more I wrote, the more I became curious about Haemi’s psychology. I wanted to explore the way violence, gender expectations, poverty, and family circumstances shaped Haemi’s life in the years after the armistice. In order to do so, I needed to develop her interiority so that readers would empathize with her. I returned to the library, eager to read memoirs written by Korean women who had come of age in the 1950s. However, I found none. Where were all the women? The answer both frustrated and fueled me. They had not been valued during this period of history, and thus, their voices had not been preserved. 

What happens when there is no research to guide your way? Determined to continue, I got creative. I read studies about the history of social and gender hierarchy in South Korea; I watched movies and documentaries; I examined the linguistics of trauma and depression in the Korean language; I returned to my grandmother for her opinions on mental health. I also turned to fiction, reading novels about women living through conflict in other countries. Finally, I considered what would happen to me if I had experienced the trauma of Japanese colonialism, Korean independence, and war before the age of twenty. I imagined how my frustrations would manifest in the domestic sphere. I empathized until I knew Haemi completely.   

Over my journey of writing If You Leave Me, my research took many forms. From reference texts and history books to films and novels to my grandmother’s own experiences, the process was more diverse than I’d expected. My favorite part though, was ending where I began—with my writerly impulse to imagine, to create characters, to tell a story.    

 

Crystal Hana Kim’s debut novel, If You Leave Me, is forthcoming from William Morrow in August. She was a 2017 PEN America Dau Short Story Prize winner and has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Hedgebrook, Jentel, among others. Her work has been published in or is forthcoming from The Washington Post, Elle Magazine, Nylon, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is a contributing editor at Apogee Journal and is the Director of Writing Instruction at Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband.

Craft Capsule: The Art of Research

by

Crystal Hana Kim

7.11.18

This is no. 34 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

When I began writing If You Leave Me, my forthcoming debut novel, I settled upon the premise quickly. Inspired by my family’s history, I knew I would open with Haemi Lee, a sixteen-year-old refugee living in Busan during the Korean War. Though the story was rooted in truth, I was eager to let my imagination take over. Scenes came to me fully formed: Haemi on a hill overlooking the makeshift shacks of her village; Hyunki, her sickly younger brother, walking to the market alone; a network of aunties whispering about the front lines, fear prickling their voices raw. Through Haemi and the characters around her, I wanted to explore how years of devastating loss and violence could warp a person’s psyche, body, and view of the world.

How would I write about 1950s South Korea, when I was born in Queens, New York, in 1987? I wanted to represent this period accurately, so I began intensive research. In the library, I took dutiful notes about that critical day on June 25, 1950, when the North invaded the South. I learned about the political climate that had catalyzed the start of the war. I jotted down the different weapons each army used, the timeline of events. As I gathered these facts, I started to see a change in my writing. I was more specific, surer about the world that Haemi, Hyunki, her best friend Kyunghwan, and her suitor Jisoo were surviving in. 

In my graduate school workshops, I was pleased to find that my research created a strong foundation for my novel. The dates and facts were clear. However, a new problem arose. In my critiques I saw the same question asked in various forms: What does this refugee village look like? What is Haemi wearing? What materials are the makeshift shacks made of? Though my readers were not confused about the circumstances of the war, I wasn’t yet conveying what it felt like to live in this tumultuous time. 

On my next trip to Korea I interviewed my maternal grandmother, who had been a teenage refugee during the Korean War. With a notebook in my lap, I asked her when she fled her home, what she ate on the journey south, what she wore, where she lived, and more. Back in America, I returned to the library. This time, I read ROK soldiers’ memoirs so that I could develop Jisoo’s and Kyunghwan’s experiences. I pored over photographs of civilian refugees, of the markets that formed during the years-long stalemate, and of the shacks constructed from corrugated tin, cardboard, and plywood. My sentences became richer, laden with sensory details. I lingered over descriptions of food, clothing, the buildings in Seoul, the fields in the rural outskirts of South Korea. In workshop I was able to anticipate my classmates’ questions about the physical world. The novel was coming together, I thought. I had finally done enough.  

Or had I? The more I wrote, the more I became curious about Haemi’s psychology. I wanted to explore the way violence, gender expectations, poverty, and family circumstances shaped Haemi’s life in the years after the armistice. In order to do so, I needed to develop her interiority so that readers would empathize with her. I returned to the library, eager to read memoirs written by Korean women who had come of age in the 1950s. However, I found none. Where were all the women? The answer both frustrated and fueled me. They had not been valued during this period of history, and thus, their voices had not been preserved. 

What happens when there is no research to guide your way? Determined to continue, I got creative. I read studies about the history of social and gender hierarchy in South Korea; I watched movies and documentaries; I examined the linguistics of trauma and depression in the Korean language; I returned to my grandmother for her opinions on mental health. I also turned to fiction, reading novels about women living through conflict in other countries. Finally, I considered what would happen to me if I had experienced the trauma of Japanese colonialism, Korean independence, and war before the age of twenty. I imagined how my frustrations would manifest in the domestic sphere. I empathized until I knew Haemi completely.   

Over my journey of writing If You Leave Me, my research took many forms. From reference texts and history books to films and novels to my grandmother’s own experiences, the process was more diverse than I’d expected. My favorite part though, was ending where I began—with my writerly impulse to imagine, to create characters, to tell a story.    

 

Crystal Hana Kim’s debut novel, If You Leave Me, is forthcoming from William Morrow in August. She was a 2017 PEN America Dau Short Story Prize winner and has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Hedgebrook, Jentel, among others. Her work has been published in or is forthcoming from The Washington Post, Elle Magazine, Nylon, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is a contributing editor at Apogee Journal and is the Director of Writing Instruction at Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband.

Craft Capsule: Who Are You?

by

Crystal Hana Kim

7.4.18

This is no. 33 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

“When did you start writing?” Writers are often asked this question, and I’m always curious about the story behind the answers, the paths we take to find our vocations. As a child of immigrants, Korean was my first language. When I began elementary school, I found myself mentally switching between my mother tongue and English, trying to match vocabulary words across language lines. I soon found myself gravitating toward writing; with a pencil in my hand, I could take my time and express myself more clearly. In the first grade, I wrote about butterflies hatching for my beloved teacher, Ms. Benz. The next year, I wrote about a girl with short black hair who wanted to get her ears pierced, but whose Korean parents refused. I presented the story to my mother and father, hopeful and full of glee at my cunning. (Reader, they fell for it and let me pierce my ears.) “I’ve written ever since I was a child,” I say in answer to that question. But when did I find the stories I wanted to tell? That was a more recent discovery.  

As a sophomore in college, I took my first formal writing workshop. Somehow, over the course of my teenage years, my writing had changed. I no longer wrote stories that were rooted in my desires and questions about the world. Instead, I created characters without clear identities—their race, appearance, and backgrounds were murky, undefined. These young adults frolicked and fought on misty hills, drunk with mulberry-stained lips. I was trying to shy away from what I thought was expected of me. I didn’t want to be pigeon-holed as the Korean American workshopper who could only write about “Asian” issues. But I sensed that something was wrong with my characters: They were vague, flat, lifeless.Who is this girl?” a classmate asked. “Don’t be afraid to write about what you know,” my teacher said. 

At first I resisted these suggestions, digging deeper into my no-name characters without a clear sense of home. That is, until the summer break between my sophomore and junior year. One June evening I had dinner with my parents. Over a meal of galbi-tang, rice, wine, and ice cream, my parents recounted their childhoods. My father described catching grasshoppers from his neighbors’ field, of cooking them on a skillet over an open flame. My mother told me of staining her fingers orange with bong seon hwa flowers, which I loved to do during my summer visits to Korea as well.  

The next morning, I found myself still mulling over my parents’ stories. I imagined my father as a child, his lithe body running through high grass in search of those plump green insects. I loved that the act of staining fingers with flower petals, which my sister and I did every summer in Korea, was not only a family tradition, but a Korean one. These stories stayed with me all summer and through the fall, when my undergraduate classes resumed. This time in my fiction workshop, I wrote with greater purpose and clarity. I developed characters with a culture and history behind them. Better, I thought.

The more I wrote, the more I sought my family. When I began my graduate studies, I turned to my maternal grandmother. A fierce matriarch and gifted storyteller, my grandmother shared her life with me—she lived under Japanese occupation, survived the Korean War, and forged a life for her daughters in the years afterward. I absorbed these anecdotes, sometimes taking notes and sometimes just listening. 

When I began If You Leave Me, my debut novel, I knew I wanted to write about the Korean War. More important, I knew I wanted the main character to be a Korean woman who was strong, willful, intelligent, stubborn, and full of contradictions. I wanted a female protagonist that readers would love one moment and argue with the next, someone who felt as complex as our best friends and lovers do. I created Haemi Lee, a teenaged refugee living in Busan during the war. I rooted her story in my grandmother’s experiences, but I added my own desires and questions and fears until Haemi became a character of her own. 

It took me a few wayward years, but I eventually realized that writing about my culture does not confine me as a writer. Instead, my history provides a pool of memory for me to draw inspiration from. Now, when I teach creative writing, I emphasize this process for my students. I encourage them to value every part of their identities.

“Who are you?” I ask. “Tell me what you know.”

 

Crystal Hana Kim’s debut novel, If You Leave Me, is forthcoming from William Morrow in August. She was a 2017 PEN America Dau Short Story Prize winner and has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Hedgebrook, Jentel, among others. Her work has been published in or is forthcoming from The Washington Post, Elle Magazine, Nylon, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is a contributing editor at Apogee Journal and is the Director of Writing Instruction at Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband.

The Darkness Within: In Praise of the Unlikable

by

Steve Almond

12.13.17

Last summer I wrote a review of Who Is Rich? (Random House, 2017) by Matthew Klam. The novel is narrated by a man named Rich Fischer, a self-loathing husband and father who conducts an anguished and antic affair with an equally unhappy infidel.

Shortly after I turned in my review, I heard the book discussed on the radio. The segment opened on an odd note. “Rich is a hard man to like,” the host began. I sat back in astonishment—the notion hadn’t even occurred to me. But a quick survey of prepublication reviews revealed that this was, in fact, the consensus view: Rich was whiny, selfish, unsympathetic.

These complaints, it should be noted, weren’t generally directed at his adultery, about which he is so racked with guilt that he attempts to kill himself twice. No, his central offense is that he articulates the miseries of monogamy and parenthood with such tender precision. He’s hard to like, in other words, because he makes the reader feel uncomfortable.

And yet when I survey the books that inspired me to quit journalism and take up fiction two decades ago, every single one features protagonists who are “hard to like” in the exact same way: Birds of America by Lorrie Moore, The Lover by Marguerite Duras, Airships by Barry Hannah, Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson, the stories of Flannery O’Connor.

My predilection for destructive and discomfiting characters arose, in part, from my years as an investigative reporter, which I spent tracking con men and corrupt cops, shady developers and sexual deviants.

In my reporting, the central danger was detection by the authorities. In literature, the danger was self-revelation. The question was why people messed up their lives and, when they got going, the lives of those around them.

This question began with the characters, but it extended to the reader. Spending time with folks who were morally flawed and ruthlessly candid, who had thrown all manner of caution to the wind, was thrilling specifically because they enacted my own repressed urges. I didn’t just want to rubberneck their misdeeds. I felt implicated by them.

As I turned all this over in my mind, I began to realize why I’d found the scolding critiques of Rich Fischer so vexing. They weren’t just sanctimonious or shallow. There was something cowardly in them, a mind-set that positioned fiction as a place we go to have our virtues affirmed rather than having the confused and wounded parts of ourselves exposed.

***

A lot of ink has been spilled over the past few years on this question of likability, as well as an adjoining anxiety: how important it is that characters be “relatable.” One of the flash points of this debate emerged from the critical reception of Claire Messud’s fierce novel The Woman Upstairs (Knopf, 2013), whose narrator, Nora Eldridge, spends much of the book railing against the forms of feminine duty she has internalized.

When an interviewer for Publishers Weekly observed that she “wouldn’t want to be friends with Nora” because of her “unbearably grim” outlook, Messud’s reply lit up the Internet. “For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that?” she demanded. Messud went on to cite a dozen famously repellent male characters who are rarely, if ever, subjected to such a litmus test. “If you’re reading to find friends,” she concluded, “you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t ‘Is this a potential friend for me?’ but ‘Is this character alive?’”

Messud was hailed for confronting what we might call the fallacy of likability, and the ways in which female authors are expected to cleave to this notion.

One of the most fascinating reactions came from novelist Jennifer Weiner. In an essay published by Slate she noted, rightly, that many readers come to fiction hoping to spend time with characters they admire. And she argued that the creators and consumers of such characters shouldn’t be looked down upon.

But Weiner’s defense of likability was undermined by her own resentments. Likable, she insisted, was a code word “employed by literary authors to tell their best-selling brethren that their work sucks.” Her response was to tell Messud that her work sucked.

“There’s no payoff,” Weiner wrote of The Woman Upstairs, “just a 300-page immersion in the acid bath of Nora’s misery, her jealousy, her lack of compassion, her towering sense of entitlement.” Weiner felt Messud had willfully crafted a character to whom no one can relate.

The irony was that Nora elicited such vehement reactions precisely because readers related to her too much. They felt implicated, both by her impotent rage and the despair lurking beneath her grievances. “Above all, in my anger, I was sad,” she confesses. “Isn’t that always the way, that at the heart of the fire is a frozen kernel of sorrow that the fire is trying—valiantly, fruitlessly—to eradicate.”

What I’m getting at here is that the debate about likability ultimately boils down to sensibility. Nora Eldridge’s view of the world, and her place in it, is too dark and intense for some readers. When they pick up a book, they want to be transported to a sunnier precinct, or a more exotic one, with a friendlier companion. They seek a refuge from the anguish of their inner life.

There’s no right or wrong in any of this. It’s a function of what sort of experience we’re after as writers and readers.

***

There’s another unspoken factor in all this: the market. If you’re an unpublished writer seeking representation, and you submit a manuscript with an abrasive protagonist, chances are you’re going to hear from agents concerned about likability. The whole reason Lolita was originally published in France, and nearly three years later in the United States, is that Humbert Humbert’s panting hebephilia was abhorrent to American editors.

Cultural and literary standards evolve, of course. But financial anxieties are forever. Which is why agents and editors remain wary of characters they fear readers will find off-putting. In a world where reading books is itself a marginal activity, one performed in defiance of the perpetual racket of digital distraction, why risk losing sales?

I spent weeks, for instance, arguing with my editor about the section of my memoir, Candyfreak (Algonquin Books, 2004), in which I developed the irrational conviction that I had testicular cancer during a barnstorming tour of U.S. candy bar factories. My editor argued, quite sensibly, that this disclosure made me a lot less likable as a guide. What’s more, it dampened the giddy mood that prevailed elsewhere and guaranteed the book would never be adopted in school curriculums.

The reason I insisted on its inclusion was that I saw my self-diagnosis as an integral part of the story, a symptom of the depression that had reignited my childhood obsession with candy.

I don’t mean to imply that highlighting the repellent traits of a character is some shortcut to literary depth. That’s as foolish as the notion that scenes of graphic violence or sex will magically yield drama.

Some years ago I began a novel about a shameless right-wing demagogue who decides to run for president (I know). The response I got from readers was that my leading man, while fun to hang out with for a little while, was ultimately oppressive. It wasn’t that my leading man had the manners and conscience of a shark but that he had no subtext, no dreams or fears animating his outsize appetites. Nor did he hew to the path of so many unlikable protagonists, the Emma Woodhouses and Ebenezer Scrooges, who are forced to confront their flaws and wind up redeemed in the bargain. My man was self-regarding without being self-aware.

Such a figure might plausibly thrive in the world of politics (again, I know). On the page, he quickly degenerated into caricature. 

***

But what about those characters who refuse to evolve or offer up much in the way of vulnerability? I am thinking here of our most famous villains: Milton’s Satan, Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz, Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit, Cormac McCarthy’s Judge Holden. These figures, though not technically protagonists, dominate their given worlds.

They do so because they’re willing to violate moral norms and thus wind up driving the action of the story. They’re also fearless in apprehending the nature of the world around them, even if they deny us access to their own inner lives. Most vitally, they embrace the transgressive aspects of their selfhood, the ones we anxiously inhibit so as to appear more likable.

Consider Melville’s Captain Ahab as he stands upon the deck of the Pequod, roaring out the true nature of his mission. “If man will strike, strike through the mask. How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me,” he tells his crew. “I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and…I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.”

Tell us how you really feel, Ahab.

The reason readers like me gravitate toward characters like Ahab is that, not very deep down, we know ourselves to be equally charged with wrath, besieged by private doubts and grudges, and thus enthralled by those who dare to speak truth in a world overrun by personal forms of marketing.

The rise of Internet culture has only magnified the allure of such figures. Most social media platforms revolve around an elaborate effort to generate “likes” by presenting an airbrushed version of our lives and values. What grants trolls their magnetic power—whether they lurk online or in the White House—is the unacknowledged force of our own suppression.

Moral perfection is admirable, after all, but deadly dull in a literary character. I think here about the figure of Jesus Christ as we encounter him in the New Testament. He says and does all the right things. But he only comes alive as a character in those rarely cited verses when his revolutionary ire and human needs come into view.

The most shocking moment in the Gospels takes place a few days before his appointed end. On the way to Jerusalem, he stops in Bethany, where a woman lovingly anoints his head with perfumed oil.

The act angers some of those who witness it, including Judas Iscariot, who asks Jesus whether the expensive oil could have been put to better use if it was sold and the money given to the poor. “The poor you will always have,” Jesus replies. “But you will not always have me.”

It’s a moment of sensual indulgence and unvarnished pride that’s astonishingly out of character for Jesus. By my reckoning, he’s never more likable. 

***

I don’t expect this piece will do much to settle the question of likability. It’s one of those disputes into which writers will continue to pour their opinions and anxieties.

And that’s probably a good thing, if you think about it. Because we happen to be living in a historical moment ruled by unlikable characters. Take a look at our political and popular culture, at the angry voices emanating from our screens, at the seething violence in our discourse.

As writers, it can feel pointless to engage in literary endeavors when the world around us feels so combustible, so fragile. But I would argue that it has never been more important for writers to engage with the questions literature seeks to answer.

If we are to reclaim our country from the dark forces determined to divide us, to sow discord and cynicism among us, we must first seek to understand the darkness within ourselves. That means turning to stories in which we encounter characters actively engaged in the struggle—and sometimes failing—to contain their unbearable thoughts and feelings.

The urgent question isn’t whether we like these folks. It’s whether, in coming to know them, we come to know ourselves any better.

 

Steve Almond’s book Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country is forthcoming in April from Red Hen Press.

His central offense is that he articulates the miseries of monogamy and parenthood with such tender precision. He’s hard to like, in other words, because he makes the reader feel uncomfortable.

Polite Need Not Apply: A Q&A With Mary Gaitskill

by

Joseph Master

12.11.17

Mary Gaitskill doesn’t believe literature should have to be polite. Do a Google image search of the author and you’ll see a succession of penetrating gazes—pale, wide eyes you just can’t fend off. Gaitskill’s writing, which has earned a National Book Award nomination, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a PEN/Faulkner nomination, has a similar effect. The author whose most recent book is a collection of personal and critical essays, Somebody With a Little Hammer (Pantheon, 2017), is best known for her fiction, having previously published three novels and three story collections. Gaitskill has been labeled “The Jane Austen of sickos,” a moniker that supposes her fiction—famous (and in some circles probably infamous) for its enjambment of sexual brutality with sensuous lyricism—is debauched. While her prose can at times appear as icy as her stare, waves of empathy, soul, and B-12 shots of humor course beneath the surface. From her first book of short stories, Bad Behavior (Simon & Schuster, 1988), which became widely known for “Secretary,” a story of sadomasochism and desire that was made into the 2002 indie film starring James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal, to her most recent novel, The Mare (Pantheon, 2015)Gaitskill’s fiction has always been ferocious, but not for the sake of brutality. The fireworks are in the vulnerability of human connection, not just the spectacle of sex. When she talks about her craft, Gaitskill’s eyes brighten and she smiles often. If you are fortunate enough to speak to her about Chekhov or Nabokov, as I was, you feel thankful for her clairvoyant insights, for her mastery of opinion—for her energizing confidence in what makes a good writer.

In an interview you once said, “Literature is not a realm of politeness.” What’s your style in the classroom? Are you the conditionally supportive teacher or the unconditionally supportive teacher?
I’m sure most people would call me conditionally supportive. I don’t really know what I’m like. I mean, I can’t see myself from the outside. People have described me as blunt. I’m not always, actually. I mean, I’m not always as blunt as I—

As you want to be?
as I might be if I were actually being blunt [laughs]. I’m blunt if I think there is no other way to be. I think my teaching style has also somewhat changed. And again, it’s hard to see myself from the outside. But I think I’ve learned how to be critical in a better way than I used to. In the past, I was so uncomfortable in a position of authority. I had never had a job before where I had any authority at all. My generation is notoriously uncomfortable with authority. That’s why we are terrible parents. I mean, I’m not speaking personally. I am not a parent. But it’s a thing—my generation makes awful parents. Because they’re so busy trying to make their children happy and be a friend to their children and make everything in their life work out that they end up just smothering them, basically.

All unconditional! I guess psychologists would say you need one unconditional and one conditionally loving parent, right? There’s a balance.
I had a similar problem teaching. But, it didn’t show up in the same way. I was just so uncomfortable having to be the authority. And I knew that I had to be. So the things I would say would come out much more forcefully than I actually meant them. It translated into harshness. And it was actually coming from a place of real discomfort and insecurity. But I don’t think the students knew that. Maybe some of them did, some of the time.

I remember a former writing professor, Chuck Kinder, always driving home the principle of Chekhov’s smoking gun. This West Virginian drawl saying, “If there’s a gun, there had better be gun smoke.” What’s your smoking gun principle? Do you have a rule?
I don’t, actually. I think there are very few rules that can’t be broken. I think there is only one that is very difficult to break. I have seen it broken, but not very often. It’s that something has to change. From the beginning of the story to the end, something needs to be different. The only time I’ve ever seen it successfully broken was a Grace Paley story called “A Conversation With My Father.” But as a general rule, something has to change. There has to be some source of tension. And even that can be subtle. Even in the language itself. You know the Flannery O’Conner story “Everything That Rises Must Converge”?

Yes!
The blood pressure. It’s mentioned in, I think, the first or second sentence. The blood pressure is the number-one thing.

Earlier I asked you which short stories of yours I should read, and you immediately responded with “Secretary.” You said you considered it one of your best. So I started there with Bad Behavior. That was your first book. You were thirty-three when it was released. How long did it take you?
About six years.

A first book is like a band’s first record, right? You have your whole life up to that point to write that first collection of words. And you release it. And then people tell you who you are. They say, “Oh, you’re the masochism writer,” or  “you’re the next Dylan.” It can be kind of crushing. Then you have, what? A year? Five years? You have such a shorter time frame to follow it up. What was the difference between writing Bad Behavior and your second book, the 1991 novel Two Girls, Fat and Thin?
Well, there were a couple of things. I had actually started the novel before I sold the story collection. I had written maybe thirty-five pages and stopped, because I just didn’t know what to do. And the reason I picked it up again was because I was in a publisher’s office, and they didn’t know if they wanted to buy the collection or not. And the guy said, “So, do you have a novel?” And I said, “Yeah. Yeah I do.” And he said, “What’s it about?”

And I just started talking about these girls. And they were like, “Oh, ok.” And they wanted to do a two-book deal: the short story collection and the novel.

Well, that certainly worked out.
It didn’t have to do with the process, though. It was much more complicated. Because when I was writing Bad Behavior I could always say to myself, “It doesn’t have to be good. No one is going to see it.” That actually made it possible for me to go forward. I said that to myself literally every time I sat down, repeatedly. “It doesn’t have to be any good. No one will see it.”

Like The Basement Tapes. Dylan and his band didn’t mean for anyone to hear them. They were just hanging out in Woodstock, recording music they never thought would see daylight.
It’s a very helpful thing to say to yourself. And I didn’t have any expectation of how it would be received, either. Whereas with Two Girls I could not say that. I knew people were going to see it. And actually, for the first time, I was self-conscious about how it would be seen. And I felt a desire, an obligation almost, to please certain readers. Because I knew who had liked Bad Behavior and I knew why they liked it. So I was uncomfortable about disappointing those people, perhaps. I tried as hard as I could to put those feelings aside. But it was very difficult.

That had to be jarring.
It was.

Had you ever thought about your limitations as a writer when you were working on that first collection?
Oh, yeah! I thought I was terrible.

You thought you were terrible?
That was the other thing about Two Girls that was different. It was that I had never tried to write a novel before. Short stories are—some people say they are harder, but I don’t think so. And the reason I don’t think so is because it’s just a smaller space to deal with. I mean, some are quite capacious. It’s not that they are easy. I don’t find them easy. But a novel? It’s like I was a cat that had been in a house all of its life, and all of a sudden a door was flung open. And I was flooded with sights and smells and was crazily running over in one direction wondering what was going on there and getting distracted. And then running in the other direction. It was a total feeling of freedom. But I didn’t know what to do with it. It was very hard to figure out what I wanted to pay attention to and how to structure it. And stories are way more manageable that way.

Being flooded with sights and smells. Yes. So appropriate, because your fourth novel, Veronica (Pantheon, 2005), is flooded with sights and smells and senses that overlap and eclipse each other. Let’s start with the origin myth that opens the book —the dark folktale told to the narrator, Alison, by her mother. Alison revisits this story for the rest of her life. It haunts her. At one point she admits that she felt it more than she heard it. At what phase in the process of writing this novel did you write the beginning—this story that keeps coming back?
I added that later.

Was there a Lebowski’s Rug moment, when you arrived at this origin story and added it, and it really brought the whole room together?
Honestly, it was because someone who read a draft of the book said it reminded them of the tale The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf. It’s Hans Christian Anderson. And I said, “Really, what’s that?” And I went and looked it up. And I agreed. I thought it was perfect.

Those old tales are soul crushing and beautiful, but also scary as hell. It’s scary being a kid.
Right. Because everybody’s bigger than you. And they are weird! [Laughs.]

You’ve mentioned a soul-quality in writing. I’ve read interviews where you break it down to the molecular level. I guess it’s a voice quality, right? This energy. How did you find that? And how in the world do you teach that?
I don’t know. How did I arrive at the voice quality?

Yes. This energy in your writing, the music of it. The way you describe these grotesquely beautiful things. It’s your voice. What all MFA students want so badly to get, I think, is their own version of that.
I used to tell students, “I want to see it how only you can see it. I don’t want to see it how a hundred people would see it.” I was basically telling them not to rely on shared perception. There isn’t anything wrong with shared perception. It can be a beautiful thing, and I think music relies partly on shared perception, or it assumes a certain kind of shared perception, rightly or wrongly. Because you feel, in a group of people, that you are hearing it the same, although you’re probably not. You feel that commonality. Slang. Expressions. There are certain things that make shared perception beautiful. You can’t have a conversation without it. But when you’re reading a story, it’s a different thing. It’s much more intimate. It’s much more like…you’re wanting to get the pith of what that person feels and sees. It’s more like that.

Music plays a huge, great part in Veronica. What’s your soundtrack?
You mean, what music do I listen to?

Yes. When you’re writing, or on the train with your headphones. What are you listening to?
I’m really sorry to say this, but I don’t have those things. I don’t like that. I don’t want to walk around listening to music and not listening to what’s happening. It’s bad enough that I’m glued to my phone. I’m not going to go there with music. But right now I’m also at a disadvantage, because I don’t have a good sound system. So I’ve been listening to music on my computer and I just don’t like it as much. Like, when I had a good sound system, I used to put on music and just walk around, drinking a glass of wine, just listening to it.

In your writing, you slip in and out of time seamlessly. In Veronica, you’re like a time bandit. We’re talking a really adult version of Madeleine L’Engle. The book spans decades of Alison’s life—from her teenage years in Paris in the 70s to New York in the 80s, where she meets Veronica, and she’s narrating when she’s in her fifties. There are certain sentences that stretch between two different moments. Considering the amount of time the book covers, there has to be a level of trust—in your own ability to do that, but also that the reader will trust this time machine you’re driving. Was that hard to do? Did you question that?
Yeah, I did question if it was a good idea or not. I was afraid it would be too arty, or just too hard to follow. Yeah, I wondered about that.

For me, that kind of movement through time made everything move faster. It made my heart beat faster, especially as the book went on.
Well, thank you. I did it, for one thing, well, I felt like I had to blend the times because the book is focused on something in the past, and the narrator is in the present. But also because I was at an age where I felt like time was blending for me, personally, in a way that it hadn’t before.

How so?
I think when you get to a certain age, and for some people it may be in their forties or for other people it may be in their sixties—I’m not sure—but I think for everybody it happens that your relationship with time changes and you see the future or the present, and it becomes like a palimpsest for the past, and you just kind of blur things. And it’s not necessarily in a confused way, but sometimes it is. Like, you can talk to very old people and they’ll think something happened. Recently, my mother thought that her mother gave her the book, Born Free by Elsa the Lioness. And that’s not possible. My mother wasn’t alive when that book was written. But in her mind it absolutely must have been that way. She’s blending something. I think that starts to happen in middle age. Not in the sense that you’re confused, but that your connections of when things happen in time, spatially, are just different.

So, let’s talk about sexuality. Never have I read fiction regarding sexuality that made me feel quite the same way—that way I felt when reading Veronica.
When you say “that way,” what do you mean?

As a male, reading about sex—this beautifully painful account of health, illness, death, with all of this sometimes brutal sex—I felt my own mortality. I became very aware of my heartbeat and my breathing. Thinking about all the cigarettes I had smoked a long time ago. It made me anxious. It hurt. And I saw all of this through the eyes of Alison, a model, who is absolutely nothing like me. At all. I related to it. Absolutely, in the moment, related to it. And it’s hard enough for me to be in the moment, ever.
Me, too.

At one point Alison says she sees how men can look at pictures and feel things. She’s trying to see the world through the eyes of the other, and reading the book as a man, I was doing the same thing backwards, through her eyes. Have you found that the reaction to your writing has been starkly different along gender lines? That men have a different response? Like, me, how I am getting super uncomfortable talking about it with you right now?
Oh, it doesn’t make me uncomfortable at all. I don’t really know. Someone wrote an article about how horrible she thinks men are when they write about me. And it’s true that some male critics have been unusually nasty. But it’s also true that once, a long time ago, for my own curiosity, I went through all the reviews and divided them into male and female. And then I added up where the most negative ones came from. They came from women. So, I think women are more likely to relate to my writing in a superficial way, because most of my characters are women. I don’t really know if there is a predictable breakdown.

I thought my last book, The Mare, would not be read by men at all. The Mare is all female characters with specifically female issues. And there isn’t a whole lot of sex in it. Even the horses are female. But men read it and liked it. I mean I don’t know how many. I can’t really say for sure. I am thinking, though, that some men seem to view it with horror that seems gendered.

Recently, Veronica was republished in England and my editor decided to have a personal friend of hers write an introduction. I can’t remember the guy’s name. He’s an English writer whom she says is very respected, but I’ve never heard of him. And he spent a lot of time—and he was a fan, apparently—talking about the horrifying, degrading imagery that I use about men. In one of these horrifying examples, Alison was thinking about a guy, and I hope you don’t mind me using this language. She’s having sex with somebody, and she can feel his asshole tingling on the end of his spine. In the context of writing, that does not seem especially degrading or at all degrading to me. If you were saying that to someone, it might be different, depending on who they are and how you said it. But the idea of somebody thinking that, in private, in a fictional novel, I don’t understand. I scratched him doing the introduction and I did it myself. And I wrote back to [my editor] and said, “Has this guy ever read Philip Roth or Saul Bellow? What makes him so shocked by this?”

In conversation it might be a shocking remark, but not in a novel, in somebody’s head. And that’s what I mean by politeness not applying to literature. There’s a different standard than at a party. I really did wonder if he would have reacted that way if it was a male writing about a female he was having sex with.

Well, I think there is maybe a double standard when it comes to writing about sex. Men might get more of a pass, right? And I’ve never read anything about sex that was written quite like that.
Thanks. Except I would normally disagree with that. I think women get more of a pass. For sexist reasons, actually, sexuality is considered the purview of women. It’s like women’s area of authority. Women can write really dirty things without being criticized as much. Are you aware of Nicholson Baker’s book The Fermata?

No.
It’s a pretty dirty book. It’s a fantasy book. Have you read him at all?

No, I haven’t. I guess I should.
Beautiful writer. Line by line, probably the best writer in America, in my opinion.  Line by line, though, not by the whole content, necessarily. Well, The Fermata was one of his lighter books. He’s better known for Vox, because Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky read it together. Or for The Mezzanine. But The Fermata is about somebody who can stop time, and he uses it to take women’s clothes off…

Oh! Yes…he masturbates on their clothes?
He masturbates, but he doesn’t do it on their clothes. My, that book got outraged reviews. People said it was violent, degrading, disgusting. It was none of those things. It was a totally harmless fantasy. And I think if a woman had written it, it would have been different. Have you ever read Natsuo Kirino?

No. You know what? Not only have I probably not read any of the books you’re mentioning, I’m probably going to get a big complex about it. 
No. Don’t worry. I’ve hardly read anything. But Natsuo Kirino, one of her books that I really like, in one of the final scenes is this guy who has been stalking her and finally gets her tied up and he’s planning to torture her and he’s cutting her and he’s raping her. And she actually responds to him. But she’s actually tricking him. She ends up killing him. And he almost likes it. She cuts his throat and he dies slowly. I don’t remember the words, but it’s almost like he says, “I love you” in the end. If a man wrote that scene, he’d be considered the equivalent of a murderer. He wouldn’t be able to show his face in public.

Well, I guess I’ll have to read that now…
It’s true, though. I think women are allowed to be much more outrageous sexually, in general, than men. What some of the male critics, who have been nasty, are responding to—and this one guy said that reading me was like being sodomized by an icy dildo—

Um, does he know what that’s like?
[Laughs] Oh, I suspect he doesn’t. Because if he did, he would never make such a ridiculous comparison. But, in a way, it’s a huge compliment, because I have never read anyone in my life who would make me feel even remotely like that. So he must think I’m some kind of badass.

What I think makes people like that uncomfortable isn’t the level of sexual detail. I think it makes them feel emotionally uncomfortable. Because they feel emotionally exposed. Lots of people write about sex very graphically.

Switching gears, you really describe the beauty and sometimes ugliness of voices. The sound of them. And you do it visually, too. Alison will describe how something looks as a sound. Are you the kind of person who can be enthralled, or just totally turned off, by the timbre of someone’s voice?
Oh yeah. I’m really, really voice responsive. When I was very young, at home, in the other room doing homework, some guy came to see one of my sisters. And I was so revolted by his voice, I could hardly bare to listen to it. And when he left I walked in the room and I said, “Who was that?” And I said, “He’s a horrible person.”

It turned out he was, actually. He had sexually molested somebody and later he made obscene calls to one of my sisters. I’m not saying I can do that all the time, but I am very voice reactive. And I can even fall in love with somebody just by the sound of their voice. I mean, I may not stay in love with them [laughs]. And it might not mean they’re a wonderful person. Although, interestingly, when I first heard my husband’s voice, I didn’t like it. But that changed. I’m not completely wedded to that impression. But it does mean something.

I read you once say that Debbie from “Secretary” was no older than eighteen. And I thought, “Wow. What an erudite, literate eighteen-year-old.”
Really, you think?

Oh yeah. That first-person narrator in that third-person universe? Totally.
It’s pretty simple, I think.

But what we can get to here is the idea of the reliability of a narrator. In Veronica, you use the first-person narrator, and you nailed the trust—the narrator was so reliable. How do you confer that trust? What advice do you give students to find that place?
I’ve always found the concept of the reliable versus the unreliable narrator peculiar, because I think all narrators are unreliable [laughs]. People tell you what they saw or what they think or what they felt, and they may be telling you the truth, but it might not at all be what someone else saw happen. Like, people always call Humbert Humbert an unreliable narrator. He’s very reliable. He’ll tell you exactly what he thought and felt in a lot of detail. And you also get a very clear sense of what Lolita is experiencing through him. But I don’t think of it as unreliable. I think more in terms, and this sounds really corny, I think more in terms of, “Do I care what this narrator thinks and feels? Can he engage me?”

With students, the problem I see most often is that I don’t get a sense of what their narrators care about. What they want. What matters to them. That’s a bigger issue to me than whether or not they’re reliable in some way.

Would you agree if I were to say that you are hard on your readers?
I don’t know [laughs]. It probably depends on the reader. I’m sure some people read my stuff and think it’s fun. And some people might think it’s boring.

Your writing? Boring?

Sure. I think Bad Behavior is boring, quite frankly. I had to read it for an audio book. I was just like, “Oh…”

For some readers it is hard. I guess I do know that for a fact. I’ve seen complaints. I’ve seen people talk about how hard it is. So it must be. But it’s not something I set out to do.

I guess we have a theme here, of conditional versus unconditional. Reading your work, I found it very hard on the reader. Not in a pejorative sense. I found it absolutely conditionally loving. It gives me everything I need, but as you once said, there is a thin line between absolute excitement and humiliation—and you thrive on that line.
I said that?

Yep.
Where?

I think in New York Times Magazine, actually.
Wow. I never read that one.

You’re tackling incredibly emotionally intense, sexually intense, illness, health, and death…
It’s true. That line.

It’s so interesting that you bring that up because a student of mine just workshopped a story; the ending is a scene in which the male character is really ashamed of his body and his girlfriend is really beautiful and she decides she wants him to pose naked for pictures. And it’s a potentially very powerful scene because it can potentially be a very horrible experience. And he’s just so uncomfortable. It would be very much a thin line. And it could be one of those things where it could be great or just really, really awful. Or both.

I’d say great and awful at the same time would be the goal, right?
Oh, yeah. For a lot of people, yeah. Because it’s the whole picture.

I think that’s what I would say about your writing. 
Well, thank you.

 

Joseph Master is the executive director of marketing and digital strategy at Drexel University in Philadelphia. His freelance work has appeared in newspapers, magazines, television commercials, and on tiny screens across the nation. He studied creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh.

Mary Gaitskill, whose most recent book is the essay collection Somebody With a Little Hammer

(Credit: Derek Shapton)

Where the Past Begins: An Interview With Amy Tan

by

Alison Singh Gee

10.13.17

This past summer, while speaking on a panel at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers conference, Amy Tan surprised an audience full of aspiring authors with an admission: “There are times when I think to myself, ‘I’ve lost it completely,’” she said. “‘That’s it. It’s over. I will never write again.’” She shook her head and added, “It took me eight years to write the last novel. It seems like with every novel, it gets harder and harder.”

Tan, the author of six novels, including The Joy Luck Club (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1989), as well as two children’s books, struggled with writing her last novel, The Valley of Amazement, first exploring one storyline for about five years, ditching much of it, and basically starting over, finally completing the book some three years later. Published by Ecco in 2013, the novel followed the odyssey of a young biracial courtesan as she searches for her American madam during the early twentieth-century in China.

As she grappled with her voice on the page, her public voice—on Facebook, notably—was becoming pointedly more personal and urgent, poking at topics that ranged from the whimsical (her beloved terriers and her latest sculptural haircuts) to the controversial (politicians she despises). In post after post on social media, Tan examined and confronted the world around her and the world within her. It was during this period that she began e-mailing with her editor, Daniel Halpern at Ecco, who she started working with on The Valley of Amazement, a little more than a decade after Faith Sales, her longtime editor at Putnam, died in 1999.

Halpern would send Tan a question, and the author would fire off a witty retort, or sometimes a very long missive. Once, for instance, Halpern asked the writer for a synopsis of her yet-to-be-written novel and Tan shot back a four-thousand-word response about why she hates writing synopses. All of these missives had a vital quality in common: spontaneity.

Buoyed by the vibrancy of their dashed-off e-mails, Tan decided to write a memoir, Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir, published this month by Ecco. The book collects Tan’s unguarded, free-flowing writing in response to family documents, personal photographs and journal entries she had collected throughout her life, which began in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she grew up the daughter of immigrant parents from China. The results of this personal research deeply surprised the author. In examining photographs of her grandmother and the clothing she wore, Tan discovered that her grandmother had most likely been a courtesan. In rereading letters she and her mother had exchanged before her death in 1999, the author realized they had remained close, even during the times that Tan tried to distance herself, and that her mother had felt that her daughter had truly understood her. The relationship between a mother and a daughter has formed the basis of much of Tan’s work, from The Joy Luck Club, which consists of stories about the experiences of four Chinese American mothers and their daughters, to The Bonesetter’s Daughter (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2001), about an immigrant Chinese woman and her American-born daughter.

Tan, who readily admits that in writing her novels she labors over every sentence, discovered something vital about her writing process: that if she just shut out her self-conscious voice and wrote, she could capture something vital, intimate, and authentic on the page. “Writing this book was very painful,” she says. “But it was exhilarating, too.” 

I recently spoke with Tan about her approach to memoir and how this shift in process changed the way she views her fiction writing. 

You’ve written six novels, two children’s books, and one collection of essays. A memoir is a departure of sorts. Why did you decide to switch literary camps?
I would say I was lured into writing this book. It was the suggestion of my publisher, Dan Halpern, who thought I needed an in-between book—as in, between my novels. At first he thought we could put together a whole book of our e-mails. I said, “That’s a terrible idea.” But he kept insisting that it would be good. We could turn our e-mails from when we were first getting together into essays about writing. Then I looked at them and said, “This is never going to work.” And he finally agreed.

But by then this book had already been announced. And I was stuck writing it. At first I started writing something esoteric about language, but it was coming out all wrong and stiff. So I decided I was just going to write whatever comes to mind. It was going to be a memoir but it was going to be spontaneous.

But you’re known as a literary craftsperson, laboring over every sentence. How did you decide that spontaneity was the way forward?
This was one of the things I learned about creativity. You have to let go of self-consciousness. When I started thinking about this book, I knew that if I felt self-conscious while writing, it would probably come out bit by bit and it would not be as honest.

So I told Dan I would send him fifteen to twenty pages of writing every week. I imposed this crazy deadline on myself. I was just writing spontaneous sentences and not doing much in the way of revision. And this is what came out.

Throughout the writing of this book I was both excited and nervous. I didn’t know what I was going to find. It was like when you go to the circus and you’re about to see the next act. You’re looking forward to it but you’re also scared out of your mind. You’re worried that the trapeze artist is going to die. The process had a suspense to it. Even though I was writing about my life, here, I was writing about what I felt about certain experiences. There’s a difference between a narrative of facts and what happened in your life.

This was about what I felt about certain experiences and the association of that experience with another, and another beyond that. It was about who I am as an adult and reflecting on the core of these experiences.

What was your process? How did you organize the mining of these moments in your life?
I had collected all these things from my family and my own life, not ever thinking that I would write from them. I am sentimental; I have things from my high school, like my student-body card. I had like eighty boxes of this stuff in my garage. I kept them with the idea that I would one day go through them and get rid of a bunch and keep a couple of things. Then I thought, I will just pull something out of the boxes, and if it intrigues me I will write about it. So the process was: I stuck my hand in a box and what came out I wrote about.

It wasn’t as though I had it all lined up, like I wanted to write about this and this. The process was surprising, shocking. It was exhilarating, a mix of emotions. It brought about those things you get out of writing—you know, you have these epiphanies and discoveries. It was an affirmation of why we write.

How did this differ from writing your novels?
Writing fiction allows me the subterfuge of it being fiction. I can change things from real life. I can still go to an emotional core but not as intensely.

Fiction is a way to bring up emotions that I have and to get a better understanding of the situation. But I found that writing memoir brought up ten times the amount of emotion I have while writing fiction. This was truly an unexpected book. I kept telling Dan, “I hate this book.” It seems so personal, like an invasion of privacy. It’s as though I let people into my bedroom and into my darkest moments. I haven’t had time to really meditate over this as I would have liked—you know that word: process. I haven’t even had reflection time to sort out my emotions.

You seem to have lived a remarkably dramatic life and so did your mother, so did your grandmother. Your grandmother was likely a courtesan, one who committed suicide by swallowing raw opium. Your mother, in choosing to leave behind an abusive husband in China, also had to leave her daughters behind as she moved to America for a new life. And I read an article in which you mentioned that you had been sexually molested as a child, held up at gun point, experienced the death of both your father and older brother within six months of each other, and lived with a mother who threatened to kill herself on many occasions, and threatened to kill you with a cleaver on another occasion. In taking stock of this generational trajectory, did you have it in your head that you would one day make sense of all this as a writer?
Well, that’s what I was doing all along with my fiction. I was writing about things, and these moments would come up spontaneously, intuitively, naturally, as part of a narrative in which I was trying to make sense of a story.

For example, when I was writing The Joy Luck Club, I was writing to understand my mother more. But not to the extent that I did in writing this particular book—there was so much turmoil. When I examined for this memoir, in a very concentrated way, what it was like to live with my mother and her suicidal rages, it was so painful. The horror of seeing her put her leg out of a car and knowing that she might possibly die.

Is it meaningful to your memoir writing that your mother, who you’ve described as your muse, died almost two decades ago? How has that freed you to write autobiographically?
I wonder every once in a while what my mother would have thought about the things I wrote in this memoir. Would she have been upset or really happy? Would she be angry? When she was alive, anytime I wrote about her, even when I wrote terrible things, she was thrilled because it was about her. I could have written that she tried to kill me, and she would have been delighted. She’d say something like, “Now you understand how I feel.” My mother was an emotional exhibitionist.

My father, a minister, would have been wounded. In this book I wrote these things about him being sincere but shallow. He depended too much on the pat phrases of the Bible. Rather than truly feeling what somebody was going through, he wanted to solve things and be a good minister. He was so blind to what was going on in his own family. He didn’t have compassion for my little brother and me and what we might have been going through.

Was there difficult material that you left out of the book? If so, how do you feel about that decision now?
We took out about ten or twelve pieces and there was one, actually, that I debated over. Dan and I agreed that it was a little too risky. It was a letter I wrote to a minister based on having been abused when I was fifteen by their youth minister. This person I was writing to was not the minister when this happened. My point in the piece was that his church is a house of worship and it’s a continuous fellowship. I wrote that he is proud of the story of his church but he has to add this to its history. His house of worship has a stain on it.

I finally said, “We have to take this piece out. It goes off the path. It doesn’t enhance what I’m trying to write about.”

Are you happy with that decision or do you regret it?
I’m happy with the decision. Sometimes you write something and it becomes almost retribution, a desire to get even. In this memoir, I could have written about betrayal. I could have written about people who deeply wounded me, but why? I could have written about the fact that my mother went through her life feeling betrayed and that is a mark she put on me. I now have very strong feelings about betrayal and condescension. But I don’t want betrayals to be a dominant part of my life, and if I had written about them I would have given them more importance than I wanted to give them.

How did you push past your emotional blocks to include difficult information and lines of questioning?
In this book I say something about writing and honesty. And it has to do with spontaneity. If you are going to get to some emotional core and truth, you have to write spontaneously. You have to let go of that frontal lobe that says, “Oh, but my father will read this.” You can look at your writing later and say, “Oh my God, my father is going to kill me when he reads this, or he’s going to kill himself.” And then you will know what to leave in or take out. Or you wait until your father’s death. But if you start out in your writing having these concerns, maybe you are writing things that are vindictive. Or maybe you are not ready to write these scenes. Maybe you need to write them later. Maybe you need to take it from a different angle and it will come out in a different way. But I think that if you always write with compassion and understanding, then you stand a good chance of having that person understand why you are writing this. That you weren’t trying to be vindictive. Being vindictive is an automatic no.

Will you take this technique of spontaneity back to your fiction writing? How else will this foray into memoir affect your work as a novelist?
I always thought as I wrote fiction that I was making discoveries, deep discoveries. I was surprised by how much deeper these went as I was writing this memoir. How much more trouble the memories are and how much more risk I had to take to go into it.

Fiction offers us a subterfuge—I keep using this word—it’s almost similar to donning a costume when I go onstage as a ridiculous singer [as she does as a member of the literary rock band, The Rock Bottom Remainders, whose other members have included Stephen King, Scott Turow, Barbara Kingsolver, and others]. If I wear the costume, I can do ridiculous singing because it’s supposed to be in the guise of a silly person.

I am much closer to who I am when I am writing fiction, but there is still a separation. I write my fiction in the first person but writing memoir is truly first person.

I wonder if, in writing fiction, I am going to be as close to the material now, as I was as writing the memoir. With fiction I will still have that protective mechanism. For my memoir I fell into this safety zone of fiction when I wrote that memory of being in the car with my mother as she threatened to commit suicide. I had to write that in the third person. At first, I wrote it in the first person and I had to take it in the third person because it was so painful. I could only get it out in the third person.

At the same time, I think that writing fiction can be very fun. It allows you to be reflective, and at the same time and there’s the art and craft of fiction that I like. So I don’t think I would ever continue to just write memoir.

You mention that you have a “messy narrative style,” that you might start a novel using one voice speaking from a particular period of time but then you shift to another voice speaking from another period of time. Does this have to do with the dual narrative you lived with your mother?
This seems to be true about every book I’ve written. I start in the present and then go into the past. I think this has to do with an interior sense that whatever is happening in one particular time has a connection to another. I’m really fascinated by what that connection might be.

It’s not always a direct connection. For example, my father was a Christian minister and very devout. That does not mean that the connection to me was that I became a Christian minister or very devout. But what it did do for me was made me question what I do believe and why. And also that I am interested in having a purpose in life, rather than a random one. 

At Squaw Valley you said something surprising—and probably very buoying to many writers—that sometimes you face a blank page and think that you have lost the ability to write another word. But then you start to write again. What’s gets you over that hump and onto writing the next page?
I sometimes have this existential dread that I will never write again. Or, I’m not a writer, or this book isn’t going anywhere. Everyone is going to be disappointed. It makes me sick. Then I just say, “Get over it, you are not the end of the world.”

I’m not a disciplined writer at all. I would never want to convey that and make other writers anxious.

What happened with this memoir is that I gave myself a self-imposed deadline—fifteen to twenty pages a week—and I allowed myself to write bad pages. That’s the thing. Allow yourself to write bad pages and just continue to write spontaneously and in that writer’s mind. Write as much as you can without self-consciousness over bad sentences. Write knowing it’s going to be imperfect—that’s important. Just press on. You might look at it later and maybe you have to throw everything away. But there might be something in there that is valuable, that you can keep.

What three or four qualities make a “literary writer”?
Ah, that’s a terrible term. It has triggered a response equal to what the word “liberals” has attracted from Trump supporters. Being a literary writer might mean that you think you’re better than everybody else, or what literary means is that you’re incomprehensible to about 90 percent of mainstream readers.

But, okay. A literary writer is serious about craft, and doing something original, writing a story that contains an important idea. Literary writing has an important theme and it comes through naturally, logically, imperatively.

What qualities make a superstar writer?
Luck. And some kind of style. There is a great deal of luck involved. You have to get recognized and read. You’re lucky if your book falls into the right hands and if it didn’t come out the day after 9/11. Beyond that, it is having established a voice that people enjoy or want to hear from and being able to provide that.

Superstar writers are not necessarily the best writers. Some have written the same book over and over again. They may have a formula that readers want. Superstar writers have that down. They can be depended upon to deliver what readers like to read. I’m not counting myself as a superstar writer, by the way.

What’s next for you?
My new book is a novel, The Memory of Desire. It’s a book that I dreamed up. The structure, the characters and the setting—they literally came to me in a dream. It is so gratifying to get the setting down. For me, it’s a major part of starting a book. But keep in mind, what works for me may not work for you. 

 

Alison Singh Gee is an award-winning journalist and the author of the Hong Kong-India memoir, Where the Peacocks Sing, about her comical and complicated relationship with her husband’s family palace in Northern India. She teaches creative nonfiction and literary travel writing at UCLA Extension. Find her at Facebook.com/AlisonSinghGee.

Amy Tan, whose new book is Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir, published by Ecco in October.

(Credit: Julian Johnson)

The Heart of the Novel: Nicholas Montemarano and Eric Puchner

11.6.17

If you want to lose and then find yourself in stories of modern family life, look no further than the fiction of Nicholas Montemarano and Eric Puchner. Both authors peer into the beautiful messiness of contemporary America by way of its homes: the high stakes of our daily rituals, the turmoil beneath serenity, the white lies and longings that hold it all together. Puchner is author of the beloved story collections Last Day on Earth (Scribner, 2017) and Music Through the Floor (Scribner, 2005), as well as the novel Model Home (Scribner, 2010), which won the California Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Montemarano is the author of two critically acclaimed novels, The Book of Why (Little, Brown, 2013) and A Fine Place (Context Books, 2002), and the short story collection If the Sky Falls (Louisiana State University Press, 2005), a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. Now he’s celebrating the release of his third novel, The Senator’s Children, published this month by Tin House Books. Centered on two sisters who have never met, it is an intimate family drama about a political scandal and the personal aftermath. Puchner read an advance copy and was enthralled. “This engrossing, brilliantly structured novel takes a familiar situation—the implosion of a presidential candidate’s career—and creates a thing of heartbreaking beauty out of it,” he writes. “By asking whether forgiveness can conquer blame, and whether we might even be able to treat strangers like family, The Senator’s Children feels like exactly the kind of novel we need.”

So Eric Puchner and Nicholas Montemarano got in touch, and what started as an e-mail exchange in the fall of 2017 turned into a literary deep-dive. The two discussed scandals and second chances, finding the heart of the novel, and blurring the personal and political.

Eric Puchner: The Senator’s Children feels like a departure for you in terms of material. One of the things I admire about it, in fact, is that you take a familiar subject, one that’s sort of ripped from the history books—the infidelity of a presidential candidate and its ramifications on his career and family—and find a brand new story to tell.  What compelled you to write about a political scandal?

Nicholas Montemarano: This novel does feel like a departure in some ways—I never expected to write about a political scandal—but in other ways, it continues a preoccupation of mine. So much of what I’ve written—I realized this only after I completed The Senator’s Children—is about families, specifically how they cope with the aftermath of tragedy. My first urge to write this novel came after listening to a late-night talk show host lampoon a politician whose career and life were falling apart. I was compelled less by the fact that this man was a politician and more that he was a public figure being mocked when privately he and his family must have been in great pain. I had an especially strong reaction to the audience’s laughter. I may have been the only person in America, for all I know, who felt sorry for this man, his wife, and his children. We like to see the mighty fall, and then we love the redemption story that often follows. But this politician—the one who was the butt of so many jokes—there wasn’t going to be a second act for him. Not a chance, not after what he did. I couldn’t help but wonder what the rest of life would be like for a person who had become such a pariah.

EP: That’s another thing I admire about the book, the sympathy you show each and every character—not only David, the disgraced senator, but also “the other woman” who in some ways conspires to take David down. Was there a particular character you found hard to empathize with at first? Who was the trickiest character to write your way into?

NM: David Christie was unfaithful to his wife while he was running for president—and while she was battling cancer. Can you feel sympathy for someone who did that? Well, that was one question I set out to ask in my novel. The answer, for me, was surprisingly immediate: yes, of course. The challenge, then, was to bring out those aspects of David that might evoke empathy in readers. On the other hand, Rae, the woman with whom David has the affair—she was more of a challenge. In early drafts, she wasn’t very sympathetic. She was too interested in cashing in on the affair; she wanted to write a book about it and still hoped, years after the affair, to win over David. But she struck me as a caricature, a cultural footnote you might see on a reality TV show (in fact, I had her on a reality TV show in the first draft). So I had to dig deeper and allow her to be flawed—she can be needy and self-absorbed—but sympathetic. In her case, her saving grace is that she loves her daughter.

EP: We’ve been talking about David and the other woman, but the novel’s called The Senator’s Children. For me the emotional heart of it is the story of the two sisters, Betsy and Avery, who don’t know each other because one of them is the living proof of their father’s scandal. It’s just such a fraught, thematically rich situation. Did you know from the beginning that you would focus on David’s two daughters and their very divergent trajectories in life? And that these trajectories would eventually cross?

NM: I was just talking about this last week with my students. I showed them the pages in my notebook from 2011 when I wrote down my first thoughts about this novel. It was called The Senator. But a few weeks later, the working title became The Senator’s Daughter because I decided that its focus—and its narrator—would be Avery, the daughter born from the affair. I wrote the first paragraph—which no longer exists in the novel—and then one page later in my notes, I wrote: The Senator’s Children. I could see myself changing my mind and discovering what the heart of the novel would be. Even at that early stage, I knew who David Christie’s three children were and that his two daughters, estranged from their father to varying degrees, would collide late in the novel. I wrote pages of notes about them. It’s amazing to me that, after five years and so many drafts, much of those first notes I wrote about them remain true. Some things we know from the very beginning, and other things we have to write our way towards knowing.

EP: I wonder about that in relation to the novel’s structure. Another thing that impresses me is the way it moves so unexpectedly through time, toggling between the mid-eighties, the early nineties, 2010, and (in the final section) 1977. I found this to be the source of a lot of the book’s poignancy and power. (In some ways, it feels like the real subject of the novel is time and its irrevocability.) Was the jumping-around-in-time structure something you knew you were going to have from the beginning, or is it something that evolved during the drafting process?   

NM: I really like what you just said about time and its irrevocability—yes! If I had to choose two words that seem to capture my books thus far, they would be: time and regret. What is the life span of a terrible mistake? Can time heal even our deepest wounds? Or do those wounds fester and multiply? I’ve written three novels, and all of them move around in time. It’s difficult for me to imagine writing a novel that doesn’t; it just feels natural to me. As a reader, I’m drawn to nonlinear narratives. Many of my favorite books—The Things They Carried, Jesus’ Son, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City—jump around in time. Or skip ahead, like the “Time Passes” section of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Or move backwards like Harold Pinter’s play Betrayal. Julia Pierpont’s Among the Ten Thousand Things, one of my favorite novels in recent years, includes surprising flash-forwards. Time jumps can be so powerful. We’re here, then suddenly we’ve jumped ahead, or back, and important things happen in that white space. I remember turning the page to Part Two of your novel, Model Home, and seeing that time had jumped ahead a year—even a small time jump like that excites me. I’m like, what did I miss? What happened between those two pages? The ending of The Senator’s Children, the final jump back in time—as soon as it happened, it thrilled me; I knew it was right.

EP: I want to ask you about the language in the book, which feels whittled down to its very essence—there’s a kind of spareness to it that feels evocative and hard-boiled at the same time.  Reading it, I couldn’t help thinking of Babel’s dictum that “only a genius can afford two adjectives to a noun,” except that it seems to me you’ve decided to get rid of adjectives altogether. Is this ultra-spare voice something that comes easily and naturally to you? Or, like Isaac Babel, do you “go over each sentence, time and again,” taking out anything extraneous?

NM: Eventually, I had to give myself over to sparer prose. During revision, it won me over and convinced me that it would be best for the novel. The first draft was bigger, louder, stylistically and formally explosive, multiple narrators, very voice-driven. With each draft, more of that fell away. The aspects of the first draft I was most enamored with were exposed as just that—writing I was too enamored with and attached to. The revision process was one of whittling down me, so to speak. The novel couldn’t be about me being a good writer or making some interesting moves; everything had to be at the service of the story. And so with each revision the novel became quieter and more intimate. Whenever my editor and I spoke about the later drafts of the novel, we always came back to intimacy—that was the novel’s strength, she kept telling me, and I came to believe her. It’s amazing to see how much the novel changed through revision—more than any other book I’ve written.

EP: Speaking of change, the biggest change that happened between your writing of this novel and its publication was the election of Trump. You wrote the novel before Trump’s infamous Hollywood Access tape, which—unlike David’s indiscretion—didn’t end up crushing Trump’s chances at the presidency and makes the Monica Lewinski scandal seem almost quaint. Has Trump’s ascendancy changed your perspective on the novel in any way? Would you write the same book in 2017?

NM: I would. Trump, of course, has reset almost everything when it comes to politics. But families—it seems to me that they remain the same. And I really see The Senator’s Children as a family novel more than a political novel. I set David’s run for the presidency in 1991 and 1992 mostly by necessity: I needed Avery, his daughter outside his marriage, to be in college during the present narrative in 2010. But setting the political scandal twenty-five years ago turned out to be interesting. I had a chance to revisit some of the political sex scandals around that time. In the case of Gary Hart in 1987, a photograph brought down his run for the Democratic nomination. But during the 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton was able to overcome allegations of infidelity and win his party’s nomination and the White House. David Christie’s fate was closer to Hart’s. Or John Edwards’s in 2008. Some readers of The Senator’s Children have told me that the political world depicted in my novel feels, in the Age of Trump, like a throwback to a more civil time. Politics, of course, has always been a rough sport—and a fascinating one. But I’m a writer more interested in the private—what happens behind closed doors when the shit hits the fan, how families cope, how people lose each other, or hold on.

Novelists Nicholas Montemarano (left), author of The Senator’s Children; and Eric Puchner.

Craft Capsule: Find Your Voice

by

Simon Van Booy

6.27.18

This is no. 32 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Would you agree that for the past forty years, automobiles have been evolving in such a way as they now all look alike? As though created from the same, basic mold? One of the most important things you can do for yourself as a writer is to find your voice. I don’t mean tone, which is another way of referring to how writing makes you feel. The tone of this piece for Poets & Writers is very different from the tone of my latest novel, or the tone of the philosophy books I edited several years ago.  

I’m talking about voice. My voice can be squeezed into a 19th century corset for one novel, or spewed from the bowels of a werewolf for another, but it’s essentially the same underneath.  

When I realized after writing a couple of early novels, that I hadn’t found my voice—that there was even something called a voice—I was devastated.  

Had my years of labor all been for nothing? If my goal was to be published then yes. A total waste of time. But if my aim was to grow as an artist and as a person, then I had reason to be proud of myself.  

Anyway, to spare you the same kind of pain, I’ve devised an exercise that will hopefully lead you closer than you’ve ever been to the fiery core of your own, utterly unique, narrative style.  

1. Pick five books (or poems) you love, and five books (or poems) you dislike intensely, for a total of ten works.

2. Read the first page (or poem) several times, then rewrite it in such a way that you think, in your opinion, it’s better. Sometimes this means changing the order of words, or cutting them, or adding to them, or changing the tone completely. Don’t worry about offending anyone, no one knows you’re doing this except me, and I won’t tell.

3. This exercise, if done properly should take a fair amount of time. Once you’ve completed it, you’ll start to get a sense of who you are as a writer, and how your writing voice differs from the voices of others. Rewriting sections from writers you love is perhaps the most fruitful, because instead of emulating—you’re forced to be different. We each love certain writers for our own reasons. Rewriting their work will illuminate the subtle differences between your voice and theirs. 

4. Once you find your voice, it will almost certainly evolve over time, the way we evolve naturally as artists. Look at the early work of Van Gogh, compared to his later work. Dubliners vs. Finnegans Wake.  Early Beethoven sounds a little like Hayden—while late Beethoven is characteristic of the sound we associate with him. The core will always remain. Your voice is a gift to the world, so find it, nurture it, develop it, work it like a machine, give it the freedom of a vine—but above all, share it. 

 

Simon Van Booy is the author of nine books and the editor of three anthologies of philosophy. His latest work for adults, The Sadness of Beautiful Things, will be released in October from Penguin, and followed up in November by his latest work for children, Gertie Milk & the Great Keeper Rescue, from Penguin Razorbill.

Craft Capsule: Infinite Distance, or The Starry Archipelagoes

by

Dan Beachy-Quick

3.6.18

This is no. 28 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I remember being told a story when I was a student, though all these years later I wonder if it can be true. The course was in Modern Art History, and we were studying Bauhaus. My professor told us that on the first day of class, the Bauhaus teacher gave each one of his students a single sheet of paper. The assignment, he said, is to fold the paper in such a way that it can support the weight of your entire body. Some succeeded; some failed. But it is the assignment itself, the sudden and impossible challenge of it, that struck me—that one simple, blank page had to hold up the weight of your entire life. I then recognized something I’ve never recovered from, some true and awful thing about being a poet and a poet’s relationship, not to words or the beauties and meanings words offer, but to the blank space those words are written on, to the page: that one must learn to trust that its thin, near nothingness can bear the burden of a life. I realized that the poet has the simplest answer. You do not need to find the strongest method of folding, you do not need an intricate architecture of support; you just leave the page as it is and step onto the blankness.

Now I see that poetry intensifies the latent properties of the daily mundane into symbolic potency. The words on the chore list lend themselves to the desperate reverie of “Ode to a Nightingale.” A pencil makes its marks in the margins of the books I teach, and as the semester unspools day by day, and poem by poem, chapter by chapter, I sharpen the pencil and it grows shorter; I see this object of mere utility is also a mortal clock, and that the pencil’s beauty is a strange humility revealed in the seldom felt fact that it is, among all the objects I live my life among, one of the few that will disappear before I do. Walking to my Intro to Poetry course, I’ve come to realize—I hope, I fear—that the day’s lesson on some point of poetic craft is something other than what the definition in the Literary Dictionary holds, and is, instead, a complex consciousness, a vital form, a means of living a life. I know that sounds impossibly grand, but I think it’s true—that metaphor can be a philosophy, and metonymy a form of faith.

To help my students grasp such possibilities I ask them to take out a blank page of paper. The question is how to get from one corner to the opposite corner in the quickest way. The immediate reaction is to take a pencil and draw a straight line from corner to corner. But then some student figures it out and, leaving the pencil where its point stands, bends the opposite corner under its tip, letting the pencil ride across the distance without leaving a mark, for it has not “moved” at all. That is the discovery of metaphor. It helps us cross the distance we cannot imagine. And if it is as they say—those star-gazers, those physicists, those astronomers—that the earth isn’t the center of the universe, nor now is the sun, nor the Milky Way’s own black hole, but that all is in the red-shift, and flees from us in every direction at increasing speed into infinite distance, and between us and all we might love, as Emerson would have it, there is “an innavigable sea,” then metaphor becomes something other than the answer on the midterm, an implicit comparison between unlike things. It becomes a way to recognize the isolate nature of our condition, and a means of countering what otherwise could best be described as our cosmic loneliness. If the cost of the consciousness that language lends us is the inevitable sense of our separation from what it is we speak of, who it is we love, what it is we desire, then metaphor short-circuits that sad consequence and shuttles us—though we hardly feel the corner of the page slip under our feet—across the abyss of the universe. Is that hyperbole? Maybe. But sometimes the universe is just the living room. Sometimes the universe is nothing more than room A113 in Microbiology, where every Tuesday and Thursday from 12:30 to 1:45 I teach my class. That doesn’t mean the distance to cross is any less. If infinity has any lesson, it’s that every part of it is also infinite: chalkboard to student’s desk; word on a page to word in a mind. 

But that’s only one way to think, only one literary term, only metaphor. There are other terms to heap your faith inside. Like metonymy, that form of substitution of a name or attribute for something closely associated with it. Think of noble Queequeg in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Royal prince, the prophets of his tribe tattooed on his body the entire epistemology of his people; his body bore the signs and symbols that held the secrets of his tribe, prophecies and histories, facts and faith. It’s a beautiful image, the body as Holy Book—of course, Queequeg left his people before those prophets could teach him how to read what on his body was written. He was himself a book he could not open, illiterate to the answers he bore, outcast from the knowledge that marked him, unrecognizable to himself by the very marks that identified him. Queequeg gets very sick. He has the carpenter make him a coffin. Instead of resting in his hammock, Queequeg gets each day into his coffin, and looking at the symbols etched on his body, carves each one onto the wooden lid. Not knowing how to get to his people’s heaven, he trusts some divine spirit will be able to read those mystic marks on the coffin itself, and take him where he most wants to go, the starry archipelagoes. I know you’ve been told the earth is round; so have I, but sometimes I’m not so sure. Maybe Queequeg’s coffin would float out to the horizon, and there, where we assume one drops behind the curve of the earth to continue a ceaseless circumnavigation of the globe, the heavens reveal themselves as metonymic, and what seems like unbridgeable distance is actually not, but is continuous, contiguous, a near substitution for what once seemed impossibly far away, and the noble prince will find his way to heaven, not because his soul has been lifted there from the wreck of his body, but because that frigate-coffin has sailed all the way to the distant islands of those stars. Metonymy says that what seems apart is not apart at all, but is instead a part, as one tile is a part of the mosaic whole, and connected to the whole image of the world, though one can’t see the picture fully oneself.

Some other eyes can read it; some invisible hand can take you, too, to the starry archipelagoes.

 

Dan Beachy-Quick is a poet, essayist, and author most recently of a collection of essays, fragments, and poems titled Of Silence and Song (Milkweed Editions, 2017).

Craft Capsule: Hundreds of Eyes

by

Dan Beachy-Quick

2.20.18

This is the twenty-sixth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I practice two arts—the poem and the essay—and I’m not good at keeping them apart. There are times, I admit, when poetry feels to me the primary vehicle of thinking, an epistemological experiment in consciousness itself, demonstrating line by line the way in which those wondrous wounds of the senses inform the mind, and the mind must work to find a word that fits—not recognition, but cognition. In this sense, the poem is the thinking that can happen only outside the mind, and the poet is one, so paradoxically, eavesdropping on her own innermost self (though the innermost is no longer exactly inner). It’s monstrous work. I mean it’s work akin to Mary Shelley’s monster fleeing through the woods and, bending over a puddle there, seeing the moon in reflection, hearing the wind in the branches, and seeing for the first time his own face. The poem’s thinking is fateful in just such fundamental ways: It does not recognize, it realizes.

And the essay, that mode of taking measure, that rational or reasonable weighing of a life, has become for me beauty’s own labyrinth. I suppose a maze is monstrous work, too—knowing those myths of the Minotaur. But sometimes I think the essay is a maze with no center at all; it is instead a bewildered initiation into what John Keats calls, in “Ode to Psyche,” the “untrodden region of my mind,” that place one finds only by getting lost.

Such wonderings have led me to think much on what I consider the most fundamental aspect of craft in each art: the line of the poem, the sentence of the essay. (One might argue the word is the fundamental aspect of both, and that might be true, but a word is a world of syllable and breath, of potency and chance, and carries, as Leibniz describes the monad, its complexity all within. I’m not sure I know how to think about words—a strange thing, I know, for a writer to admit.)

 

I. Lines

Ralph Waldo Emerson, though I can’t remember where, wrote down a thought I’ve never been able to shake loose: “Every line of a poem must be a poem.” I find this to be awful advice, by which I mean, advice that is full of awe—awful because it is so true. I apologize to my students when I repeat it them. I fear it could so burden every moment in a poem that the poet feels paralyzed, unable to forge any path into the wild blank of the page. But maybe that is just how it should feel, just that helpless, but a helplessness mined through with some urge to make in nothingness a world entire, a poem.

Emerson’s insight has unfolded in a number of ways in my thinking about poetry. If every line of a poem is a poem itself it must mean that every single line in a poem truly written contains within it all it can say, has exhausted somehow the resource of its perception until, by the last word, there is some silence that cannot be spoken past. It means each line of the poem possesses a knowledge and vision that is, in its way, wholly revelatory—a means by which to see the world anew, a way to grow a new set of eyes. Each line is a plank upon which the mind builds its whole edifice of reason—and for the length of the line, it holds.

But then, as Emily Dickinson offers it,

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down –
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing – then –

That last stanza of her great poem “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” reads to me as the lived experience of reading a poem—that plunge through every line that is itself a world entire. And of the “Finished knowing—then—,” I’ve never known if it means she has ended in knowledge, or if knowing itself is at an end.

I suppose the answer may be both, for it reveals the most astonishing aspect of the line when every line is itself a poem: that each line of a poem makes a claim for some sense of the world entire, a sense of which that line is the primary example, and then that singular sense is subsumed into the larger vision of which it is but a part. Then the poem may be the place Emerson suggests it is, where we “stand before the secret of the world, there where Being passes into Appearance and Unity into Variety.” I imagine the poem also this way: a peacock with tail outspread, and the phosphorescent circle on each feather an actual eye. The poem lets us see through every eye. Then it is, as Wallace Stevens has it, that art in which “hundreds of eyes, in one mind, see at once.”

 

II. Sentences

Emerson’s own essays are exemplary of the next suggestion, an extension of his poetic insight: Every sentence of an essay must be an essay. It might be worth going further, and to alter Stevens’s lovely line, to make the essay that art in which “hundreds of minds, in one eye, think at once.” The bond between logos and logic that seems to drive the sentence through its argument to essay’s conclusion may be a more tenuous thread than one cares to admit. Keats knows this, as over and again he examines the fraught relationship between beauty and thought, summed up nowhere more succinctly than at the end of his letter, written in 1817, to his brothers, in which he defines negative capability. There he concludes: “This pursed through Volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.” This obliteration of thought by beauty is something I’ve long pondered, but even more so as my own writing practice has turned to essays of lyric literary reverie and investigation. If Dickinson is right, and I think she is, that “This World is not Conclusion,” then the beautiful sentence might work to frustrate the considered logic of the essay’s larger aims, if not to obliterate them completely. I can imagine the mind as a knot trying to untie itself from within its own complexity, and though it may look from outside as if nothing’s changed, what’s inside has loosened its intricate ravel; I can see the sentences in an essay acting in just the same way.

Sometimes craft isn’t advice or technique, but simply a suggestion—a way of thinking, a method of approach. That is, craft can be revelatory of condition. When it is so, a poem teaches us what it is to think, and an essay teaches us what it is to see. We thought we’d entered into different lessons entirely when we picked up the book we’re reading, but when we put it down—whether it is essay or poem—we find both mind and eye opened. Not that it’s easy, in the end, to tell the two apart. 

 

Dan Beachy-Quick is a poet, essayist, and author most recently of a collection of essays, fragments, and poems titled Of Silence and Song (Milkweed Editions, 2017).

Craft Capsule: The Craft of Humility, the Craft of Love

by

Dan Beachy-Quick

2.13.18

This is the twenty-fifth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I’m teaching a class called Introduction to Poetry; I’ve taught it many times before. On day one, knowing many students are there not wholly willingly (a requirement, for many, for better or worse) I make the same tired joke: “Class, this is Poetry. Poetry, this is the class. I hope you’ll both be friends.” A few laugh.

But I mean it, that joke. I feel my job as a poet is to bring them into poetry in such a way that its difficulty becomes the means of admitting to and encountering their own complex lives, of finding in those nearly unspeakable reaches of mind or heart some companionship they did not hope to have—like a good friend offers. I hope the same for those easier pleasures in life—the sun-bright leaf, the bee in the bud, a rose—that a poem might offer itself to bear within it the sweet moment’s memory that otherwise might drift away into oblivion.

For those hopes to come true, the students need to learn how a poem works; inevitably, much of our delving into any particular poem requires an investigation into craft. I take something Ludwig Wittgenstein says about the nature of philosophy, and alter it toward poetic ends. I suggest that our condition is to find ourselves at sea on a craft that leaks and must be repaired as we float in it—that craft is our craft, the very thing that keeps the poem from sinking, and us along with it. For the honest poem, craft isn’t some willful choice of form, or any set of decisions binding the freedom of the poem to particular tropes; rather, craft is the helpless acceptance of what work is needed to keep the poem intact despite the extremity of its position—hovering there on the white abyss of the blank page, silence all around it, and you, riding in the thing you’re writing.

It is in such light that I want to offer the two most significant introductions to poetry and its craft that happened in my younger, proto-poet life. They are aspects of craft not typically thought of as craft at all, and yet, they opened me to poetry in ways I’ve yet to recover from—which is to say, I’m happy to still be here, fixing a leak while crossing the ocean.

 

I. The Craft of Humility

I thought myself a smart kid in high school, already something of a poet, dumb-drunk on some sense of my own “giftedness,” and out to prove it. I had the remarkable fortune then of having a teacher, Ms. Porter, who loved poetry and, just as important, could teach it. She broke the class into groups, and gave each group one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. My group was given number 173: “That time of year thou mays’t in me behold.” I lorded over the conversation, built some reading I cowed others into accepting, and when we presented to the class, of course, I was the one doing the speaking. I don’t remember—thank goodness—anything I said, or how it was I thought I saw that poem. What I do remember is the look on my teacher’s face—a teacher I loved. It wasn’t just disappointment, but a kind of anger. And I remember what she said, very loud, in front of everyone: That I had gotten the poem so wrong, I might as well have not read it.

I sat down and felt ashamed. That shame, the deep and burning sense of it, was my first true lesson in poetry. I realized that I’m not smarter than the poem I read, far from it; and that if I wanted, as I professed I did, to become a poet myself, then first I had to humble myself enough to know that I didn’t know much. I had to admit to myself my own insufficiency, that I needed a teacher to learn from, and the poem was both instructor and lesson itself.

Only years later did the true beauty of that poem find me: the bare ruined choir of those branches that, as the winter night darkens early with cold, become the fuel for the fire, those embers glowing and “consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.” Then I finally learned my lesson in craft, years after the hour in the classroom closed: that the poem is its own deepest resource, and the image it bears in the first lines, taken with all the literalness the imagination can muster, become the means of admitting to and countering crisis. For example: It is cold and dark and I’m getting old; but there’s a tree, and a fire, and a home. Even so late, the sweet birds sing.

 

II. The Craft of Love

Two years later, I had the same Ms. Porter again.

I had in the intervening years started reading and writing poems in earnest, and had started seeing a young woman, Kristy Beachy, who—. Well, who was everything to me.

We were reading John Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.” Humbled enough now to admit the poem made little sense to me, I was curious to see how Ms. Porter would teach it.

Stanza by stanza she led us through the metaphors, those metaphysical conceits, of lovers parting for untold time. Midway through those nine quatrains, which move from death to storm to the quaking of the planetary spheres, their gentle insistence that absence is no true remove, Donne admits to the kind of humility I’d come to recognize:

But we by a love so much refined
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care less eyes, lips, hands to miss.

Right there, at the very crux of a poem whose gentle fury of intellect seemed to cast it past my grasp, was the admission of not knowing exactly what is this thing one is in—this life, this love. I don’t know, those abashed, holy words, uttered in the very crucible of needing to know, that in their honest urgency, admit no defeat, but instead open the mind to its next vision.

That vision, Ms. Porter showed us, that “gold to airy thinness beat” of two souls that are one, depended upon gold beaten down to the micron of its leaf while remaining absolutely whole. But if these twin souls are two—and here, Ms. Porter pulled out her compass, familiar to us all from Geometry class—and demonstrated those last, astonishing lines:

If they be two, they are two so 
As stiff twin compasses are two; 
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show 
To move, but doth, if the other do. 

And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must, 
Like th’ other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just, 
And makes me end where I begun.

Then she held the paper up on which she’d drawn her perfect circle. I don’t know if I gasped. I might have. For I’d learned my other earliest lesson in craft: that metaphor in poetry isn’t difficult because of its abstraction, but because of its accuracy. And I thought I’d learned something of that sense of accuracy, those feelings so poignant in their utmost singularity that they verge on the unspeakable: There was Kristy Beachy, sitting one row over and two seats ahead of me, and I was Dan Quick, mind-struck behind her, deeply, deeply, in love—with Kristy, of course, and with poetry. Not that it’s so easy to tell such matters of craft apart.

 

Dan Beachy-Quick is a poet, essayist, and author most recently of a collection of essays, fragments, and poems titled Of Silence and Song (Milkweed Editions, 2017).

Craft Capsule: Left Brain, Right Brain

by

Sandra Beasley

4.25.17

This is the tenth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

 

***

I attended a high school geared toward professions in science or technology, so I have an active analytical streak and crave objective rubrics for understanding the wildly creative poems, stories, and essays that I read. I suspect I’m not alone in this.

One of my mentors, Gregory Orr, articulated four “temperaments” of poetry in a 1988 essay titled “Four Temperaments and the Forms of Poetry.” You can envision these facets of craft as quadrants, positioned on an X-Y axis. To the left, limiting impulses: “Story” in the upper quadrant and, below it, “Structure.” To the right, impulses that extend limitlessness: “Music” in the upper and, below it, “Imagination.” Though designed for poetry, I find these temperaments useful for prose as well. As writers, we each typically favor two of the four in our work. Which temperaments bring you to the page? Which come easiest to you? Which do you need to consciously strengthen in your work?

This system gives us a way to articulate differences in aesthetic without ranking them. I’m relieved to set aside presumptive hierarchies. I suspect I’m not alone in this.

 

Sandra Beasley is the author of three poetry collections, including Count the Waves (Norton, 2015), and a memoir. Her website is SandraBeasley.com.

Craft Capsule: The Art of Targeted Revision

by

Sandra Beasley

4.18.17

This is the ninth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each Tuesday for a new Craft Capsule.

***

“Too many hours of revising—to no clear end!” my student complains. He is tired. He feels like the poem never really gets better. There’s always more work to do.

Welcome to revision: the arbitrary realm in which we debate “the” versus “an,” “this” versus “that.” Spend an hour putting a comma in. An hour later, take it out.

Part of the problem is that we complicate the revision process by making our aims abstract. One big revision, we promise ourselves, will make the poem “better.” Don’t privilege “better,” which is a meaningless term. Assign clear and objective tasks. Devote one round of revision exclusively to heightening your imagery, another to reconsidering your verb choices, a third to playing with lineation or tense.

Think of each revision as an experiment. Often these experiments will feel like evolutionary progress, and you’ll keep their results intact. Not always, especially as you near the end of the revision process. When the new version fails to appeal—when you find yourself resisting, reverting, defending an earlier choice—you are locating the poem’s true form. You are identifying what makes this poem yours, and yours alone.

 

Sandra Beasley is the author of three poetry collections, including Count the Waves (Norton, 2015), and a memoir. Her website is SandraBeasley.com.

Craft Capsule: The Scourge of Technology

by

Tayari Jones

1.23.18

This is the twenty-second in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

The cell phone is the worst thing to ever happen to literature. Seriously. So many great fictional plots hinge on one detail: The characters can’t connect. Most famous is Romeo and Juliet. If she just could have texted him, “R, I might look dead, but I’m not. Lolz,” then none of this would have happened.

In my new novel, An American Marriage, both e-mail and cell phones threatened my plot. Here is a basic overview: A young couple, Celestial and Roy, married only eighteen months, are torn apart when the husband is wrongfully incarcerated and given a twelve-year prison sentence. After five years, he is released and wants to resume his old life with her.

A good chunk of the novel is correspondence between our separated lovers. In real life, they probably would have used e-mail. But the problem, plot-wise, is that e-mail is so off-the-cuff, and there is so little time between messages. I needed to use old-fashioned letters. Their messages needed to be deep and thoughtful, and I wanted them to have some time to stew between missives. But who in their right mind (besides me) uses paper and pen when e-mail is so much faster and easier?

The fix was that Roy uses his allocated computer time in prison to write e-mail for the other inmates, for pay. As he says, “It’s a little cottage industry.” He also explains that he likes to write letters to his wife at night when no one is looking over his shoulder or rushing him. 

So look how this fix worked: You see that even though he is incarcerated, his is still a man with a plan. The challenge was to figure out how to avoid e-mail in such a way that it didn’t read like I was just trying to come up with an excuse to write a Victorian-style epistolary novel.

The cell phone was harder to navigate. Spoiler: Celestial has taken up with another man, Andre, in the five years that her husband is incarcerated. A crucial plot point, which I will not spoil, involves Andre not being able get in touch with her. Well, in the present day there is no way to not be able to reach your bae, unless your bae doesn’t want to be reached. Trouble in paradise is not on the menu for the couple at this point, so what to do? I couldn’t very well have him drop his phone in a rest-stop commode!

To get around it, I had to put Andre in a situation in which he would agree not to call Celestial or take her calls—although he really wants to. Trust me. It’s killing him. But he makes an agreement with Roy’s father, who says, “Andre, you have had two years to let Celestial know how you feel.  Give my son one day.” Andre agrees and has to rely on faith that their relationship can survive. The scene is extremely tense and adds suspense to the novel. I had to get up and walk around while I wrote it.

I predict that future novelists will not grapple with this quite as much as we do, as technological advances will be seen as a feature rather than a bug. But for now, you can still write an old-fashioned plot that doesn’t involve texting or tweeting—you just have to figure out a work-around that enhances the plot and understanding of your characters.

Tayari Jones is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine. She is the author of four novels, including An American Marriage, forthcoming in February from Algonquin Books. Her website is www.tayarijones.com.

 

 

 

Craft Capsule: Finding Your Story

by

Tayari Jones

1.16.18

This is the twenty-first in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Like most thoughtful people, I have noticed that the world is on fire and I want to use my skills to help extinguish the flames. To this end, I set out five years ago to write a novel that addresses the injustice of wrongful incarceration. I applied for and received a fellowship to the Radcliffe Institute and I became a dedicated researcher. I learned a lot, so much so that I got angry just watching Law & Order, my ex-favorite television show. I was informed, “woke,” and motivated, but I couldn’t write a novel because I had no story. The problem was that I was trying to write to the issue, and I can only write a story that is issue-adjacent.

I know I have a novel when I have a question to which I don’t know the moral/ethical answer. When it comes to wrongful incarceration, I am not torn. The state should not imprison innocent people. Full stop. Also without ambiguity: The prison system is cruel, corrupt, and in desperate need of reform, if not abolition.

So where was the novel?

The answer revealed itself in a food court where I spied a young couple. She was dressed in a lovely cashmere coat. He wore inexpensive khakis and a polo. They were clearly angry, and clearly in love. I overheard the woman say, “Roy, you know you wouldn’t have waited on me for seven years.” He shot back, “What are you talking about? This shit wouldn’t have happened to you in the first place.”

Just then, I knew I had a novel. The reason is that I understood that they were both probably right. I didn’t know him, but I couldn’t quite picture him waiting chastely by for seven years. At the same time, I couldn’t imagine her behind bars. But did he have a right to demand her loyalty when both seem to agree she would be in no position to demand the same? Was this question moot since she would not likely face this challenge? Was this a kind of privilege? Could she mitigate this privilege by waiting like a modern-day Penelope? Should she?

So we have a couple with a conflict, and at stake between them are issues of reciprocity, duty, and love. Yes, there is the injustice of mass incarceration. And yes, this injustice is fueled by racism and prejudice. Neither of them doubt this, and neither do I. But the question of “will you wait for me” is foremost on his mind.

The result is my new novel, An American Marriage. Roy and Celestial are newlyweds, married only eighteen months, when Roy is arrested for a crime he did not commit. When he is slapped with a twelve-year sentence, the questions of desire and responsibility are at the center of the characters’ lives. As a writer, I was genuinely torn: Roy needs Celestial to be a link to the life he left behind, and Celestial loves her husband, but she has only one life. I wrote this novel not only to satisfy my heart’s curiosity as to what they would do, but to also satisfy the part of my mind that wondered what should they do.

I realized that my passion for the issue of incarceration was the reason that I couldn’t write about it directly. A novel is not me, as a writer, telling the reader what I already know. And an honest novel is not about me pretending to take on “both sides” of an issue about which I have a clear opinion. I had to start with my issue and then walk away from it until I found the thing I didn’t know. To truly challenge the reader, I had to challenge myself as well.

 

Tayari Jones is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine. She is the author of four novels, including An American Marriage, forthcoming in February from Algonquin Books. Her website is www.tayarijones.com.

 

Craft Capsule: Gin and Scotch Tape

by

Sandra Beasley

5.2.17

This is the eleventh in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Years ago a distinguished poet hosted our class’s workshops at her home in Virginia. The house was perched on an incline; down the hill was her writing cabin alongside a pond. We met at her dining room table and tried not to be distracted by the hawks swooping outside the windows.

A student brought in a draft that compared the scent of gin to Scotch tape. Setting aside all other matters of theme or craft, the discussion lingered on this comparison. The simile was bright and original. But was it accurate? That only a few in the room had ever sampled gin, and even then only of an aristrocrat variety, did not aid our analysis.

Reaching her limit, the professor sprang up from the table. “We’re settling this,” she said. She walked into the kitchen and retrieved a roll of Scotch tape. She went to a corner of the dining room, opened a cabinet, and pulled out a bottle. She walked the gin around the table so we could sniff accordingly.

Lesson one? To compare the scents of Scotch tape and gin doesn’t quite work, because the former obscures the latter’s floral qualities.

Lesson two? Always be prepared to have your simile put to the test.

Lesson three? Never let a turn of figurative language, no matter how vivid or clever, hijack what you’re trying to say. I can’t remember who wrote that poem, or where its heart lay. I only remember the gin and Scotch tape. 

 

Sandra Beasley is the author of three poetry collections, including Count the Waves (Norton, 2015), and a memoir. Her website is SandraBeasley.com.

Craft Capsule: Real Time vs. Page Time

by

Wiley Cash

9.26.17

This is the twentieth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Several years ago I worked with a student who was writing a novel about a guy training for a career in the sport of mixed martial arts. The novel was exciting and interesting, and the writing was strong and compelling. Until the fighting began. The minute the bell rang and the fists and feet started flying, the pace of the narrative turned glacial.

This may come as a surprise to you; it certainly surprised me. The talented author was actually a former MMA fighter, so it seemed impossible that he was unable to write an exciting fight scene. Then I realized that fight scenes are rarely exciting on the page. I believe this is true for two reasons. First, a fistfight is a process, and processes rarely make for compelling reading. Second, fistfights are exciting because they unfold in real time, which is wholly different than page time.

I want to talk about process first. Process is part of our daily lives, and many of the processes we undertake are performed through rote memory: brushing our teeth, making coffee, pouring cereal. These processes aren’t very interesting, and they don’t really need to be written about in detail. Readers may need to know that your characters drink coffee, eat cereal, and brush their teeth, but they don’t need to see this happening. Telling them it happened is enough. This is an example of when telling should be privileged over showing. But sometimes you may want to show a process, especially if it proves a level of expertise. Perhaps you’re writing about a character who is skilled with firearms, and you want to show that level of knowledge and skill. Perhaps you should have a scene in which the character goes through the process of breaking down and cleaning a firearm.

Most often, when readers start down the road of reading about process they’re not interested in the process itself; they’re interested in the outcome. The fight scenes in my student’s mixed martial arts novel are a good example. While the scenes were very technical and showed the same level of skill and mastery that I just mentioned, as a reader I quickly became bogged down in the descriptions of the movements, and I lost a sense of the movements themselves. I found myself skipping through the process of the fight in order to discover whether or not our hero won the fight. I realized that as a reader I was more interested in the outcome than I was in the process. The scene hinged on the result of the fight as an event, not on the act of fighting.

Not only were the fight scenes weighed down by process, they were also slowed down by the act of reading. Let’s step out of the ring. Think about the fights or dustups or schoolyard shoving matches you’ve witnessed. How long did they last before someone stepped in or called the parents or the teachers came running? Thirty seconds? A minute? A few minutes, tops? These events almost always unfold very quickly. The movements are fast; words are exchanged at a rapid clip. Your eyes and ears are able to take in the movements and the verbal exchanges simultaneously. Now, imagine trying to portray these events verbatim on the page. Think about how many words would be required to nail down both the movements and the dialogue. It would take much longer to read that scene than it would to witness it.

There’s an old writerly saying that dialogue isn’t speech, but rather an approximation of speech. Sometimes, this is true of action, especially in terms of process. 

 

Wiley Cash is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Last BalladA Land More Kind Than Home, and This Dark Road to Mercy. He currently serves as the writer in residence at the University of North Carolina in Asheville and teaches in the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA program. He lives with his wife and two young daughters in Wilmington, North Carolina. His website is www.wileycash.com.

Craft Capsule: The Art of Active Dialogue

by

Wiley Cash

9.12.17

This is the nineteenth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

When I work with new writers, one thing I often notice is their lack of faith in their dialogue: They don’t trust that it’s strong enough to stand on its own. They feel that they must add something to really get the point across. These writers add action words to their dialogue tags in an attempt to hide any flaws they fear may be hiding in their characters’ verbal interactions. In other words, they do everything they can to make certain that the reader gets the full import of what the characters are attempting, consciously or unconsciously, to communicate.

Often, and unfortunately, these action words take the form of gerunds. Let me follow this with a caveat: Gerunds in dialogue tags are not always a bad thing if they’re used purposefully and sparingly. I use them. Other writers I admire use them. But if I’ve used a gerund in a dialogue tag then I can defend it because I’ve already spent a good deal of time trying to consider whether or not to use it.

The gerunds in dialogue tags that bother me are the ones that are clearly there to underpin weakness in the dialogue. This happens when writers feel they need an action to complement a line of dialogue. Here’s an example:

“What do you mean?” he asked, shrugging his shoulders.

Let’s add an adverb and make that gerund really awful.

“What do you mean?” he asked, shrugging his shoulders nervously.

The writer (in this case, me) felt the need to add that gerund (and perhaps the adjective as well) because the dialogue itself was pretty weak. “What do you mean?” is a boring question. Anyone can ask this, but your character can’t just be anyone. He has to be a particular person with particular turns of phrase and particular movements (what are often called “beats” in dialogue) to flesh out what he means.

Let’s give it another try, and this time let’s write a better line of dialogue that essentially says the same thing as our original, just more clearly.

“What am I supposed to say to that?” He shrugged his shoulders. “What does that even mean?”

I tinkered a little with the original line and split it into two, but I divided the two lines with the beat of action. I feel like my two lines are pretty strong, and they seem particular to this person, whoever he is. Because my dialogue is strong, it doesn’t need the support of action. So my action can stand alone.

The action also does something the dialogue cannot do. It illustrates visually what the dialogue means verbally. The phrase “What am I supposed to say to that?” is a phrase of exasperation, so the action takes this a step further and shows exasperation. The follow-up question of “What does that even mean?” amplifies both the original question and the action.

If I had kept the gerund shrugging it would have combined the dialogue and the action, which crowds the reader’s mind in asking her or him to do two things at once: see and hear. Let’s focus on asking one thing of our reader at a time. The act of reading is not the act of movie watching, which often requires viewers both to see and hear at the same time. Literature and film cannot do the same things in the same ways.

The gerund shrugging is also a weak action word because it does not have a clearly demarcated time of beginning. How long has this guy been shrugging? After all, we enter the word “shrugging,” and presumably the dialogue, as the shrugging is already under way. On the other hand, when we read the line “He shrugged his shoulders” we are entering the action at the moment it begins. It has not been unfold-ing since an indeterminate moment in time. The action feels particular, as if it is caused by the line of dialogue that precedes it. It gives us a chance both to digest the dialogue and imagine the action. It does not ask us to do both at the same time with the confusion of wondering when the shrugging actually began. This is deliberate writing. We should all be deliberate writers.

I want to close with a few lines of dialogue from my upcoming novel, The Last Ballad. In this scene, a man has just come up a riverbank and met a small boy standing at a crossroad. The boy is staring down into a ditch where his injured dog is lying. The man asks the boy where they are.

The boy lifted his eyes from the ditch and looked around as if getting his bearings.

“Gaston,” the boy finally said.

“Gaston,” he repeated. He looked down at the boy. “Do you mean Gaston County?”

The boy shrugged.

“Mama just says ‘Gaston’ when she says ‘here.’”

I worked really hard on this scene. I wanted it to communicate an edge of laconic strangeness. The boy’s poverty has rendered him a bit provincial. The man’s travels have rendered him a bit wistful. I purposefully separated the actions from the lines of dialogue and cordoned them off in their own sentences.

But what if I’d used gerunds?

“Gaston,” the boy finally said, lifting his eyes from the ditch and looking around as if getting his bearings.

“Gaston,” he repeated, looking down at the boy. “Do you mean Gaston County?”

“Mama just says ‘Gaston’ when she says ‘here,’” the boy said, shrugging.

Written this way, the scene unfolds too quickly. The boy gives his answer about their location before getting his bearings. The man’s quizzical repetition of the word “Gaston” is marred by his deliberate action of looking down at the boy. The words and the actions do not go together. They must be separated and addresses and experienced on their own terms.

My advice is this: Trust your dialogue. If you don’t, make it stronger. Then, once your dialogue is strong, bring in action beats that amplify the speaker’s message, not messy gerunds that clutter it.

 

Wiley Cash is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Last BalladA Land More Kind Than Home, and This Dark Road to Mercy. He currently serves as the writer in residence at the University of North Carolina in Asheville and teaches in the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA program. He lives with his wife and two young daughters in Wilmington, North Carolina. His website is www.wileycash.com.

 

Craft Capsule: Rhyme and the Delay in Time

by

Dan Beachy-Quick

2.27.18

This is no. 27 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

It snowed last night. Not much. Just an inch or two. But this morning there’s a strange fog in the air. It isn’t like a spring fog, thick in the vision, obscuring the trees and houses across the small field. It must be frozen crystals in the air, some breath the dormant grass gathered and sighed out, or the wedding dress a cloud took off and let drop down to the ground—a dress that is no more than texture in the air. It faintly glows, like it’s holding light inside of it, like it’s slowing light down. It’s morning when I get to see what it is to see.

I’d also like to hear what it is to hear, to listen in on listening.

Over the course of many years of working on the page as best I could, reading wherever it was bliss took me, writing to catch up to those glimmers other poems taught me to see by, I began to distrust that divide I grew up being schooled in: tradition vs. experiment, conservative or “quiet” poetry vs. the avant-garde. Reading George Herbert, John Donne, and John Keats; reading Emily Dickinson, Sappho, and Gerard Manley Hopkins; reading Homer, Virgil, and the Greek pastoral traditions; reading anonymous poems for graves and for fields—all made me think that tradition might root itself down in the very humus of experiment. And, as humus and human are cognate, I began to suspect that the age-old tropes by which poetry functions—image, metaphor, metonymy, symbol; line, meter, music, rhyme—radically include us in that tradition of experiment that poetry might be described as. Trope, after all, comes from the Greek tropos, and means a turn, direction, a course, a way; but it also means the character of a person, the peculiar temper that makes one who one is; it also means the way the strong wind might move through a pine tree; it also means the way a winter morning’s fog might pause even the speed of light. I mean to suggest a simple thing, though I’ve learned the simple is often bewilderment’s own maze, that the tropes by which a poem moves through itself are not the musty pedantries of literary dictionaries, but are themselves fundamental forms of consciousness, the very means by which a poem comes to know itself, and by extension, the very means by which we come to know ourselves as well. The trope can wake us in the way the eye open wakes us—suddenly, there is light, and the first step of the day is into vision: an image. Or, take rhyme: Rhyme can make of the mind a wind-chime. 

I have no verifiable proof, just a sense from twenty years of teaching, more of reading and writing, that rhyme has become one of those aspects of tradition most easily derided. I can understand how it happened. Teaching now a lower-level poetry-writing workshop, I notice how often the weakest poems are strongest in rhyme, and the first advice, to not let the end sound of the line drive everything the line must do, inevitably makes the poem better. One of the unintended consequences of the workshop model may well be a drift away from the power of traditional tropes. The pressure put upon a single poem to achieve itself most successfully diminishes the larger work of thinking about what the work of poetry is—a work that requires the very failures, poem by poem, that necessitate thinking across the entire span of one’s efforts. The push, or the desire, to be “original,” to have a “voice,” to “make it new,” might deafen us to the latent, collective, anonymous consciousness that resides in something as simple-seeming as rhyme. There is something in rhyme—I think I can hear it, though it’s hard to describe—that speaks to the ongoing crisis of the human condition from the dawn of mind to now. It’s like an echo. But unlike that echo in stairwell or tunnel, in cave or gorge, it doesn’t get quieter as it moves through time. In rhyme, the echo gets louder.

So it is I often rhyme my poems, though it might not be obvious. I’ve come to trust there’s something in the ear’s own intelligence that leaps ahead of the conscious, analytic mind in a poem that rhymes, as if the hidden promise of a chiming sound sets forth in the poem a fate-like assurance that what is to come, though yet unseen, will welcome you. So quietly, but so familiarly, rhyme suggests that to move forward, as one must, into what one doesn’t know, will be okay. If so, rhyme offers itself as some form of existential assurance, is tuned in, and so attunes us, to fears and hopes so entwined with the human condition, we forget we even need to speak of them: that in what feels to be the chaos of the blank future, there is a cosmos, an order, into which we’ll fit. It is not exactly a means of survival, but a trust one will survive.

Rhyme also works within and against time. I can imagine in a poem heavily end-rhymed—say a Petrarchan sonnet with its octave of ABBAABBA, or Dante’s lovely, enveloping terza rima of ABA BCB CDC—that the surety of those sounds counters the awful, inevitable flow of mortal life in one direction. Then the poem that makes its claims about love’s immortality, or memory’s eternity, is no cloying euphemism, but an enacted audacity in the poem’s very fiber. That rhyme works as does mythic time, returning us ever again to a point we’ve never truly left—the day that is all one day, world’s onset, the syllable now, sun’s instant of light—even as, line by line, we recognize too that we do not get to remain in that golden light of origin. We can hear in the poem that mythic life of eternal return, and in hearing it, live within it, even as the poem accompanies us in that other recognition, that line by line we move to what end is ours. Rhyme puts a delay in time. It makes us understand what otherwise would feel an impossible paradox: that we live in time, and time doesn’t exist. And though I’m not exactly a religious man, it gives me one version of how heaven could work. It’s just a poem, just a rhyme, a single-syllable that, scanned, has no stress and rhymes AAAAAAAA…forever.

 

Dan Beachy-Quick is a poet, essayist, and author most recently of a collection of essays, fragments, and poems titled Of Silence and Song (Milkweed Editions, 2017).           

Craft Capsule: The Craft of Humility, the Craft of Love

by

Dan Beachy-Quick

2.13.18

This is the twenty-fifth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I’m teaching a class called Introduction to Poetry; I’ve taught it many times before. On day one, knowing many students are there not wholly willingly (a requirement, for many, for better or worse) I make the same tired joke: “Class, this is Poetry. Poetry, this is the class. I hope you’ll both be friends.” A few laugh.

But I mean it, that joke. I feel my job as a poet is to bring them into poetry in such a way that its difficulty becomes the means of admitting to and encountering their own complex lives, of finding in those nearly unspeakable reaches of mind or heart some companionship they did not hope to have—like a good friend offers. I hope the same for those easier pleasures in life—the sun-bright leaf, the bee in the bud, a rose—that a poem might offer itself to bear within it the sweet moment’s memory that otherwise might drift away into oblivion.

For those hopes to come true, the students need to learn how a poem works; inevitably, much of our delving into any particular poem requires an investigation into craft. I take something Ludwig Wittgenstein says about the nature of philosophy, and alter it toward poetic ends. I suggest that our condition is to find ourselves at sea on a craft that leaks and must be repaired as we float in it—that craft is our craft, the very thing that keeps the poem from sinking, and us along with it. For the honest poem, craft isn’t some willful choice of form, or any set of decisions binding the freedom of the poem to particular tropes; rather, craft is the helpless acceptance of what work is needed to keep the poem intact despite the extremity of its position—hovering there on the white abyss of the blank page, silence all around it, and you, riding in the thing you’re writing.

It is in such light that I want to offer the two most significant introductions to poetry and its craft that happened in my younger, proto-poet life. They are aspects of craft not typically thought of as craft at all, and yet, they opened me to poetry in ways I’ve yet to recover from—which is to say, I’m happy to still be here, fixing a leak while crossing the ocean.

 

I. The Craft of Humility

I thought myself a smart kid in high school, already something of a poet, dumb-drunk on some sense of my own “giftedness,” and out to prove it. I had the remarkable fortune then of having a teacher, Ms. Porter, who loved poetry and, just as important, could teach it. She broke the class into groups, and gave each group one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. My group was given number 173: “That time of year thou mays’t in me behold.” I lorded over the conversation, built some reading I cowed others into accepting, and when we presented to the class, of course, I was the one doing the speaking. I don’t remember—thank goodness—anything I said, or how it was I thought I saw that poem. What I do remember is the look on my teacher’s face—a teacher I loved. It wasn’t just disappointment, but a kind of anger. And I remember what she said, very loud, in front of everyone: That I had gotten the poem so wrong, I might as well have not read it.

I sat down and felt ashamed. That shame, the deep and burning sense of it, was my first true lesson in poetry. I realized that I’m not smarter than the poem I read, far from it; and that if I wanted, as I professed I did, to become a poet myself, then first I had to humble myself enough to know that I didn’t know much. I had to admit to myself my own insufficiency, that I needed a teacher to learn from, and the poem was both instructor and lesson itself.

Only years later did the true beauty of that poem find me: the bare ruined choir of those branches that, as the winter night darkens early with cold, become the fuel for the fire, those embers glowing and “consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.” Then I finally learned my lesson in craft, years after the hour in the classroom closed: that the poem is its own deepest resource, and the image it bears in the first lines, taken with all the literalness the imagination can muster, become the means of admitting to and countering crisis. For example: It is cold and dark and I’m getting old; but there’s a tree, and a fire, and a home. Even so late, the sweet birds sing.

 

II. The Craft of Love

Two years later, I had the same Ms. Porter again.

I had in the intervening years started reading and writing poems in earnest, and had started seeing a young woman, Kristy Beachy, who—. Well, who was everything to me.

We were reading John Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.” Humbled enough now to admit the poem made little sense to me, I was curious to see how Ms. Porter would teach it.

Stanza by stanza she led us through the metaphors, those metaphysical conceits, of lovers parting for untold time. Midway through those nine quatrains, which move from death to storm to the quaking of the planetary spheres, their gentle insistence that absence is no true remove, Donne admits to the kind of humility I’d come to recognize:

But we by a love so much refined
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care less eyes, lips, hands to miss.

Right there, at the very crux of a poem whose gentle fury of intellect seemed to cast it past my grasp, was the admission of not knowing exactly what is this thing one is in—this life, this love. I don’t know, those abashed, holy words, uttered in the very crucible of needing to know, that in their honest urgency, admit no defeat, but instead open the mind to its next vision.

That vision, Ms. Porter showed us, that “gold to airy thinness beat” of two souls that are one, depended upon gold beaten down to the micron of its leaf while remaining absolutely whole. But if these twin souls are two—and here, Ms. Porter pulled out her compass, familiar to us all from Geometry class—and demonstrated those last, astonishing lines:

If they be two, they are two so 
As stiff twin compasses are two; 
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show 
To move, but doth, if the other do. 

And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must, 
Like th’ other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just, 
And makes me end where I begun.

Then she held the paper up on which she’d drawn her perfect circle. I don’t know if I gasped. I might have. For I’d learned my other earliest lesson in craft: that metaphor in poetry isn’t difficult because of its abstraction, but because of its accuracy. And I thought I’d learned something of that sense of accuracy, those feelings so poignant in their utmost singularity that they verge on the unspeakable: There was Kristy Beachy, sitting one row over and two seats ahead of me, and I was Dan Quick, mind-struck behind her, deeply, deeply, in love—with Kristy, of course, and with poetry. Not that it’s so easy to tell such matters of craft apart.

 

Dan Beachy-Quick is a poet, essayist, and author most recently of a collection of essays, fragments, and poems titled Of Silence and Song (Milkweed Editions, 2017).

Craft Capsule: Every Novel Is a Journey

by

Tayari Jones

2.6.18

This is the twenty-fourth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Last week I wrote about how I came to make Roy the protagonist of my new novel, An American Marriage. The decision was frustrating because I came to this tale seeking to amplify the muffled voices of women who live on the margins of the crisis of mass incarceration. So imagine how hard it was for me to make the Roy’s story the main color of the take and relegate Celestial’s point of view to a mere accent wall. It nearly killed me. I was prepared to pull the novel from publication.

Luckily, I had a craft epiphany.

Roy is a great character. He’s like Odysseus, a brave and charismatic man returned home from a might battle. He just wants to get home and be taken care of by a loving wife and sheltered in a gracious house. His voice was very easy to write because he is easy to like; his desires and decisions make it easy to empathize with him. He is a wrongfully incarcerated black man. What decent person wouldn’t root for him?

Celestial was bit more challenging. She’s ambitious. She’s kind of stubborn. And most important, she isn’t really cut out to be a dutiful wife. Back when she was the protagonist of the novel, I used to say, “I am writing a novel about a woman whose husband is wrongfully incarcerated…” and everyone would expect the novel to be about her fight to free him. And it wasn’t. It was about her decision not to wait.

On the level of craft, it just didn’t work. For one thing, you can’t write a compelling novel about what someone doesn’t do. (There is a reason why Bartelby doesn’t get to narrate his own story.) Second, as I wrote last week, Roy’s crisis is just too intense and distracting for the reader to care about any other character as much.

So, what to do?

I foregrounded Roy. He is the protagonist and readers find him to be very “relatable” (my very least favorite word in the world). I took Roy on the journey, and I invite readers to accompany him. As the writer, I came to the table understanding that the expectations put on women to be “ride or die” are completely unreasonable; furthermore, there is no expectation of reciprocity.  But rather than use Celestial’s voice to amplify my position, I allowed Roy the hard work of interrogating his world view, and the reader, by proxy, must do the same.

The result is a novel that was a lot harder to write, but the questions I posed to myself and my readers were richer, more complex, and I hope, more satisfying.

 

Tayari Jones is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine. She is the author of four novels, including An American Marriage, forthcoming in February from Algonquin Books. Her website is www.tayarijones.com.

Craft Capsule: Finding the Center

by

Tayari Jones

1.30.18

This is the twenty-third in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

My new novel, An American Marriage, involves a husband and wife with an unusual challenge: Eighteen months after exchanging their vows, he is arrested and incarcerated for a crime he does not commit.

I was equally interested in both their stories, but for some reason early readers of the manuscript were way more interested in him (Roy) than her (Celestial.) At first, I was convinced that this was sexism, plain and simple. Men’s stories are considered more compelling. To try and make Celestial more appealing, I tried to give her a more vibrant personality. But regardless of the details I added to embroider her, beta readers still felt that she was “undeveloped” and that Roy was the character who popped. It almost drove me crazy. Finally, I realized that Roy held the readers’ attention because his problem was so huge. (He’s wrongfully incarcerated, for goodness sake!)

Undaunted (well, maybe a little daunted), I read stories by my favorite women writers who write beautifully about women’s inner lives. I checked out Amy Bloom, Antonia Nelson, Jennifer Egan. How did they manage to make emotional turmoil so visceral? In these writers’ hands, a small social slight can feel like a dagger. Why couldn’t I do this in my own novel?

I found the answer in the work of Toni Morrison, for all answers can be found there. It’s a matter of scale. There is a scene in The Bluest Eye where the lady of the house is distraught because her brother hasn’t invited her to his party, although she sent him to dental school. By itself, this is terrible and totally worthy of a story. However, in the same frame is Pauline, the maid who has suffered all manner of indignities in an earlier chapter. In the face of Pauline’s troubles, the matter of the party seems frivolous.

With this, I discovered a fundamental truth of fiction and perhaps of life: The character with the most pressing material crisis will always be the center of the story. Although Celestial’s challenges as a woman trying to establish herself in the world of art is intense, the fact of Roy’s wrongful incarceration makes her troubles seem like high-class problems and to center them in the novel feels distasteful to the reader, like wearing a yellow dress to a funeral and fretting over a scuffed shoe.

The solution: I made Roy the protagonist. Celestial’s voice is still there, but she is a secondary narrator. It was a hard choice because I was drawn to her story in the first place, but it was being drowned out by Roy’s narrative. Finally, I had to stop fighting it. The protagonist of An American Marriage is Roy Othaniel Hamilton.

It took me five years to figure this out. Of course, every craft solution makes for new craft obstacles. I’ll talk about the fall-out from this shift in my next (and final) Craft Capsule, next Tuesday.

Tayari Jones is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine. She is the author of four novels, including An American Marriage, forthcoming in February from Algonquin Books. Her website is www.tayarijones.com.

Craft Capsule: Who Are You?

by

Crystal Hana Kim

7.4.18

This is no. 33 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

“When did you start writing?” Writers are often asked this question, and I’m always curious about the story behind the answers, the paths we take to find our vocations. As a child of immigrants, Korean was my first language. When I began elementary school, I found myself mentally switching between my mother tongue and English, trying to match vocabulary words across language lines. I soon found myself gravitating toward writing; with a pencil in my hand, I could take my time and express myself more clearly. In the first grade, I wrote about butterflies hatching for my beloved teacher, Ms. Benz. The next year, I wrote about a girl with short black hair who wanted to get her ears pierced, but whose Korean parents refused. I presented the story to my mother and father, hopeful and full of glee at my cunning. (Reader, they fell for it and let me pierce my ears.) “I’ve written ever since I was a child,” I say in answer to that question. But when did I find the stories I wanted to tell? That was a more recent discovery.  

As a sophomore in college, I took my first formal writing workshop. Somehow, over the course of my teenage years, my writing had changed. I no longer wrote stories that were rooted in my desires and questions about the world. Instead, I created characters without clear identities—their race, appearance, and backgrounds were murky, undefined. These young adults frolicked and fought on misty hills, drunk with mulberry-stained lips. I was trying to shy away from what I thought was expected of me. I didn’t want to be pigeon-holed as the Korean American workshopper who could only write about “Asian” issues. But I sensed that something was wrong with my characters: They were vague, flat, lifeless.Who is this girl?” a classmate asked. “Don’t be afraid to write about what you know,” my teacher said. 

At first I resisted these suggestions, digging deeper into my no-name characters without a clear sense of home. That is, until the summer break between my sophomore and junior year. One June evening I had dinner with my parents. Over a meal of galbi-tang, rice, wine, and ice cream, my parents recounted their childhoods. My father described catching grasshoppers from his neighbors’ field, of cooking them on a skillet over an open flame. My mother told me of staining her fingers orange with bong seon hwa flowers, which I loved to do during my summer visits to Korea as well.  

The next morning, I found myself still mulling over my parents’ stories. I imagined my father as a child, his lithe body running through high grass in search of those plump green insects. I loved that the act of staining fingers with flower petals, which my sister and I did every summer in Korea, was not only a family tradition, but a Korean one. These stories stayed with me all summer and through the fall, when my undergraduate classes resumed. This time in my fiction workshop, I wrote with greater purpose and clarity. I developed characters with a culture and history behind them. Better, I thought.

The more I wrote, the more I sought my family. When I began my graduate studies, I turned to my maternal grandmother. A fierce matriarch and gifted storyteller, my grandmother shared her life with me—she lived under Japanese occupation, survived the Korean War, and forged a life for her daughters in the years afterward. I absorbed these anecdotes, sometimes taking notes and sometimes just listening. 

When I began If You Leave Me, my debut novel, I knew I wanted to write about the Korean War. More important, I knew I wanted the main character to be a Korean woman who was strong, willful, intelligent, stubborn, and full of contradictions. I wanted a female protagonist that readers would love one moment and argue with the next, someone who felt as complex as our best friends and lovers do. I created Haemi Lee, a teenaged refugee living in Busan during the war. I rooted her story in my grandmother’s experiences, but I added my own desires and questions and fears until Haemi became a character of her own. 

It took me a few wayward years, but I eventually realized that writing about my culture does not confine me as a writer. Instead, my history provides a pool of memory for me to draw inspiration from. Now, when I teach creative writing, I emphasize this process for my students. I encourage them to value every part of their identities.

“Who are you?” I ask. “Tell me what you know.”

 

Crystal Hana Kim’s debut novel, If You Leave Me, is forthcoming from William Morrow in August. She was a 2017 PEN America Dau Short Story Prize winner and has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Hedgebrook, Jentel, among others. Her work has been published in or is forthcoming from The Washington Post, Elle Magazine, Nylon, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is a contributing editor at Apogee Journal and is the Director of Writing Instruction at Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband.

Craft Capsule: A Bird in the Sky

by

Simon Van Booy

6.6.18

This is no. 29 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Having a writing practice is like rowing out to sea in a small boat with a typewriter and sandwiches, hoping for the arrival of some strange bird in the sky. 

After a few hours you tell yourself, “It’s only been a few hours.”  

But when days pass with not even a feather, you wonder, “Am I in the right place? I should have brought binoculars.” You keep looking though—searching the empty sky for some sign, some intervention, a tangible indication that you’re good enough to write, educated enough, wild enough, rich enough, poor enough, sober enough, drunk enough, mystical enough, existential enough.  

Months pass. You’ve been rowing out to the same deep water for weeks and weeks. You’ve lost track of days. Seasons have changed. Where your hands once bled on the oars, there are calluses. You’ve survived heaving seas, blistering heat, and torrential downpours. 

At this point most people toss their typewriters over the side of the boat, and row for the safety of land. Without the bird, they say, nothing is possible.

But you remain in the boat, listening to yourself breathe, a film of salt on your skin. You sit down and pick up the typewriter, rest it on your sore legs, and start to imagine the story you once dreamed of writing. You don’t care about the bird anymore, the words are enough, the sentences are ropes you can use to pull yourself through the narrative.

Then suddenly you look up, there’s a dazzling light, like some mystical, winged creature with blazing eyes.  

As writers, we don’t wait for inspiration. Inspiration waits for us.

Don’t ever forget that.

 

Simon Van Booy is the author of nine books and the editor of three anthologies of philosophy. His latest work for adults, The Sadness of Beautiful Things, will be released in October from Penguin, and followed up in November by his latest work for children, Gertie Milk & the Great Keeper Rescue, from Penguin Razorbill.

Craft Capsule: Finding Your Story

by

Tayari Jones

1.16.18

This is the twenty-first in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

***

Like most thoughtful people, I have noticed that the world is on fire and I want to use my skills to help extinguish the flames. To this end, I set out five years ago to write a novel that addresses the injustice of wrongful incarceration. I applied for and received a fellowship to the Radcliffe Institute and I became a dedicated researcher. I learned a lot, so much so that I got angry just watching Law & Order, my ex-favorite television show. I was informed, “woke,” and motivated, but I couldn’t write a novel because I had no story. The problem was that I was trying to write to the issue, and I can only write a story that is issue-adjacent.

I know I have a novel when I have a question to which I don’t know the moral/ethical answer. When it comes to wrongful incarceration, I am not torn. The state should not imprison innocent people. Full stop. Also without ambiguity: The prison system is cruel, corrupt, and in desperate need of reform, if not abolition.

So where was the novel?

The answer revealed itself in a food court where I spied a young couple. She was dressed in a lovely cashmere coat. He wore inexpensive khakis and a polo. They were clearly angry, and clearly in love. I overheard the woman say, “Roy, you know you wouldn’t have waited on me for seven years.” He shot back, “What are you talking about? This shit wouldn’t have happened to you in the first place.”

Just then, I knew I had a novel. The reason is that I understood that they were both probably right. I didn’t know him, but I couldn’t quite picture him waiting chastely by for seven years. At the same time, I couldn’t imagine her behind bars. But did he have a right to demand her loyalty when both seem to agree she would be in no position to demand the same? Was this question moot since she would not likely face this challenge? Was this a kind of privilege? Could she mitigate this privilege by waiting like a modern-day Penelope? Should she?

So we have a couple with a conflict, and at stake between them are issues of reciprocity, duty, and love. Yes, there is the injustice of mass incarceration. And yes, this injustice is fueled by racism and prejudice. Neither of them doubt this, and neither do I. But the question of “will you wait for me” is foremost on his mind.

The result is my new novel, An American Marriage. Roy and Celestial are newlyweds, married only eighteen months, when Roy is arrested for a crime he did not commit. When he is slapped with a twelve-year sentence, the questions of desire and responsibility are at the center of the characters’ lives. As a writer, I was genuinely torn: Roy needs Celestial to be a link to the life he left behind, and Celestial loves her husband, but she has only one life. I wrote this novel not only to satisfy my heart’s curiosity as to what they would do, but to also satisfy the part of my mind that wondered what should they do.

I realized that my passion for the issue of incarceration was the reason that I couldn’t write about it directly. A novel is not me, as a writer, telling the reader what I already know. And an honest novel is not about me pretending to take on “both sides” of an issue about which I have a clear opinion. I had to start with my issue and then walk away from it until I found the thing I didn’t know. To truly challenge the reader, I had to challenge myself as well.

 

Tayari Jones is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine. She is the author of four novels, including An American Marriage, forthcoming in February from Algonquin Books. Her website is www.tayarijones.com.

 

Craft Capsule: Writing “After”

by

Cameron Awkward-Rich

12.16.19

This is no. 43 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

The day after the 2015 AME Church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, another poet—seemingly out of nowhere—sent me a poem by Mary Oliver. They said it was because, when they read it out loud, the voice they made (or tried to make) was mine. Instantly I loved the poem, “October,” and I told them so. Still, because “October” made its way to me the day after terrible news, it also unsettled me. It moved me, but at the same time I felt the need to move against it. 

As in many Mary Oliver poems, the speaker attends to the natural world and her place in it. She asks, “What does the world / mean to you if you can’t trust it / to go on shining when you’re // not there?” By the end of the poem, it’s clear that the speaker has decided, at least for now, that in order to truly love the world, she has to be reconciled to the fact, the beautiful fact, that it will (that it ought to) go on without her. That the world will not at all be diminished by her not being there to witness it. The poem ends: “so this is the world. / I’m not in it. / It is beautiful.” 

The speaker of the poem wrestles with her own attachments to herself. She is trying to let go of her importance, to get out of the way. But by addressing a “you”—presumably a reader—in the poem, she makes an argument that extends beyond herself; she stakes out an ethical position. Most days it’s one I would agree with. Most days I would have left the poem unbothered. But on that day after the shooting, feeling acutely all of the ways in which the people I call mine are told they do not have a claim on the world in the first place—are dispossessed, are rubbed out—Oliver’s call for self-diminishment felt plainly, profoundly wrong. I wanted to see what would happen, therefore, if I used the structure of Oliver’s poem but turned the argument against itself. This experiment resulted in “Bad News, Again,” a poem that rewrites “October” but asks the first, urgent question embedded in Oliver’s longer one: “What does the world mean / if you can’t trust it to go on?” 

A handful of the poems in my new collection, Dispatch, perform similar experiments, insofar as they try to redirect contemporary poems I love to different ends. As a result I feel very anxious about the new iterations of old conversations about plagiarism, theft, and ‘after’ poems that have surfaced online in the past few years. Anxious, in part, because I did not have a developed sense of the ethics of such a practice when I first took it up. I still don’t. However, these conversations often seem to miss that there are multiple reasons one might “steal” or “borrow” or “deface” another’s work. There seems to be an assumption that the only potentially defensible motive for imitating another’s work is a sense of uncomplicated admiration. But when is admiration ever uncomplicated? What if, for example, you suspect the work you admire does not respect you, or cannot conceive of you? What if your admiration is not only enabling but also deeply injurious? What if, in this case, theft and/or defacement might be an ethical response? 

In an oft-cited passage from The Sacred Wood, T. S. Eliot insists: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” In my defense, I do not think that I have written a better poem than Mary Oliver, not by any measure, but the point was to make her work consider me. It seems to me that is what love demands.  

 

Cameron Awkward-Rich is the author of two poetry collections, Dispatch (Persea Books, 2019) and Sympathetic Little Monster (Ricochet Editions, 2016), which was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. He is a Cave Canem fellow and a poetry editor for Muzzle Magazine. He earned his PhD from Stanford University’s program in Modern Thought & Literature, and he is an assistant professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Craft Capsule: Ordering the Story Collection

by

Kimberly King Parsons

7.22.19

This is no. 38 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I always read short story collections in order. Maybe this is because my earliest infatuations happened via mix tape (and by mix tape, I mean a CD that I burned or that someone burned for me, with songs meant to convey something deep and unspeakable). Unlike with a cassette, one could, in theory, set the CD player to random, but this would break an unspoken rule. The point was to put on your headphones, lie on your bed, and think about the person who made the mix for you. You’d hold the handwritten track list and listen to the songs in their intended order, so you could figure out what this person was trying to say. You paid close attention to the lyrics, the tone, the transitions. A successful mix tape meant never forgetting about the “author.” How exactly did they feel about you? Did you feel the same way? Maybe you hadn’t before, but now, alone in your room with all those perfectly chosen songs, maybe you were charmed. 

Assembling a short story collection is a daunting process: Often the individual pieces have been written as unique, standalone works, edited by staff with varying aesthetics at different literary journals, and published over a span of years. The earliest version of my collection, Black Light, wasn’t really a collection—it was just a bunch of stories I wrote and published between 2005 and 2017. It took my terrific agent to help me see that one of the stories was actually the beginning of a novel, that two others needed to be combined into a longer piece, and that one story had a voice too abstract and confrontational to fit in with the rest. Once these decisions were made, the stories that we kept had a kind of reverberation with each other. A musicality.

In an informal poll, my friends who read collections tell me they don’t read in order. They start with the shortest story, or the title story, or they read in reverse order or at random. This is all fine—unless the stories are linked, order shouldn’t make or break a collection—but when I was putting Black Light together, sequence became very important to me. I love the way my favorite collections bend time, pull me in and out of different worlds, immerse me in a situation for thirty pages and then toss me out. 

I had three very long stories and three very short ones and half a dozen in between. I liked the idea of giving moments of reprieve, little spaces to breathe, so flash pieces often came after the longest ones. Everybody knows how important the first track of a mix tape is, and I wanted to start my collection with my most affable narrator. In the story “Guts,” Sheila is bewildered by new circumstance: She’s recently fallen for a medical student, and suddenly she sees sickness and beauty everywhere she looks. This newfound empathy overwhelms her, and in that way she’s a great proxy for a reader entering the strange world of the collection. All my stories deal with similar themes—game playing, escapism, desire—but I had strong ideas about how to move through the different voices of the remaining narrators (urban and rural, child and adult, male and female, queer and straight) in a way that felt balanced and varied to me.

On the first call with my editor, before we’d even made a deal, she talked about her vision for the collection. She liked the order, the way the stories “sang” to one another. She compared her favorite collections to music: She wanted this book to feel cohesive and unified, but never repetitive. Like a perfect mix tape, she said, a book of short stories should make the reader fall in love. I knew then that I’d found the right person for my project.

 

Kimberly King Parsons is the author of Black Light, a short story collection forthcoming from Vintage on August 13, 2019. She is a recipient of fellowships from Columbia University and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and her fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Best Small Fictions, No Tokens, the Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Her website is www.kimberlykingparsons.com.

Craft Capsule: Elegy

by

Cameron Awkward-Rich

12.23.19

This is no. 44 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Elegies speak to both [the living and the dead], forced to negotiate the impossible ethical demands of a genre that strives neither to disrespect the memory of the dead nor to ignore the needs of the living.

Diana Fuss

Each November, for nearly a decade, I have written a poem marking Trans Day of Remembrance (TDoR), an annual day of mourning for trans people lost to anti-trans violence. These poems are almost uniformly bad, but the most recent one, “Anti-Elegy,” made its way into Dispatch. I hope it will be the last of them. 

I find this occasional writing practice a confusing one—shameful, consoling, deadening, and, somehow, like feeding a tiny fire. From the beginning, I have known all of the critiques of TDoR: It has historically enabled white activists to extract political capital from the deaths of primarily Black trans women; the frame of “anti-trans” violence obscures more than it explains about the curtailing of trans feminine life; TDoR circulates “the trans woman of color” as a dead figure and therefore strips her of her life, her worlds. Still, it also is true that I came to understand trans as something it was possible for me to be when my high school’s tiny gay-straight alliance erected cardboard tombstones in the hallway to mark those trans women who had been lost. Trans became an intimate possibility in reference to strangers’ deaths. For this reason, trans has always felt, to me, entangled with elegy. 

The classic elegy—at least as I understand it—has a three-part structure: lament, praise, consolation. First you express deep sorrow over someone’s passing; then you praise their life, usually in idealized terms; then you provide some consolation for the living. Poets and scholars have long debated the ethics of elegy—whether an elegy can ever provide the consolation it promises, whether and under what circumstances we ought to make use of the dead, whether mourning enables or precludes political action. The answer to each of these questions is, of course, it depends. Still, there were two sentences from Diana Fuss’s Dying Modern: A Meditation on Modern Elegy on my mind the November I wrote “Anti-Elegy,” sentences that prompted me to return to my own questions about for whom and to what ends the elegy works. In the first, Fuss argues that the effect of elegy is “not merely to recognize the dead but also to bring them back to life.” In the second, she affirms R. Clifton Spargo’s claim that “ethics and elegy…both typically view every death as an injustice.” 

TDoR, too, is structured by these general claims: that it is important to keep the memory of individuals alive—to keep them with us—and that each entry on the list of the dead is an injustice. Undoubtedly each death on the list is the outcome of an injustice, but I’ve become increasingly suspicious of the idea that death itself is unjust. Often what is unjust is everything that preceded the end. What is unjust is the terms of living. There is something deeply unsettling, that is, to the insistence that someone ought to be alive in a world that did little to support that life. There is something deeply unsettling, therefore, about Fuss’s characterization of the elegy as a genre that strives to reanimate the dead, to bring them back. 

I find “Anti-Elegy,” as the product of these reflections, to be unsettling; its questioning of the elegy inevitably involves questioning the terms by which I came to understand myself as trans, by which I came to understand myself. Perhaps for this reason “Anti-Elegy” is formally an unsettled poem; it asks question after question and does not ever arrive at answers: “Who am I to say rise?…who am I to say, dance // with me here a little longer?” Driving this accumulation of questions is another question just beneath the surface—the poem is really asking, over and over, Should this poem exist? Should this poem exist? It depends. But this is, for all of us, an important question to ask of our work before we put it into the world. 

If we’re lucky, one poem leads us to the next. In this case, “Anti-Elegy” led me to write “All My Friends Are Sad & Bright,” a poem that is technically an elegy, but which leaves the dead in peace. Certainly this isn’t an answer to the “impossible ethical demands” of elegy, but there is something to be said for a poetics of trans/Black/queer life that takes death as its impetus, but not its object, that mourns but also (and because of this) hopes. 

 

Cameron Awkward-Rich is the author of two poetry collections, Dispatch (Persea Books, 2019) and Sympathetic Little Monster (Ricochet Editions, 2016), which was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. He is a Cave Canem fellow and a poetry editor for Muzzle Magazine. He earned his PhD from Stanford University’s program in Modern Thought & Literature, and he is an assistant professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Craft Capsule: In Praise of Writing in Longhand

by

Kimberly King Parsons

7.29.19

This is no. 39 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

This sounds made up, but in my high school you could substitute a typing class for gym. As a bookish, lazy teenager, this was perfect for me. The class was called Fundamentals of Keyboarding, and we spent all semester doing home-key practices and speed drills. Near the end of each session the teacher would hand us some random page of text—it might be instructions for building a birdhouse or a page of a novel—and it was our job to type it, print it, and staple it to the original. I wasn’t great at a lot of things in high school, but I turned out to be a terrifically fast typist who rarely made mistakes; I loved holding the papers up to the light, seeing my words perfectly overlap with those on the handout. 

As an exercise in my first fiction workshop, the professor asked us to type a short story by our favorite writer. The idea was to feel the words come through our fingers, to pound out the rhythm of those admirable sentences ourselves. I still find typing immensely satisfying—it’s relaxing, almost a form of meditation. I like the mechanics of it, the way each letter translates to a physical movement, to a clicking sound, to a shape on the screen. I also have terrible handwriting. It’s barely legible and embarrassing, like someone has dared me to use my non-dominant hand. 

When I’m writing fiction, I’m typing on my laptop into a document, using the features meant to make things easy: cut, copy and paste, backspace. It’s convenient, it’s fast, and it’s the preferred method for most of the writers I know. I do a lot of pre-work in my head, by sound, so by the time I sit down to write, I have at least a few sentences ready. In the completely new sections, I’ll get into a flow, typing as fast as I can think, then doubling back and reading each sentence aloud. I’m constantly making changes as I go: correcting errors, substituting or cutting words, shifting whole sections around on the page.

But every once in a while I’ll get stuck, hung up on some fundamental, propulsive element of the story, like I’ve reached the end of the thread. Maybe I’m insecure about what comes next, paralyzed by doubt. Or maybe there’s a problem with a sentence I can’t work out on the screen, something tangled about the rhythm or syntax. As much as I hate it, the best thing I can do in this situation is pull the problem out of the computer and write it down.

All the usual disadvantages of writing in longhand become advantages: It’s slow, it requires more mechanical effort, the words must come in order with no easy erasures. I also have rules for myself: no crossing things out or moving/inserting words. If what I’ve written is wrong, I have to skip a line and write it again. If I realize halfway through a paragraph that a sentence belongs at some earlier point, I start the whole section over. When I’m writing things down, I press too hard and my hand cramps, so I have to take frequent breaks. This slow-building repetition lets me see the work differently. Writing in longhand is also uniquely tactile—there’s the feeling of the pen in my grip, my hand drifting across the page. I’m forcing my brain and body to connect with the story in a new way. 

Once I solve the problem, I’m eager to open the document on my computer. I’ll type in the revised section and move on, fast at the keyboard, back to the easy rhythm and familiar feel, until, inevitably, I come to the next snag. 

 

Kimberly King Parsons is the author of Black Light, a short story collection forthcoming from Vintage on August 13, 2019. She is a recipient of fellowships from Columbia University and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and her fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Best Small Fictions, No Tokens, the Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Her website is www.kimberlykingparsons.com.

Craft Capsule: Multiple Narrators

by

Crystal Hana Kim

7.18.18

This is no. 35 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Before I became a writer, I was first an insatiable reader. From Curious George to Little Women to The Lover, I can mark the trajectory of my development as a writer against my reading choices. A particularly memorable turning point happened when I was eight years old. While at the library, I came across a chapter book called Morning Girl. The cover showed a young girl with dark brown hair and bare shoulders swimming in the open sea, and I picked it up because of the striking image. As I began reading, I fell for Morning Girl’s lush, bright voice as she described her fondness for waking early and searching the beach for seashells. I felt keenly for Morning Girl when her parents favored her younger brother. I had a younger sister, and I understood the mean yellow streaks of jealousy. 

The shock came when I turned to the next chapter. At the top of the page was the name Star Boy. This chapter, I realized as I read, was narrated not by the titular girl, but her younger brother. I remember the confusion I felt and how quickly it was replaced with giddy wonder. Up until that moment, I hadn’t known that a book could have multiple narrators. Morning Girl tore writing open for me: For the first time I recognized that writers were in control of how the story was told and that the possibilities were endless.

I’ve gravitated toward novels with multiple narrators ever since, so when I started writing If You Leave Me, I knew I wanted to try this format. However, I needed to make sure having multiple perspectives would serve my goals. My central character was Haemi Lee, a sixteen-year-old refugee in Busan at the start of my novel. Did I really need the voices of her best friend Kyunghwan, her suitor Jisoo, her younger brother Hyunki, and eventually, her eldest daughter Solee? Thankfully, yes. After some examination, I realized that having multiple narrators allowed me to show the secrets characters were hiding not only from each other, but also from themselves. By alternating these voices, I was able to investigate how one event could be interpreted in various ways, depending on the character’s temperament and circumstance. For example, Haemi, Kyunghwan, and Jisoo all hungered in Busan during the Korean War, and yet their resulting traumas are each unique due to differences in class, gender, and family expectations. 

If You Leave Me spans sixteen years, from 1951 to 1967. Multiple perspectives also gave me the best means of capturing the landscape of Korea during this tumultuous time. Through my five alternating narrators, I was able to write about an ROK soldier in the Korean War; a college student in Seoul in the years afterward, when dictators ruled the nation; a factory worker forced to meet with a matchmaker; a mother yearning to escape her rural community; and a young daughter growing up in post-war Korea, when the vestiges of violence took on new forms.   

When my students say they want to write a novel with multiple perspectives, I’m secretly elated. However, I always remind them of the potential pitfalls. More voices may make your story feel fragmented, which can lead to readers preferring one character over another. In order to avoid this, it’s important to value each perspective equally. If you as the writer dislike one of your characters, the reader will feel that animosity in your words. The solution? Know your characters deeply on and off the page—know their desires, tics, fears, sexual preferences, favorite foods, secret dreams, worst habits. Develop them until you know them as intimately as a friend, in all of their complexities. In the end, I hope having multiple narrators in If You Leave Me enriches the reading experience. Haemi Lee’s voice is the center, but the four characters around her provide a lens not only into the larger history of Korea, but into Haemi’s complex, difficult temperament.

In my final Craft Capsule next week, I will talk more about Haemi and the necessity of “unlikable” female protagonists. 

 

Crystal Hana Kim’s debut novel, If You Leave Me, is forthcoming from William Morrow in August. She was a 2017 PEN America Dau Short Story Prize winner and has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Hedgebrook, Jentel, among others. Her work has been published in or is forthcoming from the Washington Post, Elle Magazine, Nylon, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is a contributing editor at Apogee Journal and is the Director of Writing Instruction at Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband.

Craft Capsule: A Form of Salvation

by

Simon Van Booy

6.20.18

This is no. 31 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

When you start thinking creatively, it’s like releasing a live animal—a new species of mischief that cannot be contained to just one area of your life. Creativity is not like a machine that can be switched on and off. And therefore it does not end when you stand up from your desk after a few solid hours of work.

Ever wondered why you feel the urge to roller skate through a shopping mall listening to Abba? Leave strange notes on the doorsteps of strangers? Eat apples standing up in the bath, naked, with the window open?

Now you know. Creativity is a form of salvation.  

If we could limit creativity to just one area of our lives—how would we ever manage to convince ourselves to climb back in the rocket, and blast off again and again and again, to those distant galaxies of unwritten narrative? 

And stop worrying about getting published. You write because you’re obsessed with telling a story in a way that no one else can. Focus on that. Only that. Everything else will take care of itself.  And, please, for my sake—don’t ever think buying a plastic skeleton from a medical supply store then holding it up to the window when people walk past is a waste of time.  

Being a writer means opening your whole life to creativity. It is a commitment to overpowering fear with imagination and compassion for yourself, as well as others. As a person who writes you’ll be a better mother, son, best friend, aunt, cousin, coach, or bank teller. Because learning to write is learning to see, and striving to see beyond is perhaps the only hope for our species.

 

Simon Van Booy is the author of nine books and the editor of three anthologies of philosophy. His latest work for adults, The Sadness of Beautiful Things, will be released in October from Penguin, and followed up in November by his latest work for children, Gertie Milk & the Great Keeper Rescue, from Penguin Razorbill.

Craft Capsule: Revising the Archive

by

Cameron Awkward-Rich

12.9.19

This is no. 42 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Several of the poems in my second collection, Dispatch, which comes out this week from Persea Books, are what I think of as the detritus of my academic book-in-progress about maladjustment in transmasculine literature and theory. In conducting research for this project, I have spent countless hours digging around in digitized newspaper archives, trying to get a feel for what it was like to live a gender-nonconforming life at other times in U.S. history. During the course of this work, I have repeatedly encountered traces of Black/gender-nonconforming lives that flicker in and out of the official record. Every so often I become obsessed with these traces. Mostly what surfaces is news of arrests—arrests for “cross-dressing,” discoveries of “cross-dressing” after arrest. Mostly what surfaces are dead-ends. 

One of the traces I came across: Lawrence Jackson, a Black person who was arrested in 1881 in Chicago wearing a dress and then fined $100. According to the newspapers, Jackson could not pay the fine, but tried to plead for alternate terms of punishment, suggesting that if the judge would accept a smaller fine—all the money they reportedly had, $25—they would self-exile by leaving Chicago forever. But the judge insisted on sending Jackson to jail because “a little punishment would be beneficial.” After this episode, Jackson seems to vanish from the official record, though months later this story, along with an image of Jackson, was reprinted in the popular, tabloid-like National Police Gazette. 

When I first encountered Jackson, I was a PhD student trying to write a dissertation. My first impulse was to put these traces of Jackson’s encounter with power to work in my academic writing—to use their appearance in the archive as evidence for an argument about the regulation of race/sex/gender at the turn of the twentieth century. But it turned out that I couldn’t do it—I lacked both adequate information and the desire to put it, put Jackson, to use. I wanted something from Jackson certainly—they would not leave me alone—but each time I tried to write about them, I was unsettled by the result. It was, in Foucault’s words, “impossible to…grasp them again in themselves, as they might have been ‘in a free state.’” All I could know of Jackson, really, was that they had once or twice been caught—arrested, documented on someone else’s terms. 

Eventually I gave up making an argument altogether and, instead, wrote a poem. It’s no surprise that poetry can be a place to work out our felt relations to traces of the past; the poem has always been where I go to develop a private language, to extend intimately beyond myself, and to stage an impossible, interior conversation. But I was surprised to find that poetry also allowed me to work through some ethical questions that had stalled my academic writing, questions like: What do I do with an archival record that exists only because a violence has occurred? What do I do with lives that, to cite Foucault again, “no longer exist except through the terrible words that were destined to render them forever unworthy of the memory of men”? What I wanted—what it was impossible not to want—from this encounter with someone like me in the past was a sense of historical continuity, a “we” across time. But what kind of “we” can I fashion if all I have are these “terrible words”? 

In writing the poem “Still Life,” I of course could not resolve these questions. But I could attempt writerly experiments that academic prose does not exactly allow. In particular, rather than attending to what happened—rather than being beholden to thinking of Jackson as evidence—I was free to roam inside my lyric room, to conduct a conversation, to put my life and Jackson’s life alongside each other, to imagine them free. 

In your own work, consider asking yourself: What are the traces of the past that will not leave you alone? Can you use those traces in order to imagine the ending to an endless story? Perhaps an ending other than the dismal one hinted at in the official record? What language in the archive is suggestive of these possibilities? What language in the archive is only used for the purpose of capture? Can you make even that language do something else?

 

Cameron Awkward-Rich is the author of two poetry collections, Dispatch (Persea Books, 2019) and Sympathetic Little Monster (Ricochet Editions, 2016), which was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. He is a Cave Canem fellow and a poetry editor for Muzzle Magazine. He earned his PhD from Stanford University’s program in Modern Thought & Literature, and he is an assistant professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Craft Capsule: Oblique Strategies

by

Kimberly King Parsons

7.15.19

This is no. 37 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

When I was getting my MFA in fiction, one of my favorite professors asked us to write a story using only single syllable words. At first this sounded awful—how could we possibly pull this off? It wasn’t easy, but very quickly it became a kind of game to me, an obstruction that brought out odd new rhythms. When we came back to class and read our stories aloud, it was a revelation. Every single student had done something striking and compelling. The sentences were strange and clipped, everyday phrases made fascinating. One student had something like “he who taught us of the past” to stand in for history professor. In my story, instead of an electrician playing checkers, “the lights guy played reds and blacks.” The formal constraint forced us to go beyond the easy, obvious choices. My professor stressed that this was a starting point, something to unlock us; there was no need to stick to these rules in subsequent drafts. Later, when I was revising, I found that because the work didn’t sound like me, I could brutally edit it. Now, more than ten years later, if something isn’t working in a story or chapter, I sometimes fall back on the one-syllable trick.

The weirdest approaches to process are the ones I find most helpful—the ones that have stayed with me the longest. There was the professor who encouraged his classes to narrate problematic scenes from the perspective of inanimate objects, animals, or the dead. A friend of mine takes the articles out of any story or chapter that’s giving him problems. He usually puts most of them back, but something about the extraction lets him see the work differently. There was another professor who forbade us from using adverbs, or giving characters first names, or starting any sentence with a pronoun—I loved his bizarre rules, even when I decided to break them.

When I’m writing I sometimes consult this strange little deck of cards called Oblique Strategies. Originally created in 1975 by painter Peter Schmidt and Brian Eno—yes, that Brian Eno, immensely talented musician, producer, and co-conspirator of the late David Bowie—each card has a single directive printed on it, a “strategy” for your creative process. These prompts are meant to assist with removing blocks, but the Zen-like aphorisms are more abstract than prescriptive (i.e., “Start at the end,” or “Emphasize the flaws,” or really strange ones like “Remember a time when you hid from something as a child.”) 

The deck my partner and I have at home is the updated 2001 edition, with a bizarre product description: “These cards evolved from separate observations of the principles underlying what we were doing. Sometimes they were recognized in retrospect (intellect catching up with intuition), sometimes they were identified as they were happening, and sometimes they were formulated. They can be used when dilemma occurs in a working situation…The card is trusted even if its appropriateness is quite unclear.” These mysterious abstractions are part of the charm. There’s now a version of the strategies available for free online, although I still prefer the physicality of shuffling through a deck. Two cards I selected at random just now read: “Disconnect from desire,” and “Go slowly all the way round the outside.” It all sounds a bit wacky, and that’s exactly the point. I find the further I lean into the weird, the easier is it for me to get back to work.

 

Kimberly King Parsons is the author of Black Light, a short story collection forthcoming from Vintage on August 13, 2019. She is a recipient of fellowships from Columbia University and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and her fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Best Small Fictions, No Tokens, the Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Her website is www.kimberlykingparsons.com.

Craft Capsule: Who Are You?

by

Crystal Hana Kim

7.4.18

This is no. 33 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

“When did you start writing?” Writers are often asked this question, and I’m always curious about the story behind the answers, the paths we take to find our vocations. As a child of immigrants, Korean was my first language. When I began elementary school, I found myself mentally switching between my mother tongue and English, trying to match vocabulary words across language lines. I soon found myself gravitating toward writing; with a pencil in my hand, I could take my time and express myself more clearly. In the first grade, I wrote about butterflies hatching for my beloved teacher, Ms. Benz. The next year, I wrote about a girl with short black hair who wanted to get her ears pierced, but whose Korean parents refused. I presented the story to my mother and father, hopeful and full of glee at my cunning. (Reader, they fell for it and let me pierce my ears.) “I’ve written ever since I was a child,” I say in answer to that question. But when did I find the stories I wanted to tell? That was a more recent discovery.  

As a sophomore in college, I took my first formal writing workshop. Somehow, over the course of my teenage years, my writing had changed. I no longer wrote stories that were rooted in my desires and questions about the world. Instead, I created characters without clear identities—their race, appearance, and backgrounds were murky, undefined. These young adults frolicked and fought on misty hills, drunk with mulberry-stained lips. I was trying to shy away from what I thought was expected of me. I didn’t want to be pigeon-holed as the Korean American workshopper who could only write about “Asian” issues. But I sensed that something was wrong with my characters: They were vague, flat, lifeless.Who is this girl?” a classmate asked. “Don’t be afraid to write about what you know,” my teacher said. 

At first I resisted these suggestions, digging deeper into my no-name characters without a clear sense of home. That is, until the summer break between my sophomore and junior year. One June evening I had dinner with my parents. Over a meal of galbi-tang, rice, wine, and ice cream, my parents recounted their childhoods. My father described catching grasshoppers from his neighbors’ field, of cooking them on a skillet over an open flame. My mother told me of staining her fingers orange with bong seon hwa flowers, which I loved to do during my summer visits to Korea as well.  

The next morning, I found myself still mulling over my parents’ stories. I imagined my father as a child, his lithe body running through high grass in search of those plump green insects. I loved that the act of staining fingers with flower petals, which my sister and I did every summer in Korea, was not only a family tradition, but a Korean one. These stories stayed with me all summer and through the fall, when my undergraduate classes resumed. This time in my fiction workshop, I wrote with greater purpose and clarity. I developed characters with a culture and history behind them. Better, I thought.

The more I wrote, the more I sought my family. When I began my graduate studies, I turned to my maternal grandmother. A fierce matriarch and gifted storyteller, my grandmother shared her life with me—she lived under Japanese occupation, survived the Korean War, and forged a life for her daughters in the years afterward. I absorbed these anecdotes, sometimes taking notes and sometimes just listening. 

When I began If You Leave Me, my debut novel, I knew I wanted to write about the Korean War. More important, I knew I wanted the main character to be a Korean woman who was strong, willful, intelligent, stubborn, and full of contradictions. I wanted a female protagonist that readers would love one moment and argue with the next, someone who felt as complex as our best friends and lovers do. I created Haemi Lee, a teenaged refugee living in Busan during the war. I rooted her story in my grandmother’s experiences, but I added my own desires and questions and fears until Haemi became a character of her own. 

It took me a few wayward years, but I eventually realized that writing about my culture does not confine me as a writer. Instead, my history provides a pool of memory for me to draw inspiration from. Now, when I teach creative writing, I emphasize this process for my students. I encourage them to value every part of their identities.

“Who are you?” I ask. “Tell me what you know.”

 

Crystal Hana Kim’s debut novel, If You Leave Me, is forthcoming from William Morrow in August. She was a 2017 PEN America Dau Short Story Prize winner and has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Hedgebrook, Jentel, among others. Her work has been published in or is forthcoming from The Washington Post, Elle Magazine, Nylon, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is a contributing editor at Apogee Journal and is the Director of Writing Instruction at Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband.

Craft Capsule: Start, Stop, Change

by

Mimi Lok

1.12.20

This is no. 46 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

For many writers with long-brewing projects, starting a new year can stir up dread, excitement, grim resolve, or all of the above. Mid-January becomes a time of early reckoning: Have I stuck to my guns? Backslid already? Realized, aghast, that my goals were far too lofty? Resolutions are often focused on starting new things, but not enough is said about the value of simply carrying on, taking a moment to reflect on existing projects, and adjusting or even stopping the approaches that are no longer working. 

Whenever I feel stuck or overwhelmed with a writing project, I try to take a step back and ask myself three questions: What needs to start? What needs to stop? What needs to change? And then I make lists or action items in response to those questions. It might look something like this:

What needs to start? 

  • Write the scene or chapter you’ve been avoiding. Drink a shot of tequila and write the bloody thing. In one sitting. Tape over the delete button if necessary.
  • Admit that the work has reached the point where it needs to leave the house. Share it with the person who will tell you things you don’t want to hear but who will ultimately help you make it stronger.
  • Look farther afield for things that feed your creative brain and soul. Get your nose out of a book and get thee to an art museum, concert, or stand-up comedy show. It doesn’t have to be tangibly connected to your project, but it will wake up different parts of you and might even spark ideas.

What needs to stop?

  • Control. Release your characters from their toddler harnesses and let them do what they want to do instead of what you want them to do.
  • Narrator as bodycam. Stop treating your first-person narrator as a passive, disembodied set of eyes and ears, and turn them into an actual human being the reader can see, hear, and feel.
  • Procrastination. Specifically, the kind that’s rooted in a lack of interest and motivation rather than a lack of confidence. If some high power decreed you could only tell one last story before you died, would this be it? If the answer is “umm…,” then put this project aside and find the story that feels compelling and urgent to you, and that only you can tell.

What needs to change?

  • Point of view. Does it have to be the POV you’ve chosen? Why? What would happen if you changed it?
  • Scope. Recognize how you’ve been limiting the story and expand or shrink the world of your story accordingly. This could be related to the number of characters you want to focus on, or settings, or time periods. Or it could be about redistributing the amount of time spent with various characters and their world(s). See how it affects the intensity and focus.
  • Setting. How important is your chosen time and place to the story you want to tell? Would the story change if it were relocated, set in another time period?

The stop/start/change tool is something I’ve borrowed from my other life in the nonprofit sector (mostly in terms of assessing projects and organizational priorities), but which can be handily applied to other areas of life too: friendships, marriages, exercise routines, to name a few.

 

Mimi Lok is the author of the story collection Last of Her Name (Kaya Press, 2019), which was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. She is the recipient of a Smithsonian Ingenuity Award and an Ylvisaker Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Fiction Prize and the Susan Atefat Arts and Letters Prize for nonfiction. Her work can be found in McSweeney’s, Electric Literature, and Literary Hub, among other outlets. She is currently working on a novel. Lok is also the cofounder, executive director, and editor of Voice of Witness, an award-winning human rights/oral history nonprofit that amplifies marginalized voices through a book series and a national education program.

Craft Capsule: Revising the Archive

by

Cameron Awkward-Rich

12.9.19

This is no. 42 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Several of the poems in my second collection, Dispatch, which comes out this week from Persea Books, are what I think of as the detritus of my academic book-in-progress about maladjustment in transmasculine literature and theory. In conducting research for this project, I have spent countless hours digging around in digitized newspaper archives, trying to get a feel for what it was like to live a gender-nonconforming life at other times in U.S. history. During the course of this work, I have repeatedly encountered traces of Black/gender-nonconforming lives that flicker in and out of the official record. Every so often I become obsessed with these traces. Mostly what surfaces is news of arrests—arrests for “cross-dressing,” discoveries of “cross-dressing” after arrest. Mostly what surfaces are dead-ends. 

One of the traces I came across: Lawrence Jackson, a Black person who was arrested in 1881 in Chicago wearing a dress and then fined $100. According to the newspapers, Jackson could not pay the fine, but tried to plead for alternate terms of punishment, suggesting that if the judge would accept a smaller fine—all the money they reportedly had, $25—they would self-exile by leaving Chicago forever. But the judge insisted on sending Jackson to jail because “a little punishment would be beneficial.” After this episode, Jackson seems to vanish from the official record, though months later this story, along with an image of Jackson, was reprinted in the popular, tabloid-like National Police Gazette. 

When I first encountered Jackson, I was a PhD student trying to write a dissertation. My first impulse was to put these traces of Jackson’s encounter with power to work in my academic writing—to use their appearance in the archive as evidence for an argument about the regulation of race/sex/gender at the turn of the twentieth century. But it turned out that I couldn’t do it—I lacked both adequate information and the desire to put it, put Jackson, to use. I wanted something from Jackson certainly—they would not leave me alone—but each time I tried to write about them, I was unsettled by the result. It was, in Foucault’s words, “impossible to…grasp them again in themselves, as they might have been ‘in a free state.’” All I could know of Jackson, really, was that they had once or twice been caught—arrested, documented on someone else’s terms. 

Eventually I gave up making an argument altogether and, instead, wrote a poem. It’s no surprise that poetry can be a place to work out our felt relations to traces of the past; the poem has always been where I go to develop a private language, to extend intimately beyond myself, and to stage an impossible, interior conversation. But I was surprised to find that poetry also allowed me to work through some ethical questions that had stalled my academic writing, questions like: What do I do with an archival record that exists only because a violence has occurred? What do I do with lives that, to cite Foucault again, “no longer exist except through the terrible words that were destined to render them forever unworthy of the memory of men”? What I wanted—what it was impossible not to want—from this encounter with someone like me in the past was a sense of historical continuity, a “we” across time. But what kind of “we” can I fashion if all I have are these “terrible words”? 

In writing the poem “Still Life,” I of course could not resolve these questions. But I could attempt writerly experiments that academic prose does not exactly allow. In particular, rather than attending to what happened—rather than being beholden to thinking of Jackson as evidence—I was free to roam inside my lyric room, to conduct a conversation, to put my life and Jackson’s life alongside each other, to imagine them free. 

In your own work, consider asking yourself: What are the traces of the past that will not leave you alone? Can you use those traces in order to imagine the ending to an endless story? Perhaps an ending other than the dismal one hinted at in the official record? What language in the archive is suggestive of these possibilities? What language in the archive is only used for the purpose of capture? Can you make even that language do something else?

 

Cameron Awkward-Rich is the author of two poetry collections, Dispatch (Persea Books, 2019) and Sympathetic Little Monster (Ricochet Editions, 2016), which was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. He is a Cave Canem fellow and a poetry editor for Muzzle Magazine. He earned his PhD from Stanford University’s program in Modern Thought & Literature, and he is an assistant professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Craft Capsule: Oblique Strategies

by

Kimberly King Parsons

7.15.19

This is no. 37 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

When I was getting my MFA in fiction, one of my favorite professors asked us to write a story using only single syllable words. At first this sounded awful—how could we possibly pull this off? It wasn’t easy, but very quickly it became a kind of game to me, an obstruction that brought out odd new rhythms. When we came back to class and read our stories aloud, it was a revelation. Every single student had done something striking and compelling. The sentences were strange and clipped, everyday phrases made fascinating. One student had something like “he who taught us of the past” to stand in for history professor. In my story, instead of an electrician playing checkers, “the lights guy played reds and blacks.” The formal constraint forced us to go beyond the easy, obvious choices. My professor stressed that this was a starting point, something to unlock us; there was no need to stick to these rules in subsequent drafts. Later, when I was revising, I found that because the work didn’t sound like me, I could brutally edit it. Now, more than ten years later, if something isn’t working in a story or chapter, I sometimes fall back on the one-syllable trick.

The weirdest approaches to process are the ones I find most helpful—the ones that have stayed with me the longest. There was the professor who encouraged his classes to narrate problematic scenes from the perspective of inanimate objects, animals, or the dead. A friend of mine takes the articles out of any story or chapter that’s giving him problems. He usually puts most of them back, but something about the extraction lets him see the work differently. There was another professor who forbade us from using adverbs, or giving characters first names, or starting any sentence with a pronoun—I loved his bizarre rules, even when I decided to break them.

When I’m writing I sometimes consult this strange little deck of cards called Oblique Strategies. Originally created in 1975 by painter Peter Schmidt and Brian Eno—yes, that Brian Eno, immensely talented musician, producer, and co-conspirator of the late David Bowie—each card has a single directive printed on it, a “strategy” for your creative process. These prompts are meant to assist with removing blocks, but the Zen-like aphorisms are more abstract than prescriptive (i.e., “Start at the end,” or “Emphasize the flaws,” or really strange ones like “Remember a time when you hid from something as a child.”) 

The deck my partner and I have at home is the updated 2001 edition, with a bizarre product description: “These cards evolved from separate observations of the principles underlying what we were doing. Sometimes they were recognized in retrospect (intellect catching up with intuition), sometimes they were identified as they were happening, and sometimes they were formulated. They can be used when dilemma occurs in a working situation…The card is trusted even if its appropriateness is quite unclear.” These mysterious abstractions are part of the charm. There’s now a version of the strategies available for free online, although I still prefer the physicality of shuffling through a deck. Two cards I selected at random just now read: “Disconnect from desire,” and “Go slowly all the way round the outside.” It all sounds a bit wacky, and that’s exactly the point. I find the further I lean into the weird, the easier is it for me to get back to work.

 

Kimberly King Parsons is the author of Black Light, a short story collection forthcoming from Vintage on August 13, 2019. She is a recipient of fellowships from Columbia University and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and her fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Best Small Fictions, No Tokens, the Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Her website is www.kimberlykingparsons.com.

Craft Capsule: Consulting the Tarot

by

Emma Copley Eisenberg

2.24.20

This is no. 50 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I was raised in a house of reason where there was no God, no witchcraft, no science fiction, no astrology, and certainly no tarot. These things were for the weak, and we were not weak. But I’ll never forget when I read Uncle Tom’s Cabin and it dawned on me why Tom prayed so much: He was just trying to get through the day. I was weak, I knew. To make it from dawn to dusk, I too needed all the help I could get. 

Tarot came into my life through the friend, the friend I lost, and it is the thing she gave me more than any other for which I offer her my supreme gratitude. To be fair, I acquired the deck itself—The Wild Unknown by Kim Krans—much earlier; I bought it on impulse late one night on the gushing recommendation of someone I’d met at a party. You are not supposed to buy a tarot deck for yourself, I learned later, perhaps because without the blessing of someone you love to imbue the paper and images with power, a deck of cards is just a deck of cards.

I cannot now separate tarot from the friend, and I cannot separate tarot from writing. She and I became friends during the period when the card of the moon, which according to my deck “encompasses the idea of the Wild Unknown,” was my near constant companion. She taught me how to do the simplest spread—past, present, future—and led me to Michelle Tea’s book on tarot, life, and writing, Modern Tarot: Connecting With Your Higher Self Through the Wisdom of the Cards. Past, present, future; beginning, middle, and end. My friend and I began to draw a single card to set the mood for our writing sessions together, held at a ramshackle coworking space in the neighborhood where we lived.

What I like about drawing a single card before writing is that it allows me a single place to put my feelings about that day’s words—all my fear that the words won’t come and all my fear that they will. Drawing a single card, the mother of pentacles, for instance, which offers an image of a deer and her fawn, gives me a door at which to knock when I can’t see any of that paragraph’s architecture. She excels in the home, the card says: Perhaps I’ll turn my scent diffuser on, or I’ll have a character bake a scone, or I’ll think about why some person in my book moved around so much from place to place. It’s not so much a place to start writing but rather a way to give the day’s writing a particular mood or scent or inflection. Draw the death card, which in The Wild Unknown simply means that “something in your life needs to end…something is trying to find closure,” and the idea of ending and closure will start bonking around in my brain until it hits something in my writing that needed either to finish or to begin. Each card is like a prompt I suppose, except instead of being wacky and contrived, it feels like a prompt I gave myself from the darkest recesses of my unconscious, a shortcut to the place I was trying to go. 

I drew a card every day while writing The Third Rainbow Girl, which explores a mysterious act of violence in Pocahontas County, West Virginia in 1980, the Appalachian community where it transpired, and my own time in the place as a national service worker. For nearly the entirety of the fifteen months when I was most actively engaged, sentence by sentence, in writing the book, I dreamed about murder—either murdering or being murdered—every night. Then every morning I went to the deck and chose a card. I am not exaggerating when I say that I chose the moon card almost every time, no matter how well I shuffled. The card’s overall theme: vivid dreams and fears. I read the card’s description so many times I can recite it by heart:

[The moon] is the shadow realm, the place where dreams, fears, and mysteries are born. Much darkness can linger here, and if you aren’t careful, this can lead to periods of anxiety and self-doubt almost as if you’ve lost your way in a house of mirrors. Many great artists have roamed this inner landscape. It’s where imagination and creativity drift freely upon the midnight air.

That about summed it up. Fuck the fucking moon, I began to say aloud each time I drew it. Fuck this fucking book.

But the moon would not be fucked and neither would the book I was writing; they would not go away until they went away and maybe not even then. Eventually, I finished the book and I lost the friend. I’m drawing new cards these days—a lot of pentacles, the suit of home and hearth. I hope I drift less and dig more in the next book, but of course, it’s not up to me. 

 

Emma Copley Eisenberg is the author of The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia (Hachette Books, 2020). Her writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, Granta, the Los Angeles Review of Books, American Short Fiction, the Paris Review Daily, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, and other outlets. She is also the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Wurlitzer Foundation, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and Lambda Literary. She lives in Philadelphia, where she directs Blue Stoop, a hub for the literary arts. 

Thumbnail: Altınay Dinç

Craft Capsule: Start, Stop, Change

by

Mimi Lok

1.12.20

This is no. 46 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

For many writers with long-brewing projects, starting a new year can stir up dread, excitement, grim resolve, or all of the above. Mid-January becomes a time of early reckoning: Have I stuck to my guns? Backslid already? Realized, aghast, that my goals were far too lofty? Resolutions are often focused on starting new things, but not enough is said about the value of simply carrying on, taking a moment to reflect on existing projects, and adjusting or even stopping the approaches that are no longer working. 

Whenever I feel stuck or overwhelmed with a writing project, I try to take a step back and ask myself three questions: What needs to start? What needs to stop? What needs to change? And then I make lists or action items in response to those questions. It might look something like this:

What needs to start? 

  • Write the scene or chapter you’ve been avoiding. Drink a shot of tequila and write the bloody thing. In one sitting. Tape over the delete button if necessary.
  • Admit that the work has reached the point where it needs to leave the house. Share it with the person who will tell you things you don’t want to hear but who will ultimately help you make it stronger.
  • Look farther afield for things that feed your creative brain and soul. Get your nose out of a book and get thee to an art museum, concert, or stand-up comedy show. It doesn’t have to be tangibly connected to your project, but it will wake up different parts of you and might even spark ideas.

What needs to stop?

  • Control. Release your characters from their toddler harnesses and let them do what they want to do instead of what you want them to do.
  • Narrator as bodycam. Stop treating your first-person narrator as a passive, disembodied set of eyes and ears, and turn them into an actual human being the reader can see, hear, and feel.
  • Procrastination. Specifically, the kind that’s rooted in a lack of interest and motivation rather than a lack of confidence. If some high power decreed you could only tell one last story before you died, would this be it? If the answer is “umm…,” then put this project aside and find the story that feels compelling and urgent to you, and that only you can tell.

What needs to change?

  • Point of view. Does it have to be the POV you’ve chosen? Why? What would happen if you changed it?
  • Scope. Recognize how you’ve been limiting the story and expand or shrink the world of your story accordingly. This could be related to the number of characters you want to focus on, or settings, or time periods. Or it could be about redistributing the amount of time spent with various characters and their world(s). See how it affects the intensity and focus.
  • Setting. How important is your chosen time and place to the story you want to tell? Would the story change if it were relocated, set in another time period?

The stop/start/change tool is something I’ve borrowed from my other life in the nonprofit sector (mostly in terms of assessing projects and organizational priorities), but which can be handily applied to other areas of life too: friendships, marriages, exercise routines, to name a few.

 

Mimi Lok is the author of the story collection Last of Her Name (Kaya Press, 2019), which was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. She is the recipient of a Smithsonian Ingenuity Award and an Ylvisaker Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Fiction Prize and the Susan Atefat Arts and Letters Prize for nonfiction. Her work can be found in McSweeney’s, Electric Literature, and Literary Hub, among other outlets. She is currently working on a novel. Lok is also the cofounder, executive director, and editor of Voice of Witness, an award-winning human rights/oral history nonprofit that amplifies marginalized voices through a book series and a national education program.

Craft Capsule: Revising the Archive

by

Cameron Awkward-Rich

12.9.19

This is no. 42 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Several of the poems in my second collection, Dispatch, which comes out this week from Persea Books, are what I think of as the detritus of my academic book-in-progress about maladjustment in transmasculine literature and theory. In conducting research for this project, I have spent countless hours digging around in digitized newspaper archives, trying to get a feel for what it was like to live a gender-nonconforming life at other times in U.S. history. During the course of this work, I have repeatedly encountered traces of Black/gender-nonconforming lives that flicker in and out of the official record. Every so often I become obsessed with these traces. Mostly what surfaces is news of arrests—arrests for “cross-dressing,” discoveries of “cross-dressing” after arrest. Mostly what surfaces are dead-ends. 

One of the traces I came across: Lawrence Jackson, a Black person who was arrested in 1881 in Chicago wearing a dress and then fined $100. According to the newspapers, Jackson could not pay the fine, but tried to plead for alternate terms of punishment, suggesting that if the judge would accept a smaller fine—all the money they reportedly had, $25—they would self-exile by leaving Chicago forever. But the judge insisted on sending Jackson to jail because “a little punishment would be beneficial.” After this episode, Jackson seems to vanish from the official record, though months later this story, along with an image of Jackson, was reprinted in the popular, tabloid-like National Police Gazette. 

When I first encountered Jackson, I was a PhD student trying to write a dissertation. My first impulse was to put these traces of Jackson’s encounter with power to work in my academic writing—to use their appearance in the archive as evidence for an argument about the regulation of race/sex/gender at the turn of the twentieth century. But it turned out that I couldn’t do it—I lacked both adequate information and the desire to put it, put Jackson, to use. I wanted something from Jackson certainly—they would not leave me alone—but each time I tried to write about them, I was unsettled by the result. It was, in Foucault’s words, “impossible to…grasp them again in themselves, as they might have been ‘in a free state.’” All I could know of Jackson, really, was that they had once or twice been caught—arrested, documented on someone else’s terms. 

Eventually I gave up making an argument altogether and, instead, wrote a poem. It’s no surprise that poetry can be a place to work out our felt relations to traces of the past; the poem has always been where I go to develop a private language, to extend intimately beyond myself, and to stage an impossible, interior conversation. But I was surprised to find that poetry also allowed me to work through some ethical questions that had stalled my academic writing, questions like: What do I do with an archival record that exists only because a violence has occurred? What do I do with lives that, to cite Foucault again, “no longer exist except through the terrible words that were destined to render them forever unworthy of the memory of men”? What I wanted—what it was impossible not to want—from this encounter with someone like me in the past was a sense of historical continuity, a “we” across time. But what kind of “we” can I fashion if all I have are these “terrible words”? 

In writing the poem “Still Life,” I of course could not resolve these questions. But I could attempt writerly experiments that academic prose does not exactly allow. In particular, rather than attending to what happened—rather than being beholden to thinking of Jackson as evidence—I was free to roam inside my lyric room, to conduct a conversation, to put my life and Jackson’s life alongside each other, to imagine them free. 

In your own work, consider asking yourself: What are the traces of the past that will not leave you alone? Can you use those traces in order to imagine the ending to an endless story? Perhaps an ending other than the dismal one hinted at in the official record? What language in the archive is suggestive of these possibilities? What language in the archive is only used for the purpose of capture? Can you make even that language do something else?

 

Cameron Awkward-Rich is the author of two poetry collections, Dispatch (Persea Books, 2019) and Sympathetic Little Monster (Ricochet Editions, 2016), which was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. He is a Cave Canem fellow and a poetry editor for Muzzle Magazine. He earned his PhD from Stanford University’s program in Modern Thought & Literature, and he is an assistant professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Craft Capsule: Minor Characters

by

Carter Sickels

4.27.20

This is no. 58 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Families, however troubled, have their own unique way of functioning, like a single organism that holds its secrets, memories, habits, and narratives close. In my new novel, The Prettiest Star, the central story is about the Jacksons, who are learning to be with one another again after twenty-four-year-old Brian, who has recently found out he is HIV-positive, returns home after six years away in New York City. I wanted the novel—which is told from the perspectives of Brian, his younger sister, and his mother—to wrestle with internal family dynamics, but I quickly realized, in order to understand the Jacksons individually and as a family, I also needed them to engage with characters outside their immediate circle. 

Early on, I sent Brian’s younger sister, fourteen-year-old Jess, to the public swimming pool with a couple girls on her softball team. I had to get her away from her parents, brother, and relatives in order to understand how much the family secrets weigh on every moment of her life, but also to see Jess with more clarity—what makes her tick, what is she like? At the swimming pool, Jess feels both bored and uncomfortable around her teammates, who are only interested in impressing boys. When a couple of boys approach the girls, the scene also reveals a spark of resistance and sass in Jess I didn’t know she had. These minor characters brought tension and texture to the narrative, but also gave me insight into one of my major characters.

Sometimes, minor characters develop into key players—perhaps not quite major characters, but close. When Nick Marshall showed up in my novel, he was a minor character who quickly grew into one of my favorites and earned more time on the playing field. Nick is an outsider—a loner, a hood. He’s from a poor family, his parents are divorced, he smokes and drinks beer, and he’s a talented artist. Nick engages Jess outside of the sealed family, where she forms another life. When she’s with Nick, she shows a side of herself her family doesn’t see: rebellious, talkative, and flirtatious. Jess and Nick discuss death, dreams, disappointments. Without Nick, not only would major plot points vanish, but also Jess’s complexities and layers would recede. And in order for Nick to be believable, I had to spend time with him, I had to develop him the same way I did the central characters—figuring out his background, his personality and hobbies, his dreams and fears and joys.

Not all characters must change, and in fact, many of them won’t. But they still demand attention and need to be written with specificity and precision. Maybe readers will only catch a glimpse of their true depths because in this particular novel, these minor characters exist in order to reveal another facet of the protagonist, advance the narrative, or build tension—but we also sense they are complex, mysterious beings who could easily walk out of the pages of this book into a different one that tells their story, in which they are the stars. 

I tell my students to make their characters talk to and mingle with one other—don’t let your characters exist in a vacuum. If you’re stuck, or need a different way of looking at your story, bring in a cranky neighbor, an old flame, a great-aunt, a salesman, a bad date. How does your protagonist engage with this person? What do they say, what do they think? What’s their body language? Often it’s the minor characters who reveal something unexpected and surprising about the central characters, and sometimes, these minor figures catch the light in way that makes you want to listen closer, to follow them home and learn more.

 

Carter Sickels’s second novel, The Prettiest Star, will be published by Hub City Press on May 19. He is also the author of The Evening Hour (Bloomsbury, 2012), which was a finalist for an Oregon Book Award and a Lambda Literary Award. His essays and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in various publications, including GuernicaBellevue Literary ReviewGreen Mountains Review, and BuzzFeed. The recipient of the 2013 Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Award, Sickels has also earned fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. He is an assistant professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University, where he teaches in the Bluegrass Writers low-residency MFA program. 

Thumbnail: Joel Filipe

Craft Capsule: Catalogues, Cetaceans, and Casey Kasem

by

Carter Sickels

4.20.20

This is no. 57 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

My second novel, The Prettiest Star, examines America during the time of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, when the U.S. government, churches, schools, and families turned their backs on gay men who were dying. I was a young teenager during that time. I remember Ryan White on TV, the jokes at school, the rampant homophobia. For my research I read many books, newspapers, magazines, oral histories. I watched feature films and documentaries. I talked to friends. Much of the research was difficult and heavy and sad. 

But I also needed to study and compile those seemingly more frivolous details that are actually crucial to capturing a specific time and place: the clothes, music, movies, hairstyles, and so on. My personal memories of the 1980s helped, but for inspiration, accuracy, and veracity, I knew I had to explore a variety of archives to lead me into the past.   

If you grew up in the 1980s, you may remember the JCPenney and Sears catalogues. The size of phone books, they arrived in the mail with each new season. The most important was the Christmas catalogue; when I was a kid, I pored over the newspaper-print pages of toys and wrote up a detailed list for Santa. My parents had thrown out our copies years ago, so I ordered a few from eBay. When the catalogues arrived, they smelled faintly of cigarette smoke. One of them featured model Cheryl Tiegs wearing a safari-style jumpsuit and cuddling with a Bengal tiger kitten. The catalogues made excellent coffee table books—my guests flipped nostalgically through the pages, laughing at the absurdity. 

There were pages and pages of fashion: watches with bright bands, women posing in leotards and leg warmers, very serious men in silk pajamas. I studied the clothes and shoes my characters would wear, hairstyles. I learned the cost of things: men’s warm-up suit, $37.99; sheepskin car-seat cover, $99.99; answering machine, $179.00. The pictures helped me design my characters’ homes, too: the heavy peach drapes, the harvest-gold oven. Which objects would show up in my characters’ rooms and closets? One of my narrators, Jess, who’s fourteen, wears a Walkman to escape family tension and secrecy. I remembered the art of making mixed tapes, the sound of the rewinding cassette, the feeling of the foam on my ears. 

At antique and secondhand stores, I hunted for old magazines and found copies of TV Guide, People, and Life. Online research opened up a world of music videos and TV commercials, sound bites from Casey Kasem’s America’s Top 40, and eighties photographs of malls, SeaWorld, and high schools. On a wall in my office, I hung a picture of a tape store at a mall next to a found photo of an old woman in her kitchen, which reminded me of one of my characters. Along with all the found photos, I hung xeroxes of Nan Goldin’s brilliant photographs documenting the queer and artist community of 1980s New York—all the pain and loss, and love; Alvin Baltrop’s photographs of queer life and the West Side Piers in the seventies and eighties; and William Yang’s heartbreaking portraits of gay, HIV-positive men. And, because Jess loves whales, I tacked images of orcas that I’d cut out of the issue of National Geographic she would have read in 1984. 

It’s easy to get lost in the writing. I enjoy the hours and hours of research and immersing myself in the world of the novel. For me, the pictures on the walls and photographs and catalogues create a collage of visual reminders, a kind of map that inspires me to step inside. 

 

Carter Sickels’s second novel, The Prettiest Star, will be published by Hub City Press on May 19. He is also the author of The Evening Hour (Bloomsbury, 2012), which was a finalist for an Oregon Book Award and a Lambda Literary Award. His essays and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in various publications, including GuernicaBellevue Literary ReviewGreen Mountains Review, and BuzzFeed. The recipient of the 2013 Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Award, Sickels has also earned fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. He is an assistant professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University, where he teaches in the Bluegrass Writers low-residency MFA program. 

Thumbnail: Daniel Schludi

Craft Capsule: Multiple Points of View

by

Carter Sickels

4.13.20

This is no. 56 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich, A Home at the End of the World by Michael Cunningham, The Poisonwood Diaries by Barbara Kingsolver, The Birds of Opulence by Crystal Wilkinson, People in Trouble by Sarah Schulman, There There by Tommy Orange. All of these wonderful novels use multiple points of view and weave a tapestry of voices, with each character relaying their own version of the story to tell a broader narrative of family, place, or community.

My novel The Prettiest Star, set in 1986, follows Brian Jackson, a young, gay, HIV-positive man, who leaves New York City to return to the rural small town where he grew up and where his family still lives. When I first started writing, I wrote from the point of view of Jess, Brian’s fourteen-year-old sister, about the day Brian returns. Then I wrote sections from Brian’s perspective: What was it like to come back to the home he couldn’t wait to escape? A few months in I wrote a chapter from their mother Sharon’s perspective and suddenly realized I would need all three voices to tell this story of shame, secrets, and silences, and the complicated ties of familial love and betrayal. Writing from Sharon’s point of view gave me another angle into the story—a complicated, troubling one. Sharon is the voice of restraint and denial. She loves her son, but her worry about what neighbors and God will think get in the way.

Despite its reputation, first-person point of view is not easy to pull off. My first creative writing teacher, the brilliant Eve Shelnutt, had very strong opinions about writing, and she warned me to not even try first-person narration until I’d written at least twenty or thirty stories in third person. First-person narration seems easy to write because when it’s done well, the voice sounds intimate and authentic—we believe. But as the writer, you’re making particular choices about diction, syntax, and rhythm, so that you create a voice that sounds natural, but isn’t, most likely, exactly how that character would talk. 

Juggling multiple first-person narrators created another challenge: The individual voices must sound unique and separate, yet their differences should not be so obvious that they draw attention to the artifice of first person. For my three characters, in addition to trying to capture their voices through word choices and syntax, I paid attention to their interior lives: How do they think and feel, how do they view the world, and what is important to them? Their emotional timbre and interiority led me to their voices: Sharon’s denial, Jess’s youthful savviness, and Brian’s hurt, fear, and anger. Brian is the anchor of the novel, and his sections were the most difficult to write. A couple years into the process, I figured out that if I framed Brian’s sections as video diaries—he uses a video camera to document his last summer, and directly addresses the viewer/reader about his experiences as a queer man living during the AIDS epidemic—I could set his chapters apart, and reveal him at his most vulnerable, artistic, and honest. Moreover, the dated video diaries serve as a ticking clock; like so many young gay men, Brian will not survive this plague, but he wants to bear witness and document for posterity.

Alternating between characters chapter by chapter also informed my approach to the writing process. Some days, I switched between characters—an hour with Jess, then an hour with Brian. This approach gave me a better sense of how the novel worked as a whole. And it was sometimes a relief to move from one character to another, to get out of one character’s head and dive into another’s. On other days, I spent the hours intensely focused on a single character—immersed in one voice, one side of the story. I followed a similar approach when I printed out a full draft to revise—I read aloud all the Sharon chapters together, then all the Brian chapters, then all of Jess’s. Did the characters’ voices sound consistent? Did they carry their sections? Did the characters have their own individual narrative arcs? Then I arranged the chapters in the correct order and read my novel from beginning to end, paying close attention to how the alternating voices built tension and created momentum. 

Writing a novel with multiple first-person narrators was challenging, but it also brought me a lot of pleasure and joy. I tried to fully inhabit my characters—to write from a place of empathy while digging deep into their flaws, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities.  

 

Carter Sickels’s second novel, The Prettiest Star, will be published by Hub City Press on May 19. He is also the author of The Evening Hour (Bloomsbury, 2012), which was a finalist for an Oregon Book Award and a Lambda Literary Award. His essays and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in various publications, including GuernicaBellevue Literary ReviewGreen Mountains Review, and BuzzFeed. The recipient of the 2013 Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Award, Sickels has also earned fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. He is an assistant professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University, where he teaches in the Bluegrass Writers low-residency MFA program. 

Thumbnail: Jason Leung

Craft Capsule: Cut for Time

by

Carter Sickels

4.6.20

This is no. 55 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

When you’re reading a good novel, you’re not usually thinking about the passages the author cut, the intense revision process, or all the pages the author wrote in order to get to The Writing. These sweaty, often clumsy and inelegant pages don’t show up in the book you’re holding, but they were essential to finishing the novel.

My first novel, The Evening Hour, about Cole Freeman, a small-time drug dealer and nurse’s home aide living in the coalfields of West Virginia, took six years to write. The novel uses third-person limited narration, but in order to figure out Cole, I filled up notebooks with him speaking in first person—this voice wasn’t strong enough to carry the novel, but it revealed his innermost thoughts and feelings. I also wrote monologues for the other characters to learn how people viewed Cole. I did not intend for any of this “extra” writing to go into the novel, but it was invaluable—a way for me to gather information about Cole’s family and community, and better understand his conflicts, secrets, and desires. 

I’ve kept writing journals for years; they’re a hodgepodge of personal memories, ideas, quotes, observations. A few years ago, when I team-taught a novel writing class with the author Alexis Smith, she wisely suggested keeping a journal dedicated solely and entirely to your novel—nothing goes in unless novel-related. 

My new novel, The Prettiest Star, took around four and a half years to write. Most of this time, I was sitting at my desk, typing on my laptop. But I also filled up four Decomposition Books with material. These novel-notebooks are raw and intimate, brewing with my questions, concerns, ideas. They contain crucial writing around and behind the novel, the words and scraps of ideas and shimmers of light that spill beyond the pages of the manuscript. They’re a form of play, and all writers need time to play. Now that the novel is finished, they’re an archive, and a reminder of how messy, exhilarating, joyful, and confounding the writing process is, a mix of hard work and faith and a little bit of magic. 

Found in the pages of my notebooks:

• Lists of scenes to write
• Character sketches
• Character freewrites and monologues: their dreams, hopes, fears, memories
• Chapter outlines
• Lists of clothing, movies, TV shows, music 
• Descriptions of characters’ rooms
• Hypotheticals: What would happen if this happened, or that
• Timelines
• Blueprints of houses
• Maps of the town
• Early working titles 
• Lists of character names, street names, restaurants
• Lists of objects from the eighties (sticker books, Rubik’s Cube, etc.) 
• Notes on important events, imagery, or places to return to (i.e. the abandoned drive-in)
• Questions, questions, questions—about characters, plot, structure, themes. How does Jess find out Brian has AIDS? How do the rumors get started?

 

Carter Sickels’s second novel, The Prettiest Star, will be published by Hub City Press on May 19. He is also the author of The Evening Hour (Bloomsbury, 2012), which was a finalist for an Oregon Book Award and a Lambda Literary Award. His essays and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in various publications, including Guernica, Bellevue Literary Review, Green Mountains Review, and BuzzFeed. The recipient of the 2013 Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Award, Sickels has also earned fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. He is an assistant professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University, where he teaches in the Bluegrass Writers low-residency MFA program. 

Thumbnail: Jon Tyson

Craft Capsule: Researching IRL

by

Emma Copley Eisenberg

3.2.20

This is no. 51 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

“I was slow to realize that if we write what we know,” writes Margot Livesey in her book The Hidden Machinery: Essays on Writing, “research could help me know more.” I retweet this quote, but add the comment: “So can reporting.” 

I never wanted to be a reporter or a journalist. The word journalist had always conjured the image of someone in black dress pants and sensible shoes. Journalists, if femme, definitely carry purses, and all of my purses are collecting massive cat-fur bunnies at the bottom of a closet that mostly houses an air conditioning duct. But there came a time when I was living in Charlottesville, Virginia, when the hellmouth of the culture wars that were to become the forces that shaped the 2016 election opened, and all around me I saw things I could not explain—the Rolling Stone article about the University of Virginia’s culture of rape was released, then “debunked.” A Black UVA student leader was badly beaten and the campus was flooded, not with empathy, but with racist celebration. Two girls, one white and cis, the other Black and trans, went missing to vastly different results. The fiction I was working on began to seem limp and pointless in the face of such blatant evil and abject confusion. I began—as any good millennial might—on my phone. I Googled murder and why people do it, I Googled white supremacy and why people do it. But it didn’t take me long to figure out that the answers I sought weren’t there, not on that screen and not in that small enclosed car interior that held only me. They were somewhere else, with someone else. 

This is what reporting means: You pick up the phone and dial a number and ask the person on the other side some questions and write down or record what they say. Or you get in a car and drive to where that person lives. They let you in and you look around at their house and taste what their water tastes like and then you ask them questions and write down or record what they say. That’s it. That’s the magic. 

For it is magic. You ask the right person the right question at the right time, and they’ll tell you something that has never before been told in the history of the world. Where do we think the information on the internet comes from? At some point, some person who knew a true thing told that information to another person, and they wrote it down. Of course, many people may say many true things that contradict each other, but that is true too. You write down or record what they all say. 

I am not sure why so many literary writers who otherwise enjoy making truth eschew reporting—so hard! So scary! And I could write a whole other screed on the dangers of what so many of us often do: link to a story that links to another story that links to another story the original basis of which is maybe untrue or maybe just a single source that nobody bothered to fact-check—but that is for another day. Suffice it to say, reporting has become a key tool in my nonfiction, not because I have any particular skill for the process, but because I don’t mind picking up the phone (Jewish upward mobility patterns) and seeing what happens. There is a particular joy in knowing you don’t know, in acknowledging that your imagination and experience do not contain what is necessary to say the truest possible thing. If you are not careful, reporting may, as it has for me, become a kind of addiction because once you start knowing what you don’t know, it is nearly impossible to stop.

 

Emma Copley Eisenberg is the author of The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia (Hachette Books, 2020). Her writing has appeared in McSweeney’sGranta, the Los Angeles Review of BooksAmerican Short Fiction, the Paris Review Daily, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, and other outlets. She is also the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Wurlitzer Foundation, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and Lambda Literary. She lives in Philadelphia, where she directs Blue Stoop, a hub for the literary arts. 

Thumbnail: Sylvie Rosokoff

Craft Capsule: Stillness and Silence

by

Mimi Lok

1.20.20

This is no. 47 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I am one of those people who enjoys reading articles about the rituals and habits of writers. Partly because the articles acknowledge the work and commitment that goes into writing a story or a book, and partly because they demystify the process a little. But I’ll admit that I’m also reading because, in the same way that I’ve clicked on BuzzFeed listicles of household items that promise to magically increase my happiness quotient, I’m often hoping for a quick fix when I feel stuck or unproductive. 

I’ve repeatedly thrown myself too eagerly into a new writing ritual, hoping it will unlock something and then inspiration will flow. I’ve tried only writing at certain times of day or night. I’ve tried maintaining an immaculately organized desk, pens and notebook neatly lined up along the table’s edge. I’ve tried writing in the dark cave of a closet, and in front of a window, the view ideally green and leafy, though a view of a brick wall, it turns out, is fine too. One writer I know cannot work without the bustle of people around her, which becomes a reassuring sort of white noise. I often like a quietish room with faint sounds of human life, but have also been able to write with a teenager playing video games next to me. Total isolation, I’ve discovered, feels claustrophobic and lonely. 

I’ve come to realize that, rather than striving to create the best atmosphere for writing, what really matters is creating the conditions for pre-writing. Silence. And by silence I don’t mean the absence of external noise, but of internal noise. As Kimberlee Pérez describes it, silence is “a point of entry into deep listening.” 

So how does one create silence? One way is through meditation.  

I consider myself a lousy meditator. Not that it’s a competitive sport or anything, but I am the first to admit I could do it more often, and for longer. Still, more than taking a walk, or going for a run, or taking a shower, or eating a packet of chocolate digestive biscuits, I’ve found that meditating helps my writing. When I meditate, I’m definitely not turning over a writing problem in my mind. I’m just trying to pay attention—trying being the operative word—to nothing but my breath. In, out. In, out. It’s bloody difficult to do. Only when I invite stillness do I have to contend with how cluttered and hectic my mind really is, like a monkey on amphetamines jumping from branch to vine to branch, ooh what’s that over there, I’ll swing onto that roof as well, oh no! I’ve landed in pigeon shit, oh well, look, banana! (This is what 99 percent of meditating is like. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar.) And I never expect epiphanies, but sometimes in that monkey mess or in very rare moments of equanimity, thoughts will shoot up from the depths and break the surface. 

Afterwards, I am most definitely not full of clarity or calm. But I usually find I have a little bit more space in my head, and I’m a little bit more alert. I might not return to the writing straight away. I might make a cup of tea first, or leave it until later that day, or the next day. But when I do return to the page, I encounter the work, more often than not, in a slightly different way, the path ahead cleared of whatever obstacles were previously blocking it. Or maybe the obstacles were previously invisible to me and now I can identify them. 

Meditation is not a quick fix, or a hotline to call up in a moment of crisis. Like writing, it requires practice so that the mind gets used to stilling and quieting itself enough to listen. It’s like going to a mental gym, and even if 99 percent of the time my thoughts fly all over the place, the practice does eventually translate into a kind of discipline of the mind when I’m writing, and helps me to stay in the moment of the story—to focus and immerse myself, and to listen for what comes next.  

How to meditate:

  1. Turn off or silence your phone and put it in another room.
     
  2. Set an analog timer for fifteen minutes.
     
  3. Find a sitting position (chair, cushion, stool, etcetera) that you think you’ll be comfortable in for that duration.
     
  4. Close your eyes and focus on your breath in the space between your nostrils and your upper lip. (Sometimes I like to count my breaths up to ten, then start over so that it doesn’t feel as if I’m breathing into the howling abyss of eternity.)
     
  5. If you feel your mind stray, breathe in and out more deeply for a few breaths, then return to normal breathing.
     
  6. If you feel your mind stray, don’t beat yourself up about it. Just return to your breath with the gentleness and patience you might employ if you had to guide a lamb or a small child away from a cliff edge.
     
  7. Rinse and repeat until the timer goes off. 

 

Mimi Lok is the author of the story collection Last of Her Name (Kaya Press, 2019), which was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. She is the recipient of a Smithsonian Ingenuity Award and an Ylvisaker Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Fiction Prize and the Susan Atefat Arts and Letters Prize for nonfiction. Her work can be found in McSweeney’s, Electric Literature, and Literary Hub, among other outlets. She is currently working on a novel. Lok is also the cofounder, executive director, and editor of Voice of Witness, an award-winning human rights/oral history nonprofit that amplifies marginalized voices through a book series and a national education program.

Thumbnail: Chi Tranter

Craft Capsule: Stillness and Silence

by

Mimi Lok

1.20.20

This is no. 47 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I am one of those people who enjoys reading articles about the rituals and habits of writers. Partly because the articles acknowledge the work and commitment that goes into writing a story or a book, and partly because they demystify the process a little. But I’ll admit that I’m also reading because, in the same way that I’ve clicked on BuzzFeed listicles of household items that promise to magically increase my happiness quotient, I’m often hoping for a quick fix when I feel stuck or unproductive. 

I’ve repeatedly thrown myself too eagerly into a new writing ritual, hoping it will unlock something and then inspiration will flow. I’ve tried only writing at certain times of day or night. I’ve tried maintaining an immaculately organized desk, pens and notebook neatly lined up along the table’s edge. I’ve tried writing in the dark cave of a closet, and in front of a window, the view ideally green and leafy, though a view of a brick wall, it turns out, is fine too. One writer I know cannot work without the bustle of people around her, which becomes a reassuring sort of white noise. I often like a quietish room with faint sounds of human life, but have also been able to write with a teenager playing video games next to me. Total isolation, I’ve discovered, feels claustrophobic and lonely. 

I’ve come to realize that, rather than striving to create the best atmosphere for writing, what really matters is creating the conditions for pre-writing. Silence. And by silence I don’t mean the absence of external noise, but of internal noise. As Kimberlee Pérez describes it, silence is “a point of entry into deep listening.” 

So how does one create silence? One way is through meditation.  

I consider myself a lousy meditator. Not that it’s a competitive sport or anything, but I am the first to admit I could do it more often, and for longer. Still, more than taking a walk, or going for a run, or taking a shower, or eating a packet of chocolate digestive biscuits, I’ve found that meditating helps my writing. When I meditate, I’m definitely not turning over a writing problem in my mind. I’m just trying to pay attention—trying being the operative word—to nothing but my breath. In, out. In, out. It’s bloody difficult to do. Only when I invite stillness do I have to contend with how cluttered and hectic my mind really is, like a monkey on amphetamines jumping from branch to vine to branch, ooh what’s that over there, I’ll swing onto that roof as well, oh no! I’ve landed in pigeon shit, oh well, look, banana! (This is what 99 percent of meditating is like. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar.) And I never expect epiphanies, but sometimes in that monkey mess or in very rare moments of equanimity, thoughts will shoot up from the depths and break the surface. 

Afterwards, I am most definitely not full of clarity or calm. But I usually find I have a little bit more space in my head, and I’m a little bit more alert. I might not return to the writing straight away. I might make a cup of tea first, or leave it until later that day, or the next day. But when I do return to the page, I encounter the work, more often than not, in a slightly different way, the path ahead cleared of whatever obstacles were previously blocking it. Or maybe the obstacles were previously invisible to me and now I can identify them. 

Meditation is not a quick fix, or a hotline to call up in a moment of crisis. Like writing, it requires practice so that the mind gets used to stilling and quieting itself enough to listen. It’s like going to a mental gym, and even if 99 percent of the time my thoughts fly all over the place, the practice does eventually translate into a kind of discipline of the mind when I’m writing, and helps me to stay in the moment of the story—to focus and immerse myself, and to listen for what comes next.  

How to meditate:

  1. Turn off or silence your phone and put it in another room.
     
  2. Set an analog timer for fifteen minutes.
     
  3. Find a sitting position (chair, cushion, stool, etcetera) that you think you’ll be comfortable in for that duration.
     
  4. Close your eyes and focus on your breath in the space between your nostrils and your upper lip. (Sometimes I like to count my breaths up to ten, then start over so that it doesn’t feel as if I’m breathing into the howling abyss of eternity.)
     
  5. If you feel your mind stray, breathe in and out more deeply for a few breaths, then return to normal breathing.
     
  6. If you feel your mind stray, don’t beat yourself up about it. Just return to your breath with the gentleness and patience you might employ if you had to guide a lamb or a small child away from a cliff edge.
     
  7. Rinse and repeat until the timer goes off. 

 

Mimi Lok is the author of the story collection Last of Her Name (Kaya Press, 2019), which was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. She is the recipient of a Smithsonian Ingenuity Award and an Ylvisaker Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Fiction Prize and the Susan Atefat Arts and Letters Prize for nonfiction. Her work can be found in McSweeney’s, Electric Literature, and Literary Hub, among other outlets. She is currently working on a novel. Lok is also the cofounder, executive director, and editor of Voice of Witness, an award-winning human rights/oral history nonprofit that amplifies marginalized voices through a book series and a national education program.

Thumbnail: Chi Tranter

Craft Capsule: Living Images

by

Emma Copley Eisenberg

3.9.20

This is no. 52 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Lynda Barry has this thing about images; she says they’re alive. The writer and comics artist’s philosophy on making art is difficult to explain because it’s so true—but I’ll try. Find an image from your memory that’s alive and then draw or write it, she says, whichever is more your thing. Anything can be an image. Your first phone number when you say it out loud, a flash of an old notebook with a snowman in it, a brick wall you saw yesterday. 

Almost all of my projects have started from images. For my nonfiction book, The Third Rainbow Girl, it was the image of three women hitchhikers: two on one side of the road, the third on the other side and heading in the opposite direction. For my short story “Fat Swim,” it was the image of a little fat girl looking through a chain-link fence to watch a group of fat women in bathing suits happily playing together in a pool. I cannot remember if Lynda Barry says this or if I say this, but the key to turning an image into a narrative is to ask: Into what life does this image come? For whom is this image urgent?

It doesn’t sound like something Lynda Barry would say. It sounds too pragmatic, and too focused on making an image into something, something you can package and sell, and LB isn’t usually that into somethings. Her books on the craft of writing and drawing, What It Is, Picture This: The Near-Sighted Monkey Book, Syllabus: Notes From an Accidental Professor, and Making Comics, are much more focused on the nothings than the somethings: the places where memory crashes up onto the sand of the present and leaves a shadow impression once it’s retreated, the spaces in childhood for abject despair that just never get filled in, the ways that ghosts of childhood play can morph and change and haunt us, telling us our ideas and feelings are not even worth recording. Of all these books, What It Is has the most to say about images and the craft of writing. I know exactly where this book is in my house at all times. I can see it now, downstairs on the biggest bottom bookshelf nestled up against the fancy Aperture catalogue, with its big smooth cover and its slick pages, once textured collages LB made with her own hands but now the regular thickness of regular paper. 

For a while I kept a notebook of three images from my day and made my writing students do the same. They could be images from the present or from the past: a red sneaker against a silver background on Philly’s El train, the look on my old cat’s face when he stuck his nose in my ear to wake me up, or whatever else came up that day. When I was empty sitting down to write at my desk, I could flip through this image catalogue and see what caught, what still felt alive. I should probably start doing that again. 

 

Emma Copley Eisenberg is the author of The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia (Hachette Books, 2020). Her writing has appeared in McSweeney’sGranta, the Los Angeles Review of BooksAmerican Short Fiction, the Paris Review Daily, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, and other outlets. She is also the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Wurlitzer Foundation, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and Lambda Literary. She lives in Philadelphia, where she directs Blue Stoop, a hub for the literary arts. 

Thumbnail: Guillaume Paumier

Craft Capsule: In Praise of Drastic Measures

by

Mimi Lok

2.3.20

This is no. 49 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

It can be helpful, at a certain point in a writing project, to change up elements that previously felt off limits. One of these elements is setting. 

About ten years ago I came across a short news article about a woman in Japan who’d been arrested for sneaking into a man’s home and living in his closet. When the police asked why she’d done it, she said that she had nowhere else to live. I tried to find out more, but every piece I found recycled the same couple of paragraphs. It didn’t make sense to me that there wasn’t more to the story—there was so much more I wanted to know. I kept thinking, Who is this woman? 

Her story became the basis for my novella “The Woman in the Closet”—the final story in my debut collection, Last of Her Name. For the longest time I’d kept the setting faithful to the article, to both honor the inspiration for the story and to help ground my fictional extrapolations in a culturally and socially specific context. But when I was working on the manuscript with my editor, Sunyoung Lee, we grappled with a couple of issues with the story. First: The other stories in the collection focused on Chinese characters. This story, with its Japanese protagonist and setting, was an outlier in that sense, and I twisted myself into knots trying to connect it to the rest of the collection. Maybe the protagonist, Granny Ito, was half Chinese? Or maybe she was Chinese and immigrated to Japan? It all felt rather strained. The other issue with the story was that, as careful as I’d tried to be, I’d still tripped up on certain details that Sunyoung, whose husband is Japanese, pointed out were culturally inaccurate, such as the kind of soup one would serve a guest in a certain situation. The casual reader wouldn’t have caught it, but someone familiar with Japanese culture and customs would, and I didn’t want to have anything in there that would be a distraction. I was prepared to go through the story again with a fine-tooth comb to try and catch other inaccuracies, but then Sunyoung asked, “Is there a particular reason why it’s set in Japan?” I bristled at the notion that it could be set anywhere but Japan, but at the same time my defense of the choice sounded, well, defensive, when said aloud. Sunyoung asked me to consider changing the setting, and if it didn’t feel right then we’d stick to the original and figure out how to make it work.

I relocated the story to Hong Kong, changing the names, locations, cultural references, and so on. Almost immediately I felt the story clicking along with more ease. But I soon encountered a different issue: Hong Kong, unlike Japan, doesn’t have tent villages, and tent villages feature prominently in the story. Then I thought, But it could…in the future. Given the increasing wealth disparity in Hong Kong and the city’s ongoing instability—though the current protests hadn’t started yet when I wrote this story—I decided it wasn’t at all beyond the realm of possibility. So the story moved from Japan to Hong Kong, from the present to the near-future, and Granny Ito became Granny Ng. Just like that, the story was infused with a different, subtly futuristic kind of energy that rippled back through the other stories in the collection—stories that also jumped around in time and place, but which all occupied the past or present. Ending the collection with a story set in the future felt right. Even now, when I imagine the two versions of the story next to each other, I see the original through a slightly dim, faded Polaroid filter, and the final version with the clarity of a bright, blue sky.                   

 

Mimi Lok is the author of the story collection Last of Her Name (Kaya Press, 2019), which was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. She is the recipient of a Smithsonian Ingenuity Award and an Ylvisaker Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Fiction Prize and the Susan Atefat Arts and Letters Prize for nonfiction. Her work can be found in McSweeney’s, Electric Literature, and Literary Hub, among other outlets. She is currently working on a novel. Lok is also the cofounder, executive director, and editor of Voice of Witness, an award-winning human rights/oral history nonprofit that amplifies marginalized voices through a book series and a national education program.

Craft Capsule: Voice in the Epistolary Story

by

Mimi Lok

1.27.20

This is no. 48 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Epistolary stories can be tricky to pull off—they can seem contrived, awkward, or precious. There’s often a delicate balance at play when calibrating the reader’s awareness of the form and their immersion in the world of the story. In the case of letters, the letter writer’s voice, in this regard, is crucial. It’s a bit like being driven by a guide through an unfamiliar landscape—you’re looking at the scenery and at people going about their business, aware that you can only see so much through the windscreen and passenger side window, but you’re okay with that because you know you’re in a car. But what you don’t want to be thinking about is how broken-down or fancy the car is, or how your guide is driving, because you only tend to notice someone’s driving when you’re worried they don’t have full control of the vehicle.

I wrestled with voice a lot in my epistolary story “The Wrong Dave,” which appeared in my debut collection, Last of Her Name. The protagonist, Dave, a soon-to-be-married man in London, embarks upon an illicit correspondence with Yi, a wedding crasher he briefly met several years ago in Hong Kong. Yi contacts him out of the blue, grief-stricken after a death in her family, and Dave suspects she’s writing to the wrong Dave. Still, he decides to continue writing to her. From this point in the story on, the reader, like Dave, sees Yi entirely through her e-mail exchanges with Dave, who becomes increasingly infatuated with her.

Writing this story, I considered how letters allow for absence and omission, and how those elements can help fuel a fantasy of someone you don’t know that well. E-mail is such a strange, inadequate medium of communication, and because so much is left out and what remains is magnified, sometimes way out of proportion, it becomes fertile ground for misunderstanding and obsession. So while we see the various external and internal aspects of Dave’s life and follow him around a fair bit, I wanted the reader to have limited access to Yi. I wanted her to be tantalizing to the reader as well as to Dave—not exactly in the same way, but enough to believe why Dave would be so drawn to her. 

The e-mails brought out the very different ways in which Dave and Yi express themselves and what that says about why they’re writing to the other person. Yi’s e-mails are almost an unfiltered stream of consciousness—you get the feeling she’s not even thinking about what she’s writing—but Dave is extremely neurotic and careful about every word, as if he’s worried he’s going to expose himself in some way. For Yi, she wants to be seen—she uses the e-mails to try and make a human connection—but she’s also screaming her grief and anger into the void. It was really freeing for me, someone who tends more towards Dave’s type of e-mail neurosis, to write in Yi’s voice. Dave, however, definitely hides behind the medium. Its remove from the physical world, combined with its immediacy, lets him continue to feed his secret correspondence and romanticizing of Yi, completely free of consequence—or so he thinks.

The limited access to Yi leads the reader, like Dave, to project various ideas about the kind of person she might be, or the kind of person Dave might want her to be—the difference being that the reader is more aware of this projection than Dave himself is. She says so much, but to what is Dave really paying attention? And in Dave’s case, there’s the dissonance between the insight the reader has into his life and the vastness of what he chooses not to reveal about himself in his e-mails. 

So, in the case of epistolary stories based on letters, it’s important to understand why the characters are writing to each other, what kind of language is particular to them, and what the form reveals or hides—and how that squares with what you want revealed, or hidden from, your reader.

 

Mimi Lok is the author of the story collection Last of Her Name (Kaya Press, 2019), which was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. She is the recipient of a Smithsonian Ingenuity Award and an Ylvisaker Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Fiction Prize and the Susan Atefat Arts and Letters Prize for nonfiction. Her work can be found in McSweeney’s, Electric Literature, and Literary Hub, among other outlets. She is currently working on a novel. Lok is also the cofounder, executive director, and editor of Voice of Witness, an award-winning human rights/oral history nonprofit that amplifies marginalized voices through a book series and a national education program.

Thumbnail: Joanna Kosinska

Craft Capsule: Voice in the Epistolary Story

by

Mimi Lok

1.27.20

This is no. 48 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Epistolary stories can be tricky to pull off—they can seem contrived, awkward, or precious. There’s often a delicate balance at play when calibrating the reader’s awareness of the form and their immersion in the world of the story. In the case of letters, the letter writer’s voice, in this regard, is crucial. It’s a bit like being driven by a guide through an unfamiliar landscape—you’re looking at the scenery and at people going about their business, aware that you can only see so much through the windscreen and passenger side window, but you’re okay with that because you know you’re in a car. But what you don’t want to be thinking about is how broken-down or fancy the car is, or how your guide is driving, because you only tend to notice someone’s driving when you’re worried they don’t have full control of the vehicle.

I wrestled with voice a lot in my epistolary story “The Wrong Dave,” which appeared in my debut collection, Last of Her Name. The protagonist, Dave, a soon-to-be-married man in London, embarks upon an illicit correspondence with Yi, a wedding crasher he briefly met several years ago in Hong Kong. Yi contacts him out of the blue, grief-stricken after a death in her family, and Dave suspects she’s writing to the wrong Dave. Still, he decides to continue writing to her. From this point in the story on, the reader, like Dave, sees Yi entirely through her e-mail exchanges with Dave, who becomes increasingly infatuated with her.

Writing this story, I considered how letters allow for absence and omission, and how those elements can help fuel a fantasy of someone you don’t know that well. E-mail is such a strange, inadequate medium of communication, and because so much is left out and what remains is magnified, sometimes way out of proportion, it becomes fertile ground for misunderstanding and obsession. So while we see the various external and internal aspects of Dave’s life and follow him around a fair bit, I wanted the reader to have limited access to Yi. I wanted her to be tantalizing to the reader as well as to Dave—not exactly in the same way, but enough to believe why Dave would be so drawn to her. 

The e-mails brought out the very different ways in which Dave and Yi express themselves and what that says about why they’re writing to the other person. Yi’s e-mails are almost an unfiltered stream of consciousness—you get the feeling she’s not even thinking about what she’s writing—but Dave is extremely neurotic and careful about every word, as if he’s worried he’s going to expose himself in some way. For Yi, she wants to be seen—she uses the e-mails to try and make a human connection—but she’s also screaming her grief and anger into the void. It was really freeing for me, someone who tends more towards Dave’s type of e-mail neurosis, to write in Yi’s voice. Dave, however, definitely hides behind the medium. Its remove from the physical world, combined with its immediacy, lets him continue to feed his secret correspondence and romanticizing of Yi, completely free of consequence—or so he thinks.

The limited access to Yi leads the reader, like Dave, to project various ideas about the kind of person she might be, or the kind of person Dave might want her to be—the difference being that the reader is more aware of this projection than Dave himself is. She says so much, but to what is Dave really paying attention? And in Dave’s case, there’s the dissonance between the insight the reader has into his life and the vastness of what he chooses not to reveal about himself in his e-mails. 

So, in the case of epistolary stories based on letters, it’s important to understand why the characters are writing to each other, what kind of language is particular to them, and what the form reveals or hides—and how that squares with what you want revealed, or hidden from, your reader.

 

Mimi Lok is the author of the story collection Last of Her Name (Kaya Press, 2019), which was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. She is the recipient of a Smithsonian Ingenuity Award and an Ylvisaker Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Fiction Prize and the Susan Atefat Arts and Letters Prize for nonfiction. Her work can be found in McSweeney’s, Electric Literature, and Literary Hub, among other outlets. She is currently working on a novel. Lok is also the cofounder, executive director, and editor of Voice of Witness, an award-winning human rights/oral history nonprofit that amplifies marginalized voices through a book series and a national education program.

Thumbnail: Joanna Kosinska

Craft Capsule: Voice in the Epistolary Story

by

Mimi Lok

1.27.20

This is no. 48 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Epistolary stories can be tricky to pull off—they can seem contrived, awkward, or precious. There’s often a delicate balance at play when calibrating the reader’s awareness of the form and their immersion in the world of the story. In the case of letters, the letter writer’s voice, in this regard, is crucial. It’s a bit like being driven by a guide through an unfamiliar landscape—you’re looking at the scenery and at people going about their business, aware that you can only see so much through the windscreen and passenger side window, but you’re okay with that because you know you’re in a car. But what you don’t want to be thinking about is how broken-down or fancy the car is, or how your guide is driving, because you only tend to notice someone’s driving when you’re worried they don’t have full control of the vehicle.

I wrestled with voice a lot in my epistolary story “The Wrong Dave,” which appeared in my debut collection, Last of Her Name. The protagonist, Dave, a soon-to-be-married man in London, embarks upon an illicit correspondence with Yi, a wedding crasher he briefly met several years ago in Hong Kong. Yi contacts him out of the blue, grief-stricken after a death in her family, and Dave suspects she’s writing to the wrong Dave. Still, he decides to continue writing to her. From this point in the story on, the reader, like Dave, sees Yi entirely through her e-mail exchanges with Dave, who becomes increasingly infatuated with her.

Writing this story, I considered how letters allow for absence and omission, and how those elements can help fuel a fantasy of someone you don’t know that well. E-mail is such a strange, inadequate medium of communication, and because so much is left out and what remains is magnified, sometimes way out of proportion, it becomes fertile ground for misunderstanding and obsession. So while we see the various external and internal aspects of Dave’s life and follow him around a fair bit, I wanted the reader to have limited access to Yi. I wanted her to be tantalizing to the reader as well as to Dave—not exactly in the same way, but enough to believe why Dave would be so drawn to her. 

The e-mails brought out the very different ways in which Dave and Yi express themselves and what that says about why they’re writing to the other person. Yi’s e-mails are almost an unfiltered stream of consciousness—you get the feeling she’s not even thinking about what she’s writing—but Dave is extremely neurotic and careful about every word, as if he’s worried he’s going to expose himself in some way. For Yi, she wants to be seen—she uses the e-mails to try and make a human connection—but she’s also screaming her grief and anger into the void. It was really freeing for me, someone who tends more towards Dave’s type of e-mail neurosis, to write in Yi’s voice. Dave, however, definitely hides behind the medium. Its remove from the physical world, combined with its immediacy, lets him continue to feed his secret correspondence and romanticizing of Yi, completely free of consequence—or so he thinks.

The limited access to Yi leads the reader, like Dave, to project various ideas about the kind of person she might be, or the kind of person Dave might want her to be—the difference being that the reader is more aware of this projection than Dave himself is. She says so much, but to what is Dave really paying attention? And in Dave’s case, there’s the dissonance between the insight the reader has into his life and the vastness of what he chooses not to reveal about himself in his e-mails. 

So, in the case of epistolary stories based on letters, it’s important to understand why the characters are writing to each other, what kind of language is particular to them, and what the form reveals or hides—and how that squares with what you want revealed, or hidden from, your reader.

 

Mimi Lok is the author of the story collection Last of Her Name (Kaya Press, 2019), which was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. She is the recipient of a Smithsonian Ingenuity Award and an Ylvisaker Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Fiction Prize and the Susan Atefat Arts and Letters Prize for nonfiction. Her work can be found in McSweeney’s, Electric Literature, and Literary Hub, among other outlets. She is currently working on a novel. Lok is also the cofounder, executive director, and editor of Voice of Witness, an award-winning human rights/oral history nonprofit that amplifies marginalized voices through a book series and a national education program.

Thumbnail: Joanna Kosinska

Craft Capsule: Cut for Time

by

Carter Sickels

4.6.20

This is no. 55 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

When you’re reading a good novel, you’re not usually thinking about the passages the author cut, the intense revision process, or all the pages the author wrote in order to get to The Writing. These sweaty, often clumsy and inelegant pages don’t show up in the book you’re holding, but they were essential to finishing the novel.

My first novel, The Evening Hour, about Cole Freeman, a small-time drug dealer and nurse’s home aide living in the coalfields of West Virginia, took six years to write. The novel uses third-person limited narration, but in order to figure out Cole, I filled up notebooks with him speaking in first person—this voice wasn’t strong enough to carry the novel, but it revealed his innermost thoughts and feelings. I also wrote monologues for the other characters to learn how people viewed Cole. I did not intend for any of this “extra” writing to go into the novel, but it was invaluable—a way for me to gather information about Cole’s family and community, and better understand his conflicts, secrets, and desires. 

I’ve kept writing journals for years; they’re a hodgepodge of personal memories, ideas, quotes, observations. A few years ago, when I team-taught a novel writing class with the author Alexis Smith, she wisely suggested keeping a journal dedicated solely and entirely to your novel—nothing goes in unless novel-related. 

My new novel, The Prettiest Star, took around four and a half years to write. Most of this time, I was sitting at my desk, typing on my laptop. But I also filled up four Decomposition Books with material. These novel-notebooks are raw and intimate, brewing with my questions, concerns, ideas. They contain crucial writing around and behind the novel, the words and scraps of ideas and shimmers of light that spill beyond the pages of the manuscript. They’re a form of play, and all writers need time to play. Now that the novel is finished, they’re an archive, and a reminder of how messy, exhilarating, joyful, and confounding the writing process is, a mix of hard work and faith and a little bit of magic. 

Found in the pages of my notebooks:

• Lists of scenes to write
• Character sketches
• Character freewrites and monologues: their dreams, hopes, fears, memories
• Chapter outlines
• Lists of clothing, movies, TV shows, music 
• Descriptions of characters’ rooms
• Hypotheticals: What would happen if this happened, or that
• Timelines
• Blueprints of houses
• Maps of the town
• Early working titles 
• Lists of character names, street names, restaurants
• Lists of objects from the eighties (sticker books, Rubik’s Cube, etc.) 
• Notes on important events, imagery, or places to return to (i.e. the abandoned drive-in)
• Questions, questions, questions—about characters, plot, structure, themes. How does Jess find out Brian has AIDS? How do the rumors get started?

 

Carter Sickels’s second novel, The Prettiest Star, will be published by Hub City Press on May 19. He is also the author of The Evening Hour (Bloomsbury, 2012), which was a finalist for an Oregon Book Award and a Lambda Literary Award. His essays and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in various publications, including Guernica, Bellevue Literary Review, Green Mountains Review, and BuzzFeed. The recipient of the 2013 Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Award, Sickels has also earned fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. He is an assistant professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University, where he teaches in the Bluegrass Writers low-residency MFA program. 

Thumbnail: Jon Tyson

Craft Capsule: Metabolizing

by

Emma Copley Eisenberg

3.16.20

This is no. 53 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

The writer and comics artist Lynda Barry says that the mind is at its most relaxed and creative when the body (hands, usually) are engaged in something mindless and repetitive. She suggests drawing, of course. In her “Writing the Unthinkable” workshop, she has participants draw a spiral while they listen, urging them to try to keep the concentric circles as close together as possible. 

I like drawing for this purpose, but I prefer driving. The hands go on the wheel, the windshield opens the eyes up, the foot lifts up and down. The sun is bright and you unclip the sun visor from its little holder and rotate it to a more pleasing position. You turn the radio up or scan until you find something nice or hard or whatever it is that matches your mood. I like to sip from the straw of my water bottle as I drive, and I like to use the turn signal. I probably turn my head too much to check my blind spot, but the movement of it feels both careful and good. 

What is it about these small movements and the feeling of the world rushing past that makes bits of language, sentences, phrases, whole paragraphs sometimes, rush fully formed into the mind? Fairly often, I have to pull over at a welcome station or scenic view turnoff to type them into my phone. People have told me I could dictate, record my voice, but I don’t—it’s not the same. It’s not the sound of my voice I want to record; it’s the rhythm of the words and the way they look next to one another. 

In 2011, after I packed up my 1997 white Toyota Tacoma, equipped with a platform bed in the back and fitted with West Virginia wildlife plates that I’d purchased with two identical post-office money orders, I drove away from the place where I’d been living for the past eighteen months or so, a place I didn’t yet have any language to describe. All I knew was that for a while I couldn’t eat and I couldn’t talk to anyone and I couldn’t live anywhere else. What I could do was drive. I drove more than ten thousand miles in about three months, making a great oval through the upper middle, west coast, lower middle, and east coast of the United States. 

Very little language, very few sentences came to me during that drive, as they usually do now. I wasn’t a writer yet. But what did come to me as I drove across the prairies and past the football fields in Kansas, toward the crashing sunset in Denver, through the storms of Oregon Route 1, and down the snowy Grand Canyon BLM roads was understanding, insight. I processed as I drove; if you will, I metabolized, taking in sadness and confusion and spitting out miles. What had I done and what had they done and who even was I? Certain answers presented themselves in the form of a gay cowboy bar in West Texas and the parking lot of Faulkner’s Rowan Oaks. It would take me ten more years to write them down, but driving released them from my bloodstream. It was a start. 

 

Emma Copley Eisenberg is the author of The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia (Hachette Books, 2020). Her writing has appeared in McSweeney’sGranta, the Los Angeles Review of BooksAmerican Short Fiction, the Paris Review Daily, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, and other outlets. She is also the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Wurlitzer Foundation, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and Lambda Literary. She lives in Philadelphia, where she directs Blue Stoop, a hub for the literary arts. 

Thumbnail: Jason Abdilla

Craft Capsule: Multiple Points of View

by

Carter Sickels

4.13.20

This is no. 56 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich, A Home at the End of the World by Michael Cunningham, The Poisonwood Diaries by Barbara Kingsolver, The Birds of Opulence by Crystal Wilkinson, People in Trouble by Sarah Schulman, There There by Tommy Orange. All of these wonderful novels use multiple points of view and weave a tapestry of voices, with each character relaying their own version of the story to tell a broader narrative of family, place, or community.

My novel The Prettiest Star, set in 1986, follows Brian Jackson, a young, gay, HIV-positive man, who leaves New York City to return to the rural small town where he grew up and where his family still lives. When I first started writing, I wrote from the point of view of Jess, Brian’s fourteen-year-old sister, about the day Brian returns. Then I wrote sections from Brian’s perspective: What was it like to come back to the home he couldn’t wait to escape? A few months in I wrote a chapter from their mother Sharon’s perspective and suddenly realized I would need all three voices to tell this story of shame, secrets, and silences, and the complicated ties of familial love and betrayal. Writing from Sharon’s point of view gave me another angle into the story—a complicated, troubling one. Sharon is the voice of restraint and denial. She loves her son, but her worry about what neighbors and God will think get in the way.

Despite its reputation, first-person point of view is not easy to pull off. My first creative writing teacher, the brilliant Eve Shelnutt, had very strong opinions about writing, and she warned me to not even try first-person narration until I’d written at least twenty or thirty stories in third person. First-person narration seems easy to write because when it’s done well, the voice sounds intimate and authentic—we believe. But as the writer, you’re making particular choices about diction, syntax, and rhythm, so that you create a voice that sounds natural, but isn’t, most likely, exactly how that character would talk. 

Juggling multiple first-person narrators created another challenge: The individual voices must sound unique and separate, yet their differences should not be so obvious that they draw attention to the artifice of first person. For my three characters, in addition to trying to capture their voices through word choices and syntax, I paid attention to their interior lives: How do they think and feel, how do they view the world, and what is important to them? Their emotional timbre and interiority led me to their voices: Sharon’s denial, Jess’s youthful savviness, and Brian’s hurt, fear, and anger. Brian is the anchor of the novel, and his sections were the most difficult to write. A couple years into the process, I figured out that if I framed Brian’s sections as video diaries—he uses a video camera to document his last summer, and directly addresses the viewer/reader about his experiences as a queer man living during the AIDS epidemic—I could set his chapters apart, and reveal him at his most vulnerable, artistic, and honest. Moreover, the dated video diaries serve as a ticking clock; like so many young gay men, Brian will not survive this plague, but he wants to bear witness and document for posterity.

Alternating between characters chapter by chapter also informed my approach to the writing process. Some days, I switched between characters—an hour with Jess, then an hour with Brian. This approach gave me a better sense of how the novel worked as a whole. And it was sometimes a relief to move from one character to another, to get out of one character’s head and dive into another’s. On other days, I spent the hours intensely focused on a single character—immersed in one voice, one side of the story. I followed a similar approach when I printed out a full draft to revise—I read aloud all the Sharon chapters together, then all the Brian chapters, then all of Jess’s. Did the characters’ voices sound consistent? Did they carry their sections? Did the characters have their own individual narrative arcs? Then I arranged the chapters in the correct order and read my novel from beginning to end, paying close attention to how the alternating voices built tension and created momentum. 

Writing a novel with multiple first-person narrators was challenging, but it also brought me a lot of pleasure and joy. I tried to fully inhabit my characters—to write from a place of empathy while digging deep into their flaws, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities.  

 

Carter Sickels’s second novel, The Prettiest Star, will be published by Hub City Press on May 19. He is also the author of The Evening Hour (Bloomsbury, 2012), which was a finalist for an Oregon Book Award and a Lambda Literary Award. His essays and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in various publications, including GuernicaBellevue Literary ReviewGreen Mountains Review, and BuzzFeed. The recipient of the 2013 Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Award, Sickels has also earned fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. He is an assistant professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University, where he teaches in the Bluegrass Writers low-residency MFA program. 

Thumbnail: Jason Leung

Craft Capsule: Cut for Time

by

Carter Sickels

4.6.20

This is no. 55 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

When you’re reading a good novel, you’re not usually thinking about the passages the author cut, the intense revision process, or all the pages the author wrote in order to get to The Writing. These sweaty, often clumsy and inelegant pages don’t show up in the book you’re holding, but they were essential to finishing the novel.

My first novel, The Evening Hour, about Cole Freeman, a small-time drug dealer and nurse’s home aide living in the coalfields of West Virginia, took six years to write. The novel uses third-person limited narration, but in order to figure out Cole, I filled up notebooks with him speaking in first person—this voice wasn’t strong enough to carry the novel, but it revealed his innermost thoughts and feelings. I also wrote monologues for the other characters to learn how people viewed Cole. I did not intend for any of this “extra” writing to go into the novel, but it was invaluable—a way for me to gather information about Cole’s family and community, and better understand his conflicts, secrets, and desires. 

I’ve kept writing journals for years; they’re a hodgepodge of personal memories, ideas, quotes, observations. A few years ago, when I team-taught a novel writing class with the author Alexis Smith, she wisely suggested keeping a journal dedicated solely and entirely to your novel—nothing goes in unless novel-related. 

My new novel, The Prettiest Star, took around four and a half years to write. Most of this time, I was sitting at my desk, typing on my laptop. But I also filled up four Decomposition Books with material. These novel-notebooks are raw and intimate, brewing with my questions, concerns, ideas. They contain crucial writing around and behind the novel, the words and scraps of ideas and shimmers of light that spill beyond the pages of the manuscript. They’re a form of play, and all writers need time to play. Now that the novel is finished, they’re an archive, and a reminder of how messy, exhilarating, joyful, and confounding the writing process is, a mix of hard work and faith and a little bit of magic. 

Found in the pages of my notebooks:

• Lists of scenes to write
• Character sketches
• Character freewrites and monologues: their dreams, hopes, fears, memories
• Chapter outlines
• Lists of clothing, movies, TV shows, music 
• Descriptions of characters’ rooms
• Hypotheticals: What would happen if this happened, or that
• Timelines
• Blueprints of houses
• Maps of the town
• Early working titles 
• Lists of character names, street names, restaurants
• Lists of objects from the eighties (sticker books, Rubik’s Cube, etc.) 
• Notes on important events, imagery, or places to return to (i.e. the abandoned drive-in)
• Questions, questions, questions—about characters, plot, structure, themes. How does Jess find out Brian has AIDS? How do the rumors get started?

 

Carter Sickels’s second novel, The Prettiest Star, will be published by Hub City Press on May 19. He is also the author of The Evening Hour (Bloomsbury, 2012), which was a finalist for an Oregon Book Award and a Lambda Literary Award. His essays and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in various publications, including Guernica, Bellevue Literary Review, Green Mountains Review, and BuzzFeed. The recipient of the 2013 Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Award, Sickels has also earned fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. He is an assistant professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University, where he teaches in the Bluegrass Writers low-residency MFA program. 

Thumbnail: Jon Tyson

Craft Capsule: Consulting the Tarot

by

Emma Copley Eisenberg

2.24.20

This is no. 50 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I was raised in a house of reason where there was no God, no witchcraft, no science fiction, no astrology, and certainly no tarot. These things were for the weak, and we were not weak. But I’ll never forget when I read Uncle Tom’s Cabin and it dawned on me why Tom prayed so much: He was just trying to get through the day. I was weak, I knew. To make it from dawn to dusk, I too needed all the help I could get. 

Tarot came into my life through the friend, the friend I lost, and it is the thing she gave me more than any other for which I offer her my supreme gratitude. To be fair, I acquired the deck itself—The Wild Unknown by Kim Krans—much earlier; I bought it on impulse late one night on the gushing recommendation of someone I’d met at a party. You are not supposed to buy a tarot deck for yourself, I learned later, perhaps because without the blessing of someone you love to imbue the paper and images with power, a deck of cards is just a deck of cards.

I cannot now separate tarot from the friend, and I cannot separate tarot from writing. She and I became friends during the period when the card of the moon, which according to my deck “encompasses the idea of the Wild Unknown,” was my near constant companion. She taught me how to do the simplest spread—past, present, future—and led me to Michelle Tea’s book on tarot, life, and writing, Modern Tarot: Connecting With Your Higher Self Through the Wisdom of the Cards. Past, present, future; beginning, middle, and end. My friend and I began to draw a single card to set the mood for our writing sessions together, held at a ramshackle coworking space in the neighborhood where we lived.

What I like about drawing a single card before writing is that it allows me a single place to put my feelings about that day’s words—all my fear that the words won’t come and all my fear that they will. Drawing a single card, the mother of pentacles, for instance, which offers an image of a deer and her fawn, gives me a door at which to knock when I can’t see any of that paragraph’s architecture. She excels in the home, the card says: Perhaps I’ll turn my scent diffuser on, or I’ll have a character bake a scone, or I’ll think about why some person in my book moved around so much from place to place. It’s not so much a place to start writing but rather a way to give the day’s writing a particular mood or scent or inflection. Draw the death card, which in The Wild Unknown simply means that “something in your life needs to end…something is trying to find closure,” and the idea of ending and closure will start bonking around in my brain until it hits something in my writing that needed either to finish or to begin. Each card is like a prompt I suppose, except instead of being wacky and contrived, it feels like a prompt I gave myself from the darkest recesses of my unconscious, a shortcut to the place I was trying to go. 

I drew a card every day while writing The Third Rainbow Girl, which explores a mysterious act of violence in Pocahontas County, West Virginia in 1980, the Appalachian community where it transpired, and my own time in the place as a national service worker. For nearly the entirety of the fifteen months when I was most actively engaged, sentence by sentence, in writing the book, I dreamed about murder—either murdering or being murdered—every night. Then every morning I went to the deck and chose a card. I am not exaggerating when I say that I chose the moon card almost every time, no matter how well I shuffled. The card’s overall theme: vivid dreams and fears. I read the card’s description so many times I can recite it by heart:

[The moon] is the shadow realm, the place where dreams, fears, and mysteries are born. Much darkness can linger here, and if you aren’t careful, this can lead to periods of anxiety and self-doubt almost as if you’ve lost your way in a house of mirrors. Many great artists have roamed this inner landscape. It’s where imagination and creativity drift freely upon the midnight air.

That about summed it up. Fuck the fucking moon, I began to say aloud each time I drew it. Fuck this fucking book.

But the moon would not be fucked and neither would the book I was writing; they would not go away until they went away and maybe not even then. Eventually, I finished the book and I lost the friend. I’m drawing new cards these days—a lot of pentacles, the suit of home and hearth. I hope I drift less and dig more in the next book, but of course, it’s not up to me. 

 

Emma Copley Eisenberg is the author of The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia (Hachette Books, 2020). Her writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, Granta, the Los Angeles Review of Books, American Short Fiction, the Paris Review Daily, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, and other outlets. She is also the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Wurlitzer Foundation, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and Lambda Literary. She lives in Philadelphia, where she directs Blue Stoop, a hub for the literary arts. 

Thumbnail: Altınay Dinç

Craft Capsule: Start, Stop, Change

by

Mimi Lok

1.12.20

This is no. 46 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

For many writers with long-brewing projects, starting a new year can stir up dread, excitement, grim resolve, or all of the above. Mid-January becomes a time of early reckoning: Have I stuck to my guns? Backslid already? Realized, aghast, that my goals were far too lofty? Resolutions are often focused on starting new things, but not enough is said about the value of simply carrying on, taking a moment to reflect on existing projects, and adjusting or even stopping the approaches that are no longer working. 

Whenever I feel stuck or overwhelmed with a writing project, I try to take a step back and ask myself three questions: What needs to start? What needs to stop? What needs to change? And then I make lists or action items in response to those questions. It might look something like this:

What needs to start? 

  • Write the scene or chapter you’ve been avoiding. Drink a shot of tequila and write the bloody thing. In one sitting. Tape over the delete button if necessary.
  • Admit that the work has reached the point where it needs to leave the house. Share it with the person who will tell you things you don’t want to hear but who will ultimately help you make it stronger.
  • Look farther afield for things that feed your creative brain and soul. Get your nose out of a book and get thee to an art museum, concert, or stand-up comedy show. It doesn’t have to be tangibly connected to your project, but it will wake up different parts of you and might even spark ideas.

What needs to stop?

  • Control. Release your characters from their toddler harnesses and let them do what they want to do instead of what you want them to do.
  • Narrator as bodycam. Stop treating your first-person narrator as a passive, disembodied set of eyes and ears, and turn them into an actual human being the reader can see, hear, and feel.
  • Procrastination. Specifically, the kind that’s rooted in a lack of interest and motivation rather than a lack of confidence. If some high power decreed you could only tell one last story before you died, would this be it? If the answer is “umm…,” then put this project aside and find the story that feels compelling and urgent to you, and that only you can tell.

What needs to change?

  • Point of view. Does it have to be the POV you’ve chosen? Why? What would happen if you changed it?
  • Scope. Recognize how you’ve been limiting the story and expand or shrink the world of your story accordingly. This could be related to the number of characters you want to focus on, or settings, or time periods. Or it could be about redistributing the amount of time spent with various characters and their world(s). See how it affects the intensity and focus.
  • Setting. How important is your chosen time and place to the story you want to tell? Would the story change if it were relocated, set in another time period?

The stop/start/change tool is something I’ve borrowed from my other life in the nonprofit sector (mostly in terms of assessing projects and organizational priorities), but which can be handily applied to other areas of life too: friendships, marriages, exercise routines, to name a few.

 

Mimi Lok is the author of the story collection Last of Her Name (Kaya Press, 2019), which was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. She is the recipient of a Smithsonian Ingenuity Award and an Ylvisaker Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Fiction Prize and the Susan Atefat Arts and Letters Prize for nonfiction. Her work can be found in McSweeney’s, Electric Literature, and Literary Hub, among other outlets. She is currently working on a novel. Lok is also the cofounder, executive director, and editor of Voice of Witness, an award-winning human rights/oral history nonprofit that amplifies marginalized voices through a book series and a national education program.

Craft Capsule: Notes From the Cutting Room Floor

by

Sejal Shah

5.18.20

This is no. 60 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

An essay collection consists of more than several pieces between two covers. There is always the ghost manuscript: what is cut, what has been moved, shaped, revised. In my first book, This Is One Way to Dance, there are notes at the end of the text—they are narrative, include sources for quoted material, acknowledge readers and editors, and are not numbered. This essay is another kind of commentary. Each piece rewrites what came before. In a way, I am still rewriting my book and its notes—notes to oneself, to one’s reader, you; they are a conversation. 

I wrote the first draft of this essay in longhand; later, I typed it. At some point, I began numbering my thoughts as a way of keeping track. When I cut and pasted different sections of the text, I preserved the original numbers to trace the movement of information. In doing so, I attempt to show my writing process in the tradition of visible mending.

1. In Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, there are footnotes. There are three epigraphs at the beginning, each on a different page (I love this, the space). Many of the footnotes lead to Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature. The chapters are short, sometimes only a page, and the footnotes don’t feel like an interruption, but pleasurable, recursive reading. There is an overture disavowing prologues. After the overture is a gorgeous prologue: “The memoir is at its core, an act of resurrection. Memoirists…manipulate time; resuscitate the dead. They put themselves, and others, into necessary context.” If I had read In the Dreamhouse while working on my book, I might have written a different prologue. So many beats to a book, architecture, a tonal range, a key. All of these elements are questions that ask: Who is your audience? To whom and how do I wish to explain myself?1 

3. Are prologues and codas forms of notes? Is an introduction?

20. Here is a ghost note, something I cut from the introduction of my book: “I grew up seeing and later studying with Garth Fagan Dance. A noted choreographer, Fagan is associated with the Black Arts Movement. Fagan technique draws from ballet, modern dance, and Afro-Caribbean dance. I learned: You could invent your own language. You didn’t have to fit yourself into someone else’s forms. You didn’t have to explain yourself.”

4. I wanted my notes to go before the acknowledgments, to be part of the body of This Is One Way to Dance. In the published copy, my notes follow the acknowledgments, per the press’s house style, which is The Chicago Manual of Style. I realize I don’t believe in style manuals.

17. Somewhere in a book (an introduction) or outside it (an interview), you will have to explain why you wrote your book. At each stage of the publishing process you use a different form: a proposal, a press sheet, a preface, a prologue, an afterward, a Q&A. Sometimes I still stumble. From the preface of Sonja Livingston’s memoir, Ghostbread: “I wrote this book because the pain and power and beauty of childhood inspire me. I wrote it selfishly, to make sense of chaos. I wrote it unselfishly, to bear witness. For houses and gardens and children most of us never see.” 

Part of me wants to never explain anything. Part of me worries I have explained too much and still missed what is most important. The settling and unsettling of the self. Navigating, meditating, mediating. Not identity, but movement. A book, through architecture or by words, must instruct the reader in how to read it. Both are important.

2. For a book review, I remember finding out, after already reading far into the text, that a glossary and notes existed at the back. This changed my reading of the book. With no table of contents and no superscript numbers, how would you know to look for notes and a glossary? Do you flip to the back of the book to see what happens, in case you die before you finish reading,2 in order to know what something means?

4. (a) My book ends with the last sentence of the notes: “And there are many reasons to dance.” 

5. I am talking to my friend Prageeta Sharma, a poet, about notes. She mentions Brian Blanchfield’s Proxies: Essays Near Knowing, which begins with a section called “[A Note].” Blanchfield writes, “At the end of this book there is a rolling endnote called ‘Correction.’ It sets right much—almost certainly not all—of what between here and there I get wrong. It runs to twenty-one pages. It may still be running.” This feels true to me about writing a book. Trying to right it, but in the end, it’s a series of notations and corrections, assertions and deletions. Traces.

6. The poet Rick Barot told me his second book had notes. Not his first and third. And not his fourth, the most recent, The Galleons. He says he is anti-notes now.3 I get that.

28. Are notes like parentheses? (Say it clearly or not at all.) 

7. The writer Michael Martone wrote a book called Michael Martone, and the chapters are written in the style of “Contributors’ Notes” and his contributors’ notes are stories. Contributors’ notes are stories we tell about ourselves; they are fictions. 

10. How are notes different than sources? I wrote notes for many of my essays, but not all of them. Notes were sometimes meant to be a place to credit sources, but they also became their own commentary. They sprawled. I credit writing prompts, editors, readers, and books. Some of that could have been folded into acknowledgments. I credited sources for titles and images. I wrote about the Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage during the time and day of our ceremony and why this mattered to me. Actually, that was a kind of afterward.

13. I am writing for the kind of people who read notes. Those are my readers, my people. 

16. (a) In my book there is a coda titled “Voice Texting With My Mother.” I did not title it a coda. At some point I lost track of what needed a classification or title and what could exist as part of the invisible architecture of the book.

18. In her short “A Note from the Author,” Tyrese Coleman writes: “How to Sit [a Memoir in Stories and Essays] challenges the concept that a distinction needs to be made when the work is memory-based, because memories contain their own truth regardless of how they are documented.” 

9. This winter I read Cathy Park Hong’s book of essays, Minor Feelings. I realized, when I reached the end of the book, I had been expecting notes. Her essays are muscular, theoretical, personal, and include history, cultural commentary, friendships, family, and literature—a whole essay on the artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and her cross-genre memoir, Dictée. It surprised me to learn I liked the lack of notes in her book. It meant theorists and sources were often foregrounded in the essays themselves. In Hong’s work I saw a different model—the essay as a “coalitional form.” A model that foregrounds voices and perspectives beyond the essayist’s own—one that she credits writers in the tradition of Hilton Als, James Baldwin, and Maggie Nelson. 

19. An introduction is like a toast at a wedding. No, I cannot satisfactorily address so many audiences—pivot—who is an introduction for? Why not just begin? Whose job is it to host?

27. I read the acknowledgments and the notes in most books. I want to know how a book came together.

22. Sometimes I skim the notes.

14. I have to be honest: I am intrigued by the idea of no notes. Maybe for the next book.

 

ENDNOTES

1. After I turned in my proofs last December, I read Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings. Hong writes about Myung Mi Kim, “the first poet who said I [Hong] didn’t need to sound like a white poet nor did I have to ‘translate’ my experiences so that they sounded accessible to a white audience…Illegibility was a political act.” Yes. I believe this.
2. What Harry does in
When Harry Met Sally.
3. [E-mail from Rick] “When I say I’m now ‘anti-notes,’ this mostly refers to my last book, 
The Galleons. There’s a lot of background research in the book, but I didn’t want a notes section to make the book seem like a ‘project’ book.  After all, my research for the book was driven by lyrical sentiment and opportunity—it wasn’t systematic…”

 

Sejal Shah’s debut essay collection, This Is One Way to Dance, will be published by the University of Georgia Press in June. Her writing can be found in Brevity, Conjunctions, Guernica, Kenyon Review, the Literary Review, the Margins, and the Rumpus. She is also the recipient of a 2018 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in fiction. Shah is on the faculty of The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University, and lives in Rochester, New York. 

Thumbnail: Judith Browne

Craft Capsule: Reading Backwards

by

Carter Sickels

3.30.20

This is no. 54 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

When I was getting my MFA many years ago, a member of the workshop passed on a piece of advice he’d once heard: Read your manuscript backwards. At the time, I didn’t pay much attention (he was a bit of a know-it-all), but the advice stuck with me, clanging around in my brain, and I’ve since turned to it when line editing and hammering out bigger structural issues.

Reading backwards doesn’t mean you read from right to left, or from the bottom of the page to the top. What I do is print out the manuscript, start with the top of the last page, and work my way back to page one. This exercise works differently for me depending on where I am in the process. When I have a final draft, reading backwards helps with line editing. When I read backwards, I use my brain in a different way, and it slows down my reading. I focus on the words, not the story, and spot repetition and unnecessary words.

Reading backwards has also helped me resolve structural issues and build narrative tension. I was struggling with a short story I’d been trying to write for months. It wasn’t working but I couldn’t figure out why. I let the manuscript sit and cool, like a hot potato; when I returned to it after a few more months, I tried the backwards reading trick. The ending of the story worked, but how did I get there? There were holes in the plot, and too much exposition that glossed over important information. The first-person narrator, so focused on his lover, never stepped up or revealed any insight into his own interior. I hadn’t written any scenes with him alone or with other characters. These backwards-reading discoveries helped me restructure and revise the story; I cut exposition, wrote new scenes, and rearranged the scenes I already had to amplify the tension. 

When I’m stuck I’ll try looking at the story from a fresh angle—whether reading backwards, changing the font, hanging pages on the wall or spreading them out on the floor. I read the entire manuscript aloud. I retype. These are all ways to trick myself into approaching the novel from a different place. Sometimes it works. And when it does, it’s like seeing the project with a new pair of eyes—catching what I missed, or discovering a hidden door that leads me to the true story. 

 

Carter Sickels’s second novel, The Prettiest Star, will be published by Hub City Press on May 19. He is also the author of The Evening Hour (Bloomsbury, 2012), which was a finalist for an Oregon Book Award and a Lambda Literary Award. His essays and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in various publications, including Guernica, Bellevue Literary Review, Green Mountains Review, and BuzzFeed. The recipient of the 2013 Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Award, Sickels has also earned fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. He is an assistant professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University, where he teaches in the Bluegrass Writers low-residency MFA program. 

Thumbnail: Amie LeeKing

Craft Capsule: Consulting the Tarot

by

Emma Copley Eisenberg

2.24.20

This is no. 50 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I was raised in a house of reason where there was no God, no witchcraft, no science fiction, no astrology, and certainly no tarot. These things were for the weak, and we were not weak. But I’ll never forget when I read Uncle Tom’s Cabin and it dawned on me why Tom prayed so much: He was just trying to get through the day. I was weak, I knew. To make it from dawn to dusk, I too needed all the help I could get. 

Tarot came into my life through the friend, the friend I lost, and it is the thing she gave me more than any other for which I offer her my supreme gratitude. To be fair, I acquired the deck itself—The Wild Unknown by Kim Krans—much earlier; I bought it on impulse late one night on the gushing recommendation of someone I’d met at a party. You are not supposed to buy a tarot deck for yourself, I learned later, perhaps because without the blessing of someone you love to imbue the paper and images with power, a deck of cards is just a deck of cards.

I cannot now separate tarot from the friend, and I cannot separate tarot from writing. She and I became friends during the period when the card of the moon, which according to my deck “encompasses the idea of the Wild Unknown,” was my near constant companion. She taught me how to do the simplest spread—past, present, future—and led me to Michelle Tea’s book on tarot, life, and writing, Modern Tarot: Connecting With Your Higher Self Through the Wisdom of the Cards. Past, present, future; beginning, middle, and end. My friend and I began to draw a single card to set the mood for our writing sessions together, held at a ramshackle coworking space in the neighborhood where we lived.

What I like about drawing a single card before writing is that it allows me a single place to put my feelings about that day’s words—all my fear that the words won’t come and all my fear that they will. Drawing a single card, the mother of pentacles, for instance, which offers an image of a deer and her fawn, gives me a door at which to knock when I can’t see any of that paragraph’s architecture. She excels in the home, the card says: Perhaps I’ll turn my scent diffuser on, or I’ll have a character bake a scone, or I’ll think about why some person in my book moved around so much from place to place. It’s not so much a place to start writing but rather a way to give the day’s writing a particular mood or scent or inflection. Draw the death card, which in The Wild Unknown simply means that “something in your life needs to end…something is trying to find closure,” and the idea of ending and closure will start bonking around in my brain until it hits something in my writing that needed either to finish or to begin. Each card is like a prompt I suppose, except instead of being wacky and contrived, it feels like a prompt I gave myself from the darkest recesses of my unconscious, a shortcut to the place I was trying to go. 

I drew a card every day while writing The Third Rainbow Girl, which explores a mysterious act of violence in Pocahontas County, West Virginia in 1980, the Appalachian community where it transpired, and my own time in the place as a national service worker. For nearly the entirety of the fifteen months when I was most actively engaged, sentence by sentence, in writing the book, I dreamed about murder—either murdering or being murdered—every night. Then every morning I went to the deck and chose a card. I am not exaggerating when I say that I chose the moon card almost every time, no matter how well I shuffled. The card’s overall theme: vivid dreams and fears. I read the card’s description so many times I can recite it by heart:

[The moon] is the shadow realm, the place where dreams, fears, and mysteries are born. Much darkness can linger here, and if you aren’t careful, this can lead to periods of anxiety and self-doubt almost as if you’ve lost your way in a house of mirrors. Many great artists have roamed this inner landscape. It’s where imagination and creativity drift freely upon the midnight air.

That about summed it up. Fuck the fucking moon, I began to say aloud each time I drew it. Fuck this fucking book.

But the moon would not be fucked and neither would the book I was writing; they would not go away until they went away and maybe not even then. Eventually, I finished the book and I lost the friend. I’m drawing new cards these days—a lot of pentacles, the suit of home and hearth. I hope I drift less and dig more in the next book, but of course, it’s not up to me. 

 

Emma Copley Eisenberg is the author of The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia (Hachette Books, 2020). Her writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, Granta, the Los Angeles Review of Books, American Short Fiction, the Paris Review Daily, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, and other outlets. She is also the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Wurlitzer Foundation, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and Lambda Literary. She lives in Philadelphia, where she directs Blue Stoop, a hub for the literary arts. 

Thumbnail: Altınay Dinç

Craft Capsule: The Authority of Black Childhood

by

Joy Priest

7.6.20

This is no. 64 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Outside / its case, the mind is a beehive / fallen in the wild grasses / of an abandoned playground.

— from “Ars Poetica” by Joy Priest

It’s January 2, 2020. I’m traveling by car with a painter back to the artists’ compound that I’m staying at for a seven-month residency—a blip-stage between the MFA I finished in May 2019 and the PhD I will start in August 2020, a deliberate detour in the longer academic-poet road on which I find myself. About it, slightly in mourning. Alone in study, but wholeheartedly wanting to be closer to the people in this poetry thing.

The painter has found a way to subsist outside the university engine, working in the residency office, leading Zumba classes in the morning, painting in her studio at night. We’re talking about what academia does to artists, and, as we’re riding—from Wellfleet back to Provincetown, at the very tip of the Cape, isolated at the end of the land—she says, “I really do feel like this chapter for me has been about unlearning.”

*

“Sometimes a moment of liberation is suspended by the tight grip of contradiction,” my friend Bernardo says, which captures this moment I have in the car with the painter, as well as the larger social context we’re sailing through like a tiny, mobile dot on the periphery of the U.S. map. I was liberated by the painter’s articulation but jealous that I hadn’t pulled it out of my subconscious first: unlearning. This had been my project for the first three months of the fellowship, but I’d thought I was wasting time because that project had not yet been named. Wasting time—a feeling shaped by the values of academia, a microcosm of our larger society and its ailing imagination, which burdens artists and writers with paradigms of productivity and surplus contributions to an inaccessible archive. I had been unlearning that.

*

Usually, when stuck in a vehicle, poetry-talk is boring at worst, frustrating at best. A Lyft driver or seatmate on a plane will inevitably ask, “When did you start writing poetry?” I find this frustrating because I haven’t yet crafted a creative approach to the question, but, more importantly, because such a question precludes the true answer.

*

I was a better poet when I was a child.

During the nineties in Kentucky, I was a child in solitude. There was a lack of artificial stimuli, my technology limited to a Sega Genesis that I spent more time blowing dust from than playing. My single mother was at work. The only other person in the house was my grandfather, a man in his seventies, who—I didn’t know at the time—was white. He defined our relationship with board games, puzzles, basketball, or boxing on a box TV set—the technology of his time. With his racist perspectives, he attempted to define my identity, which I didn’t yet understand, but felt, intuitively. 

In place of understanding, in place of the internet, I cultivated a practice in noticing. This is how I developed my approach to the page, before I had an awareness of “craft.” Poetry wasn’t what I did or what I started doing in a single moment from the past onward, it was the way I thought, who I had to be in my grandfather’s household, the way my mind worked to make sense of something.

There isn’t a single event that led to me becoming a poet. There isn’t a beginning to me writing poetry—there is only the beginner’s mind. This is what I find myself trying to get back to in my unlearning: the authority of a child’s imagination—what we possess before we are fully indoctrinated into adulthood and the accepted ways of making sense of things. 

*

I spent a lot of time outside of my grandfather’s house, in the backyard. My mind was a beehive. A chaotic, intuitive knot of thought-impulses that I needed to wrest apart, investigate, ruminate on, understand. I found myself watching the ants at ground-level, making a daily visit to the carpenter bees and their perfectly round holes in the rotting wood. 

When I was inside, I noticed the difference between my grandfather’s skin and mine. I knew my hair was more like the hair of darker people, who he was always saying bad things about. I knew that he didn’t want me to be like them, but I couldn’t understand why. I couldn’t understand why, but I could notice. I kept a record of these little noticings as a substitute for clarity around what I was noticing. This conversation with myself as a Black child supplemented what I learned, or what adults sought to teach me (what a white child learns or is taught by white adults). This practice of noticing, or overhearing, was my seminal craft approach. 

*

Pulling away the scaffolding of craft “knowledge,” which I’ve accumulated as an adult poet, has led me to this—notebooks full of little noticings and meditations, overhearings and mishearings, notions that haunt me, lines that keep coming up. Writing a poem this way becomes less strained: that accumulation of craft had become a cheesecloth through which I struggled to write. 

These little noticings are the only way I wish to start a poem, or any conversation about craft. It is how I get closer to an understanding of what something or someone—my imaginary friend, my ancestors, my intuition, the flora and fauna—is trying to tell me, and I embrace this as a spiritual craft as well as a technical one. It is my resistance to the limits of the U.S. popular imagination, which condescends to the childhood imagination in tropes and shorthand, which does not know, can no longer remember, what the child knows.

 

Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower, which won the 2019 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press in September. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in numerous publications, including BOAAT, Connotation Press, Four Way Review, espnW, Gulf Coast, Mississippi Review, and Poetry Northwest, and have been anthologized in The Louisville Anthology (Belt Publishing, September 2020), A Measure of Belonging: Writers of Color on the New American South (Hub City Press, October 2020) and Best New Poets 2014, 2016, and 2019. A doctoral student in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston, Priest has also been a journalist, a theater attendant, a waitress, and a fast food worker. She has facilitated writing workshops and arbitration programs with adult and juvenile incarcerated women, and has taught composition, rhetoric, comedy, and African American arts and culture at the university level.

Thumbnail: Dustin Humes

Craft Capsule: Breaking Genre

by

Sejal Shah

6.15.20

This is no. 63 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I.

I’ve always been drawn to hybrid forms, but I didn’t think of them as hybrid until I had to describe my writing to someone else. To say “hybrid” means that you accept genre classifications and other people’s designations. I don’t. I also don’t walk around thinking of myself as hyphenated.1 I’m just me. Some of us don’t fit in the lines someone else drew. 

Like all writers, I am a combination of where I grew up, what I read, who my parents are, the languages I spoke, how safe it is for me to walk at night, my brain chemistry, the number of countries in which my parents grew up, the number of times you told me that I got the job/award/prize because I don’t look like you, the number of ways I learned to duck and weave when you blocked the door. Like all of us, I am a product of how I learned formally or informally what was what—what counts, who counts, and to whom. 

My undergraduate thesis was half poetry, half stories. I wrote and read poetry in high school and college, but then began writing prose. My lines got longer, and line breaks began to feel arbitrary. In my just-released book, This Is One Way to Dance, five of the twenty-three essays were once called stories. There is also an opening poem and a closing poem, which I think of as a lyrical coda. I cannibalized parts of what had once been the nonfiction introduction to my MFA fiction thesis to find the sounds to open and close the essays.2 

Where did my stories go? Where did my poetry go? Even as I pivoted to more nonfiction work, these forms were still there, buried, or sometimes not buried at all. In one essay3 last year, I included fiction in marked, indented sections. In writing about neurodiversity, institutional racism, and sexual harassment, I used excerpts of published short stories of mine to offer a counternarrative and voice—what the nonfiction narrator could not say in her essay. In nonfiction, I was recounting an event. In fiction, I could go to a distressing place without having to explain it. I looked for places where the language needed a different pitch, for example, when I was describing mania: 

I wanted to return to the ocean, I wanted to get cooked. I wrote on the walls in charcoal because all of the other surfaces could move and then I wouldn’t find them. I might not find you.4

Stories allowed me to say what I could not have otherwise said, at least at the time of writing. In the period in which I wrote those stories, I could not have written, as nonfiction, about the reality of being diagnosed with manic depression, adjusting to psychiatric meds that had a severe side-effect of aphasia and cognitive dampening:

They said take this pill. This one or that one, two before sleep. Take four: in the morning or at night. It’s best to avoid alcohol…These things, they said, happen sometimes. There is no relief.5

There is magic in fiction, in not having everything you write be attached directly to you. In my stories I draw from a wilder field, and I’m not worried about how something sounds, if it would make my public self cringe. If you grow up in a deeply private, Hindu, conservative, traditional family as I did, fiction and poetry offered a different code, a cover. I missed that cover when I tried to move to straight nonfiction.6 So why force it? Why choose? I want whatever genre allows me to speak the deepest truth. 

 

II.

Of course, in attempting to make a book, I encountered how the publishing and academic industries enforce limitations, rules, and expectations on writers of color, particularly in regard to genre. We are formless, but to be published you have to choose a form.

My original manuscript for what became This Is One Way to Dance was half stories, half essays, but I did not label them. Most of the pieces had already been published in print journals or online. They had been worked on, vetted, polished, edited. Several agents contacted me over the years, but no one wanted to represent the essay collection as it looks now or my (still) unpublished story collection. I learned that some editors who considered the hybrid manuscript read the stories as nonfiction. Because I wrote either in first or second person, because my narrators were women, because they were South Asian American, because I wrote about Rochester and Brooklyn and New York City and Massachusetts, the unspoken assumption was that I was writing about me.

I published my book without an agent. I still don’t have one. If you are a woman, if you are a writer of color, publishing can only imagine you in a certain box, in a narrative that makes sense to them. There’s a lack of imagination and perspective. There’s racism. At some point I got tired of readers assuming what happens in my stories actually happened. (If you need to know: I don’t have a sister who killed herself; I did grow up in Rochester; I never lived in Ithaca; I did not sleep with my professor. I write essays. If I’m calling it fiction, it’s for a reason). 

Let’s talk about two male writers both named John. John Updike and John Edgar Wideman have both drawn from some autobiographical material in their novels, but their work is accepted and reviewed as fiction. And yet most publishers don’t know how to market, let alone perceive, work by a woman of color as imagined. Our work is seen as ethnographic, dictation, not crafted, not composite, not fiction. White publishing can’t imagine that we too can create, can imagine, can make a story, can make believe. Can make money. Can be of worth, of value. They don’t believe some stories are worth advances, are worth the suspension of disbelief. 

 

III.

In her essay “Genre and Genre Theory,” my graduate school classmate, poet and scholar Dawn Lundy Martin, describes the memory of writing a poem in response to the murder of Yusef Hawkins, a Black teenager murdered by a mob of white men in 1989. It was one of the first times she knew she might be a poet, she says, describing the rightness of the form: “Poetry was the genre that allowed for a manipulation of language so that it could be stretched beyond its everyday capacity to accommodate horrific realities that make up human experience. It creates an illogic, an appropriate response to the rational narratives that attempted, with little success, to provide language for Yusef Hawkins’s murder.”

She goes on to argue for leaning into this “illogic”: poetry’s capacity to stretch, its capacity to defy genre, to create space for the unruly: “If we cannot communicate across a genre ‘divide,’ then perhaps we cannot communicate across a race ‘divide.’” In other words, how we think about writing and genre has urgent implications in real life. 

Martin’s words on poetry—her belief in a genre that breaks genre—are a comfort in and of themselves, but more than that, I was struck by the range of her essay—how the form and content of the essay made the case for crossing boundaries. I saw her place and connect a young Black man killed in 1989 and the newspaper account of it and academia and unsafe neighborhoods and genre and her position as the director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh. I saw her write about power and get paid. I saw the academy implicated through language. I want to do that. I am already—writing in this tradition of unsettling genre, of fashioning queer texts. In a blurb for This Is One Way to Dance, Martin wrote: “If a queer text is an unsettled one, crossing cultures, crossing genres, then this book of essays rescripts what we think we know about identity.”

Ultimately, I had to choose a classification for my first book. At the fork in the road, I chose nonfiction; I chose what granted me the most space: essays. Editor and writer Valerie Boyd solicited my work for Crux, the literary nonfiction series she coedits at University of Georgia Press. I made a new manuscript, cutting most of the stories and replacing them with essays. 

Even as I claim a genre, I step outside it.7 It says “essays” on the cover of This Is One Way to Dance, but this word will always contain a more complicated truth—the history and movement and genre slippage and time woven into my text and its history, which I hope offers some kind of challenge to power, to the intent to classify, to discipline. I began sending out my hybrid manuscript in 2016. I sent the first iteration of the nonfiction manuscript in 2017. Then, life: #MeToo, PTSD, a move, an illness, a resettling and evaluating of the manuscript, two rounds of academic peer review (nothing is fast in the academy, and I’m not fast either). My book was published in 2020. In a global pandemic, mass protests and mourning, executions and terror, a reckoning—enough—some movement toward what looks like change.  

Language fractures, is further fractured by others, in its attempt to be spoken. I understand the difficulty and the contortion. I am speaking anyways.

 

IV.

I read my work aloud when I am working on it, when I am revising. My husband read aloud This Is One Way to Dance when I was going through proofs. The sentences have to land; the sounds have to hit a certain note. I’m thinking of when you tune a violin and the string next to it needs to vibrate. That is how I work in most any genre when I am most true to myself. I don’t think about labels. I don’t care about what to call it, what it will be called. We are called. I listen for the sound.

 

ENDNOTES

1. I had a girlhood. It was American because I was in America. I once wrote on Facebook: “I don’t hate Indian [as a qualifier] and I do use it—I just hate the assumptions that writer = white and the rest of us need to have who we are qualified. There’s a writer and then a woman writer. Or a Black writer. Or an Indian American writer. Why not just say writer?” 
2. I always go by sound, which engenders its own accidental hybrid forms. I think of voice-texting and autocorrect. For years if I said my husband’s name, “Raj,” the phone wrote down “Roger.” “Saris” became “sorrows.”
3. “Even If You Can’t See It: Invisible Disability & Neurodiversity” in the Kenyon Review Online.
4. From my story “Watch Over Me; Turn a Blind Eye” in the
Asian American Literary Review.
5. From my story “Climate, Man, Vegetation” in Drunken Boat.
6. In 2011 my friend the poet Philip White told me he thought “Street Scene,” an essay in my book, could be called a lyric essay. I looked up the definition and agreed this rang true: My essay had qualities of both poetry and the essay. It was the first time I had heard this term. 
7. I asked two poets of color, Sarah Gambito and Cathy Park Hong, to help me launch my book. During my virtual launch, they spoke about my books not only as essays, but also claimed and named them as prose poems, meditations. I didn’t know why I asked them and not fiction writers—in my academic career I was a fiction writer through graduate school, visiting professorships, fellowships, and a tenure-track job—but it was a relief to be legible to poets who were always my first tribe.

 

Sejal Shah is the author of This Is One Way to Dance (University of Georgia Press). Her writing can be found in BrevityConjunctionsGuernicaKenyon Review, the Literary Review, the Margins, and the Rumpus. She is also the recipient of a 2018 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in fiction. Shah is on the faculty of The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University, and lives in Rochester, New York. 

Thumbnail: Michele Bitetto

Craft Capsule: Break It Down or Shorter Forms

by

Sejal Shah

6.1.20

This is no. 62 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Working right now—in the twenty-first century, in the pandemic—I find my attention is even more fragmented than usual. It’s splintered. I’ve had to connect to people via Skype, WhatsApp, Zoom, and send messages via e-mail, Twitter, Instagram, and—the grandfather of social media—Facebook. Each platform presents itself differently, and I present myself differently. Then there’s the distractions of the phone itself: A text comes in, then another notification. I cannot remember my name after switching from one portal to another all day. I forget passwords. I forgot my neighbor’s name. 

With my attention so dispersed, I find myself writing in shorter forms, using fragments to build a larger structure. My debut essay collection, This Is One Way to Dance, is composed of twenty-three essays—some are more traditional and longform, but others are short lyric essays, segmented essays, varying in length. There is a list essay, too. 

Making a book means figuring out the binding, the connective tissue, but the scale of that task can be daunting. Using shorter forms, smaller canvases—and markers and signposts in the longer essays—helped me not feel overwhelmed by the subject matter: racism, immigration, depression, mental health, neurodivergence, the lack of basic geography and knowledge Americans have about most other cultures (even writing that out feels exhausting). Using numbers in a list essay, subheadings in a segmented essay, breaking up my own words with words from other writers, an asterisk or ornament to signal a pause—all this somehow gave my work more space, breath, silence, and pauses, especially in painful matters. 

*

This week I picked up my copy of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, which I bought in 1995 and read in my twenties during my first trip to England and Italy. I only saw today that the binding had split. I’ve referred to it a lot over the years, often in teaching. In the chapter “Short Assignments,” Lamott writes: “Often when you sit down to write, what you have in mind is an autobiographical novel about your childhood, or a play about the immigrant experience, or a history of—oh, say—say women. But this is like trying to scale a glacier…then your mental illnesses arrive at the desk like your sickest, most secretive relatives.” In that same chapter she refers to an object that steadies her: “I go back to trying to breathe, slowly and calmly, and I finally notice the one-inch picture frame that I put on my desk to remind me of short assignments.”

When I write, sometimes I think of that one-inch picture frame: its visual representation of Bird by Bird and short assignments. My version of the short assignment is writing four hundred words or four sentences for The Grind, a peer e-mail accountability group for writers. It’s using timers, for fifteen minutes or an hour, or doing coworking sessions with writer friends.

Sometimes I feel we all are telling the same story again and again, but it’s an important story and the thing is to be able to hear it. I sometimes find it easier to see the story—to hold the different threads of an essay—if I divide up the text, if there are visual breaks and spaces, numbers. 

Later in Bird by Bird, Lamott reminds us of another object, another tool of the short form that might be especially useful: index cards. When I reread her description of keeping the cards everywhere, all over the house, I thought, Now, that’s the problem. I forgot about index cards! I sometimes remember to type notes into my phone or record a voice memo, but then don’t do anything with them. But paper: That helps. To see it. This is a problem with the phone.

*

My attraction to scaffolding and shorter forms comes partially from how I think. I was formally diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in my forties—unusually late. When I was in graduate school in my twenties, my doctor thought I had attention deficit disorder. I could get evaluated for free through our graduate student health insurance, but I kept losing the slip of paper. We used to laugh about this. I didn’t pursue a diagnosis, because I didn’t think having one would help me. Either way I had to figure out how to get my work done. Asian Americans are supposed to be good at school. (I was good at some parts of it, but not others.) Just try harder. I present as normal or as high-functioning. The doctor I’ve known longest in my life, my father, always said doctors can’t do anything for you. You have to help yourself. 

The doctor before my most recent one would not prescribe ADHD medication to me because he said, “You should have been diagnosed by age nine.” (My report cards read, “Talks too much, reads too much, easily distracted, not trying to the best of her ability.” But I didn’t disrupt the class by jumping around—girls don’t present in the way boys do and our medical and educational systems use white men as the standard. I wasn’t throwing erasers, so of course I wasn’t diagnosed.) My husband teaches middle school. To him, it’s very clear I have ADHD. I live with my brain and he lives with me. I spend a lot of time trying to organize papers, e-mails, to-dos, grocery lists. And thinking of where I last left that list or notebook. I think associatively, not in a linear way. Numbers and subheadings help me to translate or render those associative leaps to a reader, or to make them legible: a visual signal we are shifting gears.

This is part of why it took a long time to figure out the structure for my book. A book is a long form. It requires stepping back to see the forest. Left to my own devices, I see leaves and trees. Shorter forms, dividing up longer essays, bird by bird, restored a sense of agency. They granted me permission to not say everything—or to say just enough. There is a learning curve to know how and when to choose a particular short form or how to divide something and break it down. Not all subjects will be unlocked by fragments or subheadings, numbers or lists. But as I practice—found my one-inch picture frame, index cards, list essays, the thing that worked for my brain—I began to speak on my own terms.

 

Sejal Shah is the author of This Is One Way to Dance (University of Georgia Press). Her writing can be found in BrevityConjunctionsGuernicaKenyon Review, the Literary Review, the Margins, and the Rumpus. She is also the recipient of a 2018 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in fiction. Shah is on the faculty of The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University, and lives in Rochester, New York. 

Thumbnail: Hassan Pasha

Craft Capsule: Feel Your Way

by

Sejal Shah

5.25.20

This is no. 61 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

1.
During the last year I lived in New York, I started dancing again at a Sunday morning class in the West Village called “Sweat Your Prayers.” An old boyfriend told me I should go. I was stuck on him, not great, but he did bring some good things into my life and this was one of them. The class was in the style of 5Rhythms, an ecstatic dance and movement meditation practice: 11:00 AM, no talking, a DJ, flowy clothes, everyone moving. A lot of white people, some people of color. They danced; we danced. The music sets changed, but the pattern remained steady, following the five rhythms: Flowing, Staccato, Chaos, Lyrical, Stillness. Shapes emerge from movement, unbidden, in an intuitive way. Not speaking opened up another way of communicating with one’s self and the other dancers in the room—through the repetition of movement, in how we dodged some people and were drawn to others. 

2.
I moved intuitively in dance class. It was a class based on improvisation, not a final performance. Making a book involves intuition, too, but then you have to stop and think: How can I make sense of this for a reader? A book is a performance, a gathering, a repetition, a ritual, and a thing, an object. There is an end point.

3.
My first book will be published next week, but it took me twenty years to write. The essays that comprise This Is One Way to Dance were written, revised, then collected and stitched together in what proved to be a long process of encountering and attempting to contain and shape a lot of life, stylistic choices, and past selves—as much as the work—between two covers. A few essays began as short stories but as I worked, they became legible as essays through editing, shaping, metamorphosis. 

The process of finding a form for my book produced a tension between my instinctive sense of how the essays were connected, and the pressure I felt to utilize some kind of discernible structure or concept to link them. Framework often emerges slowly, an invisible labor. 

In my book, one way I created structure was through the use of dates, timestamps. I followed Joan Didion’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem as an example and placed timestamps at the end of each piece: the year I wrote it and, if relevant, the year I revised it. The stamps offer me—and the reader—a moment to consider time: its mysterious nature and passing.

4.
I learned the term “front matter” from Tom, my book’s project editor. Before this, I had not considered how the beginning of a book is put together, how it unfolds. The front matter includes the title page, copyright page, dedication, epigraph, table of contents, preface or introduction. It can include acknowledgments, too.

After the front matter in my book is an opening poem, a prologue. I called it “Prelude” after “Prelude: Discipline is Freedom,” a dance choreographed by the artist Garth Fagan many years ago, a piece I grew up seeing. The dance is an invocation of sorts, with parts of a dance class woven within: the repetition of fundamental movements, foundational exercises, floor sequences, four women passing here, four men there, now slow, now speedy, now ratcheting up, now a solo. 

Before the introduction, before the poem, is the title page: the book’s title, the author’s name, the publisher’s name, the place of publication. There is also a childhood photo of me, dressed up to dance, in front of our old house wearing a chuniya chori my grandmother sewed, with Ba standing a ways behind me, visible in the glass door. 

“Prelude” begins with brackets, “[ ],” then my name in Gujarati. Then the first line in English: “I am trying to describe what it feels like //.” Working on the frontmatter, and the book as a whole, meant conversations with Tom and the designer Erin: deliberations about the language of captions, Gujarati script, typeface, size, margins, ornaments, headings. The permission to quote from Toni Morrison’s essay, “The Site of Memory,” is on the copyright page as per the agreement. All of this was new to me—this level of detail that belongs to a book. 

5.
I bought Martha Graham’s Blood Memory: An Autobiography last year, because I wanted structure and language and forms from the world of dance. I was searching for a connection to something fundamental; a structure I could rely on as I shaped my book from so many pieces. Classifications, levels, subgenres, terminology. I didn’t find my book’s structure there, but I found these words: “There are always ancestral footsteps behind me, pushing me, when I am creating a new dance, and gestures are flowing through me.” This movement.

6.
My book’s internal architecture began with academic fields of study, disciplines. I organized essays under subheadings of American Studies, Area Studies, Cultural Studies, and Women’s Studies. School had been my house for many years, but I no longer live there. I live somewhere else now. 

7.
Another try: I took the title of one of my lyric essays, “Castle, Fort, Lookout, House,” and divided my book into four sections: Castle, Fort, Lookout, House. The essay itself is one of my favorites: It’s an incantation built from years of reading fairy tales and love stories, romances, epics. Where is home? What is the journey? Who do you love? But it felt artificial to classify the other essays under these images, as they are.

8.
A third try. These categories from dance: Space, Time, Direction. Too abstract. 

9. 
Ultimately, I realized that my book is a series of gestural movements, beginning from its spine, the tree. An old photograph to place us, to bring the past into now, though the whole book is a weaving of this time into that time, the way we carry the past with us in our bones, in our cells. 

10.
There has to be movement and stretching, shapes, a direction. I thought of mudras, which I learned from studying Bharata Natyam and Kuchipudi, two styles of classical Indian dance. Anjali mudra is one used often at the end of yoga and dance classes. Palms pressed together: a balancing. So much of writing is what has been cut away. A book is a series of choices; it is what remains.  

 11.
To dance is a way to integrate: to shed for a moment the weight and sense of being seen. It’s not lost, exactly, but being seen does not dominate. To move through the world, there is no leaving race behind. Not in this country. But to dance is to allow yourself to feel out through your arms, the sensation of being held in space, moving in a direction, grounded in a place. To be a person and not only a girl, not only a brown body, but to be embodied and therefore the subject, the I. In my “Prelude,” my opening poem, I borrow a line from a poem by Kamala Das: “I too call myself I.” I use different punctuation: “[(I, too, call myself I)].”

Working this way—in both dance and writing—takes time, to feel your way into the structure by sound. I look for my glasses on a morning bedside table cluttered with books, a glass of water, pens, a lamp, hand lotion, a weighted lavender eye pillow. How can you find your glasses if you can’t see? You feel your way.

 

Sejal Shah’s debut essay collection, This Is One Way to Dance, will be published by the University of Georgia Press in June. Her writing can be found in Brevity, Conjunctions, Guernica, Kenyon Review, the Literary Review, the Margins, and the Rumpus. She is also the recipient of a 2018 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in fiction. Shah is on the faculty of The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University, and lives in Rochester, New York. 

Thumbnail: Nikoline Arns

Craft Capsule: Feel Your Way

by

Sejal Shah

5.25.20

This is no. 61 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

1.
During the last year I lived in New York, I started dancing again at a Sunday morning class in the West Village called “Sweat Your Prayers.” An old boyfriend told me I should go. I was stuck on him, not great, but he did bring some good things into my life and this was one of them. The class was in the style of 5Rhythms, an ecstatic dance and movement meditation practice: 11:00 AM, no talking, a DJ, flowy clothes, everyone moving. A lot of white people, some people of color. They danced; we danced. The music sets changed, but the pattern remained steady, following the five rhythms: Flowing, Staccato, Chaos, Lyrical, Stillness. Shapes emerge from movement, unbidden, in an intuitive way. Not speaking opened up another way of communicating with one’s self and the other dancers in the room—through the repetition of movement, in how we dodged some people and were drawn to others. 

2.
I moved intuitively in dance class. It was a class based on improvisation, not a final performance. Making a book involves intuition, too, but then you have to stop and think: How can I make sense of this for a reader? A book is a performance, a gathering, a repetition, a ritual, and a thing, an object. There is an end point.

3.
My first book will be published next week, but it took me twenty years to write. The essays that comprise This Is One Way to Dance were written, revised, then collected and stitched together in what proved to be a long process of encountering and attempting to contain and shape a lot of life, stylistic choices, and past selves—as much as the work—between two covers. A few essays began as short stories but as I worked, they became legible as essays through editing, shaping, metamorphosis. 

The process of finding a form for my book produced a tension between my instinctive sense of how the essays were connected, and the pressure I felt to utilize some kind of discernible structure or concept to link them. Framework often emerges slowly, an invisible labor. 

In my book, one way I created structure was through the use of dates, timestamps. I followed Joan Didion’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem as an example and placed timestamps at the end of each piece: the year I wrote it and, if relevant, the year I revised it. The stamps offer me—and the reader—a moment to consider time: its mysterious nature and passing.

4.
I learned the term “front matter” from Tom, my book’s project editor. Before this, I had not considered how the beginning of a book is put together, how it unfolds. The front matter includes the title page, copyright page, dedication, epigraph, table of contents, preface or introduction. It can include acknowledgments, too.

After the front matter in my book is an opening poem, a prologue. I called it “Prelude” after “Prelude: Discipline is Freedom,” a dance choreographed by the artist Garth Fagan many years ago, a piece I grew up seeing. The dance is an invocation of sorts, with parts of a dance class woven within: the repetition of fundamental movements, foundational exercises, floor sequences, four women passing here, four men there, now slow, now speedy, now ratcheting up, now a solo. 

Before the introduction, before the poem, is the title page: the book’s title, the author’s name, the publisher’s name, the place of publication. There is also a childhood photo of me, dressed up to dance, in front of our old house wearing a chuniya chori my grandmother sewed, with Ba standing a ways behind me, visible in the glass door. 

“Prelude” begins with brackets, “[ ],” then my name in Gujarati. Then the first line in English: “I am trying to describe what it feels like //.” Working on the frontmatter, and the book as a whole, meant conversations with Tom and the designer Erin: deliberations about the language of captions, Gujarati script, typeface, size, margins, ornaments, headings. The permission to quote from Toni Morrison’s essay, “The Site of Memory,” is on the copyright page as per the agreement. All of this was new to me—this level of detail that belongs to a book. 

5.
I bought Martha Graham’s Blood Memory: An Autobiography last year, because I wanted structure and language and forms from the world of dance. I was searching for a connection to something fundamental; a structure I could rely on as I shaped my book from so many pieces. Classifications, levels, subgenres, terminology. I didn’t find my book’s structure there, but I found these words: “There are always ancestral footsteps behind me, pushing me, when I am creating a new dance, and gestures are flowing through me.” This movement.

6.
My book’s internal architecture began with academic fields of study, disciplines. I organized essays under subheadings of American Studies, Area Studies, Cultural Studies, and Women’s Studies. School had been my house for many years, but I no longer live there. I live somewhere else now. 

7.
Another try: I took the title of one of my lyric essays, “Castle, Fort, Lookout, House,” and divided my book into four sections: Castle, Fort, Lookout, House. The essay itself is one of my favorites: It’s an incantation built from years of reading fairy tales and love stories, romances, epics. Where is home? What is the journey? Who do you love? But it felt artificial to classify the other essays under these images, as they are.

8.
A third try. These categories from dance: Space, Time, Direction. Too abstract. 

9. 
Ultimately, I realized that my book is a series of gestural movements, beginning from its spine, the tree. An old photograph to place us, to bring the past into now, though the whole book is a weaving of this time into that time, the way we carry the past with us in our bones, in our cells. 

10.
There has to be movement and stretching, shapes, a direction. I thought of mudras, which I learned from studying Bharata Natyam and Kuchipudi, two styles of classical Indian dance. Anjali mudra is one used often at the end of yoga and dance classes. Palms pressed together: a balancing. So much of writing is what has been cut away. A book is a series of choices; it is what remains.  

 11.
To dance is a way to integrate: to shed for a moment the weight and sense of being seen. It’s not lost, exactly, but being seen does not dominate. To move through the world, there is no leaving race behind. Not in this country. But to dance is to allow yourself to feel out through your arms, the sensation of being held in space, moving in a direction, grounded in a place. To be a person and not only a girl, not only a brown body, but to be embodied and therefore the subject, the I. In my “Prelude,” my opening poem, I borrow a line from a poem by Kamala Das: “I too call myself I.” I use different punctuation: “[(I, too, call myself I)].”

Working this way—in both dance and writing—takes time, to feel your way into the structure by sound. I look for my glasses on a morning bedside table cluttered with books, a glass of water, pens, a lamp, hand lotion, a weighted lavender eye pillow. How can you find your glasses if you can’t see? You feel your way.

 

Sejal Shah’s debut essay collection, This Is One Way to Dance, will be published by the University of Georgia Press in June. Her writing can be found in Brevity, Conjunctions, Guernica, Kenyon Review, the Literary Review, the Margins, and the Rumpus. She is also the recipient of a 2018 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in fiction. Shah is on the faculty of The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University, and lives in Rochester, New York. 

Thumbnail: Nikoline Arns

Craft Capsule: Obsessions, Hobbies, Dreams

by

Carter Sickels

5.4.20

This is no. 59 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Early in the writing of my second novel, The Prettiest Star, I thought about what TV shows one of the protagonists, Jess, a fourteen-year-old girl, would be watching in 1986, when the novel begins. MTV, of course, and a lot of sitcoms. But what about when she was younger, what shaped her? I grew up in the eighties, and before my family had cable or a satellite dish, we had four channels from which to choose. Like most kids from that time, I watched a lot of PBS. In addition to Sesame Street, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and The Electric Company, a nature show always seemed to be on: Nova or Wild America. While I was thinking about Jess’s TV habits, I also watched the 2013 documentary Blackfish, a heartbreaking indictment of SeaWorld’s practice of raising orcas in captivity, and remembered when I visited SeaWorld Ohio as a kid. (Yes, they actually had whales in Ohio; the park closed in 2000.)

What if Jess watched a lot of nature shows? What if she fell in love with killer whales, the way some kids do with horses? Maybe she goes to SeaWorld Ohio, and since she’s never been to the ocean, the shows and books she reads about whales transport her from small-town Ohio to the wildness and mystery of the sea. As I did more research, I started to hear Jess’s voice—and her brainy knowledge of whale facts and details worked their way into the novel. Before this, I didn’t know much about whales, except that they were beautiful and spectacular and mysterious. This is something I love about writing fiction—entering, if only briefly, other worlds, and learning about topics and places and people you may never encounter in real life. 

The killer whales also began to resonate thematically, which surprised me—the orcas’ relationships to family, matriarchy, and mourning the dead reflected and deepened some of my explorations in my novel of how my human characters relate to one another. The Prettiest Star revolves around Jess’s older brother, Brian Jackson, a young gay man diagnosed with AIDs, who has returned to his family’s home in the small, conservative town where he grew up, and asks how his family will, or will not, care for him. Similarly, like Jess’s love for whales, Brian’s love for David Bowie reverberates throughout the novel, even influencing the title. For Brian, a queer kid growing up in a small conservative town in Appalachia, Bowie’s music represented hope and magic and possibility.

What interests your characters, what obsesses them? What are their hobbies? What do they dream about, what do they love? Maybe they play basketball, read tarot cards, collect matchbooks, idolize Dolly Parton, dream about outer space. What is that thing that lights your character up, and gives you a way inside—so that you’re not writing from the outside, but inhabiting the character from within? A hobby, a gesture, a dream may help you understand and develop your characters, and just may deepen the novel’s ideas, building stronger connections between characters, themes, and imagery.  

 

Carter Sickels’s second novel, The Prettiest Star, will be published by Hub City Press on May 19. He is also the author of The Evening Hour (Bloomsbury, 2012), which was a finalist for an Oregon Book Award and a Lambda Literary Award. His essays and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in various publications, including GuernicaBellevue Literary ReviewGreen Mountains Review, and BuzzFeed. The recipient of the 2013 Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Award, Sickels has also earned fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. He is an assistant professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University, where he teaches in the Bluegrass Writers low-residency MFA program. 

Thumbnail: Bart van meele

Craft Capsule: Obsessions, Hobbies, Dreams

by

Carter Sickels

5.4.20

This is no. 59 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Early in the writing of my second novel, The Prettiest Star, I thought about what TV shows one of the protagonists, Jess, a fourteen-year-old girl, would be watching in 1986, when the novel begins. MTV, of course, and a lot of sitcoms. But what about when she was younger, what shaped her? I grew up in the eighties, and before my family had cable or a satellite dish, we had four channels from which to choose. Like most kids from that time, I watched a lot of PBS. In addition to Sesame Street, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and The Electric Company, a nature show always seemed to be on: Nova or Wild America. While I was thinking about Jess’s TV habits, I also watched the 2013 documentary Blackfish, a heartbreaking indictment of SeaWorld’s practice of raising orcas in captivity, and remembered when I visited SeaWorld Ohio as a kid. (Yes, they actually had whales in Ohio; the park closed in 2000.)

What if Jess watched a lot of nature shows? What if she fell in love with killer whales, the way some kids do with horses? Maybe she goes to SeaWorld Ohio, and since she’s never been to the ocean, the shows and books she reads about whales transport her from small-town Ohio to the wildness and mystery of the sea. As I did more research, I started to hear Jess’s voice—and her brainy knowledge of whale facts and details worked their way into the novel. Before this, I didn’t know much about whales, except that they were beautiful and spectacular and mysterious. This is something I love about writing fiction—entering, if only briefly, other worlds, and learning about topics and places and people you may never encounter in real life. 

The killer whales also began to resonate thematically, which surprised me—the orcas’ relationships to family, matriarchy, and mourning the dead reflected and deepened some of my explorations in my novel of how my human characters relate to one another. The Prettiest Star revolves around Jess’s older brother, Brian Jackson, a young gay man diagnosed with AIDs, who has returned to his family’s home in the small, conservative town where he grew up, and asks how his family will, or will not, care for him. Similarly, like Jess’s love for whales, Brian’s love for David Bowie reverberates throughout the novel, even influencing the title. For Brian, a queer kid growing up in a small conservative town in Appalachia, Bowie’s music represented hope and magic and possibility.

What interests your characters, what obsesses them? What are their hobbies? What do they dream about, what do they love? Maybe they play basketball, read tarot cards, collect matchbooks, idolize Dolly Parton, dream about outer space. What is that thing that lights your character up, and gives you a way inside—so that you’re not writing from the outside, but inhabiting the character from within? A hobby, a gesture, a dream may help you understand and develop your characters, and just may deepen the novel’s ideas, building stronger connections between characters, themes, and imagery.  

 

Carter Sickels’s second novel, The Prettiest Star, will be published by Hub City Press on May 19. He is also the author of The Evening Hour (Bloomsbury, 2012), which was a finalist for an Oregon Book Award and a Lambda Literary Award. His essays and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in various publications, including GuernicaBellevue Literary ReviewGreen Mountains Review, and BuzzFeed. The recipient of the 2013 Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Award, Sickels has also earned fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. He is an assistant professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University, where he teaches in the Bluegrass Writers low-residency MFA program. 

Thumbnail: Bart van meele

Craft Capsule: Doors vs. Corridors

by

Will Harris

8.17.20

This is no. 68 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

During the pandemic, with so many doors locked and shuttered, I lived in the corridors of my house. Thom Gunn describes the corridor as a “separate place between the thought and felt”—a place of uncertainty, where thoughts are unformed and feelings suppressed. It’s probably not surprising, then, that the few poems I managed to eke out were meandering, confused, and muffled.

As the architecture of my house extended into what I wrote, I started looking for poems about houses—either set indoors or using the “house” as a metaphor for the craft of poetry. I was trying to work out what kind of house poetry should be, and how much confusion that house might be able to contain. Soon enough I turned to Emily Dickinson: 

I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –

I always read this stanza with the ironic hint of the estate agent in her tone (“Superior—for Doors” is particularly funny), which seems to mock the idea you could ever really compare poetry to a house. Though it can feel like using a conceit means committing to it entirely, here the analogy is loosely held, self-consciously tenuous: “If you look to your right, you’ll see some windows. How many? Numerous. And if you look down there, yup, superior doors. You won’t get that with Prose.” The lightness of tone is part of the image she projects about poetry. 

But I read it with another, darker Dickinson poem in the back of my head, this one taking the house less as a metaphor for poetry than for the poet’s interior life:

One need not be a Chamber – to be haunted – 
One need not be a House –
The Brain has Corridors – surpassing 
Material Place

These lines suggest that when you forgo “Material Place” and build your house in “Possibility” you open yourself up to a particular danger: being haunted. Where the other poem began with a confident assertion of habitation—“I dwell”—here the speaker expresses horror at the idea of being dwelt in: “The Brain has Corridors.” The tone is repetitious, fevered, as though the speaker has been running up and down their internal corridors for hours. The effect of this is compounded by the use of the impersonal pronoun “One” and that definite article before “Brain”—not my brain but the brain—which suggests a traumatic detachment from the body; and “surpassing,” hanging at the end of the line makes it feel like those brain corridors are only getting bigger, longer, more labyrinthine. 

What’s missing from the second poem is a door of the kind Dickinson thought made poetry so superior—and without one, there’s no means of escape. Door and corridor may sound related but there’s no etymological link between them. The word door comes from the Old English duru and has always meant the same thing. Corridor is from the Italian corridoio, referring to a “running-place.” They represent two forms of possibility, each reliant on the other: The door is a portal, signifying insight, while the corridor is an in-between place, signifying uncertainty and confusion. 

An important way to understand the corridor might be via the horror film in which a shadowy figure always seems to be lurking at the other end, or the protagonist is trapped, running down an endless dark passage full of locked doors. Where the corridor represents terror, the door is freedom.

*

During lockdown I also turned to Bhanu Kapil’s book How to Wash a Heart and stopped at this section:

When what you perform 
At the threshold
Is at odds 
With what happens
When the front door is closed,
Then you are burning
The toast 
And you are letting the butter
Fester.

The front door is where the internal becomes public, even if briefly. But in order for an act to be meaningful, what you “perform” at the threshold must have some relationship to what happens behind it. Kapil’s lines make me think of those people in expensive houses who voted to privatize Britain’s National Health Service last December and then stepped out onto their doorsteps this spring to clap enthusiastically in support of nurses and carers. They make me think of what the threshold can conceal. The door only has meaning in relation to the corridor.

In early July, Bhanu and I did a reading together on Zoom. She began hers by lighting a small candle. She had some shallots next to her that she’d picked from Wittgenstein’s garden in Cambridge. The effect of these gestures wasn’t just to welcome the listener in. It was to create an open space into which the poem could emerge, where we could meet it. In trying to harmonize inner and outer, in letting out what festers, the distance between our two screens fell away.

After the reading, I thought back to Dickinson’s haunted house poem. It’s driven by a claustrophobic fear of the internal. Even the “External Ghost” or hidden “Assassin” (other threats that feature in Dickinson’s poem) are less terrifying than the prospect of “self encounter.” The self is a more ambiguous, volatile element. It could stay hidden forever: “Ourself, behind ourself concealed,” reads one line in the poem. You might think you’ve turned a corner, the front door in sight, only to find yourself lost down another passageway. 

But this is only a nightmare if you’re looking for a door. The beauty of Kapil’s How to Wash a Heart lies in its openness: “I want to be split / Into two parts / Or a thousand pieces.” The self that’s been split into a thousand pieces has nothing to lose. What’s not whole cannot be broken. Likewise, the poem doesn’t have to form a coherent whole—a portal to insight. It doesn’t have to involve finding the right door and standing outside of it proudly. It can also mean walking the corridors, afraid and confused.

 

Will Harris is the author of the poetry collection RENDANG (Wesleyan University Press, 2020), which was selected as a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. He has worked in schools and led workshops at the Southbank Centre and currently teaches for the Poetry School. A contributing editor at the Rialto, he lives in London. 

Thumbnail: Kilarov Zaneit

Craft Capsule: The Authority of Black Childhood

by

Joy Priest

7.6.20

This is no. 64 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Outside / its case, the mind is a beehive / fallen in the wild grasses / of an abandoned playground.

— from “Ars Poetica” by Joy Priest

It’s January 2, 2020. I’m traveling by car with a painter back to the artists’ compound that I’m staying at for a seven-month residency—a blip-stage between the MFA I finished in May 2019 and the PhD I will start in August 2020, a deliberate detour in the longer academic-poet road on which I find myself. About it, slightly in mourning. Alone in study, but wholeheartedly wanting to be closer to the people in this poetry thing.

The painter has found a way to subsist outside the university engine, working in the residency office, leading Zumba classes in the morning, painting in her studio at night. We’re talking about what academia does to artists, and, as we’re riding—from Wellfleet back to Provincetown, at the very tip of the Cape, isolated at the end of the land—she says, “I really do feel like this chapter for me has been about unlearning.”

*

“Sometimes a moment of liberation is suspended by the tight grip of contradiction,” my friend Bernardo says, which captures this moment I have in the car with the painter, as well as the larger social context we’re sailing through like a tiny, mobile dot on the periphery of the U.S. map. I was liberated by the painter’s articulation but jealous that I hadn’t pulled it out of my subconscious first: unlearning. This had been my project for the first three months of the fellowship, but I’d thought I was wasting time because that project had not yet been named. Wasting time—a feeling shaped by the values of academia, a microcosm of our larger society and its ailing imagination, which burdens artists and writers with paradigms of productivity and surplus contributions to an inaccessible archive. I had been unlearning that.

*

Usually, when stuck in a vehicle, poetry-talk is boring at worst, frustrating at best. A Lyft driver or seatmate on a plane will inevitably ask, “When did you start writing poetry?” I find this frustrating because I haven’t yet crafted a creative approach to the question, but, more importantly, because such a question precludes the true answer.

*

I was a better poet when I was a child.

During the nineties in Kentucky, I was a child in solitude. There was a lack of artificial stimuli, my technology limited to a Sega Genesis that I spent more time blowing dust from than playing. My single mother was at work. The only other person in the house was my grandfather, a man in his seventies, who—I didn’t know at the time—was white. He defined our relationship with board games, puzzles, basketball, or boxing on a box TV set—the technology of his time. With his racist perspectives, he attempted to define my identity, which I didn’t yet understand, but felt, intuitively. 

In place of understanding, in place of the internet, I cultivated a practice in noticing. This is how I developed my approach to the page, before I had an awareness of “craft.” Poetry wasn’t what I did or what I started doing in a single moment from the past onward, it was the way I thought, who I had to be in my grandfather’s household, the way my mind worked to make sense of something.

There isn’t a single event that led to me becoming a poet. There isn’t a beginning to me writing poetry—there is only the beginner’s mind. This is what I find myself trying to get back to in my unlearning: the authority of a child’s imagination—what we possess before we are fully indoctrinated into adulthood and the accepted ways of making sense of things. 

*

I spent a lot of time outside of my grandfather’s house, in the backyard. My mind was a beehive. A chaotic, intuitive knot of thought-impulses that I needed to wrest apart, investigate, ruminate on, understand. I found myself watching the ants at ground-level, making a daily visit to the carpenter bees and their perfectly round holes in the rotting wood. 

When I was inside, I noticed the difference between my grandfather’s skin and mine. I knew my hair was more like the hair of darker people, who he was always saying bad things about. I knew that he didn’t want me to be like them, but I couldn’t understand why. I couldn’t understand why, but I could notice. I kept a record of these little noticings as a substitute for clarity around what I was noticing. This conversation with myself as a Black child supplemented what I learned, or what adults sought to teach me (what a white child learns or is taught by white adults). This practice of noticing, or overhearing, was my seminal craft approach. 

*

Pulling away the scaffolding of craft “knowledge,” which I’ve accumulated as an adult poet, has led me to this—notebooks full of little noticings and meditations, overhearings and mishearings, notions that haunt me, lines that keep coming up. Writing a poem this way becomes less strained: that accumulation of craft had become a cheesecloth through which I struggled to write. 

These little noticings are the only way I wish to start a poem, or any conversation about craft. It is how I get closer to an understanding of what something or someone—my imaginary friend, my ancestors, my intuition, the flora and fauna—is trying to tell me, and I embrace this as a spiritual craft as well as a technical one. It is my resistance to the limits of the U.S. popular imagination, which condescends to the childhood imagination in tropes and shorthand, which does not know, can no longer remember, what the child knows.

 

Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower, which won the 2019 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press in September. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in numerous publications, including BOAAT, Connotation Press, Four Way Review, espnW, Gulf Coast, Mississippi Review, and Poetry Northwest, and have been anthologized in The Louisville Anthology (Belt Publishing, September 2020), A Measure of Belonging: Writers of Color on the New American South (Hub City Press, October 2020) and Best New Poets 2014, 2016, and 2019. A doctoral student in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston, Priest has also been a journalist, a theater attendant, a waitress, and a fast food worker. She has facilitated writing workshops and arbitration programs with adult and juvenile incarcerated women, and has taught composition, rhetoric, comedy, and African American arts and culture at the university level.

Thumbnail: Dustin Humes

Craft Capsule: Notes From the Cutting Room Floor

by

Sejal Shah

5.18.20

This is no. 60 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

An essay collection consists of more than several pieces between two covers. There is always the ghost manuscript: what is cut, what has been moved, shaped, revised. In my first book, This Is One Way to Dance, there are notes at the end of the text—they are narrative, include sources for quoted material, acknowledge readers and editors, and are not numbered. This essay is another kind of commentary. Each piece rewrites what came before. In a way, I am still rewriting my book and its notes—notes to oneself, to one’s reader, you; they are a conversation. 

I wrote the first draft of this essay in longhand; later, I typed it. At some point, I began numbering my thoughts as a way of keeping track. When I cut and pasted different sections of the text, I preserved the original numbers to trace the movement of information. In doing so, I attempt to show my writing process in the tradition of visible mending.

1. In Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, there are footnotes. There are three epigraphs at the beginning, each on a different page (I love this, the space). Many of the footnotes lead to Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature. The chapters are short, sometimes only a page, and the footnotes don’t feel like an interruption, but pleasurable, recursive reading. There is an overture disavowing prologues. After the overture is a gorgeous prologue: “The memoir is at its core, an act of resurrection. Memoirists…manipulate time; resuscitate the dead. They put themselves, and others, into necessary context.” If I had read In the Dreamhouse while working on my book, I might have written a different prologue. So many beats to a book, architecture, a tonal range, a key. All of these elements are questions that ask: Who is your audience? To whom and how do I wish to explain myself?1 

3. Are prologues and codas forms of notes? Is an introduction?

20. Here is a ghost note, something I cut from the introduction of my book: “I grew up seeing and later studying with Garth Fagan Dance. A noted choreographer, Fagan is associated with the Black Arts Movement. Fagan technique draws from ballet, modern dance, and Afro-Caribbean dance. I learned: You could invent your own language. You didn’t have to fit yourself into someone else’s forms. You didn’t have to explain yourself.”

4. I wanted my notes to go before the acknowledgments, to be part of the body of This Is One Way to Dance. In the published copy, my notes follow the acknowledgments, per the press’s house style, which is The Chicago Manual of Style. I realize I don’t believe in style manuals.

17. Somewhere in a book (an introduction) or outside it (an interview), you will have to explain why you wrote your book. At each stage of the publishing process you use a different form: a proposal, a press sheet, a preface, a prologue, an afterward, a Q&A. Sometimes I still stumble. From the preface of Sonja Livingston’s memoir, Ghostbread: “I wrote this book because the pain and power and beauty of childhood inspire me. I wrote it selfishly, to make sense of chaos. I wrote it unselfishly, to bear witness. For houses and gardens and children most of us never see.” 

Part of me wants to never explain anything. Part of me worries I have explained too much and still missed what is most important. The settling and unsettling of the self. Navigating, meditating, mediating. Not identity, but movement. A book, through architecture or by words, must instruct the reader in how to read it. Both are important.

2. For a book review, I remember finding out, after already reading far into the text, that a glossary and notes existed at the back. This changed my reading of the book. With no table of contents and no superscript numbers, how would you know to look for notes and a glossary? Do you flip to the back of the book to see what happens, in case you die before you finish reading,2 in order to know what something means?

4. (a) My book ends with the last sentence of the notes: “And there are many reasons to dance.” 

5. I am talking to my friend Prageeta Sharma, a poet, about notes. She mentions Brian Blanchfield’s Proxies: Essays Near Knowing, which begins with a section called “[A Note].” Blanchfield writes, “At the end of this book there is a rolling endnote called ‘Correction.’ It sets right much—almost certainly not all—of what between here and there I get wrong. It runs to twenty-one pages. It may still be running.” This feels true to me about writing a book. Trying to right it, but in the end, it’s a series of notations and corrections, assertions and deletions. Traces.

6. The poet Rick Barot told me his second book had notes. Not his first and third. And not his fourth, the most recent, The Galleons. He says he is anti-notes now.3 I get that.

28. Are notes like parentheses? (Say it clearly or not at all.) 

7. The writer Michael Martone wrote a book called Michael Martone, and the chapters are written in the style of “Contributors’ Notes” and his contributors’ notes are stories. Contributors’ notes are stories we tell about ourselves; they are fictions. 

10. How are notes different than sources? I wrote notes for many of my essays, but not all of them. Notes were sometimes meant to be a place to credit sources, but they also became their own commentary. They sprawled. I credit writing prompts, editors, readers, and books. Some of that could have been folded into acknowledgments. I credited sources for titles and images. I wrote about the Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage during the time and day of our ceremony and why this mattered to me. Actually, that was a kind of afterward.

13. I am writing for the kind of people who read notes. Those are my readers, my people. 

16. (a) In my book there is a coda titled “Voice Texting With My Mother.” I did not title it a coda. At some point I lost track of what needed a classification or title and what could exist as part of the invisible architecture of the book.

18. In her short “A Note from the Author,” Tyrese Coleman writes: “How to Sit [a Memoir in Stories and Essays] challenges the concept that a distinction needs to be made when the work is memory-based, because memories contain their own truth regardless of how they are documented.” 

9. This winter I read Cathy Park Hong’s book of essays, Minor Feelings. I realized, when I reached the end of the book, I had been expecting notes. Her essays are muscular, theoretical, personal, and include history, cultural commentary, friendships, family, and literature—a whole essay on the artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and her cross-genre memoir, Dictée. It surprised me to learn I liked the lack of notes in her book. It meant theorists and sources were often foregrounded in the essays themselves. In Hong’s work I saw a different model—the essay as a “coalitional form.” A model that foregrounds voices and perspectives beyond the essayist’s own—one that she credits writers in the tradition of Hilton Als, James Baldwin, and Maggie Nelson. 

19. An introduction is like a toast at a wedding. No, I cannot satisfactorily address so many audiences—pivot—who is an introduction for? Why not just begin? Whose job is it to host?

27. I read the acknowledgments and the notes in most books. I want to know how a book came together.

22. Sometimes I skim the notes.

14. I have to be honest: I am intrigued by the idea of no notes. Maybe for the next book.

 

ENDNOTES

1. After I turned in my proofs last December, I read Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings. Hong writes about Myung Mi Kim, “the first poet who said I [Hong] didn’t need to sound like a white poet nor did I have to ‘translate’ my experiences so that they sounded accessible to a white audience…Illegibility was a political act.” Yes. I believe this.
2. What Harry does in
When Harry Met Sally.
3. [E-mail from Rick] “When I say I’m now ‘anti-notes,’ this mostly refers to my last book, 
The Galleons. There’s a lot of background research in the book, but I didn’t want a notes section to make the book seem like a ‘project’ book.  After all, my research for the book was driven by lyrical sentiment and opportunity—it wasn’t systematic…”

 

Sejal Shah’s debut essay collection, This Is One Way to Dance, will be published by the University of Georgia Press in June. Her writing can be found in Brevity, Conjunctions, Guernica, Kenyon Review, the Literary Review, the Margins, and the Rumpus. She is also the recipient of a 2018 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in fiction. Shah is on the faculty of The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University, and lives in Rochester, New York. 

Thumbnail: Judith Browne

Craft Capsule: We Are All Translators

by

Jenny Bhatt

9.21.20

This is no. 73 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Literary translation is about being a close reader in the source language and a skilled writer in the target language. Of course, a language is not merely words, phrases, idioms, diction, and syntax. Languages contain entire cultures within them, entire ways of thinking and being, too. Those of us who translate other writers’ works do so because we want to dive deep and fully immerse ourselves in another world—to pay attention to more than the literal content and preserve the emotions, cultural nuances, and humor from the source to target language.  

This is not unlike how, as readers and writers, we seek to inhabit the worlds of fictional characters. We are all translators. The process of reading involves translating and interpreting the writer’s meaning and intent. The process of writing involves interpreting and giving voice to our own thoughts, which are guided by the things we have read, seen, heard, and experienced. As Mexican poet Octavio Paz famously wrote, “No text is entirely original because language itself, in its essence, is already a translation: firstly, of the nonverbal world and secondly, since every sign and every phrase is the translation of another sign and another phrase.”

Due to the accretions of traditions and culture over centuries, it is not possible to seamlessly transpose two languages when translating. Similarly, due to our conditioning and subjectivity, it is not possible for two readers to read the same text entirely the same way. And it is not possible for two writers to create entirely the same story. A single piece of writing can have multiple acceptable readings and translations due to the flexibility of language, suppleness of imagination, and versatility of craft techniques. 

I was a writer before I became a translator. But I learned to appreciate linguistic, aesthetic, and cultural diversity more profoundly because of translation work. There are ten key practices of the discipline that pull me in each time:

1. Reading a work closely and repetitively to know it, sometimes even better than the original writer.

2. Listening to the tonalities, textures, rhythms, cadences, and diction in both languages to capture the writer’s voice as fully as possible.

3. Learning nuanced meanings of words and phrases in the target language by seeing them used with different specificity and significance in the source language.

4. Hunting for le mot juste that honors the complexities of both languages.

5. Discovering aesthetic reinterpretations of an original work to suit a new readership or audience linguistically, intellectually, and intuitively. 

6. Deliberating over the subtexts, cultural implications, and stylistic choices made by the original writer in the source language to recreate them in the target language without losing any literary merit.

7. Interrogating the politics of the writer, their text, and the source and target languages.

8. Meditating on the original writer’s themes to convey them with the proper intentions and emotions.

9. Deepening my understanding of the world, past and present, by transforming something foreign into something familiar.

10. Negotiating with what remains untranslatable.

With only one book of translation and a handful of shorter works completed, I am still developing these practices into technical proficiencies. However, as each translation project helps me hone and refine my skills, I am also leveraging these lessons more frequently in my reading and writing. Literary translation is, in the end, about actively co-creating a text with its original writer by adding more shape, context, nuance, and texture to it. Aren’t we all better off as readers if we learn to do the same? And aren’t we stronger writers when we draw from, build onto, and expand upon the world of literature that has come before us?

 

Jenny Bhatt is a writer, translator, and literary critic. She is the host of the Desi Books podcast and the author of the short story collection Each of Us Killers (7.13 Books, 2020). Her literary translation of Gujarati writer Dhumketu’s best short fiction is forthcoming from HarperCollins India in late 2020. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Literary Hub, Longreads, Poets & Writers Magazine, the Millions, Electric Literature, the Rumpus, and Kenyon Review. Having lived and worked in India, England, Germany, Scotland, and various parts of the United States, she now lives in a suburb of Dallas.

Thumbnail: Patrick Tomasso

Craft Capsule: Doors vs. Corridors

by

Will Harris

8.17.20

This is no. 68 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

During the pandemic, with so many doors locked and shuttered, I lived in the corridors of my house. Thom Gunn describes the corridor as a “separate place between the thought and felt”—a place of uncertainty, where thoughts are unformed and feelings suppressed. It’s probably not surprising, then, that the few poems I managed to eke out were meandering, confused, and muffled.

As the architecture of my house extended into what I wrote, I started looking for poems about houses—either set indoors or using the “house” as a metaphor for the craft of poetry. I was trying to work out what kind of house poetry should be, and how much confusion that house might be able to contain. Soon enough I turned to Emily Dickinson: 

I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –

I always read this stanza with the ironic hint of the estate agent in her tone (“Superior—for Doors” is particularly funny), which seems to mock the idea you could ever really compare poetry to a house. Though it can feel like using a conceit means committing to it entirely, here the analogy is loosely held, self-consciously tenuous: “If you look to your right, you’ll see some windows. How many? Numerous. And if you look down there, yup, superior doors. You won’t get that with Prose.” The lightness of tone is part of the image she projects about poetry. 

But I read it with another, darker Dickinson poem in the back of my head, this one taking the house less as a metaphor for poetry than for the poet’s interior life:

One need not be a Chamber – to be haunted – 
One need not be a House –
The Brain has Corridors – surpassing 
Material Place

These lines suggest that when you forgo “Material Place” and build your house in “Possibility” you open yourself up to a particular danger: being haunted. Where the other poem began with a confident assertion of habitation—“I dwell”—here the speaker expresses horror at the idea of being dwelt in: “The Brain has Corridors.” The tone is repetitious, fevered, as though the speaker has been running up and down their internal corridors for hours. The effect of this is compounded by the use of the impersonal pronoun “One” and that definite article before “Brain”—not my brain but the brain—which suggests a traumatic detachment from the body; and “surpassing,” hanging at the end of the line makes it feel like those brain corridors are only getting bigger, longer, more labyrinthine. 

What’s missing from the second poem is a door of the kind Dickinson thought made poetry so superior—and without one, there’s no means of escape. Door and corridor may sound related but there’s no etymological link between them. The word door comes from the Old English duru and has always meant the same thing. Corridor is from the Italian corridoio, referring to a “running-place.” They represent two forms of possibility, each reliant on the other: The door is a portal, signifying insight, while the corridor is an in-between place, signifying uncertainty and confusion. 

An important way to understand the corridor might be via the horror film in which a shadowy figure always seems to be lurking at the other end, or the protagonist is trapped, running down an endless dark passage full of locked doors. Where the corridor represents terror, the door is freedom.

*

During lockdown I also turned to Bhanu Kapil’s book How to Wash a Heart and stopped at this section:

When what you perform 
At the threshold
Is at odds 
With what happens
When the front door is closed,
Then you are burning
The toast 
And you are letting the butter
Fester.

The front door is where the internal becomes public, even if briefly. But in order for an act to be meaningful, what you “perform” at the threshold must have some relationship to what happens behind it. Kapil’s lines make me think of those people in expensive houses who voted to privatize Britain’s National Health Service last December and then stepped out onto their doorsteps this spring to clap enthusiastically in support of nurses and carers. They make me think of what the threshold can conceal. The door only has meaning in relation to the corridor.

In early July, Bhanu and I did a reading together on Zoom. She began hers by lighting a small candle. She had some shallots next to her that she’d picked from Wittgenstein’s garden in Cambridge. The effect of these gestures wasn’t just to welcome the listener in. It was to create an open space into which the poem could emerge, where we could meet it. In trying to harmonize inner and outer, in letting out what festers, the distance between our two screens fell away.

After the reading, I thought back to Dickinson’s haunted house poem. It’s driven by a claustrophobic fear of the internal. Even the “External Ghost” or hidden “Assassin” (other threats that feature in Dickinson’s poem) are less terrifying than the prospect of “self encounter.” The self is a more ambiguous, volatile element. It could stay hidden forever: “Ourself, behind ourself concealed,” reads one line in the poem. You might think you’ve turned a corner, the front door in sight, only to find yourself lost down another passageway. 

But this is only a nightmare if you’re looking for a door. The beauty of Kapil’s How to Wash a Heart lies in its openness: “I want to be split / Into two parts / Or a thousand pieces.” The self that’s been split into a thousand pieces has nothing to lose. What’s not whole cannot be broken. Likewise, the poem doesn’t have to form a coherent whole—a portal to insight. It doesn’t have to involve finding the right door and standing outside of it proudly. It can also mean walking the corridors, afraid and confused.

 

Will Harris is the author of the poetry collection RENDANG (Wesleyan University Press, 2020), which was selected as a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. He has worked in schools and led workshops at the Southbank Centre and currently teaches for the Poetry School. A contributing editor at the Rialto, he lives in London. 

Thumbnail: Kilarov Zaneit

Craft Capsule: The Authority of Black Childhood

by

Joy Priest

7.6.20

This is no. 64 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Outside / its case, the mind is a beehive / fallen in the wild grasses / of an abandoned playground.

— from “Ars Poetica” by Joy Priest

It’s January 2, 2020. I’m traveling by car with a painter back to the artists’ compound that I’m staying at for a seven-month residency—a blip-stage between the MFA I finished in May 2019 and the PhD I will start in August 2020, a deliberate detour in the longer academic-poet road on which I find myself. About it, slightly in mourning. Alone in study, but wholeheartedly wanting to be closer to the people in this poetry thing.

The painter has found a way to subsist outside the university engine, working in the residency office, leading Zumba classes in the morning, painting in her studio at night. We’re talking about what academia does to artists, and, as we’re riding—from Wellfleet back to Provincetown, at the very tip of the Cape, isolated at the end of the land—she says, “I really do feel like this chapter for me has been about unlearning.”

*

“Sometimes a moment of liberation is suspended by the tight grip of contradiction,” my friend Bernardo says, which captures this moment I have in the car with the painter, as well as the larger social context we’re sailing through like a tiny, mobile dot on the periphery of the U.S. map. I was liberated by the painter’s articulation but jealous that I hadn’t pulled it out of my subconscious first: unlearning. This had been my project for the first three months of the fellowship, but I’d thought I was wasting time because that project had not yet been named. Wasting time—a feeling shaped by the values of academia, a microcosm of our larger society and its ailing imagination, which burdens artists and writers with paradigms of productivity and surplus contributions to an inaccessible archive. I had been unlearning that.

*

Usually, when stuck in a vehicle, poetry-talk is boring at worst, frustrating at best. A Lyft driver or seatmate on a plane will inevitably ask, “When did you start writing poetry?” I find this frustrating because I haven’t yet crafted a creative approach to the question, but, more importantly, because such a question precludes the true answer.

*

I was a better poet when I was a child.

During the nineties in Kentucky, I was a child in solitude. There was a lack of artificial stimuli, my technology limited to a Sega Genesis that I spent more time blowing dust from than playing. My single mother was at work. The only other person in the house was my grandfather, a man in his seventies, who—I didn’t know at the time—was white. He defined our relationship with board games, puzzles, basketball, or boxing on a box TV set—the technology of his time. With his racist perspectives, he attempted to define my identity, which I didn’t yet understand, but felt, intuitively. 

In place of understanding, in place of the internet, I cultivated a practice in noticing. This is how I developed my approach to the page, before I had an awareness of “craft.” Poetry wasn’t what I did or what I started doing in a single moment from the past onward, it was the way I thought, who I had to be in my grandfather’s household, the way my mind worked to make sense of something.

There isn’t a single event that led to me becoming a poet. There isn’t a beginning to me writing poetry—there is only the beginner’s mind. This is what I find myself trying to get back to in my unlearning: the authority of a child’s imagination—what we possess before we are fully indoctrinated into adulthood and the accepted ways of making sense of things. 

*

I spent a lot of time outside of my grandfather’s house, in the backyard. My mind was a beehive. A chaotic, intuitive knot of thought-impulses that I needed to wrest apart, investigate, ruminate on, understand. I found myself watching the ants at ground-level, making a daily visit to the carpenter bees and their perfectly round holes in the rotting wood. 

When I was inside, I noticed the difference between my grandfather’s skin and mine. I knew my hair was more like the hair of darker people, who he was always saying bad things about. I knew that he didn’t want me to be like them, but I couldn’t understand why. I couldn’t understand why, but I could notice. I kept a record of these little noticings as a substitute for clarity around what I was noticing. This conversation with myself as a Black child supplemented what I learned, or what adults sought to teach me (what a white child learns or is taught by white adults). This practice of noticing, or overhearing, was my seminal craft approach. 

*

Pulling away the scaffolding of craft “knowledge,” which I’ve accumulated as an adult poet, has led me to this—notebooks full of little noticings and meditations, overhearings and mishearings, notions that haunt me, lines that keep coming up. Writing a poem this way becomes less strained: that accumulation of craft had become a cheesecloth through which I struggled to write. 

These little noticings are the only way I wish to start a poem, or any conversation about craft. It is how I get closer to an understanding of what something or someone—my imaginary friend, my ancestors, my intuition, the flora and fauna—is trying to tell me, and I embrace this as a spiritual craft as well as a technical one. It is my resistance to the limits of the U.S. popular imagination, which condescends to the childhood imagination in tropes and shorthand, which does not know, can no longer remember, what the child knows.

 

Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower, which won the 2019 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press in September. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in numerous publications, including BOAAT, Connotation Press, Four Way Review, espnW, Gulf Coast, Mississippi Review, and Poetry Northwest, and have been anthologized in The Louisville Anthology (Belt Publishing, September 2020), A Measure of Belonging: Writers of Color on the New American South (Hub City Press, October 2020) and Best New Poets 2014, 2016, and 2019. A doctoral student in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston, Priest has also been a journalist, a theater attendant, a waitress, and a fast food worker. She has facilitated writing workshops and arbitration programs with adult and juvenile incarcerated women, and has taught composition, rhetoric, comedy, and African American arts and culture at the university level.

Thumbnail: Dustin Humes

Craft Capsule: On Becoming a Pop Star, I Mean, a Poet

by

Chen Chen

11.2.20

This is no. 77 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

1. I started to write poetry because of a secret that I had trouble sharing even with myself.

2. I continue to write poetry because, in the fifth grade, my short story about a pregnant witch living in Venice received the following peer critique: “You do know it takes nine months for the baby to grow inside the mom, not two?” I write poetry because I wish I’d responded, “You do know this is a witch baby???” 

3. I knew I would always be a poet after a barely audible “goodbye” in the doorway of a tenth-floor apartment. How there was no elevator and it was the middle of summer and I had to walk down and down those stairs. 

4. I wake up craving poetry because Sawako Nakayasu once said, “I work mostly in poetry because it claims to be neither fiction nor nonfiction, because it acknowledges the gap between what really was or is, and what is said about it.”1 

5. Poetry because French class, Russian class. Because Mandarin and English and Hokkien at home. Because English. Because I learn and learn, then forget so much Mandarin. Because I forgot all my Hokkien2 by age seven. Poetry because my first-year advisor in college, a professor of Russian Studies, asked me why all my three-page Tolstoy responses were so late. “Go on,” she said, “give us your narrative.” Poems because I loved how her prompt was a comment on the expected form of my response. Poet because I said, “Time management’s an issue,” which really meant I wanted every paper to be about everything and I wanted Takeshi Kaneshiro’s character in Chungking Express and I wanted Takeshi Kaneshiro and was rewatching the film over and over and Googling stills. 

6. In eighth grade I began writing poetry outside of school assignments because I couldn’t keep imitating Robert Frost. I kept writing poetry because it seemed no one else with a secret like this looked like me.

7. Poet because I am a failed musician. Failed painter. Failed scientist obsessed with the moon.3 Failed gymnast, though once I was very, very good at cartwheeling. Poetry because my favorite scenes in Power Rangers were when, instead of running, they all backflipped and backflipped to where the fighting would take place.

8. The violence of the state. The silence of the h in French words, like homme. How violent, many homes. To ask, “Where is home?” as if it’s ever a simple question. To say, “I have a home” as if it’s an unremarkable statement. To say “I have” in Russian, you use a genitive construction that translates to the awkward English, “At me there is.” At home the adults asked, “Why did you get an A-?” in three different languages; there were no questions about whether I would ever start hating myself for what and whom I loved.   

9. I continue to read poetry because it seems every poem has a big secret at its core and I always want to know if it’s a big gay secret. Because Anna Akhmatova wrote, “Sunset in the ethereal waves: / I cannot tell if the day / is ending, or the world, or if / the secret of secrets is inside me again”4 and that seems pretty gay to me. Because Denise Levertov wrote, “Two girls discover / the secret of life / in a sudden line of / poetry”5 and that sounds definitely gay. 

Because for years I had to settle for subtext and total projection. 

Because when I found Justin Chin’s Bite Hard in a college library, I glanced at just one poem then added the book to my stack to check out. Because I moved it to the middle of the stack, as if hiding it from both the sky and the ground. Because I was so moved to see both “Chinese New Year” and “ex-boyfriends” in one poem. Because was it hide or protect, and do I know the difference now? 

10. In English, I still have trouble with lie versus lay, which I always feel ashamed to admit, though I know English is a troublesome, troubling language that makes one want to lay down, to lie one’s body on its side till all one’s lies have tumbled out from one’s head and belly, and are lain out like one single shadow-body of a liar on the grass. 

11. I started off as a fiction writer. 

12.  I started as a reader of fantastical literature, a writer of both fantasy and science fiction. I started on the playground, telling friends that the jungle gym was a spaceship and we’d better hurry onboard before it took off: “Danny, you’re new to the cause, like me. Amanda, you’re the chosen one, our only hope.” I couldn’t get enough of the galactic, magic, any-kind-of-epic mission; the dueling-with-lasers-or-wands journey. I acted them out, wrote them down. 

Moments of poetry occurred in my stories when I stayed too long in the pocket dimension of an emotion; when I strayed too far into the magic of an image; when I mismanaged the time and leapt through the wormhole/plot-hole back to my implausible Venice and its witch baby. Poetry erupted when I couldn’t keep performing the narrative I was supposed to—that of a boy who liked Amandas, not Dannys. 

13. Looking back, dueling with lasers or wands sounds definitely phallic. 

14. I became a poet after my friends no longer wanted to play the games we made up. After they decided to only play games that would help them grow up. But growing up, for me, meant no longer just playing at, dancing around what I desired. And some days I wanted to grow up. And some days I wanted to die. 

15. I had to Google “coming out.” I had to Google “lie vs. lay.” I had to Google “gay and Asian” and found mainly what white men had to say about bodies like mine. I had to Google “gay Asian American literature.” I had to Google “queer.” I had to Google “fag.” I had to search for one sentence with “I” that eventually I could say out loud. 

16. Poems became my favorite way of telling stories because poems can tell a secret and talk about telling that secret and along the way become another secret.

17. Of course, all this can and does happen in other genres too. And when I write poems I’m drawing on aspects of fantastical fiction, autobiography, realist fiction, standup comedy, Tolstoy as much as Takeshi Kaneshiro, TV shows that got way too many seasons, and elements I don’t want to be able to name. In recent years, lots of prose poems and lyric essay–esque pieces have been showing their blocky faces to me. And very recently, a teensy spoonful of fiction. To call myself poet just makes the most sense, personally, creatively. Poet is where I feel freest to do this and that and wtf.

18. Some nights I just want to be an international sex symbol/pop star with Grammy-worthy vocal chops but still a ton of totally relatable habits, like eating bread. I envy the pop song that can end simply6 by repeating its chorus over and over, slowly fading out yet also burrowing itself into your ear. 

19. A barely audible “hey” in the collapsed year. The violence of state-sanctioned language. My own unbroken, snowy silences. To ask “Where is home?” as if there is one answer. To write home in a poem, like a poem could be a home—is this happy or sad? Strange yet not uncommon, to weep with and into joy. A form of power, a kind of language: to weep and disobey silence. My favorite silence is a space for thought, is spaciousness. A wormhole named Maybe. A parallel galaxy called Another Way. 

20. I continue to poet because now I have all these poet friends who’ll text me to ask what poems I’m writing and I have to start writing again so they’ll stop bugging me and I never want them to stop. 

I continue to poet because I’m not satisfied with the definitions behind, the narratives around “coming out,” “lie vs. lay,” “gay and Asian,” “gay Asian American literature,” “queer,” “fag.” I am always trying to say the everything I’ve lived, am living, but I never want to feel like I’ve said it all. 

For years I believed poetry was the only place where I could be all my selves, any self. I wrote, trying to answer the question, “How can a poem hold the myriad me’s and realms and loves and ferocities and shards and velocities—this whole multiverse that the life cannot, yet?” But can a poem do this? A book of poems? Is poetry a place? 

I am a poet because I ask poetry to do too much, and then it does it. 

 

ENDNOTES

1. From a working note that prefaced a set of Nakayasu’s poems published in How2
2. Except what my parents call each other. 
3. What joy! Poets! Not caring one bit how annoying we are when we go on and on about the moon!
4. “A land not mine,” translated by Jane Kenyon in
From Room to Room (Alice James Books, 1978). 
5. “The Secret” in
O Taste and See (New Directions, 1964). 
6. With the best pop music, this is no simple feat; the chorus has to be excellent.

 

Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017), which was longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry and won the Publishing Triangle Thom Gunn Award. His work has appeared in many publications, including Poetry and the 2015 and 2019 editions of The Best American Poetry. He has received a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Kundiman and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at Brandeis University as the Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence. 

Thumbnail: Romain Gille

Craft Capsule: We Are All Translators

by

Jenny Bhatt

9.21.20

This is no. 73 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Literary translation is about being a close reader in the source language and a skilled writer in the target language. Of course, a language is not merely words, phrases, idioms, diction, and syntax. Languages contain entire cultures within them, entire ways of thinking and being, too. Those of us who translate other writers’ works do so because we want to dive deep and fully immerse ourselves in another world—to pay attention to more than the literal content and preserve the emotions, cultural nuances, and humor from the source to target language.  

This is not unlike how, as readers and writers, we seek to inhabit the worlds of fictional characters. We are all translators. The process of reading involves translating and interpreting the writer’s meaning and intent. The process of writing involves interpreting and giving voice to our own thoughts, which are guided by the things we have read, seen, heard, and experienced. As Mexican poet Octavio Paz famously wrote, “No text is entirely original because language itself, in its essence, is already a translation: firstly, of the nonverbal world and secondly, since every sign and every phrase is the translation of another sign and another phrase.”

Due to the accretions of traditions and culture over centuries, it is not possible to seamlessly transpose two languages when translating. Similarly, due to our conditioning and subjectivity, it is not possible for two readers to read the same text entirely the same way. And it is not possible for two writers to create entirely the same story. A single piece of writing can have multiple acceptable readings and translations due to the flexibility of language, suppleness of imagination, and versatility of craft techniques. 

I was a writer before I became a translator. But I learned to appreciate linguistic, aesthetic, and cultural diversity more profoundly because of translation work. There are ten key practices of the discipline that pull me in each time:

1. Reading a work closely and repetitively to know it, sometimes even better than the original writer.

2. Listening to the tonalities, textures, rhythms, cadences, and diction in both languages to capture the writer’s voice as fully as possible.

3. Learning nuanced meanings of words and phrases in the target language by seeing them used with different specificity and significance in the source language.

4. Hunting for le mot juste that honors the complexities of both languages.

5. Discovering aesthetic reinterpretations of an original work to suit a new readership or audience linguistically, intellectually, and intuitively. 

6. Deliberating over the subtexts, cultural implications, and stylistic choices made by the original writer in the source language to recreate them in the target language without losing any literary merit.

7. Interrogating the politics of the writer, their text, and the source and target languages.

8. Meditating on the original writer’s themes to convey them with the proper intentions and emotions.

9. Deepening my understanding of the world, past and present, by transforming something foreign into something familiar.

10. Negotiating with what remains untranslatable.

With only one book of translation and a handful of shorter works completed, I am still developing these practices into technical proficiencies. However, as each translation project helps me hone and refine my skills, I am also leveraging these lessons more frequently in my reading and writing. Literary translation is, in the end, about actively co-creating a text with its original writer by adding more shape, context, nuance, and texture to it. Aren’t we all better off as readers if we learn to do the same? And aren’t we stronger writers when we draw from, build onto, and expand upon the world of literature that has come before us?

 

Jenny Bhatt is a writer, translator, and literary critic. She is the host of the Desi Books podcast and the author of the short story collection Each of Us Killers (7.13 Books, 2020). Her literary translation of Gujarati writer Dhumketu’s best short fiction is forthcoming from HarperCollins India in late 2020. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Literary Hub, Longreads, Poets & Writers Magazine, the Millions, Electric Literature, the Rumpus, and Kenyon Review. Having lived and worked in India, England, Germany, Scotland, and various parts of the United States, she now lives in a suburb of Dallas.

Thumbnail: Patrick Tomasso

Craft Capsule: Doors vs. Corridors

by

Will Harris

8.17.20

This is no. 68 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

During the pandemic, with so many doors locked and shuttered, I lived in the corridors of my house. Thom Gunn describes the corridor as a “separate place between the thought and felt”—a place of uncertainty, where thoughts are unformed and feelings suppressed. It’s probably not surprising, then, that the few poems I managed to eke out were meandering, confused, and muffled.

As the architecture of my house extended into what I wrote, I started looking for poems about houses—either set indoors or using the “house” as a metaphor for the craft of poetry. I was trying to work out what kind of house poetry should be, and how much confusion that house might be able to contain. Soon enough I turned to Emily Dickinson: 

I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –

I always read this stanza with the ironic hint of the estate agent in her tone (“Superior—for Doors” is particularly funny), which seems to mock the idea you could ever really compare poetry to a house. Though it can feel like using a conceit means committing to it entirely, here the analogy is loosely held, self-consciously tenuous: “If you look to your right, you’ll see some windows. How many? Numerous. And if you look down there, yup, superior doors. You won’t get that with Prose.” The lightness of tone is part of the image she projects about poetry. 

But I read it with another, darker Dickinson poem in the back of my head, this one taking the house less as a metaphor for poetry than for the poet’s interior life:

One need not be a Chamber – to be haunted – 
One need not be a House –
The Brain has Corridors – surpassing 
Material Place

These lines suggest that when you forgo “Material Place” and build your house in “Possibility” you open yourself up to a particular danger: being haunted. Where the other poem began with a confident assertion of habitation—“I dwell”—here the speaker expresses horror at the idea of being dwelt in: “The Brain has Corridors.” The tone is repetitious, fevered, as though the speaker has been running up and down their internal corridors for hours. The effect of this is compounded by the use of the impersonal pronoun “One” and that definite article before “Brain”—not my brain but the brain—which suggests a traumatic detachment from the body; and “surpassing,” hanging at the end of the line makes it feel like those brain corridors are only getting bigger, longer, more labyrinthine. 

What’s missing from the second poem is a door of the kind Dickinson thought made poetry so superior—and without one, there’s no means of escape. Door and corridor may sound related but there’s no etymological link between them. The word door comes from the Old English duru and has always meant the same thing. Corridor is from the Italian corridoio, referring to a “running-place.” They represent two forms of possibility, each reliant on the other: The door is a portal, signifying insight, while the corridor is an in-between place, signifying uncertainty and confusion. 

An important way to understand the corridor might be via the horror film in which a shadowy figure always seems to be lurking at the other end, or the protagonist is trapped, running down an endless dark passage full of locked doors. Where the corridor represents terror, the door is freedom.

*

During lockdown I also turned to Bhanu Kapil’s book How to Wash a Heart and stopped at this section:

When what you perform 
At the threshold
Is at odds 
With what happens
When the front door is closed,
Then you are burning
The toast 
And you are letting the butter
Fester.

The front door is where the internal becomes public, even if briefly. But in order for an act to be meaningful, what you “perform” at the threshold must have some relationship to what happens behind it. Kapil’s lines make me think of those people in expensive houses who voted to privatize Britain’s National Health Service last December and then stepped out onto their doorsteps this spring to clap enthusiastically in support of nurses and carers. They make me think of what the threshold can conceal. The door only has meaning in relation to the corridor.

In early July, Bhanu and I did a reading together on Zoom. She began hers by lighting a small candle. She had some shallots next to her that she’d picked from Wittgenstein’s garden in Cambridge. The effect of these gestures wasn’t just to welcome the listener in. It was to create an open space into which the poem could emerge, where we could meet it. In trying to harmonize inner and outer, in letting out what festers, the distance between our two screens fell away.

After the reading, I thought back to Dickinson’s haunted house poem. It’s driven by a claustrophobic fear of the internal. Even the “External Ghost” or hidden “Assassin” (other threats that feature in Dickinson’s poem) are less terrifying than the prospect of “self encounter.” The self is a more ambiguous, volatile element. It could stay hidden forever: “Ourself, behind ourself concealed,” reads one line in the poem. You might think you’ve turned a corner, the front door in sight, only to find yourself lost down another passageway. 

But this is only a nightmare if you’re looking for a door. The beauty of Kapil’s How to Wash a Heart lies in its openness: “I want to be split / Into two parts / Or a thousand pieces.” The self that’s been split into a thousand pieces has nothing to lose. What’s not whole cannot be broken. Likewise, the poem doesn’t have to form a coherent whole—a portal to insight. It doesn’t have to involve finding the right door and standing outside of it proudly. It can also mean walking the corridors, afraid and confused.

 

Will Harris is the author of the poetry collection RENDANG (Wesleyan University Press, 2020), which was selected as a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. He has worked in schools and led workshops at the Southbank Centre and currently teaches for the Poetry School. A contributing editor at the Rialto, he lives in London. 

Thumbnail: Kilarov Zaneit

Craft Capsule: Writing Hot

by

Jordan Kisner

11.30.20

This is no. 80 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

When I was a writing student, a professor once commented to me that my writing was a little intense. I don’t remember exactly what he said, and he wasn’t unkind, but it was something like “Your writing is always at eleven,” or “Your writing is always just so hot-blooded.” 

This comment elicited a mixed reaction at the time. I wasn’t proud. I didn’t sense that this was a compliment. He was giving me a note: Learn to tone it down sometimes. It felt respectful in its way, as if he were saying, “Okay, you can write like your hair is on fire, but make sure that’s not the only thing you can do.” Which is a good and teacherly thing to do, to discourage a student from leaning too heavily on the thing that feels good, to point out tics and habits. But as a young writer—a female writer, a queer writer—to hear an older male professor note that your work is unrelentingly intense can set off a clamor of questions, insecurities, suspicions, irritations, doubts, shames. This is maybe especially the case when the young writer is writing (as I was) about her own life and self, the source of this overmuchness. 

So I was a little embarrassed, concerned that “intense” was code for melodramatic, maudlin, tacky, purple. Childish. Overfeminine. Hysterical. But also, I wanted to be an intense writer. What was the point of writing if it wasn’t vivid and compelling, if it wasn’t transporting, if it didn’t make you rock back in your seat? I wrote then, and write now, I suppose, to express an intensity to the condition of being, an aliveness that feels full and bewildering. 

After that, though, I spent several years trying to write in a way that was hot-blooded, or full of feeling, but also somehow cool. Writing that was fierce and ardent while being unimpeachably in control of itself. I’ve tried a few ways to do this over the years. The first, maybe, we’ll call The Didion method: Bury feeling in a near-hysterical radiance of detail or texture when describing absolutely mundane things like sock brands; directly reference imminent emotional breakdown (or past breakdown) in prose so deadpan and commanding it seems like possibly a complex joke. Then there is what we might call The Nelson: Go straight to eleven, get poetic and hot about sex, love, heartbreak, pain, and then stave off accusations of mawkishness with theory and academically rigorous discussions of the sex. 

I love both these methods—and Joan Didion and Maggie Nelson—but lately I’ve been thinking about what you lose when you insist on cooling down your prose. Early this summer I had a conversation with Ocean Vuong on my Thresholds podcast during which he spoke about his reclamation of prose that some might dismiss as purple. “I am interested in using a style that a lot of men have deemed too prissy for them to use in the present,” he told me. “It feels like drag to me—to be extra! There’s too much glitter because we want to be blindingly present and seen.” He was speaking about the historical moment when emotional and beautiful writing was deemed feminine and therefore less worthy, and the way that as a [queer] man he might begin to excavate and subvert that. He reminded me, also, that you can find fun and even joy in just going ahead and writing at eleven, writing hot, writing like your hair is on fire—to be blindingly present and seen.  

 

Jordan Kisner is the author of the essay collection Thin Places (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). Her writing has also appeared in the Atlantic, the Believer, the Guardian, n+1, the New York Times Magazine, and the Paris Review Daily. The recipient of fellowships from Pioneer Works, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and Art Omi, she is currently a fellow at the Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas. 

Thumbnail: Dmitry Bayer

Craft Capsule: On Becoming a Pop Star, I Mean, a Poet

by

Chen Chen

11.2.20

This is no. 77 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

1. I started to write poetry because of a secret that I had trouble sharing even with myself.

2. I continue to write poetry because, in the fifth grade, my short story about a pregnant witch living in Venice received the following peer critique: “You do know it takes nine months for the baby to grow inside the mom, not two?” I write poetry because I wish I’d responded, “You do know this is a witch baby???” 

3. I knew I would always be a poet after a barely audible “goodbye” in the doorway of a tenth-floor apartment. How there was no elevator and it was the middle of summer and I had to walk down and down those stairs. 

4. I wake up craving poetry because Sawako Nakayasu once said, “I work mostly in poetry because it claims to be neither fiction nor nonfiction, because it acknowledges the gap between what really was or is, and what is said about it.”1 

5. Poetry because French class, Russian class. Because Mandarin and English and Hokkien at home. Because English. Because I learn and learn, then forget so much Mandarin. Because I forgot all my Hokkien2 by age seven. Poetry because my first-year advisor in college, a professor of Russian Studies, asked me why all my three-page Tolstoy responses were so late. “Go on,” she said, “give us your narrative.” Poems because I loved how her prompt was a comment on the expected form of my response. Poet because I said, “Time management’s an issue,” which really meant I wanted every paper to be about everything and I wanted Takeshi Kaneshiro’s character in Chungking Express and I wanted Takeshi Kaneshiro and was rewatching the film over and over and Googling stills. 

6. In eighth grade I began writing poetry outside of school assignments because I couldn’t keep imitating Robert Frost. I kept writing poetry because it seemed no one else with a secret like this looked like me.

7. Poet because I am a failed musician. Failed painter. Failed scientist obsessed with the moon.3 Failed gymnast, though once I was very, very good at cartwheeling. Poetry because my favorite scenes in Power Rangers were when, instead of running, they all backflipped and backflipped to where the fighting would take place.

8. The violence of the state. The silence of the h in French words, like homme. How violent, many homes. To ask, “Where is home?” as if it’s ever a simple question. To say, “I have a home” as if it’s an unremarkable statement. To say “I have” in Russian, you use a genitive construction that translates to the awkward English, “At me there is.” At home the adults asked, “Why did you get an A-?” in three different languages; there were no questions about whether I would ever start hating myself for what and whom I loved.   

9. I continue to read poetry because it seems every poem has a big secret at its core and I always want to know if it’s a big gay secret. Because Anna Akhmatova wrote, “Sunset in the ethereal waves: / I cannot tell if the day / is ending, or the world, or if / the secret of secrets is inside me again”4 and that seems pretty gay to me. Because Denise Levertov wrote, “Two girls discover / the secret of life / in a sudden line of / poetry”5 and that sounds definitely gay. 

Because for years I had to settle for subtext and total projection. 

Because when I found Justin Chin’s Bite Hard in a college library, I glanced at just one poem then added the book to my stack to check out. Because I moved it to the middle of the stack, as if hiding it from both the sky and the ground. Because I was so moved to see both “Chinese New Year” and “ex-boyfriends” in one poem. Because was it hide or protect, and do I know the difference now? 

10. In English, I still have trouble with lie versus lay, which I always feel ashamed to admit, though I know English is a troublesome, troubling language that makes one want to lay down, to lie one’s body on its side till all one’s lies have tumbled out from one’s head and belly, and are lain out like one single shadow-body of a liar on the grass. 

11. I started off as a fiction writer. 

12.  I started as a reader of fantastical literature, a writer of both fantasy and science fiction. I started on the playground, telling friends that the jungle gym was a spaceship and we’d better hurry onboard before it took off: “Danny, you’re new to the cause, like me. Amanda, you’re the chosen one, our only hope.” I couldn’t get enough of the galactic, magic, any-kind-of-epic mission; the dueling-with-lasers-or-wands journey. I acted them out, wrote them down. 

Moments of poetry occurred in my stories when I stayed too long in the pocket dimension of an emotion; when I strayed too far into the magic of an image; when I mismanaged the time and leapt through the wormhole/plot-hole back to my implausible Venice and its witch baby. Poetry erupted when I couldn’t keep performing the narrative I was supposed to—that of a boy who liked Amandas, not Dannys. 

13. Looking back, dueling with lasers or wands sounds definitely phallic. 

14. I became a poet after my friends no longer wanted to play the games we made up. After they decided to only play games that would help them grow up. But growing up, for me, meant no longer just playing at, dancing around what I desired. And some days I wanted to grow up. And some days I wanted to die. 

15. I had to Google “coming out.” I had to Google “lie vs. lay.” I had to Google “gay and Asian” and found mainly what white men had to say about bodies like mine. I had to Google “gay Asian American literature.” I had to Google “queer.” I had to Google “fag.” I had to search for one sentence with “I” that eventually I could say out loud. 

16. Poems became my favorite way of telling stories because poems can tell a secret and talk about telling that secret and along the way become another secret.

17. Of course, all this can and does happen in other genres too. And when I write poems I’m drawing on aspects of fantastical fiction, autobiography, realist fiction, standup comedy, Tolstoy as much as Takeshi Kaneshiro, TV shows that got way too many seasons, and elements I don’t want to be able to name. In recent years, lots of prose poems and lyric essay–esque pieces have been showing their blocky faces to me. And very recently, a teensy spoonful of fiction. To call myself poet just makes the most sense, personally, creatively. Poet is where I feel freest to do this and that and wtf.

18. Some nights I just want to be an international sex symbol/pop star with Grammy-worthy vocal chops but still a ton of totally relatable habits, like eating bread. I envy the pop song that can end simply6 by repeating its chorus over and over, slowly fading out yet also burrowing itself into your ear. 

19. A barely audible “hey” in the collapsed year. The violence of state-sanctioned language. My own unbroken, snowy silences. To ask “Where is home?” as if there is one answer. To write home in a poem, like a poem could be a home—is this happy or sad? Strange yet not uncommon, to weep with and into joy. A form of power, a kind of language: to weep and disobey silence. My favorite silence is a space for thought, is spaciousness. A wormhole named Maybe. A parallel galaxy called Another Way. 

20. I continue to poet because now I have all these poet friends who’ll text me to ask what poems I’m writing and I have to start writing again so they’ll stop bugging me and I never want them to stop. 

I continue to poet because I’m not satisfied with the definitions behind, the narratives around “coming out,” “lie vs. lay,” “gay and Asian,” “gay Asian American literature,” “queer,” “fag.” I am always trying to say the everything I’ve lived, am living, but I never want to feel like I’ve said it all. 

For years I believed poetry was the only place where I could be all my selves, any self. I wrote, trying to answer the question, “How can a poem hold the myriad me’s and realms and loves and ferocities and shards and velocities—this whole multiverse that the life cannot, yet?” But can a poem do this? A book of poems? Is poetry a place? 

I am a poet because I ask poetry to do too much, and then it does it. 

 

ENDNOTES

1. From a working note that prefaced a set of Nakayasu’s poems published in How2
2. Except what my parents call each other. 
3. What joy! Poets! Not caring one bit how annoying we are when we go on and on about the moon!
4. “A land not mine,” translated by Jane Kenyon in
From Room to Room (Alice James Books, 1978). 
5. “The Secret” in
O Taste and See (New Directions, 1964). 
6. With the best pop music, this is no simple feat; the chorus has to be excellent.

 

Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017), which was longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry and won the Publishing Triangle Thom Gunn Award. His work has appeared in many publications, including Poetry and the 2015 and 2019 editions of The Best American Poetry. He has received a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Kundiman and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at Brandeis University as the Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence. 

Thumbnail: Romain Gille

Craft Capsule: We Are All Translators

by

Jenny Bhatt

9.21.20

This is no. 73 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Literary translation is about being a close reader in the source language and a skilled writer in the target language. Of course, a language is not merely words, phrases, idioms, diction, and syntax. Languages contain entire cultures within them, entire ways of thinking and being, too. Those of us who translate other writers’ works do so because we want to dive deep and fully immerse ourselves in another world—to pay attention to more than the literal content and preserve the emotions, cultural nuances, and humor from the source to target language.  

This is not unlike how, as readers and writers, we seek to inhabit the worlds of fictional characters. We are all translators. The process of reading involves translating and interpreting the writer’s meaning and intent. The process of writing involves interpreting and giving voice to our own thoughts, which are guided by the things we have read, seen, heard, and experienced. As Mexican poet Octavio Paz famously wrote, “No text is entirely original because language itself, in its essence, is already a translation: firstly, of the nonverbal world and secondly, since every sign and every phrase is the translation of another sign and another phrase.”

Due to the accretions of traditions and culture over centuries, it is not possible to seamlessly transpose two languages when translating. Similarly, due to our conditioning and subjectivity, it is not possible for two readers to read the same text entirely the same way. And it is not possible for two writers to create entirely the same story. A single piece of writing can have multiple acceptable readings and translations due to the flexibility of language, suppleness of imagination, and versatility of craft techniques. 

I was a writer before I became a translator. But I learned to appreciate linguistic, aesthetic, and cultural diversity more profoundly because of translation work. There are ten key practices of the discipline that pull me in each time:

1. Reading a work closely and repetitively to know it, sometimes even better than the original writer.

2. Listening to the tonalities, textures, rhythms, cadences, and diction in both languages to capture the writer’s voice as fully as possible.

3. Learning nuanced meanings of words and phrases in the target language by seeing them used with different specificity and significance in the source language.

4. Hunting for le mot juste that honors the complexities of both languages.

5. Discovering aesthetic reinterpretations of an original work to suit a new readership or audience linguistically, intellectually, and intuitively. 

6. Deliberating over the subtexts, cultural implications, and stylistic choices made by the original writer in the source language to recreate them in the target language without losing any literary merit.

7. Interrogating the politics of the writer, their text, and the source and target languages.

8. Meditating on the original writer’s themes to convey them with the proper intentions and emotions.

9. Deepening my understanding of the world, past and present, by transforming something foreign into something familiar.

10. Negotiating with what remains untranslatable.

With only one book of translation and a handful of shorter works completed, I am still developing these practices into technical proficiencies. However, as each translation project helps me hone and refine my skills, I am also leveraging these lessons more frequently in my reading and writing. Literary translation is, in the end, about actively co-creating a text with its original writer by adding more shape, context, nuance, and texture to it. Aren’t we all better off as readers if we learn to do the same? And aren’t we stronger writers when we draw from, build onto, and expand upon the world of literature that has come before us?

 

Jenny Bhatt is a writer, translator, and literary critic. She is the host of the Desi Books podcast and the author of the short story collection Each of Us Killers (7.13 Books, 2020). Her literary translation of Gujarati writer Dhumketu’s best short fiction is forthcoming from HarperCollins India in late 2020. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Literary Hub, Longreads, Poets & Writers Magazine, the Millions, Electric Literature, the Rumpus, and Kenyon Review. Having lived and worked in India, England, Germany, Scotland, and various parts of the United States, she now lives in a suburb of Dallas.

Thumbnail: Patrick Tomasso

Craft Capsule: Creating a Seasonal Writing Practice

by

Khadijah Queen

1.4.21

This is no. 84 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

The pandemic, social uprisings, and a volatile political climate—superimposed upon family and work responsibilities, as well as health challenges—has made a regular writing practice impossible over the past ten months. Essays I pitched early in the year didn’t materialize, and only a handful of terribly sad poems arrived in usable condition. The one longform piece I did finish—a zuihitsu that appeared in Harper’s—was about the pandemic, written in April and May as I worried terribly about the health and safety of family members who were sick, and some who are still frontline workers. As a relatively prolific writer, with six published books since 2008 and four more currently in various stages of completion, I’m trying to see my current lack of time and energy to write as a side effect of all that’s happening in the world, but I don’t want to give up on a regular writing practice. To that end, I want to reenvision possibilities for that practice while taking into account the new reality. 

This isn’t the first time I’ve had to adapt to complicated circumstances; I’ve tried many different kinds of writing practices over the past two decades. My early years of writing consisted of recording lines on my lunch breaks and during lulls at my day jobs, and a few minutes in my car before entering the house in the evening. When my son got older, I somehow managed six years of a daily writing practice, usually a half hour at 5:30 AM with a cup of tea and a blueberry muffin. When I had an emergency appendectomy in 2015, my writing routine tanked as I recovered. Slowly I built back up to weekend flurries, and that lasted long enough for me to complete my fifth book. Then I wrote during intensely concentrated weeks and months for three and a half years of doctoral study, resulting in one book of poetry, the first draft of a memoir and a 270-page critical dissertation by the end of 2019. After all that writing, all I wanted was a break, so I took a couple of months. Then the pandemic happened, and the writing—didn’t. As a person who really needs an intentional writing routine, I felt at a loss. 

How, with mounting caregiving, health issues and work responsibilities, would I fit in regular writing time? I struggled for months, until I hit upon the one thing I hadn’t tried yet—seasons. Thinking in terms of seasons avoids the specificity (and requisite pressure) of calendar dates and days of the week. A seasonal practice could preserve writing goals more gently and flexibly. It might include thematic prompts—write about lightness and travel in summer, or perhaps reflect on freedom; focus on renewal and revisit the pastoral or the aubade in spring; delve into darkness, list modes of comfort, and maybe address grief in winter; autumn writing might spotlight transformation and beauty. Autumn is my favorite season. I love wearing knee boots and turtleneck sweaters and leather gloves, love the early October riot of color in the trees. You can of course define for yourself what each season means. Collect keywords over the year that can provide lasting inspiration. 

Let’s also pause here and define “writing goals.” For me that’s mostly meant books, and that hasn’t changed. But I’ve had to think smaller when it comes to productivity even as I continue to envision larger projects. To avoid becoming overwhelmed, maybe I’ll choose a single element to work on, such as order, or beginnings and endings. For a seasonal practice, choosing writing goals that can be adjusted as needed, and granting yourself the easement of non-specified time to work, seems more than reasonable right now.  

If you have an impending deadline in early February, maybe you’ll work only on the coldest days, when outside pursuits aren’t accessible. In summer, if you enjoy writing outside like I do, choose the sunniest days to work on a patio, or at a socially distant café. If you have a deadline that isn’t urgent, try softening it. Make one date—or date range!—for a first draft, another for draft two, another for draft three. After each draft, especially if it’s spring, buy yourself fresh flowers. Get as much done as you can, then reward yourself with an evening walk or morning drive, weather permitting. These are just a few basic suggestions, and you can adjust goals (and rewards) as you go along. I happen to like dark chocolate, so that’s my default treat. Make a list of yours and have it ready along with those seasonal keywords. I firmly believe we need as many reminders as possible that part of the work of writing is allowing for mental space, for infusions of beauty, for intentional nourishment—physical and otherwise. During these incredibly challenging times, I would wager that flexibility rules the day. Don’t abuse grace, of course; communicate clearly and continue to commit to due dates with integrity, but also make use of kindness—given, and received.

 

Khadijah Queen is the author of six books, including Anodyne (Tin House, 2020) and I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On (YesYes Books, 2017). Her writing has also appeared in American Poetry Review, BuzzFeed, Fence, Poetry, and Tin House, among other publications. Holding a PhD in English from the University of Denver and an MFA from Antioch University, she teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and for Regis University’s Mile High MFA program.

Thumbnail: Oliver Hihn

Craft Capsule: Writing Hot

by

Jordan Kisner

11.30.20

This is no. 80 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

When I was a writing student, a professor once commented to me that my writing was a little intense. I don’t remember exactly what he said, and he wasn’t unkind, but it was something like “Your writing is always at eleven,” or “Your writing is always just so hot-blooded.” 

This comment elicited a mixed reaction at the time. I wasn’t proud. I didn’t sense that this was a compliment. He was giving me a note: Learn to tone it down sometimes. It felt respectful in its way, as if he were saying, “Okay, you can write like your hair is on fire, but make sure that’s not the only thing you can do.” Which is a good and teacherly thing to do, to discourage a student from leaning too heavily on the thing that feels good, to point out tics and habits. But as a young writer—a female writer, a queer writer—to hear an older male professor note that your work is unrelentingly intense can set off a clamor of questions, insecurities, suspicions, irritations, doubts, shames. This is maybe especially the case when the young writer is writing (as I was) about her own life and self, the source of this overmuchness. 

So I was a little embarrassed, concerned that “intense” was code for melodramatic, maudlin, tacky, purple. Childish. Overfeminine. Hysterical. But also, I wanted to be an intense writer. What was the point of writing if it wasn’t vivid and compelling, if it wasn’t transporting, if it didn’t make you rock back in your seat? I wrote then, and write now, I suppose, to express an intensity to the condition of being, an aliveness that feels full and bewildering. 

After that, though, I spent several years trying to write in a way that was hot-blooded, or full of feeling, but also somehow cool. Writing that was fierce and ardent while being unimpeachably in control of itself. I’ve tried a few ways to do this over the years. The first, maybe, we’ll call The Didion method: Bury feeling in a near-hysterical radiance of detail or texture when describing absolutely mundane things like sock brands; directly reference imminent emotional breakdown (or past breakdown) in prose so deadpan and commanding it seems like possibly a complex joke. Then there is what we might call The Nelson: Go straight to eleven, get poetic and hot about sex, love, heartbreak, pain, and then stave off accusations of mawkishness with theory and academically rigorous discussions of the sex. 

I love both these methods—and Joan Didion and Maggie Nelson—but lately I’ve been thinking about what you lose when you insist on cooling down your prose. Early this summer I had a conversation with Ocean Vuong on my Thresholds podcast during which he spoke about his reclamation of prose that some might dismiss as purple. “I am interested in using a style that a lot of men have deemed too prissy for them to use in the present,” he told me. “It feels like drag to me—to be extra! There’s too much glitter because we want to be blindingly present and seen.” He was speaking about the historical moment when emotional and beautiful writing was deemed feminine and therefore less worthy, and the way that as a [queer] man he might begin to excavate and subvert that. He reminded me, also, that you can find fun and even joy in just going ahead and writing at eleven, writing hot, writing like your hair is on fire—to be blindingly present and seen.  

 

Jordan Kisner is the author of the essay collection Thin Places (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). Her writing has also appeared in the Atlantic, the Believer, the Guardian, n+1, the New York Times Magazine, and the Paris Review Daily. The recipient of fellowships from Pioneer Works, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and Art Omi, she is currently a fellow at the Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas. 

Thumbnail: Dmitry Bayer

Craft Capsule: On Becoming a Pop Star, I Mean, a Poet

by

Chen Chen

11.2.20

This is no. 77 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

1. I started to write poetry because of a secret that I had trouble sharing even with myself.

2. I continue to write poetry because, in the fifth grade, my short story about a pregnant witch living in Venice received the following peer critique: “You do know it takes nine months for the baby to grow inside the mom, not two?” I write poetry because I wish I’d responded, “You do know this is a witch baby???” 

3. I knew I would always be a poet after a barely audible “goodbye” in the doorway of a tenth-floor apartment. How there was no elevator and it was the middle of summer and I had to walk down and down those stairs. 

4. I wake up craving poetry because Sawako Nakayasu once said, “I work mostly in poetry because it claims to be neither fiction nor nonfiction, because it acknowledges the gap between what really was or is, and what is said about it.”1 

5. Poetry because French class, Russian class. Because Mandarin and English and Hokkien at home. Because English. Because I learn and learn, then forget so much Mandarin. Because I forgot all my Hokkien2 by age seven. Poetry because my first-year advisor in college, a professor of Russian Studies, asked me why all my three-page Tolstoy responses were so late. “Go on,” she said, “give us your narrative.” Poems because I loved how her prompt was a comment on the expected form of my response. Poet because I said, “Time management’s an issue,” which really meant I wanted every paper to be about everything and I wanted Takeshi Kaneshiro’s character in Chungking Express and I wanted Takeshi Kaneshiro and was rewatching the film over and over and Googling stills. 

6. In eighth grade I began writing poetry outside of school assignments because I couldn’t keep imitating Robert Frost. I kept writing poetry because it seemed no one else with a secret like this looked like me.

7. Poet because I am a failed musician. Failed painter. Failed scientist obsessed with the moon.3 Failed gymnast, though once I was very, very good at cartwheeling. Poetry because my favorite scenes in Power Rangers were when, instead of running, they all backflipped and backflipped to where the fighting would take place.

8. The violence of the state. The silence of the h in French words, like homme. How violent, many homes. To ask, “Where is home?” as if it’s ever a simple question. To say, “I have a home” as if it’s an unremarkable statement. To say “I have” in Russian, you use a genitive construction that translates to the awkward English, “At me there is.” At home the adults asked, “Why did you get an A-?” in three different languages; there were no questions about whether I would ever start hating myself for what and whom I loved.   

9. I continue to read poetry because it seems every poem has a big secret at its core and I always want to know if it’s a big gay secret. Because Anna Akhmatova wrote, “Sunset in the ethereal waves: / I cannot tell if the day / is ending, or the world, or if / the secret of secrets is inside me again”4 and that seems pretty gay to me. Because Denise Levertov wrote, “Two girls discover / the secret of life / in a sudden line of / poetry”5 and that sounds definitely gay. 

Because for years I had to settle for subtext and total projection. 

Because when I found Justin Chin’s Bite Hard in a college library, I glanced at just one poem then added the book to my stack to check out. Because I moved it to the middle of the stack, as if hiding it from both the sky and the ground. Because I was so moved to see both “Chinese New Year” and “ex-boyfriends” in one poem. Because was it hide or protect, and do I know the difference now? 

10. In English, I still have trouble with lie versus lay, which I always feel ashamed to admit, though I know English is a troublesome, troubling language that makes one want to lay down, to lie one’s body on its side till all one’s lies have tumbled out from one’s head and belly, and are lain out like one single shadow-body of a liar on the grass. 

11. I started off as a fiction writer. 

12.  I started as a reader of fantastical literature, a writer of both fantasy and science fiction. I started on the playground, telling friends that the jungle gym was a spaceship and we’d better hurry onboard before it took off: “Danny, you’re new to the cause, like me. Amanda, you’re the chosen one, our only hope.” I couldn’t get enough of the galactic, magic, any-kind-of-epic mission; the dueling-with-lasers-or-wands journey. I acted them out, wrote them down. 

Moments of poetry occurred in my stories when I stayed too long in the pocket dimension of an emotion; when I strayed too far into the magic of an image; when I mismanaged the time and leapt through the wormhole/plot-hole back to my implausible Venice and its witch baby. Poetry erupted when I couldn’t keep performing the narrative I was supposed to—that of a boy who liked Amandas, not Dannys. 

13. Looking back, dueling with lasers or wands sounds definitely phallic. 

14. I became a poet after my friends no longer wanted to play the games we made up. After they decided to only play games that would help them grow up. But growing up, for me, meant no longer just playing at, dancing around what I desired. And some days I wanted to grow up. And some days I wanted to die. 

15. I had to Google “coming out.” I had to Google “lie vs. lay.” I had to Google “gay and Asian” and found mainly what white men had to say about bodies like mine. I had to Google “gay Asian American literature.” I had to Google “queer.” I had to Google “fag.” I had to search for one sentence with “I” that eventually I could say out loud. 

16. Poems became my favorite way of telling stories because poems can tell a secret and talk about telling that secret and along the way become another secret.

17. Of course, all this can and does happen in other genres too. And when I write poems I’m drawing on aspects of fantastical fiction, autobiography, realist fiction, standup comedy, Tolstoy as much as Takeshi Kaneshiro, TV shows that got way too many seasons, and elements I don’t want to be able to name. In recent years, lots of prose poems and lyric essay–esque pieces have been showing their blocky faces to me. And very recently, a teensy spoonful of fiction. To call myself poet just makes the most sense, personally, creatively. Poet is where I feel freest to do this and that and wtf.

18. Some nights I just want to be an international sex symbol/pop star with Grammy-worthy vocal chops but still a ton of totally relatable habits, like eating bread. I envy the pop song that can end simply6 by repeating its chorus over and over, slowly fading out yet also burrowing itself into your ear. 

19. A barely audible “hey” in the collapsed year. The violence of state-sanctioned language. My own unbroken, snowy silences. To ask “Where is home?” as if there is one answer. To write home in a poem, like a poem could be a home—is this happy or sad? Strange yet not uncommon, to weep with and into joy. A form of power, a kind of language: to weep and disobey silence. My favorite silence is a space for thought, is spaciousness. A wormhole named Maybe. A parallel galaxy called Another Way. 

20. I continue to poet because now I have all these poet friends who’ll text me to ask what poems I’m writing and I have to start writing again so they’ll stop bugging me and I never want them to stop. 

I continue to poet because I’m not satisfied with the definitions behind, the narratives around “coming out,” “lie vs. lay,” “gay and Asian,” “gay Asian American literature,” “queer,” “fag.” I am always trying to say the everything I’ve lived, am living, but I never want to feel like I’ve said it all. 

For years I believed poetry was the only place where I could be all my selves, any self. I wrote, trying to answer the question, “How can a poem hold the myriad me’s and realms and loves and ferocities and shards and velocities—this whole multiverse that the life cannot, yet?” But can a poem do this? A book of poems? Is poetry a place? 

I am a poet because I ask poetry to do too much, and then it does it. 

 

ENDNOTES

1. From a working note that prefaced a set of Nakayasu’s poems published in How2
2. Except what my parents call each other. 
3. What joy! Poets! Not caring one bit how annoying we are when we go on and on about the moon!
4. “A land not mine,” translated by Jane Kenyon in
From Room to Room (Alice James Books, 1978). 
5. “The Secret” in
O Taste and See (New Directions, 1964). 
6. With the best pop music, this is no simple feat; the chorus has to be excellent.

 

Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017), which was longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry and won the Publishing Triangle Thom Gunn Award. His work has appeared in many publications, including Poetry and the 2015 and 2019 editions of The Best American Poetry. He has received a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Kundiman and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at Brandeis University as the Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence. 

Thumbnail: Romain Gille

Craft Capsule: The Short Short Story

by

Peter Kispert

2.22.21

This is no. 89 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I was assigned that first short short story in college, which I still return to today: Amy Hempel’s knockout “Going,” a three-page piece from her collection Reasons to Live (Knopf, 1985). Sitting in my dorm room, students loud in the common area outside, I recall thinking I had missed some pages, then the unmistakable feeling that I couldn’t have possibly. That perfect last line at the very bottom of the page, punctuating a deeply satisfying story that defied conventional narrative. There are moments one experiences as a reader and writer that blow the world wide open in the best way, and reading this story was one of those; to anyone who would (pretend to) listen, I couldn’t stop talking about it.

Short short stories hold the obvious charge of compressing narrative in a rather extreme way, but what I initially loved about writing the form was the possibility to attend to reverberation. I noticed how a detail could echo out more apparent, and controlled, than in the longer works of fiction I had been drafting. The attention of the reader had become, in writing these brief pieces, an available consideration, if not yet a manageable one. I had assumed that short short prose was written quickly because it was so quick to read, but as so often happens, the sketches began to take longer, and serious effort, the more I learned.

In my debut story collection, I Know You Know Who I Am, published by Penguin Books last year, I wrote about queer characters trapped by (often elaborate) falsehoods. I featured several short short stories of just one or two pages to mirror the restriction that I felt the liars of my fiction not only possessed but frequently valued. These narrators and protagonists are constricted by their deceptions, and sometimes say little, or just enough, to their own ends. In this way, the shorter pieces in the book felt true, and rang out with echoes from the longer stories in the book: doublings that hinted at a presiding consciousness over the collection, which I vied to make available, if not explicit.

The short short story form is, speaking frankly, often slighted. Quick, confident work can render something more like scene, and leave the reader ambivalent. Reader investment can be hard to manage. A detail can become a redundant crutch. The best short pieces are closed systems in which elements of narrative are brought into careful relief. And resonate in brevity that masks a world of meaning and complexity beneath their small surfaces.

Several years after studying that first short short story, I attended a reading Hempel gave at the New York Summer Writers Institute at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs. At the time, I was working as an academic administrator for a gifted youth program (hosted by the same university) for children whose talents extended to running loudly down the hallways outside that auditorium as Hempel read beautifully from a longer story, “The Dog of the Marriage.” I remember thinking, as I sat rapt in that auditorium, how intricate the piece was. How each of its scenes delivered precise, accumulating thematic echoes. The spectacular ending. It called to mind the experience of first flipping that page—once, then again, for the words that couldn’t be there. Later, while walking from the campus gym, I passed by her near the main lawn. Of course, I couldn’t say one word.

 

Peter Kispert is the author of the debut story collection I Know You Know Who I Am (Penguin Books, 2020), which was selected as a Best Book of the Year by Elle and a Best LGBTQ Book of the Year by O, the Oprah Magazine. His stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in GQ, Esquire, them, Playboy, and other publications. He is finishing work on his first novel.

Thumbnail: Jakob Andreasen

Craft Capsule: Rethinking Theory and Poetics

by

Khadijah Queen

1.11.21

This is no. 85 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I entered my English PhD program in the fall of 2016 knowing that I wanted to write criticism—I felt excited to dive into prose and formally shape what I had learned about reading and writing literature over the course of nearly two decades. I wasn’t as excited about theory. My experience reading Heidegger during my MFA involved extreme disagreement, to put it mildly—disagreement with both classmates and my professor, not to mention Heidegger himself. This time around, as I read Foucault and structuralist texts, revisited Derrida and Baudrillard and Plato, I realized that their theories didn’t quite align with mine; when I tried to apply their thinking, it rang false. I came to different conclusions around what was important in shaping meaning within a text. Their texts are foundational, but they didn’t seem capable of even conceiving of the work I wanted to analyze—particularly literature by Black women. I also felt that the books I was assigned to analyze in class, works by John Ashbery and Ralph Ellison, for example, could benefit from a fresher, more updated approach to their work—an approach that didn’t take their being classics for granted, but examined, with feminist, queer and critical race theories in mind, how they approached both content and form. 

The literary criticism class I took was aggressively white, misogynist, and dead. The language of analysis favored rather violent words like argue, interrogate, force, demand, impose, rupture. The more I read, the less I understood why literary analysis had to be so painful. I loved literature! Why couldn’t I love analysis as well? I wondered, too, why literary analysis couldn’t reflect the love that we as writers and thinkers and readers have for the work. Objectivity felt like a farce; the so-called rigor felt like busywork, fake and antiproductive. The language of literary criticism (and the field overall, frankly) is steeped in imperialist hierarchy and exclusivity. If I wanted something more inclusive, I needed to read into the present and future as well as the past with, to paraphrase Audre Lorde’s famous quote, all new tools. 

I found myself approaching more feeling-centered analyses, in direct opposition to objectivity, which didn’t stand up to scrutiny as a default praxis, in my opinion. I decided to compile and add to a new critical framework to approach the work I wanted to study. Upon the recommendation of my advisor, Dr. Tayana Hardin, I found kinship, brilliance, and wisdom in Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s Revolutionary Mothering, and the interviews with Toni Cade Bambara, Nikki Giovanni, Maya Angelou, and Sonia Sanchez in Claudia Tate’s hard-to-find 1984 treasure Black Women Writers at Work. I revisited Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider and Toni Morrison’s The Origin of Others. To help me articulate what I wanted to express about literary analysis and the field of literary theory, I drew inspiration and training from Edward Said’s Humanism and Democratic Criticism, Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return, and—surprisingly—Roland Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text. By foregrounding enjoyment, aesthetically and content-wise, I could access nineteenth-century authors like Herman Melville in ways that acknowledged underlying queerness and class concerns in the work, as well as my own perspective as a Black woman. 

After reading and hearing about the nightmarishly racist and damaging experiences of my peers who had undertaken doctoral study, I was determined to enjoy my experience. I had to fight to identify and create that enjoyment, but once I did, I cherished and nurtured it. If you find literary theory inadequate for your needs, too convoluted, too dead—you aren’t alone. You can imagine new thinking methods for yourself, and trust your responses to theories that may be established and entrenched, but have outlived an unquestioned existence. 

Asking questions of one’s own work is part of any professional writing practice; it follows that our thinking about how writing works—in terms of craft, theory, and the work we choose to canonize—also benefits from periodic reexamination. If a work cannot stand up to such questioning, it is not only valuable to articulate why, but to point to works that do hold up to scrutiny. When we search for alternatives to problematic texts—alternatives that past critics may have overlooked or even actively dismissed—we expand the reach, influence, and richness of literature overall. Instead of lamenting “the death of the canon,” we can celebrate the power of human creativity to evolve for the better. We can recognize that we’ve always had examples of that power—all we have to do is remain open to changing how, and where, we look for and analyze it.

 

Khadijah Queen is the author of six books, including Anodyne (Tin House, 2020) and I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On (YesYes Books, 2017). Her writing has also appeared in American Poetry Review, BuzzFeed, Fence, Poetry, and Tin House, among other publications. Holding a PhD in English from the University of Denver and an MFA from Antioch University, she teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and for Regis University’s Mile High MFA program.

Thumbnail: Jaredd Craig

Craft Capsule: The Arc of Epiphany

by

Jordan Kisner

12.7.20

This is no. 81 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I continually puzzle over something the essayist Amy Benson said during a seminar on “the lyric essay.” Or maybe she didn’t say it but alluded to it by the structure of her syllabus. This was a while ago, but essentially she proposed that essays might follow one of a few types of arcs: the arc of narrative, the arc of argument, the arc of epiphany.

This concept made intuitive sense to me. The feeling of the word arc—which for me always conjures the bowing of a ship’s prow, something sturdy and flexible, something constructed but buoyant, something that cuts through water and ice but is smooth enough to run your hand over—matches the feeling of an essay. The arc of narrative seems clear enough: The essay uses as its keel the rising and falling action of story. Its end point is coterminous with a feeling of resolution, or maybe just arrival, in the narrative. The arc of argument shapes an essay around an idea that needs advancing, a thought that needs interrogating and articulating—whether it’s clearly an argument or just a notion the writer is toying with. 

But what is an essay that follows the arc of epiphany?

I don’t remember how Benson defined it, and I prefer it that way. This way the arc of epiphany is something I get to imagine, to theorize, to puzzle over, to strive within. Is it an essay that provokes an epiphany? An essay that finds its arrival point in a moment of epiphany or bright realization? Does it replicate, structurally, the feeling of epiphany: total confusion followed by rupture and maybe rapture, followed by reassessment of everything that came before in light of the new knowledge, followed, perhaps, by disillusionment or fading fervor? Is it an essay that completely upends itself part of the way through and starts over on new premises? Does it just go right ahead and manifest the divine, as the word’s earliest uses in English (first, to describe Christ’s appearance to the Magi; and then to denote the revelation of a divinity more generally) would indicate?

When I wrote my first book, Thin Places, I toyed with creating an arc of epiphany not only within a single essay but through an arrangement of essays—or, to put it in geometric terms, a major arc produced by a series of minor arcs. I wanted to make a collection of essays that each individually riffed on the epiphanic (say, by ending with the appearance of a holy orange; or by putting the reader in a prolonged confrontation with death; or by pulling a U-turn halfway through a piece about debutante balls to talk about queerness) but also collectively and gradually, through sequential reading, crested into something like the epiphanic. I wanted that big inrush of air, that clearer picture, that sudden recognition of pattern. 

This is an extremely lofty goal, I realize, and I didn’t necessarily think such a thing would be possible (not least because I still wonder what “arc of epiphany” means), but it gave me something to play with and push against. Most writing that I like—of my own or by other people—is written as a genuine and urgent attempt to understand something inscrutable. When the writer stretches to comprehend something just out of their reach, or to articulate something for which they have no words—that’s when the air begins to crackle. It feels like a goal worth reaching for, even and especially if you have to make up its rubric yourself.

 

Jordan Kisner is the author of the essay collection Thin Places (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). Her writing has also appeared in the Atlantic, the Believer, the Guardiann+1, the New York Times Magazine, and the Paris Review Daily. The recipient of fellowships from Pioneer Works, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and Art Omi, she is currently a fellow at the Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas.

Thumbnail: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Photo Library

Craft Capsule: On Nightmares

by

Chen Chen

11.9.20

This is no. 78 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

1.
A nightmare: realizing I need to restructure this essay, again, and it’s due tomorrow. 

A nightmare: COVID-19 cases on the rise again all across the country. 

A nightmare: how often essayists, especially poets-turned-essayists, like to remind everyone that essay comes from the French verb essayer, meaning to try, to attempt, to test. 

Not a nightmare: I love the try, the attempt. 

A nightmare: the test. The test freaks me out. 

A nightmare: how long it’s taken in the United States for COVID tests to become more accessible. 

Why do I prefer the nightmare of being dreadfully stuck, working on a poem, over the nightmare of being dreadfully stuck, working on an essay? 

A collective, ongoing nightmare: the pandemic. 

2.
Working on my essays for this series has been both a welcome distraction and (as I knew would happen) a dive into the deep end of my anxieties. The process feels nightmarish because my preferred method of exploring and articulating craft ideas is writing poems (and it seems I’ve gotten to the point in my poetry writing where I can befriend the dread, the stuck-ness). Or through conversation: engaging with students and connecting with friends, all of which happens these days over the shared nightmare known as Zoom. 

Also, I hate paragraphs. The blocky-ness of paragraphs makes me anxious, like I’m trapped in a box and, in the essay form, can only move from one box to another. I feel I have to make sense. Too much sense. I like paragraphs in prose poems, because I’m freer to do—I know better how to do—weird things with sentences. Or not write sentences at all. 

I think of Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey (Wave Books, 2012), a collection of essays based on lectures she was required to give as a teacher—at one point, Ruefle describes lectures as “bad dreams.” Ruefle has commented frequently on the fact that this one volume on poetry has far outsold her books of poetry; that people would rather read about poetry, than read a poem. That for many, poetry remains a nightmare. 

Poetry, to me, is the best dreaming. 

A form of breaking out of the Zoom room or the chain of paragraphs, into an expanse of fresh blooms,1 a field bursting with sunflowers. 

Still I’m drawn to essays for how they document a thought process, an attempt to think clearly and deeply. And I love good essays on poetry. I love Madness, Rack, and Honey. I’d like to write craft essays like Ruefle’s. I’m not sure that is possible, given our very different brains. But maybe my brain can do something else and figure out ways to enjoy writing an essay, or at least dislike it less. 

Could it be that my fear of the essay draws me to it? I’m afraid I won’t write as well in this genre, but the challenge entices. I’m nervous to delve into new subjects and discover scary truths, but surprise is also one of the key reasons I write anything. After all, in poetry it’s usually the door I don’t want to open that leads me to the room I most need to investigate.2

3.
I’ve long wanted to examine nightmares in my poetry. I’m intrigued by how fear can act as a signpost on the path to truth; how terror can mean getting closer to a complicated reality. I’ve written poems based on dreams—wild dreams that contain some frightening revelation at their core—but I have yet to write a poem based on a straight-up nightmare. Specifically, I’ve been itching to write a poem about my two recurring nightmares involving high school French teachers. 

One nightmare stars my sophomore year instructor, my favorite one, as a highly trained assassin. Her weapon of choice: one of my mother’s beloved Chinese cleavers. Somehow she manages very clean kills. In the nightmare I admire her and am also terrified. Sometimes I am the target, for getting a B on a quiz, say, and before the final blow she reminds me, “Cravate is a feminine noun, despite it referring to men’s neckties! It’s LA cravate, UNE cravate, SA cravate!” If I experience this again, I hope I remember to respond, “But anyone can wear a necktie!” Other times the nightmare gets loftier and the target is a corrupt politician, usually French. One time I am the corrupt French politician. 

I haven’t had this nightmare in a while, and I miss it—perhaps because 2020 is a global waking nightmare. What sleeping nightmare of mine could compare with Trump, COVID, and the police? I hesitate to type it out, but I miss this assassin nightmare because I wish there were worse consequences for the Trump administration. I wish there were consequences at all. As someone invested in abolition, I can’t advocate for prison. I have to imagine and help build other types of justice and accountability, ones that don’t rely on punishment and vengeance. At the same time, the part of me that misses the assassin nightmare would love for something nightmarish to visit these leaders who’ve abandoned all duty to the people. 

Another part of me misses this nightmare because seeing my mother’s cleaver in it is like seeing a part of her. I also associate high school language study with her because she teaches Mandarin at that level. I haven’t seen my mother since this pandemic was declared a pandemic. She’s immunocompromised and has been taking every precaution. Every call with her begins with her asking, “Have you been staying at home?” and ends with her command, “Keep staying at home.” My father, who never texts, texted me last week to say, “Avoid travel to any hot spots,” while travel ads pop up on my TV. Back in March my partner’s father was quarantined in a hospital in upstate New York after experiencing COVID-like symptoms. It was four days, but it felt like a year before the test results came back: negative. 

I check the news and check the news. I check social media, texts. I pick up the phone. The friends of friends with the virus. The friends with the virus. 

4.
Perhaps my fear of writing essays has to do with how my brain always associates the act with an academic assignment, a requirement, a grammar test that I might fail. It doesn’t help that so far most of the essays I write have in fact been assigned to me. They do help pay the bills. I do love a prompt. But is it, on some level, masochism? Is all my writing, in some way, a testing to which I subject myself, over and over? Am I perpetually trying to win a French teacher’s approval? 

The other French teacher nightmare goes like this: On an otherwise blissfully uneventful day, I receive a letter from my high school. I know something is amiss before even opening it. For a long time I just stare at it; it stares back from my coffee table. Then I open it. And it says because I never finished my senior year French project, I never actually passed high school. Therefore I have to return to school, where this time I will also reside. The second I step back into that memory-drenched building, I am met by my senior year French instructor. She looks me over then says in the most disappointed yet unsurprised way, “Bonjour.” 

What terrifies me in this dream is not the disruption of everyday life (by a cleaver-wielding assassin like in my other nightmare), but the resurrection of days I’ve long put behind me, a time and a self I’d rather not reinhabit. Not that high school was all stuffy, all busy work. No, I had many brilliant teachers and classmates, many life-changing experiences. This nightmare is the nightmare that my life didn’t really change. What I fear is going back to school but never learning, never growing. 

What I love is the school of poetry, which invites me to play anew and wonder differently and try strange things—to test in the sense of to experiment. To test in the sense of encountering nerve-wracking challenges, but trusting that the fear is a sign of one’s hunger for and effort toward real growth. Maybe one day I will experience essay writing more like that: an experiment in good fear. 

5.
A poem I find instructive for writing about nightmares is “The Dream”3 by Aracelis Girmay, one of my former professors, whose work continues to nourish as well as push me. Indeed, Girmay’s writing always reminds me how poems themselves can be the best poetry teachers. I also return to this one because it focuses on a mother, the figure beside or behind the French teacher of my first nightmare. Here is the startling start of “The Dream”: 

Last night, all night
the dream, the dead
mother, my small sister,
tiny, her mouth
over my shoulder
(screaming) like a knapsack
when she heard the news,
& my brother playing
the stereo. I howled
like the coyotes; myself.

The poem then shifts from the howl to a sunlit, tranquil scene, the way dreams can, suddenly and completely. “The Nightmare” ultimately wouldn’t be the most fitting title for this poem. The word dream can encompass good ones and bad. That said, nightmare can contain the abject as well as the gorgeous (my favorite horror movies have stellar aesthetics). My French teacher nightmares feature both terror and tenderness—fear of disappointing the mother/teacher figure, but also admiration for her and a longing for a time when I could, on a regular basis, talk with her in person. Rereading Girmay’s poem I realize that at the heart of the poem I want to write are questions like: How do fear and affection sit side by side? Why do I connect French teachers and mothers in this manner? 

This is what I mean by poems being the best poetry teachers: They offer an array of techniques to emulate, yes, but more fundamentally and expansively, they conjure up uncomfortable questions and encourage bewildering (sometimes frightening) leaps in imagination.

6.
One week, feeling particularly defeated by this essay, I write a draft of my poem “The Nightmare.” It reads ridiculous, then not, which seems like how a lot of my writing goes. I’d like one day to write a poem that shifts from not one bit ridiculous to utterly. Still, this poem is some new occurrence. Every truly new poem4 is its own strange school. 

I revise and revise. The poem teaches me about how my recurring nightmares are linked to the world’s shared nightmare of COVID-19. How afraid I am, as a teacher myself now, to be back this fall; how fortunate I feel that my university has allowed me to teach online; how much I miss teaching in person; how angry I am that not every teacher “gets to” do this. 

I revise and revise the ending of this essay. I’m afraid of being so direct and so pared down in my diction. But I know from poetry that it’s often when I’m trying the least to be “poetic” that the most charged truths emerge. 

Truths like: I’m afraid my students will get sick. I’m afraid of losing a student, more than one student. I think I should be more afraid of getting very sick too. I miss my mother, who, as a high school Mandarin teacher, knows that school is more than a building, but misses her classroom. I’m relieved she has the option to teach online as well. I miss many of my high school teachers and hope they are safe and finding ways to rest. 

To dream, both literally and creatively. To speak back to the nightmares, both personal and collective.

 

ENDNOTES

1. A beautiful nightmare: how much poets adore the word bloom.
2. In life, I know better than to go exploring attics, basements, or other favorite hangout spots of vengeful ghosts and demons. 
3. From
Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions, 2011).
4. I mean new mainly in terms of process; new to the writer. The big hope is that the poem will then do something new for a reader.

 

Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017)which was longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry and won the Publishing Triangle Thom Gunn Award. His work has appeared in many publications, including Poetry and the 2015 and 2019 editions of The Best American Poetry. He has received a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Kundiman and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at Brandeis University as the Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence. 

Thumbnail: Chuttersnap

Craft Capsule: The Art of Literary Criticism

by

Jenny Bhatt

9.28.20

This is no. 74 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

A personal manifesto for literary criticism:

1. On close reading: Before reviewing, read a book at least three times for the following: text, subtext, and what’s left off the page. Often the latter two will reveal more about the writer’s true intent.

2. On references and associations: A good review is, first and foremost, about expanding the literary conversation between the text, the author, other readers, and ourselves—determining what the text means to us as individuals and as societies. Enrich your frames of reference by reading widely, purposefully, and mindfully. And then look for the literary associations, assemblages, affinities, and networks of relevant ideas, texts, people, and objects. Remember W. H. Auden’s sixth must-have for literary criticism: “Throw light upon the relation of art to life, to science, economics, ethics, religion, etc.”

3. On fairness: Ensure fairness and balance for the author and for readers (of both the review and the work itself). It is not enough to say what’s good or bad about a book. Make the case with evidence as to why. It is also not enough to write an information-filled essay that’s missing a “so what?” Every major point in the review should answer the twofold question: Why is this good or bad, and why does it matter?

4. On argument: Never speculate. Always contextualize. The review thesis must have plausible counterarguments, and the essay must include and respond to those counterarguments. That said, don’t indulge in what Virginia Woolf called the “desiccation of the living tissues of literature into a network of little bones” as some critics do with their “able and industrious pens.”

5. On comparison: Keep in mind Elizabeth Hardwick’s indictment: “How often we read a beginner’s review that compares a thin thing to a fat one. ‘John Smith, like Tolstoy, is very interested in the way men interact under the conditions of battle.’ Well, no.” Also, resist your cognitive biases—recency, confirmation, in-group, distinction, and attentional—in such comparative analysis.

6. On building up versus tearing down: A work of literature can do so much more than “demystify, destabilize, denaturalize, deconstruct, debunk, decipher,” as Rita Felski reminds us in The Limits of Critique (University of Chicago Press, 2015). It can, more significantly, also “recontextualize, reconfigure, remake, recharge perceptions.” Instead of simply focusing on excavating a text for causes, conditions, and motives, follow Felski’s advice to reflect on the text’s revelations and possibilities. Because, as Felski argues, “Works of art do not only subvert, but also convert; they do not only inform but also transform—a transformation that is not just a matter of intellectual readjustment but one of affective realignment as well (a shift of mood, a sharpened sensation, an unexpected surge of affinity or disorientation).”

7. On readership: Understand the target audience of a book—never mind who its writer or translator or publisher might have intended—and whether it meets their needs. Engage the reader as a smart, active participant in the conversation rather than a passive receiver of information. Felski’s four modes of textual engagement—recognition, enchantment, knowledge, and shock—also apply to how we engage with a review. Recognition is about the text as a source of self-interpretation and self-understanding. Enchantment is that pleasurable self-forgetting while reading. Knowledge refers to what literature discloses about the world beyond oneself. Shock speaks to the troubling and taboo aspects of human existence.

8. On language: Be specific, precise, and clear. Craft each sentence to make the review aesthetically pleasing. But avoid overwrought sentences that call more attention to themselves (or to you) than to the points they are making.

9. On the why: The payoff of writing criticism is deepening our reading pleasure and making it time well-spent. It helps us create a sense of understanding amid the constant activity of our surroundings. As Virginia Woolf wrote: “Poems and novels, histories and memoirs, dictionaries and blue-books; books written in all languages by men and women of all tempers, races, and ages jostle each other on the shelf. And outside the donkey brays, the women gossip at the pump, the colts gallop across the fields. Where are we to begin? How are we to bring order into this multitudinous chaos and so get the deepest and widest pleasure from what we read?”

10. On the so what: Do all of the above because a book is a sociocultural, historical, and political artifact. Like all human creations, it is a product of our experiences and reflects our desires, conflicts, and potential. Critiquing literature well involves learning about some crucial aspects of ourselves as individuals and as a species. It is how we elevate and preserve our literary traditions.

 

Jenny Bhatt is a writer, translator, and literary critic. She is the host of the Desi Books podcast and the author of the short story collection Each of Us Killers (7.13 Books, 2020). Her literary translation of Gujarati writer Dhumketu’s best short fiction is forthcoming from HarperCollins India in late 2020. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Literary Hub, LongreadsPoets & Writers Magazine, the Millions, Electric Literature, the Rumpus, and Kenyon Review. Having lived and worked in India, England, Germany, Scotland, and various parts of the United States, she now lives in a suburb of Dallas.

Thumbnail: Markus Winkler

Craft Capsule: Lyric vs. Narrative

by

Will Harris

8.24.20

This is no. 69 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

A few years ago I showed a series of new poems to some friends and a deflating word kept coming up: narrative. The poems involved a speaker moving through London, having random encounters. They were baggy poems that contained events, but I didn’t think of them as narrative. I had been trying to avoid some of the pitfalls of the lyric; now I worried I’d unintentionally slipped into another mode, one that was artificial and linear, associated with dead white men known—like brands of cake—by their surnames: Wordsworth, Browning, (Mr.) Kipling. 

I started thinking about the differences between lyric and narrative. Maybe the biggest one is time. According to Aristotle, narrative is the “imitation of an action,” and that requires time in which to happen. A lyric, on the other hand, if it was filmed, might flit across the screen in a second or two. Take fragment 105A by Sappho—one of the first lyric poets—translated here by Anne Carson: 

as the sweetapple reddens on a high branch 
   high on the highest branch and the applepickers forgot—
no, not forgot: were unable to reach

Summary: Person reaches for apple. End of shot. 

But in that moment, the real action has nothing to do with apples. It’s internal: a swerving thought-line, folding back in on itself. Those apples—too high to pick, and thus objects of longing—represent something the speaker either forgets about (maybe wants to forget about) or chooses to remember as out of reach.

Though Sappho didn’t conceive of this as a whole poem, it feels of a piece with the contemporary lyric. “Disembodied, the poem provokes longing,” writes poet and scholar Jennifer Moxley. “The song it sings is either a lament of exile from the body or a celebration of freedom from its material prison, depending on the direction of the winds.” Or as the literary critic Helen Vendler puts it: In lyric, voice is “made abstract,” emancipated from time and space; it’s “the gesture of immortality and freedom.” By contrast, “the novel is the gesture of the historical and the spatial.” 

This transcendental view of the lyric has made some poets want to throw all conventional distinctions out the window. At a talk for the Kootenay School of Writing in 1990, Lisa Robertson identifies Bruce Andrews as one such poet who railed against, as he put it, “the intrinsic evils of narrative, lyric, identity among other traditional constructions.” Behind this rage at “traditional constructions”—tied to systems of structural oppression like capitalism—is the understandable desire to renew language by purging it. 

Though what else would that kind of purged language erase? Identity is rarely a choice; it chooses you. But writing through identity, whether I like it or not, has been my way to engage with the social and political conditions in which I exist—to reclaim, in small part, the choice that racialization takes away. This might explain why I lean on narrative sometimes, and why I’ve tried to set it—unintentionally or otherwise—against the lyric. Because my experience is “historical and spatial,” as much as it gestures towards “freedom.”

Questions still nag, though: Why bother? Why say “lyric” or “narrative”? Why not invent new forms, new genres, new terms? Why not just write

I can only respond—I’m talking to myself here—that the poles of lyric and narrative have helped me navigate the blank night of the page. They’ve helped me to think, in particular, about how time functions: With narrative, a focus on action centers time; with lyric, the suspension of time centers language. 

And sometimes I go back to The Virago Book of Fairy Tales to remember how varied and strange “narrative” can be—to remind myself that it doesn’t have to limit the work of poets at all. This is the first paragraph of a Greenlandic tale:

There was woman who was old, blind and likewise unable to walk. Once she asked her daughter for a drink of water. The daughter was so bored with her old mother that she gave her a bowl of her own piss. The old woman drank it all up, then said: “You’re a nice one, daughter. Tell me—which would you prefer as a lover, a louse or a sea scorpion?”

This could be reconstituted as a lyric. It demands—and rewards—a careful consideration of word choice and rhythm: the use of “likewise” in the first sentence; that phrase “nice one”; the ambiance of violent boredom. 

But it’s not a lyric. If you changed the words of a lyric poem—like that Sappho fragment earlier—it would become another poem altogether. If you changed the words here, the content would survive; narrative doesn’t rely quite so heavily on language itself for meaning. In this case, it’s already survived translation to reach us. And more could be added to it, taken away, spun off. 

This is the place I always end up at: The poem comes to life where lyric and narrative meet—where time and language cross over—and a possibility emerges of a poem that’s neither lyric nor narrative, but contains elements of both. Which has a body that moves through time and space, even as language tugs it skyward.

 

Will Harris is the author of the poetry collection RENDANG (Wesleyan University Press, 2020), which was selected as a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. He has worked in schools and led workshops at the Southbank Centre and currently teaches for the Poetry School. A contributing editor at the Rialto, he lives in London. 

Thumbnail: Charlotte Noelle

Craft Capsule: Craft Is Not Objective

by

Joy Priest

7.13.20

This is no. 65 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

In order to discuss ways to practice craft—the sustained attention that distinguishes poets from those who occasionally write poems or carpenters from those who once made a table of compromised integrity—we must first establish that craft is not an objective activity. Craft is not simply technical. If we take our craft seriously, or even if we want to play, we must realize that what we bring to craft is the world that crafted us. The way we work, our technique, holds all of our subconscious anxieties and desires. 

Toni Morrison talked about the U.S. literary imagination as one that has been wholly constructed from an uninterrogated unease. That is, a subconscious response to the presence of Blackness, and all of the resulting politesse, avoidance, shorthand, and metaphorical language—purity and innocence (read: light), and sinfulness and evil (read: dark)—that maintaining such an anxiety requires.

In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Morrison writes,

For some time now, I have been thinking about the validity or vulnerability of a certain set of assumptions conventionally accepted among literary historians or critics and circulated as “knowledge.” This knowledge holds that traditional, canonical American literature is free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the four-hundred-year old presence of, first, Africans and then African Americans in the United States. It assumes that this presence—which shaped the body politic, the Constitution, and the entire history of the culture—has had no significant place or consequence in the origin and development of that culture’s literature…. Just as the formation of the nation necessitated coded language and purposeful restriction to deal with the racial disingenuousness and moral frailty at its heart, so too did the literature, whose founding characteristics extend into the twentieth century, reproduce the necessity for codes and restriction. 

This “knowledge” has been internalized, to some degree, by all Americans, but some of us are subjects of it, and some of us are subjugated by it. Still, Morrison is interested in how this phenomenon occurs in the U.S. literary imagination not because it is a problem of Black people—as is often assumed when a Black writer writes about race—but because she wants to understand “the impact of racism on those who perpetuate it,” to “see what racial ideology does to the mind, imagination, and behavior of masters,” and to “observe how their lavish exploration of literature manages not to see meaning in the thunderous, theatrical presence of black surrogacy”—that which is released, which seeps out uninterrogated, undetected, that subconscious obsession. 

*

To practice craft, let us go back to the child. To that time before an awareness of formal craft: the beginner’s mind. To that fleeting moment before we fully absorbed the tropes of the U.S. literary imagination. Is this possible? Was it ever? Did we retain any of what we worked so hard to outgrow? 

As a subjugated child, what drove my craft—my record of little noticings and the subsequent piecing of them together, like the box puzzles I worked on with my grandfather—was a desire to know the truth about myself in a household where the adults secreted (secret-ed and secreted) my Blackness; hid it and released it; quieted it and let it seep; vigilantly avoided it and therefore obsessed over it. I knew that I was keeping a secret for my white grandfather, even if I didn’t know why. I noticed the releasing and seeping, even when he didn’t. After all, I was a child. 

After all, I was a Black child. The world outside my grandfather’s house wouldn’t let me avoid this truth.  

*

What shapes your craft? Your technical discipline? What shapes what you notice and therefore what you attend to? What do you refuse to notice and therefore deny? 

What do you see about yourself? Is there an active, critical interrogation of the self? Is there self-discipline (which is distinct from being policed or policing the self)? Self-discipline is an internal cultivation or a spiritual exercise, while being policed or self-policing is an external social force placed upon us to protect the material interests of the ruling elite. This must be a spiritual practice, this craft thing. Because, otherwise, this new knowledge-construction, this record-making, will reproduce the official knowledge and narratives of the status quo, inherent in which is that uninterrogated unease, that subconscious, but seeping, racism. 

When you go back to the child, when you achieve the beginner’s mind as an adult, you aren’t an authentic beginner anymore. Once you know craft, no matter how much you unlearn it, you hold that knowledge, alongside your newly remembered childhood attentiveness. Place this unlearning next to a self-discipline instead of a canonical knowledge or academic discipline. 

If you are white, notice yourself:

When you are sitting there working on an image, a metaphor, a simile, a symbol, an allusion; when you are considering personification, the narrative, the elliptical, the word choice, the music and your approach to music; when you are working in an elevated, established, and legitimized system of prosody—

What are you avoiding? What are you leaving out? What is uninterrogated? What trope is activated in that allusion, that figuration? What is behind your shorthand, your word choice, your line break? What is behind the way you employ color? The language of color? Who do you sacrifice for your music?

Are you exhausted? Good. The child isn’t. Don’t be the “knowledge”-holding adult. Be the noticing child. 

*

What did Ciara, Hannah, Markis, Abigail, Devonte, and Jeremiah notice before Jennifer and Sarah Hart drove them over that cliff in 2018? What did they have to notice as they tried to survive? What did the adults, who could have protected them, refuse to notice?

What do the children at the border notice from inside the cages, where they remain, still, today? Our avoidance, our passive refusal to notice them, keeps them there. 

 

Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower, which won the 2019 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press in September. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in numerous publications, including BOAAT, Connotation Press, Four Way Review, espnW, Gulf Coast, Mississippi Review, and Poetry Northwest, and have been anthologized in The Louisville Anthology (Belt Publishing, September 2020), A Measure of Belonging: Writers of Color on the New American South (Hub City Press, October 2020) and Best New Poets 2014, 2016, and 2019. A doctoral student in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston, Priest has also been a journalist, a theater attendant, a waitress, and a fast food worker. She has facilitated writing workshops and arbitration programs with adult and juvenile incarcerated women, and has taught composition, rhetoric, comedy, and African American arts and culture at the university level.

Thumbnail: New York Public Library

Craft Capsule: Craft Is Not Objective

by

Joy Priest

7.13.20

This is no. 65 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

In order to discuss ways to practice craft—the sustained attention that distinguishes poets from those who occasionally write poems or carpenters from those who once made a table of compromised integrity—we must first establish that craft is not an objective activity. Craft is not simply technical. If we take our craft seriously, or even if we want to play, we must realize that what we bring to craft is the world that crafted us. The way we work, our technique, holds all of our subconscious anxieties and desires. 

Toni Morrison talked about the U.S. literary imagination as one that has been wholly constructed from an uninterrogated unease. That is, a subconscious response to the presence of Blackness, and all of the resulting politesse, avoidance, shorthand, and metaphorical language—purity and innocence (read: light), and sinfulness and evil (read: dark)—that maintaining such an anxiety requires.

In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Morrison writes,

For some time now, I have been thinking about the validity or vulnerability of a certain set of assumptions conventionally accepted among literary historians or critics and circulated as “knowledge.” This knowledge holds that traditional, canonical American literature is free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the four-hundred-year old presence of, first, Africans and then African Americans in the United States. It assumes that this presence—which shaped the body politic, the Constitution, and the entire history of the culture—has had no significant place or consequence in the origin and development of that culture’s literature…. Just as the formation of the nation necessitated coded language and purposeful restriction to deal with the racial disingenuousness and moral frailty at its heart, so too did the literature, whose founding characteristics extend into the twentieth century, reproduce the necessity for codes and restriction. 

This “knowledge” has been internalized, to some degree, by all Americans, but some of us are subjects of it, and some of us are subjugated by it. Still, Morrison is interested in how this phenomenon occurs in the U.S. literary imagination not because it is a problem of Black people—as is often assumed when a Black writer writes about race—but because she wants to understand “the impact of racism on those who perpetuate it,” to “see what racial ideology does to the mind, imagination, and behavior of masters,” and to “observe how their lavish exploration of literature manages not to see meaning in the thunderous, theatrical presence of black surrogacy”—that which is released, which seeps out uninterrogated, undetected, that subconscious obsession. 

*

To practice craft, let us go back to the child. To that time before an awareness of formal craft: the beginner’s mind. To that fleeting moment before we fully absorbed the tropes of the U.S. literary imagination. Is this possible? Was it ever? Did we retain any of what we worked so hard to outgrow? 

As a subjugated child, what drove my craft—my record of little noticings and the subsequent piecing of them together, like the box puzzles I worked on with my grandfather—was a desire to know the truth about myself in a household where the adults secreted (secret-ed and secreted) my Blackness; hid it and released it; quieted it and let it seep; vigilantly avoided it and therefore obsessed over it. I knew that I was keeping a secret for my white grandfather, even if I didn’t know why. I noticed the releasing and seeping, even when he didn’t. After all, I was a child. 

After all, I was a Black child. The world outside my grandfather’s house wouldn’t let me avoid this truth.  

*

What shapes your craft? Your technical discipline? What shapes what you notice and therefore what you attend to? What do you refuse to notice and therefore deny? 

What do you see about yourself? Is there an active, critical interrogation of the self? Is there self-discipline (which is distinct from being policed or policing the self)? Self-discipline is an internal cultivation or a spiritual exercise, while being policed or self-policing is an external social force placed upon us to protect the material interests of the ruling elite. This must be a spiritual practice, this craft thing. Because, otherwise, this new knowledge-construction, this record-making, will reproduce the official knowledge and narratives of the status quo, inherent in which is that uninterrogated unease, that subconscious, but seeping, racism. 

When you go back to the child, when you achieve the beginner’s mind as an adult, you aren’t an authentic beginner anymore. Once you know craft, no matter how much you unlearn it, you hold that knowledge, alongside your newly remembered childhood attentiveness. Place this unlearning next to a self-discipline instead of a canonical knowledge or academic discipline. 

If you are white, notice yourself:

When you are sitting there working on an image, a metaphor, a simile, a symbol, an allusion; when you are considering personification, the narrative, the elliptical, the word choice, the music and your approach to music; when you are working in an elevated, established, and legitimized system of prosody—

What are you avoiding? What are you leaving out? What is uninterrogated? What trope is activated in that allusion, that figuration? What is behind your shorthand, your word choice, your line break? What is behind the way you employ color? The language of color? Who do you sacrifice for your music?

Are you exhausted? Good. The child isn’t. Don’t be the “knowledge”-holding adult. Be the noticing child. 

*

What did Ciara, Hannah, Markis, Abigail, Devonte, and Jeremiah notice before Jennifer and Sarah Hart drove them over that cliff in 2018? What did they have to notice as they tried to survive? What did the adults, who could have protected them, refuse to notice?

What do the children at the border notice from inside the cages, where they remain, still, today? Our avoidance, our passive refusal to notice them, keeps them there. 

 

Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower, which won the 2019 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press in September. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in numerous publications, including BOAAT, Connotation Press, Four Way Review, espnW, Gulf Coast, Mississippi Review, and Poetry Northwest, and have been anthologized in The Louisville Anthology (Belt Publishing, September 2020), A Measure of Belonging: Writers of Color on the New American South (Hub City Press, October 2020) and Best New Poets 2014, 2016, and 2019. A doctoral student in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston, Priest has also been a journalist, a theater attendant, a waitress, and a fast food worker. She has facilitated writing workshops and arbitration programs with adult and juvenile incarcerated women, and has taught composition, rhetoric, comedy, and African American arts and culture at the university level.

Thumbnail: New York Public Library

Craft Capsule: Lyric vs. Narrative

by

Will Harris

8.24.20

This is no. 69 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

A few years ago I showed a series of new poems to some friends and a deflating word kept coming up: narrative. The poems involved a speaker moving through London, having random encounters. They were baggy poems that contained events, but I didn’t think of them as narrative. I had been trying to avoid some of the pitfalls of the lyric; now I worried I’d unintentionally slipped into another mode, one that was artificial and linear, associated with dead white men known—like brands of cake—by their surnames: Wordsworth, Browning, (Mr.) Kipling. 

I started thinking about the differences between lyric and narrative. Maybe the biggest one is time. According to Aristotle, narrative is the “imitation of an action,” and that requires time in which to happen. A lyric, on the other hand, if it was filmed, might flit across the screen in a second or two. Take fragment 105A by Sappho—one of the first lyric poets—translated here by Anne Carson: 

as the sweetapple reddens on a high branch 
   high on the highest branch and the applepickers forgot—
no, not forgot: were unable to reach

Summary: Person reaches for apple. End of shot. 

But in that moment, the real action has nothing to do with apples. It’s internal: a swerving thought-line, folding back in on itself. Those apples—too high to pick, and thus objects of longing—represent something the speaker either forgets about (maybe wants to forget about) or chooses to remember as out of reach.

Though Sappho didn’t conceive of this as a whole poem, it feels of a piece with the contemporary lyric. “Disembodied, the poem provokes longing,” writes poet and scholar Jennifer Moxley. “The song it sings is either a lament of exile from the body or a celebration of freedom from its material prison, depending on the direction of the winds.” Or as the literary critic Helen Vendler puts it: In lyric, voice is “made abstract,” emancipated from time and space; it’s “the gesture of immortality and freedom.” By contrast, “the novel is the gesture of the historical and the spatial.” 

This transcendental view of the lyric has made some poets want to throw all conventional distinctions out the window. At a talk for the Kootenay School of Writing in 1990, Lisa Robertson identifies Bruce Andrews as one such poet who railed against, as he put it, “the intrinsic evils of narrative, lyric, identity among other traditional constructions.” Behind this rage at “traditional constructions”—tied to systems of structural oppression like capitalism—is the understandable desire to renew language by purging it. 

Though what else would that kind of purged language erase? Identity is rarely a choice; it chooses you. But writing through identity, whether I like it or not, has been my way to engage with the social and political conditions in which I exist—to reclaim, in small part, the choice that racialization takes away. This might explain why I lean on narrative sometimes, and why I’ve tried to set it—unintentionally or otherwise—against the lyric. Because my experience is “historical and spatial,” as much as it gestures towards “freedom.”

Questions still nag, though: Why bother? Why say “lyric” or “narrative”? Why not invent new forms, new genres, new terms? Why not just write

I can only respond—I’m talking to myself here—that the poles of lyric and narrative have helped me navigate the blank night of the page. They’ve helped me to think, in particular, about how time functions: With narrative, a focus on action centers time; with lyric, the suspension of time centers language. 

And sometimes I go back to The Virago Book of Fairy Tales to remember how varied and strange “narrative” can be—to remind myself that it doesn’t have to limit the work of poets at all. This is the first paragraph of a Greenlandic tale:

There was woman who was old, blind and likewise unable to walk. Once she asked her daughter for a drink of water. The daughter was so bored with her old mother that she gave her a bowl of her own piss. The old woman drank it all up, then said: “You’re a nice one, daughter. Tell me—which would you prefer as a lover, a louse or a sea scorpion?”

This could be reconstituted as a lyric. It demands—and rewards—a careful consideration of word choice and rhythm: the use of “likewise” in the first sentence; that phrase “nice one”; the ambiance of violent boredom. 

But it’s not a lyric. If you changed the words of a lyric poem—like that Sappho fragment earlier—it would become another poem altogether. If you changed the words here, the content would survive; narrative doesn’t rely quite so heavily on language itself for meaning. In this case, it’s already survived translation to reach us. And more could be added to it, taken away, spun off. 

This is the place I always end up at: The poem comes to life where lyric and narrative meet—where time and language cross over—and a possibility emerges of a poem that’s neither lyric nor narrative, but contains elements of both. Which has a body that moves through time and space, even as language tugs it skyward.

 

Will Harris is the author of the poetry collection RENDANG (Wesleyan University Press, 2020), which was selected as a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. He has worked in schools and led workshops at the Southbank Centre and currently teaches for the Poetry School. A contributing editor at the Rialto, he lives in London. 

Thumbnail: Charlotte Noelle

Craft Capsule: Craft Is Not Objective

by

Joy Priest

7.13.20

This is no. 65 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

In order to discuss ways to practice craft—the sustained attention that distinguishes poets from those who occasionally write poems or carpenters from those who once made a table of compromised integrity—we must first establish that craft is not an objective activity. Craft is not simply technical. If we take our craft seriously, or even if we want to play, we must realize that what we bring to craft is the world that crafted us. The way we work, our technique, holds all of our subconscious anxieties and desires. 

Toni Morrison talked about the U.S. literary imagination as one that has been wholly constructed from an uninterrogated unease. That is, a subconscious response to the presence of Blackness, and all of the resulting politesse, avoidance, shorthand, and metaphorical language—purity and innocence (read: light), and sinfulness and evil (read: dark)—that maintaining such an anxiety requires.

In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Morrison writes,

For some time now, I have been thinking about the validity or vulnerability of a certain set of assumptions conventionally accepted among literary historians or critics and circulated as “knowledge.” This knowledge holds that traditional, canonical American literature is free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the four-hundred-year old presence of, first, Africans and then African Americans in the United States. It assumes that this presence—which shaped the body politic, the Constitution, and the entire history of the culture—has had no significant place or consequence in the origin and development of that culture’s literature…. Just as the formation of the nation necessitated coded language and purposeful restriction to deal with the racial disingenuousness and moral frailty at its heart, so too did the literature, whose founding characteristics extend into the twentieth century, reproduce the necessity for codes and restriction. 

This “knowledge” has been internalized, to some degree, by all Americans, but some of us are subjects of it, and some of us are subjugated by it. Still, Morrison is interested in how this phenomenon occurs in the U.S. literary imagination not because it is a problem of Black people—as is often assumed when a Black writer writes about race—but because she wants to understand “the impact of racism on those who perpetuate it,” to “see what racial ideology does to the mind, imagination, and behavior of masters,” and to “observe how their lavish exploration of literature manages not to see meaning in the thunderous, theatrical presence of black surrogacy”—that which is released, which seeps out uninterrogated, undetected, that subconscious obsession. 

*

To practice craft, let us go back to the child. To that time before an awareness of formal craft: the beginner’s mind. To that fleeting moment before we fully absorbed the tropes of the U.S. literary imagination. Is this possible? Was it ever? Did we retain any of what we worked so hard to outgrow? 

As a subjugated child, what drove my craft—my record of little noticings and the subsequent piecing of them together, like the box puzzles I worked on with my grandfather—was a desire to know the truth about myself in a household where the adults secreted (secret-ed and secreted) my Blackness; hid it and released it; quieted it and let it seep; vigilantly avoided it and therefore obsessed over it. I knew that I was keeping a secret for my white grandfather, even if I didn’t know why. I noticed the releasing and seeping, even when he didn’t. After all, I was a child. 

After all, I was a Black child. The world outside my grandfather’s house wouldn’t let me avoid this truth.  

*

What shapes your craft? Your technical discipline? What shapes what you notice and therefore what you attend to? What do you refuse to notice and therefore deny? 

What do you see about yourself? Is there an active, critical interrogation of the self? Is there self-discipline (which is distinct from being policed or policing the self)? Self-discipline is an internal cultivation or a spiritual exercise, while being policed or self-policing is an external social force placed upon us to protect the material interests of the ruling elite. This must be a spiritual practice, this craft thing. Because, otherwise, this new knowledge-construction, this record-making, will reproduce the official knowledge and narratives of the status quo, inherent in which is that uninterrogated unease, that subconscious, but seeping, racism. 

When you go back to the child, when you achieve the beginner’s mind as an adult, you aren’t an authentic beginner anymore. Once you know craft, no matter how much you unlearn it, you hold that knowledge, alongside your newly remembered childhood attentiveness. Place this unlearning next to a self-discipline instead of a canonical knowledge or academic discipline. 

If you are white, notice yourself:

When you are sitting there working on an image, a metaphor, a simile, a symbol, an allusion; when you are considering personification, the narrative, the elliptical, the word choice, the music and your approach to music; when you are working in an elevated, established, and legitimized system of prosody—

What are you avoiding? What are you leaving out? What is uninterrogated? What trope is activated in that allusion, that figuration? What is behind your shorthand, your word choice, your line break? What is behind the way you employ color? The language of color? Who do you sacrifice for your music?

Are you exhausted? Good. The child isn’t. Don’t be the “knowledge”-holding adult. Be the noticing child. 

*

What did Ciara, Hannah, Markis, Abigail, Devonte, and Jeremiah notice before Jennifer and Sarah Hart drove them over that cliff in 2018? What did they have to notice as they tried to survive? What did the adults, who could have protected them, refuse to notice?

What do the children at the border notice from inside the cages, where they remain, still, today? Our avoidance, our passive refusal to notice them, keeps them there. 

 

Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower, which won the 2019 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press in September. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in numerous publications, including BOAAT, Connotation Press, Four Way Review, espnW, Gulf Coast, Mississippi Review, and Poetry Northwest, and have been anthologized in The Louisville Anthology (Belt Publishing, September 2020), A Measure of Belonging: Writers of Color on the New American South (Hub City Press, October 2020) and Best New Poets 2014, 2016, and 2019. A doctoral student in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston, Priest has also been a journalist, a theater attendant, a waitress, and a fast food worker. She has facilitated writing workshops and arbitration programs with adult and juvenile incarcerated women, and has taught composition, rhetoric, comedy, and African American arts and culture at the university level.

Thumbnail: New York Public Library

Craft Capsule: The Art of Literary Criticism

by

Jenny Bhatt

9.28.20

This is no. 74 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

A personal manifesto for literary criticism:

1. On close reading: Before reviewing, read a book at least three times for the following: text, subtext, and what’s left off the page. Often the latter two will reveal more about the writer’s true intent.

2. On references and associations: A good review is, first and foremost, about expanding the literary conversation between the text, the author, other readers, and ourselves—determining what the text means to us as individuals and as societies. Enrich your frames of reference by reading widely, purposefully, and mindfully. And then look for the literary associations, assemblages, affinities, and networks of relevant ideas, texts, people, and objects. Remember W. H. Auden’s sixth must-have for literary criticism: “Throw light upon the relation of art to life, to science, economics, ethics, religion, etc.”

3. On fairness: Ensure fairness and balance for the author and for readers (of both the review and the work itself). It is not enough to say what’s good or bad about a book. Make the case with evidence as to why. It is also not enough to write an information-filled essay that’s missing a “so what?” Every major point in the review should answer the twofold question: Why is this good or bad, and why does it matter?

4. On argument: Never speculate. Always contextualize. The review thesis must have plausible counterarguments, and the essay must include and respond to those counterarguments. That said, don’t indulge in what Virginia Woolf called the “desiccation of the living tissues of literature into a network of little bones” as some critics do with their “able and industrious pens.”

5. On comparison: Keep in mind Elizabeth Hardwick’s indictment: “How often we read a beginner’s review that compares a thin thing to a fat one. ‘John Smith, like Tolstoy, is very interested in the way men interact under the conditions of battle.’ Well, no.” Also, resist your cognitive biases—recency, confirmation, in-group, distinction, and attentional—in such comparative analysis.

6. On building up versus tearing down: A work of literature can do so much more than “demystify, destabilize, denaturalize, deconstruct, debunk, decipher,” as Rita Felski reminds us in The Limits of Critique (University of Chicago Press, 2015). It can, more significantly, also “recontextualize, reconfigure, remake, recharge perceptions.” Instead of simply focusing on excavating a text for causes, conditions, and motives, follow Felski’s advice to reflect on the text’s revelations and possibilities. Because, as Felski argues, “Works of art do not only subvert, but also convert; they do not only inform but also transform—a transformation that is not just a matter of intellectual readjustment but one of affective realignment as well (a shift of mood, a sharpened sensation, an unexpected surge of affinity or disorientation).”

7. On readership: Understand the target audience of a book—never mind who its writer or translator or publisher might have intended—and whether it meets their needs. Engage the reader as a smart, active participant in the conversation rather than a passive receiver of information. Felski’s four modes of textual engagement—recognition, enchantment, knowledge, and shock—also apply to how we engage with a review. Recognition is about the text as a source of self-interpretation and self-understanding. Enchantment is that pleasurable self-forgetting while reading. Knowledge refers to what literature discloses about the world beyond oneself. Shock speaks to the troubling and taboo aspects of human existence.

8. On language: Be specific, precise, and clear. Craft each sentence to make the review aesthetically pleasing. But avoid overwrought sentences that call more attention to themselves (or to you) than to the points they are making.

9. On the why: The payoff of writing criticism is deepening our reading pleasure and making it time well-spent. It helps us create a sense of understanding amid the constant activity of our surroundings. As Virginia Woolf wrote: “Poems and novels, histories and memoirs, dictionaries and blue-books; books written in all languages by men and women of all tempers, races, and ages jostle each other on the shelf. And outside the donkey brays, the women gossip at the pump, the colts gallop across the fields. Where are we to begin? How are we to bring order into this multitudinous chaos and so get the deepest and widest pleasure from what we read?”

10. On the so what: Do all of the above because a book is a sociocultural, historical, and political artifact. Like all human creations, it is a product of our experiences and reflects our desires, conflicts, and potential. Critiquing literature well involves learning about some crucial aspects of ourselves as individuals and as a species. It is how we elevate and preserve our literary traditions.

 

Jenny Bhatt is a writer, translator, and literary critic. She is the host of the Desi Books podcast and the author of the short story collection Each of Us Killers (7.13 Books, 2020). Her literary translation of Gujarati writer Dhumketu’s best short fiction is forthcoming from HarperCollins India in late 2020. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Literary Hub, LongreadsPoets & Writers Magazine, the Millions, Electric Literature, the Rumpus, and Kenyon Review. Having lived and worked in India, England, Germany, Scotland, and various parts of the United States, she now lives in a suburb of Dallas.

Thumbnail: Markus Winkler

Craft Capsule: Lyric vs. Narrative

by

Will Harris

8.24.20

This is no. 69 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

A few years ago I showed a series of new poems to some friends and a deflating word kept coming up: narrative. The poems involved a speaker moving through London, having random encounters. They were baggy poems that contained events, but I didn’t think of them as narrative. I had been trying to avoid some of the pitfalls of the lyric; now I worried I’d unintentionally slipped into another mode, one that was artificial and linear, associated with dead white men known—like brands of cake—by their surnames: Wordsworth, Browning, (Mr.) Kipling. 

I started thinking about the differences between lyric and narrative. Maybe the biggest one is time. According to Aristotle, narrative is the “imitation of an action,” and that requires time in which to happen. A lyric, on the other hand, if it was filmed, might flit across the screen in a second or two. Take fragment 105A by Sappho—one of the first lyric poets—translated here by Anne Carson: 

as the sweetapple reddens on a high branch 
   high on the highest branch and the applepickers forgot—
no, not forgot: were unable to reach

Summary: Person reaches for apple. End of shot. 

But in that moment, the real action has nothing to do with apples. It’s internal: a swerving thought-line, folding back in on itself. Those apples—too high to pick, and thus objects of longing—represent something the speaker either forgets about (maybe wants to forget about) or chooses to remember as out of reach.

Though Sappho didn’t conceive of this as a whole poem, it feels of a piece with the contemporary lyric. “Disembodied, the poem provokes longing,” writes poet and scholar Jennifer Moxley. “The song it sings is either a lament of exile from the body or a celebration of freedom from its material prison, depending on the direction of the winds.” Or as the literary critic Helen Vendler puts it: In lyric, voice is “made abstract,” emancipated from time and space; it’s “the gesture of immortality and freedom.” By contrast, “the novel is the gesture of the historical and the spatial.” 

This transcendental view of the lyric has made some poets want to throw all conventional distinctions out the window. At a talk for the Kootenay School of Writing in 1990, Lisa Robertson identifies Bruce Andrews as one such poet who railed against, as he put it, “the intrinsic evils of narrative, lyric, identity among other traditional constructions.” Behind this rage at “traditional constructions”—tied to systems of structural oppression like capitalism—is the understandable desire to renew language by purging it. 

Though what else would that kind of purged language erase? Identity is rarely a choice; it chooses you. But writing through identity, whether I like it or not, has been my way to engage with the social and political conditions in which I exist—to reclaim, in small part, the choice that racialization takes away. This might explain why I lean on narrative sometimes, and why I’ve tried to set it—unintentionally or otherwise—against the lyric. Because my experience is “historical and spatial,” as much as it gestures towards “freedom.”

Questions still nag, though: Why bother? Why say “lyric” or “narrative”? Why not invent new forms, new genres, new terms? Why not just write

I can only respond—I’m talking to myself here—that the poles of lyric and narrative have helped me navigate the blank night of the page. They’ve helped me to think, in particular, about how time functions: With narrative, a focus on action centers time; with lyric, the suspension of time centers language. 

And sometimes I go back to The Virago Book of Fairy Tales to remember how varied and strange “narrative” can be—to remind myself that it doesn’t have to limit the work of poets at all. This is the first paragraph of a Greenlandic tale:

There was woman who was old, blind and likewise unable to walk. Once she asked her daughter for a drink of water. The daughter was so bored with her old mother that she gave her a bowl of her own piss. The old woman drank it all up, then said: “You’re a nice one, daughter. Tell me—which would you prefer as a lover, a louse or a sea scorpion?”

This could be reconstituted as a lyric. It demands—and rewards—a careful consideration of word choice and rhythm: the use of “likewise” in the first sentence; that phrase “nice one”; the ambiance of violent boredom. 

But it’s not a lyric. If you changed the words of a lyric poem—like that Sappho fragment earlier—it would become another poem altogether. If you changed the words here, the content would survive; narrative doesn’t rely quite so heavily on language itself for meaning. In this case, it’s already survived translation to reach us. And more could be added to it, taken away, spun off. 

This is the place I always end up at: The poem comes to life where lyric and narrative meet—where time and language cross over—and a possibility emerges of a poem that’s neither lyric nor narrative, but contains elements of both. Which has a body that moves through time and space, even as language tugs it skyward.

 

Will Harris is the author of the poetry collection RENDANG (Wesleyan University Press, 2020), which was selected as a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. He has worked in schools and led workshops at the Southbank Centre and currently teaches for the Poetry School. A contributing editor at the Rialto, he lives in London. 

Thumbnail: Charlotte Noelle

Craft Capsule: On Nightmares

by

Chen Chen

11.9.20

This is no. 78 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

1.
A nightmare: realizing I need to restructure this essay, again, and it’s due tomorrow. 

A nightmare: COVID-19 cases on the rise again all across the country. 

A nightmare: how often essayists, especially poets-turned-essayists, like to remind everyone that essay comes from the French verb essayer, meaning to try, to attempt, to test. 

Not a nightmare: I love the try, the attempt. 

A nightmare: the test. The test freaks me out. 

A nightmare: how long it’s taken in the United States for COVID tests to become more accessible. 

Why do I prefer the nightmare of being dreadfully stuck, working on a poem, over the nightmare of being dreadfully stuck, working on an essay? 

A collective, ongoing nightmare: the pandemic. 

2.
Working on my essays for this series has been both a welcome distraction and (as I knew would happen) a dive into the deep end of my anxieties. The process feels nightmarish because my preferred method of exploring and articulating craft ideas is writing poems (and it seems I’ve gotten to the point in my poetry writing where I can befriend the dread, the stuck-ness). Or through conversation: engaging with students and connecting with friends, all of which happens these days over the shared nightmare known as Zoom. 

Also, I hate paragraphs. The blocky-ness of paragraphs makes me anxious, like I’m trapped in a box and, in the essay form, can only move from one box to another. I feel I have to make sense. Too much sense. I like paragraphs in prose poems, because I’m freer to do—I know better how to do—weird things with sentences. Or not write sentences at all. 

I think of Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey (Wave Books, 2012), a collection of essays based on lectures she was required to give as a teacher—at one point, Ruefle describes lectures as “bad dreams.” Ruefle has commented frequently on the fact that this one volume on poetry has far outsold her books of poetry; that people would rather read about poetry, than read a poem. That for many, poetry remains a nightmare. 

Poetry, to me, is the best dreaming. 

A form of breaking out of the Zoom room or the chain of paragraphs, into an expanse of fresh blooms,1 a field bursting with sunflowers. 

Still I’m drawn to essays for how they document a thought process, an attempt to think clearly and deeply. And I love good essays on poetry. I love Madness, Rack, and Honey. I’d like to write craft essays like Ruefle’s. I’m not sure that is possible, given our very different brains. But maybe my brain can do something else and figure out ways to enjoy writing an essay, or at least dislike it less. 

Could it be that my fear of the essay draws me to it? I’m afraid I won’t write as well in this genre, but the challenge entices. I’m nervous to delve into new subjects and discover scary truths, but surprise is also one of the key reasons I write anything. After all, in poetry it’s usually the door I don’t want to open that leads me to the room I most need to investigate.2

3.
I’ve long wanted to examine nightmares in my poetry. I’m intrigued by how fear can act as a signpost on the path to truth; how terror can mean getting closer to a complicated reality. I’ve written poems based on dreams—wild dreams that contain some frightening revelation at their core—but I have yet to write a poem based on a straight-up nightmare. Specifically, I’ve been itching to write a poem about my two recurring nightmares involving high school French teachers. 

One nightmare stars my sophomore year instructor, my favorite one, as a highly trained assassin. Her weapon of choice: one of my mother’s beloved Chinese cleavers. Somehow she manages very clean kills. In the nightmare I admire her and am also terrified. Sometimes I am the target, for getting a B on a quiz, say, and before the final blow she reminds me, “Cravate is a feminine noun, despite it referring to men’s neckties! It’s LA cravate, UNE cravate, SA cravate!” If I experience this again, I hope I remember to respond, “But anyone can wear a necktie!” Other times the nightmare gets loftier and the target is a corrupt politician, usually French. One time I am the corrupt French politician. 

I haven’t had this nightmare in a while, and I miss it—perhaps because 2020 is a global waking nightmare. What sleeping nightmare of mine could compare with Trump, COVID, and the police? I hesitate to type it out, but I miss this assassin nightmare because I wish there were worse consequences for the Trump administration. I wish there were consequences at all. As someone invested in abolition, I can’t advocate for prison. I have to imagine and help build other types of justice and accountability, ones that don’t rely on punishment and vengeance. At the same time, the part of me that misses the assassin nightmare would love for something nightmarish to visit these leaders who’ve abandoned all duty to the people. 

Another part of me misses this nightmare because seeing my mother’s cleaver in it is like seeing a part of her. I also associate high school language study with her because she teaches Mandarin at that level. I haven’t seen my mother since this pandemic was declared a pandemic. She’s immunocompromised and has been taking every precaution. Every call with her begins with her asking, “Have you been staying at home?” and ends with her command, “Keep staying at home.” My father, who never texts, texted me last week to say, “Avoid travel to any hot spots,” while travel ads pop up on my TV. Back in March my partner’s father was quarantined in a hospital in upstate New York after experiencing COVID-like symptoms. It was four days, but it felt like a year before the test results came back: negative. 

I check the news and check the news. I check social media, texts. I pick up the phone. The friends of friends with the virus. The friends with the virus. 

4.
Perhaps my fear of writing essays has to do with how my brain always associates the act with an academic assignment, a requirement, a grammar test that I might fail. It doesn’t help that so far most of the essays I write have in fact been assigned to me. They do help pay the bills. I do love a prompt. But is it, on some level, masochism? Is all my writing, in some way, a testing to which I subject myself, over and over? Am I perpetually trying to win a French teacher’s approval? 

The other French teacher nightmare goes like this: On an otherwise blissfully uneventful day, I receive a letter from my high school. I know something is amiss before even opening it. For a long time I just stare at it; it stares back from my coffee table. Then I open it. And it says because I never finished my senior year French project, I never actually passed high school. Therefore I have to return to school, where this time I will also reside. The second I step back into that memory-drenched building, I am met by my senior year French instructor. She looks me over then says in the most disappointed yet unsurprised way, “Bonjour.” 

What terrifies me in this dream is not the disruption of everyday life (by a cleaver-wielding assassin like in my other nightmare), but the resurrection of days I’ve long put behind me, a time and a self I’d rather not reinhabit. Not that high school was all stuffy, all busy work. No, I had many brilliant teachers and classmates, many life-changing experiences. This nightmare is the nightmare that my life didn’t really change. What I fear is going back to school but never learning, never growing. 

What I love is the school of poetry, which invites me to play anew and wonder differently and try strange things—to test in the sense of to experiment. To test in the sense of encountering nerve-wracking challenges, but trusting that the fear is a sign of one’s hunger for and effort toward real growth. Maybe one day I will experience essay writing more like that: an experiment in good fear. 

5.
A poem I find instructive for writing about nightmares is “The Dream”3 by Aracelis Girmay, one of my former professors, whose work continues to nourish as well as push me. Indeed, Girmay’s writing always reminds me how poems themselves can be the best poetry teachers. I also return to this one because it focuses on a mother, the figure beside or behind the French teacher of my first nightmare. Here is the startling start of “The Dream”: 

Last night, all night
the dream, the dead
mother, my small sister,
tiny, her mouth
over my shoulder
(screaming) like a knapsack
when she heard the news,
& my brother playing
the stereo. I howled
like the coyotes; myself.

The poem then shifts from the howl to a sunlit, tranquil scene, the way dreams can, suddenly and completely. “The Nightmare” ultimately wouldn’t be the most fitting title for this poem. The word dream can encompass good ones and bad. That said, nightmare can contain the abject as well as the gorgeous (my favorite horror movies have stellar aesthetics). My French teacher nightmares feature both terror and tenderness—fear of disappointing the mother/teacher figure, but also admiration for her and a longing for a time when I could, on a regular basis, talk with her in person. Rereading Girmay’s poem I realize that at the heart of the poem I want to write are questions like: How do fear and affection sit side by side? Why do I connect French teachers and mothers in this manner? 

This is what I mean by poems being the best poetry teachers: They offer an array of techniques to emulate, yes, but more fundamentally and expansively, they conjure up uncomfortable questions and encourage bewildering (sometimes frightening) leaps in imagination.

6.
One week, feeling particularly defeated by this essay, I write a draft of my poem “The Nightmare.” It reads ridiculous, then not, which seems like how a lot of my writing goes. I’d like one day to write a poem that shifts from not one bit ridiculous to utterly. Still, this poem is some new occurrence. Every truly new poem4 is its own strange school. 

I revise and revise. The poem teaches me about how my recurring nightmares are linked to the world’s shared nightmare of COVID-19. How afraid I am, as a teacher myself now, to be back this fall; how fortunate I feel that my university has allowed me to teach online; how much I miss teaching in person; how angry I am that not every teacher “gets to” do this. 

I revise and revise the ending of this essay. I’m afraid of being so direct and so pared down in my diction. But I know from poetry that it’s often when I’m trying the least to be “poetic” that the most charged truths emerge. 

Truths like: I’m afraid my students will get sick. I’m afraid of losing a student, more than one student. I think I should be more afraid of getting very sick too. I miss my mother, who, as a high school Mandarin teacher, knows that school is more than a building, but misses her classroom. I’m relieved she has the option to teach online as well. I miss many of my high school teachers and hope they are safe and finding ways to rest. 

To dream, both literally and creatively. To speak back to the nightmares, both personal and collective.

 

ENDNOTES

1. A beautiful nightmare: how much poets adore the word bloom.
2. In life, I know better than to go exploring attics, basements, or other favorite hangout spots of vengeful ghosts and demons. 
3. From
Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions, 2011).
4. I mean new mainly in terms of process; new to the writer. The big hope is that the poem will then do something new for a reader.

 

Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017)which was longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry and won the Publishing Triangle Thom Gunn Award. His work has appeared in many publications, including Poetry and the 2015 and 2019 editions of The Best American Poetry. He has received a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Kundiman and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at Brandeis University as the Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence. 

Thumbnail: Chuttersnap

Craft Capsule: The Art of Literary Criticism

by

Jenny Bhatt

9.28.20

This is no. 74 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

A personal manifesto for literary criticism:

1. On close reading: Before reviewing, read a book at least three times for the following: text, subtext, and what’s left off the page. Often the latter two will reveal more about the writer’s true intent.

2. On references and associations: A good review is, first and foremost, about expanding the literary conversation between the text, the author, other readers, and ourselves—determining what the text means to us as individuals and as societies. Enrich your frames of reference by reading widely, purposefully, and mindfully. And then look for the literary associations, assemblages, affinities, and networks of relevant ideas, texts, people, and objects. Remember W. H. Auden’s sixth must-have for literary criticism: “Throw light upon the relation of art to life, to science, economics, ethics, religion, etc.”

3. On fairness: Ensure fairness and balance for the author and for readers (of both the review and the work itself). It is not enough to say what’s good or bad about a book. Make the case with evidence as to why. It is also not enough to write an information-filled essay that’s missing a “so what?” Every major point in the review should answer the twofold question: Why is this good or bad, and why does it matter?

4. On argument: Never speculate. Always contextualize. The review thesis must have plausible counterarguments, and the essay must include and respond to those counterarguments. That said, don’t indulge in what Virginia Woolf called the “desiccation of the living tissues of literature into a network of little bones” as some critics do with their “able and industrious pens.”

5. On comparison: Keep in mind Elizabeth Hardwick’s indictment: “How often we read a beginner’s review that compares a thin thing to a fat one. ‘John Smith, like Tolstoy, is very interested in the way men interact under the conditions of battle.’ Well, no.” Also, resist your cognitive biases—recency, confirmation, in-group, distinction, and attentional—in such comparative analysis.

6. On building up versus tearing down: A work of literature can do so much more than “demystify, destabilize, denaturalize, deconstruct, debunk, decipher,” as Rita Felski reminds us in The Limits of Critique (University of Chicago Press, 2015). It can, more significantly, also “recontextualize, reconfigure, remake, recharge perceptions.” Instead of simply focusing on excavating a text for causes, conditions, and motives, follow Felski’s advice to reflect on the text’s revelations and possibilities. Because, as Felski argues, “Works of art do not only subvert, but also convert; they do not only inform but also transform—a transformation that is not just a matter of intellectual readjustment but one of affective realignment as well (a shift of mood, a sharpened sensation, an unexpected surge of affinity or disorientation).”

7. On readership: Understand the target audience of a book—never mind who its writer or translator or publisher might have intended—and whether it meets their needs. Engage the reader as a smart, active participant in the conversation rather than a passive receiver of information. Felski’s four modes of textual engagement—recognition, enchantment, knowledge, and shock—also apply to how we engage with a review. Recognition is about the text as a source of self-interpretation and self-understanding. Enchantment is that pleasurable self-forgetting while reading. Knowledge refers to what literature discloses about the world beyond oneself. Shock speaks to the troubling and taboo aspects of human existence.

8. On language: Be specific, precise, and clear. Craft each sentence to make the review aesthetically pleasing. But avoid overwrought sentences that call more attention to themselves (or to you) than to the points they are making.

9. On the why: The payoff of writing criticism is deepening our reading pleasure and making it time well-spent. It helps us create a sense of understanding amid the constant activity of our surroundings. As Virginia Woolf wrote: “Poems and novels, histories and memoirs, dictionaries and blue-books; books written in all languages by men and women of all tempers, races, and ages jostle each other on the shelf. And outside the donkey brays, the women gossip at the pump, the colts gallop across the fields. Where are we to begin? How are we to bring order into this multitudinous chaos and so get the deepest and widest pleasure from what we read?”

10. On the so what: Do all of the above because a book is a sociocultural, historical, and political artifact. Like all human creations, it is a product of our experiences and reflects our desires, conflicts, and potential. Critiquing literature well involves learning about some crucial aspects of ourselves as individuals and as a species. It is how we elevate and preserve our literary traditions.

 

Jenny Bhatt is a writer, translator, and literary critic. She is the host of the Desi Books podcast and the author of the short story collection Each of Us Killers (7.13 Books, 2020). Her literary translation of Gujarati writer Dhumketu’s best short fiction is forthcoming from HarperCollins India in late 2020. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Literary Hub, LongreadsPoets & Writers Magazine, the Millions, Electric Literature, the Rumpus, and Kenyon Review. Having lived and worked in India, England, Germany, Scotland, and various parts of the United States, she now lives in a suburb of Dallas.

Thumbnail: Markus Winkler

Craft Capsule: The Arc of Epiphany

by

Jordan Kisner

12.7.20

This is no. 81 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I continually puzzle over something the essayist Amy Benson said during a seminar on “the lyric essay.” Or maybe she didn’t say it but alluded to it by the structure of her syllabus. This was a while ago, but essentially she proposed that essays might follow one of a few types of arcs: the arc of narrative, the arc of argument, the arc of epiphany.

This concept made intuitive sense to me. The feeling of the word arc—which for me always conjures the bowing of a ship’s prow, something sturdy and flexible, something constructed but buoyant, something that cuts through water and ice but is smooth enough to run your hand over—matches the feeling of an essay. The arc of narrative seems clear enough: The essay uses as its keel the rising and falling action of story. Its end point is coterminous with a feeling of resolution, or maybe just arrival, in the narrative. The arc of argument shapes an essay around an idea that needs advancing, a thought that needs interrogating and articulating—whether it’s clearly an argument or just a notion the writer is toying with. 

But what is an essay that follows the arc of epiphany?

I don’t remember how Benson defined it, and I prefer it that way. This way the arc of epiphany is something I get to imagine, to theorize, to puzzle over, to strive within. Is it an essay that provokes an epiphany? An essay that finds its arrival point in a moment of epiphany or bright realization? Does it replicate, structurally, the feeling of epiphany: total confusion followed by rupture and maybe rapture, followed by reassessment of everything that came before in light of the new knowledge, followed, perhaps, by disillusionment or fading fervor? Is it an essay that completely upends itself part of the way through and starts over on new premises? Does it just go right ahead and manifest the divine, as the word’s earliest uses in English (first, to describe Christ’s appearance to the Magi; and then to denote the revelation of a divinity more generally) would indicate?

When I wrote my first book, Thin Places, I toyed with creating an arc of epiphany not only within a single essay but through an arrangement of essays—or, to put it in geometric terms, a major arc produced by a series of minor arcs. I wanted to make a collection of essays that each individually riffed on the epiphanic (say, by ending with the appearance of a holy orange; or by putting the reader in a prolonged confrontation with death; or by pulling a U-turn halfway through a piece about debutante balls to talk about queerness) but also collectively and gradually, through sequential reading, crested into something like the epiphanic. I wanted that big inrush of air, that clearer picture, that sudden recognition of pattern. 

This is an extremely lofty goal, I realize, and I didn’t necessarily think such a thing would be possible (not least because I still wonder what “arc of epiphany” means), but it gave me something to play with and push against. Most writing that I like—of my own or by other people—is written as a genuine and urgent attempt to understand something inscrutable. When the writer stretches to comprehend something just out of their reach, or to articulate something for which they have no words—that’s when the air begins to crackle. It feels like a goal worth reaching for, even and especially if you have to make up its rubric yourself.

 

Jordan Kisner is the author of the essay collection Thin Places (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). Her writing has also appeared in the Atlantic, the Believer, the Guardiann+1, the New York Times Magazine, and the Paris Review Daily. The recipient of fellowships from Pioneer Works, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and Art Omi, she is currently a fellow at the Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas.

Thumbnail: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Photo Library

Craft Capsule: On Nightmares

by

Chen Chen

11.9.20

This is no. 78 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

1.
A nightmare: realizing I need to restructure this essay, again, and it’s due tomorrow. 

A nightmare: COVID-19 cases on the rise again all across the country. 

A nightmare: how often essayists, especially poets-turned-essayists, like to remind everyone that essay comes from the French verb essayer, meaning to try, to attempt, to test. 

Not a nightmare: I love the try, the attempt. 

A nightmare: the test. The test freaks me out. 

A nightmare: how long it’s taken in the United States for COVID tests to become more accessible. 

Why do I prefer the nightmare of being dreadfully stuck, working on a poem, over the nightmare of being dreadfully stuck, working on an essay? 

A collective, ongoing nightmare: the pandemic. 

2.
Working on my essays for this series has been both a welcome distraction and (as I knew would happen) a dive into the deep end of my anxieties. The process feels nightmarish because my preferred method of exploring and articulating craft ideas is writing poems (and it seems I’ve gotten to the point in my poetry writing where I can befriend the dread, the stuck-ness). Or through conversation: engaging with students and connecting with friends, all of which happens these days over the shared nightmare known as Zoom. 

Also, I hate paragraphs. The blocky-ness of paragraphs makes me anxious, like I’m trapped in a box and, in the essay form, can only move from one box to another. I feel I have to make sense. Too much sense. I like paragraphs in prose poems, because I’m freer to do—I know better how to do—weird things with sentences. Or not write sentences at all. 

I think of Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey (Wave Books, 2012), a collection of essays based on lectures she was required to give as a teacher—at one point, Ruefle describes lectures as “bad dreams.” Ruefle has commented frequently on the fact that this one volume on poetry has far outsold her books of poetry; that people would rather read about poetry, than read a poem. That for many, poetry remains a nightmare. 

Poetry, to me, is the best dreaming. 

A form of breaking out of the Zoom room or the chain of paragraphs, into an expanse of fresh blooms,1 a field bursting with sunflowers. 

Still I’m drawn to essays for how they document a thought process, an attempt to think clearly and deeply. And I love good essays on poetry. I love Madness, Rack, and Honey. I’d like to write craft essays like Ruefle’s. I’m not sure that is possible, given our very different brains. But maybe my brain can do something else and figure out ways to enjoy writing an essay, or at least dislike it less. 

Could it be that my fear of the essay draws me to it? I’m afraid I won’t write as well in this genre, but the challenge entices. I’m nervous to delve into new subjects and discover scary truths, but surprise is also one of the key reasons I write anything. After all, in poetry it’s usually the door I don’t want to open that leads me to the room I most need to investigate.2

3.
I’ve long wanted to examine nightmares in my poetry. I’m intrigued by how fear can act as a signpost on the path to truth; how terror can mean getting closer to a complicated reality. I’ve written poems based on dreams—wild dreams that contain some frightening revelation at their core—but I have yet to write a poem based on a straight-up nightmare. Specifically, I’ve been itching to write a poem about my two recurring nightmares involving high school French teachers. 

One nightmare stars my sophomore year instructor, my favorite one, as a highly trained assassin. Her weapon of choice: one of my mother’s beloved Chinese cleavers. Somehow she manages very clean kills. In the nightmare I admire her and am also terrified. Sometimes I am the target, for getting a B on a quiz, say, and before the final blow she reminds me, “Cravate is a feminine noun, despite it referring to men’s neckties! It’s LA cravate, UNE cravate, SA cravate!” If I experience this again, I hope I remember to respond, “But anyone can wear a necktie!” Other times the nightmare gets loftier and the target is a corrupt politician, usually French. One time I am the corrupt French politician. 

I haven’t had this nightmare in a while, and I miss it—perhaps because 2020 is a global waking nightmare. What sleeping nightmare of mine could compare with Trump, COVID, and the police? I hesitate to type it out, but I miss this assassin nightmare because I wish there were worse consequences for the Trump administration. I wish there were consequences at all. As someone invested in abolition, I can’t advocate for prison. I have to imagine and help build other types of justice and accountability, ones that don’t rely on punishment and vengeance. At the same time, the part of me that misses the assassin nightmare would love for something nightmarish to visit these leaders who’ve abandoned all duty to the people. 

Another part of me misses this nightmare because seeing my mother’s cleaver in it is like seeing a part of her. I also associate high school language study with her because she teaches Mandarin at that level. I haven’t seen my mother since this pandemic was declared a pandemic. She’s immunocompromised and has been taking every precaution. Every call with her begins with her asking, “Have you been staying at home?” and ends with her command, “Keep staying at home.” My father, who never texts, texted me last week to say, “Avoid travel to any hot spots,” while travel ads pop up on my TV. Back in March my partner’s father was quarantined in a hospital in upstate New York after experiencing COVID-like symptoms. It was four days, but it felt like a year before the test results came back: negative. 

I check the news and check the news. I check social media, texts. I pick up the phone. The friends of friends with the virus. The friends with the virus. 

4.
Perhaps my fear of writing essays has to do with how my brain always associates the act with an academic assignment, a requirement, a grammar test that I might fail. It doesn’t help that so far most of the essays I write have in fact been assigned to me. They do help pay the bills. I do love a prompt. But is it, on some level, masochism? Is all my writing, in some way, a testing to which I subject myself, over and over? Am I perpetually trying to win a French teacher’s approval? 

The other French teacher nightmare goes like this: On an otherwise blissfully uneventful day, I receive a letter from my high school. I know something is amiss before even opening it. For a long time I just stare at it; it stares back from my coffee table. Then I open it. And it says because I never finished my senior year French project, I never actually passed high school. Therefore I have to return to school, where this time I will also reside. The second I step back into that memory-drenched building, I am met by my senior year French instructor. She looks me over then says in the most disappointed yet unsurprised way, “Bonjour.” 

What terrifies me in this dream is not the disruption of everyday life (by a cleaver-wielding assassin like in my other nightmare), but the resurrection of days I’ve long put behind me, a time and a self I’d rather not reinhabit. Not that high school was all stuffy, all busy work. No, I had many brilliant teachers and classmates, many life-changing experiences. This nightmare is the nightmare that my life didn’t really change. What I fear is going back to school but never learning, never growing. 

What I love is the school of poetry, which invites me to play anew and wonder differently and try strange things—to test in the sense of to experiment. To test in the sense of encountering nerve-wracking challenges, but trusting that the fear is a sign of one’s hunger for and effort toward real growth. Maybe one day I will experience essay writing more like that: an experiment in good fear. 

5.
A poem I find instructive for writing about nightmares is “The Dream”3 by Aracelis Girmay, one of my former professors, whose work continues to nourish as well as push me. Indeed, Girmay’s writing always reminds me how poems themselves can be the best poetry teachers. I also return to this one because it focuses on a mother, the figure beside or behind the French teacher of my first nightmare. Here is the startling start of “The Dream”: 

Last night, all night
the dream, the dead
mother, my small sister,
tiny, her mouth
over my shoulder
(screaming) like a knapsack
when she heard the news,
& my brother playing
the stereo. I howled
like the coyotes; myself.

The poem then shifts from the howl to a sunlit, tranquil scene, the way dreams can, suddenly and completely. “The Nightmare” ultimately wouldn’t be the most fitting title for this poem. The word dream can encompass good ones and bad. That said, nightmare can contain the abject as well as the gorgeous (my favorite horror movies have stellar aesthetics). My French teacher nightmares feature both terror and tenderness—fear of disappointing the mother/teacher figure, but also admiration for her and a longing for a time when I could, on a regular basis, talk with her in person. Rereading Girmay’s poem I realize that at the heart of the poem I want to write are questions like: How do fear and affection sit side by side? Why do I connect French teachers and mothers in this manner? 

This is what I mean by poems being the best poetry teachers: They offer an array of techniques to emulate, yes, but more fundamentally and expansively, they conjure up uncomfortable questions and encourage bewildering (sometimes frightening) leaps in imagination.

6.
One week, feeling particularly defeated by this essay, I write a draft of my poem “The Nightmare.” It reads ridiculous, then not, which seems like how a lot of my writing goes. I’d like one day to write a poem that shifts from not one bit ridiculous to utterly. Still, this poem is some new occurrence. Every truly new poem4 is its own strange school. 

I revise and revise. The poem teaches me about how my recurring nightmares are linked to the world’s shared nightmare of COVID-19. How afraid I am, as a teacher myself now, to be back this fall; how fortunate I feel that my university has allowed me to teach online; how much I miss teaching in person; how angry I am that not every teacher “gets to” do this. 

I revise and revise the ending of this essay. I’m afraid of being so direct and so pared down in my diction. But I know from poetry that it’s often when I’m trying the least to be “poetic” that the most charged truths emerge. 

Truths like: I’m afraid my students will get sick. I’m afraid of losing a student, more than one student. I think I should be more afraid of getting very sick too. I miss my mother, who, as a high school Mandarin teacher, knows that school is more than a building, but misses her classroom. I’m relieved she has the option to teach online as well. I miss many of my high school teachers and hope they are safe and finding ways to rest. 

To dream, both literally and creatively. To speak back to the nightmares, both personal and collective.

 

ENDNOTES

1. A beautiful nightmare: how much poets adore the word bloom.
2. In life, I know better than to go exploring attics, basements, or other favorite hangout spots of vengeful ghosts and demons. 
3. From
Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions, 2011).
4. I mean new mainly in terms of process; new to the writer. The big hope is that the poem will then do something new for a reader.

 

Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017)which was longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry and won the Publishing Triangle Thom Gunn Award. His work has appeared in many publications, including Poetry and the 2015 and 2019 editions of The Best American Poetry. He has received a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Kundiman and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at Brandeis University as the Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence. 

Thumbnail: Chuttersnap

Craft Capsule: The Art of Literary Criticism

by

Jenny Bhatt

9.28.20

This is no. 74 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

A personal manifesto for literary criticism:

1. On close reading: Before reviewing, read a book at least three times for the following: text, subtext, and what’s left off the page. Often the latter two will reveal more about the writer’s true intent.

2. On references and associations: A good review is, first and foremost, about expanding the literary conversation between the text, the author, other readers, and ourselves—determining what the text means to us as individuals and as societies. Enrich your frames of reference by reading widely, purposefully, and mindfully. And then look for the literary associations, assemblages, affinities, and networks of relevant ideas, texts, people, and objects. Remember W. H. Auden’s sixth must-have for literary criticism: “Throw light upon the relation of art to life, to science, economics, ethics, religion, etc.”

3. On fairness: Ensure fairness and balance for the author and for readers (of both the review and the work itself). It is not enough to say what’s good or bad about a book. Make the case with evidence as to why. It is also not enough to write an information-filled essay that’s missing a “so what?” Every major point in the review should answer the twofold question: Why is this good or bad, and why does it matter?

4. On argument: Never speculate. Always contextualize. The review thesis must have plausible counterarguments, and the essay must include and respond to those counterarguments. That said, don’t indulge in what Virginia Woolf called the “desiccation of the living tissues of literature into a network of little bones” as some critics do with their “able and industrious pens.”

5. On comparison: Keep in mind Elizabeth Hardwick’s indictment: “How often we read a beginner’s review that compares a thin thing to a fat one. ‘John Smith, like Tolstoy, is very interested in the way men interact under the conditions of battle.’ Well, no.” Also, resist your cognitive biases—recency, confirmation, in-group, distinction, and attentional—in such comparative analysis.

6. On building up versus tearing down: A work of literature can do so much more than “demystify, destabilize, denaturalize, deconstruct, debunk, decipher,” as Rita Felski reminds us in The Limits of Critique (University of Chicago Press, 2015). It can, more significantly, also “recontextualize, reconfigure, remake, recharge perceptions.” Instead of simply focusing on excavating a text for causes, conditions, and motives, follow Felski’s advice to reflect on the text’s revelations and possibilities. Because, as Felski argues, “Works of art do not only subvert, but also convert; they do not only inform but also transform—a transformation that is not just a matter of intellectual readjustment but one of affective realignment as well (a shift of mood, a sharpened sensation, an unexpected surge of affinity or disorientation).”

7. On readership: Understand the target audience of a book—never mind who its writer or translator or publisher might have intended—and whether it meets their needs. Engage the reader as a smart, active participant in the conversation rather than a passive receiver of information. Felski’s four modes of textual engagement—recognition, enchantment, knowledge, and shock—also apply to how we engage with a review. Recognition is about the text as a source of self-interpretation and self-understanding. Enchantment is that pleasurable self-forgetting while reading. Knowledge refers to what literature discloses about the world beyond oneself. Shock speaks to the troubling and taboo aspects of human existence.

8. On language: Be specific, precise, and clear. Craft each sentence to make the review aesthetically pleasing. But avoid overwrought sentences that call more attention to themselves (or to you) than to the points they are making.

9. On the why: The payoff of writing criticism is deepening our reading pleasure and making it time well-spent. It helps us create a sense of understanding amid the constant activity of our surroundings. As Virginia Woolf wrote: “Poems and novels, histories and memoirs, dictionaries and blue-books; books written in all languages by men and women of all tempers, races, and ages jostle each other on the shelf. And outside the donkey brays, the women gossip at the pump, the colts gallop across the fields. Where are we to begin? How are we to bring order into this multitudinous chaos and so get the deepest and widest pleasure from what we read?”

10. On the so what: Do all of the above because a book is a sociocultural, historical, and political artifact. Like all human creations, it is a product of our experiences and reflects our desires, conflicts, and potential. Critiquing literature well involves learning about some crucial aspects of ourselves as individuals and as a species. It is how we elevate and preserve our literary traditions.

 

Jenny Bhatt is a writer, translator, and literary critic. She is the host of the Desi Books podcast and the author of the short story collection Each of Us Killers (7.13 Books, 2020). Her literary translation of Gujarati writer Dhumketu’s best short fiction is forthcoming from HarperCollins India in late 2020. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Literary Hub, LongreadsPoets & Writers Magazine, the Millions, Electric Literature, the Rumpus, and Kenyon Review. Having lived and worked in India, England, Germany, Scotland, and various parts of the United States, she now lives in a suburb of Dallas.

Thumbnail: Markus Winkler

Craft Capsule: Creating a Seasonal Writing Practice

by

Khadijah Queen

1.4.21

This is no. 84 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

The pandemic, social uprisings, and a volatile political climate—superimposed upon family and work responsibilities, as well as health challenges—has made a regular writing practice impossible over the past ten months. Essays I pitched early in the year didn’t materialize, and only a handful of terribly sad poems arrived in usable condition. The one longform piece I did finish—a zuihitsu that appeared in Harper’s—was about the pandemic, written in April and May as I worried terribly about the health and safety of family members who were sick, and some who are still frontline workers. As a relatively prolific writer, with six published books since 2008 and four more currently in various stages of completion, I’m trying to see my current lack of time and energy to write as a side effect of all that’s happening in the world, but I don’t want to give up on a regular writing practice. To that end, I want to reenvision possibilities for that practice while taking into account the new reality. 

This isn’t the first time I’ve had to adapt to complicated circumstances; I’ve tried many different kinds of writing practices over the past two decades. My early years of writing consisted of recording lines on my lunch breaks and during lulls at my day jobs, and a few minutes in my car before entering the house in the evening. When my son got older, I somehow managed six years of a daily writing practice, usually a half hour at 5:30 AM with a cup of tea and a blueberry muffin. When I had an emergency appendectomy in 2015, my writing routine tanked as I recovered. Slowly I built back up to weekend flurries, and that lasted long enough for me to complete my fifth book. Then I wrote during intensely concentrated weeks and months for three and a half years of doctoral study, resulting in one book of poetry, the first draft of a memoir and a 270-page critical dissertation by the end of 2019. After all that writing, all I wanted was a break, so I took a couple of months. Then the pandemic happened, and the writing—didn’t. As a person who really needs an intentional writing routine, I felt at a loss. 

How, with mounting caregiving, health issues and work responsibilities, would I fit in regular writing time? I struggled for months, until I hit upon the one thing I hadn’t tried yet—seasons. Thinking in terms of seasons avoids the specificity (and requisite pressure) of calendar dates and days of the week. A seasonal practice could preserve writing goals more gently and flexibly. It might include thematic prompts—write about lightness and travel in summer, or perhaps reflect on freedom; focus on renewal and revisit the pastoral or the aubade in spring; delve into darkness, list modes of comfort, and maybe address grief in winter; autumn writing might spotlight transformation and beauty. Autumn is my favorite season. I love wearing knee boots and turtleneck sweaters and leather gloves, love the early October riot of color in the trees. You can of course define for yourself what each season means. Collect keywords over the year that can provide lasting inspiration. 

Let’s also pause here and define “writing goals.” For me that’s mostly meant books, and that hasn’t changed. But I’ve had to think smaller when it comes to productivity even as I continue to envision larger projects. To avoid becoming overwhelmed, maybe I’ll choose a single element to work on, such as order, or beginnings and endings. For a seasonal practice, choosing writing goals that can be adjusted as needed, and granting yourself the easement of non-specified time to work, seems more than reasonable right now.  

If you have an impending deadline in early February, maybe you’ll work only on the coldest days, when outside pursuits aren’t accessible. In summer, if you enjoy writing outside like I do, choose the sunniest days to work on a patio, or at a socially distant café. If you have a deadline that isn’t urgent, try softening it. Make one date—or date range!—for a first draft, another for draft two, another for draft three. After each draft, especially if it’s spring, buy yourself fresh flowers. Get as much done as you can, then reward yourself with an evening walk or morning drive, weather permitting. These are just a few basic suggestions, and you can adjust goals (and rewards) as you go along. I happen to like dark chocolate, so that’s my default treat. Make a list of yours and have it ready along with those seasonal keywords. I firmly believe we need as many reminders as possible that part of the work of writing is allowing for mental space, for infusions of beauty, for intentional nourishment—physical and otherwise. During these incredibly challenging times, I would wager that flexibility rules the day. Don’t abuse grace, of course; communicate clearly and continue to commit to due dates with integrity, but also make use of kindness—given, and received.

 

Khadijah Queen is the author of six books, including Anodyne (Tin House, 2020) and I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On (YesYes Books, 2017). Her writing has also appeared in American Poetry Review, BuzzFeed, Fence, Poetry, and Tin House, among other publications. Holding a PhD in English from the University of Denver and an MFA from Antioch University, she teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and for Regis University’s Mile High MFA program.

Thumbnail: Oliver Hihn

Craft Capsule: Writing Hot

by

Jordan Kisner

11.30.20

This is no. 80 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

When I was a writing student, a professor once commented to me that my writing was a little intense. I don’t remember exactly what he said, and he wasn’t unkind, but it was something like “Your writing is always at eleven,” or “Your writing is always just so hot-blooded.” 

This comment elicited a mixed reaction at the time. I wasn’t proud. I didn’t sense that this was a compliment. He was giving me a note: Learn to tone it down sometimes. It felt respectful in its way, as if he were saying, “Okay, you can write like your hair is on fire, but make sure that’s not the only thing you can do.” Which is a good and teacherly thing to do, to discourage a student from leaning too heavily on the thing that feels good, to point out tics and habits. But as a young writer—a female writer, a queer writer—to hear an older male professor note that your work is unrelentingly intense can set off a clamor of questions, insecurities, suspicions, irritations, doubts, shames. This is maybe especially the case when the young writer is writing (as I was) about her own life and self, the source of this overmuchness. 

So I was a little embarrassed, concerned that “intense” was code for melodramatic, maudlin, tacky, purple. Childish. Overfeminine. Hysterical. But also, I wanted to be an intense writer. What was the point of writing if it wasn’t vivid and compelling, if it wasn’t transporting, if it didn’t make you rock back in your seat? I wrote then, and write now, I suppose, to express an intensity to the condition of being, an aliveness that feels full and bewildering. 

After that, though, I spent several years trying to write in a way that was hot-blooded, or full of feeling, but also somehow cool. Writing that was fierce and ardent while being unimpeachably in control of itself. I’ve tried a few ways to do this over the years. The first, maybe, we’ll call The Didion method: Bury feeling in a near-hysterical radiance of detail or texture when describing absolutely mundane things like sock brands; directly reference imminent emotional breakdown (or past breakdown) in prose so deadpan and commanding it seems like possibly a complex joke. Then there is what we might call The Nelson: Go straight to eleven, get poetic and hot about sex, love, heartbreak, pain, and then stave off accusations of mawkishness with theory and academically rigorous discussions of the sex. 

I love both these methods—and Joan Didion and Maggie Nelson—but lately I’ve been thinking about what you lose when you insist on cooling down your prose. Early this summer I had a conversation with Ocean Vuong on my Thresholds podcast during which he spoke about his reclamation of prose that some might dismiss as purple. “I am interested in using a style that a lot of men have deemed too prissy for them to use in the present,” he told me. “It feels like drag to me—to be extra! There’s too much glitter because we want to be blindingly present and seen.” He was speaking about the historical moment when emotional and beautiful writing was deemed feminine and therefore less worthy, and the way that as a [queer] man he might begin to excavate and subvert that. He reminded me, also, that you can find fun and even joy in just going ahead and writing at eleven, writing hot, writing like your hair is on fire—to be blindingly present and seen.  

 

Jordan Kisner is the author of the essay collection Thin Places (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). Her writing has also appeared in the Atlantic, the Believer, the Guardian, n+1, the New York Times Magazine, and the Paris Review Daily. The recipient of fellowships from Pioneer Works, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and Art Omi, she is currently a fellow at the Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas. 

Thumbnail: Dmitry Bayer

Craft Capsule: Body in the Mirror

by

Susan Stinson

3.22.21

This is no. 92 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

When I was an undergraduate, I saw a call for writing about fatness for the anthology Shadow on a Tightrope: Writing by Women on Fat Oppression (Aunt Lute Books, 1983), which became a feminist classic, still in print decades later. I was a young writer who very much wanted to be published. I had been fat all my life. I knew that the shape of my body had been central in defining the shape of my life, but I had no language for how to write or even think about that. The cultural tropes for fat women were virulently dismissive. I knew that they did not represent who I was. The hate language that was regularly shouted at me on the street didn’t either, but I didn’t know how to start to say anything else.

Soon after I graduated, I moved from Colorado to Boston. I got a job at a drugstore and started figuring out how to be a writer. I gave myself the simple assignment to look in the mirror and try to describe myself accurately and, to the best of my ability, without judgment. I chose to do this naked, but the exercise can be equally powerful if the writer is wearing clothes.

It proved to be enormously difficult, both emotionally and because I found that I had extremely limited options for language with which to describe my body. I have said elsewhere that it took participation in grassroots feminism and reading great poets (for me, Gertrude Stein and Walt Whitman) before I could find my belly with my hands and write that it was soft to the touch. Eventually, though, I got there. This is from a lyric essay in my chapbook of poetry and essays, Belly Songs: In Celebration of Fat Women:

My belly pours, hangs, moves, grows hair, shines in marks that fall like fingers curing up around its sides. I am loose, I hang. There are not enough names for the places where my fat gathers on me; there is belly, thigh, hip, chin, but no simple way to say soft-mound-between-breast-and-arms, or low-full-folds-that-are-sides.

I didn’t just observe my body. I also touched it.

I take my belly in my hands. It’s warm. My fingers feel cool, but quickly warm, too. It has a good weight, is soft. I sit very still, and feel the pulse in my thumbs, then find the pulse in the place of my thickest fat. It’s delicate and regular, there, yes, there, yes, there. It comes from the underside where my palms are resting, from the left half and the right half, from veins that curve out the with rest of me. This is not dead lard. It’s my body. It’s my living fat.

Writing Belly Songs opened a vein of literary exploration that eventually resulted in three novels. It changed the way I move through the world too. Having language for fatness—for that aspect of my body I had once understood to be too shameful to speak of—allowed me to begin to know, say, and be more fully who I am. All of that anguished silence was distracting. Living with less of it makes me more present for every other aspect of life. I’ve written about other things, but I know that I’m not done with this topic.

This exercise is useful for any writer. The body is the vessel for all sensory knowledge. Describing one’s physical self with accurate, nuanced attention is like plugging into an electrical socket. There’s a charge. If a writer runs into obstacles to finding language for his, her, or their specific body, then the strategies that arise from grappling with that, or even just touching it lightly, can be revelatory. It has been for me.

 

Susan Stinson is a writer, editor, and teacher. She is the author of four novels, including Spider in a Tree (Small Beer Press, 2013) and Martha Moody (Spinsters Ink Books, 1995; Small Beer Press, 2020). Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Curve, Lambda Literary Review, Seneca Review, and Kenyon Review Online. She is also a recipient of the Outstanding Mid-Career Novelists’ Prize from Lambda Literary. Born in Texas and raised in Colorado, she lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Thumbnail: Oscar Blair

Craft Capsule: Queer Characters Who Behave Badly

by

Peter Kispert

2.15.21

This is no. 88 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

It did not occur to me, while drafting the stories in my debut collection, I Know You Know Who I Am (Penguin Books, 2020), that they might ever become a book. I had not considered anyone would ever read or judge or enjoy or review my writing, beyond some appearances in literary magazines. After a few years of writing stale straight characters, I had finally begun to write queer stories featuring queer people, who to my great relief felt alive on the page. Late at night on my bed, a dim bulb flickering in the kitchen, screen light white on my face, I conjured it all up, and let my heart lead. In my fiction, I tried to articulate the truth.

But the “truth” felt slippery, uneasy. My queer characters, as I found them, were often a mess of wiring: self-sabotage, deception, jealousy, rage—crackling in ways that risked flame. In various ways, in different stories, I can still recall the experience of channeling these things as I wrote. Underneath the elation of finishing a story, I wondered: Why am I writing this? I sometimes feared my rendering of queer characters who behaved badly would be confused as an endorsement of that bad behavior, but nonetheless the work consumed me.

While revising I returned to the question of why my queer characters were behaving badly. I held my ear to each scene to see if I could hear a human sound inside. I didn’t want to presuppose that these characters were liars, but many shared a painful compulsion for self-betrayal. It did make me wonder: Does a writer make decisions on the goodness or badness of their characters, and why? How?

One reflex I noticed in drafting was to complicate a one-dimensional character by working away from either direction. This character is “bad” and so should have “good” characteristics. This character is “good” and so we must find a flaw. But I found this approach yielded rote shattered vases, reminiscent of my two-dimensional straight characters, and tended to render in a kind of permanent sketch. A more holistic, embodied approach—without judgment—transported me into their lives, which rang with a conditional joy I found exquisitely rich. I had to let them breathe.

Many of the stories in my book feature a protagonist or narrator whose deceptions serve a great self-betrayal. They must be masculine enough, or successful enough, or have friends because they don’t, or even merely have histories that suggest these things, in order to be or feel deserving of the love they chase. Often the lies become the stuff of these characters’ undoing. They mean the best but fail in their pursuit.

It is sometimes suggested that we write to free ourselves, but this has never interested me. The great freedom of the page was that I did not have to run from what I felt, or once had. Acknowledgment of complexity felt like a kiss. Fiction, stories, had been where I went to be honest, through queer characters who had begun to habituate, at times compulsively, their desires to betray themselves. Imposing a sense of goodness on a character flattened them, suffocating a tenderness and kindness that I found my characters do often possess too. In the middle of Indiana, in the middle of the night, I trained my gaze on only what felt true. From that feeling, eventually, the book emerged.

 

Peter Kispert is the author of the debut story collection I Know You Know Who I Am (Penguin Books, 2020), which was selected as a Best Book of the Year by Elle and a Best LGBTQ Book of the Year by O, the Oprah Magazine. His stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in GQ, Esquire, them, Playboy, and other publications. He is finishing work on his first novel.

Thumbnail: Evie S.

Craft Capsule: Creating a Seasonal Writing Practice

by

Khadijah Queen

1.4.21

This is no. 84 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

The pandemic, social uprisings, and a volatile political climate—superimposed upon family and work responsibilities, as well as health challenges—has made a regular writing practice impossible over the past ten months. Essays I pitched early in the year didn’t materialize, and only a handful of terribly sad poems arrived in usable condition. The one longform piece I did finish—a zuihitsu that appeared in Harper’s—was about the pandemic, written in April and May as I worried terribly about the health and safety of family members who were sick, and some who are still frontline workers. As a relatively prolific writer, with six published books since 2008 and four more currently in various stages of completion, I’m trying to see my current lack of time and energy to write as a side effect of all that’s happening in the world, but I don’t want to give up on a regular writing practice. To that end, I want to reenvision possibilities for that practice while taking into account the new reality. 

This isn’t the first time I’ve had to adapt to complicated circumstances; I’ve tried many different kinds of writing practices over the past two decades. My early years of writing consisted of recording lines on my lunch breaks and during lulls at my day jobs, and a few minutes in my car before entering the house in the evening. When my son got older, I somehow managed six years of a daily writing practice, usually a half hour at 5:30 AM with a cup of tea and a blueberry muffin. When I had an emergency appendectomy in 2015, my writing routine tanked as I recovered. Slowly I built back up to weekend flurries, and that lasted long enough for me to complete my fifth book. Then I wrote during intensely concentrated weeks and months for three and a half years of doctoral study, resulting in one book of poetry, the first draft of a memoir and a 270-page critical dissertation by the end of 2019. After all that writing, all I wanted was a break, so I took a couple of months. Then the pandemic happened, and the writing—didn’t. As a person who really needs an intentional writing routine, I felt at a loss. 

How, with mounting caregiving, health issues and work responsibilities, would I fit in regular writing time? I struggled for months, until I hit upon the one thing I hadn’t tried yet—seasons. Thinking in terms of seasons avoids the specificity (and requisite pressure) of calendar dates and days of the week. A seasonal practice could preserve writing goals more gently and flexibly. It might include thematic prompts—write about lightness and travel in summer, or perhaps reflect on freedom; focus on renewal and revisit the pastoral or the aubade in spring; delve into darkness, list modes of comfort, and maybe address grief in winter; autumn writing might spotlight transformation and beauty. Autumn is my favorite season. I love wearing knee boots and turtleneck sweaters and leather gloves, love the early October riot of color in the trees. You can of course define for yourself what each season means. Collect keywords over the year that can provide lasting inspiration. 

Let’s also pause here and define “writing goals.” For me that’s mostly meant books, and that hasn’t changed. But I’ve had to think smaller when it comes to productivity even as I continue to envision larger projects. To avoid becoming overwhelmed, maybe I’ll choose a single element to work on, such as order, or beginnings and endings. For a seasonal practice, choosing writing goals that can be adjusted as needed, and granting yourself the easement of non-specified time to work, seems more than reasonable right now.  

If you have an impending deadline in early February, maybe you’ll work only on the coldest days, when outside pursuits aren’t accessible. In summer, if you enjoy writing outside like I do, choose the sunniest days to work on a patio, or at a socially distant café. If you have a deadline that isn’t urgent, try softening it. Make one date—or date range!—for a first draft, another for draft two, another for draft three. After each draft, especially if it’s spring, buy yourself fresh flowers. Get as much done as you can, then reward yourself with an evening walk or morning drive, weather permitting. These are just a few basic suggestions, and you can adjust goals (and rewards) as you go along. I happen to like dark chocolate, so that’s my default treat. Make a list of yours and have it ready along with those seasonal keywords. I firmly believe we need as many reminders as possible that part of the work of writing is allowing for mental space, for infusions of beauty, for intentional nourishment—physical and otherwise. During these incredibly challenging times, I would wager that flexibility rules the day. Don’t abuse grace, of course; communicate clearly and continue to commit to due dates with integrity, but also make use of kindness—given, and received.

 

Khadijah Queen is the author of six books, including Anodyne (Tin House, 2020) and I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On (YesYes Books, 2017). Her writing has also appeared in American Poetry Review, BuzzFeed, Fence, Poetry, and Tin House, among other publications. Holding a PhD in English from the University of Denver and an MFA from Antioch University, she teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and for Regis University’s Mile High MFA program.

Thumbnail: Oliver Hihn

Craft Capsule: Self-Deprecating Humor

by

Kristen Arnett

5.3.21

This is no. 97 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

At a recent writing conference panel, a group of writers and I sat at the head of a packed room and spoke for well over an hour about women and humor. It was an interesting conversation; we all cared deeply about the topic since our writing contained different forms of comedy. Since the panel was so well attended, we wound up fielding a tremendous number of questions once the session was over. There were many good questions, but one stuck out in particular: A woman inquired why one of the writers didn’t think that self-deprecating humor was a valuable form of comedic writing.

The response was that self-deprecating humor is often lazy, that it is choosing to focus on the negative aspects of the self instead of engaging with the larger picture of the outside world. The person who asked the question responded with the fact that they were queer, and that self-deprecating humor felt important to them and their coming out process, so therefore it felt significant to their writing of queer characters.

I considered that response for the rest of the afternoon, and in fact, I am still thinking about it today. I would absolutely say that what I find funny in writing (and in life) sits inside the realm of the self-deprecating. I like joking around about my work as well as joking around about myself—throw my Word doc in the computer recycling bin, throw me in along after it, that kind of thing. Self-deprecating humor, to me, is funny. But I also understand that not everyone finds the same things humorous. Taste is subjective, right? Well, humor is too.

When I think about self-deprecating humor, I often attach it to my queerness. When I was first coming out—or perhaps even before I was all the way out, just one toe out the door—I was thinking about who I was as a person and how I wanted to be seen. I did not, in fact, want to be a lesbian. It made my life (stuffed inside an evangelical, very Southern Baptist family) extremely difficult. So upon coming out, my go-to resource was humor that was self-deprecating. It was easy to poke fun at the things that made me weird or different—the things I did not, in fact, wish to be. It is a way in which many queer people learn to process things. By making fun of ourselves, we are better able to understand the things that we can’t seem to uproot.

Not every queer person forms their sense of humor from a place of self-deprecation. But if my humor started out from this specific site, then perhaps self-deprecation has essentially formed my identity and therefore influences my writing.

When applied to queer work, self-deprecating humor becomes a touchstone not only for the author, but for the queer reader. Consider Peter Kispert’s recent short fiction collection, I Know You Know Who I Am (Penguin Books, 2020). Many of these stories contain characters hiding behind a facade. By presenting themselves packaged as a lie, they are able to deceive others for some form of gain—generally, intimacy. But if we consider that so many of these lies are built upon the fact that the characters dislike themselves, then the humor is obviously self-deprecating. To sit with a character who creates a fake friend so he can have something to talk about with his boyfriend, then paying an actor to pretend to be that fake friend? Hilarious, but also deeply self-loathing. I need to make up something better than me to present to this person in order to keep them, it tells the reader. Funny and sad all at once!

There is much to be mined from self-deprecating humor, especially if we remember that it can deeply inform characterization in fiction. After all, writers are always searching out ways to flesh the “bag of bones,” as Thomas Hardy put it. Maybe that bag of bones is rooting around in the dumpster. Maybe that bag of bones wants to fight a raccoon over the carcass of a rotisserie chicken. Maybe that bag of bones winds up with nothing to show for it but a fistful of grimy chicken fat and maybe they hate themselves for it. And hey, you know what? Maybe that’s a little bit funny.

 

Kristen Arnett is a queer writer based in Florida. She is the author of the novel Mostly Dead Things (Tin House, 2019), which was a New York Times best-seller, and the story collection Felt in the Jaw (Split/Lip Press, 2017). Her writing has also appeared in the New York Times, North American Review, Gulf Coast, Guernica, and McSweeney’s, among other publications. Her second novel, With Teeth, is forthcoming from Riverhead Books in June.

Thumbnail: Jackson Simmer

Craft Capsule: In Praise of Italics

by

Susan Stinson

3.29.21

This is no. 93 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I love italics. They make me feel as if the author is whispering tremulous secrets to me. The words need to be worth leaning closer to take them in. That’s all I ask.

An idiosyncratic, opinionated, passionate reader who is dear to me skips passages in italics. Reading next to her was the first time I learned that some people don’t read them. It breaks my heart.

Moby Dick has a famous first line, but before “Call me Ishmael,” Melville gives an italicized description of a “late consumptive usher to a grammar school” who provides an etymology of the word “whale”:

The pale Usher—threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him now. He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nations of the world. He loved to dust his old grammars; it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.

Dusting books on grammar and punctuation with my own queer handkerchief embellished with gay flags, I am also reminded of the approach of death. I am also in search of dry and spectacular facts about creatures from the watery parts of the world. About people, too.

I am wearing a new T-shirt emblazoned with Fat and Queer (which is the title of a forthcoming anthology) in the font Italic Lobster Two. Some friends have confused the font with cursive. The lean of italics can suggest handwriting, language shaped through the press and flow of a hand. The queerness of italics for me is both in the way it looks—that tilt—and in how it brings attention to that which gets set aside.

The poetry of Adrienne Rich is one place I learned to linger over italics. She wowed me with sudden evidence or testimony, complete with notes in the back. Poring over those notes, I discovered that Emily Dickinson, June Jordan, or Édouard Glissant might be speaking in her work in direct quotes, not attributed in the body of a poem, but marked by italics. That tensions and influences within a piece of writing can be made explicit and acknowledged without loss of lyrical beauty and power. The voices that spoke to her might speak to me, too. I could speak back.

Italics as revelation! Slipped in so softly, briefly. Easy to miss. Rich to explore. I followed those italic breadcrumb trails.

And, oh my goodness, dedications? In the front of a book: a name, maybe a line. Those are the hottest italics of all time.

And epigraphs? The quotations at the beginning of a novel, a story, a poem, or a chapter? There, the writer gives a glimpse into or intentional misdirection about other writing that the piece is in conversation with. Those italics were some of the first things that allowed me to sense what it might be like to be a writer.

In my novel Venus of Chalk, I wrote a good deal of the prologue in italics. It involves an afternoon party and the only sex scene in the book. The sex is between fat lesbians. One is a home economist. It’s very specific. Readers often miss the erotic lives of such characters. This is one of my persistent challenges as a writer and a human being: how to effectively invite people to notice—to linger over—characters, bodies, lives, impulses that seem easily skipped.

The novelist Daniel José Older has pointed out that using italics when a multilingual and/or multicultural speaker switches languages is a falsification of how people speak, think, talk, and are.

The text of the King James Bible that friends gave me in high school is set in a font very close to italics, half-slanted. Because it was the King James Version, it invited me into all sorts of intense experiences with language. That King James Bible was the first adult book I owned that was and is an intentionally beautiful object. Everything Jesus said is printed in red.

I started writing on a manual typewriter. I used it to draft my first novel, Fat Girl Dances With Rocks. I couldn’t type italics. I had to underline words and imagine them. I dreamed of italics. I aspired to them.

I had to fight for that prologue with fat lesbian sex and italics. I wanted to offer that chance to readers who could brave those things.

Who could brave them or who longed for them.

 

Susan Stinson is a writer, editor, and teacher. She is the author of four novels, including Spider in a Tree (Small Beer Press, 2013) and Martha Moody (Spinsters Ink Books, 1995; Small Beer Press, 2020). Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Curve, Lambda Literary Review, Seneca Review, and Kenyon Review Online. She is also a recipient of the Outstanding Mid-Career Novelists’ Prize from Lambda Literary. Born in Texas and raised in Colorado, she lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Craft Capsule: In Praise of Italics

by

Susan Stinson

3.29.21

This is no. 93 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I love italics. They make me feel as if the author is whispering tremulous secrets to me. The words need to be worth leaning closer to take them in. That’s all I ask.

An idiosyncratic, opinionated, passionate reader who is dear to me skips passages in italics. Reading next to her was the first time I learned that some people don’t read them. It breaks my heart.

Moby Dick has a famous first line, but before “Call me Ishmael,” Melville gives an italicized description of a “late consumptive usher to a grammar school” who provides an etymology of the word “whale”:

The pale Usher—threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him now. He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nations of the world. He loved to dust his old grammars; it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.

Dusting books on grammar and punctuation with my own queer handkerchief embellished with gay flags, I am also reminded of the approach of death. I am also in search of dry and spectacular facts about creatures from the watery parts of the world. About people, too.

I am wearing a new T-shirt emblazoned with Fat and Queer (which is the title of a forthcoming anthology) in the font Italic Lobster Two. Some friends have confused the font with cursive. The lean of italics can suggest handwriting, language shaped through the press and flow of a hand. The queerness of italics for me is both in the way it looks—that tilt—and in how it brings attention to that which gets set aside.

The poetry of Adrienne Rich is one place I learned to linger over italics. She wowed me with sudden evidence or testimony, complete with notes in the back. Poring over those notes, I discovered that Emily Dickinson, June Jordan, or Édouard Glissant might be speaking in her work in direct quotes, not attributed in the body of a poem, but marked by italics. That tensions and influences within a piece of writing can be made explicit and acknowledged without loss of lyrical beauty and power. The voices that spoke to her might speak to me, too. I could speak back.

Italics as revelation! Slipped in so softly, briefly. Easy to miss. Rich to explore. I followed those italic breadcrumb trails.

And, oh my goodness, dedications? In the front of a book: a name, maybe a line. Those are the hottest italics of all time.

And epigraphs? The quotations at the beginning of a novel, a story, a poem, or a chapter? There, the writer gives a glimpse into or intentional misdirection about other writing that the piece is in conversation with. Those italics were some of the first things that allowed me to sense what it might be like to be a writer.

In my novel Venus of Chalk, I wrote a good deal of the prologue in italics. It involves an afternoon party and the only sex scene in the book. The sex is between fat lesbians. One is a home economist. It’s very specific. Readers often miss the erotic lives of such characters. This is one of my persistent challenges as a writer and a human being: how to effectively invite people to notice—to linger over—characters, bodies, lives, impulses that seem easily skipped.

The novelist Daniel José Older has pointed out that using italics when a multilingual and/or multicultural speaker switches languages is a falsification of how people speak, think, talk, and are.

The text of the King James Bible that friends gave me in high school is set in a font very close to italics, half-slanted. Because it was the King James Version, it invited me into all sorts of intense experiences with language. That King James Bible was the first adult book I owned that was and is an intentionally beautiful object. Everything Jesus said is printed in red.

I started writing on a manual typewriter. I used it to draft my first novel, Fat Girl Dances With Rocks. I couldn’t type italics. I had to underline words and imagine them. I dreamed of italics. I aspired to them.

I had to fight for that prologue with fat lesbian sex and italics. I wanted to offer that chance to readers who could brave those things.

Who could brave them or who longed for them.

 

Susan Stinson is a writer, editor, and teacher. She is the author of four novels, including Spider in a Tree (Small Beer Press, 2013) and Martha Moody (Spinsters Ink Books, 1995; Small Beer Press, 2020). Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Curve, Lambda Literary Review, Seneca Review, and Kenyon Review Online. She is also a recipient of the Outstanding Mid-Career Novelists’ Prize from Lambda Literary. Born in Texas and raised in Colorado, she lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Craft Capsule: The Short Short Story

by

Peter Kispert

2.22.21

This is no. 89 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I was assigned that first short short story in college, which I still return to today: Amy Hempel’s knockout “Going,” a three-page piece from her collection Reasons to Live (Knopf, 1985). Sitting in my dorm room, students loud in the common area outside, I recall thinking I had missed some pages, then the unmistakable feeling that I couldn’t have possibly. That perfect last line at the very bottom of the page, punctuating a deeply satisfying story that defied conventional narrative. There are moments one experiences as a reader and writer that blow the world wide open in the best way, and reading this story was one of those; to anyone who would (pretend to) listen, I couldn’t stop talking about it.

Short short stories hold the obvious charge of compressing narrative in a rather extreme way, but what I initially loved about writing the form was the possibility to attend to reverberation. I noticed how a detail could echo out more apparent, and controlled, than in the longer works of fiction I had been drafting. The attention of the reader had become, in writing these brief pieces, an available consideration, if not yet a manageable one. I had assumed that short short prose was written quickly because it was so quick to read, but as so often happens, the sketches began to take longer, and serious effort, the more I learned.

In my debut story collection, I Know You Know Who I Am, published by Penguin Books last year, I wrote about queer characters trapped by (often elaborate) falsehoods. I featured several short short stories of just one or two pages to mirror the restriction that I felt the liars of my fiction not only possessed but frequently valued. These narrators and protagonists are constricted by their deceptions, and sometimes say little, or just enough, to their own ends. In this way, the shorter pieces in the book felt true, and rang out with echoes from the longer stories in the book: doublings that hinted at a presiding consciousness over the collection, which I vied to make available, if not explicit.

The short short story form is, speaking frankly, often slighted. Quick, confident work can render something more like scene, and leave the reader ambivalent. Reader investment can be hard to manage. A detail can become a redundant crutch. The best short pieces are closed systems in which elements of narrative are brought into careful relief. And resonate in brevity that masks a world of meaning and complexity beneath their small surfaces.

Several years after studying that first short short story, I attended a reading Hempel gave at the New York Summer Writers Institute at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs. At the time, I was working as an academic administrator for a gifted youth program (hosted by the same university) for children whose talents extended to running loudly down the hallways outside that auditorium as Hempel read beautifully from a longer story, “The Dog of the Marriage.” I remember thinking, as I sat rapt in that auditorium, how intricate the piece was. How each of its scenes delivered precise, accumulating thematic echoes. The spectacular ending. It called to mind the experience of first flipping that page—once, then again, for the words that couldn’t be there. Later, while walking from the campus gym, I passed by her near the main lawn. Of course, I couldn’t say one word.

 

Peter Kispert is the author of the debut story collection I Know You Know Who I Am (Penguin Books, 2020), which was selected as a Best Book of the Year by Elle and a Best LGBTQ Book of the Year by O, the Oprah Magazine. His stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in GQ, Esquire, them, Playboy, and other publications. He is finishing work on his first novel.

Thumbnail: Jakob Andreasen

Craft Capsule: Night Call

by

Alex Dimitrov

6.7.21

This is no. 100 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

New York’s streets are everywhere in my poems. In February of 2014 I used the city quite literally. It was for a project called Night Call. The idea was to travel to strangers and read them poems in bed, or in the most intimate space of their homes. For many people this ended up being the kitchen or living room. For one guy, his balcony in Tribeca. Mostly though, strangers walked me right into their bedrooms and offered me a glimpse of their lives.

I’ve lived in New York for more than ten years. It still feels like the city doesn’t need me or know that I’m here. And to be honest, I like that. I’m a writer who thrives off resistance. That kind of pushback and being ignored excites me. In Night Call, I wanted to fuse that feeling with the intimacy of going over to someone’s apartment. Being in a person’s space is often more intimate than sleeping with them. It’s an alluring exchange: people showing you where they spend the majority of their lives. The poem is also an exchange. It’s like showing you a map to the interior though not the interior itself. The poem, to me, is a conversation between people.

I announced Night Call on social media and offered to do readings for anyone who didn’t know me. That was the catch, they had to be total strangers. They could be in any borough and had the choice of four separate Sundays on which we could meet. I’d leave my apartment around eight in the evening with poems and my phone. Nothing more. Maybe a pack of cigarettes (though I was trying to quit). Sometimes I didn’t know the gender of the person I was going to read to (based on their name) and I didn’t care either. I took the N and the R and the 6 and the B trains. Most of the readings were quick. Twenty or twenty-five minutes. Other times I wouldn’t leave someone’s apartment until two or three in the morning and I’d cab back, exhausted and exhilarated both. People offered me drinks, told me stories about their childhoods, affairs, the death of their parents. They took me up to their roofs, made me coffee, showed me things they had written or painted. One stranger cooked me dinner and told me she regretted both of her marriages. “Don’t get married,” she said. “There are more interesting things to do with people.” I’ll never forget the way she kept adjusting a silver pendant around her neck.

At the time I had a nine-to-five job and I’m not sure how I got up on those Monday mornings. Several major media outlets asked to cover Night Call but I declined. I’ve never written or talked about it before. It was private. My interest was to open up a new space between the reader and the poet and between the reader and the poem. I wanted to demystify both. I wanted people, in the privacy of their beds, to encounter the poem like a bedtime story (being read to having been one of the only pleasures of my childhood).

The poems I read were from drafts of my second book, Together and by Ourselves. The strangers in Night Call were the first people to hear it. It’s my favorite book I’ve written and my most personal, too. In some ways I wrote it to survive the change in an important relationship. It’s amazing the things people shared with me when I read them those poems. We usually sat across from each other on top of the bedspread, sometimes about one or two arm-lengths apart, sometimes for long stretches of time, often in silence.

For about a month, in the dead of winter, I went to the Village and Queens and Brooklyn, and almost to Staten Island once but it was too late at that point. Some people I read to ended up becoming my friends. I remember even those I haven’t seen again, which is most of them. I remember what they told me about their lives and I remember their faces. The poem is, of course, a place to remember. It keeps people’s voices and things right there, outside time. And those first hours after midnight, when Night Call would often take place, they feel outside time to me also. It’s a beautiful illusion. The imagination is the only real freedom. That’s what Night Call helped me remember. I had forgotten it too.

 

Alex Dimitrov is the author of three books of poems, including Love and Other Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2021), as well as the chapbook American Boys (Floating Wolf Quarterly, 2012). His work has been published in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Paris Review, and Poetry. He was previously the senior content editor at the Academy of American Poets, where he edited the Poem-a-Day series and American Poets. He has taught creative writing at Princeton University, Columbia University, and New York University, among other institutions. With Dorothea Lasky, he is the coauthor of Astro Poets: Your Guides to the Zodiac (Flatiron Books, 2019). Dimitrov lives in New York City.

Thumbnail: Guillaume Técher

Craft Capsule: A Poem Called Love

by

Alex Dimitrov

6.14.21

This is no. 101 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Three months into 2017 I realized we were entering a period of cultural monotony. Daily doom, constant outrage, and the media and tech giants both cashing in on exactly the thing they were (supposedly) outraged about. Click here. Sign this. Keep tweeting. Don’t go offline. Forget about pleasure. Resign yourself to your phone, your laptop, your screen—everyone was exhausted. The cycle itself produced a kind of hysteria. And I don’t trust hysteria. One of the reasons being how unsustainable and uninspiring it is. Another being that historically it has ushered in sloppy thinking.

Logging onto social media became the most depressing part of my day. It was closer to advertising and propaganda than any real rhetoric or news. I’m not sure why but right around then I began to wonder what the role of the artist even is. And a year later, when nothing had changed, when the media enabled Washington and Washington enabled the media, when the tech giants surveilled us and we began to surveil one another—I wondered again. I wanted to offer something in place of hysteria and the didactic landscape of Twitter.

I once heard Marina Abramović give a talk at the Guggenheim in which she said that one role of the artist is to elevate the public spirit. I’ve always loved her work. Two things we share in common, other than being immigrants from the same part of the world, is that we’re both interested in duration and endurance in our creative work. I wanted to make something that returned people to their inner lives. I wanted to remind them about pleasure and the sensual mind. And I knew it would be difficult since online culture had become a place for the opposite. A place where we’re endlessly bombarded with opportunism and lack of nuance. What I had to do, I told myself, was find a container for something that occurred daily and was endless in form, like the internet itself.

The first line I wrote for what became the title poem of my book Love and Other Poems was, “I love opening a window in a room.” I decided that was the feeling I wanted the poem to evoke. I wanted possibility without abstraction. I wanted the poem to be a space where you could throw everything in, and not feel hopeless about that everything when you were done reading. I was also listening to a lot of The Doors. In one interview I read with Jim Morrison (Sagittarius), he says: “I’d like to do a song or a piece of music that’s just a pure expression of joy, like a celebration of existence, like the coming of spring or the sun rising, just pure unbounded joy. I don’t think we’ve really done that yet.” And so I began my poem with that in mind. It would be a list. A list of things I loved about the world. And maybe, as crazy as it sounded, I wouldn’t stop writing it. Maybe the poem could go on forever (“I am thinking that a poem could go on forever,” Jack Spicer wrote in “Psychoanalysis: An Elegy”). Although I did need to finish, as poems in physical books have to end, I decided I’d continue the poem on Twitter—the place I loathed—one tweet a day, every day, for as long as I was alive.

It was while writing the poem that I began to understand what Abramović meant by “elevating the public spirit.” That became my mantra and my aim. I kept the form and the language accessible because it was important to me that any person, even one who didn’t read or like poetry, might enjoy and understand the poem, should they encounter it online. And I wanted the poem to be encountered. That’s the main reason I brought it to Twitter and didn’t keep it solely in print. I hoped people could see themselves in some line or some future line I hadn’t yet written. But I’d made the commitment to write. There was no going back really. You see, I’m still writing the poem today.

 

Alex Dimitrov is the author of three books of poems, including Love and Other Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2021), as well as the chapbook American Boys (Floating Wolf Quarterly, 2012). His work has been published in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Paris Review, and Poetry. He was previously the senior content editor at the Academy of American Poets, where he edited the Poem-a-Day series and American Poets. He has taught creative writing at Princeton University, Columbia University, and New York University, among other institutions. With Dorothea Lasky, he is the coauthor of Astro Poets: Your Guides to the Zodiac (Flatiron Books, 2019). Dimitrov lives in New York City.

Craft Capsule: Night Call

by

Alex Dimitrov

6.7.21

This is no. 100 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

New York’s streets are everywhere in my poems. In February of 2014 I used the city quite literally. It was for a project called Night Call. The idea was to travel to strangers and read them poems in bed, or in the most intimate space of their homes. For many people this ended up being the kitchen or living room. For one guy, his balcony in Tribeca. Mostly though, strangers walked me right into their bedrooms and offered me a glimpse of their lives.

I’ve lived in New York for more than ten years. It still feels like the city doesn’t need me or know that I’m here. And to be honest, I like that. I’m a writer who thrives off resistance. That kind of pushback and being ignored excites me. In Night Call, I wanted to fuse that feeling with the intimacy of going over to someone’s apartment. Being in a person’s space is often more intimate than sleeping with them. It’s an alluring exchange: people showing you where they spend the majority of their lives. The poem is also an exchange. It’s like showing you a map to the interior though not the interior itself. The poem, to me, is a conversation between people.

I announced Night Call on social media and offered to do readings for anyone who didn’t know me. That was the catch, they had to be total strangers. They could be in any borough and had the choice of four separate Sundays on which we could meet. I’d leave my apartment around eight in the evening with poems and my phone. Nothing more. Maybe a pack of cigarettes (though I was trying to quit). Sometimes I didn’t know the gender of the person I was going to read to (based on their name) and I didn’t care either. I took the N and the R and the 6 and the B trains. Most of the readings were quick. Twenty or twenty-five minutes. Other times I wouldn’t leave someone’s apartment until two or three in the morning and I’d cab back, exhausted and exhilarated both. People offered me drinks, told me stories about their childhoods, affairs, the death of their parents. They took me up to their roofs, made me coffee, showed me things they had written or painted. One stranger cooked me dinner and told me she regretted both of her marriages. “Don’t get married,” she said. “There are more interesting things to do with people.” I’ll never forget the way she kept adjusting a silver pendant around her neck.

At the time I had a nine-to-five job and I’m not sure how I got up on those Monday mornings. Several major media outlets asked to cover Night Call but I declined. I’ve never written or talked about it before. It was private. My interest was to open up a new space between the reader and the poet and between the reader and the poem. I wanted to demystify both. I wanted people, in the privacy of their beds, to encounter the poem like a bedtime story (being read to having been one of the only pleasures of my childhood).

The poems I read were from drafts of my second book, Together and by Ourselves. The strangers in Night Call were the first people to hear it. It’s my favorite book I’ve written and my most personal, too. In some ways I wrote it to survive the change in an important relationship. It’s amazing the things people shared with me when I read them those poems. We usually sat across from each other on top of the bedspread, sometimes about one or two arm-lengths apart, sometimes for long stretches of time, often in silence.

For about a month, in the dead of winter, I went to the Village and Queens and Brooklyn, and almost to Staten Island once but it was too late at that point. Some people I read to ended up becoming my friends. I remember even those I haven’t seen again, which is most of them. I remember what they told me about their lives and I remember their faces. The poem is, of course, a place to remember. It keeps people’s voices and things right there, outside time. And those first hours after midnight, when Night Call would often take place, they feel outside time to me also. It’s a beautiful illusion. The imagination is the only real freedom. That’s what Night Call helped me remember. I had forgotten it too.

 

Alex Dimitrov is the author of three books of poems, including Love and Other Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2021), as well as the chapbook American Boys (Floating Wolf Quarterly, 2012). His work has been published in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Paris Review, and Poetry. He was previously the senior content editor at the Academy of American Poets, where he edited the Poem-a-Day series and American Poets. He has taught creative writing at Princeton University, Columbia University, and New York University, among other institutions. With Dorothea Lasky, he is the coauthor of Astro Poets: Your Guides to the Zodiac (Flatiron Books, 2019). Dimitrov lives in New York City.

Thumbnail: Guillaume Técher

Craft Capsule: On Copycats and Reply Guys

by

Kristen Arnett

5.10.21

This is no. 98 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

When telling a joke, I am simply trying to please myself. That might be my only writing rule. I am my own audience first, before a reader ever sees anything. I have to enjoy it. If I don’t, then what’s the point? This is an opinion many share about creative work. In the creation and in the consumption, it is foremost about pleasure.

Plenty of people love to piggyback on a good gag. Post your own on the internet, and you get a slew of copycat replies! Some people just want to add to it, to feel like they’re participating in the joke. But quite often someone replies by trying to tell it “better.” I use quotes here because that’s the thing about jokes; often there isn’t a better way to tell them. Something that feels funny to one person might not resonate with someone else. What gets our funny bone is often decided by our personal lived experiences: how we grew up, what we watched and loved as kids, how we relate to pop culture and media.

I am not saying copycatting is a bad thing. I do it all the time! I have riffed off a million jokes that were not mine. Sometimes they come from a television show or from a stand-up routine. Sometimes it’s a funny story I overheard at a party or a bar. All humor has an origin story. The place where you find the nugget and then expand upon it. For instance, one night I was at a bar in Tallahassee, Florida, and the woman beside me ordered a white wine. Except she didn’t say a white wine, she asked the bartender for a “peanut grigio.” This was unbearably funny to me, though no one else at the bar said a word about it, including the bartender, who simply poured the woman her drink.

Later on, I told that story at an online literary event. I mentioned how much I missed bars and working at the library, missed hearing people speak when they thought that no one else was listening. The author I was in conversation with brought up the fact it could work as a very good drag name. Peanut Grigio! This was taking the riff and spinning it out, collaboratively mining it for further content. Up front was the woman asking for the wrong drink, followed by me talking about the incident itself, followed by another person adding on to it, turning the joke into something else entirely. A completely different format. I spent a few days thinking about converting the bit into fiction that included other wine-themed drag names. The initial thing I had found funny turned and morphed. The writing became yet another layer to the joke.

Here, imitation is not only the sincerest form of flattery, but also a collaborative process, one in which we are able to uncover more layers and deck different approaches on top of one another. Lots of writers do this. Consider Samantha Irby’s wildly funny (and wildly successful) essay collection Wow, No Thank You (Vintage, 2020). All these essays are gloriously funny and many reformat jokes for gutting and repurposing, but in particular, let’s look at the essay “Lesbian Bed Death.” The essay takes a look at the “Sure, sex is fun…” riff that has been so popular on Twitter, then subverts it to encompass the trope of lesbians in long-term relationships who no longer have sex. Did Irby make up the “Sure, sex is fun…” joke? No, but the essay works because she takes the idea and collaborates with it to create something nuanced and layered, furthering the comedic effect in new ways.

Sadly, these days we live in a world where collaboration is restricted to a computer or phone screen, but in this time of isolation, I will take whatever connection I can get. So bring on the joke-replies, buddy. If anything, maybe we’ll get a new meme out of it. And if a short story pops up from that…I’ll make sure to credit you.

 

Kristen Arnett is a queer writer based in Florida. She is the author of the novel Mostly Dead Things (Tin House, 2019), which was a New York Times best-seller, and the story collection Felt in the Jaw (Split/Lip Press, 2017). Her writing has also appeared in the New York TimesNorth American ReviewGulf CoastGuernica, and McSweeney’s, among other publications. Her second novel, With Teeth, is forthcoming from Riverhead Books in June.

Thumbnail: Alexander Popov

Craft Capsule: Freedom

by

Susan Stinson

4.5.21

This is no. 94 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

In 1985 I was part of a fat radio program on an International Women’s Day broadcast in Boston. Cat Pausé, a fat studies scholar who is writing about the history of fat radio and podcasts, recently told me that the show and its predecessor in 1984 were likely the first ever fat-positive radio programs. During the show I read my poem “Lifting Belly Again,” which includes excerpts from Gertrude Stein’s astonishing erotic lesbian poem “Lifting Belly.”

From the beginning of my life as a writer, I was ambitious, trying to write work that would offer readers the kind of intense experiences that the books and poems I loved most had given me. And from the beginning, the fact that I wanted to write about fatness and queerness meant both that my work immediately had an audience within my communities, including an extensive network of feminist and queer publishers, journals, and bookstores, and also that it was met with a consistent stream of rejection from mainstream publishers. (This didn’t change even when I wrote Spider in a Tree, a novel about the eighteenth-century preacher and slaveholder Jonathan Edwards.)

In the early nineties I was in a lesbian writers group with Sally Bellerose and Janet Aalfs, among others. We decided to form a micro press to publish a chapbook that included work by everyone in the group, and then went on to publish one chapbook by each of us. Mine was Belly Songs: In Celebration of Fat Women. The cover art was a gorgeous drawing by my brother Don Stinson of me wearing one of my mom’s hand-me-down slips. We fundraised and sold advance copies to help pay for the printing. I traveled to conferences with a backpack full of Belly Songs. Sometimes I sold a few. Sometimes I sold out.

What this generated for me as a writer wasn’t money, or at least not much. It was freedom. I wasn’t writing looking over my shoulder, half-frozen with fear about what was marketable. I considered my readers thoroughly and tenderly, but I also scared myself and took plenty of risks. (See, for instance, that Calvinist preacher.) For writers, knowing that they can take publication into their own hands is a source of power.

I want writers at every point of their career to know that they can do this. It is possible to write work that no one except you and a few other pockets of literary adventurers have even dreamed of wanting to read. If the work exists, it will find its readers, or some of them. You, the writer, can help make sure of that. If it is never written, it will not.

There are many models for radical, small-scale indie publishing. I think of Radix Media, a worker-owned printer and publisher, which offers the Own Voices Chapbook Prize and recently announced a new Graphic Narrative Collection. Gavin Grant and Kelly Link of Small Beer Press published two of my novels and produce the zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. The website describes the zine as “an Occasional Outburst, an arrow shot into the future, a harbinger.”

The writing I love is unpredictable and specific. It has sentences that are snowdrifts or mud-wrestling matches or swap meets. It leads me, the reader, more deeply into life. Whether or not it is marketable is a question that can be dangerous to its creation, so I say yes, it is. If you make it truly and well, you can sell it. Enough of it to keep the work alive in the minds of at least a few readers. Extraordinary things come from that.

 

Susan Stinson is a writer, editor, and teacher. She is the author of four novels, including Spider in a Tree (Small Beer Press, 2013) and Martha Moody (Spinsters Ink Books, 1995; Small Beer Press, 2020). Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Curve, Lambda Literary Review, Seneca Review, and Kenyon Review Online. She is also a recipient of the Outstanding Mid-Career Novelists’ Prize from Lambda Literary. Born in Texas and raised in Colorado, she lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Craft Capsule: Braided Narratives

by

Peter Kispert

3.1.21

This is no. 90 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Reading a story told in alternating periods of time can be comforting in its set expectation: We will move, with some regularity, forward and backward. This kind of story, a braided narrative, establishes propulsion in each sphere of time and supposes the eventual interaction or coalescence of its threads. While a large chunk of backstory can deaden a story set in an otherwise forward-moving present, I love how a story that doles out the past and its accompanying narrative present in equal measure can camouflage the narrator or protagonist’s desires, sustain tension, and ultimately, manipulate the trajectory of the story itself.

I first “discovered” the braided narrative more than a decade ago, after writing a draft of a story on a computer in a public library—an effort to shame myself into getting pages out. (He’s checking his phone again? I’d imagine some stranger judging.) I had, as I remember it, very painstakingly painted each brick as I laid it, sentence by sentence. When I went to e-mail the story to myself, it was nowhere on the desktop or server. Not hidden or minimized: It was gone. I ran home, flipped open the heavy lid of my black MacBook, and furiously reassembled the story from memory: A woman in a hotel overlooking the beach, three kids spearfishing in the water, pockets of blood lighting up in the tide. Her girlfriend. Strange nightmares. Her father’s wake.

In my rather manic redrafting process, I braided together distinct periods of time as I recalled them. I instinctually resequenced the narrative to accommodate each of its seemingly disparate threads—how the nightmares evolved during the woman’s stay at the hotel and the meaning of those children on that beach, out of which the character of a young girl confidently appeared in this draft. The threads had been called up in my memory as distinct but were thematically linked, with images and elements that gathered import as the story progressed. Failing to save what was almost certainly a mediocre draft became an invaluable lesson on structure and the managing of time in short fiction.

Of course there is no one perfect form, and despite the braided narrative’s serious versatility, it cannot always be deployed or imposed successfully. But as I found years later, the hyperartifice of the structure can be an effective way to play with how a liar manages, or manufactures, their own story, a fascination that guided me as I wrote the stories that eventually became my debut collection. My unreliable narrators and protagonists sang on the page with an urgency to tell their own story that implied an honesty their histories and relationships, often unfurling in a past sequence, called into question.

Despite that fateful day, I now save my work very carefully and often. But it still is an effective exercise, painful to entertain as it is simple: Rewrite the story from memory. From heart. Go.

 

Peter Kispert is the author of the debut story collection I Know You Know Who I Am (Penguin Books, 2020), which was selected as a Best Book of the Year by Elle and a Best LGBTQ Book of the Year by O, the Oprah Magazine. His stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in GQEsquirethemPlayboy, and other publications. He is finishing work on his first novel.

Thumbnail: Daniele Franchi

Craft Capsule: Poets’ Prose

by

Khadijah Queen

2.1.21

This is no. 87 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

The process of writing prose can intimidate even the most seasoned poets. But we should view our training in poetry as an advantage rather than a drawback. Lately, with all that’s happening in the world, I’ve actually found it easier to write prose than poetry. Early on in the pandemic, I managed to write a zuihitsu (a Japanese form of hybrid poem-essay, invented by Sei Shōnagon in the eleventh century), and revised it over the summer with the keen eyes of the editors at Harper’s. The experience affirmed that blending poetry and prose can be supremely satisfying, even if, by its nature, prose requires more content, and can thus be more time-intensive. Using the zuihitsu form provided just the open space I needed—and working with professional editors helped steer the work toward clarity.

By contrast, in my doctoral study, I found I struggled most with critical essays that forced me into predetermined structures. For poets, I think allowing a certain kind of fluidity or invention into existing rhetorical practices—while preserving important aspects like accurate research and citation—makes room for poetic sensibility and enriches criticality with stylistic appeal. Prose, and perhaps essays in particular, can have the same kind of intimacy in tone and voice that poetry does, creating an emotional connection with readers.

In fact, poets can embrace the expansiveness of prose—the sheer volume of words—as an opportunity to create more points of connection through poetic language than in the distilled, compact space of a poem. Prose can be both sprawling and specific: two seemingly contrasting characteristics that demonstrate how we can hold two truths in mind at once. That contrast and simultaneity is also a driving force in poetry. I suspect that’s partly why hybrid works like the zuihitsu hold so much appeal to both writers and readers. They blend the best parts of each genre: poetic language and dramatic dialogue, gorgeous images and a compelling narrative, rhythmic sound and the familiar beat of prose.

While it can be difficult to maintain that lyricism in longer prose pieces, committing to drawing out lyrical patterns enriches prose compositions, particularly fiction. Fiction tends to have life and death stakes and a driving narrative, and the intentional use of poetic devices can help accentuate those high stakes. We can make use of lyric sentences, narrative control, surprising images and rich image-based action, and repetition and sound patterns.

No poetic tool is off-limits in prose. And as your piece takes shape, you can always identify which experiments work, and any elements that don’t work, with a good editor. Poets and prose writers alike benefit from a generous, sharp reader who can recognize threads hidden from you, the maker, or that you’re perhaps hiding from; areas where readers might connect more; and what can fall away. There’s a letting-go process in prose that feels a bit heavier than poetry, to me, perhaps because of the sheer volume of words. But it’s nonetheless a necessity, and almost always makes the piece better. An excellent editor will identify what has potential for expansion, and encourage you to lean into that. Of course, not everyone has access to professional editorial assistance, and for many years that was true for me. But you can build your own community in which editing and writing becomes a shared activity, where you read and learn together from both poetry and prose. After I finished my MFA in 2006, I joined a writing group for three years. I credit that experience with teaching me the persistence I needed to keep writing books—in whatever genre I decide to explore.

 

Khadijah Queen is the author of six books, including Anodyne (Tin House, 2020) and I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On (YesYes Books, 2017). Her writing has also appeared in American Poetry Review, BuzzFeed, FencePoetry, and Tin House, among other publications. Holding a PhD in English from the University of Denver and an MFA from Antioch University, she teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and for Regis University’s Mile High MFA program.

Thumbnail: Barn Images

Craft Capsule: The Arc of Understanding

by

Khadijah Queen

1.25.21

This is no. 86 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

One of the most common questions I hear when I visit universities is: How do you organize a poetry manuscript? Ordering poems is one of those intuitive processes that can prove challenging to articulate. I often share Natasha Sajé’s article “Dynamic Design: The Structure of Books of Poems,” which appeared in the Iowa Review in 2005. Reading that essay informed how I shaped my first book. It enriched my understanding of sequence, thematic and aesthetic gestures, beginnings and endings. It made me consider the importance of enjoyment—Sajé cites Roland Barthes’s concept of pleasure, both physical and intellectual, as part of the reading experience. But over the fifteen years since then, I also developed an idea I began to call “the arc of understanding.” This arc, like a story arc or outline, helps a writer to frame the overall trajectory of a poetry manuscript—or individual poem—with intention at all stages. That intention works alongside intuition on the way to feeling “finished.” Over the past couple of years I’ve only talked about the arc of understanding extemporaneously and with a fair bit of self-deprecation, but I want to articulate it now for the first time in writing.

To revise or organize toward an arc of understanding, ask yourself three basic questions:

  1. What do you want your reader’s experience to be when reading the poem or book?
  2. What do you want your reader to understand by the time they arrive at the end of your book or poem?
  3. What order of poems or lines will lead them to that experience and understanding?

For a manuscript, I recommend writing the answers down rather than just holding them in your head, and—perhaps this goes without saying—to repeat the questioning process for each manuscript. When applying these questions to individual poems, especially longer poems, the third question can feel tricky. Instead of lines, you may wish to think in stanzas, depending on the shape and content of your poem. For experimental or less narrative work, I find it helps to think in terms of patterns—shapes, sounds, images, and so on. Tracking and balancing patterns is of course part of revision no matter what kind of poetry you write, but doing so with a specific arc of understanding in mind can help add cohesion.

When I answer these questions, I make sure to articulate both intuited and explicit understanding, since, after all, understanding works on multiple levels. In A General Theory of Love (Vintage, 2001), three psychiatrists outlined how the brain processes love, noting that the levels of our triune brain—reptilian, limbic, and neocortic—haven’t evolved to talk to one another. Respectively, they deal with our instincts, emotions, and critical thought. Those processes happen simultaneously. Poetry can thus offer an instinctive and felt understanding in addition to (or rather than) an explicit one. Said another way, we understand a poem instinctively, emotionally, and intellectually. As a poet, you can use ambiguity in language to invite the reader to imagine into those multiple levels of understanding.

The more familiar I become with these questions, the more I generate corollaries: What obstacles do we place in the way of ease, when it comes to understanding? Why do we place such obstacles there? Are they actually obstacles, or are they signposts of depth, invitations to complicated or layered meaning? What is the relationship between clarity and accessibility? How do we balance variety, complexity, and clarity? How can we redefine and expand access for folks who are Blind and/or D/deaf by reconsidering structure and publication? Indeed, how can we make sure full inclusivity becomes baseline professional practice?

Consistent questioning and naming bolsters depth and clarifies intention. With each new book I write, I aim to make more conscious choices that move each poem and the book as a whole work toward a more complex, multifaceted arc of understanding—a pathway made of language and illumination, perceiving comprehension not just as concept, but experience.

 

Khadijah Queen is the author of six books, including Anodyne (Tin House, 2020) and I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On (YesYes Books, 2017). Her writing has also appeared in American Poetry Review, BuzzFeed, FencePoetry, and Tin House, among other publications. Holding a PhD in English from the University of Denver and an MFA from Antioch University, she teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and for Regis University’s Mile High MFA program.

Thumbnail: Weston MacKinnon

Craft Capsule: The Schedule

by

Jordan Kisner

12.14.20

This is no. 82 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Maya Angelou rented herself a hotel room and went off to it every morning at six-thirty. Susan Sontag forbade herself from reading until the evening. Kafka wrote all night. Capote wrote laying down all day. Virginia Woolf wrote standing up. Gertrude Stein wrote outside, in the countryside, preferably while looking at a cow. Alice Munro wrote when her children napped. Robert Lowell worked in bed with a bottle of milk. Auden used speed. Didion needed an hour before dinner with a drink to go over the day’s work. Ntozake Shange wrote with Perrier and a glass of wine at a cafe during off-hours. 

I have one friend who washes her hands before she sits down to write. Another friend gets up at the crack of dawn. A third friend works by word-count quotas and keeps a sticky note next to her so she can note the incremental increases: five hundred words here, two hundred words there. 

I have no daily habits or routines, other than coffee and walking the dog. For years I’ve tried. There was a period of time in graduate school when I wrote from ten to one on either side of the clock, but that became less feasible once I had a partner. For long stretches I’ll make myself write a few pages right when I wake up, a version of the “morning pages” in Julia Cameron’s The Artist Way, a pseudo spiritual guide to sorting out your creativity problems that’s popular among writers and artists I know—but then I’ll stop. At the beginning of this year, I wrote a note to myself declaring the intention to start with my own writing first (as opposed to e-mail or contract work) and to begin with five minutes of meditation for focus. I do not do this. If I were to look back over my notebooks from the last five years, I’d find failed attempt after failed attempt to make myself a schedule, to develop a program, to devise some infrastructure for the nebulous work of materializing thoughts and arranging them in words.

Many writers I know are strange and obsessive about the notion of keeping a schedule, even and especially when they don’t. I am one of those. I imagine it will make writing easier, because for me at least writing feels not just technically difficult but spiritually difficult. It feels as extractive as it is expressive. Routine, I suspect, would alleviate this, or at least get me more inured to it. It would make me more productive, maybe. It would make my labor more legible as labor, not only to the world but to myself. Sitting at a desk at appointed hours, like the rest of the desk-bound workforce—in other words cosplaying work as others perform it—might mitigate the suspicion that my chosen vocation, which involves spending a lot of time motionlessly staring into space, is too loose and diaphanous to be real work. Elizabeth Gilbert keeps a “militaristic” schedule, waking up at four-thirty and writing all morning, on the theory that you can’t choose when the muse shows up; if you show up you’ve done your part. This sounds right and totally soothing to me. 

I’ve never managed it. Something about my personality refuses it and insists I work in spurts, at random hours, crashing deadlines and taking ill-advised breaks and wasting just so much time. And of course there is no right way to have a writing schedule; of course brilliant writers have written at all hours and according to all manner of quirky or mundane habits; of course the only thing anyone cares about in the end is whether you wrote and whether it’s any good. But it’s continued to bother and fascinate me, this question of managing writing by tightly managing time. But then last night I happened to read (for work, at 11:45 PM) the latest book by Eileen Myles, which is a slim volume that’s sort of about being a writer and a lot about having an apartment, and Myles wrote something that broke over me like a huge wave of relief: “Literature is wasted time.”

It really takes so much time to become a writer and you have to be able to roll in time itself, that was my experience, it seems to me, like a dog likes to roll in dead fish at the beach. Or a dog (my dog) stands in the shit of a stable underneath the body of a horse (trembling) and feels awe. Cause there’s so much shit and there’s so much horse.

Reading this was startling and clarifying. The Schedule, or whatever I’m imagining when I comb the archives of Daily Routines (an excellent blog, if you’re into snooping the day planners of dead writers—which clearly I am), makes time and writing very tidy. Writing isn’t very tidy, which my inner time-anarchist seems to have always known. Writing—or the writing that feels good coming out of my hands—is much more like trembling, like awe, or even like shit. It bears the mark of abundance, a so-muchness of time, thought, sensation; you can roll around in it. It gets to feel like forever. 

 

Jordan Kisner is the author of the essay collection Thin Places (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). Her writing has also appeared in the Atlantic, the Believer, the Guardian, n+1, the New York Times Magazine, and the Paris Review Daily. The recipient of fellowships from Pioneer Works, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and Art Omi, she is currently a fellow at the Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas.

Thumbnail: Daniele Levis Pelusi

Craft Capsule: Against Universality, in Praise of Anger

by

Chen Chen

11.16.20

This is no. 79 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Of my fury,
I come like a joint popping into place.

—Sarah Gambito, “Of My Fury”1 

Another thing you didn’t mention in your letter: the fact that you must feel profoundly alone.

—Yanyi, “How Do I Write About My Identity Authentically?”2

 

1. One of my earliest crushes was Tuxedo Mask. I still think he’s a babe. 

2. During my MFA, I wrote a love poem that referenced Tuxedo Mask plus another early crush, Spider-Man. I don’t remember if I brought it to workshop. I remember feeling anxious that someone might advise cutting those references in order to make it a more “timeless” poem. How angry I got, thinking that would likely happen. 

3. One of my favorite movies is Sailor Moon R: The Movie, in which an alien dude named Fiore develops a big crush on Tuxedo Mask. Sailor Moon, who’s destined to be with Tuxedo Mask, has to fight Fiore for her man. Also, save the Earth. 

4. During an MFA workshop, a white classmate declared he represented “millions of readers” who would stop reading a poem if they came across a stanza in Mandarin. He insisted I cut it to one line, if the poem needed even that. 

5. Which is more universal: a species of bird that some readers will have to look up or an animated character that some readers will have to look up? 

6. These days I embrace writing to an Asian American reader, or more specifically, a queer Asian American reader, a queer Chinese American reader. It’s taken me a long time to get to this place and some days I forget how much I can embrace it. 

7. A white professor in my MFA advised us not to use the term white people in poetry because it was “alienating.”

8. I love that Tuxedo Mask fights with roses, that Sailor Moon fights with her tiara and eventually with even mightier, gorgeouser accessories. I love that when you visit sailormoon.fandom.com, your mouse arrow transforms into her Spiral Moon Heart Rod. 

9. Which is more universal: Tuxedo Mask, Spider-Man, the Great Sphinx of Giza, or a queer Asian American poet referencing each in a love poem for another big nerd?

10. Another white classmate called the Mandarin “gobbledygook.” Of course, neither classmate complained about the French in a previous poem—or in others, my references to Russian literature. 

11. Fiore, whose name means flower in Italian, is obsessed with finding the perfect one for Tuxedo Mask, who gave him a rose when they were both lonely children. Fiore was lonely because he seemed to be the only one left of his species. Tuxedo Mask, who back then was only Mamoru, was lonely because his parents had just been killed in a car accident. After years of wandering alone through space, an exhausted Fiore landed on Earth, outside the hospital where Mamoru was staying. Mamoru found him and the two immediately formed a deep bond. When, just a short time later, Fiore had to leave3 the Earth due to its incompatible atmosphere, he made it his mission to find a gift worthy of the one who had made him feel no longer alone. 

12. The Mandarin was translated in the poem itself. Now I’m working on poems that keep my Mandarin untranslated. Full stanzas.4

Which is more universal: Italian, Mandarin, French, Russian, Japanese, English, or the English dub of Sailor Moon R: The Movie

13. In recent years my work has been praised for transcending identity categories. I know this is a well-intentioned compliment, and I feel fortunate to be read with enthusiasm. But I wonder if a white dude has ever been praised for transcending his white dudery. 

14. In an interview about her second book, Some Say the Lark (Alice James Book, 2017), Jennifer Chang discusses the expectation to write about and from identity in straightforward ways: 

Early in my career…I would repeatedly encounter the critique that my work seemed unrelated to my biography. I understood that these editors and judges were reading my work as insufficiently Asian American…. I thought my writing was Asian American, despite the lack of whatever they think makes for authentic Asian American writing. Ethnography? Bilingualism? And yet, at the same time, I wondered if I was hiding behind metaphor and mythology because I didn’t know or want to write about race or identity. I was confused. Wasn’t writing about the self an interrogation of identity? Or, worse, had I internalized the misguided aesthetic imperative that literature be apolitical and universal (and therefore nonthreatening to white readers)?5

15. Fan interpretations of Fiore’s feelings for Tuxedo Mask range from they’re totally gay to aww friends. In the movie itself Sailor Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, and Venus briefly discuss whether something romantic had occurred between the two. The English dub downplays this possibility, as it did with the anime TV series, for an overtly gay relationship between two women, Sailor Uranus and (my fave!) Sailor Neptune.6 

16. In recent years my work has been compared to Frank O’Hara’s. A lot. It’s flattering; I love O’Hara. His appetite for pop culture, everyday conversation, play. His gayness. His gaiety and his gravity. He’s a big influence. Still, there’s something odd about how this is considered such high praise: to be compared to a canonical white poet. “You’re the next Frank O’Hara!” “You’re like an Asian O’Hara!” I’ve been thinking of writing a poem titled “Frank O’Hara Is the White Me.”7

17. One afternoon I tried to talk to a white professor about the complicated feelings I had when visiting extended family in China after not being able to see them for over a decade. She then showed me pictures from her vacation travels in China, Vietnam, Cambodia. 

18. Jennifer Chang: 

In writing Some Say the Lark, I was intentional about writing about race and my Asian American identity on my own terms. I wanted to make the reader uncomfortable. I wanted the reader to know I was pissed off at the world and quite possibly at her.8 

19. After searching the cosmos for the perfect flower for Tuxedo Mask, Fiore is deceived by a beautiful but parasitic space plant called the Xenian Flower, who possesses him, turns his sorrow into a lust for vengeance. Fiore believes that he must attack the Earth—to punish humanity for letting Tuxedo Mask be lonely and to claim the planet for his perfect gift to fully bloom, i.e. drain all life energy from the world. Fiore asserts that Tuxedo Mask can never be truly unlonely with anyone except him. He works to destroy the Sailor Scouts defending the Earth, in particular Sailor Moon, whose connection with Tuxedo Mask drives him into a jealous fury. 

20. I wasn’t surprised by the confidence with which my white classmate claimed to know how millions of readers read. Nor was I surprised that he didn’t say white readers. What I was taken aback by was the implication that that many people would even come across a poem of mine—how he framed his critique as concern: that I’d be losing out on all these potential readers. As though he were looking out for me, as a friend.

21. Another white classmate said he found Nikky Finney’s Head Off & Split (TriQuarterly Books, 2011) “alienating.” Another referred to Kiki Petrosino’s Hymn for the Black Terrific (Sarabande Books, 2013) as “another one of those books all about identity.” Which is more universal: a white student feeling excluded from a text or Black students and students of color being excluded from the field of literature? Which is universal: a white professor’s anger over getting called white or an Asian American student’s anger over racism as well as queerphobia in workshops, literature courses, program culture, the culture of the university? 

22. What makes my poems queer and Asian American? In another version of this essay I type twelve single-spaced pages trying to answer that. I could keep going. Into this universe.9 

23. If you cut my yellow wrists, I’ll teach my yellow toes to write. 
If you cut my yellow fists, I’ll teach my yellow feet to fight.

—Marilyn Chin, “Blues on Yellow”10 

These lines blaze from a postcard I keep tacked above my bed. They’re among the first things I see when I wake up. They bless me as I’m falling asleep. The lines are by groundbreaking Chinese American poet Marilyn Chin; the postcard is made by Kundiman, a groundbreaking organization that supports Asian American writers and readers. When I write groundbreaking, I mean world-reshaping, heart-replenishing. 

24. Yes, most of my MFA classes took place in a building called “Hall of Languages,” but really all of them were in a department called English that made some students comfortably ignorant and some deeply alienated by insisting it was the universe. Yes, during that time I fell in love with the boy I’m still with today. But I was lonely, lonely, lonely in school.

25. As I write this essay, the pandemic. As I write, cops beating up protestors. I tell my friend Muriel Leung, a poet I met through Kundiman, that I haven’t been doing well lately. She sends a letter, a candle, and a sticker. The sticker is of Sailor Moon in her classic ready-to-fight pose with the magnificent caption: “Sailor Moon says: FUCK RACIST POLICE.” 

26. Anger, loneliness, and hope for a better writing community led me to apply and apply for the Kundiman Retreat—led me to my first retreat, summer of 2014. I had just completed the second year of my MFA and had one more to go. I needed Kundiman; I so needed that first retreat where I got to work with, among other brilliances, those cited in this essay: cofounder Sarah Gambito, executive director Cathy Linh Che, home group leader Jennifer Chang, and poetry faculty Marilyn Chin. Chin, whose work I first read in college. Chin, who at one point during the retreat, looked around the room where more than thirty fellows new and returning were gathered, and said: “You are the future of Asian American literature.” 

27. I continue to need Kundiman. It continues to evolve, sometimes with shortcomings. In my experience the organization is committed to engaging in the less comfortable discussions so crucial for real growth. I’m glad to see the expansion of funding and leadership opportunities as well as the addressing of serious gaps in who gets to attend the retreat—who needs an Asian American literary space and isn’t yet finding the access. I’m glad for those who’ve spoken up11 with urgent critique, with loving anger, to hold Kundiman and other organizations like it accountable. 

That anger gives me hope and encourages me to add my own critical voice. In particular, I’d like to reiterate the demand for these organizations to do more to support Black Asians, Pacific Islanders, and West Asians. I want always to be part of Asian American writing communities where accountability isn’t avoided and difference isn’t flattened.

28. I hope to one day write something as beautiful as Sailor Moon’s catchphrase, “In the name of the moon, I’ll punish you!” Though my abolitionist politics would revise that to: “In the name of the moon, let’s fight for nonpunitive forms of justice!” 

29. I’d like white writers to get angrier. Why did so few of my white grad school classmates speak out? Some of my Asian American peers could get angrier too. About racism. About who still gets left out of Asian American spaces. About anti-Blackness in Asian America.  

30. In a final effort to stop Sailor Moon, Fiore tries to take from her the immensely powerful Silver Crystal. Sailor Moon says that she wants to save him, too; that he doesn’t have to be lonely anymore, but Fiore won’t hear it. Suddenly a vision, seemingly from the Silver Crystal, allows Fiore to see that it was Sailor Moon, back then only Usagi and also a child, who first gave Mamoru the rose that he would give Fiore. Usagi had come to the same hospital, carrying a bouquet of roses to celebrate the birth of her sister. Realizing this, Fiore is able to break the Xenian Flower’s grip on his heart. Meanwhile, Sailor Moon has died, having depleted her life energy to save Earth. To make amends, Fiore finally hands Tuxedo Mask the perfect flower: one containing his own life energy, which he tells his great love to use to revive Sailor Moon. This act is Fiore’s last. 

31. Why does the alien have to sacrifice everything to save everyone else, in the end? 

32. How often I was critiqued in workshop for being alienating, being alien. How often I am praised now for being so specific and yet (and yet!) so relatable.12 As though my only options are bad alien or good alien. Or Frank O’Hara with a perpetual crush on Tuxedo Mask. 

33. If the particular is the doorway to the universal, who maintains the door? Who made it? Do I want to travel to that universe anyway? If the particulars must be understandable, palatable to a white audience, is that a universe or is that the white gaze? 

34. I think of Paul Celan—a poet whose work is steeped in his Jewishness, his always-fraught relationship with the German language, his having survived the Holocaust. In a speech delivered in 1958 he said, “For the poem does not stand outside time. True, it claims the infinite and tries to reach across time—but across, not above.”13 Then again, am I quoting Celan here because he’s a poet I believe white poets will listen to? He doesn’t fit easily at all into whiteness, yet I remember my white classmates being completely unbothered by having to learn his particular history. 

35. “Why are you so angry all the time?” I get asked, sometimes in response to the mere mention of race or sexuality. I’m not angry 24-7, but I believe in the power of a queer person of color’s anger. It is fear of such power that leads to the dismissive title of Angry Minority.14 And I recognize that as a cis man of Chinese descent, my anger tends to get treated in the white imagination as more “rational” or less threatening (this depends on the status of “China” in the white imagination). Still, I’ve been dismissed by white people as “just upset,” “too frustrated,” “divisive,” and (my fave!) “anguished”—as though my anger towards racism and other issues is the issue.15 

I’ve come to love my powerful anger; it’s fueled and steered me in the best directions. I also don’t experience anger as separate from other emotions. For instance, my anger is a part of my joy—because without it, what kind of joy is possible? A deluded, diluted one. The country I live in is racist, misogynist, ableist, transphobic, queerphobic, classist, imperialist, genocidal. Part of the anger is that a basic recognition of (not even a reckoning with) this reality is not universal. 

36. And to what extent have I internalized white literary sensibilities? To what degree am I still writing, living in their restrictive universe? 

37. The ending of Jennifer Chang’s “Again a Solstice”16

What it does even mean to write a poem? 
It means today 
I’m correcting my mistakes. 
It means I don’t want to be lonely. 

38. Another reading of the movie’s ending: Sailor Moon—through her connection with Tuxedo Mask but just as much through her friendship with the other Sailor Scouts—shows Fiore what love looks like, free of the draining anger of jealousy, the anger of a crushing loneliness. And Fiore responds with an enormous act of love. I wish it didn’t have to involve dying though; I dream for Fiore an untragic conclusion. A scene of him eventually revived, too, and finding his own fierce circle. 

39. Since my book was published, I’ve traveled across the United States and have gotten to meet so many Asian American, queer Asian American, queer Chinese American readers. I’ve also met readers of Asian descent in the U.K. and in New Zealand, many of them queer. These experiences confirmed what my truest self always knew, what white MFA culture didn’t: that impassioned readers for my work—at its most idiosyncratically identity-filled—exist.17 These experiences also pushed me to think further on the term Asian diasporic—not only for those outside the United States or those who don’t identify as American, but also for when Asian American slides into a violent18 U.S. nationalism. I’m also interested in what the term Sino offers over Chinese,19 when Chinese gets weaponized for nationalist aims. Queer can also get appropriated, become reductive, lose its radical politics. How to keep these terms active, alive? 

40. When asked what advice he would give to “emerging writers, particularly of marginalized identities,” poet Michael Wasson said: 

For marginalized identities, discover the deep complexities in who you are & what spaces you & your body occupy. I hope you stay true to your path…because too often we are told to simplify & make the work accessible to the reader (i.e. white, hetero, male). This ends up watering down the nuance of the histories that you’ve been trusted to carry through each day.20

41. Toni Morrison was asked again and again about whether she found the label “Black woman writer” limiting. One of her responses: 

Oh, so boring, oh God.… You know, “male French writer;” is that limiting? No, I don’t think it is. But I understood instantly that [“Black woman writer”] was meant to be.…

So instead of pretending that the label had no force in the minds of readers, I decided very early on that I would not just accept it, but wear it. Force people to say “Black woman writer” and then to see what the fallout would be. I don’t want to be an honorary white man.

But that doesn’t narrow the field. Not for me.

It’s an interesting, rich terrain in which to work. If I tried to compare it with something that is probably more powerful in terms of culture, it would be like saying “Black music.” And what does that mean? Does that sound narrow?21

42. In these months, this year of pandemic, I miss so many of my favorite people—so much of my universe. I text, call, Zoom. Attend online readings. Reread the poems that hold me, that reinvent holding. I search for the perfect sticker to send to Muriel.

43. Rewatching the movie, I develop a crush on Fiore. The way he tells the gay truth about his feelings. The way he lyrically meditates on loneliness. The way he gives me a different way. Not an Asian version of someone else, neither good nor bad alien, no: a badass truth-teller with great hair. 

44. When the term universal comes up, ask: Whose universe?22 When the term timeless: Who can stand outside of time? When transcends categories: Why not transgress? I don’t want to transcend. I want to sing about living in a tangle of histories and dreams. Embrace that song, I’m reminding myself. Keep writing in and to a vastness of queer Asian trouble—a cosmos full of protest and tiaras, laughter and pissed-off poems, roses and ruptures and hot stubborn shit-starters who live. 

 

ENDNOTES

1. Matadora (Alice James, 2004). 
2. An installment from the poet’s Substack, The Reading, published in July 2020
3. Until Fiore’s return years later, Mamoru/Tuxedo Mask is unsure whether he was a real or imaginary friend.
4. In a 2018 interview for the Rumpus, Cathy Linh Che responds to a question about translating the Vietnamese in her poetry: 

I don’t.…

When I write, my primary audience is someone who occupies my exact same language and identity space…. Those who don’t understand Vietnamese can understand the language around it, or they can look it up. I’ve seen my parents labor over dictionaries their whole lives to decode letters from government officials—I think English-speaking audiences can do the same for my parents’ words.

5. From a 2018 interview with Tupelo Quarterly
6. The English version made them cousins—as though that would make their romantic dynamic less odd. 
7. After completing the first full draft of this essay, I discovered an orientalist poem by O’Hara that begins “At night Chinamen jump / on Asia with a thump” and ends “we couple in the grace / of that mysterious race” (from “Poem” in
The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, University of California Press, 1995). 
8. From the same interview as earlier. 
9. I carry with me Ocean Vuong’s lines, “The most beautiful part of your body / is where it’s headed,” from “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong,” in
Night Sky With Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon, 2016). 
10. 
Rhapsody in Plain Yellow (Norton, 2003). 
11. I’ve gone back and forth on whether to provide a more detailed account; due to the complexity of the issues and privacy concerns, I’ve decided, for this essay, to keep the details of these internal community discussions internal. 
12. As with universality, I question the assumptions behind relatability and how it gets used, especially in workshop. Same with empathy—who gets to empathize? Who’s prioritized when relating to a piece? Should a writer of color aim for a text that invites empathy? Why not critique the white imagination instead—and push white writers to do more of that work? Read: “Empathy Is an End Point,” a 2017 conversation in Sublevel between Solmaz Sharif and Rickey Laurentiis. 
13. “Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen.” Translated by Rosemarie Waldrop in
Paul Celan: Collected Prose (Sheep Meadow Press, 1986). With gratitude to Dorothy J. Wang, whose Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry (Stanford University Press, 2014) is where I first encountered this speech.
14. Grateful for this June 2020 conversation in
Los Angeles Review of Books between Omar Sakr and George Abraham, in which Abraham says: “This circles back to your point about how we’re being read versus Read. It’s almost as easy for the publishing world to ignore our voices as it is for them to lazily read and casually misinterpret us, assigning implicitly racist labels on our work like ‘amply justified anger.’”
15. I’m indebted to Sara Ahmed’s work on how talking about the problem means becoming the problem, a phenomenon she identifies and explores in
Living a Feminist Life (Duke University Press, 2017).
16.
Some Say the Lark (Alice James Books, 2017).
17. Being a poet, I never expected a giant audience (though poetry readership in the United States has been growing). Still, it’s good to laugh at those who insisted I’d never have any real audience and so must write more “broadly.”

18. Is this word redundant? I’m suspicious of most nationalisms and U.S. nationalism I recognize as inherently violent—as inextricable from white supremacy. 
19. Thanks also to
sinθ magazine for opening up a myriad of distinct possibilities for Sino literary discourse and community. 
20. A 2018 interview on VIDA. 
21. A 2003 interview for Wisconsin Public Radio.
22. Whose verse gets to be read as a universe?

 

Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017)which was longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry and won the Publishing Triangle Thom Gunn Award. His work has appeared in many publications, including Poetry and the 2015 and 2019 editions of The Best American Poetry. He has received a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Kundiman and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at Brandeis University as the Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence. 

Thumbnail: NASA

Craft Capsule: Revising Folktales and Myths

by

Jenny Bhatt

10.5.20

This is no. 75 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Archetypes from folktales, fairy tales, and myths appear again and again in a wide range of contemporary stories and genres. But even if they are familiar, there is a sense that each archetype is a kind of blank slate: We can read our own interpretations into them both as readers and writers. Each time one is retold, new colors, shapes, and shadows are filled in to suit more contemporary tastes. Each new version gives us, beyond a fresh context, a way to understand our present world through an ancient one.

Why are writers of various stripes drawn to the tradition of revisionism, of retelling or subverting these age-old stories? First, folktales and myths hold a pervasive and persuasive charm because we’ve heard them from an early age. They are cultural, historical, and aesthetic artifacts passed down from generation to generation. Second, we often need to recast older works because the stereotypes and clichés that we are willing to accept or the things that need to be explained have changed. So revisionism helps us keep these stories alive and relevant for our times. Third, we get a certain satisfaction from working with the specific forms and techniques generally employed by such stories. Beyond the pleasure and play involved, we’re also adding to time-honored and beloved literary traditions.

For some of the stories in my collection, Each of Us Killers, I reached back to Gujarati folklore and Hindu myths. Gujarat is a west-coast state in India that over the centuries has seen a regular influx of travelers and immigrants from other places with ancient cultures, such as Greece, Persia, East Africa, and Arabia. Gujarati folklore and language absorbed and adapted aspects of those cultures, meaning many indigenous stories began to incorporate new traditions, rituals, and beliefs. In a similar manner, I’ve participated in the ongoing revisionism tradition by integrating contemporary themes and responding to or subverting older ones.

Here is how I have observed, classified, and approached three revisionism traditions:

Retelling: This keeps the main plot and story elements but uses different forms or points of view to explore new themes. The goal is to bring something old and something new together, causing both recognition and surprise. For instance, “Separation Notice” in my collection is a straight retelling about the Hindu god, Vishnu. While I’ve stayed true to the widely accepted myths, I’ve explored new themes by using the epistolary form and a formal business voice with a celestial (as opposed to a human) resources manager’s point of view.

Adaptation: This preserves most of the original plot but differs in structural elements like the setting, frame, or time period to complicate or raise questions about the original’s contemporary relevance. My story “Journey to a Stepwell” includes a Gujarati folktale I heard often from my mother in childhood. I never cared for its misogynistic morality so I added plot elements and a contemporary frame. And I subverted the ending.

Spinoff: This tells a new story centering a minor character from the original story. Other characters may recur but in different ways. In my story “The Waiting,” a dead wife’s ghost narrates the story about her grieving husband. In Indian folklore, many stories feature dead lovers or spouses haunting their beloveds because of “unfinished business.” Such stories typically focus on the one who is alive and how they are driven to deal with that business. My version complicates all of that, centering the emotions and concerns of the dead over those of the living. 

For any such work to stand out, it needs to accomplish at least one of these three things. First, the revised version has to colonize the original to the extent that readers internalize the revised version as easily as the original. For example, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which was based in large part on ancient Greek myths about Prometheus, is as memorable as its predecessor. Second, the revised version needs to defamiliarize or dismantle stereotypes so that our understanding and interaction with classic identities evolve too. For example, much of Angela Carter’s 1979 collection, The Bloody Chamber, which draws heavily on fairy tales and folktales, gives us new ways of looking at the old stereotype of the oppressed or imprisoned woman seeking liberation. And, finally, the revised version must engage with and broaden discussions around key evolving socio-political narratives of our times. I admire, for instance, the feminist revisions of the Odyssey in Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad and Madeline Miller’s Circe.

Complex as all this may sound, these simple classic stories remain endless troves of profound truths and pleasures that writers can discover with each revision.

 

Jenny Bhatt is a writer, translator, and literary critic. She is the host of the Desi Books podcast and the author of the short story collection Each of Us Killers (7.13 Books, 2020). Her literary translation of Gujarati writer Dhumketu’s best short fiction is forthcoming from HarperCollins India in late 2020. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Literary Hub, LongreadsPoets & Writers Magazine, the Millions, Electric Literature, the Rumpus, and Kenyon Review. Having lived and worked in India, England, Germany, Scotland, and various parts of the United States, she now lives in a suburb of Dallas.

Craft Capsule: Witness vs. Withness

by

Will Harris

8.31.20

This is no. 70 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Poems express a relationship between a subject and an object, but they don’t just say, Here’s a subject (“I”), here’s an object (“you,” a “tree”), this is how they relate (“I saw a red leaf”). They express something about the nature—and possibilities—of the subject-object relationship. 

One model for the subject-object relationship can be found in the poetry of witness, a term coined by Carolyn Forché. The poetry of witness, Forché writes, is “the literature of that-which-happened and its mode is evidentiary rather than representational—as evidentiary, in fact, as spilled blood.” Her most famous poem, “The Colonel,” begins “What you have heard is true,” before giving a gruesome account of her meal with a Salvadoran military leader who spills a sack of human ears onto the table in front of her. 

The poem derives power from its “truth,” its objectivity. Reading it, however, makes me wonder how active—or troublingly passive—a witness is in what they see. In bearing witness to spilled blood and writing about it to what extent does the poet participate in that violence? Think of the phrase bear witness. “Witness” might sound abstract and legalistic by itself; “bear” gives it weight and physicality. It gives the witnessing “I”/eye presence in the world, like a rain-buffeted journalist clutching at their notepad. It establishes a relationship that is simple—however difficult it may be—in the sense that there is a clear “I” (the subject) that goes out into the world to witness something (the object) and bring back an account of it.

In my own work, I’ve always been uncomfortable with how subjects and objects relate—maybe this comes from the experience of being objectified through race, and from my perennial uncertainty as to my own subject position. (What am “I”?) Recently I was thinking about the amazing simplicity with which John the Baptist’s relationship to Jesus is described in the Bible: “He [John] was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light” (John 1:8). A few lines later, the gospel author uses an unusual past form of bear: “John bare witness of him, and cried” (1:15). Though the pun is probably unintentional, that slide from bear to bare derives such power, for me, from the implied metaphor of witness as a physical act: It is a weight you can carry and sometimes a weight you can throw off, leaving the subject (yourself) bare and exposed. Perhaps this idea of baring witness is the logical extension of Forché’s position, offering a beautiful—if impossible—possibility: That of a subjectless perspective, an act of seeing that obliterates the self. 

In Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 1997), Saidiya Hartman claims that there’s an “uncertain line between witness and spectator.” Accordingly, she refuses to reproduce the graphic account of Aunt Hester’s beating from the first chapter of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, first published in 1845. It’s too easy to put such horror into words and so think that you’ve faced up to it. Accounts of extreme hurt may prompt indignation, but Hartman argues that they eventually “immure us to pain by virtue of their familiarity.” That in some sense, to demand “suffering be materialized and evidenced” is more “obscene” than the original torture.

The refusal to type out an act of violence again—to re-witness it—points to a different subject-object relation. It acknowledges that the subject is implicated in what and how they see. And if we care about respecting the suffering of others this needs to be taken into account. Witness carries no moral imperative in itself; the act of seeing is not inherently virtuous. Or you could say, its moral charge lies less in the “evidence” it provides than in how it’s rendered in language. The viewing “I”/eye is a fiction, inasmuch as it cleanly separates the subject from the object. So the job of the writer is not just to choose what to look at, but to work out how to represent the complex relationships embedded in the act of looking.

In an endnote at the back of her book Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (Routledge, 2000), Sara Ahmed argues for a particular reading of Heidegger’s notion of Mitsein (being-with or with-ness): “I would argue that ‘with-ness’ could be theorized as pre-ontological, that is, before one ‘is,’ one is ‘with.’ In other words, with-ness could be theorized as prior to being.”

Reading that makes me think of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s bleak and beautiful poem “I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.” In it, the speaker—or subject—is depressed, crying, cut off from someone he refers to only as “dearest him.” The problem is that though the object of the speaker’s affection isn’t present he isn’t fully absent either. He’s as visible as if he were in front of him, his absence texturing the world. Subject and object are no longer distinct from one another. In such a state, the self is implicated—emotionally and ethically—in the other. It’s impossible to conceive of “being” without “being-with.” Hopkins writes: “With witness I speak this.” In my head that line always reads: “With withness I speak this.”

 

Will Harris is the author of the poetry collection RENDANG (Wesleyan University Press, 2020), which was selected as a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. He has worked in schools and led workshops at the Southbank Centre and currently teaches for the Poetry School. A contributing editor at the Rialto, he lives in London. 

Thumbnail: Nazar Sharafutdinov

Craft Capsule: The Black Bildungsroman

by

Joy Priest

7.20.20

This is no. 66 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things

—1 Corinthians 13:11

At some point while putting together the manuscript that would become my debut poetry collection, Horsepower, I got it into my mind that I was writing a bildungsroman—a bildungsroman in poems. Maybe someone used this term when my poem was up in workshop, or maybe one of my MFA professors suggested it in office hours. Before this point, I’d been talking about it for several years as “an escape narrative,” but it was, specifically, the escape narrative of a child. 

The coming-of-age story, as we know it in the American literary canon, usually depicts a white boy-child—possessed of naïveté and mischief, prone to being punished—who sets off on a literal or figurative journey, during which he is presented with a series of lessons and, through them, reaches a stage of maturity or young adulthood. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer likely comes to mind. 

Originally a German literary genre, the word bildungsroman translates to “novel of education” or “novel of formation.” “Coming of age” is a derivative of this genre, but similarly signals to a process of maturation or the development of a character. This genre was—and still is—seen as a useful way to teach children what “childish things” they should leave behind, to what character and behavior they should aspire. But when the genre developed in the American tradition, it took on America’s subconscious anxieties. 

What has white U.S. society historically seen as “childish”? Are the lessons of the traditional canon useful for everyone? Harmful to some? Not too long ago—and still in some instances and places—adult Black men were referred to as “boy” by white citizens, adult and child alike, and Black people and traditions are often still not seen as “sophisticated.”

As a poet, I spend a lot of time trying to recover what I’ve been encouraged to leave in childhood—imagination and wonder, but also, as a Black person, certain aspects of my identity. Because of this double-consciousness, I’m inclined to peel back the dogma of adulthood, and I have found one of the layers of this education to be an assimilation project. Inherent in this assimilation project is a belief in the superiority of white things: customs, canons, behavior, hairstyles, speaking and writing styles. 

Is a genre in this tradition useful for non-white children if to become an adult in our society is to adopt white customs, while certain features of Black culture (the way we wear our hair or dress or speak or communicate) are seen as “childish” or “unsophisticated”? What is the relationship between Black culture and “professionalism”? What is “sophisticated” literature? What do these standards of adulthood teach Black children about themselves, about what they should aspire to and what they should leave behind? But, more important, what would a Black child’s coming-of-age story reveal or teach us about our society? 

*

Bring on the children, imitate the children. Not childish, but child-like. 

 —“Swagger Jackson’s Revenge,” Jay Electronica

I remember a particular experience in workshop around a poem in my manuscript now titled “Self-Portrait as Disney Princess.” In the poem, the speaker speaks directly to her child-self who is galivanting around the urban-pastoral of her backyard. The direct address performs two functions. The first is description—the speaker describes the scene in which she finds her child-self in memory: “You are green / as the colonial Pippins piling beneath a neighbor’s Newtown.” The second function is recovery—rather than merely describing the fixed scene that the child inhabits, the adult-speaker contextualizes the scene with the wisdom of hindsight, or, in other words, the adult-speaker speaks from the other side of the lessons that have led her to this matured vantage: “Never a child with other children. Dead summer, so dark / The bottoms of your feet look as if you’ve skipped through ash.” 

During the workshop, most of my cohort read the poem as tragic—there was a sense of pity around the child, who they felt was trapped in the household of her racist grandfather. What bothered me the most was their feeling that she was doomed. But one person, another Black woman at the table, recognized the poem’s nuanced, complex emotional tones, which held a simultaneity—survival but also exploration, subjugation but also Black joy. Some of these plot-outcomes and behaviors of the child-speaker might be read as failure via a white canonical understanding of the bildungsroman because some of the necessary lessons and strategies for a Black child’s survival and arrival at adulthood—escape, waywardness, the rejection of a hero or savior complex—directly conflict with the values of a white-supremacist society. 

After this workshop, I began to look at my work-in-progress as part of a distinct genre with its own respective conventions: the Black bildungsroman. During the revision stage, I asked myself: What are some of the distinguishing features characteristic of Black childhood that are illegible in the traditional bildungsroman? What did I want to honor, recover, rescue? 

Once I had this framework, I could transform the work; I could craft what would normally be seen as tragic as triumphant. Escape could be skilled and elusive. Waywardness could be aspirational. The Black child didn’t have to return to society and the status quo, fitting in better. The Black child could be celebrated as a perpetual runaway. 

In the Black bildungsroman, the narrative arc does not result in the child arriving at maturity or adulthood because the Black child lacks the freedom to come of age naively, and must, from the beginning, possess a wisdom of the conflicts and dangers inherent to adulthood, namely the violence that results from a societal creed of white superiority. The Black bildungsroman presents an arc at the end of which the Black child has become adept at surviving such a society. Rather than a “novel of education” or a “novel of formation,” the Black bildungsroman is a collection of preservation or a collection of survival, the preservation and survival of the Black child in the world created by the poet, and in the sensibility and memory of the adult-speaker. 

*

When I was a child, I spoke not, I learned to understand the adults around me, to think like them, I lived with an adult’s awareness: but when I became an adult, I went back to rescue the child, to encourage the child, to honor the child. 

 

Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower, which won the 2019 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press in September. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in numerous publications, including BOAAT, Connotation Press, Four Way Review, espnW, Gulf Coast, Mississippi Review, and Poetry Northwest, and have been anthologized in The Louisville Anthology (Belt Publishing, September 2020), A Measure of Belonging: Writers of Color on the New American South (Hub City Press, October 2020) and Best New Poets 2014, 2016, and 2019. A doctoral student in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston, Priest has also been a journalist, a theater attendant, a waitress, and a fast food worker. She has facilitated writing workshops and arbitration programs with adult and juvenile incarcerated women, and has taught composition, rhetoric, comedy, and African American arts and culture at the university level.

Craft Capsule: The Black Bildungsroman

by

Joy Priest

7.20.20

This is no. 66 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things

—1 Corinthians 13:11

At some point while putting together the manuscript that would become my debut poetry collection, Horsepower, I got it into my mind that I was writing a bildungsroman—a bildungsroman in poems. Maybe someone used this term when my poem was up in workshop, or maybe one of my MFA professors suggested it in office hours. Before this point, I’d been talking about it for several years as “an escape narrative,” but it was, specifically, the escape narrative of a child. 

The coming-of-age story, as we know it in the American literary canon, usually depicts a white boy-child—possessed of naïveté and mischief, prone to being punished—who sets off on a literal or figurative journey, during which he is presented with a series of lessons and, through them, reaches a stage of maturity or young adulthood. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer likely comes to mind. 

Originally a German literary genre, the word bildungsroman translates to “novel of education” or “novel of formation.” “Coming of age” is a derivative of this genre, but similarly signals to a process of maturation or the development of a character. This genre was—and still is—seen as a useful way to teach children what “childish things” they should leave behind, to what character and behavior they should aspire. But when the genre developed in the American tradition, it took on America’s subconscious anxieties. 

What has white U.S. society historically seen as “childish”? Are the lessons of the traditional canon useful for everyone? Harmful to some? Not too long ago—and still in some instances and places—adult Black men were referred to as “boy” by white citizens, adult and child alike, and Black people and traditions are often still not seen as “sophisticated.”

As a poet, I spend a lot of time trying to recover what I’ve been encouraged to leave in childhood—imagination and wonder, but also, as a Black person, certain aspects of my identity. Because of this double-consciousness, I’m inclined to peel back the dogma of adulthood, and I have found one of the layers of this education to be an assimilation project. Inherent in this assimilation project is a belief in the superiority of white things: customs, canons, behavior, hairstyles, speaking and writing styles. 

Is a genre in this tradition useful for non-white children if to become an adult in our society is to adopt white customs, while certain features of Black culture (the way we wear our hair or dress or speak or communicate) are seen as “childish” or “unsophisticated”? What is the relationship between Black culture and “professionalism”? What is “sophisticated” literature? What do these standards of adulthood teach Black children about themselves, about what they should aspire to and what they should leave behind? But, more important, what would a Black child’s coming-of-age story reveal or teach us about our society? 

*

Bring on the children, imitate the children. Not childish, but child-like. 

 —“Swagger Jackson’s Revenge,” Jay Electronica

I remember a particular experience in workshop around a poem in my manuscript now titled “Self-Portrait as Disney Princess.” In the poem, the speaker speaks directly to her child-self who is galivanting around the urban-pastoral of her backyard. The direct address performs two functions. The first is description—the speaker describes the scene in which she finds her child-self in memory: “You are green / as the colonial Pippins piling beneath a neighbor’s Newtown.” The second function is recovery—rather than merely describing the fixed scene that the child inhabits, the adult-speaker contextualizes the scene with the wisdom of hindsight, or, in other words, the adult-speaker speaks from the other side of the lessons that have led her to this matured vantage: “Never a child with other children. Dead summer, so dark / The bottoms of your feet look as if you’ve skipped through ash.” 

During the workshop, most of my cohort read the poem as tragic—there was a sense of pity around the child, who they felt was trapped in the household of her racist grandfather. What bothered me the most was their feeling that she was doomed. But one person, another Black woman at the table, recognized the poem’s nuanced, complex emotional tones, which held a simultaneity—survival but also exploration, subjugation but also Black joy. Some of these plot-outcomes and behaviors of the child-speaker might be read as failure via a white canonical understanding of the bildungsroman because some of the necessary lessons and strategies for a Black child’s survival and arrival at adulthood—escape, waywardness, the rejection of a hero or savior complex—directly conflict with the values of a white-supremacist society. 

After this workshop, I began to look at my work-in-progress as part of a distinct genre with its own respective conventions: the Black bildungsroman. During the revision stage, I asked myself: What are some of the distinguishing features characteristic of Black childhood that are illegible in the traditional bildungsroman? What did I want to honor, recover, rescue? 

Once I had this framework, I could transform the work; I could craft what would normally be seen as tragic as triumphant. Escape could be skilled and elusive. Waywardness could be aspirational. The Black child didn’t have to return to society and the status quo, fitting in better. The Black child could be celebrated as a perpetual runaway. 

In the Black bildungsroman, the narrative arc does not result in the child arriving at maturity or adulthood because the Black child lacks the freedom to come of age naively, and must, from the beginning, possess a wisdom of the conflicts and dangers inherent to adulthood, namely the violence that results from a societal creed of white superiority. The Black bildungsroman presents an arc at the end of which the Black child has become adept at surviving such a society. Rather than a “novel of education” or a “novel of formation,” the Black bildungsroman is a collection of preservation or a collection of survival, the preservation and survival of the Black child in the world created by the poet, and in the sensibility and memory of the adult-speaker. 

*

When I was a child, I spoke not, I learned to understand the adults around me, to think like them, I lived with an adult’s awareness: but when I became an adult, I went back to rescue the child, to encourage the child, to honor the child. 

 

Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower, which won the 2019 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press in September. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in numerous publications, including BOAAT, Connotation Press, Four Way Review, espnW, Gulf Coast, Mississippi Review, and Poetry Northwest, and have been anthologized in The Louisville Anthology (Belt Publishing, September 2020), A Measure of Belonging: Writers of Color on the New American South (Hub City Press, October 2020) and Best New Poets 2014, 2016, and 2019. A doctoral student in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston, Priest has also been a journalist, a theater attendant, a waitress, and a fast food worker. She has facilitated writing workshops and arbitration programs with adult and juvenile incarcerated women, and has taught composition, rhetoric, comedy, and African American arts and culture at the university level.

Craft Capsule: Possible and Impossible

by

Will Harris

9.7.20

This is no. 71 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

In her essay “Erasing the Signs of Labor Under the Signs of Happiness,” poet and translator Sophie Collins takes issue with the idea that translation work should always be filled with “joy.” Despite often feeling excited by translating, she writes that the process also “evokes feelings of uncertainty and self-consciousness, and—perhaps more frequently than might be imagined—breakdown and frustration.” I don’t translate but I can sympathize with this experience, which I associate with reading and writing. Not having grown up in a bookish household, a part of me—however much I read or write—still finds books hard, inscrutable things. And if hard things allow for a kind of pleasure, it’s a pleasure laced with darker feelings of failure, apathy, and self-doubt. 

At a Zoom event in May, Sophie and I chatted about a poet and critic we both admire: Veronica Forrest-Thomson—a writer who’s helped both of us think about how to read and understand poems. Over the last few months, I’ve been running an online course based around Forrest-Thomson’s Poetic Artifice, a barbed, idiosyncratic monograph published after her death in 1975 at the age of twenty-seven. It begins with a question: “How do poems work?” For Forrest-Thomson, one way that poems work is by refusing normal sense. In doing so, they bring to the surface what she calls the “nonmeaningful aspects” of language: sound patterns, echoes, connotations. These aren’t “nonmeaningful” in the sense of being meaningless; they’re just not what we might focus on in a message from a friend or when reading an article—in those situations, we glean a text for information. In a poem, the language of information is being put to a different use. It gleans us: We find scraps of words, memories, and desires that collect and connect in unknown ways in our preverbal imagination.

This is why Forrest-Thomson reacts against what she calls “the tendency to make the already-known or already-thought the point of arrival, to make poetry an obscure and figured statement which one understands by translating it into the already-known.” One of the things that put me off poetry for a long time was the idea that poems were really saying something simple, but using “obscure and figured” language to do it. So the reader’s job was to “translate” the poem into normal, “already-known” sense, in the process showing off their supposed intelligence. 

Forrest-Thomson writes about a line by the French surrealist Max Jacob, “Dahlia! dahlia! que Dalila lia” (Dahlia! Dahlia! that Delilah tied together), which joyfully defies translation into “the already-known.” In her words, “Our pleasure in the line comes from a realization that what seems, at first, a complete surrender of the conscious mind to an impersonal network of meaningless verbal resemblances, in fact reveals the latent intentionality of poetic language.” We surrender to the poem, but not passively. Instead, we become part of the meaning-making process, plugged into the poem’s play of connotations and “verbal resemblances.” For example, Jacob draws our attention the pun and resemblance between the French verb “lia” and “dahlia.” Lia (or lier) means “to tie up,” or figuratively “to bind.” The poet’s role, by extension, is to bind and loosen the threads between sound and sense.

*

Forrest-Thomson’s thinking on the pleasure (or joy) of reading led me back to her own poems, tracing the point at which her theories blur into her writing. I’ve thought a lot about two lines, in particular, from her poem “Cordelia, or ‘A Poem Should Not Mean, But Be’”: 

Waste not and want not while you’re here
The possibles of joy.

I love the way Forrest-Thomson repurposes the sanctimony of “waste not and want not,” raising the stakes by adding “while you’re here” (which brings out the morbidity of “waste”), and then complicating it with that incredible phrase: “The possibles of joy.” It feels like an anti-homiletic homily. And, as in much of Forrest-Thomson’s work, it’s a parable about how to read poems.

On the one hand, “waste not and want not” suggests a certain frugality (save up your pennies, make every moment count). On the other hand, “possibles” indicates profusion, both as a casual synonym for alternatives and as a philosophical term referring to possible worlds. Forrest-Thomson seems to argue that we shouldn’t waste joy. Which is to say, we shouldn’t deny the “latent intentionality” of the poem—its “possibles”—by reducing it to joyless paraphrase. Even as it might prove impossible to discuss a poem without curtailing it through description, it’s still crucial to recognize that the poem’s “I” is a voice licensed to perform numerous, contradictory statements.

I connect those lines in “Cordelia” with these from Sylvia Plath’s “Purdah,” which is the last poem Forrest-Thomson discusses in Poetic Artifice, part of a final, passionate argument in favor of poems where “the ‘I’ is clothed in its negation,” not asserting its “already-known” self on the reader.

… I 
Revolve in my
Sheath of impossibles,

Priceless and quiet

Plath’s speaker—like the one in “Cordelia”—takes pleasure in being “enigmatical”, constantly deflecting and undermining her self-image. The jagged line breaks after “I” and “my” draw out this sense of the self coming briefly into view before disappearing again. Elsewhere in the poem, she writes, “My visibilities hide. / I gleam like a mirror.” 

I can’t help but read Forrest-Thomson’s “possibles of joy” and Plath’s “sheath of impossibles” as two ways of saying something similar: The “I” is at once a series of open “possibles,” capable of being read and reread, and a series of “impossibles,” incapable of being finally understood. Maybe this gets at what makes reading poems so frustrating sometimes. They’re plural and profuse, possible and impossible. But acknowledging this frustration—the fact that poems often fill me with a sense of failure—also affirms why I go back to them. Uncertainty and frustration aren’t opposed to pleasure; they’re bound up in it.

 

Will Harris is the author of the poetry collection RENDANG (Wesleyan University Press, 2020), which was selected as a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. He has worked in schools and led workshops at the Southbank Centre and currently teaches for the Poetry School. A contributing editor at the Rialto, he lives in London. 

Craft Capsule: The Cinema Factory

by

Joy Priest

8.3.20

This is no. 67 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

What is “craft” anyway? Google says: an activity involving skill or technique in making things. If the activity is poetry, you might think about how you deploy figurative language, the choices you make around form and structure, and so on. But because I come out of a tradition that orients me as a trickster to the status quo, I often avoid formal craft “rules” and rely mostly on instinct when drafting a poem. I wrote poetry before I encountered “formal” craft techniques, and in this “amateur hour” period of poetry writing, in this private activity, I developed these instincts about what sounded good or what worked. “The objective is not to transmit my tricks to you, it’s for you to become the trick factory for yourself,” says my friend, poet and educator Tongo Eisen-Martin. Sure, you can sometimes borrow a trick factory—like that used clarinet workbook you checked out for a semester in middle school band, until you could play the basic tunes—but eventually you have to build your own oeuvre. 

For the most part, I’m not conscious of my trick factory until the revision stage, and I mostly focus my technique on the line: What can I fit onto a single line? Where to break? What can I juxtapose on the same line to suggest, like a subliminal layer, the revelation of the poem? When I went to put together my debut collection, Horsepower, I realized I had yet to develop a trick factory for this level of the process—curating an entire collection. Before you put together a collection, craft is something that happens at the level of a single poem. What is best for that poem? What does that poem need or what is it trying to do? When revising your manuscript, however, you begin to think about the poems not as individual units but as part of a larger work. How do you order the poems in a way that constructs a cohesive whole? How does a single poem need to be revised to serve the arc of the collection? 

My teacher Nikky Finney had to prompt me to consider formal craft at this level and stage of revision: “What tense is this?” she asked spreading the pages of a few carefully selected poems from the collection across her office table. “Future perfect?” When I went back to look at the organizing tense in each poem, I realized I had made these choices intuitively, and now they appeared to be rendered in an arbitrary manner—too arbitrary. Nikky suggested that I try revising all the poems set in the speaker’s childhood in the same tense in order to create a reliable system that signaled to the reader where they were in the story. 

As I worked on this system and began to order the poems, the formation of a nonlinear narrative materialized, a cinematic experience. I began to think of curating the collection like one would a film, splicing and cutting, pasting scenes together, camera cutaways and zoom-ins. I’d been reading Kara Keeling’s The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, The Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Duke University Press, 2007), and I’d fallen in love with the concept of the Black Femme figure—where she might appear or, commonly, be overlooked in mainstream frames. Could my poems be scenes? Frames in which the Black girl-child appeared, rescued from the margins? A collection of preservation and survival, a way to honor Black childhood?

Nikky’s suggestion to focus on tense helped me begin to see how I could build this cinematic experience within the collection. But I also quickly noticed that there was more than tense at play. The nonlinear narrative arc of these poems was also informed by point of view and address—a whole complex of narrative elements. I realized that I could select from this complex in order to strategically release information—important information about the passage of time, the relationship between the physical setting and the speaker’s emotional state, and the relationship between the adult speaker and her child self. 

To give an example of this complex of narrative elements: I realized that the several poems Nikky had isolated were all narrated by a child speaker in present tense, but with omniscient foresight. The effect is the speaker speaking as her child self in first-person “I,” but with details for the reader that the child could not know in the moment the memory captures. 

In the middle of the title poem, “Horsepower,” the speaker tells us: 

Beyond the spires 
is a larger world I do not know 
exists. A mile West, in my line 
of vision, is a family 
I do not know 
I have. 

The child speaker in this memory cannot know that this family existed at the time of this setting. In fact, she tells you she doesn’t know. What this communicates to us is that it is actually the adult speaker talking, in a kind of omniscient first-person as her child-self. The poem could’ve easily been: “Beyond the spires / is a larger world she does not know exists…a family / she does not know / she has,”—a close third-person narrator, typical of fiction. 

In another poem rendered in this way, the speaker recalls her own birth: “I am born in the season of color-blocking and crack, / in the dawn of the Reagan era.” I am rather than I was. Such a configuration—first-person present tense—puts the reader or listener, to whom the story is addressed, immediately down into the scene, making the layer of memory—explicitly pronounced in first-person past tense—indetectable. Via this complex, the speaker is also able to slip in important assessments and analyses of the sociopolitical elements of the setting—something that might feel inauthentic in a young child’s voice. 

In understanding how these omniscient child poems were working, and the patterns that some of the other poems obeyed, I developed my own technique, or to borrow Eisen-Martin’s metaphor: I developed my own trick—the cinema factory by which the collection ran. 

What craft elements will you use to assemble your poetry collection? What tools will you use to inform the narrative? Will you move along a progressive line, or will there be alternate paths, cutaways and flashes, trick mirrors?

 

Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower, which won the 2019 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press in September. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in numerous publications, including BOAAT, Connotation Press, Four Way Review, espnW, Gulf Coast, Mississippi Review, and Poetry Northwest, and have been anthologized in The Louisville Anthology (Belt Publishing, September 2020), A Measure of Belonging: Writers of Color on the New American South (Hub City Press, October 2020) and Best New Poets 2014, 2016, and 2019. A doctoral student in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston, Priest has also been a journalist, a theater attendant, a waitress, and a fast food worker. She has facilitated writing workshops and arbitration programs with adult and juvenile incarcerated women, and has taught composition, rhetoric, comedy, and African American arts and culture at the university level.

Thumbnail: Jeremy Yap

Craft Capsule: Revising Folktales and Myths

by

Jenny Bhatt

10.5.20

This is no. 75 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Archetypes from folktales, fairy tales, and myths appear again and again in a wide range of contemporary stories and genres. But even if they are familiar, there is a sense that each archetype is a kind of blank slate: We can read our own interpretations into them both as readers and writers. Each time one is retold, new colors, shapes, and shadows are filled in to suit more contemporary tastes. Each new version gives us, beyond a fresh context, a way to understand our present world through an ancient one.

Why are writers of various stripes drawn to the tradition of revisionism, of retelling or subverting these age-old stories? First, folktales and myths hold a pervasive and persuasive charm because we’ve heard them from an early age. They are cultural, historical, and aesthetic artifacts passed down from generation to generation. Second, we often need to recast older works because the stereotypes and clichés that we are willing to accept or the things that need to be explained have changed. So revisionism helps us keep these stories alive and relevant for our times. Third, we get a certain satisfaction from working with the specific forms and techniques generally employed by such stories. Beyond the pleasure and play involved, we’re also adding to time-honored and beloved literary traditions.

For some of the stories in my collection, Each of Us Killers, I reached back to Gujarati folklore and Hindu myths. Gujarat is a west-coast state in India that over the centuries has seen a regular influx of travelers and immigrants from other places with ancient cultures, such as Greece, Persia, East Africa, and Arabia. Gujarati folklore and language absorbed and adapted aspects of those cultures, meaning many indigenous stories began to incorporate new traditions, rituals, and beliefs. In a similar manner, I’ve participated in the ongoing revisionism tradition by integrating contemporary themes and responding to or subverting older ones.

Here is how I have observed, classified, and approached three revisionism traditions:

Retelling: This keeps the main plot and story elements but uses different forms or points of view to explore new themes. The goal is to bring something old and something new together, causing both recognition and surprise. For instance, “Separation Notice” in my collection is a straight retelling about the Hindu god, Vishnu. While I’ve stayed true to the widely accepted myths, I’ve explored new themes by using the epistolary form and a formal business voice with a celestial (as opposed to a human) resources manager’s point of view.

Adaptation: This preserves most of the original plot but differs in structural elements like the setting, frame, or time period to complicate or raise questions about the original’s contemporary relevance. My story “Journey to a Stepwell” includes a Gujarati folktale I heard often from my mother in childhood. I never cared for its misogynistic morality so I added plot elements and a contemporary frame. And I subverted the ending.

Spinoff: This tells a new story centering a minor character from the original story. Other characters may recur but in different ways. In my story “The Waiting,” a dead wife’s ghost narrates the story about her grieving husband. In Indian folklore, many stories feature dead lovers or spouses haunting their beloveds because of “unfinished business.” Such stories typically focus on the one who is alive and how they are driven to deal with that business. My version complicates all of that, centering the emotions and concerns of the dead over those of the living. 

For any such work to stand out, it needs to accomplish at least one of these three things. First, the revised version has to colonize the original to the extent that readers internalize the revised version as easily as the original. For example, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which was based in large part on ancient Greek myths about Prometheus, is as memorable as its predecessor. Second, the revised version needs to defamiliarize or dismantle stereotypes so that our understanding and interaction with classic identities evolve too. For example, much of Angela Carter’s 1979 collection, The Bloody Chamber, which draws heavily on fairy tales and folktales, gives us new ways of looking at the old stereotype of the oppressed or imprisoned woman seeking liberation. And, finally, the revised version must engage with and broaden discussions around key evolving socio-political narratives of our times. I admire, for instance, the feminist revisions of the Odyssey in Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad and Madeline Miller’s Circe.

Complex as all this may sound, these simple classic stories remain endless troves of profound truths and pleasures that writers can discover with each revision.

 

Jenny Bhatt is a writer, translator, and literary critic. She is the host of the Desi Books podcast and the author of the short story collection Each of Us Killers (7.13 Books, 2020). Her literary translation of Gujarati writer Dhumketu’s best short fiction is forthcoming from HarperCollins India in late 2020. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Literary Hub, LongreadsPoets & Writers Magazine, the Millions, Electric Literature, the Rumpus, and Kenyon Review. Having lived and worked in India, England, Germany, Scotland, and various parts of the United States, she now lives in a suburb of Dallas.

Craft Capsule: Against Universality, in Praise of Anger

by

Chen Chen

11.16.20

This is no. 79 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Of my fury,
I come like a joint popping into place.

—Sarah Gambito, “Of My Fury”1 

Another thing you didn’t mention in your letter: the fact that you must feel profoundly alone.

—Yanyi, “How Do I Write About My Identity Authentically?”2

 

1. One of my earliest crushes was Tuxedo Mask. I still think he’s a babe. 

2. During my MFA, I wrote a love poem that referenced Tuxedo Mask plus another early crush, Spider-Man. I don’t remember if I brought it to workshop. I remember feeling anxious that someone might advise cutting those references in order to make it a more “timeless” poem. How angry I got, thinking that would likely happen. 

3. One of my favorite movies is Sailor Moon R: The Movie, in which an alien dude named Fiore develops a big crush on Tuxedo Mask. Sailor Moon, who’s destined to be with Tuxedo Mask, has to fight Fiore for her man. Also, save the Earth. 

4. During an MFA workshop, a white classmate declared he represented “millions of readers” who would stop reading a poem if they came across a stanza in Mandarin. He insisted I cut it to one line, if the poem needed even that. 

5. Which is more universal: a species of bird that some readers will have to look up or an animated character that some readers will have to look up? 

6. These days I embrace writing to an Asian American reader, or more specifically, a queer Asian American reader, a queer Chinese American reader. It’s taken me a long time to get to this place and some days I forget how much I can embrace it. 

7. A white professor in my MFA advised us not to use the term white people in poetry because it was “alienating.”

8. I love that Tuxedo Mask fights with roses, that Sailor Moon fights with her tiara and eventually with even mightier, gorgeouser accessories. I love that when you visit sailormoon.fandom.com, your mouse arrow transforms into her Spiral Moon Heart Rod. 

9. Which is more universal: Tuxedo Mask, Spider-Man, the Great Sphinx of Giza, or a queer Asian American poet referencing each in a love poem for another big nerd?

10. Another white classmate called the Mandarin “gobbledygook.” Of course, neither classmate complained about the French in a previous poem—or in others, my references to Russian literature. 

11. Fiore, whose name means flower in Italian, is obsessed with finding the perfect one for Tuxedo Mask, who gave him a rose when they were both lonely children. Fiore was lonely because he seemed to be the only one left of his species. Tuxedo Mask, who back then was only Mamoru, was lonely because his parents had just been killed in a car accident. After years of wandering alone through space, an exhausted Fiore landed on Earth, outside the hospital where Mamoru was staying. Mamoru found him and the two immediately formed a deep bond. When, just a short time later, Fiore had to leave3 the Earth due to its incompatible atmosphere, he made it his mission to find a gift worthy of the one who had made him feel no longer alone. 

12. The Mandarin was translated in the poem itself. Now I’m working on poems that keep my Mandarin untranslated. Full stanzas.4

Which is more universal: Italian, Mandarin, French, Russian, Japanese, English, or the English dub of Sailor Moon R: The Movie

13. In recent years my work has been praised for transcending identity categories. I know this is a well-intentioned compliment, and I feel fortunate to be read with enthusiasm. But I wonder if a white dude has ever been praised for transcending his white dudery. 

14. In an interview about her second book, Some Say the Lark (Alice James Book, 2017), Jennifer Chang discusses the expectation to write about and from identity in straightforward ways: 

Early in my career…I would repeatedly encounter the critique that my work seemed unrelated to my biography. I understood that these editors and judges were reading my work as insufficiently Asian American…. I thought my writing was Asian American, despite the lack of whatever they think makes for authentic Asian American writing. Ethnography? Bilingualism? And yet, at the same time, I wondered if I was hiding behind metaphor and mythology because I didn’t know or want to write about race or identity. I was confused. Wasn’t writing about the self an interrogation of identity? Or, worse, had I internalized the misguided aesthetic imperative that literature be apolitical and universal (and therefore nonthreatening to white readers)?5

15. Fan interpretations of Fiore’s feelings for Tuxedo Mask range from they’re totally gay to aww friends. In the movie itself Sailor Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, and Venus briefly discuss whether something romantic had occurred between the two. The English dub downplays this possibility, as it did with the anime TV series, for an overtly gay relationship between two women, Sailor Uranus and (my fave!) Sailor Neptune.6 

16. In recent years my work has been compared to Frank O’Hara’s. A lot. It’s flattering; I love O’Hara. His appetite for pop culture, everyday conversation, play. His gayness. His gaiety and his gravity. He’s a big influence. Still, there’s something odd about how this is considered such high praise: to be compared to a canonical white poet. “You’re the next Frank O’Hara!” “You’re like an Asian O’Hara!” I’ve been thinking of writing a poem titled “Frank O’Hara Is the White Me.”7

17. One afternoon I tried to talk to a white professor about the complicated feelings I had when visiting extended family in China after not being able to see them for over a decade. She then showed me pictures from her vacation travels in China, Vietnam, Cambodia. 

18. Jennifer Chang: 

In writing Some Say the Lark, I was intentional about writing about race and my Asian American identity on my own terms. I wanted to make the reader uncomfortable. I wanted the reader to know I was pissed off at the world and quite possibly at her.8 

19. After searching the cosmos for the perfect flower for Tuxedo Mask, Fiore is deceived by a beautiful but parasitic space plant called the Xenian Flower, who possesses him, turns his sorrow into a lust for vengeance. Fiore believes that he must attack the Earth—to punish humanity for letting Tuxedo Mask be lonely and to claim the planet for his perfect gift to fully bloom, i.e. drain all life energy from the world. Fiore asserts that Tuxedo Mask can never be truly unlonely with anyone except him. He works to destroy the Sailor Scouts defending the Earth, in particular Sailor Moon, whose connection with Tuxedo Mask drives him into a jealous fury. 

20. I wasn’t surprised by the confidence with which my white classmate claimed to know how millions of readers read. Nor was I surprised that he didn’t say white readers. What I was taken aback by was the implication that that many people would even come across a poem of mine—how he framed his critique as concern: that I’d be losing out on all these potential readers. As though he were looking out for me, as a friend.

21. Another white classmate said he found Nikky Finney’s Head Off & Split (TriQuarterly Books, 2011) “alienating.” Another referred to Kiki Petrosino’s Hymn for the Black Terrific (Sarabande Books, 2013) as “another one of those books all about identity.” Which is more universal: a white student feeling excluded from a text or Black students and students of color being excluded from the field of literature? Which is universal: a white professor’s anger over getting called white or an Asian American student’s anger over racism as well as queerphobia in workshops, literature courses, program culture, the culture of the university? 

22. What makes my poems queer and Asian American? In another version of this essay I type twelve single-spaced pages trying to answer that. I could keep going. Into this universe.9 

23. If you cut my yellow wrists, I’ll teach my yellow toes to write. 
If you cut my yellow fists, I’ll teach my yellow feet to fight.

—Marilyn Chin, “Blues on Yellow”10 

These lines blaze from a postcard I keep tacked above my bed. They’re among the first things I see when I wake up. They bless me as I’m falling asleep. The lines are by groundbreaking Chinese American poet Marilyn Chin; the postcard is made by Kundiman, a groundbreaking organization that supports Asian American writers and readers. When I write groundbreaking, I mean world-reshaping, heart-replenishing. 

24. Yes, most of my MFA classes took place in a building called “Hall of Languages,” but really all of them were in a department called English that made some students comfortably ignorant and some deeply alienated by insisting it was the universe. Yes, during that time I fell in love with the boy I’m still with today. But I was lonely, lonely, lonely in school.

25. As I write this essay, the pandemic. As I write, cops beating up protestors. I tell my friend Muriel Leung, a poet I met through Kundiman, that I haven’t been doing well lately. She sends a letter, a candle, and a sticker. The sticker is of Sailor Moon in her classic ready-to-fight pose with the magnificent caption: “Sailor Moon says: FUCK RACIST POLICE.” 

26. Anger, loneliness, and hope for a better writing community led me to apply and apply for the Kundiman Retreat—led me to my first retreat, summer of 2014. I had just completed the second year of my MFA and had one more to go. I needed Kundiman; I so needed that first retreat where I got to work with, among other brilliances, those cited in this essay: cofounder Sarah Gambito, executive director Cathy Linh Che, home group leader Jennifer Chang, and poetry faculty Marilyn Chin. Chin, whose work I first read in college. Chin, who at one point during the retreat, looked around the room where more than thirty fellows new and returning were gathered, and said: “You are the future of Asian American literature.” 

27. I continue to need Kundiman. It continues to evolve, sometimes with shortcomings. In my experience the organization is committed to engaging in the less comfortable discussions so crucial for real growth. I’m glad to see the expansion of funding and leadership opportunities as well as the addressing of serious gaps in who gets to attend the retreat—who needs an Asian American literary space and isn’t yet finding the access. I’m glad for those who’ve spoken up11 with urgent critique, with loving anger, to hold Kundiman and other organizations like it accountable. 

That anger gives me hope and encourages me to add my own critical voice. In particular, I’d like to reiterate the demand for these organizations to do more to support Black Asians, Pacific Islanders, and West Asians. I want always to be part of Asian American writing communities where accountability isn’t avoided and difference isn’t flattened.

28. I hope to one day write something as beautiful as Sailor Moon’s catchphrase, “In the name of the moon, I’ll punish you!” Though my abolitionist politics would revise that to: “In the name of the moon, let’s fight for nonpunitive forms of justice!” 

29. I’d like white writers to get angrier. Why did so few of my white grad school classmates speak out? Some of my Asian American peers could get angrier too. About racism. About who still gets left out of Asian American spaces. About anti-Blackness in Asian America.  

30. In a final effort to stop Sailor Moon, Fiore tries to take from her the immensely powerful Silver Crystal. Sailor Moon says that she wants to save him, too; that he doesn’t have to be lonely anymore, but Fiore won’t hear it. Suddenly a vision, seemingly from the Silver Crystal, allows Fiore to see that it was Sailor Moon, back then only Usagi and also a child, who first gave Mamoru the rose that he would give Fiore. Usagi had come to the same hospital, carrying a bouquet of roses to celebrate the birth of her sister. Realizing this, Fiore is able to break the Xenian Flower’s grip on his heart. Meanwhile, Sailor Moon has died, having depleted her life energy to save Earth. To make amends, Fiore finally hands Tuxedo Mask the perfect flower: one containing his own life energy, which he tells his great love to use to revive Sailor Moon. This act is Fiore’s last. 

31. Why does the alien have to sacrifice everything to save everyone else, in the end? 

32. How often I was critiqued in workshop for being alienating, being alien. How often I am praised now for being so specific and yet (and yet!) so relatable.12 As though my only options are bad alien or good alien. Or Frank O’Hara with a perpetual crush on Tuxedo Mask. 

33. If the particular is the doorway to the universal, who maintains the door? Who made it? Do I want to travel to that universe anyway? If the particulars must be understandable, palatable to a white audience, is that a universe or is that the white gaze? 

34. I think of Paul Celan—a poet whose work is steeped in his Jewishness, his always-fraught relationship with the German language, his having survived the Holocaust. In a speech delivered in 1958 he said, “For the poem does not stand outside time. True, it claims the infinite and tries to reach across time—but across, not above.”13 Then again, am I quoting Celan here because he’s a poet I believe white poets will listen to? He doesn’t fit easily at all into whiteness, yet I remember my white classmates being completely unbothered by having to learn his particular history. 

35. “Why are you so angry all the time?” I get asked, sometimes in response to the mere mention of race or sexuality. I’m not angry 24-7, but I believe in the power of a queer person of color’s anger. It is fear of such power that leads to the dismissive title of Angry Minority.14 And I recognize that as a cis man of Chinese descent, my anger tends to get treated in the white imagination as more “rational” or less threatening (this depends on the status of “China” in the white imagination). Still, I’ve been dismissed by white people as “just upset,” “too frustrated,” “divisive,” and (my fave!) “anguished”—as though my anger towards racism and other issues is the issue.15 

I’ve come to love my powerful anger; it’s fueled and steered me in the best directions. I also don’t experience anger as separate from other emotions. For instance, my anger is a part of my joy—because without it, what kind of joy is possible? A deluded, diluted one. The country I live in is racist, misogynist, ableist, transphobic, queerphobic, classist, imperialist, genocidal. Part of the anger is that a basic recognition of (not even a reckoning with) this reality is not universal. 

36. And to what extent have I internalized white literary sensibilities? To what degree am I still writing, living in their restrictive universe? 

37. The ending of Jennifer Chang’s “Again a Solstice”16

What it does even mean to write a poem? 
It means today 
I’m correcting my mistakes. 
It means I don’t want to be lonely. 

38. Another reading of the movie’s ending: Sailor Moon—through her connection with Tuxedo Mask but just as much through her friendship with the other Sailor Scouts—shows Fiore what love looks like, free of the draining anger of jealousy, the anger of a crushing loneliness. And Fiore responds with an enormous act of love. I wish it didn’t have to involve dying though; I dream for Fiore an untragic conclusion. A scene of him eventually revived, too, and finding his own fierce circle. 

39. Since my book was published, I’ve traveled across the United States and have gotten to meet so many Asian American, queer Asian American, queer Chinese American readers. I’ve also met readers of Asian descent in the U.K. and in New Zealand, many of them queer. These experiences confirmed what my truest self always knew, what white MFA culture didn’t: that impassioned readers for my work—at its most idiosyncratically identity-filled—exist.17 These experiences also pushed me to think further on the term Asian diasporic—not only for those outside the United States or those who don’t identify as American, but also for when Asian American slides into a violent18 U.S. nationalism. I’m also interested in what the term Sino offers over Chinese,19 when Chinese gets weaponized for nationalist aims. Queer can also get appropriated, become reductive, lose its radical politics. How to keep these terms active, alive? 

40. When asked what advice he would give to “emerging writers, particularly of marginalized identities,” poet Michael Wasson said: 

For marginalized identities, discover the deep complexities in who you are & what spaces you & your body occupy. I hope you stay true to your path…because too often we are told to simplify & make the work accessible to the reader (i.e. white, hetero, male). This ends up watering down the nuance of the histories that you’ve been trusted to carry through each day.20

41. Toni Morrison was asked again and again about whether she found the label “Black woman writer” limiting. One of her responses: 

Oh, so boring, oh God.… You know, “male French writer;” is that limiting? No, I don’t think it is. But I understood instantly that [“Black woman writer”] was meant to be.…

So instead of pretending that the label had no force in the minds of readers, I decided very early on that I would not just accept it, but wear it. Force people to say “Black woman writer” and then to see what the fallout would be. I don’t want to be an honorary white man.

But that doesn’t narrow the field. Not for me.

It’s an interesting, rich terrain in which to work. If I tried to compare it with something that is probably more powerful in terms of culture, it would be like saying “Black music.” And what does that mean? Does that sound narrow?21

42. In these months, this year of pandemic, I miss so many of my favorite people—so much of my universe. I text, call, Zoom. Attend online readings. Reread the poems that hold me, that reinvent holding. I search for the perfect sticker to send to Muriel.

43. Rewatching the movie, I develop a crush on Fiore. The way he tells the gay truth about his feelings. The way he lyrically meditates on loneliness. The way he gives me a different way. Not an Asian version of someone else, neither good nor bad alien, no: a badass truth-teller with great hair. 

44. When the term universal comes up, ask: Whose universe?22 When the term timeless: Who can stand outside of time? When transcends categories: Why not transgress? I don’t want to transcend. I want to sing about living in a tangle of histories and dreams. Embrace that song, I’m reminding myself. Keep writing in and to a vastness of queer Asian trouble—a cosmos full of protest and tiaras, laughter and pissed-off poems, roses and ruptures and hot stubborn shit-starters who live. 

 

ENDNOTES

1. Matadora (Alice James, 2004). 
2. An installment from the poet’s Substack, The Reading, published in July 2020
3. Until Fiore’s return years later, Mamoru/Tuxedo Mask is unsure whether he was a real or imaginary friend.
4. In a 2018 interview for the Rumpus, Cathy Linh Che responds to a question about translating the Vietnamese in her poetry: 

I don’t.…

When I write, my primary audience is someone who occupies my exact same language and identity space…. Those who don’t understand Vietnamese can understand the language around it, or they can look it up. I’ve seen my parents labor over dictionaries their whole lives to decode letters from government officials—I think English-speaking audiences can do the same for my parents’ words.

5. From a 2018 interview with Tupelo Quarterly
6. The English version made them cousins—as though that would make their romantic dynamic less odd. 
7. After completing the first full draft of this essay, I discovered an orientalist poem by O’Hara that begins “At night Chinamen jump / on Asia with a thump” and ends “we couple in the grace / of that mysterious race” (from “Poem” in
The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, University of California Press, 1995). 
8. From the same interview as earlier. 
9. I carry with me Ocean Vuong’s lines, “The most beautiful part of your body / is where it’s headed,” from “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong,” in
Night Sky With Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon, 2016). 
10. 
Rhapsody in Plain Yellow (Norton, 2003). 
11. I’ve gone back and forth on whether to provide a more detailed account; due to the complexity of the issues and privacy concerns, I’ve decided, for this essay, to keep the details of these internal community discussions internal. 
12. As with universality, I question the assumptions behind relatability and how it gets used, especially in workshop. Same with empathy—who gets to empathize? Who’s prioritized when relating to a piece? Should a writer of color aim for a text that invites empathy? Why not critique the white imagination instead—and push white writers to do more of that work? Read: “Empathy Is an End Point,” a 2017 conversation in Sublevel between Solmaz Sharif and Rickey Laurentiis. 
13. “Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen.” Translated by Rosemarie Waldrop in
Paul Celan: Collected Prose (Sheep Meadow Press, 1986). With gratitude to Dorothy J. Wang, whose Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry (Stanford University Press, 2014) is where I first encountered this speech.
14. Grateful for this June 2020 conversation in
Los Angeles Review of Books between Omar Sakr and George Abraham, in which Abraham says: “This circles back to your point about how we’re being read versus Read. It’s almost as easy for the publishing world to ignore our voices as it is for them to lazily read and casually misinterpret us, assigning implicitly racist labels on our work like ‘amply justified anger.’”
15. I’m indebted to Sara Ahmed’s work on how talking about the problem means becoming the problem, a phenomenon she identifies and explores in
Living a Feminist Life (Duke University Press, 2017).
16.
Some Say the Lark (Alice James Books, 2017).
17. Being a poet, I never expected a giant audience (though poetry readership in the United States has been growing). Still, it’s good to laugh at those who insisted I’d never have any real audience and so must write more “broadly.”

18. Is this word redundant? I’m suspicious of most nationalisms and U.S. nationalism I recognize as inherently violent—as inextricable from white supremacy. 
19. Thanks also to
sinθ magazine for opening up a myriad of distinct possibilities for Sino literary discourse and community. 
20. A 2018 interview on VIDA. 
21. A 2003 interview for Wisconsin Public Radio.
22. Whose verse gets to be read as a universe?

 

Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017)which was longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry and won the Publishing Triangle Thom Gunn Award. His work has appeared in many publications, including Poetry and the 2015 and 2019 editions of The Best American Poetry. He has received a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Kundiman and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at Brandeis University as the Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence. 

Thumbnail: NASA

Craft Capsule: Who Cares?

by

Jordan Kisner

12.21.20

This is no. 83 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I feel lately that there’s so little I know how to say about writing in a general, prescriptive sense, despite the fact that I write for a living, despite the fact that I teach writing and can, in that context, usually manage prescriptive statements. The “craft” of writing to me feels synonymous with the craft of sitting still, which I find difficult; or the craft of patiently pursuing the rightest, most elegant piece for whatever part of the puzzle is in front of me; the craft of making little rituals to call forth both order and chaos; the craft of snacking; the craft of eavesdropping. Once, when I was about fifteen and had no aspirations to write at all, I spent a few days with an author of a famous book about teenage girls and their derangements, and she remarked to me that I would be a writer. This surprised and flattered me. I thought maybe she could see something about my mind. “You carry a notebook,” she pointed out. The craft of having a pen on hand.

This tension between the writer’s need to take her mind seriously and the reality that most of the world is less automatically enthralled with it, feels like one of the hardest things to get right, especially for anyone whose written I is themselves. Taking an inner life seriously but not too seriously, I think, is as much a technique or a practice as anything else. Inner life drives most of the writing I find fascinating, whether or not the end result is explicitly about the writer. Take Anne Boyer’s The Undying. Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. Homie by Danez Smith. Still Life With Oyster and Lemon by Mark Doty. On Immunity by Eula Biss. All different forms (memoir, poetry, researched essay, novel) and all totally about and deeply drawn from a writer’s interiority—their questions, their experiences, their loves, their griefs, their memories. I could now—but won’t—name five books that could be described the same way but feel, to me, solipsistic and masturbatory. 

This is the high-wire act with which I am personally concerned from a craft perspective: how to write with your full self, and perhaps including yourself, while not writing in a way that’s just so far up your own navel.

Who cares, who cares, who cares, I sometimes want to write in the margins of my students’ essays. I don’t, remembering the teachers who kindly didn’t write that in my margins though I am absolutely sure they wanted to. I don’t mean the question cruelly—or literally: They care, obviously! And often I do, too—but it would be felt as cruelty, probably. Which is too bad because it’s a worthy question. It’s maybe the most salient question I could present to my students. It is the question I ask myself most often when I’m working, honestly. (I am asking it right now.) 

When we say a work is masturbatory, we mean that it was written to please the person who made it to the neglect of anyone else’s pleasure. It is, to use the argot of writing pedagogy, “writer-based,” as opposed to “reader-based.” “Writer-based” prose feels good for the writer, maybe, but it does not do much for a reader—because it has not really considered the reader. It has not concerned itself with whether a reader will, or should, find pleasure or meaning in the experience. 

So to consider who might care and why—this is a kindness, an ethic, a canny nod to pleasure. How many people do you want to bring into the circle with you? The craft of obsessive query: Who cares about flower seasons, about autopsies, about writing, a dead lake, a dead musician, a particular septuagenarian’s books? Why would they care? Just because I care, will anyone else? Assuming that not everyone will care about everything, whom do I wish to address? Who would I like to make care?

 

Jordan Kisner is the author of the essay collection Thin Places (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). Her writing has also appeared in the Atlantic, the Believer, the Guardiann+1, the New York Times Magazine, and the Paris Review Daily. The recipient of fellowships from Pioneer Works, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and Art Omi, she is currently a fellow at the Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas.

Thumbnail: Sean Benesh

Craft Capsule: The Arc of Understanding

by

Khadijah Queen

1.25.21

This is no. 86 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

One of the most common questions I hear when I visit universities is: How do you organize a poetry manuscript? Ordering poems is one of those intuitive processes that can prove challenging to articulate. I often share Natasha Sajé’s article “Dynamic Design: The Structure of Books of Poems,” which appeared in the Iowa Review in 2005. Reading that essay informed how I shaped my first book. It enriched my understanding of sequence, thematic and aesthetic gestures, beginnings and endings. It made me consider the importance of enjoyment—Sajé cites Roland Barthes’s concept of pleasure, both physical and intellectual, as part of the reading experience. But over the fifteen years since then, I also developed an idea I began to call “the arc of understanding.” This arc, like a story arc or outline, helps a writer to frame the overall trajectory of a poetry manuscript—or individual poem—with intention at all stages. That intention works alongside intuition on the way to feeling “finished.” Over the past couple of years I’ve only talked about the arc of understanding extemporaneously and with a fair bit of self-deprecation, but I want to articulate it now for the first time in writing.

To revise or organize toward an arc of understanding, ask yourself three basic questions:

  1. What do you want your reader’s experience to be when reading the poem or book?
  2. What do you want your reader to understand by the time they arrive at the end of your book or poem?
  3. What order of poems or lines will lead them to that experience and understanding?

For a manuscript, I recommend writing the answers down rather than just holding them in your head, and—perhaps this goes without saying—to repeat the questioning process for each manuscript. When applying these questions to individual poems, especially longer poems, the third question can feel tricky. Instead of lines, you may wish to think in stanzas, depending on the shape and content of your poem. For experimental or less narrative work, I find it helps to think in terms of patterns—shapes, sounds, images, and so on. Tracking and balancing patterns is of course part of revision no matter what kind of poetry you write, but doing so with a specific arc of understanding in mind can help add cohesion.

When I answer these questions, I make sure to articulate both intuited and explicit understanding, since, after all, understanding works on multiple levels. In A General Theory of Love (Vintage, 2001), three psychiatrists outlined how the brain processes love, noting that the levels of our triune brain—reptilian, limbic, and neocortic—haven’t evolved to talk to one another. Respectively, they deal with our instincts, emotions, and critical thought. Those processes happen simultaneously. Poetry can thus offer an instinctive and felt understanding in addition to (or rather than) an explicit one. Said another way, we understand a poem instinctively, emotionally, and intellectually. As a poet, you can use ambiguity in language to invite the reader to imagine into those multiple levels of understanding.

The more familiar I become with these questions, the more I generate corollaries: What obstacles do we place in the way of ease, when it comes to understanding? Why do we place such obstacles there? Are they actually obstacles, or are they signposts of depth, invitations to complicated or layered meaning? What is the relationship between clarity and accessibility? How do we balance variety, complexity, and clarity? How can we redefine and expand access for folks who are Blind and/or D/deaf by reconsidering structure and publication? Indeed, how can we make sure full inclusivity becomes baseline professional practice?

Consistent questioning and naming bolsters depth and clarifies intention. With each new book I write, I aim to make more conscious choices that move each poem and the book as a whole work toward a more complex, multifaceted arc of understanding—a pathway made of language and illumination, perceiving comprehension not just as concept, but experience.

 

Khadijah Queen is the author of six books, including Anodyne (Tin House, 2020) and I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On (YesYes Books, 2017). Her writing has also appeared in American Poetry Review, BuzzFeed, FencePoetry, and Tin House, among other publications. Holding a PhD in English from the University of Denver and an MFA from Antioch University, she teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and for Regis University’s Mile High MFA program.

Thumbnail: Weston MacKinnon

Craft Capsule: The Arc of Understanding

by

Khadijah Queen

1.25.21

This is no. 86 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

One of the most common questions I hear when I visit universities is: How do you organize a poetry manuscript? Ordering poems is one of those intuitive processes that can prove challenging to articulate. I often share Natasha Sajé’s article “Dynamic Design: The Structure of Books of Poems,” which appeared in the Iowa Review in 2005. Reading that essay informed how I shaped my first book. It enriched my understanding of sequence, thematic and aesthetic gestures, beginnings and endings. It made me consider the importance of enjoyment—Sajé cites Roland Barthes’s concept of pleasure, both physical and intellectual, as part of the reading experience. But over the fifteen years since then, I also developed an idea I began to call “the arc of understanding.” This arc, like a story arc or outline, helps a writer to frame the overall trajectory of a poetry manuscript—or individual poem—with intention at all stages. That intention works alongside intuition on the way to feeling “finished.” Over the past couple of years I’ve only talked about the arc of understanding extemporaneously and with a fair bit of self-deprecation, but I want to articulate it now for the first time in writing.

To revise or organize toward an arc of understanding, ask yourself three basic questions:

  1. What do you want your reader’s experience to be when reading the poem or book?
  2. What do you want your reader to understand by the time they arrive at the end of your book or poem?
  3. What order of poems or lines will lead them to that experience and understanding?

For a manuscript, I recommend writing the answers down rather than just holding them in your head, and—perhaps this goes without saying—to repeat the questioning process for each manuscript. When applying these questions to individual poems, especially longer poems, the third question can feel tricky. Instead of lines, you may wish to think in stanzas, depending on the shape and content of your poem. For experimental or less narrative work, I find it helps to think in terms of patterns—shapes, sounds, images, and so on. Tracking and balancing patterns is of course part of revision no matter what kind of poetry you write, but doing so with a specific arc of understanding in mind can help add cohesion.

When I answer these questions, I make sure to articulate both intuited and explicit understanding, since, after all, understanding works on multiple levels. In A General Theory of Love (Vintage, 2001), three psychiatrists outlined how the brain processes love, noting that the levels of our triune brain—reptilian, limbic, and neocortic—haven’t evolved to talk to one another. Respectively, they deal with our instincts, emotions, and critical thought. Those processes happen simultaneously. Poetry can thus offer an instinctive and felt understanding in addition to (or rather than) an explicit one. Said another way, we understand a poem instinctively, emotionally, and intellectually. As a poet, you can use ambiguity in language to invite the reader to imagine into those multiple levels of understanding.

The more familiar I become with these questions, the more I generate corollaries: What obstacles do we place in the way of ease, when it comes to understanding? Why do we place such obstacles there? Are they actually obstacles, or are they signposts of depth, invitations to complicated or layered meaning? What is the relationship between clarity and accessibility? How do we balance variety, complexity, and clarity? How can we redefine and expand access for folks who are Blind and/or D/deaf by reconsidering structure and publication? Indeed, how can we make sure full inclusivity becomes baseline professional practice?

Consistent questioning and naming bolsters depth and clarifies intention. With each new book I write, I aim to make more conscious choices that move each poem and the book as a whole work toward a more complex, multifaceted arc of understanding—a pathway made of language and illumination, perceiving comprehension not just as concept, but experience.

 

Khadijah Queen is the author of six books, including Anodyne (Tin House, 2020) and I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On (YesYes Books, 2017). Her writing has also appeared in American Poetry Review, BuzzFeed, FencePoetry, and Tin House, among other publications. Holding a PhD in English from the University of Denver and an MFA from Antioch University, she teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and for Regis University’s Mile High MFA program.

Thumbnail: Weston MacKinnon

Craft Capsule: Braided Narratives

by

Peter Kispert

3.1.21

This is no. 90 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Reading a story told in alternating periods of time can be comforting in its set expectation: We will move, with some regularity, forward and backward. This kind of story, a braided narrative, establishes propulsion in each sphere of time and supposes the eventual interaction or coalescence of its threads. While a large chunk of backstory can deaden a story set in an otherwise forward-moving present, I love how a story that doles out the past and its accompanying narrative present in equal measure can camouflage the narrator or protagonist’s desires, sustain tension, and ultimately, manipulate the trajectory of the story itself.

I first “discovered” the braided narrative more than a decade ago, after writing a draft of a story on a computer in a public library—an effort to shame myself into getting pages out. (He’s checking his phone again? I’d imagine some stranger judging.) I had, as I remember it, very painstakingly painted each brick as I laid it, sentence by sentence. When I went to e-mail the story to myself, it was nowhere on the desktop or server. Not hidden or minimized: It was gone. I ran home, flipped open the heavy lid of my black MacBook, and furiously reassembled the story from memory: A woman in a hotel overlooking the beach, three kids spearfishing in the water, pockets of blood lighting up in the tide. Her girlfriend. Strange nightmares. Her father’s wake.

In my rather manic redrafting process, I braided together distinct periods of time as I recalled them. I instinctually resequenced the narrative to accommodate each of its seemingly disparate threads—how the nightmares evolved during the woman’s stay at the hotel and the meaning of those children on that beach, out of which the character of a young girl confidently appeared in this draft. The threads had been called up in my memory as distinct but were thematically linked, with images and elements that gathered import as the story progressed. Failing to save what was almost certainly a mediocre draft became an invaluable lesson on structure and the managing of time in short fiction.

Of course there is no one perfect form, and despite the braided narrative’s serious versatility, it cannot always be deployed or imposed successfully. But as I found years later, the hyperartifice of the structure can be an effective way to play with how a liar manages, or manufactures, their own story, a fascination that guided me as I wrote the stories that eventually became my debut collection. My unreliable narrators and protagonists sang on the page with an urgency to tell their own story that implied an honesty their histories and relationships, often unfurling in a past sequence, called into question.

Despite that fateful day, I now save my work very carefully and often. But it still is an effective exercise, painful to entertain as it is simple: Rewrite the story from memory. From heart. Go.

 

Peter Kispert is the author of the debut story collection I Know You Know Who I Am (Penguin Books, 2020), which was selected as a Best Book of the Year by Elle and a Best LGBTQ Book of the Year by O, the Oprah Magazine. His stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in GQEsquirethemPlayboy, and other publications. He is finishing work on his first novel.

Thumbnail: Daniele Franchi

Craft Capsule: A Poem Called Love

by

Alex Dimitrov

6.14.21

This is no. 101 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Three months into 2017 I realized we were entering a period of cultural monotony. Daily doom, constant outrage, and the media and tech giants both cashing in on exactly the thing they were (supposedly) outraged about. Click here. Sign this. Keep tweeting. Don’t go offline. Forget about pleasure. Resign yourself to your phone, your laptop, your screen—everyone was exhausted. The cycle itself produced a kind of hysteria. And I don’t trust hysteria. One of the reasons being how unsustainable and uninspiring it is. Another being that historically it has ushered in sloppy thinking.

Logging onto social media became the most depressing part of my day. It was closer to advertising and propaganda than any real rhetoric or news. I’m not sure why but right around then I began to wonder what the role of the artist even is. And a year later, when nothing had changed, when the media enabled Washington and Washington enabled the media, when the tech giants surveilled us and we began to surveil one another—I wondered again. I wanted to offer something in place of hysteria and the didactic landscape of Twitter.

I once heard Marina Abramović give a talk at the Guggenheim in which she said that one role of the artist is to elevate the public spirit. I’ve always loved her work. Two things we share in common, other than being immigrants from the same part of the world, is that we’re both interested in duration and endurance in our creative work. I wanted to make something that returned people to their inner lives. I wanted to remind them about pleasure and the sensual mind. And I knew it would be difficult since online culture had become a place for the opposite. A place where we’re endlessly bombarded with opportunism and lack of nuance. What I had to do, I told myself, was find a container for something that occurred daily and was endless in form, like the internet itself.

The first line I wrote for what became the title poem of my book Love and Other Poems was, “I love opening a window in a room.” I decided that was the feeling I wanted the poem to evoke. I wanted possibility without abstraction. I wanted the poem to be a space where you could throw everything in, and not feel hopeless about that everything when you were done reading. I was also listening to a lot of The Doors. In one interview I read with Jim Morrison (Sagittarius), he says: “I’d like to do a song or a piece of music that’s just a pure expression of joy, like a celebration of existence, like the coming of spring or the sun rising, just pure unbounded joy. I don’t think we’ve really done that yet.” And so I began my poem with that in mind. It would be a list. A list of things I loved about the world. And maybe, as crazy as it sounded, I wouldn’t stop writing it. Maybe the poem could go on forever (“I am thinking that a poem could go on forever,” Jack Spicer wrote in “Psychoanalysis: An Elegy”). Although I did need to finish, as poems in physical books have to end, I decided I’d continue the poem on Twitter—the place I loathed—one tweet a day, every day, for as long as I was alive.

It was while writing the poem that I began to understand what Abramović meant by “elevating the public spirit.” That became my mantra and my aim. I kept the form and the language accessible because it was important to me that any person, even one who didn’t read or like poetry, might enjoy and understand the poem, should they encounter it online. And I wanted the poem to be encountered. That’s the main reason I brought it to Twitter and didn’t keep it solely in print. I hoped people could see themselves in some line or some future line I hadn’t yet written. But I’d made the commitment to write. There was no going back really. You see, I’m still writing the poem today.

 

Alex Dimitrov is the author of three books of poems, including Love and Other Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2021), as well as the chapbook American Boys (Floating Wolf Quarterly, 2012). His work has been published in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Paris Review, and Poetry. He was previously the senior content editor at the Academy of American Poets, where he edited the Poem-a-Day series and American Poets. He has taught creative writing at Princeton University, Columbia University, and New York University, among other institutions. With Dorothea Lasky, he is the coauthor of Astro Poets: Your Guides to the Zodiac (Flatiron Books, 2019). Dimitrov lives in New York City.

Craft Capsule: Night Call

by

Alex Dimitrov

6.7.21

This is no. 100 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

New York’s streets are everywhere in my poems. In February of 2014 I used the city quite literally. It was for a project called Night Call. The idea was to travel to strangers and read them poems in bed, or in the most intimate space of their homes. For many people this ended up being the kitchen or living room. For one guy, his balcony in Tribeca. Mostly though, strangers walked me right into their bedrooms and offered me a glimpse of their lives.

I’ve lived in New York for more than ten years. It still feels like the city doesn’t need me or know that I’m here. And to be honest, I like that. I’m a writer who thrives off resistance. That kind of pushback and being ignored excites me. In Night Call, I wanted to fuse that feeling with the intimacy of going over to someone’s apartment. Being in a person’s space is often more intimate than sleeping with them. It’s an alluring exchange: people showing you where they spend the majority of their lives. The poem is also an exchange. It’s like showing you a map to the interior though not the interior itself. The poem, to me, is a conversation between people.

I announced Night Call on social media and offered to do readings for anyone who didn’t know me. That was the catch, they had to be total strangers. They could be in any borough and had the choice of four separate Sundays on which we could meet. I’d leave my apartment around eight in the evening with poems and my phone. Nothing more. Maybe a pack of cigarettes (though I was trying to quit). Sometimes I didn’t know the gender of the person I was going to read to (based on their name) and I didn’t care either. I took the N and the R and the 6 and the B trains. Most of the readings were quick. Twenty or twenty-five minutes. Other times I wouldn’t leave someone’s apartment until two or three in the morning and I’d cab back, exhausted and exhilarated both. People offered me drinks, told me stories about their childhoods, affairs, the death of their parents. They took me up to their roofs, made me coffee, showed me things they had written or painted. One stranger cooked me dinner and told me she regretted both of her marriages. “Don’t get married,” she said. “There are more interesting things to do with people.” I’ll never forget the way she kept adjusting a silver pendant around her neck.

At the time I had a nine-to-five job and I’m not sure how I got up on those Monday mornings. Several major media outlets asked to cover Night Call but I declined. I’ve never written or talked about it before. It was private. My interest was to open up a new space between the reader and the poet and between the reader and the poem. I wanted to demystify both. I wanted people, in the privacy of their beds, to encounter the poem like a bedtime story (being read to having been one of the only pleasures of my childhood).

The poems I read were from drafts of my second book, Together and by Ourselves. The strangers in Night Call were the first people to hear it. It’s my favorite book I’ve written and my most personal, too. In some ways I wrote it to survive the change in an important relationship. It’s amazing the things people shared with me when I read them those poems. We usually sat across from each other on top of the bedspread, sometimes about one or two arm-lengths apart, sometimes for long stretches of time, often in silence.

For about a month, in the dead of winter, I went to the Village and Queens and Brooklyn, and almost to Staten Island once but it was too late at that point. Some people I read to ended up becoming my friends. I remember even those I haven’t seen again, which is most of them. I remember what they told me about their lives and I remember their faces. The poem is, of course, a place to remember. It keeps people’s voices and things right there, outside time. And those first hours after midnight, when Night Call would often take place, they feel outside time to me also. It’s a beautiful illusion. The imagination is the only real freedom. That’s what Night Call helped me remember. I had forgotten it too.

 

Alex Dimitrov is the author of three books of poems, including Love and Other Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2021), as well as the chapbook American Boys (Floating Wolf Quarterly, 2012). His work has been published in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Paris Review, and Poetry. He was previously the senior content editor at the Academy of American Poets, where he edited the Poem-a-Day series and American Poets. He has taught creative writing at Princeton University, Columbia University, and New York University, among other institutions. With Dorothea Lasky, he is the coauthor of Astro Poets: Your Guides to the Zodiac (Flatiron Books, 2019). Dimitrov lives in New York City.

Thumbnail: Guillaume Técher

Craft Capsule: Technically It’s a Ravioli

by

Kristen Arnett

5.17.21

This is no. 99 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Sometimes trying to describe what makes something funny feels like letting the air leak out of a balloon. I think so many things are hilarious, but capturing what makes them work inside a sentence or a paragraph feels wildly difficult. What is humor but a magic trick? Maybe that’s why so often I turn to the absurd.

Typically, humor is in the eye of the beholder. So much of what makes something funny to a particular person relies on the comedic map of their brain: inside jokes, their upbringing, their background. I would imagine that within a specific friend group, social constructs map out like a Venn diagram of what actually is funny to the whole and what stays closer to the borders of personal preference. But absurdism blurs all those boundaries.

When we discuss the absurd, we are basically asking the brain to not make any connections. This is a weird ask when it comes to most humor, which relies on those connections to make the joke: set-up followed quickly by the punchline. Puns do this. So do traditional knock-knock jokes. Most jokes have some type of innate formula, but absurdism asks you to throw everything you know about what’s funny out the metaphorical window.

An example: the ravioli joke.

For a period of time, I made a point to tweet once a day that something—basically almost any object, food or otherwise—was in fact a ravioli. I might say that a mattress was a ravioli or that a sportscar was a ravioli. Once I claimed that the human skull was technically a ravioli. The purpose behind this? It was very weird, made no sense, and I found it funny. For quite a while I could not unpack what made it so funny for me, which made it even funnier. My brain just liked it. It was nonsense, and I enjoyed the sheer ridiculousness of the daily prompt.

Then the joke morphed into something that was still funny, but explainable. Something I was able to parse out and understand. I did not share it with anyone at first, especially not online, because I wanted to keep gleaning the joy of the daily absurdity—banana as ravioli, clam as ravioli. But I discovered that a secondary comedic element was how people reacted to the absurdity itself. There was the initial humor of posting the absurd comparison, quickly followed by the outrage of those who viewed it. Some people enjoyed them immensely in the same way that I did; they liked the fact that it was strange and did not make sense. Other people attempted to parse it, make it into a sustainable fact (the human skull holding the brain, meat and blood and bone—yes, they could see it, it’s allowed). The third type of person made the joke a different kind of funny. These were the people that were absolutely furious that I had attempted the comparison in the first place. People got very, very angry! Over a silly, harmless joke! About food! I began posting my daily ravioli comparisons and quickly muting the joke itself, all the while knowing that people were in my mentions, commenting on how horrible they thought the joke was, how angry it made them—and I never, ever saw their complaints. This second level of humor, placed on top of the first absurdist level of humor, gave me intense satisfaction.

When we consider absurdist humor in fiction, it is easy enough to spot it in action. A book does not necessarily have to be filled with absurdism to host pockets of it neatly inside the plot. An example would be Jami Attenberg’s latest novel, All This Could Be Yours (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019). In one particular scene, Twyla, a woman who is deep in grief and is obsessed with makeup, walks around a CVS picking up tube after tube of lipstick. She tosses all of them in her shopping cart. Handfuls of lipstick. Dozens upon dozens of tubes. When she gets to the checkout and the teenager at the counter starts bagging up all the purchases, Twyla suddenly decides she does not want them anymore. Hundreds of lipsticks, just sitting loose on the counter, halfway bagged, and she is buying none of them. The image is absurd and wildly comical. It works because it is also attached to the idea that for Twyla, beauty has long felt like a trap, but also like something she could control. It’s delightfully funny and also deeply sad. It’s absurdism on multiple levels.

A fun way to try out absurdist humor for yourself might be to insert something silly and improbable within a scene and then work the room around it, just for the hell of it. Let the actual physical elephant sit inside the room and ignore it while your characters drink their happy hour beers. See what comes from it. Technically, this idea…is a ravioli. Enjoy.

 

Kristen Arnett is a queer writer based in Florida. She is the author of the novel Mostly Dead Things (Tin House, 2019), which was a New York Times best-seller, and the story collection Felt in the Jaw (Split/Lip Press, 2017). Her writing has also appeared in the New York Times, North American Review, Gulf Coast, Guernica, and McSweeney’s, among other publications. Her second novel, With Teeth, is forthcoming from Riverhead Books in June.

Thumbnail: David Fedulov

 

Ten Questions for Jami Attenberg

by

Staff

10.22.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Jami Attenberg, whose novel All This Could Be Yours is out today from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Told from multiple perspectives across several generations, All This Could Be Yours follows the members of a family as they navigate an impending death. When doctors report Victor Tuchman is in his final days, his wife betrays little emotion, his son resists coming home at all, and his daughter, Alex, feels a kind of relief, wondering if her mother will finally tell her about her father’s shrouded criminal past. As the family gathers in New Orleans and the story unfolds, some secrets remain obscured, while others come to light. Neither triumphant nor despairing, All This Could Be Yours maps the ways in which family dynamics are always evolving, with new intimacies and alienations blossoming at unexpected turns. “Attenberg expertly weaves together a chorus of love, betrayal, and inheritance,” writes Hannah Tinti. “Each chapter a prism turned, revealing a new spectrum of secrets.” Jami Attenberg is the author of six other works of fiction, including the New York Times best-selling novel The Middlesteins. Her essays have appeared in various outlets including the New York Times Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and Longreads. Born in Illinois, Attenberg lives in New Orleans.

1. How long did it take you to write All This Could Be Yours
It took about a year from start to finish. About six months to write a draft I could submit to my editor, another three months of edits, another three months here and there through the copyediting process, give or take a few weeks at any point along the way. In general this is usually how long it takes for me to write my books.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
The biggest challenge was capturing New Orleans properly. I had only lived here a few years before I started writing the book and I felt extremely responsible toward the city. So most of the research I did—on foot, by car, through interviews—was focused on the city and the region. I was really intent on getting it right.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
I tend to write in the mornings, in the front room of my house, by hand. Or sometimes I’ll write in a café. In the afternoons I’ll type up whatever I wrote in the morning, and edit it through that process. When I’m actually in the process of working on a project I work five days a week on it.

4. What are you reading right now? 
I’m rereading this poetry collection I read while I was writing the first draft of the book. It’s called Absolute Solitude, by Dulce María Loynaz, a Cuban writer.

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
I don’t want to make anyone feel like their career sucks! But in general I want people to read more poetry and graphic novels. I love a lot of stuff Drawn & Quarterly publishes and I’ve read some great poetry collections this year. I read a debut collection called Hoodwitch recently by Faylita Hicks and thoroughly enjoyed it.

6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The internet.

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? 
Well, they always tell me to chill out, but I never listen.

8. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
I don’t think the most recent wave of #MeToo cleaned enough houses.

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? 
My agent, Doug Stewart, has been my most consistent reader in my life. He is always looking out for my best interests, always on my side. Also he can look at what I’m doing and place it in my entire body of work.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
It has changed over the years—how relevant advice is to me and my craft and my career. In college I had a fiction teacher tell me to make every sentence so good that the reader would have to read the next one. So basic and obvious but I needed to hear it. (But that wouldn’t mean much to me now, of course!) I think what’s helpful to me is just to meet with writers I admire on occasion for a cup of coffee and I learn so much just by being around them. We’re a supportive group of people, and when one person succeeds, in the end we all do.

Jami Attenberg, author of All This Could Be Yours.

(Credit: Zack Smith)

Ten Questions for Mimi Lok

by

Staff

10.21.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Mimi Lok, whose debut story collection, Last of Her Name, is out tomorrow from Kaya Press. In Last of Her Name, Lok brings to life an exceptionally various set of characters and places, reflecting the complex lives of diasporic women across generations. Told in alternating sections, the first story shifts between a British council home in the 1980s and Hong Kong during World War II. The final story follows a grandmother as she travels from one tent village to another, forced to seek out increasingly unlikely shelters after she chooses homelessness rather than being shut away in a senior home. Whether in seven pages or fifty, Lok brings each story to life in clear, precise prose, and draws the reader’s eye to strangeness and injustice without slipping into a didactic tone. When the absurd transpires, she passes no judgment. “I can’t think of a collection that better speaks to this moment of global movement and collective rupture from homes and history, and the struggle to find meaning despite it all,” writes Dave Eggers. Mimi Lok’s writing has appeared in Electric Literature, Hyphen, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University and is the cofounder and executive director of the award-winning nonprofit Voice of Witness. Born and raised in the United Kingdom, Lok lives in California.  

1. How long did it take you to write Last of Her Name
I worked in earnest on the manuscript over the course of about three years. But in terms of the span of time the individual stories represent, it’s a bit more fuzzy than that. So many of the stories started off as kernels knocking around in my brain for ages, maybe from a decade ago or more, and then maybe a fragment here and there got onto the page, and then an early draft that was miles away from the final incarnation. For example, the title story started off as a short piece about two sisters painting a house. Then I forgot about it until my MFA in the mid-2000s, when I unearthed it for a workshop class and developed it into more of a family portrait that also delved into the parents’ marriage and earlier lives. Years later when I was working on it for the collection, it evolved further into a dual narrative between the older sister in ’80s British suburbia and the mother as a girl in World War II Hong Kong, both dealing with extreme, harrowing circumstances. I sometimes wish the writing process for me was faster, but things need to percolate in their own time, I suppose.  

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Balancing the need to write with the need to convince myself over and over that I wasn’t wasting my time.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
I run the nonprofit Voice of Witness, which amplifies marginalized voices through oral history. As most people working in the nonprofit world can attest, it’s more than a job—it’s an extremely consuming labor of love. For the first few years, when I was building the organization (I’m also a cofounder), I barely wrote at all. It was really challenging to find the energy and the time and also the justification. Fortunately, I have terrific colleagues and a wonderful board who knew I needed to scale back, and writer friends who kept encouraging me. In recent years I’ve been able to go down to four days a week. I write all day Friday and also grab some time several mornings a week before work. 

4. What are you reading right now? 
I’m on the second book in Jin Yong’s Legend of the Condor Heroes trilogy. He’s known as the Chinese Tolkien. These are historical martial arts epics that are immensely vivid, exciting, and satisfying. I’ve also been enjoying Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing and have an early copy of Meng Jin’s Little Gods on my bedside table, which I can’t wait to dive into. 

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
I don’t think Gina Berriault gets her due. Barbara Comyns is also a fantastic writer who a lot of readers outside of the United Kingdom it seems aren’t too familiar with.

6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Basically, life itself! Dirty dishes. Laundry. Not having enough uninterrupted time and space. But I’m a big believer in not trying to have it all. Something has to give. Let the pile of dishes grow. Create and communicate personal and professional boundaries. But maybe water that dying plant because you really don’t need more guilt in your life. 

7. What trait do you most value in your editor (or agent)?
So many things to admire about Sunyoung Lee, my editor at Kaya, but above all is her commitment to understanding me as a writer before making a single edit. 

8. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
I don’t have just one reader who fits that bill, as everyone—including myself—has some biases and blind spots. For me, I value having a small, diverse group of readers. I can rely on my writing group to give me insightful, honest feedback, and to read as writers, but I also appreciate hearing from people who aren’t writers or editors and who tend to focus their feedback more on their emotional reactions to a piece of writing.

9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
I was recently on a short story panel moderated by Peg Alford Pursell, and we talked about how story writers are often admonished with the line that story collections don’t sell, and that story writing is perceived as merely a training ground for the more serious, grown-up business of writing a novel. So I’d love to see more investment in short story writers, especially those who offer rarely seen perspectives. More money, more representation, more exposure. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
When I was doing rewrites and my editor Sunyoung thought they didn’t work, it was invariably because she felt that the life depicted on the page felt fictitious rather than lived. I was crushed, of course, but I knew what she meant—I was approaching it more from an idea rather than from an emotional or sensory place. Robert Olen Butler pretty much says the same thing in his book From Where You Dream, which is full of helpful writing advice. You don’t have to agree with everything he says to get something useful out of it, and he doesn’t seem to expect you to. He basically invites you to do XYZ in this precise way, unless it doesn’t make sense for you—in which case, do the thing that makes sense!

Mimi Lok, author of Last of Her Name.

(Credit: Andria Lo)

Ten Questions for Adrienne Brodeur

by

Staff

10.15.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Adrienne Brodeur, whose memoir, Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me, is out today from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. When Brodeur was fourteen years old, her mother woke her in the middle of the night to confess she had kissed a close family friend. Brodeur describes the intoxicating effects of being chosen as her mother’s confidante—of protecting the secret for nearly a decade—without obscuring the costs of the affair that followed. Brodeur traces her own life as much as her mother’s, and uses the past to think carefully about how to move forward in her relationship with her own daughter. Leaning into the most difficult memories, Wild Game is a testament to the possibilities of writing and art as means to find personal clarity. The novelist Ruth Ozeki describes the memoir as a “courageous act of radical self-reflection and truth telling, Brodeur untangles karmic threads that bind families together across generations.” Over the course of her career in publishing, Adrienne Brodeur has been a writer, editor, and administrator. She is the author of the novel Man Camp (Random House, 2005); she was cofounder and editor in chief of Zoetrope: All Story and an editor at Harcourt. In 2013 she joined Aspen Woods, a literary arts nonprofit, where she currently serves as executive director. 

1. How long did it take you to write Wild Game
It took a lifetime to process and about two and a half years to write. With memoir, it’s less about the events of your past—the past is always there—and more about what you make of those events, your consciousness about them. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
The most challenging thing was getting my relationship with my mother right and avoiding depicting our relationship as black-and-white. I heeded the advice of Vivian Gornick, who wrote that “for the drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent.” That line was taped to my computer screen as I wrote Wild Game

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
When I’m in the thick of a project—which currently, I’m not—I write daily in my home office. I start at 5:00 AM with a cup of strong coffee and don’t stop until my son wakes up and comes in for a snuggle, usually around 7:00 AM.

4. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?
Early on, my agent told me that I should write my memoir like I was writing a novel, scene by scene. That guidance was revelatory. 

5. What are you reading right now? 
I’m listening to Toni Morrison narrate Beloved on Audible, which is an amazing way to experience the poetry of her writing, and I’m reading Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino, a lucid, bold and thought-provoking collection of essays. 

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
There are many. At the top of my list is Peter Rock, who writes one strange and beautiful novel after the next. 

7. How do you balance your day job with your writing?
I’m lucky to have a day job that I feel passionately about, as the executive director of Aspen Words, a literary nonprofit. I balance the two—if you can call it that—by compartmentalizing them. Typically, I’m finished writing long before my work day begins. I take a walk in between to shift gears, and then once I’m in work mode, I rarely look back. 

8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Wild Game, what would you say?
I would tell myself to stop worrying about what others might think and just go for it. I would remind myself that I need to write this memoir in order to own my own story, make peace with it, and move toward a brighter future. I would tell myself that it’s going to be challenging to reveal so much about my life, but it will also be cathartic and empowering. 

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
I have many trusted readers, each of whom offered unique and thoughtful perspectives on Wild Game, making it a better book. That said, I did have one unexpectedly amazing reader—a friend who is not part of the literary community—who gave me brilliant feedback as well as encouragement when I was stuck. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
Read like your work depends on it. It does.

 

 

Adrienne Brodeur, author of Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me.

(Credit: Julia Comes)

Ten Questions for Saeed Jones

by

Staff

10.8.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Saeed Jones, whose memoir, How We Fight For Our Lives, is out today from Simon & Schuster. Raised in Texas, Jones begins his story in Lewisville, Texas, where as a twelve-year-old boy he discovered his mother’s copy of James Baldwin’s Another Country. “Holding Another Country in my hands, I felt that the book was actually holding me,” he writes. “Sad, sexy, and reeking of jazz, the story had its arm around my waist.” Tracing his journey of finding and fighting for a life of his own—from Lewisville to Memphis and across the Atlantic and back again—Jones describes necessary distances and cleavings, but also pays tribute to home and particularly the love and labor of his single mother, who died in 2011. “Both love song and battle cry,” writes Jacqueline Woodson of the memoir. “Brilliant as fuck and, at times, heartbreaking as hell.” Saeed Jones is also the author of a poetry collection, Prelude to Bruise, winner of the 2015 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award and finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award and a Lambda Literary Award. A graduate of Kentucky University and Rutgers University in Newark, Jones currently lives in Columbus, Ohio. 

1. How long did it take you to write How We Fight for Our Lives?
The earliest iteration of the book was an essay about the most beautiful man I’ve ever kissed trying to kill me. I started writing it a few days after it happened in January 2008. I wrote what eventually became the first chapter of the book when I was in graduate school. I think I always knew this book was coming, one way or another. I started writing in earnest in 2011, sold the book on proposal in 2015, and finally finished it at some point last year. Now I find myself in the bizarre position of having to figure out who I am without this book’s writing process being a part of my daily life. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Because the book is about me, whenever I was struggling with a part of the book I’d begin to wonder if I was struggling because I don’t really know who I am. I thought that surely, if I knew who I was, writing about myself would’ve been easier. It was a vicious loop and very depressing. The process of writing a memoir can swallow you whole if you aren’t careful. I started therapy in 2017, which helped tremendously. I thank my therapist in the Acknowledgements for that reason. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
When I’m home in Columbus, I wake up around 8:00 AM, listen to a podcast while I drink coffee, and then write until I’m hungry around 11:00 AM or noon. I probably write five or six days a week. My desk is up against the window; there is a lot of light, which is important to me, and good views of shirtless men jogging up and down the street, which is also important to me.

4. What are you reading right now? 
I’m reading Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino. I keep highlighting every other paragraph and then reading what I’ve highlighted out loud. Experiencing her work with my eyes just isn’t enough; I want to hear it too. And this morning, I plucked Michael Lee’s chapbook Secondly, Finally from my shelf. The first poem is so good, it made me mad. Like, how dare you? That’s my version of a starred review. I’m excited to read his new book, The Only Worlds We Know

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
I will not rest until every person in America has read The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. She’s hardly an unknown writer, and that book, rightfully, has received a great deal of praise. But look at what’s going on in our country. Clearly every American hasn’t read it yet, which frankly is traitorous. 

6. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
I think it’s essential that we get more comfortable talking about money, contracts, and the business that enables our art to reach readers wherever they might be. The idea that it’s rude to talk candidly about book deals and contract negotiations serves the publishers very well but endangers writers, especially emerging writers. A healthy discourse about money would expose just how much publishing depends on the scam of white privilege, which is why gatekeepers work so hard to delay and derail the conversation. 

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? 
Honestly, what sticks with me the most is what my editor and agent didn’t say. They never said “Where is that damn book?!” or “Why is it taking so long?” My editor only gave me concrete deadlines when I would ask for them. They protected me and allowed me to do what I needed to do. I was so anxious about finishing the book but I couldn’t rush the process. A quickly written memoir is a memoir full of lies. At one point, I was at a literary gala and someone at my table made a joke—“Oh, so you’re the writer who is taking so long.” I cried when I got home that night. And even now I picture his face every time I’m within striking range of a punching bag. 

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
White people. 

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? 
My editor Jon Cox is, simply put, the most intelligent reader I’ve ever had the privilege of working with closely. I always marvel at the insight in his notes. He’s also incredibly handsome and nice. It’s very overwhelming. Anyway, I trust him with my writing almost as much as I trust myself. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
Rigoberto González helped me understand that my success as a writer would hinge on my success as a reader. I’ve translated that advice into a ratio. For every poem or page I write, I try to read three times as much work by other people. I don’t have a ledger or anything but you get the idea.

Saeed Jones, author of How We Fight For Our Lives.

Ten Questions for Kimberly Reyes

by

Staff

10.1.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Kimberly Reyes, whose debut poetry collection, Running to Stand Still, is out today from Omnidawn. Rich in literary and pop culture references, the voice of Running to Stand Still is both specific and wide-ranging. Quotations from artists as disparate as Frank Bidart and The Killers splice and introduce poems. In one section, Reyes repurposes screenshots of text messages; in another, partial strikethroughs enable multiple readings. Through this juxtaposing of different forms and language, Reyes weaves a deeply intimate portrait out of impossibly expansive themes: modern life, Black womanhood, family history, and technology. “The brilliance of these poems is their achievement of discomfit as they simultaneously travel distance and move inward,” writes Valerie Wallace. Kimberly Reyes is also the author of a poetry chapbook, Warning Coloration (dancing girl press, 2018), and a collection of essays, Life During Wartime (Fourteen Hills, 2018). Her poems have appeared in Columbia JournalCosmonauts Avenue, and New American Writing, among other publications. A second-generation New Yorker, Reyes is currently a Fulbright fellow studying Irish literature and film at University College Cork in Ireland.

1. How long did it take you to write Running to Stand Still
All in all, about five years. I didn’t know the collection would become a book as I was writing the early versions of the poems that appear in the first few sections. But those poems became the chapbook Warning Coloration. That’s when I really started to see a narrative that I knew I had to do justice to in book form.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Sitting with and then ultimately bypassing the fear of what others might think. The book is a lot about the external gaze, and it’s no secret (if you’ve read the book) that I’ve had a problem with prioritizing other people’s opinions about me over my own for a long time. It’s a tough habit to break.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
Honestly, not nearly enough. I’m in that loop of applying for fellowships, scholarships, and grants so that I can write, but then the next application cycle comes around and I need to be applying again instead of writing. I also might have some undiagnosed case of ADHD or maybe we are all just a bit frazzled with the state of the world today, but it’s not always easy to sit and focus. When I do find time to write, it’s like I’m back to myself. I’m back home. And that currently happens once a week or so. When I lived in San Francisco I lived in a heavenly cottage that had a half room with a loft and a big, garden-facing window so I would use that space as an office and write there. Now, as a Fulbright fellow in Cork, Ireland, I usually write upstairs in my bedroom, on my bed, using my nightstand as a desk, staring at the rain, and I feel just as productive.

4. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? 
It depends if it’s poetry or prose, but for poetry my dear friend Irène Mathieu. We were roommates as Callaloo fellows, and she’s just a brilliant writer and reader of poetry—honest, sharp, and hilarious. For prose I don’t send out anything of importance without first sending it to a friend I’ve known since junior high school, Rachel Sur. She pulls zero punches and that’s precisely what I need, especially because so much of my writing deals with sensitive subjects. The work has to be done honestly and correctly, and she definitely has my back as far as that’s concerned. Our thirty-year friendship means that she knows when I’m bullshitting before I even do.

5. What are you reading right now?
I just finished reading Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, and whew, no kidding. Whew. What an amazingly raw and honest and beautiful and insightful work. That’s the kind of book that helped me sit down for my weekly writing session and just have at it. It’s a call to art, so to speak. It’s an example of the kind of honesty and reflection that can heal us.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Oh man, how to even begin? I won’t point out anyone in particular. I’ll just say people outside of the MFA networking world. I love reading the slush-pile success stories.

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? 
I went through a round of edits with Rusty Morrison that was everything I wanted it to be. She started by saying: We can publish this manuscript as is now, that’s fine, it’s a good book, but let’s make it great. I loved that artistic faith and freedom.

8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Running to Stand Still, what would you say? 
Don’t work with people who don’t respect you or your art. Publication isn’t worth that sacrifice. You put too much blood on the page to have something in the world that doesn’t feel professional. I learned that lesson the hard way with the project right before this book. I will revisit that project and make it what it should be, but the time and energy that incarnation of it took away from me… I’m not sure it was worth it. Working with Omnidawn was healing and affirming and this book is my true firstborn.

9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
The networking, marketing machine. I talk about how socially awkward I can be all the time and I’m certainly not the only writer with that affliction and I just think the publishing community I know isn’t very tolerant of that. So many of our favorite writers were absolute recluses and we loved them for that, yet they wouldn’t be published nowadays. I like having my reclusive moments, and while it may not be good for my career it’s certainly good for my writing.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I think it was: Don’t read writers you don’t like. I can’t actually remember who said that but that sentiment was transformative for me because we are taught, especially in MFA culture, to slog through writing we don’t necessarily feel because it’s a good exercise in reading and expanding our horizons. But there’s way too much stuff out there to be moved by and to enjoy instead of wasting time with a backlog of books you loathe. It’s important to challenge yourself and to branch out, but life’s too short and there aren’t enough hours in the day for that kind of pain. 

 

Kimberly Reyes, author of Running to Stand Still.

Ten Questions for Maaza Mengiste

9.24.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Maaza Mengiste, whose novel The Shadow King is out today from W. W. Norton. At once intimate portrait and sweeping history, The Shadow King tells the story of Hirut, an orphaned servant who comes of age during the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. Travelling with the army led by the man she serves, Hirut, like the other women, is forbidden to fight. But as the war rages on and the emperor abandons the country into exile, Hirut helps disguise a villager in his likeness to inspire courage and becomes a warrior herself—the guard to the new “Shadow King.” Often shifting perspective to tell the stories of both Hirut and a cast of Ethiopian and Italian characters, Mengiste’s narration is unflinching, fair, and always complex. She speaks into silence, finding language for the trauma and courage—for the life—of a woman at war. “A beautiful and devastating work of women holding together a world ripping itself apart,” writes Marlon James. “They will slip into your dreams and overtake your memories.” Maaza Mengiste is the author of a previous novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze (W. W. Norton, 2010), which the Guardian named among the ten best contemporary African books. Her essays have also appeared in Granta, the Massachusetts Review, the New Yorker, and other publications. Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, she currently lives in New York City. 

1. How long did it take you to write The Shadow King
It took about nine years to write The Shadow King. I had no idea the challenges that awaited me! I thought that after writing one book, the next would be easier. It was completely the opposite.   

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
The hardest thing was figuring out how I wanted to tell this story of war. I knew the facts surrounding Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia. I knew the details of the subsequent war. I’d read the articles, seen the reels, and looked at the published photographs depicting both sides. I didn’t know how all of this would take shape in a novel though, and that was because I didn’t know what story I wanted to tell about this particular war. What I eventually came to understand, from looking at several varied accounts of this conflict, was that history was biased. History is a narrative created by human beings who are biased, and make mistakes. I began to look into the gaps and erasures, the silences left deliberately or in error, and see what emerged. I started moving away from official accounts and archives, and instead started going through personal journals, diaries, and photographs of those involved in this war. I started talking to descendants of those who fought in the war. I started to “read” photographs taken by Italian soldiers stationed in Ethiopia, setting the images on a historical timeline, and attempting to understand what was happening in the background, in that area, when the photo was shot. Incrementally, slowly, another history emerged. With that second history came a new voice: insistent, demanding to be heard, often contradictory of a narrative that one of the characters was trying to establish. I went with that and gave myself the freedom to develop a new structure, a new way of telling. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
I wrote this book at my desk, at many desks across several cities in New York and throughout the United States. I wrote this in different parts of Europe and in Ethiopia. I wrote at night after teaching and on weekends. I isolated myself for extended days and weeks and wrote. I wrote every day and, on those days when I had no time, I kept a small notebook for notes. I didn’t always feel like writing but I still made myself sit down and do it. I practiced discipline and worked towards inspiration.  

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process? 
That moment when you understand that the manuscript is now in other hands at your publisher’s office and they are going to read it for other ways to bring the story alive. For so many years, it had just been me and this book.   

5. What are you reading right now? 
I just finished Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte, which is fantastic. I’m reading Tishani Doshi’s beautiful and evocative Small Days and Nights, which comes out in January. I haven’t let Mona Eltahawy’s The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls out of my sight; it’s riveting and absolutely brilliant. And I am completely engrossed in Jaquira Díaz’s stunning memoir, Ordinary Girls. It’s breathtakingly good.  

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
The late Dasa Drndic, who is getting wider recognition now after her death, but should be read by many more. Her book Trieste is spectacular, as are her others. Emmanuel Iduma has been breaking new ground in art criticism, fiction, and nonfiction and doing so well. His work is incredible. Read A Stranger’s Pose.  

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?
When my very patient editor said, “Now I know why it took you so long to write this book.” It made all the years of frustration and fatigue and leaps of faith worth it.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
My human need for sleep. 

9. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started The Shadow King, what would you say?
Hang in there, kid. This is going to take a while but don’t give up. Be fearless.  

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
From the late Dasa Drndic, who said to me: “Fuck story.” She meant, forget what you think you want to say. Forget what you know. Look at form, find the voice, let it roam freely and follow it. It will tell you the narrative. 

 

Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King.

(Credit: Nina Subin)

Ten Questions for Anne Boyer

9.17.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Anne Boyer, whose memoir, The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care, is out today from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. In incisive prose, Boyer documents the diagnosis and treatment of her highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer and critiques how “the ideological regime of cancer”—as much as the malignant cells—determines the experience of illness. In the face of overtreatment, pharmaceutical greed, and the expectation of survivor heroism, Boyer turns to the long lineage of women writers examining illness with intellect and vulnerability for company: Kathy Acker, Eve Sedgwick, and Audre Lorde, to name a few. Boyer also articulates the possibilities for care in friendship—the present-day relationships that carried her through an otherwise compromised and corrupted social world. “Anne Boyer’s radically unsentimental account of cancer and the ‘carcinogenosphere’ obliterates cliché,” writes Ben Lerner. “By demonstrating how her utterly specific experience is also irreducibly social, she opens up new spaces for thinking and feeling together.” Anne Boyer is the recipient of a 2018 Whiting Award for poetry and nonfiction. She is the author of the essay collection A Handbook of Disappointed Fate and several poetry collections, including Garments Against Women, winner of the 2016 CLMP Firecracker Award. She was born and raised in Kansas and currently teaches creative writing at the Kansas City Art Institute. 

1. How long did it take you to write The Undying
The Undying took around four and a half years from first word to last edit. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Cancer was, including the devastating effects of its treatment, its disabling aftermath, and its crushing ideological and social weight, felt both individually and collectively. The diminishment of life under our present conditions makes cancer—around which all the other ordinary problems of life gather and heighten—almost too much to bear thinking about without collapsing in sadness or rage. It would have been easier to survive and turn away and try to forget. I had lost my strength and much of my capacity to think when I needed both the most, and I had to learn the humility of writing a difficult book while often weak, upset, and confused. But I had made a bargain with myself that if I lived, I would give a book of what I learned back to the world in return—an act of gratitude and sometimes vengeance—and I made it through. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
When everything is going okay, I like to write every morning on my sofa until around lunchtime, but in times when things are more stressful and erratic, I write whenever I can steal the time away from my paid work and my obligations to the people around me. When things are at their best and there are few demands on my time, I write from morning to night, and being able to write like that is my perfect day. 

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process? 
I marvel at all the production and post-production work, the teams of brilliant and devoted people required, not just the editors and agents and publicists, but everyone else, paid and unpaid: reviewers, booksellers, assistants, teachers, interns, event organizers, designers, warehouse workers, librarians, and the people who do the infrastructural and maintenance work of all the places devoted to literature, the people who deliver books, maintain databases, clean rooms, and the people who care for all the people doing all of the above. It comes together in a way that foregrounds the name of the writer, but every book on the shelf is there because of all of these efforts, and the efforts of everyone around the writer, too, and all the other writers and the people who helped them who came before, and the people involved with the social movements and struggles that made it possible for so many of us to write and publish. A single name on a book is a ruthless abridgement of the facts. 

5. What are you reading right now? 
Edith Grossman’s translation of Don Quixote, which is the perfect novel of middle age.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
Bhanu Kapil, Lisa Robertson, Verity Spott, Ryan Eckes, Precious Okoyomon, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, Wendy Trevino, Jackie Wang, Nat Raha, Diana Hamilton, and Nikki Wallschlaeger are all poets or poetry-allied writers making fantastic work right now. As far as nonfiction, I am eager to read a book by Chloe Watlington. Her recent piece in Commune Magazine was astonishing.

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?
Both of them have told me this in so many ways, which is why I work with them: Write what you need to and don’t worry about it being strange.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
Capitalism, which continues to devour the living world that we need as our home and to consume the hours of everyone’s lives for the profit of the very few, setting people against each other for the mere preservation of life and pressurizing gendered and racialized forms of oppression. There’s no writing without time, without air to breathe and potable water, without a body and earth that supports life, without each other. 

9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
Capitalism.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Clement of Alexandria: “To write all things in a book is to put a sword in the hands of a child.” 

 

Anne Boyer, author of The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care.

Ten Questions for Oliver Baez Bendorf

9.10.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Oliver Baez Bendorf, whose second poetry collection, Advantages of Being Evergreen, is published today by Cleveland State University Poetry Center. A vessel of both memories and dreams, Advantages of Being Evergreen documents and mends fractured relationships—between humans, between humans and nature—amid political and climate crises. “These are poems that never shy from the shocking violence and cruelty of the world,” writes Gabrielle Calvocoressi. “I don’t know when I’ve read a book that is so gentle and ferocious at the same time.” Oliver Baez Bendorf is the author of a previous poetry collection, The Spectral Wilderness, which Mark Doty selected for the 2013 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize at Kent State University Press. His poems have also appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, BOMB, and the anthology Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics. Bendorf is currently an assistant professor of poetry at Kalamazoo College in Michigan.

1. How long did it take you to write Advantages of Being Evergreen?
I’d say my whole life. Another way of putting it is that I sat down and wrote the poems over a three-year period. Then I revised my butt off during my fellowship year at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing (2017–2018). I’m grateful for that time, which made so much possible. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Nearly everything about writing a book is hard. The hope is that it’s harder, in some way, not to. But revision and letting go were the most challenging parts for me. I kept dragging my feet during the final round of line edits because I knew that once they were done the book would be out of my hands. Once I printed out the manuscript, though, and leaned into those “final moments” with each poem, that stage of the process became a blessing, and it felt good. I was also really grateful to have supportive and smart editorial help from my press, Cleveland State University Poetry Center. It seems to me that the interval between letting go of a manuscript and having a book “forthcoming” can invite all kinds of gremlins. All the fears, doing their dance.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write in a composition notebook as often as I can. I also have a typewriter, which is useful for moving things from my notebook onto a typewritten page without the endless distractions of the internet. These days, every Sunday by noon, I owe one hundred words to my e-mail writing group. Usually I write those at my desk in Michigan, looking out into the backyard, but I write them wherever I am on Sunday mornings. A few weeks ago I wrote them from my friend Alex’s house in Charlotte, North Carolina. 

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
That I could love the way the book looks and feels so much. I wanted a really beautiful tangible object for these poems and I’m so happy that I got it. 

5. What are you reading right now?
Too much news. I like to stay informed but there’s a saturation point where I have to back away. I read a bunch of books at the beginning of the summer, and wrote about some of them for Tarpaulin Sky. The new critical edition of The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions from Nightboat Books is incredible and life-giving. I’m starting to work my way through a stack of things for some updates to my fall syllabus. And I’ve been diving back into historical accounts and records of the Community of True Inspiration, which became the Amana Colonies in Iowa. My ancestors on my father’s side were part of that community and it’s been amazing to learn more about the history as an adult. 

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Rane Arroyo, 1954–2010. I only came to his work a few years ago myself, so I’ve been working to spread the word. He was a gay Puerto Rican poet and playwright who was raised in Chicago and lived and taught in Toledo for many years. His voice is so present, generous, warm, and full of joy even when incisive and unbearably sad. That’s such a queer combination to me—how wonder and play continue after loss. A lot of his work is in conversation with Emily Dickinson and Pablo Neruda, through direct address. Also, the preface he wrote to his The Buried Sea: New and Selected (2008) is one of the best writers’ statements I’ve ever read. 

7. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
I have a handful of close friends and mentors whose ways of looking at my work teach me how to see it more clearly for myself. Some of those people are poets but not all are. 

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
E-mail and fear of failure.

9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
I keep thinking there must be a better way to do Q&As after readings. Q&As sometimes feel like being back in grade school ducking dodgeballs. So many writers I know, and I’ll say that marginalized writers seem to bear the brunt of this, field oddball and careless comments and questions during Q&As. Often these seem to come from a belief that someone is entitled to more: more trauma, more background, more details, more emotional labor, just more. But to give a good reading, a writer has already given a lot. And these kinds of questions take without necessarily acknowledging what’s already been given. I think many would agree that it’d be absurd to expect a musician to do a Q&A after a live show, yet the Q&A after an author reading remains ubiquitous. Giving a good reading is hard work and it’s the live show. If people want more from a particular writer, I hope they will turn to the words that are on the page, to what’s been written: buy their book, then buy their other books. Read their work online; read interviews they’ve given. If someone wants to buy a book and ask a question as the writer signs it, that seems like a fair exchange, if they are respectful. I’m happy to talk about my work on my own terms, like in this interview, or when I’m visiting a class where students have read my work and prepared for a great conversation. If Q&As must continue, here are some ideas. For starters, never surprise writers with a Q&A after a reading—always ask in advance. They’re not neutral, innocuous, or easy for all. I recently read some other ideas that I thought were great as far as reforming the Q&A. The first: to take a very short break after the reading ends and before the Q&A starts, so that people don’t ask questions just to release steam or break the silence. Another was to have people write down the question they plan to ask, and turn to the person next to them to ask for feedback on whether the question is decent and respectful. That might sound ridiculous, but a little peer review goes a long way. I personally don’t mind the notorious “question that is actually a comment,” because it gives a break from having my brain picked, which is a grotesque image and also how it often feels. I love giving readings and I love meeting readers. So how can we have the most humane connections and treat each other with care? 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
So much of the writing advice that’s changed things for me came from my teacher, Lynda Barry. Here’s one: “Don’t forget to start it all by writing by hand. Your hand! It’s right there!” 

Oliver Baez Bendorf, author of Advantages of Being Evergreen.

(Credit: Faylita Hicks)

Ten Questions for Jillian Weise

9.3.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Jillian Weise, whose poetry collection Cyborg Detective is out today by BOA Editions. The poems in Weise’s third collection investigate and challenge the ways in which nondisabled writers have appropriated disabled bodies. “Populated with a variety of voices that speak with a sort of sly candor that can only be prompted by the most intimate inquiries, this book is a true ventriloquist act,” writes Cate Marvin. “With a thrilling lack of remorse, Weise targets the mundane viciousness of everday hypocrisy like a heat-seeking missile.” Jillian Weise is the author of two previous poetry collections, The Amputee’s Guide to Sex, which was reissued in a tenth anniversary edition by Soft Skull Press in 2017, and The Book of Goodbyes (BOA Editions, 2013), which won the 2013 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and the 2013 Isabella Gardner Award from BOA Editions, as well as the speculative novel, The Colony (Soft Skull Press, 2010). She hosts a series of online videos satirizing literary ableism under the persona Tipsy Tullivan.

1. How long did it take you to write Cyborg Detective?
I’m still writing it. One of the poems in the book, “Attack List,” continues on Twitter. Since I am an actual cyborg—and not a tryborg who writes about or with machines while stuck in the ontological position of pure human—I make cyborg poems. What is a cyborg poem? I don’t know yet. It’s certainly not Fluxus, not Flarf: Those are tryborg poems. Maybe it’s a poem that jumps from page to screen and never ends. Or a poem that hacks the DNA of the short story “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver. Or a poem that glitches on Dickinson’s #745 (“Renunciation—is a piercing Virtue”). Or a poem that renounces esteemed keywords. Those are all poems in the book. But I lay no claim to defining the genre. We cyborgs are just getting started.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I internalize a lot of static from nondisabled writers and nondisabled literary conventions. When I’m writing or making, sometimes the static interrupts: This is gimmick. This is trick. This is too mean. Too much. Here’s another interruption that, for years, I believed: The writer’s ability or disability is irrelevant to art. So I had to uninstall all that and trust my crip and queer instincts.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Tonight, in my office, I figured out how to place the poem “Confession” at Dateline NBC, the New Yorker, True Crime Daily, Variety, VICE News, W Magazine, and WIRED all at once. I’m into guerrilla practices and code-as-accommodation and getting in sideways. It is not very different than daily life for us disabled writers. We often get into a building—whether restaurant or reading—through a side door or a back alley.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Peter Conners, publisher of BOA Editions, accepted the manuscript a while ago and said something like, “Now that you have the security of the contract, go and write whatever you want and make whatever you want.” It gave me an unexpected jolt toward new forms.

5. What are you reading right now?
I just finished an article titled “Algorithmic Disability Discrimination” by Mason Marks and it is bleak, so what else? I loved “Possibilities in Cyborg (Cripborg) Bodies” by Mallory Kay Nelson, Ashley Shew, and Bethany Stevens. I’m in the middle of Sophie Collins’s Who Is Mary Sue? The poems are brilliant.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
I cannot name only one. If I could revise The Norton Anthology of Poetry, it would include the openly disabled poets Hazel Hall, Josephine Miles, Larry Eigner, June Jordan, Pat Parker, Laura Hershey, and Constance Merritt. Then I’d ask the poets Raymond Antrobus, John Lee Clark and Meg Day to confirm that it’s basically a Hearing anthology. Norton has just published About Us: Essays From the NYT Disability Series, expertly edited by Peter Catapano and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. I should add that I’m biased; I’m in the anthology. So I imagine Norton is already remedying the erasure of disabled and Deaf writers in their other anthologies.

7. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
The answer to this question is top secret.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I have this recurring fantasy that I’m born disabled five hundred years from now on a comet with tons of disabled people and we all have healthcare and none of us has to set up a GoFundMe and we all write poems and none of us has to explain plastic straws to anyone. Sometimes the discourse on disability infringes on my imagination. The discourse includes things like the plastic straw debate, the latest book by a mother-of, father-of, thief-of disabled person and all the ableist devotion to diagnosing Trump with a mental illness. There are far more fascinating conversations we could be having on disability. For the most part, we are not having those conversations in the public sphere. 

9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
The publishing industry should allocate 50 percent of its budget to finding and soliciting and publishing and promoting books by disabled and Deaf and neurodivergent writers until the moment when our books reach equity with all their books about us. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I return over and over to this passage—“I didn’t know it could be done. I had never seen it done. I had, in fact, been told it couldn’t be done”—from Julia Alvarez’s “On Finding a Latino Voice.”

Jillian Weise, author of Cyborg Detective.

Ten Questions for Crystal Hana Kim

8.27.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Crystal Hana Kim, whose novel, If You Leave Me, is out in paperback today from William Morrow. This intergenerational saga is set in motion when sixteen-year-old Haemi Lee, forced to flee with her mother and brother to a refugee camp in Busan, South Korea, in 1951, decides to find a husband in order to ensure the safety of her family. Her decision to marry Jisoo despite her feelings for his cousin Kyunghwan, has repercussions that are felt generations later. If You Leave Me was named a best book of 2018 by the Washington Post, ALA Booklist, Cosmopolitan, and others. It was also longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Kim’s work has been published in Elle Magazine, the Paris Review, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and an MSEd from Hunter College. She is a Teach For America alum and has taught elementary school, high school, and collegiate writing. She is a contributing editor at Apogee Journal.

1. How long did it take you to write If You Leave Me
When I began my MFA studies in 2011, I started experimenting with different voices and perspectives. This is when I created the main characters Haemi, Solee, Kyunghwan, Jisoo, and Hyunki. At that point, I didn’t think I could write a novel yet; there was too much to learn. An interconnected short story collection sounded more attainable, so that’s the form I decided on. But in 2014, in my last semester of the MFA, my teacher Ben Metcalf convinced me to tear the collection apart and create a novel about the first generation of characters. I think it took me until early 2016 to finish the book. Then I had to find an agent, and then of course an editor, so my novel didn’t come out until August 2018. I’ve learned that writing is not for the impatient.   

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Maintaining the confidence to continue. In graduate school, I received constant feedback and encouragement about my work. But in the years after, without the structure of school, I felt as if I was in a free fall. There were days and weeks when I wasn’t sure if my writing was good enough—and by extension, if I was good enough. Self-doubt is always the most challenging for writers, isn’t it? All the research I had to do for the book is a close second though.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
My writing schedule fluctuates wildly depending on what my sources of income are at the moment. Right now, I’m transitioning from working in the nonprofit space to freelancing and teaching, which is less stable but also allows for more writing time. I like to write at home at my desk. I take lots of notes by hand but write the actual manuscript on my laptop. Sometimes I listen to binaural beats or ocean waves. Sometimes I just put in headphones and listen to nothing. I often use the Freedom app to block out the internet because I am compulsive about checking e-mail. 

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process? 
The nerves! Everyone told me publishing is a terrifying process, but I’m not an anxious person so I thought I’d be fine. I was wrong. If You Leave Me is fictional, but I still felt so vulnerable and tender, as if a layer of my skin had been peeled off. 

This sounds naïve, but another unexpected thing was hearing from so many different types of readers. As a debut author without a lot of prior publications, I honestly wondered who would read my book. But then I heard from Korean Americans, immigrants from other countries, war veterans, and mothers who had experienced postpartum depression. The variety of responses was overwhelming in the best way. 

5. What are you reading right now? 
A Pale View of the Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro. It’s eerie and haunting. I’m worried I’ll get nightmares. The next book on my list is the short story anthology Everyday People, edited by Jennifer Baker. 

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
I love Mercè Rodoreda’s work. She was a prolific Catalan author. I’d recommend starting with The Time of the Doves. I also love the Library of Korean Literature’s translated books. I recently discovered Seo Hajin’s short story collection A Good Family. Each of her stories explores the meaning of family and the secrets we keep from each other in stark, slightly strange, intelligent prose.  

7. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
This is a tough question because there’s no right answer. The MFA is what you make of it. You’ll be provided with time, community, and feedback. Hopefully, you’ll also learn to read more widely, to think critically, to teach in a collegiate setting, and form lasting friendships with other writers. But the actually writing, which is the most important part, is up to you. I will say that I always tell my students that it’s not worth going into debt over an MFA.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
Money and time, which are, of course, related. 

9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
We need more diversity across the spectrum, meaning in terms of race, sexuality, gender, class, nationality, ability. This needs to happen behind the scenes in the publishing world, too. I’m seeing more diverse writers—particularly in the YA world—but I don’t think there’s been as much change in editors, publicists, heads of publishing, etc. Also, we should do away with blurbs. Asking for blurbs is the worst. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
I’ve been thinking about Toni Morrison a lot these days and I recently found this quote via Jamel Brinkley. Here’s what Toni said about character, which is helping me as I draft my second novel: “All the characters in my book, whether they are successful or not, they’re all pushed into that place where all the definitions of themselves are suspicious…. The circumstances have to be invented so that the characters…have to simply be stripped down, and made very lean, so that you can see who you are.” 

One more piece of advice, from James Baldwin, which I have taped above my desk: “You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone.” 

Crystal Hana Kim, author of If You Leave Me.

Ten Questions for Jonathan Vatner

8.20.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Jonathan Vatner, whose debut novel, Carnegie Hill, is out today from Thomas Dunne Books. Ushering the reader inside the world of New York City’s wealthy elite—the upper-crust denizens of Carnegie Hill, to be exact, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan—Vatner constructs a narrative web of deception and secrecy through which Penelope “Pepper” Bradford, who is having second thoughts about her financier fiancé, is forced to navigate. “You won’t envy these people for a second but you’ll have a great time watching them undo and fix themselves,” writes Joan Silber. Jonathan Vatner is an award-winning journalist who has written for The New York TimesO, The Oprah MagazinePoets & Writers Magazine; and many other publications. He has an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College and a BA in cognitive neuroscience from Harvard University. He lives in Yonkers, New York, with his husband and cats.

1. How long did it take you to write Carnegie Hill?
I started writing it in the summer of 2013 as linked stories that all took place in the same apartment building on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I finished a draft in January of 2015. Some of my readers told me it wasn’t working either as short stories or as a novel, so I spent another year making it more novel-like, stretching a few plots throughout the book. I signed with my agent in early 2016, and we had trouble selling it—true agony!—so before he sent it out again, I spent another eight months reworking it. We sold the book in early 2017, and I spent another year revising it with my editors at St. Martin’s. I think I finally stopped tinkering with it in September of 2018. So, five years.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I struggled a lot with character likability. I’ve long bristled at this demand placed on writers: It’s not enough to make characters lifelike; readers have to like them too! The truth is, though, I’ve put down plenty of books because I hated the characters so much I stopped caring what happened to them.

In Carnegie Hill, a lot of characters were acting out and didn’t know why—their blindness turned off readers. I worked really hard at not softening the most shocking scenes but instead preparing the reader with backstory and context. And then placing those characters in situations where they could be their best selves.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I wrote most of Carnegie Hill in two places: after hours at my job, and on weekends on my couch. Maybe six or seven times I carved out a week for a residency, either something I applied to or a friend’s house or a little vacation with my writing group.

Last year, however, I moved to Yonkers from New York City, and I ride a commuter train forty minutes each way to work. That’s when I write. Having to come to the page twice a day for short bursts gets me writing very fast; there’s very little wasted time. I’ve never been so productive in my life.

4. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
A legion of readers shaped Carnegie Hill in important ways…it’s very humbling to accept that I could not have written this book on my own. Of everyone who read it, I think I trusted my husband’s feedback more than anyone else’s. He’s very psychologically attuned, and he understood what I was trying to do, so I took his advice on how to get there. Another reader I trust in a different way is my friend Phil, who is also not a professional writer and who always reads my chapters first from a place of pure appreciation. Knowing that the work has value from the outset helps me weather the criticisms that inevitably follow.

5. What are you reading right now?
I’m halfway through a bunch of books. On audio I’m listening to Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips, which is such a sophisticated and complex novel I can’t believe it’s her first—and I can feel the gut punch waiting for me at the end. I’m loving Very Nice by Marcy Dermansky—it’s like eating candy that happens to satisfy all your nutritional needs. On my nightstand I have two excellent books of poems by LGBTQ poets, Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith and High Ground Coward by Alicia Mountain. And on a completely different note, I’m reading an advance copy of my friend Christy Harrison’s Anti-Diet—it makes you realize just how pervasive and unnecessary dieting is. When it comes out in December, I think it’s going to change the national conversation about diet culture.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
At AWP a few years back I picked up a pocket-size book, published by A Strange Object, called Misadventure by Nicholas Grider. It’s a collection of intricately crafted and mysterious short stories about bondage. I found the craft of those stories and their subject matter deeply compelling, and I think about them all the time.

Also: A truly legendary professor at Sarah Lawrence, David Hollander, published a novel straight out of grad school and, because it didn’t sell through the advance, he had trouble finding another publisher willing to take a risk on him. And his writing is virtuosic and funny and surprising, like a David Foster Wallace or a Stanley Elkin. Almost twenty years later, his second novel, Anthropica, is coming out next spring from a new imprint called Dead Rabbits. I am mightily looking forward to it.

7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business? 
The thing that seems scariest to me is the likelihood that if you’re with a major publisher and you don’t have success right out of the gate, you won’t get another book deal. I recognize that there are lots of fantastic independent presses—and self-publishing, to boot—but the financial prospects of those routes are generally unsustainable. Not only does the specter of commercial failure keep me up at night, the idea that one book could end a career implies that all of an author’s output over an entire career is basically interchangeable, that an author is what people buy, rather than a book.

8. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
I was thrilled with the program at Sarah Lawrence College from beginning to end. It helped me take myself seriously as a novelist and an artist, it connected me with other serious writers who are publishing great work, and it sparked a growth trajectory in my craft that has continued to this day. It also greased the wheels of the publishing process: My fellow alumna, novelist Christine Reilly, recommended me to her agent, and my professors wrote bighearted blurbs to help promote my novel.

One reason the MFA was the right choice for me, I think, was that I was eight years out of college, and I’d had time to: A) get some life experience, and B) crave school again. I wouldn’t recommend the MFA to people who don’t know for sure that they want to be writers; there were some of these people in my program, and I watched them struggle. I think one would get more insight into questions of career by working in a few different industries.

9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Having to make a living! But I also think that if I didn’t have a job—at least a few days a week—I wouldn’t know how to fill my days, and I’d be depressed.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
It came from my thesis advisor at Sarah Lawrence, Brian Morton: Don’t be subtle. After hearing that advice, I began noticing that even in classic literature, authors make their points explicitly, again and again. Obviously there are times when subtlety is called for, and readers usually appreciate the challenge of connecting a few dots. But for the most part, I’ve found success by telling readers what I want them to know.

Jonathan Vatner, author of the novel Carnegie Hill.

(Credit: Smiljana Peros)

Ten Questions for Karen Skolfield

8.13.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Karen Skolfield, whose second poetry collection, Battle Dress, is published today by W. W. Norton. In Battle Dress, Skolfield, a U.S. Army veteran, offers a fierce yet intimate glimpse of a soldier’s training, mental conditioning, and combat preparation as well as a searing examination of the long-term repercussions of war and how they become embedded in our language and psyche. “A terrific and sometimes terrifying collection—morally complex, rhythmic, tough-minded, and original,” writes Rosanna Warren, who chose the book as winner of the 2018 Barnard Women Poets Prize. Karen Skolfield is the author of a previous poetry collection, Frost in the Low Areas. She teaches writing to engineers at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

1. How long did it take you to write the poems in Battle Dress?
Most were written in the five years after my first book came out. A handful were written in grad school, not long after I finished my second enlistment. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Staying on topic. I’ve never had to do that before with poetry, and it meant I had both short-term and long-term goals in the writing stage. It was the difference between writing a poem I cared about and writing a book I cared about. Then, after Battle Dress was accepted, it was hard to go back to writing poems that were not about the military. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I get a ton of writing done at residencies. Battle Dress—plus many other non-military poems I snuck in—would not exist without my residencies at Ucross, Hedgebrook, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Vermont Studio Center. But I can’t go away all the time, so I do at least one “30 poems in 30 days” per year with friends, plus I write on an irregular basis the rest of the year. If I hadn’t already been discharged from the Army (honorably discharged, thank you very much) I am sure they would kick me out now for my lack of discipline and my deep love of 8:00 AM wake-ups. I remain in awe of writers who manage a regular writing life. You write at 5:00 every morning? Whoa, I bow in your direction.

4. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
I have three readers I lean on heavily: Brandon Amico, Kristin Bock, and Janet Bowdan, all poets. They see really different things and react in their own ways to my work: Brandon is over the moon when I write anything, but when it gets down to editing he pulls no punches. Kristin believes in my work before I ever do and convinces me that good things will come; she’s excellent at seeing the possibilities in poem intensity and ordering. Janet very kindly stomps on my poems and then offers ideas on how to rebuild them. 

5. What are you reading right now?
I’m finishing Brandon Courtney’s This, Sisyphus from YesYes Books. Courtney is a poet and a Navy veteran and I’m in absolute awe of his lyricism and musical ear. It’s a book I’m both enjoying and learning from in terms of craft and how to build a book, how to make a collection of poems work together.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Janet Mock. She’s well known to adult readers, but her books should be required reading for middle- and high-school students everywhere. Redefining Realness is taught at my son’s high school and I am sure it has changed—and saved—lives. 

7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Battle Dress, what would you say? 
I’d go back a ways and ask the seventeen-year-old, newly enlisted me to take notes, please, lots of them. I’d ask kindly, because I know what’s coming and she’s just so young. Battle Dress is invented, but it relies heavily on my seven years in the Army, and I’d love a better account of my enlistment than the pitch and yaw of memory, the few letters I managed to save. 

8. What trait do you most value in a poetry editor? 
As a poet, I largely take for granted how talented and efficient poetry editors are. What gets me in the gut is how kind they invariably are even as, I am sure, they are overworked. I’ve received the nicest comments and editing from literary journals—George David Clark and Cate Lycurgus from 32 Poems, and Don Bogen at The Cincinnati Review are recent examples in my world, but there have been so many others. Poets Rosanna Warren and Nancy Eimers, the judges who chose my two books for publication, wrote such nice notes and gave such thoughtful editing suggestions that I had to pause multiple times while reading. 

Similarly, Jill Bialosky and Drew Weitman at Norton and the folks at Barnard College have taken great care and thoughtfully passed along all the congratulations and comments they’ve received about my book. You know, poet here, starving for praise, and they weren’t required to take the time out of their work days, but they did, and it means a lot. And when I got the style sheet and copy editing queries from Norton I got teary. Having top copy editors see and consider not just the drive of the poems but the structure, make sure every comma and capitalization was correct, was deeply touching. I was stunned—something I wrote had earned that level of care. 

9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Myself. The world is both really fun and really demanding and it’s hard to look away. Lately I can add some physical difficulties to this—neck, spine—that severely limit my time at the keyboard, but that just comes back to me, doesn’t it? 

Wait. Everyone says this, don’t they? (Checks last zillion answers on the P&W website.) Yeah, pretty much. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all just give ourselves up? Think of all the writing we’d get done! 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
It’s necessary to write terrible lines, awful drafts, half-hearted poems. Write ten in a row if needed. Throw pencils, get mad, take a walk. Swear off poetry, read a chapter of a post-apocalyptic novel, wash the dishes. Feel better? Back to writing. Repeat as necessary. 

For some reason, this is advice I need to hear again and again.  Every poem I write is either my delight or torment, a feather or a lash. But I don’t know how to be less invested, even in my poems that sound nonchalant to a reader.

Karen Skolfield, author of the poetry collection Battle Dress.

(Credit: Michael Medeiros)

Ten Questions for Jess Row

8.6.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Jess Row, whose essay collection White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination is out today from Graywolf Press. In essays exploring race in the imaginative life of Americans, from the end of the civil rights era to the present, Row ties the movement of white Americans into segregated communities, such as suburbs and gentrified neighborhoods, to white writers setting their stories in isolated or “emotionally insulated” landscapes. In close readings of work by Don DeLillo, Annie Dillard, Richard Ford, and David Foster Wallace, he illustrates how these and other writers have cleared imaginitive space for themselves at the expense of engaging with race. Jess Row is the author of the novel Your Face in Mine and the story collections The Train to Lo Wu and Nobody Ever Gets Lost. White Flights is his first book of nonfiction. One of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists of 2007, he lives in New York and teaches at the College of New Jersey.

1. How long did it take you to write the essays in White Flights?
Quite a while! I began writing essays about race and American fiction back around the time I started writing my novel Your Face in Mine, which takes us all the way back to 2010. I published the essay that contained the kernel of the book’s argument, “White Flights,” in the Boston Review in 2013. But honestly most of the writing took place after I signed up with Graywolf in the spring of 2015. I’d say at least 80 percent of the book was written in a focused way between 2015 and 2018.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Because whiteness is a vast and amorphous subject—because it largely exists without being talked about, identified, or even noticed—the biggest challenge was narrowing down what I wanted to say and which writers I wanted to engage with. There are so many white writers whose work could have been part of this project—Annie Proulx, Ann Beattie, and then of course many postwar writers like Cheever and Malamud and Updike and Bellow, all of whom play a part in the construction of American literary whiteness and what might be called the “white sensibility.” But I couldn’t do it all.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Whenever I can. My kids are nine and twelve, and much of my life revolves around them, of course; I have a full time academic job at the College of New Jersey, which involves a long commute from my home in New York, so my writing time has to be very carefully carved out and protected. I try to dedicate whole working days to writing, at best three (but usually two) days a week during the academic year. I would not have been able to finish this book without a Guggenheim grant, which allowed me to take off a whole year from teaching—the first time I’ve done that since I started working full time in 2001. I also was invited to be a visiting professor at NYU in 2016 to 2017, which meant I didn’t have to travel to work, and I wrote a lot of the book then as well.

4. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
My wife, Sonya, absolutely. She’s very honest, and almost always right, although we’ll argue forever about what goes into that “almost.”

5. What are you reading right now?
I read a lot of books at once, and I only read books on paper, which may explain why I’m nursing a shoulder injury this summer! Books are heavy. Among other things I’m reading Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, her dystopian novel about climate change and the collapse of the U.S. state, which I’ve honestly been afraid to read until now—and for good reason. It’s astonishingly, horrifyingly accurate for a novel written in 1993. I’m also reading Uwe Johnson’s mammoth novel Anniversaries, which was translated just recently for the first time from German and published by NYRB Classics last year. It’s in some ways very similar to the novel I’m working on now, The New Earth, in that Johnson was trying to capture the feeling of New York at a chaotic and terrible moment, 1969, and I’m doing a version of the same thing (not just in New York, but rooted in New York) in 2018.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
For years my standard answer to this question was James Baldwin, whose Another Country is probably the single most important American novel of them all, in my humble opinion—but Baldwin has now received a share of his long-overdue recognition. So I’ll say Henry Dumas, another great writer of the 1960s who was killed by the police in New York in 1968. His collected works, Echo Tree, is a book everyone should own.

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?
Fiona McCrae, who acquired the book at Graywolf, and I had a lot of conversations in the early stages about the role of anger and antagonism in literary criticism. Some of the essays I originally published in magazines that went into the first draft of White Flights were, for lack of a better word, snarky. Intentionally so. She was concerned that the book be as thoughtful and exploratory as it could possibly be, and she didn’t want anything I wrote to be perceived as a cheap shot. As I got further into the project, it became clear to me that she was entirely right, not because anger isn’t a necessary part of criticism, but because, in my view, the anger has to be directed at the structural forces that make racism work (and the political leaders who consciously and intentionally make use of those forces). In most cases—not all—the white writers I talk about in White Flights aren’t intentionally racist; in many cases they’re trying hard not to be racist, but in simply telling stories the way they want to tell them, they’re exposing the structure and formation of a racist culture (and, unfortunately, sometimes perpetuating it.) Which is something I have done too. I’m as implicated in this as anyone.

8. How do you balance your day job with your writing?
Writers are artists, which means that (in my experience, anyway) we have to work hard to protect our creative time, our imaginations, in the midst of all the other parts of our lives—not just work but family, bills, laundry, taxes, car repairs, and so on. For me it’s all about creating psychic, emotional boundaries, so that I have time to feel free and unencumbered while I’m working, no matter what else is going on. That’s a real struggle, of course. I don’t really believe in balance; I believe in trying to sustain a feeling of wholeness, which means, in large part, taking care of other things you need to do so that you can feel free in your work, and also realizing that success in your career is only one part of a larger whole, which involves paying attention to your physical health, your relationships, your children and partner, your religious practice, your financial obligations, and so on.

9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I have many fewer impediments to my writing life than most writers, god knows! The impediments I do have are mostly emotional, and are shared by just about every writer I’ve ever met: self-doubt, envy and the constant urge to compare oneself with others, anxiety about success, fear of not finding the right material, or not doing right by your material, fear of cultural irrelevance, wanting more readers, worries about the changing nature of publishing (and whether publishing will exist in any recognizable form twenty or thirty years from now). And on top of all of that, in the present moment, wondering whether any kind of art can address the crises of racist nationalism and environmental collapse in our time.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Neither of these are pieces of writing advice, but they’re two of the most meaningful things I’ve ever encountered about making art. First, from Liz Phair, in the context of a song in which she’s addressing a romantic partner: “Everything you say is so obnoxious, funny, true, and mean.” That’s more of a credo for my fiction than my nonfiction, because I don’t want to be mean, particularly in the context of a book like White Flights, but I would like to be true, obnoxious (in the sense of pointing out the obvious) and at least a little bit funny. The second, from Peter Tosh: “Live clean, and let your works be seen.” That’s a life motto that can interpreted many ways, and some will find it vague and useless, but I’ve tried to live by it in my own way since I first heard it in high school.

Jess Row, author of the essay collection White Flights.

(Credit: Sarah Shatz)

Ten Questions for Sarah Elaine Smith

7.30.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Sarah Elaine Smith, whose novel, Marilou Is Everywhere, is out today from Riverhead Books. Cindy, the fourteen-year-old narrator of Smith’s debut novel, lives alone with her two older brothers in rural Pennsylvania, deprived of adult supervision and a consistent source of healthy food. “[M]y brothers and I had turned basically feral since our mother had gone off for a number of months and we were living free, according to our own ideas and customs,” she says. When her living situation becomes untenable, Cindy escapes her own family’s poverty by assuming the identity of Jude Vanderjohn, a glamorous teen who has gone missing from an affluent, cultured home. Author Julie Buntin calls Marilou Is Everywhere “a haunting novel about craving escape so badly you’re willing to erase yourself.” Sarah Elaine Smith holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an MFA in poetry from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas in Austin.

1. How long did it take you to write Marilou Is Everywhere?
About three years. I wrote each draft over three months, then let it sit unwatched for three months. I don’t know why, but that cycle and length of time made sense to me.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
It took me forever to find an ending that felt true to the characters. I wanted desperately to write a sexier ending, and by “sexier” I mean more bleak. I wanted to punish Cindy for what she did, and my trusted readers very rightly reflected that it seemed a little harsh, some of the places where I had her ending up. It was humbling to surrender my own idea of myself as a merciless artiste and write that most gauche of all things, a happy ending. Which is not to say that the ending is without some bleakness, some consequences.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Usually I write fiction at home because the refreshments are cheap—and also because I can’t shake some performative posture when I’m writing my made-up people in a public place. I will go out to get other kinds of work done—e-mails, essays, lesson plans—because it helpfully breaks up my day. I’m a full-time writer, so I could easily go an entire day without speaking a single word to another human. My cat, Nellie Belle, on the other hand, does hear frequent words from me. I try to engineer grocery trips and errands and coffee dates so I don’t get too cooped up and wild-eyed. I typically write every day and I try to do it as early in the morning as possible, because everything I do after that feels like it’s just fun.

4. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
My future self, I’m afraid. There are a lot of brilliant readers in my life, but I usually take their feedback as a mirror of what’s currently on the page rather than a set of directives I should follow to improve the book. 

My current self, however, is a really terrible and mean reader of my work, and I don’t trust her at all. She usually throws all the worst critiques at me while I’m working on something new. She would be really happy if I never wrote anything again, unless it emerged pure and perfect on the first try. My future self on the other hand, is usually delighted by the hidden energy and animus in whatever I wrote before.

5. What are you reading right now?
I’ve been diving back into Larry Levis, one of my absolute favorite poets, someone whose work I’ve had in my ear for a long time. I love that he uses plain language to get at the wildly mobile emptiness of the world, all the ways he describes that silence. I’m someone who has always seen a great deal of emptiness inside the ordinary, and I don’t mean that as a dramatic emotional statement, or not merely as a dramatic emotional statement, anyway. But when he writes, “There are two worlds,” I know exactly. It feels like home to me. And I think there’s also a tremendous comedy that rides alongside that emptiness, like the line “I still had two friends, but they were trees.” I take great comfort in his work. It feels like comfort to me, to recognize myself in how someone else sees the world.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Well, Larry Levis for one! Although he’s no secret among poets, but very few poets are secrets among poets anyway. 

The fact that there are no movies based on Octavia Butler’s work is a shock to me.

7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Marilou Is Everywhere, what would you say? 
I would say: I love you, babe. You’re going to have to be a different person to write the end of this book, but that’s a good thing. Whenever one thing doesn’t work out, it’s only because something better is going to take its place.

8. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? 
Why not? But only if it doesn’t cost money or incur debt. Debt is the last thing writers need, and the least helpful aid to actual real-life writing. And to me, that should be the goal of getting an MFA: to find your way into a life of writing, not just a job or book contract. I found my time at MFA programs to be intense, fun, and instructive in lots of noncurricular ways. It’s popular to bash them as style factories where your edges get sanded down, but it’s been my experience that any group of readers, whether in a formal setting or not, will collectively steer you toward the expected. I think it’s important to keep your own heart’s guidance at the front, no matter who’s reading your stuff.

In truth, I think MFAs are effective because they put you in the orbit of people who do what you want to do. You see people who were like you in some way finishing their books, selling their books, and it makes it feel a little more possible that you can do it too. Not to knock any of the other amazing things, like genius peers—who make stellar friends, too—or brilliant teachers, and not to obscure the tremendous privilege that comes with being in a program where agents visit and actually want to read your work. Those things are real, absolutely. But I mention the mirror effect because I don’t hear people talk about it as often, and because it’s not exclusive to MFAs. Anyone can find writers who come from where they come from, or lived some of the same experiences, and those examples have expanded me at least as much as anything I’ve learned in a classroom.

9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Self-doubt, shitty little rules I’ve made up for myself, jealousy, ego. I don’t want to even claim those qualities as part of myself, but it’s true. To cope with those things, I’ve made up a lot of tricks for myself. For example: I think about the ways that Procter & Gamble or whatever makes money off my self-doubt. That usually shifts my determination. Nobody benefits from my fear except the people who want to sell me Lean Pockets and compulsory femininity—and fuck those people. They’re not going to get that dollar, not today!

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I’ve got two. From Terrance Hayes, in an interview from jubilat, I think, paraphrased: If you’re blocked, it just means that there’s some invisible rule you’re afraid of breaking. So figure out what the rule is, and break it. 

And from the playwright Sherry Kramer, paraphrased yet again, because this came from cocktail party chatter, if you can believe it. But it goes something like: People always want to write something strange or surprising, and they think they have to go somewhere out there to find it. But nothing is stranger than the moment you’re in. If you begin in this moment and tell what’s happening with all the clarity you can, it will be stranger than anything you can imagine.  

Sarah Elaine Smith, author of the novel Marilou Is Everywhere.

(Credit: Jason Kirker)

Ten Questions for Jana Prikryl

7.23.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Jana Prikryl, whose poetry collection No Matter is out today from Tim Duggan Books. Called “one of the most original voices of her generation” by critic James Wood, Prikryl follows up her acclaimed debut, The After Party (Tim Duggan Books, 2016), with a collection of sonnets, free verse, and invented forms rooted in themes of loss, self-reliance, and redemption, pivoting from love poems to elegies for a fraught culture worth saving. Born in Czechoslovakia, Prikryl fled to Austria with her family when she was five; a year later she moved to Canada and, in 2016, a few months before the presidential election, she became a U.S. citizen. Prikryl’s poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, the Paris Review, and the New York Review of Books, where she is a senior editor and the poetry editor.

1. How long did it take you to write the poems in No Matter?
Nine months, plus a few years—nine months was the length of my fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, where I had an amazing five days a week to write in 2017 and 2018. That’s where most of the book was written. But I’d started a number of the poems in 2015, as soon as I’d handed in The After Party, my first book. And a couple are slightly revised from things I rediscovered in decades-old notebooks. And I kept writing, at a trickle, for a few months after I returned to New York last summer. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Tolerating myself on the page during my first few months at Radcliffe. I’d never before had such a stretch of time for writing, and it was a tremendous gift that produced the intensity and cohesion of the book, but it was agony to be thrust into daily contact with my first drafts. I had to plow through them to reach the lines that felt charged in some way, and develop those. That started to happen about a third of the way through the fellowship, and then things got interesting. But the first few months my spouse had to put up with much groaning when I came home from “the office” every night.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Anywhere, when some unexpected words occur to me, if I can. I work full-time as an editor, and my son is a toddler, and my husband is an artist who takes care of our boy much of the week, so on weekends I am parenting while my husband works. Some days I can focus on the subway, during my commute, and tap things into my phone.

4. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
I don’t exactly have one—it depends on what I’ve written and what I fear its weaknesses are. My spouse, Colin Gee, is a performing artist and a very sensitive and voracious reader, and if something is just not true he will hear it. My oldest friend, Jé Wilson, is a fiction writer who knows everything about me, has read everything ever written, and delivers very sound judgments. I have a handful of good friends who are brilliant and sophisticated readers too, and sometimes I send things to one of them. But I also feel that no one can really help me with poems, as opposed to essays. Each one is like a trial I get to undergo alone.

5. What are you reading right now?
Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work, Ivone Margulies’s Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday, and Robert Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematograph, among other things.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
The very great essayist Louise Glück.

7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started the first poems in No Matter, what would you say?
I am tempted to reply: Don’t worry so much about how dark and angry the book is becoming. But crucial to writing the book was the panic I started feeling about halfway through because of its darkness and anger—I wouldn’t want to have avoided reckoning with the book’s tone or meaning. In fact, if I could go back I’d tell myself to get to the gym every day, take advantage of the ridiculously convenient Harvard pool—I’m a swimmer—while you have the chance. Live a little. But then, I wouldn’t have wanted to live more and write less, etc.

8. How do you balance your day job with your writing?
I don’t think I do at the moment! Before I had a child I tried to devote evenings and weekends to writing, but it was always a stretch to write on weeknights. I work best in the mornings and I find it much easier to get started if I know I have all day to noodle around. 

9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Some depressing joint custody between my full-time job and the lack of subsidized childcare in this country. I’m lucky to have an intellectually stimulating job that I care about. But writing something good demands time, just sitting with it and staring and rewriting, and this kind of time is a luxury most working parents do not have.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Read widely.

Jana Prikryl, author of No Matter.

(Credit: Willy Somma)

Ten Questions for Courtney Maum

7.16.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Courtney Maum, whose novel Costalegre is published today by Tin House Books. The story of fourteen-year-old Lara, whose mother, the quixotic American heiress Leonora Calaway, has brought her and a group of surrealist artists to an isolated compound in Costalegre, on the coast of Mexico, in 1937, Costalegre is a portrait of a young girl looking for someone to love her. Inspired by the relationship between Peggy Guggenheim and her daughter, Pegeen, the novel is, as Samantha Hunt wrote in her prepublication praise, “as heady, delirious, and heartbreaking as a young girl just beginning to fall in love with the world.” Courtney Maum is also the author of the novels Touch (Putnam, 2017) and I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You (Touchstone, 2014); the chapbook Notes From Mexico (Cupboard Pamphlet, 2012); and the handbook Before and After the Book Deal, forthcoming from Catapult. Her writing has been widely published in such outlets as BuzzFeed; the New York Times; O, the Oprah Magazine; and Modern Loss. She is the founder of the Cabins, a learning collaborative in Norfolk, Connecticut.

1. How long did it take you to write Costalegre?
It was a two-part process. I researched for the better part of a year, and I had a very specific way in which I “digested” my research. I’d transcribe notes into a journal, and when it was full, I would yellow-highlight the most salient facts, and then those would go into a new journal, and from that journal, I would do the yellow-highlighting filtration thing again. Rinse and repeat until I put all of my favorite facts onto a giant piece of sturdy watercolor paper. By that point, I’d basically memorized the stand-out events that I wanted to use, so when I sat down to write the book, I was able to do so very quickly, as if I was writing a diary of events I’d actually lived; of dreams that I’d had. I had a first draft completed in a month. Things changed in revision, of course, but it’s probably the first time in my career that my first draft so closely resembles the finished one. Usually my first draft is just a blueprint of what is to come, and most of the text in that draft doesn’t survive the revision process.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
You know, I have to say that I enjoyed absolutely everything about writing Costalegre. I enjoyed the research, I adored the writing process, and I had a really good experience editing it with Masie Cochran at Tin House. I think the hardest part of writing this particular book was knowing that it would have to transition from this private, curious thing into a “product” that the public would find out about, would not find out about. Would buy, would not buy. This is my third novel, so I’ve learned by now that you can’t plan or “expect” anything in publishing. Plus, I work in marketing and branding on the side, so it’s extra challenging for me to turn off the part of my brain that understands market forces, book sales, public relations, and all that. Definitely the most challenging thing was to not think about the commercial viability of this project so that I could write the book I needed to write.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write my best at home, alone, in silence. I have a nice desk in my bedroom with a lovely view of our yard. That is where I write best. I have a Draconian schedule that has worked well for me over the years. I front load my week: Mondays and Tuesdays are for my writing, only. Other writing—blurbs, book reviews, essays, my marketing and branding work—I tackle that on the other days. I find I’m less resentful about replying to e-mails and whatnot if I’ve given my own writing everything I’ve got in the beginning of the week.

If I have a good week and feel confident about where I am in terms of my writing, I sometimes take Fridays off, and that’s when I’ll do out-of-the-house errands and other domestic stuff that I’ve been avoiding. I try not to work on the weekends, ever. I find that I function best when I’m excited to get back to the writing. If you force yourself to the desk when you’re not feeling it, creative writing feels like a slog. Listen, it can’t feel magical every day, of course, but writing does have the potential to be an act of joy.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process? 
Well, I suppose the most unexpected thing is how different every book publication feels. There really isn’t a magic formula. You can have a book that “got all the things” in terms of media, and it still doesn’t sell for some reason; or you can have a sleeper book that suddenly becomes a cult hit. This is a generalization, but I do feel that many publishers still believe in the existence of that “magic formula.” Maybe the formula existed at some point, but today, with three novels behind me and a nonfiction book on the way, I’ve come to believe that your book’s fate is actually in the hand of readers. There has to be something about your book that makes people want to disappear inside the story. You can’t manufacture that kind of alchemy. It’s out of your control. This can be hard for writers to accept.

5. What are you reading right now?
I’m currently reading a galley of Cameron Dezen Hammon’s This Is My Body. I’m trying to work on an experimental memoir about female desire and reproductive psychology, so I’m finding Cameron’s memoir about her various religious and romantic obsessions really interesting to read. The idea of religious faith—of having it versus not having it—is much on my mind as my five-year-old starts to ask me big questions about life and death and purpose and all that. I grew up without a religion and I often question if I am doing a disservice to my daughter by not presenting her with some religious options. Can this be outsourced? Is there like a religion catering service that will come to your house and present a smorgasbord of all the different options? A religious tasting flight of sorts? Hit me up if there is, I’d like to know about it.

6. Who do you trust to be the first reader of your work?
Myself? (I’m laughing here.) For better or for worse, I’m not the writer who has a circle of trusted writer friends who I workshop new writing with. I didn’t go through an MFA program, and I’ve lived for well over a decade in a really rural area, so I think that I’d been DIY-ing the writing thing for so long, when I finally did grow a writing community that I trusted—and still trust—I’d come to rely so heavily on myself that I just kept doing it. This being said, I think I’m a good reader of my own work. I’m very savage with myself in terms of edits. So I’m my own first reader. When I feel ready for outside criticism and feedback, the manuscript goes to my agent and my husband at the same time.

7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing Costalegre, what would you say?
Oh, that “me” wouldn’t have listened to anything that the “hindsight” me would have to say! Pre-Costalegre me was hell-bent on writing Costalegre, in secret, in a very specific way. I just would have brought that version of me some water and a bowl of mixed nuts and let her do her thing.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
I find it really challenging—especially now that I am a mother—to toggle between the feral, creative, striving version of myself and the version that has to set a behavioral example for my daughter, plan for the meals that we’ll be eating and all that. It’s not just the parenthood thing, though. I’m a very hard worker. I love to work intensely. Left to my own devices, I would hole up in my house and write for five days straight and live on Miso soup and cheese. But my husband is very French, very civilized. He works from home as well and wants me to eat lunch with him and for us both to chat about our days. I find that incredibly difficult to do on work days. This pushing and pulling. I don’t want to “chat,” I want to be alone with the narrative problems in my head and a soft-boiled egg and the work. That’s just on work days though. I’m less of a wildebeest on the weekends.

9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
Well, I have an entire book coming out on this topic called Before and After the Book Deal: A writer’s guide to finishing, publishing, promoting and surviving your first book so “longer letter later” as we used to say. For starters though, I think that publishers should provide their authors with some version of health insurance and compensation for talk therapy.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
“If you have a cliché in your writing, put a funny hat on it and make it dance around.” Alexander Chee said that in a writers workshop that I took with him a long while ago. I’ve never let it go.

Courtney Maum, author of the novel Costalegre.

(Credit: Colin Lane)

Ten Questions for Helen Phillips

7.9.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Helen Phillips, whose novel The Need is out today from Simon & Schuster. The Need is an existential thriller about Molly, a scientist and mother of two young children. When a masked intruder appears in her home and demonstrates an eerie familiarity with the inner workings of her life, Molly falls down a mind-bending rabbit hole. A paleobotanist who has recently uncovered an array of peculiar artifacts at her fossil quarry, Molly eventually learns the true identity of the intruder, forcing her to confront an almost impossible moral decision with far-reaching repercussions for her children. Helen Phillips is the author of the story collections Some Possible Solutions (Henry Holt, 2016), which received the 2017 John Gardner Fiction Book Award, and And Yet They Were Happy (Leapfrog Press, 2011); the novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat (Henry Holt, 2015), a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and the children’s adventure book Here Where the Sunbeams Are Green (Delacorte Press, 2012). A graduate of Yale and the Brooklyn College MFA program, she is an associate professor at Brooklyn College. Born and raised in Colorado, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband, artist Adam Douglas Thompson, and their children.

1. How long did it take you to write The Need
I began the long, chaotic document of notes that would grow into The Need in February of 2015, and I handed the final draft in to my editor in September of 2018. But the urgency to write a book about motherhood arose in me in the summer of 2012, when my daughter was born and my sister died, though it took me some years to approach the material. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
The most challenging thing about writing the book was the emotional task of trying to evoke grief on the page. I shied away from that pain in the first draft. When I went back in to revise, it required me to go on an emotional journey. I have never before written something where the primary challenge was not one of craft or character or structure but rather of emotion. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
During the semester, when I’m teaching at Brooklyn College, I typically write one hour a day, five days a week, sometimes in my shared office on campus and sometimes at home. I put on a timer and protect that hour. The moment the timer rings, I’m off to teach or to prepare for class. 

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Simon & Schuster sent me on a pre-publication tour to meet with independent booksellers at Winter Institute in Albuquerque, and in Seattle, the Bay Area, Boston, and New York. It was fascinating to meet indie booksellers from across the country. For one thing, indie booksellers are (unsurprisingly) a very smart, funny, and thoughtful group. And I was surprised and excited by the positivity they seem to feel about the industry overall—they are selling a good number of books, hosting a lot of events, playing a central role in their communities. 

5. What are you reading right now? 
I recently finished Mira Jacob’s Good Talk and Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School, both of which I loved. I’m currently reading Darcey Steinke’s riveting Flash Count Diary. Next up is Rumaan Alam’s That Kind of Mother. And my book tour reads will include Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive, Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias, and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
The Swedish writer Karin Tidbeck, whose novel Amatka is an exquisitely written evocation of a dystopian society where everything that isn’t properly labeled with a name-tag turns to sludge. One of my favorite books in recent years.  

7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing The Need, what would you say?
Don’t be scared of the tension and grief that has to be present in this book.  

8. What has changed about your writing process over the years, since writing your first book? 
When I wrote my first published book, And Yet They Were Happy, as well as three other long-since-thrown-away novels before it, I had a lot more time to write. I had an administrative job and was teaching night classes, but still I could fit in three to four hours of writing time before going to work. When I became a mother, my daily writing time shifted from four hours per day to one hour per day. But it’s a quality-over-quantity thing, or so I tell myself; now I shove the energy of four hours into my single hour. 

9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
The biggest impediment to my writing life is also the biggest inspiration for my writing life: my children. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
I always go to Samuel Beckett’s “Fail again. Fail better.” And, Toni Morrison’s “A failure is just information.” Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about Isak Dinesen’s “I write a little every day, without hope, without despair.” 

Helen Phillips, author of The Need.

Ten Questions for Caite Dolan-Leach

7.2.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Caite Dolan-Leach, whose novel We Went to the Woods is out today from Random House. Certain that society is on the verge of economic and environmental collapse, five millennials flee to Upstate New York to transform an abandoned farm, once the site of a turn-of-the-century socialist commune, into a utopian compound called Homestead. What starts out as an idyllic sanctuary, however, soon turns dark, deeply isolating, and deadly. Caite Dolan-Leach is a writer and literary translator. She was born in the Finger Lakes region of New York and is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin and the American University in Paris. Her first novel, Dead Letters, was published by Random House in 2017.

1. How long did it take you to write We Went to the Woods
I worked on it for about two and a half years.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
I started the book before the 2016 elections, and my feelings about the characters and their sense of political doom really changed—I had to take a moment to reconsider what they were trying to do and their motivations for doing it. It definitely slowed me down.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
I travel a bit, so the “where” tends to be a variable: sometimes my desk at home, sometimes a café in a different country, sometimes a hotel room. But I work best in the mid-morning, and I try to write at least four days a week.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process? 
This is my second book with Random House, so there weren’t too many surprises. But I’m always struck—and deeply grateful—at how many people are involved in a book’s life, and how much time and effort goes into the publication process. As a young reader, I don’t think I imagined the dozens of people who contribute to just one manuscript, and as a writer, it’s simply amazing.

5. What are you reading right now? 
I just got back from Italy, so I’ve been reading some Italian novels: Sabbia nera by Christina Scalia, and L’amica geniale by Elena Ferrante—I read the English translation a few years ago, but I’ve missed working in Italian, so I’m re-immersing.

6. Who do you trust to be the first reader of your work? 
My husband is always the first person who sets eyes on anything I write.

7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing We Went to the Woods, what would say? 
Don’t do an outline! I did a pretty detailed outline for this book, and I think it changed how I approached the process, and ultimately made it harder.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
Myself. 

9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
I think it’s pretty obvious that we need to be more inclusive as a community. But since I also work as a translator, I’d specifically like to see more books coming from other languages—particularly under-represented ones.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I can’t remember who said it to me, but it’s a truism that I deploy often: Don’t be precious about your writing. By which I mean: Let people read your work, and listen to what they say about it. Obviously, you shouldn’t share until you’re ready, but I think fearing criticism or worrying that people might dislike your work gets in the way of what you really want to write.

Caite Dolin-Leach, author of We Went to the Woods.

(Credit: Dominique Cabrelli)

Ten Questions for Peter Orner

7.2.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Peter Orner, whose story collection Maggie & Other Stories is out today from Little, Brown. Forty-four interlocking stories—some as short as a few paragraphs, none longer than twenty pages—are paired with a novella, “Walt Kaplan Is Broke,” that together form a composite portrait of life so intricately drawn, line by line, strand by strand, that it shimmers with the heaviness and lightness of the human experience. As Yiyun Li wrote in her prepublication praise, “This book, exquisitely written, is as necessary and expansive as life.” Peter Orner is the author of two novels, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo and Love and Shame and Love, and two story collections, Esther Stories and Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge. His latest book, Am I Alone Here?, a memoir, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Orner’s fiction and nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly, Granta, the Paris Review, McSweeney’s, the Southern Review, and many other publications. 

1. How long did it take you to write Maggie Brown & Others?
Hard to say. Stories come slow and I try not to force them. One, “An Ineffectual Tribute to Len” I began in 1999. Many of the others I carried around for years before I managed to put them right, or sort of right. The novella took about ten years. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
For me the stories in a collection should be both disparate and—somehow—cohesive. Cohesive isn’t the right word. They should talk to each other, I guess is what I’m trying to say. And I like for stories to talk to each other across generations, across geography. So they can’t all be speaking in the same voice, and yet, like I say, they’re communicating, or at least trying to. This takes years and a lot of fiddling, in the sense of fiddling as tinkering—and fiddling as in fiddling around, riffing, etc. (I flunked violin, but I still have aspirations.) 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Whenever I’m not reading, and I read all the time. I squeeze some of my own stuff inbetween. Mornings are the best when my head is a little less cluttered. 

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Though this is my sixth book, I take nothing for granted. When the book comes in the mail I’m still astonished by the physicality of it. For days I walk around with it, sleep with it. It’s weird. I wish I wasn’t serious.  

5. What are you reading right now? 
The poetry of Ada Limón.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
Randal Kenan, author of Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, a seminal story collection published in the early ’90s. 

7. Do you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
It’s like asking, “So, should I marry this guy?” Well, I dunno. Is he kind? How about the snoring? If the question is, does a writer need an MFA? No. Can it help to be surrounded by other neurotics who love literature? Sometimes. Sure. Doesn’t make it any less lonely though, which as it should be. 

8. What has changed about your writing process over the years, since writing your first book? 
If anything, I feel less confident than ever I’m going to be able to make a story work. Back around the time of Esther Stories I remember days when I felt I could make a story out of anything. I was kidding myself, but sometimes kidding yourself tricks you into working harder. 

9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
Myself, myself, myself.  

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
My old teacher and friend Andre Dubus would often say: “You got to walk around with it. Walk around with it. You’ll get it.” He meant, in a sense, that sometimes you got to get up and leave the story, walk around, live a little—and when you least expect it, there’s your ending. 

Peter Orner, author of Maggie Brown & Other Stories.

(Credit: Pawel Kruk)

Ten Questions for Chanelle Benz

6.25.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Chanelle Benz, whose novel The Gone Dead is out today from Ecco. As the novel opens, Billie James returns to the shack she inherited from her father, a renowned Black poet who died unexpectedly when Billie was four years old, in the Mississippi Delta. As she encounters the locals, including the McGees, a family whose history is entangled with hers, she finds out that she herself went missing the day her father died. The mystery intensifies as “the narrator and narrative tug at Mississippi’s past and future with equal force,” Kiese Laymon writes. Chanelle Benz has published short stories in Guernica, Granta, Electric Literature, the American Reader, Fence, and the Cupboard. She is the recipient of an O. Henry Prize. Her story collection The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead was published in 2017 by Ecco Press and was named a Best Book of 2017 by the San Francisco Chronicle. It was also longlisted for the 2018 PEN/Robert Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and the 2017 Story Prize. It won the 2018 Sergio Troncoso Award for Best First Fiction and the Philosophical Society of Texas 2018 Book Award for fiction. She lives in Memphis, where she teaches at Rhodes College.

1. How long did it take you to write The Gone Dead
About five years, though some of that time I was also working on finishing my story collection.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Getting the voice of the main protagonist right. I tried different points of view, dialing it up and down, but it wasn’t until I shifted my attention to developing the voices of the characters around her that she finally came into relief.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
I write in bed, at the dining room table, and occasionally in my actual office. When I’m on a deadline, I try to dedicate some hours late morning/early afternoon, or every other day if I’m teaching. I also write at night if need be—I have a small child so I can’t afford to be particular. But I’ve always tried to be flexible because I came up in the theatre which demands you come onstage whenever and however you may be feeling.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process? 
That some readers see the book as a thriller or mystery, which I’m totally comfortable with, but it was unexpected. I felt that I was structuring the novel the only way it could work. But then so many of the stories I am drawn to are mysteries, whether existential, psychological, or the more classic murder mystery.

5. What are you reading right now? 
Casey Cep’s The Furious Hours and Daisy Johnston’s Everything Under.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
Jennifer Clement’s work is so fantastic, so luminous, so cutting that I don’t understand why she’s not wildly famous.

7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing The Gone Dead, what would say? 
Don’t be careful; definitely not in the first draft. I was so worried when I began the book about doing the time and its people justice that for quite a while I didn’t let my imagination take the lead, which can happen when grappling with the dark side of history.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
Student loan debt.

9. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
Yes, as long as it doesn’t put them in debt. I found that the time and space to write was an incredible, powerful gift.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
That’s impossible for me to narrow down! But I often think of something the theatre director and theorist Jerzy Grotowski said: “Whenever the ground shakes beneath your feet, go back to your roots.” (I may be paraphrasing there.) I interpret this as whenever you fail or meet with rejection or some experience that saps your heart, that you remember why you started writing, what you fell in love with reading, whatever it was that first inspired you.

Chanelle Benz, author of the novel The Gone Dead.

(Credit: Kim Newmoney)

Ten Questions for Catherine Chung

6.18.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Catherine Chung, whose second novel, The Tenth Muse, is out today from Ecco. Growing up with a Chinese mother (who eventually abandons the family) and an American father who served in World War II (but refuses to discuss the past), the novel’s protagonist, Katherine, finds comfort and beauty in the way mathematics brings meaning and order to chaos. As an adult she embarks on a quest to solve the Riemann hypothesis, the greatest unsolved mathematical problem of her time, and turns to a theorem that may hold the answer to an even greater question: Who is she? Catherine Chung is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a Director’s Visitorship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Her first novel, Forgotten Country, was a Booklist, Bookpage, and San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2012. She has published work in the New York Times, the Rumpus, and Granta, and is a fiction editor at Guernica. She lives in New York City.

1. How long did it take you to write The Tenth Muse?
From when I first had the idea to when I turned in the first draft, it took about five years, with many starts and stops in between.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
My mind! My mind is the biggest challenge in everything I do. I write to try to set myself free, and then find myself snagged on my own limitations. It’s maddening and absurd and so, so humbling. With this book, it was a tie between trying to learn the math I was writing about—which I should have seen coming—and having to confront certain habits of mind I didn’t even know I had. I found myself constantly reining my narrator in, even though I meant for her to be fierce and brilliant and strong. She’s a braver person than me, and I had to really fight my impulse to hold her back, to let her barrel ahead with her own convictions and decisions, despite my own hesitations and fears. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write where I can, when I can. I’ve written in bathtubs of hotel rooms so as not to wake my companions, I’ve written on napkins in restaurants, I’ve written on my phone on the train, sitting under a tree or on a rock, and on my own arm in a pinch. I’ve walked down streets repeating lines to myself when I’ve been caught without a pen or my phone. I’ve also written on my laptop or in a notebook at cafes and in libraries or in bed or at my dining table. As to how often I write, it depends on childcare, what I’m working on, on deadlines, on life!

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
I wish it didn’t turn me into a crazy person, but it does. A pleasant surprise is just how kind so many people have been—withdrawing from the real world to write can be very isolating; it was lovely to emerge and be reminded of the community I write to be a part of.

5. What are you reading right now?
Right now I’m reading Honeyfish—an absolutely gorgeous collection of poetry by Lauren Alleyne, and the wonderful The Weil Conjectures—forthcoming!—about the siblings Simone and Andre Weil, by Karen Olsson. I’m in love with Christine H. Lee’s column Backyard Politics, which is about urban farming, family, trauma, love, resilience, growth—basically everything I care about. It’s been a very good few year of reading for me! I’m obsessed with Ali Smith and devoured her latest, Spring. I thought Women Talking by Miriam Toews and Trust Exercise by Susan Choi were both extraordinary. Helen Oyeyemi is one of my absolute favorites, and Gingerbread was pure brilliance and spicy delight. Jean Kwok’s recent release, Searching for Sylvie Lee, is a stunner; Mary Beth Keane’s Ask Again, Yes broke me with its tenderness and humanity; and Tea Obreht’s forthcoming Inland is magnificent. It took my breath away.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Ali Smith and Tove Jansson are both widely recognized, especially in their home countries—but I feel like they should be more widely read here than they are. I didn’t discover Smith until last year, and when I did it was like a hundred doors opening in my mind at once: She’s so playful and wise, she seems to know everything and can bring together ideas that seem completely unrelated until she connects them in surprising and beautiful ways, and her work is filled with such warmth and good humor. And Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book is so delicious, so sharp and clean and clear with the purity and wildness of nature and childhood. Ko Un is a Korean poet who’s well known in Korea, but not here—he’s incredible, his poems changed my idea of what poetry is and what it can do. I routinely e-mail his poems to people, just so they know. Bae Suah and Eun Heekyung are Korean fiction writers I admire—I really like reading work in translation because the conventions of storytelling are different everywhere, and I love being reminded of that, and being shown the ways my ideas of story can be exploded. Also, how Rita Zoey Chin’s memoir Let the Tornado Come isn’t a movie or TV show yet, I don’t know. Same with Dan Sheehan’s novel Restless Souls and Vaddey Ratner’s devastating In The Shadow of the Banyan. And Samantha Harvey is a beautiful, thoughtful, revelatory writer who I’m surprised isn’t more widely read in the States.

7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing The Tenth Muse, what would say?
I’d say, “Hey, I know you’re worried about things like finishing and selling this book, and also health insurance and finding a job and not ending up on the street, and all that will more or less work out, but more pressingly, here I am from the future, freaking out because apparently I’ve figured out time travel and also either bypassed or am creating various temporal paradoxes by visiting you now. Clearly we have bigger issues than this book you’re working on or the current moment you’re in, so can you take a moment to help me figure some things out? Like how should I now divide my time between the present and the past? Am I obligated to try to change the outcome of various historical events? Should I visit the distant, distant past before there were people? Should I visit the immediate future? Do I even want to know what happens next and if I do will I become obsessed with trying to edit my life and history in the way that I edit my stories? Help!”

8. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
I don’t see it as a one-size-fits-all situation—I think sure, why not, if it’s fully funded and you feel like you’re getting something out of it. Otherwise, no. The key is to protect your own writing and trust your gut as far as what you want and need.

9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My mind, always my mind! Related: self-doubt, self-censorship, and shame.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Back in my twenties, when I was writing my first book, I was eating breakfast at the MacDowell Colony, and this older writer asked me where he could find my published work. I said nowhere. I had an essay coming out in a journal soon, but that was it. He was astonished that I’d been let in and made a big production out of my never having published before, offering to read my forthcoming essay and give me a grade on it. It was weird, but it also sort of bounced off me. Anyway, there was a British poet sitting next to me at that breakfast named Susan Wicks, and some days later, as I was going to fetch some wood (it was winter, we all had our own fireplaces and wood delivered to our porches—have I mentioned MacDowell is paradise?) I opened the side door to my porch, and a little letter fluttered to the ground. It was dated the day of the breakfast, and it was from Susan Wicks. It said: Dear Cathy, I was so angry at the conversation that happened at breakfast! If you are here, it is because you deserve to be here. And you should know there is nothing more precious than this moment of anonymity when no one is watching you. You will never have this freedom again. Enjoy it. Have fun! And have a nice day! And then she drew a smiley face and signed her name. Susan Wicks. I think of her and that advice and her kindness all the time.

Catherine Chung, author of The Tenth Muse.

(Credit: David Noles)

Ten Questions for Mona Awad

6.11.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Mona Awad, whose new novel, Bunny, is published today by Viking. A riveting exploration of female relationships, desire, and the creative and destructive power of the imagination, Bunny is the story of Samantha Heather Mackey, an outsider in the MFA program at New England’s Warren University, a scholarship student who prefers the company of her own dark imagination. Repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort, who call one another “Bunny,” Samantha is nevertheless intrigued when she receives an invitation to the group’s fabled “Smut Salon” and she begins a descent into the Bunny cult and their ritualistic off-campus workshop, where the edges of reality start to blur. Mona Awad is the award-winning author of 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. The recipient of an MFA in fiction from Brown University and a PhD in English and creative writing from the University of Denver, she has published work in Time, VICE, Electric Literature, McSweeney’s, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. 

1. How long did it take you to write Bunny?
Two years. Three months to write the first draft and then a year and a half of revision

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Not giving up on it. I had a blast writing the first draft of Bunny and just let myself take risks and go down rabbit holes, but in the revision, I had to really reign it in and flesh it out. That took time. It didn’t help that every time I described the novel to someone, I burst out laughing because the story sounded so crazy to me. And then I’d panic. I’d think: what I’m writing is clearly insane. Pushing through that and continuing to embrace the madness of it was scary. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
When I’m working on a book, I try to write every morning for at least a few hours. I work in bed, at my desk or in the Writer’s Room of Boston. I’m pretty rigid about it, just because it really does help build momentum with the story and the voice to work on a story every day. Once I feel I’m emotionally inside the world of the story, I begin to work at night too. Towards the end, I work whenever I possibly can. 

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Just how much people are interested in reality when we’re talking about fiction, in which parts of the story actually literally happened to you (the author). In some ways, I get it. Fiction is a reflection/refraction of reality, in some ways fiction is the ultimate form of memoir so it makes sense for people to be curious about how much of the writer’s actual life is mirrored in the story, but to me the most exciting things are always the things I make up. In my view, that’s the most telling stuff in the novel, not the stuff that literally maps to something that literally happened. 

5. What are you reading right now?
Right now, I’m reading Tea Mutonji’s Shut Up, You’re Pretty and John Waters’s Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder. I’m enjoying them both immensely. 

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Russell Hoban. I love the way he weaves the magical into the everyday and I love the way he writes loneliness. The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz is a brilliant work of fabulist fiction, but it’s also a real meditation on the bond between a father and a son, and the desire for and cost of personal freedom. Turtle Diary is wonderful too. It’s just about two lonely people who decide to free a turtle at the London Zoo, but the characters are handled with such empathy, nuance and depth. 

7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing Bunny, what would say?
Trust yourself more. 

8. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
Depends on the writer, the program and the project. I was very fortunate. My MFA was fully funded and when I started it, I was already halfway finished with my first novel, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, which I completed there and turned into my MFA thesis. There was also a writer on the faculty, Brian Evenson, whom I admired deeply and was very keen to work with. So I knew exactly what I planned to do while I was there, I just needed time and space to work, and some guidance and encouragement from a community I could trust. I was also older—in my thirties—when I did it. So although I had lots of growing to do as a writer, I’d already found my voice, knew what I was going to work on and I’d lived a little. I think all of those factors contributed to why it was such a successful experience for me. It might not be the right thing for someone else and I don’t believe that you need it to write.

9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Me. My own insecurities and impatience and shortcomings that show up when I write. Also my difficulty getting a routine going. My best work comes out of a sustained, daily practice of writing and sometimes that isn’t possible.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Write the shitty first draft. A finished story is better than a perfect story that just lives in your mind. And be curious. So much can come of being willing to shut up and pay close attention to the world around you. 

Mona Awad, author of Bunny.

Ten Questions for Nicole Dennis-Benn

6.4.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Nicole Dennis-Benn, whose second novel, Patsy, is out today from Liveright, an imprint of W. W. Norton. The novel tells the story of two women, Patsy and her daughter, Tru. After leaving behind Tru for a life she’s always wanted in New York, Patsy ends up working as a nanny caring for wealthy children while Tru rebuilds a faltering relationship with her father back in Jamaica. Jumping back and forth between narratives in New York and Jamaica, Dennis-Benn has created “a stunningly powerful intergenerational novel,” as Alexander Chee writes, “about the price—the ransom really—women must pay to choose themselves, their lives, their value, their humanity.” Nicole Dennis-Benn is the author of Here Comes the Sun, a New York Times Notable Book and winner of the Lambda Literary Award. Born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, she teaches at Princeton and lives with her wife in Brooklyn, New York.

1. How long did it take you to write Patsy?
For me, the process begins way before I put pen to paper. Patsy was conceived in the fall of 2012, when I started as an adjunct at the College of Staten Island. I was writing Here Comes the Sun at the time, but would scribble notes about my early morning travel on the subway and the Staten Island Ferry while commuting with other immigrants going to their various jobs. I began to wonder about these peoples’ lives—what versions of themselves they brought to America and what they left behind in their countries of origin. Here they were in America, hustling to get to their jobs on time, their heads bowed underneath vacation ads displaying white sand beaches in places some once called home. Struck by this irony, I began to write. The character of Patsy came to me and refused to leave, even through the publication of my first novel and well after. So, this book has been with me for seven years.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Writing the story of a woman, a mother who defies cultural and societal norms by abandoning her daughter in her quest for personal freedom, and by choosing to love the way she wants to love with her childhood best friend, Cicely. It took me some time to get comfortable with that angle of the story, but I realized early on that I couldn’t judge Patsy the way other people might. I had to be open to telling her story and portraying her as authentically as possible, knowing that there are women who grapple with this very same dilemma—feeling forced into motherhood by societal pressures, unable to live up to the high standards of the maternal role. Patsy didn’t have the opportunity to explore her own identity before becoming a mother. Her greatest desire is to find her place in the world, trying to define herself in a world that already defines her. Once I started to listen to that, I no longer found it challenging to step into her shoes and walk the miles with her. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
Lately, I’ve been writing on the New Jersey Transit during my commute to Princeton, where I’ve been teaching this past year. But I mostly write in my study. Early morning and mid-afternoon are the perfect times for me. I try to write every day. If that isn’t possible—since we’re human and we need breathers—I read, watch television, and spend time with my loved ones. I find that the majority of my inspiration comes from just living my life, so I take my non-writing time as seriously as I do my writing.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process? 
I was once that reader who devoured books without ever thinking about the process of how those books got to me in the first place. I didn’t know the sheer amount of work it took behind the scenes for a book to get on my bookshelf. I’m grateful for the team I have and for the opportunity to reach so many people. 

5. What are you reading right now? 
I’m reading Warsan Shire’s Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth. It’s one of the best poetry collections I’ve read in a while.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
There are so many authors who I think deserve wider recognition. There’s Sanderia Faye, author of Mourner’s Bench; Tracy Chiles McGhee, author of Melting the Blues; Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, author of Blue Talk and Love; JP Howard, an exceptional poet and author of Say Mirror; and Cheryl Boyce Taylor, who has written several collections of poetry, including my favorite, Arrival. 

7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing Patsy, what would say? 
I would tell myself to relax, breathe, and trust the process. 

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
When I was first published, I used to read reviews on Goodreads and Amazon. But a very good mentor, who happens to be a renowned author, told me never to do that since reviews are really conversations between readers—that an author has no business being in that conversation unless she’s invited. That made perfect sense to me. Once I was able to block out that extra noise—both good and bad—I was able to completely focus on my next project.

9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
That would be diversifying the gate keepers, not just in terms of race, but also class and culture. Expand the industry so that we have all different types of people of color; that there would be no such thing as a model minority of the year, but a celebration of everyone. Though I’ve been lucky to be surrounded and championed by people who understand me and get what I’m doing, deep down I question my belonging. I know that many writers of color who are in the game are anxious that the door might close soon—that our time might be up when the industry yawns and moves on to the next thing. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
Elizabeth Strout once told me to keep my head down and write. That’s the greatest advice I’ve ever gotten. At the end of the day, we have to remind ourselves why we write and why it’s important for us to tell these stories. The universe will take care of the rest. 

Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of the novel Patsy.

Ten Questions for Domenica Ruta

5.28.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Domenica Ruta, whose novel, Last Day, is out today from Spiegel & Grau. The fates of three sets of characters converge during the celebration of an ancient holiday anticipating the planet’s demise. A bookish wunderkind looks for love from a much older tattoo artist she met at last year’s Last Day BBQ; a young woman with a troubled past searches for her long-lost adoptive brother; three astronauts on the International Space Station contemplate their lives on Earth from afar. Last Day brings these characters and others together as they embark on a last-chance quest for redemption. Domenica Ruta is the author of the New York Times best-selling memoir With or Without You (Spiegel & Grau, 2013). A graduate of Oberlin College, Ruta received an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas in Austin. Her short fiction has been published in the Boston Review, the Indiana Review, and Epoch. Her essays have appeared in Ninth Letter, New York magazine, and elsewhere. She reviews books for the New York Times, Oprah.com, and the American Scholar, and works as an editor, curator, and advocate for solo moms at ESME.com. She lives in New York City.

1. How long did it take you to write Last Day?
I started playing around with it immediately after my memoir, With or Without You, was published, but I was also writing another novel at the same time, trying to see which one would win my full attention. When I found out I was pregnant, I began pounding the keys of my laptop every day for a couple of hours to force out an ugly first draft before I became a single mother. In the first six months of my son’s life I wrote nothing. After that I worked a little at a time whenever I could, meaning whenever I could afford childcare. So the short answer is five years, but not continuously.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
The most challenging thing for me as an author of this and probably any book I write is the way publishing is a performative act of maturation. Writers grow up in public. If you compare the first book written by your favorite author with one they wrote fifteen or twenty years later the difference in quality is almost always astounding. And this is the same human using the same tools. So it is challenging for me to let go of a work and set it free into the world when I am positive I could still make it better, if only I had a few more decades. But that’s what the next book is for, and the one after that.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write mostly in bed, with occasional commutes to my kitchen table. I try to write every week, sometimes every day, sometimes not. As a mother of a small child, there is no set schedule. I write when I can, usually when the kid is at school, and other pockets I can find.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
When my publisher and editor, Cindy Spiegel, lost her incredible imprint Spiegel & Grau after a banner year, just a few months before Last Day was published—this was not something I ever expected would happen.

5. What are you reading right now?
In Love with the World by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche and Secrets We Kept by Kristal Sital.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Why doesn’t the Octavia Butler estate have ten different Netflix specials in the works right now?

7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing Last Day, what would say?
I wish I had something that would create the mystique of myself as a precious artist, alchemist of verbs and nouns, thinker of Big Thoughts, but to be perfectly honest, if I could go back in time before this novel I would advise myself to get savvy about the whole social media game. It is so important for authors to market themselves and their work in this way, which I was totally oblivious to until very recently. 

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Self-doubt, self-hatred, self-sabotage; I love more than anything to be alone in my imagination, but sometimes it is a dangerous place.

9. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
Not unless it is fully funded. I cannot in good conscience recommend that anyone without a trust fund or wealthy no-strings-attached parents/patrons go into debt for a degree in the arts. Read every single interview in the Paris Review instead; you will learn there are as many different ways to write a book as there are writers. Read widely across genres and write terrible drafts of things you are ashamed of. But if an MFA program is fully funded, then definitely go. Being a professional student is the most fun job I’ve ever had.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Anne Lamott said something along the lines of “write a shitty first draft.” This is the only way I can summon the courage to write anything. I am human and flawed and this is never more evident than when I see it spelled out in my words on a screen or a sheet of paper. But as bad as that first draft may be—and sometimes it’s not as bad as my first impression of it is—I have a chance to make it better one day at a time. That is the craft. That is what makes a writer: the willingness to rewrite a thousand times if necessary. 

Domenica Ruta, author of Last Day.

(Credit: Charlie Mahoney)

Ten Questions for Sara Collins

5.21.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Sara Collins, whose debut novel, The Confessions of Frannie Langton, is out today from Harper. Both a suspenseful gothic mystery and a historical novel, Collins’s debut tells the story of a slave’s journey from a Jamaican plantation to an English prison, where she is tried for a brutal double murder she cannot remember. “With as much psychological savvy as righteous wrath, Sara Collins twists together slave narrative, bildungsroman, love story, and crime novel to make something new,” wrote Emma Donoghue. Sara Collins grew up in Grand Cayman. She studied law at the London School of Economics and worked as a lawyer for seventeen years before earning a master’s degree in creative writing at Cambridge University, where she was the recipient of the 2015 Michael Holroyd Prize for Creative Writing. She lives in London. 

1. How long did it take you to write The Confessions of Frannie Langton
My agent signed me with only a partial manuscript, and I had to write feverishly in order to finish it in just under two years. But the novel had been simmering for all the decades I’d spent wondering why a Black woman had never been the star of her own gothic romance. My dissatisfaction about that state of affairs grew so strong over time that it finally nudged me in the direction of writing my own. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
At times there was nothing more terrifying than the distance between the novel in my head and the one making its way onto the page. I had to force myself to accept the failure of my first attempts. I’m always terrified that the rough and rambling sentences that come out first, as a kind of advance party, will be all I can manage. They trick me into trying to polish them as I go. And that slows me down.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
Either at my desk overlooking a quiet canal patrolled by iguanas in Grand Cayman or at my kitchen table in London overlooking my courtyard garden, and now sometimes in bed, to avoid the intense back pain I get after sitting for long periods. When working on a novel, I write every day, 8:00 AM to 7:00 PM, following very strict routines: starting and finishing at the same time, and aiming to get a certain quota of work done. Over time I’ve developed a Pavlovian response to my rituals: When I take the first sip of coffee at 8:00 AM, my brain flips a switch and I’m in writing mode.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process? 
I wrote the novel in isolation, but I’ve now done numerous radio and podcast interviews, panel and bookshop appearances, essays and columns. Writing requires withdrawal, publishing demands engagement. It’s the shock of wandering out of a tunnel onto a stage.

5. What are you reading right now? 
I’m reading Clarie Messud’s The Woman Upstairs. The writing feels electric and alive, crackling with anger, which I think we should have more of in novels. One of my top reads of recent months was André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name. I’m going to start John Banville’s The Book of Evidence next.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
James Baldwin. He is unparalleled: as a writer, as an intellectual, as a man. Yes, he’s fairly widely recognized, but it should be wider.

7. What is one thing you’d do differently if you could have a do-over? 
I would definitely take more days off. 

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
When I’m so immersed in a project that I don’t want to look up, let alone talk to anyone, I feel like I’m being pulled between novel and family. What many people won’t admit is that it’s impossible to write a novel without a pinch of selfishness, and you have to beg your loved ones to forgive you for it. 

9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)? 
Each of my editors, and my agent, saw straight through my manuscript to the novel I wanted to write, not the one I’d written. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I often quote Annie Lamott quoting the coach in Cool Runnings (a film I dislike, but which apparently produced this great line): “If you weren’t enough before the gold medal, you won’t be enough afterwards.”

Sara Collins, author of The Confessions of Frannie Langton.

Ten Questions for Xuan Juliana Wang

5.14.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Xuan Juliana Wang, whose debut story collection, Home Remedies, is out today from Hogarth. In a dozen electrified stories, Wang captures the unheard voices of a new generation of Chinese youth via characters that are navigating their cultural heritage and the chaos and uncertainty of contemporary life, from a pair of synchronized divers at the Beijing Olympics on the verge of self-discovery to a young student in Paris who discovers the life-changing possibilities of a new wardrobe. As Justin Torres writes, Wang “is singing an incredibly complex song of hybridity and heart.” Xuan Juliana Wang was born in Heilongjiang, China, and grew up in Los Angeles. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and earned her MFA from Columbia University. She has received fellowships and awards from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Cite des Arts International, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Elizabeth George Foundation. She is a fiction editor at Fence and teaches at UCLA. 

1. How long did it take you to write the stories in Home Remedies?
All of my twenties and the early part of my thirties.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I would have to say the loneliness of falling out of step with society. When I’m out celebrating a friend who has just made a huge stride in their career, someone would ask me, “Hey how’s that book coming along?” Then having to tell them that I have a desk in an ex-FBI warehouse and I’ll be sitting there in the foreseeable future, occasionally looking out the window, trying to make imaginary people behave themselves. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I keep a regular journal where I describe interesting things I’d seen or heard the day before as well as random plot ideas. That’s something I like to do every day, preferably first thing in the morning or right before bed. My ideal writing environment is a semi-public place, like a shared office, or a library as long as I can avoid making eye-contact with people around me. When I’m really getting going on an idea I am capable of sitting for eight hours a day, many days in a row. I was forced to play piano as a child so I have no trouble forcing myself to do anything.  

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
It made me feel a deep kinship with anyone who has ever published a book. I want to clutch them, look into their eyes and say, “I understand now.”

5. What are you reading right now?
King of the Mississippi by Mike Freedman. I just picked up Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires and it’s great! I’m putting off finishing The Unpassing by Chia Chia Lin because it’s so gorgeously written I am savoring it. 

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Wang Shuo. He’s like the Chinese Chuck Palahniuk. I wish he could be translated more and better. 

7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I wish publishers would open up their own bookstores, or sell books in unexpected places, so people could interact with books in-person. There isn’t a single bookstore within a fifteen-mile radius of the city where I grew up in LA. 

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Health insurance. 

9. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? 
Yes. But choose wisely. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Victor Lavalle gave us a lot of practical advice in his workshop. The one I use the most often is: Take the best part of your story and move it to first page and start there. Challenge yourself to make the rest rise to the level of that.

Xuan Juliana Wang, author of the story collection Home Remedies.

(Credit: Ye Rin Mok)

Ten Questions for Julie Orringer

5.7.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Julie Orringer, whose third book, the novel The Flight Portfolio, is out today from Knopf. Based on the true story of Varian Fry, a young New York journalist and editor who in 1940 was the head of the Emergency Rescue Committee, designed to protect artists and writers from being deported to Nazi concentration camps and to send intellectual treasures back to the United States, The Flight Portfolio returns to the same territory, Europe on the brink of World War II, that thrilled readers of Orringer’s debut novel, The Invisible Bridge. Andrew Sean Greer calls it “ambitious, meticulous, big-hearted, gorgeous, historical, suspenseful, everything you want a novel to be.” Orringer is also the author of the award-winning short story collection How to Breathe Underwater, which was a New York Times Notable Book. She lives in Brooklyn.

1. How long did it take you to write The Flight Portfolio?
Nine years, more or less. While researching my last novel, The Invisible Bridge, which also took place during the Second World War, I read about the American journalist Varian Fry’s heroic work in Marseille: His mission was to locate celebrated European artists who’d fled to France from the Nazi-occupied countries and arrange their safe passage to the States. The job was fraught with moral complications—given limited time and resources, who would Fry choose to save?—and the historical account seemed to miss certain essential elements, particularly those surrounding Fry’s personal life (he had a number of well-documented relationships with men, a fact that historians elided, denied, or shuddered away from, as if to suggest that it’s not acceptable to be a hero of the Holocaust if one also happens to be gay).  Researching Fry’s life and mission took the better part of four years—a time during which I moved three times and gave birth to my two children—and writing and revision occupied the five years that followed. Which is not to suggest that no writing occurred during the initial research, nor that there was ever a time when the research ceased—it continued, in fact, through the last day I could change a word of the draft.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Undoubtedly it was the research into Fry’s work in Marseille, a detailed record of which exists in biographies, interviews, letters, ephemera, and even still in living memory: Fry’s last surviving associate, Justus Rosenberg, is a professor emeritus of languages and literature at Bard College, and was kind enough to speak to me about his experiences. Twenty-seven boxes of Fry’s letters, papers, photographs, and other writings reside in the Rare Books and Manuscripts collection at Columbia’s Butler Library; I spent many hours immersed in those files, learning what I could about what kept Fry up at night, what obsessed him by day, what he struggled with, how he triumphed, and how he thought about his own work years later.  I spent a year at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, where Fry studied as an undergraduate; there I had the chance to examine his recently unsealed student records, which include not only his grade transcripts and his application, but also letters from his father, his professors, the dean, and various close associates, many of them arguing either for or against Fry’s expulsion from Harvard for a variety of infractions that included spotty attendance, raucous partying, destruction of school property, reckless driving, and, ultimately, the placing of a For Sale sign on Dean Greenough’s lawn. Then there were the dozens—hundreds, ultimately thousands—of Fry’s clients, whose lives and work I felt I must know before I wrote the book.  And of course I had to go to Marseille, where I visited the places Fry lived and worked, at least those that still exist (the marvelous Villa Air Bel, where he lived with a group of Surrealist writers and artists, was razed decades ago).  The nearly impossible task was to clear space among all that was known for what could not be known—space where I could make a narrative that would honor Fry’s experience but would move beyond what could have been recorded at the time.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write five or six days a week at the Brooklyn Writers’ Space. I’m married to another fiction writer, my former Iowa MFA classmate Ryan Harty, and, as I mentioned, we have two young children; we have a carefully worked-out schedule that allows each of us a couple of long writing days each week (eight hours or so) and a number of shorter ones (five hours). Often I write at night, too, especially if I’m starting something new or working on a short story or a nonfiction piece.     

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The inestimable benefit of sharing a very early draft with my editor, Jordan Pavlin. Jordan edited my two previous books, but I’d never before shown her anything that hadn’t been revised six or seven times. This novel involved so much risk, and took so long to complete, that I felt I needed her insight and support long before I’d written three or four versions. Did the novel strike the right balance between history and fiction? Had I captured the characters’ essential struggles clearly? How to address problems of pacing, continuity, clarity? Jordan’s exacting readings—not just one, but three or four—echoed my own doubts and provided necessary perspective and reassurance. And her comments pulled no punches. She was scrupulously honest. She was rigorous. She challenged me to do better. And my desire to meet her standards was, as it always is, fueled as much by my ardent admiration for her as a human being as by my deep respect for her literary mind.    

5. What trait do you most value in an editor?   
See above.

6. What are you reading right now?
Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise, which cuts a little too close at times to my own 1980’s experience in a high school drama group—one that took itself at least as seriously as Choi’s Citywide Academy for the Performing Arts. She hits all the notes with dead-on precision: favoritism toward certain students by charismatic teachers, intrigue surrounding highly-charged relationships, endless quoting of Monty Python, jobs at TCBY, the dire importance of having a car and/or friends with cars, etc. But the true brilliance of the book is its structure: A first section in which the subjective experience of high school students is rendered with respect and utter seriousness; a second section that brings a questioning (and revenge-seeking) adult sensibility to bear upon the first; and a third section that sharpens the earlier sections into clearer resolution still, suggesting the persistent consequences of those seemingly trivial sophomore liaisons. 

7. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Here are three new writers whose work I’ve found risk-laced, challenging, and full of fierce delights: Ebony Flowers, Rona Jaffe-winning cartoonist and disciple of Lynda Barry, whose brilliant debut short story collection, Hot Comb, will be published by Drawn and Quarterly in June; shot through with tender and intelligent humor, it’s an incisive examination of cultural and familial tensions in black women’s lives. Domenica Phetteplace is another of my favorite new writers; her marvelous short story “Blue Cup,” a futurist skewering of commerce-driven life in the Bay Area, involves a young woman whose job requires her to deliver tailored social experiences to clients at an exclusive dining club; the story is narrated by the artificial intelligence software that co-inhabits her mind. And Anjali Sachdeva’s All the Names they Used for God is a story collection that merges the real and the supernatural with genre-breaking bravery, employing a prose so precise that you follow her into marvelous realms without question: Ice caves, exploding steel mill furnaces, an ocean inhabited by an elusive mermaid whose fleshy, tentacle-like hair still haunts my dreams.

8. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’d love to see more works in translation published in this country—for more publishing houses to commit seriously to the cultivation and dissemination of international literature.  I admire the work of New York Review Books, Restless Books, and Europa Editions in this arena. I loved, for example, Restless Books’ recently published translation of Marcus Malte’s The Boy, a Prix Femina-winning novel about a young man who spent the first fourteen years of his life in mute isolation in the wilds of France. The story of this young man’s entry into the early twentieth-century world—first into a rural setting, then Paris, and finally the battlefields of the First World War—is the story of what makes us human, and casts our world in a stark new light. Even stories as place-specific as The Boy have much to reveal about all our lives; and, just as importantly, they illuminate and particularize the vast array of human experiences different from our own. One of literature’s great powers is its ability to act as a tonic against xenophobia; there’s never been a moment when that power has been more urgently needed.

9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The finite nature of the twenty-four-hour day. But places like the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, seek to explode that limitation by removing barriers to creative freedom.  At MacDowell, where every artist gets a secluded studio, meticulously prepared meals, and unlimited uninterrupted time to work, there’s a kind of magical speeding-up of the creative process. You don’t necessarily fail less often; you fail faster, and recover faster. The people who dedicate their professional lives to the running of those programs are literature’s great guardians and cultivators.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
It would be impossible to identify the best, because I’ve been the fortunate recipient of much wonderful advice from writers like Marilynne Robinson, James Alan MacPherson, Tobias Wolff, Elizabeth Tallent, and John L’Heureux, for more years than I care to consider. But I can tell you about a piece of advice I chose not to take: A prominent writer once told me, at a barbecue at a friend’s house in Maine, that if I wanted to take myself seriously as a writer, I’d better reconsider my desire to have children. For each child I had, this writer told me, I was sacrificing a book. Now I can say with certainty that my writing life has been immeasurably enriched and transformed by having become a parent. And if parenthood is demanding, both of time and emotional energy—as of course it is—life with children reminds me always of why writing feels essential: At its best and most rigorous, it illuminates—both for writer and reader—the richness and complexity of the human world, and forces us to make a deep moral consideration of our role in it.

Julie Orringer, author of The Flight Portfolio.

(Credit: Brigitte Lacombe)

Ten Questions for Namwali Serpell

3.26.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Namwali Serpell, whose novel The Old Drift is out today from Hogarth. Blending historical fiction, fairy-tale fables, romance, and science fiction, The Old Drift tells a sweeping tale of Zambia, a small African country, as it comes into being, following the trials and tribulations of its people, whose stories are told by a mysterious swarm-like chorus that calls itself man’s greatest nemesis. In the words of Chinelo Okparanta, it is a “dazzling genre-bender of a novel, an astonishingly historical and futuristic feat.” Namwali Serpell teaches at the University of California in Berkeley. She won the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing for her story “The Sack.” She received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award for women writers in 2011 and was selected for the Africa39, a 2014 Hay Festival project to indentify the best African writers under the age of forty. Her fiction and nonfiction has appeared in the New Yorker, McSweeney’s, the Believer, Tin House, Triple Canopy, Callaloo, n+1, Cabinet, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Guardian, and the New York Review of Books.

1. How long did it take you to write The Old Drift?
I’ve been writing it off and on since the year 2000. I worked on it in between getting my PhD; publishing my first work of literary criticism, a dozen stories, and a few essays and reviews; getting tenure; and writing a novel that went in a drawer. I concentrated exclusively on The Old Drift after I sold it based on a partial manuscript—about a third—in 2015. I finished in 2017.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Fact-checking. The novel is rife with speculative fiction—fairy tale, magical realism, science fiction—but I was anxious to get historical, scientific, and cultural details right, that the notes didn’t sound off. Because the novel is so sprawling, it was hard to verify everything. I’m grateful for my informants—family, friends, acquaintances, strangers, and the blessed internet.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I’m too nomadic, or “movious” as we say in Zambia, to limit myself to a particular desk in a specific nook with a certain slant of light. I write from late morning to late afternoon, when most people are hungry or sleepy—I seem to find both states conducive to “flow,” as they call it. My writing frequency varies by genre. I can write nonfiction or scholarly prose for about five hours at a time, and as many days in a row as needed. I can write fiction for about three hours at a time, and it improves distinctly if I write every other day. My best work, regardless of genre, often happens in one big burst—an eight hour stretch, say, like a fugue. But I can’t prime my schedule or prepare myself for those eruptions. They come as they wish. I am left spent and grateful.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The chasm between writing the book and marketing the book. It’s a rift in one’s psychology but also in logistics (who does what), and most shockingly, in value. There is simply no calculable relation between these two value systems: the literary and the financial, the good and the goods.

5. What are you reading right now?
Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s We Cast a Shadow. I’m excited because it draws on a longstanding preoccupation of mine: the recurrent fantasy of racial transformation in sci-fi.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
María Luisa Bombal.

7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
Blurbs. They tap into our most craven, gratuitous, and back-patting tendencies. End them.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The problem of money, of course.

9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
Being able to recognize how things will best coincide—opportunities, ideas, words, people—and not forcing them, but setting up the space for them to do so. It goes by various names: “finger on the pulse,” “a sense of the zeitgest,” “savvy.” I think of it as a feel for kismet.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Amitav Ghosh once visited a graduate course I was taking. And he said of a writer (who shall remain nameless): “If everything is a jewel, nothing shines.” 

Namwali Serpell, author of The Old Drift.

(Credit: Peg Skorpinski)

Ten Questions for Bryan Washington

3.19.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Bryan Washington, whose debut story collection, Lot, is out today from Riverhead Books. Set in Houston, the stories in Lot spring from the life a young man, the son of a Black mother and a Latino father, who works at his family’s restaurant while navigating his relationships with his brother and sister and discovering his own sexual identity. Washington then widens his lens to explore the lives of others who live in the myriad neighborhoods of Houston, offering insight into what makes a community, a family, and a life. “Lot is the confession of a neighborhood,” writes Mat Johnson, “channeled through a literary prodigy.” Bryan Washington’s  stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, BuzzFeed, Vulture, the Paris Review, Tin House, One Story, Bon Appetité, American Short Fiction, GQ, Fader, the Awl, and elsewhere. He lives in Houston.

1. How long did it take you to write the stories in Lot?
Three years-ish. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Description is always tricky for me, and that held up in every story. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I can edit wherever, but I prefer to write new stuff in the mornings. And I write most days, if I’ve got a project going. But if I don’t then I won’t. 

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Hearing back from folks about the galleys was really rad. 

5. What are you reading right now?
Xuan Juliana Wang’s Home Remedies, Morgan Parker’s Magical Negro, Pitchaya Sidbanthad’s It Rains in Bangkok, Candice Carty-Williams’s Queenie, and Yuko Tsushima’s Territory of Light. Then there’s Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We Were Briefly Gorgeous, which is probably going to change everything. 

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
More folks in the States should know about Gengoroh Tagame and My Brother’s Husband

7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
It’d be nice if the American literary community’s obsession with signal-boosting the optics of diversity were solidified into a tangible, fiscally remunerative reality for minority writers. 

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Living. 

9. Would you recommend writers attend a writing program?
If you can go for free? Sure. But there are other ways. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Mat Johnson taught me a lot, and one of the most profound things he said was to just relax. Readers can sense when you’re tense.

 

Bryan Washington, author of Lot.

(Credit: David Gracia)

Ten Questions for Ed Pavlić

3.12.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Ed Pavlić, whose novel Another Kind of Madness is out today from Milkweed Editions. The epic story of Ndiya Grayson, a young professional with a high-end job in a Chicago law-office who meets Shame Luther, a no-nonsense construction worker who plays jazz piano at night, Another Kind of Madness moves from Chicago’s South Side to the coast of Kenya as the pair navigate their pasts as well as their uncertain future. Of the novel Jeffrey Renard Allen writes, “In these pages, Black music sounds and surrounds experience like a mysterious house people long to live in but can’t find, a quest where they find themselves ever more deeply involved.” Widely published as a poet and scholar, Ed Pavlić is the author of the collection Visiting Hours at the Color Line, winner of the 2013 National Poetry Series, as well as ‘Who Can Afford to Improvise?’: James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners and Crossroads Modernism: Descent and Emergence in African American Literary Culture.

1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I’ve always written in and around the gifts and demands of family, parenting, etc. I have no real literary credits that pre-date my life as a father and husband. In fact, often I’ve worked while pretty confused about which aspects of all of that were “gifts” and which were “demands,” demanding gifts in any case. I’ve also written in and around the work as a professor and administrator in universities. For many years I found I could compose and revise poems in the momentary midst of all of that overlapping life and labor. Most likely poems were the way I survived those overloads, kept track of enough of the mind and body, all those minds and bodies, so that I didn’t go permanently off the rails. So I could at least find my way back to the tracks when wrecks and crack-ups did—and they did, of course—occur. 

Maybe writing was and is a way to address the displacements of an upwardly mobile, cross-racially identified, working-class man amid waves and undertows in an intensely segregated, hyper-racialized, and hierarchical bureaucratic world. Or maybe, for a working class consciousness like mine, writing is just another wave of displacement? Most likely it’s both. I guess we could file most of these thoughts under the “where” I write part of the question. 

2. You write both poetry and prose; does your process differ for each form?
Essays and other longer works weren’t as immediately about or out of that tumble of pleasure and trouble, of placement, displacement and replacement, of the startling novelty and bone-bending drudgery of, say, early parenthood, or of showing up to work in the unbelievably bourgeois and indelibly white halls of academia. At least that work wasn’t doused in the texture of my tumbles and pleasures in the same way. So, I’ve written what might pass as prose, and lots of it, in times when I can work for extended periods, on days—at times weeks or even months—when I don’t have to totally leave that space tomorrow, where I didn’t arrive fresh to it today. So, if I’ve got four days “off” from the rest of the work-world, I can work away at what’s called prose on the middle days. 

3. How long did it take you to write Another Kind of Madness?
I wrote Another Kind of Madness in a way unlike anything else I’d ever written, or done. I worked on the novel only in spaces where I had at least a month in which I could be with the work unencumbered by the demands of life and employment. I began it in the summer of 2009 when the kids were old enough (and my in-laws young enough) that they could be with the grandparents in Maryland for six weeks during the summer. Stacey went to work and I turned the front porch in Georgia into a writing retreat. Working “at home” in this way was something I’d almost never done. After that summer, I worked on the book in similar breaks of a month or two, but never again at home. Instead, I worked in rented, borrowed, or gifted spaces in Montreal, at the MacDowell Colony (twice), in Istanbul, in Mombasa, and in Lamu Town on the coast of Kenya, in France, and in the West Farms section of the Bronx, a few blocks south of the Bronx Zoo one summer. 

During these strange times I floated by myself in mostly urban, unfamiliar spaces, writing a few hours a day and then spending the rest of the days and nights accompanied by the story on walks, at meals, in dreams, on errands, in reading books I found in those places, etc. I found that the story wouldn’t reveal itself amid the tumble of my life, would only appear when I could really sit, walk, and sleep with it, where it could accrue its reality in a textured and present—but also most often in a peripheral and angular—region of my attention. The pressure of my daily worlds seemed to obliterate that nimble angularity, but my comings and goings in those unfamiliar urban spaces allowed this story to happen. I remember showing up after eight months away from the book, opening a blank, unlined (yes, unlined: “free your lines, the mind will follow”) notebook and waiting for Shame, Ndiya, Junior, Colleen and them to let me know what had been happening since we last saw each other and, in return, I tried to be as honest with them as I could be about what had been happening with me. It was always as if, unknowingly, we had, in fictional-fact, been at some of the same parties.  

4. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
That it takes a village. 

And, with this book, a novel, with this novel, how dense the space between the lines is with things (references, inferences) that I don’t remember creating. So many things that never appeared to me until the ARC came between the covers. At that point I could see it as a thing outside my body, and I noticed all kinds of new things there. That was a surprise, for sure; the book was a stranger to me in a way I didn’t expect. The poems aren’t that way, essays either. I’ve left copies of the ARC around the house and, when I walk past them, I’ll pick up the book and turn to a random page and begin reading at the first new paragraph, halfway trying to catch it actively changing, as if I can catch it coming up with something else it hadn’t told me about. 

5. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’d love to see more recognition in and between writers of what happens in and around Black music, where singers are singing in an organic kind of tandem with tradition, in which songs bristle with depths and complexities quite beyond the capacities of any particular singer. And audiences seem to roll with that, we almost insist upon it. I don’t think we insist upon or even at times allow a similar kind of dimensionality with our sense of writers and writing. It happens in contemporary writing, of course; but I think it’s less obvious to readers than that similar dynamic is to listeners. Maybe readers even refuse it. Maybe I’m saying that I’d love the community of contemporary writers to read each other with the freedom and rigor (vigor) we bring to hearing the music we love the most. I struggle to do this myself. Maybe singers need to listen to each other with the freedom they read with? I don’t know. 

6. What are you reading right now?
I’m always reading multiple books, always accompanied by music in the background and foreground. Right now I’m reading Singing in a Strange Land, Nick Salvatore’s biography of C. L. Franklin (Aretha’s father); David Ritz’s Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin; Eve Dunbar’s Black Regions of the Imagination; and I just finished rereading Danielle McGuire’s At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance. My rereading of Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped begins today. Meanwhile, I’ve been listening to five discs in the changer (Aretha’s double disc set, Amazing Grace: The Complete Recordings, Marvin’s What’s Going On, and Coltrane’s Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album) on endless loop for weeks. I’m working my way into writing something about the recently released film, Amazing Grace, that was made while Aretha was recording the album with James Cleveland and his choir in Los Angeles in January 1972. Aretha performs with absolutely stunning, epic power. It’s incredible. Easily the most powerful thing I saw / heard / felt on film in 2018. 

I listen to and stream contemporary music mostly in the car. The latest song I’ve been repeating all around town is Summer Walker’s newly released “Riot,” from her EP Clear. So good. It’s like Sade’s “Is It a Crime” for the 21st century. 

7. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
Well, so many of course. The word “author” almost means “deserves wider recognition.” Though not always. I’d say Christopher Gilbert, his Turning Into Dwelling. Also the second half of Adrienne Rich’s career, especially: Your Native Land, Your Life (1986), Time’s Power (1989), An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991), Dark Fields of the Republic (1995) and Midnight Salvage (1999). Adrienne Rich is obviously a widely recognized writer, but the woman who wrote these books—meaning those poems—is mostly unknown. Also I’d say the Ghanaian writer Kojo Laing, his masterpiece Search Sweet Country

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Racial terror. A feeling that—like how the finest silt settles on every plane in a space and then somehow constitutes an immobilizing weight—one is operating in a prison to which we’ve been trained to accommodate (meaning obliterate) ourselves. But, you can’t really write—at least not very well—about that, or at least I can’t. I need to catch it when it flashes into view, before it becomes something it’s not, which is usually all we know. The need to arrest that unknowing, at times excruciating yet still unfeeling, state that takes our steps elsewhere to where we’re walking. 

So all of that and, I think, a kind of impatience that masquerades as procrastination.  

9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
I need to write my mother a letter. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
In 1976, when James Baldwin told a writer’s group in the women’s prison at Riker’s Island: “One can change any situation, even though it may seem impossible. But it must happen inside you first. Only you know what you want. The first step is very, very lonely. But later you will find the people you need, who need you, who will be supportive.” 

Over the last twenty-something years, I’ve found that to be absolutely true. I come back to that statement all the time. 

Or maybe the best is, in 1970, when Baldwin told John Hall: “Nothing belongs to you…and you do what you can with the hand life dealt you.” I think if we can proceed with that in mind we can figure a few profiles of the ways, we do, in fact, belong to each other. I’m not talking about holding hands at sunset, I’m talking about a sense of mutual consequence that moves with the power (redemptive) of accuracy. 

Ed Pavlić, author of Another Kind of Madness.

(Credit: Suncana Pavlić)

Ten Questions for Helen Oyeyemi

3.5.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Helen Oyeyemi, whose novel Gingerbread is out today from Riverhead Books. The story of three generations of women and the legacy of the Lee family’s famed gingerbread recipe (“devised by a person who became Harriet Lee’s great-great-great grandmother by saving Harriet’s great-great-great grandfather’s life”) Gingerbread follows its characters through encounters with jealousy, ambition, family grudges, work, wealth, and real estate. Ron Charles of the Washington Post calls the novel “a challenging, mind-bending exploration of class and female power heavily spiced with nutmeg and sweetened with molasses.” Helen Oyeyemi is the author of the story collection What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, winner of the PEN Open Book Award, along with five novels—most recently Boy, Snow, Bird, which was a finalist for the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She received a 2010 Somerset Maugham Award and a 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. In 2013 she was named one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists.

1. How long did it take you to write Gingerbread?
About six months—two of them mostly fuelled by Honey Butter Chip consumption, and I think if those first two months were measured out in terms of daily portions of Honey Butter Chips recommended for a healthy lifestyle, that would adjust the writing time to six or seven years.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Getting started. I feel like I always say that, but this time around there were four false starts as opposed to the usual one or two.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
For some reason during my first reading of this question my brain added an additional word: ‘why’ do I write as part of the question…how scary. I usually write in bed, daily, until I’ve finished writing the book. But a good portion of Gingerbread was written sitting on the floor, in a chair with no legs but excellent back support, with a very low standing desk for my laptop. I’m still not sure what it was about the posture and the position that made some act of imaginative grace feel more possible—and I’m not saying I ended up pulling any off—but it might work for others, so I’d recommend it.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
How pretty the finished copy of the book looks, and how good it is to hold.

5. What are you reading right now?
I just finished Carleton Bulkin’s quicksilver-fine translation of Vladislav Vančura’s Marketa Lazarová, and you should read it too! It’s difficult to describe the narrative tone—tones, really—but this book’s combination of earthiness, the sublime, the infernal, and the wryly metafictional is the most involving I’ve come across in a while.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Kuzhali Manickavel! Prose like a thrown knife with gossamer wings. Funny, tender, piercing, marvelous.

7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I don’t see either as being in stasis; I suppose the best you can hope for are that the changes are the ones necessary for continued survival.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The thought of having to explain what I’ve done. Or have what I’ve done explained to me, ahhhhh.

9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
An acute sense of the absurd.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
To pay no attention to writing advice?

Helen Oyeyemi, author of Gingerbread.

(Credit: Manchul Kim)

Ten Questions for Brian Kimberling

2.26.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Brian Kimberling, whose second novel, Goulash, is out today from Pantheon. A book that Tessa Hadley calls “a quirky, funny, melancholy portrait of a significant European moment,” is the story of Elliot Black, who escapes small-town Indiana by moving to Prague in the late 1990s, just as the Czech Republic is moving out of the shadow of communism, and Amanda, an English teacher from the United Kingdom with whom he falls in love. The couple explore the dark history and surprising wonders of their adopted city, eventually learning that the forces reshaping Prague are also at work on them. Brian Kimberling grew up in southern Indiana and spent several years working in the Czech Republic, Mexico, and Turkey before settling in England. He received an MA in creative writing at Bath Spa University in 2010. Snapper, his first novel, was published by Pantheon in 2013.

1. How long did it take you to write Goulash
Goulash took me three and a half years. I swore up and down three years ago that there was no such thing as a “second novel” curse, that I didn’t feel under pressure, that everything was going to be alright. (My first novel, Snapper, was published in 2013). Yet many people take eight or ten novels to complete a second book if they complete it at all, and now I can see why.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Goulash is set in Prague, and although I lived there for four years, it is not my place or my culture or my people, and I didn’t want to be a brash, clumsy American stepping on all the pretty local wildflowers or the dead bodies underneath them. Goulash is being translated into Czech, which I hope is a sign that I got something right.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
In the kitchen, late morning or early afternoon, and sporadically. I write everything by hand, so later I have the dreary job of typing it all up and discovering that my word count is about half what I estimated.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process? 
That it happened at all—twice now.

5. What are you reading right now? 
Late in the Day by Tessa Hadley.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
All of them! But to a select few we will also grant cash aplenty: Tessa Hadley, Lauren Z. Collins, the fearless Samantha Harvey.

7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business? 
The literary community is too small—I’d create lots more thoughtful and appreciative readers like the ones who read interviews in Poets & Writers Magazine.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
My other life: the one comprising fatigue, childcare, rent, etc. 

9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)? 
Is this a trick question? It’s like asking me to choose between children. I have one editor in the U.S. and one in the UK as well as an agent in the UK. All three of them have, I think, taken risks on my behalf. I can go months without hearing from any of them, but I never doubt their commitment.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
Don’t shine. Don’t seek to shine. Burn. (Richard Mitchell)

Brian Kimberling, author of Goulash.

(Credit: Chris Banks)

Ten Questions for Lindsay Stern

by

Staff

2.19.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Lindsay Stern, whose debut novel, The Study of Animal Languages, is out today from Viking. A book that Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney calls “exuberant, wise, and darkly funny,” the novel follows a married couple of professors at an elite New England college who, while brilliant—he’s a philosopher, she’s a rising star in the emerging field of biolinguistics—barely seem capable of navigating their own lives. A send-up of academia and a psychological portrait of marriage, the novel is a comedy of errors that explores the limitations of language, the fragility of love, and the ways we misunderstand one another and ourselves. Lindsay Stern is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the recipient of a Watson Fellowship and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers, Inc. She is currently pursuing a PhD in comparative literature at Yale University.

1. How long did it take you to write The Study of Animal Languages?
I wrote the novel’s long-abandoned first scene in September of 2013, in a guesthouse in Phnom Penh, and sent the final draft to my editor in late March of 2018. But I wasn’t writing continuously over those years. The first draft took about six months, and then—because I was teaching and applying to graduate school at the time—I set it aside for about a year, and picked it back up during my two years at the Writers’ Workshop in Iowa. Once my agent sold it, I worked on it in spurts for about another year and a half with my editor. I remember exactly where I was when she e-mailed us saying she thought it was ready: a Metro North train to New York. It pulled into Harlem’s 125th street station, and I practically floated out onto the platform.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Realizing I had to rewrite it. The nadir of the process came the morning after my first workshop at Iowa, after the brilliant Paul Harding had had his gentle but uncompromising way with my first draft. Light was coming through my window. I had that moment of bodiless amnesia. Then the memory of our two-hour discussion came trampling back, and all the air went out of my skull.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Anywhere I can find a room of my own, green tea, and frozen peas. When I’m in the thick of a project it gets me up and to my desk by 7 AM. Because of other commitments I’ve had to take a break from that rhythm over the last few weeks, which is frustrating for me but not fatal to the work, as long as I keep the embers going internally.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Its length. There’s a phenomenon in journalism that Nick Davies has called “churnalism”—you get the point—which has not infected book publishing, thank god. I had close to two years with my editor to wrestle The Study of Animal Languages into its final form.

5. What are you reading right now?
Nicholson Baker’s Vox.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
She’s already a legend in Japan, but I think everyone should read Taeko Kono. Her story “Toddler Hunting” is a marvel of psychological exploration.

7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
The fee to access Publishers Marketplace.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
A tendency to forget that I have a limited time on earth to do it.

9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
Clarity of thought. I was wildly fortunate to land an agent, Henry Dunow, who is both a gifted editor and mensch. My brilliant editor, Lindsey Schwoeri, also lavished attention on the manuscript. Because of them The Study of Animal Languages is a stronger, clearer book.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Go there. When the work takes you somewhere deep, it can be difficult not to swim back up out of fear or squeamishness. I did that in early drafts of the book. It took great teachers to show me that the novel was avoiding its true subject matter. So: Always go there.

Ten Questions for Shane McCrae

by

Staff

2.12.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Shane McCrae, whose sixth poetry collection, The Gilded Auction Block, is out today from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Employing and subverting traditional meter and form, the poems in the new book confront the 2016 presidential election in the United States from both personal and historical perspectives. The poems interrogate issues of identity, freedom, racism, oppression, and inheritance, using inventive line breaks and spacing to create a sense of disruption and shift, fissures in both text and feeling. McCrae is the author of five previous books, including most recently In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), which won the 2018 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in poetry and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and The Animal Too Big to Kill (Persea Books, 2015), winner of the 2014 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award. McCrae lives in New York City and is an assistant professor of writing at Columbia University.

1. How long did it take you to write The Gilded Auction Block?
I started writing the oldest poem in the book in 2014, and I wrote the newest poem in the book in 2018—so, four years. As with all my other books, I was revising it until the very last possible moment, which in this case was, I think, November 2018.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Maybe not giving up on the long narrative poem—“The Hell Poem”—that takes up a third of the book. I’m a poet! What do I know about narrative? Nothing! But I want to learn.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write everywhere I can, whenever I can, and as often as I can—I don’t have a set place or time.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The Gilded Auction Block is my first book with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and I wasn’t expecting how many opportunities—for readings, interviews, etc.—working with a press that size would enable. I’m grateful for every one of them.

5. What are you reading right now?
Oh my gosh, kind of a lot of things? I’ll narrow the list down to one book of poetry, one book of fiction, and one book of nonfiction. I’m reading Vahni Capildeo’s Venus as a Bear, Kathryn Davis’s The Silk Road, and Thomas Dilworth’s David Jones: Engraver, Solider, Painter, Poet.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
G. C. Waldrep. I think he’s one of the best poets in America.

7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I would get rid of Twitter.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Fear, I suppose. I’m always trying to do something new, which is usually something I’m afraid of. But for the most part the new things I’m trying to do are only new in a small way—like “The Hell Poem.” I had never written a narrative poem before, so that was new to me. But it’s still strictly metrical, as all my poems are. Writing in free verse would be new to me in a big way, and I’m terrified to try.

9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
Honesty and kindness.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
The construction “there is/are” is weak. Lex Runciman gave me that advice.

Shane McCrae, author of The Gilded Auction Block.

Ten Questions for Paige Ackerson-Kiely

by

Staff

2.5.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Paige Ackerson-Kiely, whose third poetry collection, Dolefully, a Rampart Stands, is out today from Penguin Books. Set primarily in the rural northeastern United States, the poems in the new book explore poverty, captivity, violence, and the longing to disappear. Employing a range of different forms, from free verse to long prose poetry, the book considers the question of who our captors might be and examines the universal search for connection and freedom. As Michael Robbins writes at the Chicago Tribune, these poems “remind us to be absolutely shot through with anxiety and uncertainty and desire.” Ackerson-Kiely is the author of two previous poetry collections, My Love Is a Dead Arctic Explorer (Ahsahta Press, 2012) and In No One’s Land (Ahsahta Press, 2007). She lives in Peekskill, New York.

1. How long did it take you to write Dolefully, a Rampart Stands?
Once I saw the shape the poems I’d been fiddling with were making, not that long. Maybe six months? But some of the poems go way back—the earliest were written in 2010, the latest in 2018. The conversation between them was revealed to me in 2016, or thereabouts. I write a lot of stuff I end up scrapping.



2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I’m a slow-burn kind of person. It takes me a long time to commit. That doesn’t mean that I’m not working or feeling something in the intervening months or years, but it means that giving up is always within reach. The most challenging thing always is trusting that something is real / possible / important / will happen. So, in short, the length of time it takes to make a thing is always a challenge for me. The slow climb without much of a view. Trusting you will look out over the valley when you finally get there, breathless and exulted and maybe in love for a second.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Since there are so few opportunities to experience a feeling of freedom in my life, I do not allow rules and regulations to dictate my writing—it’s one thing I can control. I’ve always been a striver, and it just hasn’t brought me the satisfaction I thought it would. Also, my livelihood has never depended on a publication record. So, I’m trying to be done with striving when I have the ability to make that choice. Listen, I am middle-aged, I’m not trying to be a big deal, why should I make writing poems, something I love (and how many things do you really get to love in this life?), into another opportunity to suffer? I write when I can, wherever I am, and I am trying to accept this commitment to lawlessness. 



4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Doomsday prepper that I am, it felt like a surprise that it happened at all! And of course, lucky. And the help of those involved—from first readers to Paul Slovak, my editor at Penguin—that attention and kindness has been amazing in ways that make me feel awkward and blushy and like doing better next time.

5. What are you reading right now?
Right now I am savoring an advanced copy of Allan Peterson’s new and selected, This Luminous. He is one of the great love poets of our time, and I will fight anyone who disagrees. I’m also rereading Nicholas Muellner’s The Amnesia Pavillions, an elegant and modest book I cannot learn enough from.



6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
I mean, besides every living contemporary poet? God, I am enthusiastic about so much of what I read! It’s a great time to be alive, and all that. I return to Kerri Webster’s poetry often. Reading her makes me want to join a coven—to learn how to cast a spell like she does.



7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I wish I’d had more access as a kid, and I was a library kid through and through. My own kids were library kids. So the thing I’d want to change isn’t a function of the free market or the problem of any specific community. What I’d like to see is the U.S. government purchasing 1,500 copies of every book published in any given year (large presses and small), and distributing those copies among public and school libraries in every state. I can’t even begin to imagine how differently my life would have gone, as a confused teenager in rural New Hampshire, if I’d had access to contemporary poetry. I didn’t. And that’s criminal. It’s not just about me, but many other folks (especially in poor rural communities) interested in art. There just wasn’t anything. My parents worked hard and did their taxes by April 15th and paid for wars they didn’t agree with. Everyone I care about spent too many years looking for something else, some kind of external inspiration. It felt so good early on, like we would suss it out. But some gave up, and who can blame them? It was so hard to find, and the business of living can take everything from you. Wouldn’t it be great if, as a country, we could support our writers and artists in meaningful (by which I mean financial and otherwise) ways? To think of how that war money could be diverted to makers and others who need it to meet basic needs? To get the work of contemporary writers and artists into the hands of people who are hungry for it? They totally exist, they will always exist, and it is critical they are served. 


8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I need to be kind of exhausted—I don’t know how else to put it—in order to steady myself on the page. I am curious about so many things! The Internet is a problem for a person like me. It’s like I need to get to the end of everything before I can plant myself. I have to know how mussels are harvested, I have to see all of Franky Larouselle’s work available online, walk the perimeter of my town four times, and feel some big feeling for someone (these are a few examples from today), before my mind is relaxed enough to do its own business. 



9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
Oh, the human ones! Curiosity, devotion to beauty, vigorousness, humor, love of the underdog, an ability to call bullshit.



10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I remember when I was in my MFA program, a few of my mentors told me the most important part of being in a program would be the lasting friendships I would make. I’m sure that, jerk that I was/am, I disregarded this advice as pat. Guess what? It was totally true, for me at least. And you don’t have to go to a program—attending an MFA program is not part of this advice, though programs are great for many of us—but finding your writing soulmate: that is the best advice I ever received. And all the best writing advice since has come from my soulmate, Allison Titus. From figuring it out together. That creative relationship has been like a wish for a thousand wishes—I could not write or live without her. As I was advised.

Paige Ackerson-Kiely, author of Dolefully, a Rampart Stands.

Ten Questions for Hala Alyan

1.29.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Hala Alyan, whose fourth poetry collection, The Twenty-Ninth Year, is out today from Mariner Books. In wild, lyrical poems, Alyan examines the connections between physical and interior migration, occasioned by the age of twenty-nine, which, in Islamic and Western tradition, is a year of transformation and upheaval. Leaping from war-torn cities in the Middle East to an Oklahoma Olive Garden to a Brooklyn brownstone, Alyan’s poems chronicle a personal history shaped by displacement. “Alyan picks up the fragments of a broken past and reassembles them into a livable future made more dazzling for having known brokenness,” writes Kaveh Akbar. “This is poetry of the highest order.” Hala Alyan is an award-winning Palestinian American poet and novelist as well as a clinical psychologist. Her previous books include the novel Salt Houses (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) and the poetry collections Hijra (Southern Illinois University Press, 2016), Four Cities (Black Lawrence Press, 2015), and Atrium (Three Rooms Press, 2012).

1. How long did it take you to write The Twenty-Ninth Year
I wrote it in bits and pieces over a year, and then stitched it together into a coherent collection in a few weeks, which is usually how I work with poetry.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Much of it was written from a state of pain—psychic, emotional grief, a time in my life that involved a fair amount of evolution and “lying fallow,” as my friend put it. At times I found it difficult to write about an experience I was still in the middle of, which is why I had to wait to iron out the narrative until things felt more settled.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
I’m not picky about location. I make sure to write thirty minutes a day, though that generally is for fiction, which I have a harder time being disciplined about. In terms of poetry, I usually wait until I need to write, which makes for a really thrilling, cathartic experience of creation.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process? 
Just how involved and long the process can be! How many beautiful, moving parts have to work together just to create a book, and how much you need dedication and love for the process from every single person involved.

5. What are you reading right now?
At the moment, I’m rereading Virgin by Analicia Sotelo as well as The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
That’s such a difficult question, because I wish all good writing (especially by writers of color) had equal recognition—an impossible want, I know. There’s several books coming out or recently out by women of color that I’m really hoping soak up a ton of recognition: Invasive Species by Marwa Helal, To Keep the Sun Alive by Rabeah Ghaffari and A Woman is No Man by Etaf Rum.

7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I wish the different parts of the community were more integrated. Starting off, I knew virtually nothing about the publishing industry, for instance, which seems like an oversight. I would love to have more interaction with different members of the writing, reading and publishing community—to know more about what publicists do, to talk to more booksellers and libraries, to really be reminded that we’re all in this together!

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
My easily distracted nature: laundry, walking the dog, making oatmeal. Although I also think that these are necessary parts to a writing life, as is work (for me) and procrastination and daydreaming.

9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)? 
A combination of honesty and empathy, which I’ve been lucky enough to find both in my agent and the editors I’ve worked with so far. I also like a bit of tough love, because it brings out the eager student in me.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
I like to toss Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird at anyone who is even remotely interested in writing. In particular, I love her approach to breaking down a massive writing task into small, digestible pieces, and finding joy in those pieces.

Hala Alyan, author of The Twenty-Ninth Year.

(Credit: Bob Anderson)

First Fiction 2017

by

Danzy Senna, Mira Jacob, Maggie Nelson, Emily Raboteau, Gary Shteyngart

6.14.17

For our seventeenth annual roundup of the summer’s best debut fiction, we asked five established authors to introduce this year’s group of debut writers. Read the July/August 2017 issue of the magazine for interviews between Zinzi Clemmons and Danzy Senna, Hala Alyan and Mira Jacob, Jess Arndt and Maggie Nelson, Lisa Ko and Emily Raboteau, and Diksha Basu and Gary Shteyngart. But first, check out these exclusive readings and excerpts from their debut novels.

What We Lose (Viking, July) by Zinzi Clemmons
Salt Houses (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, May) by Hala Alyan
Large Animals (Catapult, May) by Jess Arndt
The Leavers (Algonquin Books, May) by Lisa Ko
The Windfall (Crown, June) by Diksha Basu
 

What We Lose
by Zinzi Clemmons

My parents’ bedroom is arranged exactly the same as it always was. The big mahogany dresser sits opposite the bed, the doily still in place on the vanity. My mother’s little ring holders and perfume bottles still stand there. On top of all these old feminine relics, my father has set up his home office. His old IBM laptop sits atop the doily, a tangle of cords choking my mother’s silver makeup tray. His books are scattered around the tables, his clothes draped carelessly over the antique wing chair that my mother found on a trip to Quebec.

In the kitchen, my father switches on a small flat-screen TV that he’s installed on the wall opposite the stove. My mother never allowed TV in the kitchen, to encourage bonding during family dinners and focus during homework time. As a matter of fact, we never had more than one television while I was growing up—an old wood-paneled set that lived in the cold basement, carefully hidden from me and visitors in the main living areas of the house.

We order Chinese from the place around the corner, the same order that we’ve made for years: sesame chicken, vegetable fried rice, shrimp lo mein. As soon as they hear my father’s voice on the line, they put in the order; he doesn’t even have to ask for it. When he picks the order up, they ask after me. When my mother died, they started giving us extra sodas with our order, and he returns with two cans of pineapple soda, my favorite.

My father tells me that he’s been organizing at work, now that he’s the only black faculty member in the upper ranks of the administration.

I notice that he has started cutting his hair differently. It is shorter on the sides and disappearing in patches around the crown of his skull. He pulls himself up in his chair with noticeable effort. He had barely aged in the past twenty years, and suddenly, in the past year, he has inched closer to looking like his father, a stooped, lean, yellow-skinned man I’ve only seen in pictures.

“How have you been, Dad?” I say as we sit at the table.

The thought of losing my father lurks constantly in my mind now, shadowy, inexpressible, but bursting to the surface when, like now, I perceive the limits of his body. Something catches in my throat and I clench my jaw.

My father says that he has been keeping busy. He has been volunteering every month at the community garden on Christian Street, turning compost and watering kale.

“And I’m starting a petition to hire another black professor,” he says, stabbing his glazed chicken with a fire I haven’t seen in him in years.

He asks about Peter.

“I’m glad you’ve found someone you like,” he says.

“Love, Dad,” I say. “We’re in love.”

He pauses, stirring his noodles quizzically with his fork. “Why aren’t you eating?” he asks.

I stare at the food in front of me. It’s the closest thing to comfort food since my mother has been gone. The unique flavor of her curries and stews buried, forever, with her. The sight of the food appeals to me, but the smell, suddenly, is noxious; the wisp of steam emanating from it, scorching.

“Are you all right?”

All of a sudden, I have the feeling that I am sinking. I feel the pressure of my skin holding in my organs and blood vessels and fluids; the tickle of every hair that covers it. The feeling is so disorienting and overwhelming that I can no longer hold my head up. I push my dinner away from me. I walk calmly but quickly to the powder room, lift the toilet seat, and throw up.

From What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons, published in July by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2017 by Zinzi Clemmons.

(Photo: Nina Subin)

Salt Houses
by Hala Alyan

On the street, she fumbles for a cigarette from her purse and smokes as she walks into the evening. She feels a sudden urge, now that she is outside the apartment, to clear her head. This is her favor­ite thing about the city—the ability it gives you to walk, to literally put space between your body and distress. In Kuwait, nobody walks anywhere.

Mimi lives in a quiet part of the city, mostly residential, with small, pretty apartments, each window like a glistening eye. The streetlamps are made of wrought iron, designs flanking either side of the bulbs. There is a minimalist sense of wealth in the neighborhood, children dressed simply, the women always adjusting scarves around their necks, their hair cut into perfectly symmetrical lines. Souad walks by the manicured lawns of a grammar school, empty and discarded for the summer. Next to it a gray-steepled church. She tries to imagine that, elsewhere, there is smoke and destroyed palaces and men carry­ing guns. It seems impossible.

The night is cool, and Souad wraps her cardigan tightly around her, crosses her arms. A shiver runs through her. She is nervous to see him, a familiar thrill that he always elicits in her. Even before last night.

Le Chat Rouge is a fifteen-minute walk from Mimi’s apartment, but within several blocks the streets begin to change, brownstones and Gothic-style latticework replaced with grungier alleyways, young Algerian men with long hair sitting on steps and drinking beer from cans. One eyes her and calls out, caressingly, something in French. She can make out the words for sweet and return. Bars line the streets with their neon signs and she walks directly across the Quartier Latin courtyard, her shoes clicking on the cobblestones.

“My mother’s going to call tomorrow,” she told Elie yesterday. She wasn’t sure why she said it, but it felt necessary. “They’re taking me to Amman.” In the near dark, Elie’s face was peculiarly lit, the sign making his skin look alien.

“You could stay here,” Elie said. He smiled mockingly. “You could get married.”

Souad had blinked, her lips still wet from the kiss. “Married?” She wasn’t being coy—she truthfully had no idea what Elie meant. Mar­ried to whom? For a long, awful moment, she thought Elie was sug­gesting she marry one of the other Lebanese men, that he was fob­bing her off on a friend in pity.

“Yes.” Elie cocked his head, as though gauging the authenticity of her confusion. He smiled again, kinder this time. He closed his fingers around hers so that she was making a fist and he a larger one atop it. They both watched their hands silently for a few seconds, an awkward pose, more confrontational than romantic, as though he were preventing her from delivering a blow. It occurred to her that he was having a difficult time speaking. She felt her palm itch but didn’t move. Elie cleared his throat, and when he spoke, she had to lean in to hear him.

“You could marry me.”

Now, even in re-creating that moment, Souad feels the swoop in her stomach, her mouth drying. It is a thing she wants in the dark­est, most furtive way, not realizing how badly until it was said aloud. Eighteen years old, a voice within her spoke, eighteen. Too young, too young. And her parents, her waiting life.

But the greater, arrogant part of Souad’s self growled as if wo­ken. Her steps clacked with her want of it. The self swelled trium­phantly—Shame, shame, she admonishes herself, thinking of the war, the invasion, the troops and fire, but she is delighted nonetheless.

From Salt Houses by Hala Alyan. Copyright © 2017 by Hala Alyan. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

(Photo: Beowulf Sheehan)

Large Animals
by Jess Arndt

In my sleep I was plagued by large animals—teams of grizzlies, timber wolves, gorillas even came in and out of the mist. Once the now extinct northern white rhino also stopped by. But none of them came as often or with such a ferocious sexual charge as what I, mangling Latin and English as usual, called the Walri. Lying there, I faced them as you would the inevitable. They were massive, tube-shaped, sometimes the feeling was only flesh and I couldn’t see the top of the cylinder that masqueraded as a head or tusks or eyes. Nonetheless I knew I was in their presence intuitively. There was no mistaking their skin; their smell was unmistakable too, as was their awful weight.

During these nights (the days seemed to disappear before they even started) I was living two miles from a military testing site. In the early morning and throughout the day the soft, dense sound of bombs filled the valley. It was comforting somehow. Otherwise I was entirely alone.

This seemed a precondition for the Walri—that I should be theirs and theirs only. on the rare occasion that I had an overnight visitor to my desert bungalow the Walri were never around. Then the bears would return in force, maybe even a large local animal like a mountain lion or goat, but no form’s density came close to walrusness. So I became wary and stopped inviting anyone out to visit at all.

The days, unmemorable, had a kind of habitual slide. I would wake up with the sun and begin cleaning the house. No matter how tightly I’d kept the doors shut the day before, dust and sand and even large pieces of mineral rock seemed to shove  their way inside. I swept these into piles. Then the dishes that I barely remembered dirtying—some mornings it was as if the whole artillery of pots and pans had been used in the night by someone else—then the trash (again always full), then some coffee. Eight o’clock.

This work done, I sat in various chairs in the house following the bright but pale blades of light. I was drying out. oh, an LA friend said somewhat knowingly, from the booze? But I had alcohol with me, plenty of it. It wasn’t that. I moved as if preprogrammed. only later did I realize that my sleep was so soggy that it took strong desert sun to unshrivel me and since it was the middle of winter and the beams were perforce slanted, I’d take all of it I could find.

For lunch I got in my car and drove into town, to the empty parking lot of Las Palmas. There were many Mexican joints along the highway that also functioned as Main Street. I hadn’t bothered to try them out. Las Palmas, with its vacant booths, dusty cacti, and combination platter lunch special for $11.99 including $4 house margarita, was fine.

A waitress named Tamara worked there. She seemed like the only one. She wasn’t my type—so tall she bent over herself and a bona fide chain-smoker. Sometimes to order you’d have to exit your booth and find her puffing outside. A friend who had borrowed the bungalow before I did told me about Tamara and so if I had a crush at all it was an inherited one that even came with inherited guilt—from having taken her on once he could no longer visit her. Regardless, we barely spoke.

I had things I was supposed to be doing, more work than I could accomplish even if I
duct-taped my fists to my laptop, but none of it seemed relevant to my current state. In the afternoons I drove back home slowly, always stopping for six-packs of beer at the Circle K. I enjoyed the task. The beer evaporated once I stuck it in my fridge—it was there and then, it was gone.

My sleeping area was simple: a bed on a plywood platform. A wooden dresser. Built-in closets and a cement floor. At first  I would wake up in the night from the sheer flattening silence of the desert. It was impossible that the world still existed elsewhere. After that initial jolt, relief.

Don’t you miss it? my same friend said during our weekly telephone chats. But I couldn’t explain the euphoria of walking up and down the chilly aisles of Stater Bros. In week-old sweatpants if I wanted, uncounted by life. Would I buy refried or whole beans? This brand or that? It didn’t matter, no one cared.

It was in these conditions that the Walri arrived.

* * * 

I’d slept as usual for the first few hours, heavily, in a kind of coma state. Then had woken, I thought to pee. But lying there with the gritty sheets braided around me, the violet light that was created from the fly zapper, the desert cold that was entering through the gaps and cracks in the fire’s absence—I felt a new form of suffocation.

It wasn’t supernatural. I’d also had that. The sense of someone’s vast weight sitting on the bed with you or patting your body with ghostly hands. This breathless feeling was larger, as if I was uniformly surrounded by mammoth flesh.

Dream parts snagged at me. Slapping sounds and hose-like alien respiration. I felt I was wrestling within inches of what must be—since I couldn’t breathe—the end of my life. Now the lens of my dream panned backward and I saw my opponent in his entirety.

He lay (if that’s what you could call it) on my bed, thick and wrinkled, the creases in his hide so deep I could stick my arms between them. His teeth were yellow and as long as my legs.

“I’m sexually dormant,” I said aloud to him. “But I want to put my balls in someone’s face.”

Then somehow light was peeling everything back for dawn.

From Large Animals. Used with permission of Catapult. Copyright 2017 by Jess Arndt.

(Photo: Johanna Breiding)

The Leavers
by Lisa Ko

The day before Deming Guo saw his mother for the last time, she surprised him at school. A navy blue hat sat low on her forehead, scarf around her neck like a big brown snake. “What are you waiting for, Kid? It’s cold out.”

He stood in the doorway of P.S. 33 as she zipped his coat so hard the collar pinched. “Did you get off work early?” It was four thirty, already dark, but she didn’t usually leave the nail salon until six.

They spoke, as always, in Fuzhounese. “Short shift. Michael said you had to stay late to get help on an assignment.” Her eyes narrowed behind her glasses, and he couldn’t tell if she bought it or not. Teachers didn’t call your mom when you got detention, only gave a form you had to return with a signature, which he forged. Michael, who never got detention, had left after eighth period, and Deming wanted to get back home with him, in front of the television, where, in the safety of a laugh track, he didn’t have to worry about letting anyone down.

Snow fell like clots of wet laundry. Deming and his mother walked up Jerome Avenue. In the back of a concrete courtyard three older boys were passing a blunt, coats unzipped, wearing neither backpacks nor hats, sweet smoke and slow laughter warming the thin February air. “I don’t want you to be like that,” she said. “I don’t want you to be like me. I didn’t even finish eighth grade.”

What a sweet idea, not finishing eighth grade. He could barely finish fifth. His teachers said it was an issue of focus, of not applying himself. Yet when he tripped Travis Bhopa in math class Deming had been as shocked as Travis was. “I’ll come to your school tomorrow,” his mother said, “talk to your teacher about that assignment.” He kept his arm against his mother’s, loved the scratchy sound of their jackets rubbing together. She wasn’t one of those TV moms, always hugging their kids or watching them with bemused smiles, but insisted on holding his hand when they crossed a busy street. Inside her gloves her hands were red and scraped, the skin angry and peeling, and every night before she went to sleep she rubbed a thick lotion onto her fingers and winced. Once he asked if it made them hurt less. She said only for a little while, and he wished there was a special lotion that could make new skin grow, a pair of superpower gloves.

Short and blocky, she wore loose jeans—never had he seen her in a dress—and her voice was so loud that when she called his name dogs would bark and other kids jerked around. When she saw his last report card he thought her shouting would set off the car alarms four stories below. But her laughter was as loud as her shouting, and there was no better, more gratifying sound than when she slapped her knees and cackled at something silly. She laughed at things that weren’t meant to be funny, like TV dramas and the swollen orchestral soundtracks that accompanied them, or, better yet, at things Deming said, like when he nailed the way their neighbor Tommie always went, “Not bad-not bad-not bad” when they passed him in the stairwell, an automatic response to a “Hello-how-are-you” that hadn’t yet been issued. Or the time she’d asked, flipping through TV stations, “Dancing with the Stars isn’t on?” and he had excavated Michael’s old paper mobile of the solar system and waltzed with it through the living room as she clapped. It was almost as good as getting cheered on by his friends.

When he had lived in Minjiang with his grandfather, Deming’s mother had explored New York by herself. There was a restlessness to her, an inability to be still or settled. She jiggled her legs, bounced her knees, cracked her knuckles, twirled her thumbs. She hated being cooped up in the apartment on a sunny day, paced the rooms from wall to wall to wall, a cigarette dangling from her mouth. “Who wants to go for a walk?” she would say. Her boyfriend Leon would tell her to relax, sit down. “Sit down? We’ve been sitting all day!” Deming would want to stay on the couch with Michael, but he couldn’t say no to her and they’d go out, no family but each other. He would have her to himself, an ambling walk in the park or along the river, making up stories about who lived in the apartments they saw from the outside—a family named Smith, five kids, father dead, mother addicted to bagels, he speculated the day they went to the Upper East Side. “To bagels?” she said. “What flavor bagel?” “Everything bagels,” he said, which made her giggle harder, until they were both bent over on Madison Avenue, laughing so hard no sounds were coming out, and his stomach hurt but he couldn’t stop laughing, old white people giving them stink eye for stopping in the middle of the sidewalk. Deming and his mother loved everything bagels, the sheer balls of it, the New York audacity that a bagel could proclaim to be everything, even if it was only topped with sesame seeds and poppy seeds and salt.

A bus lumbered past, spraying slush. The walk sign flashed on. “You know what I did today?” his mother said. “One lady, she had a callus the size of your nose on her heel. I had to scrape all that dead skin off. It took forever. And her tip was shit. You’ll never do that, if you’re careful.”

He dreaded this familiar refrain. His mother could curse, but the one time he’d let motherfucker bounce out in front of her, loving the way the syllables got meatbally in his mouth, she had slapped his arm and said he was better than that. Now he silently said the word to himself as he walked, one syllable per footstep.

“Did you think that when I was growing up, a small girl your age, I thought: hey, one day, I’m going to come all the way to New York so I can pick gao gao out of a stranger’s toe? That was not my plan.”

Always be prepared, she liked to say. Never rely on anyone else to give you things you could get yourself. She despised laziness, softness, people who were weak. She had few friends, but was true to the ones she had. She could hold a fierce grudge, would walk an extra three blocks to another grocery store because, two years ago, a cashier at the one around the corner had smirked at her lousy English. It was lousy, Deming agreed.

From The Leavers. Printed by permission of Algonquin Books. Copyright © 2017 by Lisa Ko.

(Photo: Bartosz Potocki)
page_5: 

The Windfall
by Diksha Basu

The following week, on an unusually overcast September day, Mr. Jha pulled into the quiet lane of his new Gurgaon home. He had never been here by himself, he realized. Mrs. Jha was usually with him, and this summer Rupak had come with them a few times, and there were all the contractors and painters and builders buzzing around, working. He had never really appreciated the silence and the greenery before. Gurgaon felt still while the rest of Delhi throbbed.

The air was heavy with heat and the promise of rain. On the radio, a Bon Jovi song played. “It’s been raining since you left me,” the lyrics said. How funny, Mr. Jha thought. An Indian song would have to say, “It hasn’t rained since you left me.” Unless, of course, you were happy that they left you.

An electronic shoe-polishing machine in a large box was on the passenger seat of his Mercedes. He had strapped it in with the seat belt. It was beautiful. And it was expensive. It was not a planned purchase. This morning he had a breakfast meeting with two young men who were launching a website that would help you find handymen around Delhi, and they asked him to join their team as a consultant. He declined. He did not have time to take on any new work until they were done moving homes. And then they had to visit Rupak, so he was not going to have any free time until November or December. And then it would be the holiday season, so really it was best if he took the rest of the year off work.

The meeting was over breakfast at the luxurious Teresa’s Hotel in Connaught Place in central Delhi, and after filling himself up with mini croissants, fruit tarts, sliced cheeses, salami, coffee, and orange juice, Mr. Jha went for a stroll through the lobby and the other restaurants in the hotel. All the five-star hotels in the center of town were little oases of calm and cool. Mr. Jha was walking by the large windows that overlooked the swimming pool that was for guests only when he thought he would book a two-night stay here. He knew his wife loved the indulgence of nice hotels and he had recently read about what youngsters were calling a staycation—a vacation where you don’t leave the city or the home you usually live in, but you give yourself a few days to take a holiday. Of course, since he didn’t work much anymore, most days, weeks, months were a staycation, but how wonderful it would be to check into a hotel and have a lazy few days. Having room service—or, like they were called at Teresa’s, butlers—was a different sort of pleasure than having servants bringing you food and cleaning your home. Butlers showed that you had made the progression from servants to expensive appliances to uniformed men who ran the expensive appliances.

From The Windfall, published by Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, in June. Copyright © 2017 by Diksha Basu.

(Photo: Mikey McCleary)

First Fiction 2016

by

Staff

6.14.16

For our sixteenth annual roundup of the summer’s best debut fiction, we asked five established authors to introduce this year’s group of debut writers. Read the July/August 2016 issue of the magazine for interviews between Yaa Gyasi and Angela Flournoy, Masande Ntshanga and Naomi Jackson, Rumaan Alam and Emma Straub, Maryse Meijer and Lindsay Hunter, and Imbolo Mbue and Christina Baker Kline. But first, check out these exclusive readings and excerpts from their debut novels.

Homegoing (Knopf, June) by Yaa Gyasi
The Reactive (Two Dollar Radio, June) by Masande Ntshanga
Rich and Pretty (Ecco, June) by Rumaan Alam
Heartbreaker (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, July) by Maryse Meijer
Behold the Dreamers (Random House, August) by Imbolo Mbue

 

Homegoing
By Yaa Gyasi

The night Effia Otcher was born into the musky heat of Fanteland, a fire raged through the woods just outside her father’s compound. It moved quickly, tearing a path for days. It lived off the air; it slept in caves and hid in trees; it burned, up and through, unconcerned with what wreckage it left behind, until it reached an Asante village. There, it disappeared, becoming one with the night.

Effia’s father, Cobbe Otcher, left his first wife, Baaba, with the new baby so that he might survey the damage to his yams, that most precious crop known far and wide to sustain families. Cobbe had lost seven yams, and he felt each loss as a blow to his own family. He knew then that the memory of the fire that burned, then fled, would haunt him, his children, and his children’s children for as long as the line continued. When he came back into Baaba’s hut to find Effia, the child of the night’s fire, shrieking into the air, he looked at his wife and said, “We will never again speak of what happened today.”

The villagers began to say that the baby was born of the fire, that this was the reason Baaba had no milk. Effia was nursed by Cobbe’s second wife, who had just given birth to a son three months before. Effia would not latch on, and when she did, her sharp gums would tear at the flesh around the woman’s nipples until she became afraid to feed the baby. Because of this, Effia grew thinner, skin on small bird- like bones, with a large black hole of a mouth that expelled a hungry crywhich could be heard throughout the village, even on the days Baaba did her best to smother it, covering the baby’s lips with the rough palm of her left hand.

“Love her,” Cobbe commanded, as though love were as simple an act as lifting food up from an iron plate and past one’s lips. At night, Baaba dreamed of leaving the baby in the dark forest so that the god Nyame could do with her as he pleased.

Effia grew older. The summer after her third birthday, Baaba had her first son. The boy’s name was Fiifi, and he was so fat that some- times, when Baaba wasn’t looking, Effia would roll him along the ground like a ball. The first day that Baaba let Effia hold him, she accidentally dropped him. The baby bounced on his buttocks, landed on his stomach, and looked up at everyone in the room, confused as to whether or not he should cry. He decided against it, but Baaba, who had been stirring banku, lifted her stirring stick and beat Effia across her bare back. Each time the stick lifted off the girl’s body, it would leave behind hot, sticky pieces of banku that burned into her flesh. By the time Baaba had finished, Effia was covered with sores, screaming and crying. From the floor, rolling this way and that on his belly, Fiifi looked at Effia with his saucer eyes but made no noise.

Cobbe came home to find his other wives attending to Effia’s wounds and understood immediately what had happened. He and Baaba fought well into the night. Effia could hear them through the thin walls of the hut where she lay on the floor, drifting in and out of a feverish sleep. In her dream, Cobbe was a lion and Baaba was a tree. The lion plucked the tree from the ground where it stood and slammed it back down. The tree stretched its branches in protest, and the lion ripped them off, one by one. The tree, horizontal, began to cry red ants that traveled down the thin cracks between its bark. The ants pooled on the soft earth around the top of the tree trunk.

And so the cycle began. Baaba beat Effia. Cobbe beat Baaba. By the time Effia had reached age ten, she could recite a history of the scars on her body. The summer of 1764, when Baaba broke yams across her back. The spring of 1767, when Baaba bashed her left foot with a rock, breaking her big toe so that it now always pointed away from the other toes. For each scar on Effia’s body, there was a companion scar on Baaba’ s, but that didn’t stop mother from beating daughter, father from beating mother.

Matters were only made worse by Effia’s blossoming beauty. When she was twelve, her breasts arrived, two lumps that sprung from her chest, as soft as mango flesh. The men of the village knew that first blood would soon follow, and they waited for the chance to ask Baaba and Cobbe for her hand. The gifts started. One man tapped palm wine better than anyone else in the village, but another’s fishing nets were never empty. Cobbe’s family feasted off Effia’s burgeoning woman- hood. Their bellies, their hands, were never empty.

Excerpted from HOMEGOING by Yaa Gyasi. Copyright © 2016 by Yaa Gyasi. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

The Reactive
By Masande Ntshanga

The way I got to know them, by the way, my two closest friends here, is that we met at one of the new HIV and drug-counseling sessions cropping up all over the city. We were in the basement parking lot of the free clinic in Wynberg. The seminar room upstairs had been locked up and taped shut, there’d been a mer­cury spill, and our group couldn’t meet in there on account of the vapors being toxic to human tissue. Instead, they arranged us in the basement parking lot, and in two weeks we got used to not being sent upstairs for meetings. I did, in any case, and that was enough for me in the beginning.

In those days, I attended the meetings alone. I’d catch a taxi from Obs over to Wynberg for an afternoon’s worth of coun­seling. By the end of my first month, when the seminar room had been swept once, and then twice, and then three times by a short man who wore a blue contamination meter over his chest, each time checking out clean, everyone decided they preferred it down below, and so that’s where we stayed.

Maybe we all want to be buried here, I said.

It had been the first time I’d spoken in group. Talking always took me a while, back then, but the remark succeeded in making a few of them laugh. It won me chuckles even from the old-timers, and later, I wrote down my first addiction story to share with the group. It was from a film I saw adapted from a book I wasn’t likely to read. Ruan and Cissie arrived on the following Wednesday.

I noticed them immediately. Something seemed to draw us in from our first meeting. In the parking lot, we eyeballed each other for a while before we spoke. During the coffee break, we stood by the serving table in front of a peeling Toyota bakkie, mumbling tentatively towards each other’s profiles. I learned that Cecelia was a teacher. She pulled week-long shifts at a day­care center just off Bridge Street in Mowbray, and she was there on account of the school’s accepting its first openly positive pupil. Ruan, who was leaning against the plastic table, gulping more than sipping at the coffee in his paper cup, said that he suffocated through his life by working on the top floor of his uncle’s computer firm. He was there to shop for a social issue they could use for their corporate responsibility strategy. He called it CRS, and Cissie and I had to ask him what he meant.

In the end, I guess I was impressed. I told them how I used to be a lab assistant at Peninsula Tech, and how in a way this was part of how I’d got to be sick with what I have.

When we sat back down again, we listened to the rest of the members assess each other’s nightmares. They passed them around with a familiar casualness. Mark knew about Ronelle’s school fees, for instance, and she knew about Linette’s hepatitis, and all of us knew that Linda had developed a spate of genital warts over September. She called them water warts, when she first told us, and, like most of her symptoms, she blamed them on the rain.

That day, when the discussion turned to drug abuse, as it always did during the last half-hour of our sessions, the three of us had nothing to add. I looked over at Ruan and caught him stashing a grin behind his fist, while on my other side, Cecelia blinked up at the ceiling. I didn’t need any more evidence for our kinship.

The meeting lasted the full two hours, and when it came to an end, I collected my proof of attendance and exchanged num­bers with Ruan and Cecelia. I suppose we said our goodbyes at the entrance of the parking lot that day, and later, within that same week I think, we were huffing paint thinner together in my flat in Obs.

Excerpted from The Reactive by Masande Ntshanga. Copyright  ©  2016 by Masande Ntshanga. Excerpted by permission of Two Dollar Radio. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

 Rich and Pretty
By Rumaan Alam

Lauren’s office is freezing. You could keep butter on the desk. You could perform surgery. Every woman in the office—they’re all women—keeps a cashmere sweater on the back of her chair. They sit, hands outstretched over computer keyboards like a bum’s over a flaming garbage can. The usual office noises: typing, telephones, people using indoor voices, the double ding of an elevator going down. For some reason, the double ding of the elevator going down is louder than the single ding of the elevator going up. There’s a metaphor in there, waiting to be untangled. They make cookbooks, these women. There’s no food, just stacks of paper and editorial assistants in glasses. She’s worked here for four years. It’s fine.

Today is different because today there’s a guy, an actual dude, in the office with them, not a photographer or stylist popping by for a meeting, as does happen: He’s
a temp, because Kristen is having a baby and her doctor put her on bed rest. Lauren isn’t totally clear on what Kristen does, but now there’s a dude doing it. He’s wearing a button-down shirt and jeans, and loafers, not sneakers, which implies a certain maturity. Lauren’s been trying to get him to notice her all day. She’s the second-prettiest woman in the office, so it isn’t hard. Hannah, the prettiest, has a vacant quality about her. She’s not stupid, exactly—in fact, she’s very competent—but she doesn’t have spark. She’s not interesting, just thin and blond, with heavy eyeglasses and a photograph of her French bulldog on her computer screen.

Lauren has it all planned out. She’ll walk past his desk a couple of times, which isn’t suspicious because his desk isn’t far from the kitchen, and the kitchen is where the coffee is, and by the third time, he’ll follow her in there, and she’ll make a wisecrack about the coffee, and he’ll say it’s not so bad, and they’ll talk, and exchange phone numbers, e-mail addresses, whatever, and then later they’ll leave the office at the same time, ride down together in the elevator and not talk because they both understand that the social contract dictates that sane people do not talk in elevators, and then he’ll let her go through the revolving door first, even though she’s pretty sure that etiquette has it that men precede women through revolving doors, and then they’ll both be standing on Broadway, and there will be traffic and that vague smell of charred, ethnic meat from the guy with the lunch cart on the corner, and he’ll suggest they get a drink, and she’ll say sure, and they’ll go to the Irish pub on Fifty-Fifth Street, because there’s nowhere else to go, and after two drinks they’ll be starving, and he’ll suggest they get dinner, but there’s nowhere to eat in this part of town, so they’ll take the train to Union Square and realize there’s nowhere to eat there either, and they’ll walk down into the East Village and find something, maybe ramen, or that Moroccan-y place that she always forgets she likes, and they’ll eat, and they’ll start touching each other, casually but deliberately, carefully, and the check will come and she’ll say let’s split it, and he’ll say no let me, even though he’s a temp and can’t make that much money, right? Then they’ll be drunk, so taking a cab seems wise and they’ll make out in the backseat, but just a little bit, and kind of laugh about it, too: stop to check their phones, or admire the view, or so he can explain that he lives with a roommate or a dog, or so she can tell him some stupid story about work that won’t mean anything to him anyway because it’s only his first day and he doesn’t know anyone’s name, let alone their personality quirks and the complexities of the office’s political and social ecosystem.

Then he’ll pay the driver, because they’ll go to his place—she doesn’t want to bring the temp back to her place—and it’ll be nice, or fine, or ugly, and he’ll open beers because all he has are beers, and she’ll pretend to drink hers even though she’s had enough, and he’ll excuse himself for a minute to go to the bathroom, but really it’s to brush his teeth, piss, maybe rub some wet toilet paper around his ass and under his balls. This is something Gabe had told her, years ago, that men do this, or at least, that he did. Unerotic, but somehow touching. Then the temp will come sit next to her on the couch, please let it be a couch and not a futon, and he’ll play with her hair a little before he kisses her, his mouth minty, hers beery. He’ll be out of his shirt, then, and he’s hard and hairy, but also a little soft at the belly, which she likes. She once slept with this guy Sean, whose torso, hairless and lean, freaked her out. It was like having sex with a female mannequin. The temp will push or pull her into his bedroom, just the right balance of aggression and respect, and the room will be fine, or ugly, and the bedsheets will be navy, as men’s bedsheets always are, and there will be venetian blinds, and lots of books on the nightstand because he’s temping at a publishing company so he must love to read. She’ll tug her shirt over her head, and he’ll pull at her bra, and they’ll be naked, and he’ll fumble around for a condom, and his dick will be long but not, crucially, thick, and it will be good, and then it will be over. They’ll laugh about how this whole thing is against the company’s sexual harassment policy. She’ll try to cover herself with the sheet, and he’ll do the same, suddenly embarrassed by his smaller, slightly sticky dick. When he’s out of the room, to get a beer, to piss, whatever, she’ll get dressed. He’ll call her a car service, because there are no yellow cabs wherever he lives. They’ll both spend the part of the night right before they fall asleep trying to figure out how to act around each other in the office tomorrow.

Or maybe not that. Maybe she’ll find a way to go up to him and say, what, exactly, Hey, do you like parties? Do you want to go to a party . . . tonight? No, the jeans and tie are fine. It’s not fancy. A party. A good party. Good open bar, for sure. Probably canapés, what are canapés exactly, whatever they are, there will probably be some. Last party, there were these balls of cornbread and shrimp, like deep fried, holy shit they were great. That was last year, I think. Anyway, there might be celebrities there. There will definitely be celebrities there. I once saw Bill Clinton at one of these parties. He’s skinnier than you’d think. Anyway, think about it, it’ll be a time, and by the way, I’m Lauren, I’m an associate editor here and you are? She can picture his conversation, the words coming to her so easily, as they do in fantasy but never in reality. They call it meeting cute, in movies, but it only happens in movies.

From Rich and Pretty by Rumaan Alam. Copyright © 2016 by Rumaan Alam. Excerpted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Heartbreaker
By Maryse Meijer

Daddy comes over on Thursdays. My husband and son are out watching movies where people blow each other up. They have burgers afterward and buf- falo wings and milkshakes and they talk about  TV shows and girls and the latest bloody video game. At least that’s what I imagine they do. No way do they imagine what I am doing, sitting here at the kitchen table doing my math homework as Daddy microwaves the mac and cheese he brought over. We have three hours together and in these three hours I am twelve years old and my daddy is the most wonderful man in the world.

On craigslist I post the photo from my work website, the one with my hair scraped back in a ponytail, expos- ing my shiny forehead, my thin lips, my arms bursting from the sleeves of my blue blouse. Daughter seeks Father is all I write as a caption. In response I receive an avalanche of cell-phone numbers, chat invitations, and penis pics lifted from porn sites.

I delete all the emails except for Richard’s: Sweetheart, please call home. I sit for a moment hunched in my cubicle, sweating, before lifting the receiver and dialing his number.

Daddy? I whisper, hand up to cover my mouth so no one walking by can see it moving.

He doesn’t skip a beat. Sweetheart! he says. Did you see the photo? I ask.

Of course, he says.

I’m not better in person, I warn. You’re perfect, he assures me.

I’m married, I tell him. I have a kid. No problem, he insists.

I chew the inside of my cheek. There’s not going to be any sex, I say.

Absolutely not! he agrees.

I wait for him to say something creepy or disgusting, but he doesn’t. We make arrangements to meet at McDonald’s for dinner on Thursday.

Don’t kill me, I say, and he laughs.

Oh sweetheart, he says. What on earth?

I’m  early. I don’t  know what Daddy looks like and every time the door swings open my head jerks like a ball on a string. I convince myself I’m going to be stood up and that it will be better anyway if I am. But at seven on the dot he enters and he looks straight at me and waves.

Our usual, sweetheart?  he says, loud enough for other people to hear, and I nod. He brings a tray of chicken nugget combos to my table. He kisses my cheek. The food steams in our hands as we look at each other; he seems about twenty, twenty-two, with chinos frayed at the bottoms and red hair and glasses and biceps as skinny as my wrist. Maybe someday he will be good- looking.

Extra barbecue sauce, just the way you like, he says, gesturing to my nuggets. I smile and take a bite. He asks me about school and I ask him about work and he is as interested in how I’m doing in gym class as I am in the stocks he’s trading at the office; we slip into our new roles as easily as knives into butter.

I almost forgot, he says. He reaches into the pocket of his jacket and pulls out a CD with a Christmas bow stuck on it. Just a little something, he adds, and hands it to me. I unstick the bow and turn the CD over in my hands: Britney Spears. I bounce, once, and my left butt cheek, which doesn’t quite fit on the plastic chair, bangs on the edge of the seat.

Oh Daddy, I say, touched because I k now he went into a store and asked what would be the right thing to get for his little girl, and he paid for it with his own money and put it in his pocket and found  the gaudy bow to go with it and then brought it all the way here, to me, because he k new he would like me and already wanted to give me something, and this makes me want to give everything I have to him in return.

Apart from  Thursday nights—and it’s  always Thurs- days, always nights—we don’t communicate, except by email. Sometimes he’ll send me a note just to say, Have a great day!! or he’ll tell me what plans he has for dinner: Working late need a treat pizza sound  good??? or he’ll hint at imagined happenings in my little-girl life: Don’t forget dentist today xoxoxoxo!! and Good luck on the history quiz I know you’ll do awesome!!!! I write back in equally breathless terms to report the results of the history quiz or the number of cavities rotting my teeth or to squeal over the impending pizza feast. These exchanges give me a high so intense my chest muscles spasm and when my boss calls and says to bring her such-and-such a document I hit print and out comes an email from Daddy, not the work document, and I giggle into my hand and hit print again.

He always arrives exactly fifteen minutes after my hus- band and son leave. I sit on the couch with the televi- sion on while he fumbles with the keys and the empty banged-up briefcase he always brings. Sweetheart! he says when he enters, and I yelp Daddy! and if I was maybe ten or twenty or, okay, thirty pounds lighter, I might run toward him, but as it is I wait on the couch for him to come over and k iss my hair. I’ll pour him a soda on the rocks and he’ll  pour  me some milk and we touch glasses and smile. If my husband calls I stand by the back door with my head down and say Uh-huh, yes, fine, all right, see you soon, no, nothing for me, thanks, I’m enjoying the leftovers, have fun, love you.

Excerpted from Heartbreaker by Maryse Meijer. Copyright ©  Maryse Meijer, 2016. Reprinted with permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

page_5: 

Behold the Dreamers
By Imbolo Mbue

He’d never been asked to wear a suit to a job interview. Never been told to bring along a copy of his résumé. He hadn’t even owned a résumé until the previous week when he’d gone to the library on Thirty-fourth and Madison and a volunteer career counselor had written one for him, detailed his work history to suggest he was a man of grand accomplishments: farmer responsible for tilling land and growing healthy crops; street cleaner responsible for making sure the town of Limbe looked beautiful and pristine; dishwasher in Manhattan restaurant, in charge of ensuring patrons ate from clean and germ-free plates; livery cabdriver in the Bronx, responsible for taking passengers safely from place to place.

He’d never had to worry about whether his experience would be appropriate, whether his English would be perfect, whether he would succeed in coming across as intelligent enough. But today, dressed in the green double-breasted pinstripe suit he’d worn the day he entered America, his ability to impress a man he’d never met was all he could think about. Try as he might, he could do nothing but think about the questions he might be asked, the answers he would need to give, the way he would have to walk and talk and sit, the times he would need to speak or listen and nod, the things he would have to say or not say, the response he would need to give if asked about his legal status in the country. His throat went dry. His palms moistened. Unable to reach for his handkerchief in the packed downtown subway, he wiped both palms on his pants.

“Good morning, please,” he said to the security guard in the lobby when he arrived at Lehman Brothers. “My name is Jende Jonga. I am here for Mr. Edwards. Mr. Clark Edwards.”

The guard, goateed and freckled, asked for his ID, which he quickly pulled out of his brown bifold wallet. The man took it, examined it front and back, looked up at his face, looked down at his suit, smiled, and asked if he was trying to become a stockbroker or something.

Jende shook his head. “No,” he replied without smiling back. “A chauffeur.”

“Right on,” the guard said as he handed him a visitor pass. “Good luck with that.”

This time Jende smiled. “Thank you, my brother,” he said. “I really need all that good luck today.”

Alone in the elevator to the twenty-eighth floor, he inspected his fingernails (no dirt, thankfully). He adjusted his clip-on tie using the security mirror above his head; reexamined his teeth and found no visible remnants of the fried ripe plantains and beans he’d eaten for breakfast. He cleared his throat and wiped off whatever saliva had crusted on the sides of his lips. When the doors opened he straightened his shoulders and introduced himself to the receptionist, who, after responding with a nod and a display of extraordinarily white teeth, made a phone call and asked him to follow her. They walked through an open space where young men in blue shirts sat in cubicles with multiple screens, down a corridor, past another open space of cluttered cubicles and into a sunny office with a four-paneled glass window running from wall to wall and floor to ceiling, the thousand autumn-drenched trees and proud towers of Manhattan standing outside. For a second his mouth fell open, at the view outside—the likes of which he’d never seen—and the exquisiteness inside. There was a lounging section (black leather sofa, two black leather chairs, glass coffee table) to his right, an executive desk (oval, cherry, black leather reclining chair for the executive, two green leather armchairs for visitors) in the center, and a wall unit (cherry, glass doors, white folders in neat rows) to his left, in front of which Clark Edwards, in a dark suit, was standing and feeding sheets of paper into a pullout shredder.

“Please, sir, good morning,” Jende said, turning toward him and half-bowing.

“Have a seat,” Clark said without lifting his eyes from the shredder.

Jende hurried to the armchair on the left. He pulled a résumé from his folder and placed it in front of Clark’s seat, careful not to disturb the layers of white papers and Wall Street Journals strewn across the desk in a jumble. One of the Journal pages, peeking from beneath sheets of numbers and graphs, had the headline: Whites’ Great Hope? Barack Obama and the Dream of a Color-blind America.” Jende leaned forward to read the story, fascinated as he was by the young ambitious senator, but immediately sat upright when he remembered where he was, why he was there, what was about to happen.

“Do you have any outstanding tickets you need to resolve?” Clark asked as he sat down.

“No, sir,” Jende replied.

“And you haven’t been in any serious accidents, right?”

“No, Mr. Edwards.”

Clark picked up the résumé from his desk, wrinkled and moist like the man whose history it held. His eyes remained on it for several seconds while Jende’s darted back and forth, from the Central Park treetops far beyond the window to the office walls lined with abstract paintings and portraits of white men wearing bow ties. He could feel beads of sweat rising out of his forehead.

“Well, Jende,” Clark said, putting the résumé down and leaning back in his chair. “Tell me about yourself.”

Excerpted from Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue. Copyright  ©  2016 by Imbolo Mbue. Reprinted with permission of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

First Fiction 2016: Nine More Notable Debuts

As part of our sixteenth annual First Fiction roundup, in which five debut authors—Yaa GyasiMasande Ntshanga, Rumaan Alam, Maryse Meijer, and Imbolo Mbue—discuss their first books, we picked nine more notable debuts that fans of fiction should consider reading this summer.

Remarkable (BOA Editions, May) by Dinah Cox
Set primarily in Oklahoma, the remarkable (that’s right, remarkable) stories in Cox’s award-winning collection spotlight characters whose wit, resilience, and pathos are as vast as the Great Plains landscape they inhabit.

Anatomy of a Soldier (Knopf, May) by Harry Parker
A former officer in the British Army who lost his legs in Afghanistan in 2009, Parker delivers a riveting, provocative novel that captures his wartime experience in an unconventional way. Forty-five inanimate objects—including a helmet, boots, and weapons—act as narrators, together offering the reader a powerful new perspective on war.

Goodnight, Beautiful Women (Grove, June) by Anna Noyes
With language both sensuous and precise, these interconnected stories immerse us in the lives of women and girls in coastal Maine as they navigate familial intimacy, sexual awakening, and love’s indiscretions.

Grief Is the Thing With Feathers (Graywolf, June) by Max Porter
In the wake of his wife’s sudden death, a man is visited by Crow, a “sentimental bird” that settles into the man’s life and the lives of his children in an attempt to heal the wounded family. A nuanced meditation that not only breaks open the boundaries of what constitutes a novel, but also demonstrates through its fragmentary form the unique challenge of writing about grief.

A Hundred Thousand Worlds (Viking, June) by Bob Proehl
Valerie and her son embark on a road trip from New York to Los Angeles to reunite the nine-year-old with his estranged father, attending comic-book conventions along the way. Proehl weaves the comic-con worlds of monsters and superheroes into a complex family saga, a tribute to a mother’s love and the way we tell stories that shape our lives.

Lily and the Octopus (Simon & Schuster, June) 
by Steven Rowley
Rowley’s novel centers on narrator Ted Flask and his aging companion—a dachshund named Lily—but readers who mistake this as a simple “boy and his dog” story are in for a profound and pleasant surprise. This powerful debut is a touching exploration of friendship and grief.

Pond (Riverhead Books, July) 
by Claire-Louise Bennett
In this compelling, innovative debut, the interior reality of an unnamed narrator—a solitary young woman living on the outskirts of a small coastal village—is revealed through the details of everyday life, some rendered in long stretches of narrative and others in poetic fragments. Bennett’s unique portrait of a persona emerges with an intensity and vision not often seen, or felt, in a debut. 

Champion of the World (Putnam, July) by Chad Dundas
Gangsters, bootlegging, and fixed competitions converge in the tumultuous world of 1920s American wrestling, which disgraced former lightweight champion Pepper Van Dean and his wife, Moira, must navigate in order to create the life they want. With crisp, muscular prose, this 470-page historical novel illuminates a time of rapid change in America.

Problems (Emily Books, July) by Jade Sharma
Raw, unrepentant, and biting with dark humor, Problems turns the addiction-redemption narrative inside out, as Sharma follows heroin hobbyist Maya through her increasingly chaotic life after the end of both her marriage and an affair. 

Ten Questions for Sarah McColl

1.15.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Sarah McColl, whose memoir, Joy Enough, is out today from Liveright. “I loved my mother, and she died. Is that a story?” From the first sentences of her memoir, which Megan Stielstra calls “a stunningly beautiful and meditative map of loss,” McColl captures what it means to be a daughter. Through vivid memories, Joy Enough charts the dissolution of the author’s marriage alongside the impending loss of her mother, who is diagnosed with cancer. A book about love and grief, Joy Enough attempts to explain what people mean when they say, “You are just like your mother.” Sarah McColl was the founding editor in chief of Yahoo Food. A MacDowell fellow and Pushcart Prize nominee, her essays have appeared in the Paris Review, StoryQuarterly, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence and lives in Los Angeles.

1. How long did it take you to write Joy Enough?
For a long time I didn’t think I was writing a book. I thought I was writing essays, and then I was writing a thesis, and then I started thinking of it as my weird art project. I was so afraid to call it a book because I was afraid it wouldn’t be published, and then I would be a writer with an unpublished book in a drawer. Now I think at least one book in a drawer is a good thing. It means you’re doing the work. But I must have known there was something like a book there, whatever I called it, because I kept working on it, and I kept sending it out. That process of writing and revising took three years.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I didn’t know how to make memory conform to a narrative arc. There were discrete scenes and moments that were very vivid to me, but I struggled with how to connect one to another in some linear, continuous way. I remember expressing this frustration to one of my professors. She said, “Write the scene, hit return a few times, and keep going.” So that was my solution in the end. The return key.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I participate with a group of writers in what we call “the 250s.” We have a shared Google doc with the days of the week marked out and a column for each writer. The goal is to write 250 words five days a week. The low word count is a mind trick to get you to sit down (it’s all about the mind tricks!) and then, hopefully, sail past 250 words. But if the writing is going badly, and you stop at 250, you still have some sense of accomplishment (again, mind trick). That’s the goal, mind you, and I do not consistently achieve this goal. Sometimes I walk around thinking about an essay for six months and then sit down and write a draft in one burst. I like the fuzzy, quiet quality of the mornings and the night. I have a small studio above the garage, but I also tend to write in bed a lot.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process? 
I had no idea just how much buy-in a book requires. It’s not enough to have an agent champion a book and then for an editor to fall in love with it. The editor has to get everyone on board—sales, marketing, publicity. If your book finds a publisher, then it takes all those same people working on your behalf for a book to find its way in the world. Writing is such a solitary activity, but publishing is a completely different animal. I didn’t realize that at the outset. Sorry to get all “it takes a village,” but it really does, and I have pinched myself many times at how grateful I have felt in Liveright’s hands. 

5. What are you reading right now? 
I have a predictably overambitious new year’s resolution to read a book of poetry, a novel, a book of short stories, and a book of nonfiction each month. Right now I’m reading People Like You by Margaret Malone, which is dark and funny and sublime; Claire Fuller’s Bitter Orange, which feels marvelously escapist and lush and has been keeping me up too late; Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde, who needs no adjectives; and I’m anxiously awaiting Paige Ackerson-Kiely’s new book, Dolefully, a Rampart Stands.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
Discovering and falling in love with an author is such a private activity. When you meet someone who loves the same writer you do, it becomes a kind of shorthand for a shared aesthetic or philosophical worldview. I nearly knocked over my wine glass with excitement when I met a woman who wanted to talk about Canadian author Elizabeth Smart as much as I did. That’s not wide recognition, but it’s a form of literary community, and that’s probably more lasting in the end.

7. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? 
Getting my MFA was the best decision of my adult life, and I loved my program at Sarah Lawrence. I wanted to be able to teach at the college level, I knew what I wanted to work on, and I had some money saved to pay for part of it. But I think it depends what a writer is looking for in their creative life (structure, guidance, encouragement, time), the package offered by the school, and their long-term career goals. If you have the resources to devote two or three years to the world of language and ideas, I found it a powerful and blissful experience.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
The mental space daily life demands. Buying a birthday present, calling the insurance company, grocery shopping, dishes, e-mail. This was captured so well in the comic The Mental Load, which focuses on parenthood but applies equally to keeping the lights on and the toilet paper replenished, if you ask me. This is why I love residencies. I honestly cannot believe how much more space I have in my brain when I am not thinking about how and what to feed myself three times a day.

9. What trait do you most value in agent? 
I trust my agent, Grainne Fox, to always tell me the hard thing. That she does so with a soft touch and incomparable charm is proof she’s for me. I trust her implicitly, and we get on like a house on fire. That’s the foundation for any great relationship.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
You must find pleasure in the work itself—doing the work. Otherwise, what’s the point?

Sarah McColl, author of Joy Enough.

(Credit: Joanna Eldredge Morrissey)

Ten Questions for Elisa Gabbert

by

Staff

12.18.18

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Elisa Gabbert, whose essay collection The Word Pretty is just out from Black Ocean. Part of the press’s new Undercurrents series of literary nonfiction, the book combines personal essay, criticism, meditation, and craft to offer lyric and often humorous observations on a wide range of topics related to writing, reading, and life—from emojis and aphorisms to front matter, tangents, and Twitter. Gabbert is the author of the poetry collections The French Exit and L’Heure Bleue, or the Judy Poems; and a previous collection of essays, The Self Unstable. Her poems and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, A Public Space, the Paris Review, Guernica, and the Threepenny Review, among other publications, and she writes an advice column for writers, The Blunt Instrument, at Electric Literature. She lives in Denver. 

1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I just turned in a manuscript, another collection of essays, and the way I wrote that was very specific: For between one and three months, depending on my time constraints, I’d surround myself with, or submerse myself in, material on a topic—for example nuclear disasters, or “hysteria,” or memory—and read and watch films and think and take tons of notes. Then after a while the essay would start to take shape in my mind. I’d outline a structure, and then block off time to write it. As this process got systematized, I became more efficient; for the last essay I finished, I wrote most of it, about 5,000 words, in a single day. It was pretty much my ideal writing day: I got up relatively early on a Saturday morning and wrote until dark. Then I poured a drink and read over what I’d written. Of course I wouldn’t be able to do that if I didn’t give myself plenty of processing time. I can write 5,000 good words in a day, but I can only do that maybe once a month. I did most of the work for this book, the note-taking and the actual writing, sitting at the end of our dining room table. I try not to write at the same desk where I do my day job.

2. You write both poetry and prose; does your process differ for each form?
Yes. With prose, all I need is time to think and I can generate it pretty easily; a lot of my thoughts are already in prose. Poetry is harder. I feel like I have less material, and I can’t waste it, so it’s this delicate, concentrated operation not to screw it up. It feels like there’s some required resource I deplete. And I have to change my process entirely every three or four years if I’m going to write poems at all. Basically I come up with a form and then find a way to “translate” my thoughts into the form. It wasn’t always like that, but that’s the way it is now. I used to think in lines.

3. How long did it take you to write The Word Pretty?
I hadn’t set out to write a book, per se; I was just writing little essays until eventually they started to feel like a collection. But I think I wrote all of them between 2015 and 2017.

4. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
I hope this doesn’t sound like faux humility, but I am surprised by the number of people who have bought it and read it already. I thought this was one for, like, eight to ten of my super-fans. We didn’t have a lot of time or money (read: any money) to promote it. What doesn’t surprise me is everyone commenting on how pretty it is. Black Ocean makes beautiful books.

5. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
One thing? I’d like to change a lot, but I wish both were less beholden to trends and the winner-take-all tendencies of hype and attention.

6. What are you reading right now?
I just finished reading Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely cover to cover—I’d only read parts of it before—which got me thinking about the indirect, out-of-sequence nature of influence. My second book, The Self Unstable, looks the way it does (i.e. little chunks of essayistic, aphoristic, sometimes personal prose) in part because I’d just read a few collections of prose poetry I really liked. One was a chapbook by my friend Sam Starkweather, who was always talking about Don’t Let Me Be Lonely. This was years ago, before Claudia Rankine was a household name. I finally read the whole book and thought, “Oh! This was an influence on me!” Next I am planning to reread The Bell Jar, which I last read in high school, in preparation to write about the new Sylvia Plath story that is being published in January. I have an early copy of the story as a PDF, but I haven’t even opened the file yet. I’m terrified of it.

7. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
I didn’t invent Elizabeth Bowen but I just read her for the first time this year and she blew my mind. I’m always telling people to read this hilarious novella about Po Biz called Lucinella by Lore Segal, and Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb, one of the best novels I’ve ever read. Michael Joseph Walsh is a Korean American poet I love who doesn’t have a book yet. Also, some people will find this gauche, but my husband, John Cotter, writes beautiful essays that don’t get enough attention.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Not being independently wealthy, I guess? I have a job, so I can only work on writing stuff at night and on the weekends.

9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
It would be nice to win some kind of major award—but that would really go against my brand, which is “I don’t win awards.”

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
The best writing advice is always “read stuff,” but you’ve heard that before, so here’s something more novel: My thesis advisor, a wonderful man named John Skoyles, once said in a workshop—I think he was repeating something he’d heard from another poet—that if a poem has the word “chocolate” in it, it should also have the word “disconsolate.” I took this advice literally at least once, but it also works as a metaphor: that is to say, a piece of writing should have internal resonances (which could occur at the level of the word or the phrase or the idea or even the implication) that work semantically like slant rhymes, parts that call back softly to other parts, that make a chime in your mind.

Elisa Gabbert, author of The Word Pretty.

(Credit: Adalena Kavanagh)

Ten Questions for Guy Gunaratne

by

Staff

12.11.18

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Guy Gunaratne, whose debut novel, In Our Mad and Furious City, is out today from MCD x FSG Originals. Inspired by the real-life murder of a British soldier at the hands of religious fanatics, Gunaratne’s novel explores class, racism, immigration, and the chaotic fringes of modern-day London. Longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and Gordon Burn Prize, In Our Mad and Furious City tells a story, Marlon James says, “so of this moment that you don’t even realize you’ve waited your whole life for it.” Gunaratne was born in London and has worked as a journalist and a documentary filmmaker covering human rights stories around the world. He divides his time between London and Malmö, Sweden.

1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write in my study, in Malmö. A large wooden desk, surrounded by books set where I left them. I write as much as I can, when I can. The most focused period tends to be early mornings, between 5 AM and 6 AM to 9 AM, and then in dribs and drabs throughout the day.

2. How long did it take you to write In Our Mad and Furious City?
The novel took about four years to write the initial manuscript and then another year with my editor. As someone who enjoys the solitary commitment of writing, I didn’t quite know what to expect in terms of collaborating on it. I’ve found the process to be rewarding and instructive.

3. What trait do you most value in an editor?
Patience, probably. And space. Once when working on In Our Mad and Furious City, my editor and I were working on a specific part of one character’s voice. She asked me to go away and think about a few specific things. She gave a list. “Just think,” she said. She gave me the time to simmer, which I think is important when making any significant change.

4. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
I try, sometimes with difficulty, not to be cynical about the relationship between art and industry. My hopefulness comes from knowing that there are usually enough dedicated people in any industry who are committed to doing good work. My surprise comes from finding out that I’d actually underestimated the amount of good people I’d meet during the process.

5. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I think about this more as a reader than as a writer. I think we can all agree that homogeneity in any industry is unbearably boring. I’m interested in reading anything surprising, challenging, and provocative, in the best sense of the word. But I do wonder, at least with my experience thus far, how anything truly new, different, or challenging can ever come out of an industry that looks and acts so conservatively. There is still vitality here, and a desire to experiment with what gets published. The challenge is in encouraging those voices to keep on.

6. What are you reading right now?
I’m currently reading a nonfiction book called Rojava by Thomas Schmidinger, which is about the Kurds of Northern Syria. And I’ve finally got around to Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream.

7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
More people should be reading Machado de Assis and Nawal El Saadawi. But I think, more generally, people should be reading translated fiction. One of the beautiful things about the novel is its capacity to offer the reader a way to transgress beyond the parochial or familiar. It opens new territory to explore. At times it can even help confront learned biases that you wouldn’t have known were there. Many of my most surprising and enriching experiences have come from reading translated fiction.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Inevitably, there was always going to be a degree of friction because of the time I now commit to the public side of all this—the events, publicity, the travel. I think I underestimated how much all that would impact the other side, the writing side. Not to say I don’t like the public facing part. Engaging with readers, for example, I think is hugely rewarding. I find it a privilege, honestly. But I do find myself missing home quite a bit. I find that I need to have an extended period writing in once place in order to gather momentum. Sadly, I’ve been flitting back and forth, which doesn’t help.

9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
I don’t have any external goals with my writing, not really. Right now I just want to write, publish, and keep writing. If I’m still writing novels in my sixties, it would mean that I would have attained something I had once thought impossible. Namely, a writer’s life.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I can’t remember who spoke about this, but there was something I heard early on which I get the sense has become more and more apparent as I continue to write. It’s simple really, it’s just that there is something about your own subconscious that is far more perceptive than whatever your conscious mind can conjure up. Being attentive to allowing that stuff to come through, to trust in allowing a degree of exploration as you write. This has become very important to me, and useful to know, too, any time I sit and stare at a blank page. You’ve got to get out of your own way.

Guy Gunaratne, author of In Our Mad and Furious City.

(Credit: Jai Stokes)

Ten Questions for Nuruddin Farah

by

Staff

12.4.18

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Nuruddin Farah, whose new novel, North of Dawn, is out today from Riverhead Books. Inspired by true events, the novel follows a Somali couple living in Oslo, whose son becomes involved in jihadism in Somalia and eventually kills himself in a suicide attack. When the son’s wife and children move in with his parents in Oslo, the family finds itself confronted with questions of religion, extremism, xenophobia, displacement, and identity. Farah, who the New York Review of Books calls “the most important African novelist to emerge in the past twenty-five years,” is the author of four previous novels, most recently Hiding in Plain Sight (Riverhead, 2014), which have been translated into more than twenty languages and have won numerous awards, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Born in Baidoa, Somalia, he currently lives in Cape Town.

1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write less and less when I am on the road, travelling, or in upstate New York, teaching. But when I am in Cape Town, where I reside for much of the year, I write daily for no less than six hours.

2. How long did it take you to write North of Dawn?
It took a lot of time—two years to do the research, and nearly a year and a half to whip the text into shape. I suppose that is the nature of research-based literary fiction.

3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
That it takes up to a year or more for a book to be published after the author has submitted it.

4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
It saddens me that the shelf life of literary fiction has been drastically reduced to a few months after publication, unless the said novel becomes a commercial success or is made into a movie or the author gains some notoriety.

5. What are you reading right now?
I am currently reading Kwame Anthony Appiah’s In My Father’s House, which is on the syllabus of a course about journalism and literature I am teaching at Bard College this semester.

6. Would you recommend that writers get an MFA?
Having never taken an MFA, I am in no position to speak to this.

7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
My favorite editors have been the editors who have shown me the weaknesses of the draft texts I submit and I am grateful to them when they do.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I have found traveling away from Cape Town, where I do much of my writing, has proven to be an impediment.

9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
Taken as a whole, I am content with the body of work I’ve produced.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
That no writing is good enough until you, as an author, make a small contribution, the size of a drop, into the ocean of the world’s literature.

Nuruddin Farah, author of North of Dawn.

(Credit: Jeffrey Wilson)

Ten Questions for Oyinkan Braithwaite

11.20.18

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Oyinkan Braithwaite, whose debut novel, My Sister, the Serial Killer, is out today from Doubleday. A novel of violence and sibling rivalry, My Sister, the Serial Killer follows Ayoola, the murderer in the book’s title, and quiet, practical Korede, a nurse who cleans up her younger sister’s messes. (“I bet you didn’t know that bleach masks the smell of blood,” Korede says in the novel’s first pages.) The pair work reasonably well together until Ayoola sets her sights on a handsome doctor who has long been the object of Korede’s desire. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly called My Sister, the Serial Killer “as sharp as a knife…bitingly funny and brilliantly executed, with not a single word out of place.” A graduate of London’s Kingston University, where she earned a degree in creative writing and law, Braithwaite works as a freelance writer and editor in Lagos, Nigeria. 

1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Most of the time I type on my laptop, lying on my bed. Generally, I like to write when everyone is asleep and everywhere is quiet. But if I have to, I will write on my phone, standing up, in the middle of a party. I try to write every day. It is a fantastic practice, but not an easy one.

2. How long did it take you to write My Sister, the Serial Killer?
The entire writing and editing process took about seven months.

3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
What has surprised me the most is how much takes place before a book is released. And how much of a book’s success is dependent on the publishers’ faith in the book. I have enjoyed far too much favour, warmth, encouragement and kindness from my agents and publishers, and from strangers—booksellers, book bloggers, etc.—people who do not know me, but are going out of their way to make sure that My Sister, the Serial Killer is a book that is read.

4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
The publishing business is a business at the end of the day. The literary community, however, I believe could make a bit more of an effort to bring to the spotlight books that were well written and engaging but were, for all intents and purposes, unknown.

5. What are you reading right now?
We and Me by Saskia de Coster.

6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
It surprises me when I mention Robin Hobb’s name and people don’t immediately know who she is. Clearly, I don’t know the right people. The right people would know who Robin Hobb was. Also, her books should have a TV series, and/or a movie.

7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
Frankness. And perhaps kindness. I worked with two editors on this book—Margo from Doubleday and James from Atlantic Books—and it seemed to me that they were conscious of the potential difficulty of having two different views and stances; so they went out of their way to make the process smooth for me.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Social media! Social media is distracting and it invites too many voices into your head. The world is in the room with you and it can be difficult to stay true to yourself and to your creativity.

9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
I would love to be involved in the writing and animating of a feature length animated movie. But I am still honing my skills, especially as far as animation goes; I am not very good yet!

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
“If I waited till I felt like writing , I’d never write at all.” —Ann Tyler. “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” I have learned that it isn’t wise to wait for inspiration; inspiration will meet me at my desk writing.

Oyinkan Braithwaite, author of My Sister, the Serial Killer.

(Credit: Studio 24)

Ten Questions for Idra Novey

11.6.18

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Idra Novey, whose new novel, Those Who Knew, is out today from Viking. Set in an unnamed island country, Those Who Know is the story of Lena, a college professor who knows all too well the secrets of a powerful senator whose young press secretary suddenly dies under mysterious circumstances. It is a novel about the cost of staying silent and the mixed rewards of speaking up in a divided country—a dramatic parable of power and silence and an uncanny portrait of a political leader befitting our times. Novey is the author of a previous novel, Ways to Disappear (Little, Brown, 2016), winner of the Brooklyn Eagles Prize and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction, as well as two poetry collections: Exit, Civilian (University of Georgia Press, 2012) and The Next Country (Alice James Books, 2008). Her work has been translated into ten languages, and she has translated numerous authors from Spanish and Portuguese, most recently Clarice Lispector. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her family.

1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I have the most clarity writing at home on the sofa in the early morning. Sometimes it is only one silent hour before everyone else in my apartment wakes up. On weekdays, if I’m not teaching and don’t have any other commitments, I try to get in another long stretch of writing after my children are off at school. Usually, I return to the same spot on the sofa and try to trick myself into focusing the way I did sitting in that same spot earlier in the morning.

2. How long did it take you to write Those Who Knew?
Four years. My earliest notes for the novel are from 2014 and I’ve written endless drafts of it since then.

3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
I started this novel long before a man who bragged about groping women became president and the silencing of victims of sexual assault became an international conversation. It was startling to see the issues around power imbalances and assault I had been writing about every day suddenly all over the news, especially during the Kavanaugh hearing, when the patriarchal forces that protected Brett Kavanaugh mirrored so much of what occurs in Those Who Knew

4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
Translated authors are often relegated to a separate conversation in the United States. The number of translated authors reviewed and published in this country has steadily increased since I began translating fifteen years ago, but there remains an “America First” approach to how literature is discussed in this country, which is such a disservice to writing students and readers, especially now. To see how writers in other languages have written about deep divides in their countries can illuminate new ways to write and think about what is at stake in our country now. 

5. What are you reading right now?
Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad and alongside it The Tale of the Missing Man by Manzoor Ahtesham, translated by Ulrike Stark and Jason Grunebaum.  I love juxtaposing reading at night from very different books and seeing what they might reveal about each other.

6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Of the many I could name, Chilean writer Pedro Lemebel is among my favorites. He has an extraordinary novel available in English, The Tender Matador, translated by Katherine Silver.  Every time I include The Tender Matador in a class, students end up clutching the book with both hands and commenting on how crazy it is that more readers don’t know about Lemebel. 

7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
An openness to communication. I value so many of the strengths that my editor Laura Tisdel brought to Those Who Knew and also to my first novel, which she edited as well. But on a daily basis what I treasure most about our relationship is her willingness to talk through not only changes to the novel itself, but also the cover design, and all the decisions that come up while publishing a book. 

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Paralyzing doubt. I doubt every word of every sentence I put down. And when I manage to convince myself a sentence can stay for now, the next day when I reread it, I’m often overcome with doubt all over again about whether it’s necessary and whether what goes unsaid in the sentence has the right sort of tone and resonance.  

9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
To get through even half an hour of writing without feeling paralyzed with doubt would be a welcome experience in this lifetime.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
A teacher once scribbled on a piece of writing I handed in, you should be optimistic. Optimistic about what? The note didn’t say, but that vague advice has stayed with me because it’s true: To sit down and write requires a degree of optimism. You have to trust that there is relief to be found in placing one word after another.  

Idra Novey, author of Those Who Knew.

Ten Questions for Sherwin Bitsui

by

Staff

10.30.18

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Sherwin Bitsui, whose new book of poetry, Dissolve, is out today from Copper Canyon Press. Bitsui was raised in White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation, and Dissolve is imbued with Navajo history and tradition. The book is a long poem, an inventive and sweeping work that blurs the lines between past and present, urban and rural, landscape and waste, crisis and continuity, and leads readers on a dissonant and dreamlike journey through the American Southwest. Bitsui is the author of two previous poetry collections, including Shapeshift (University of Arizona Press, 2003) and Flood Song (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), which won the 2010 American Book Award in poetry. He lives in Arizona, where since 2013 he has served on the faculty of the Institute of American Indian Arts. 

1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write best when I return from visiting my family on the reservation. The journey home feeds my creative process. I move between language, history, and worldviews—it’s always place between that gives me the most insight into my creative process.

2. How long did it take you to write Dissolve?
Dissolve took about seven years to complete. Most of those seven years I spent revising the poem. It was a challenge to harmonize all its layers and dimensions. I’m excited for people to read and experience this work.

3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
The care and attention Copper Canyon Press gave to my creative process. They’ve been wonderful—and it’s not so much a surprise. I’m always grateful.

4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
People should know more about the contributions Indigenous poets and writers have given to world poetry. There’s so much work out there, but many voices are seemingly still invisible to the general public. I would love for the literary world to stay open to all the poets from my community and not focus on only a few “representative” voices. It happens time and time again. Poets Heid Erdrich and Allison Hedge Coke have recently edited great anthologies that may give the larger public a glimpse of the diversity and range of contemporary Indigenous poetry.

5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading poems by a few contemporary Chinese poets I’ve been asked to translate this week for a translation festival in China. This work is entirely new for me and I’m excited to learn more about poetry from this part of the world.

6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
There are people I like who deserve more attention—I wouldn’t call them “underrated,” they are incredible in their own right and will receive the attention they deserve. People should read more Indigenous writers. They are writing some of the most innovative and important work in contemporary literature.

7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
I value an editor’s ability to trust the poet. I’m fortunate to have great editors in who’ve been absolutely supportive of my poetic vision. I’ve never felt I had to compromise my artistic integrity. It’s a wonderful thing when one’s editor is also protective and supportive of one’s body of work and creative vision.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Social media.

9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
I hope I continue to feel I can innovate upon previous creations. I want to blend all my poetic and visual work into a singular expression someday. I don’t know what this means. I’ll find out when I get there.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I’m grateful for the writers and artist who’ve advised me to maintain my creative and artistic integrity. My poems continue to reach new readers and I’m grateful they can trust that I will always want more from poetry than what is easily available and accessible. I want them to return to my books and feel they experience something new with each reading.

Sherwin Bitsui, author of Dissolve.

Road Trip: A Profile of Sherwin Bitsui

by

Rigoberto González

11.1.09

This isn’t really my landscape,” says Sherwin Bitsui as we head east on Interstate 10 through the Sonoran Desert. We’ve just left Tucson, and almost immediately the surroundings open up. No more southwestern tourist traps or neighborhoods heavy with generations of conflict among Mexicans, Native Americans, and whites. Around us, the mesquite and the cholla, with bursts of white spikes, grow in abundance along the highway. Aside from the road itself, the only other man-made objects in sight are the shrines—descansos in Spanish—commemorating tragic highway accidents.  

While it may not be his preferred landscape, Bitsui has learned to appreciate it. “Especially with this sky, and when it rains,” he says.

Indeed, the land has just been blessed with rain for the first time in five months—half an inch in a matter of hours, which is rare for southern Arizona, where the average rainfall is twelve inches a year. The heavy downpour caused more than a few traffic mishaps in the city. Sirens blared as the drains flooded at every intersection. But past the city limits everything is calm: Large clouds hover over the Catalina Mountains and the Tucsons, and the land releases the soothing smell of wet earth.

It’s Bitsui who suggested conducting our interview while driving in a car. “It’s how I remember hearing stories when I was a child,” he says. “Riding in my father’s truck.”

And soon, Bitsui, whose second book of poetry, Flood Song, will be released this month by Copper Canyon Press, should be sitting back and enjoying the proverbial ride. Up to now, he’s been laboring over last-minute revisions and worrying a bit about how his work will be received. But Michael Wiegers, Copper Canyon’s executive editor, speaks with excitement and confidence when he characterizes Bitsui’s new book: “There’s a distinct music to Flood Song, an almost mournful high-desert mysticism at work among all the wonder and uncertainty he’s addressing. It’s an intensely visual book that jumps back and forth between the urban and the rural, the modern and the traditional, the personal and the tribal; its vision is sprawling and marvelously ambitious—the poem is in constant motion through landscape and time and cultures.” 

The landscape that is Bitsui’s preference lies five hours to the north of Tucson, in the Navajo reservation where his family has lived “since time immemorial,” he says, tongue-in-cheek. “It’s difficult to convince people that my upbringing is not like the traumatic ones shown in books and documentaries about Native peoples,” Bitsui says. He points out a turkey vulture descending gracefully from above, and then launches into a story about having seen a caracara, also known as a Mexican eagle (“It’s really a falcon.”), for the first time. What amused him about it was that he spotted the bird in a parking lot, a place far removed from the romantic notions of land and nature that are so often imposed on his work by readers because he’s Native American.

“I have no control over how people perceive me. One time a white woman came to my reading and just cried in front of me,” he says. “She was reacting to my indigenousness, not my poetry, which isn’t even about reservation life.” There have been many other awkward exchanges: Once he was shown a picture of Geronimo and asked if he was related (“No. Geronimo is Apache.”), another time he was given tobacco. “What did that person think I was going to do, trade with it?” he asks, incredulously.

Bitsui shrugs these things off. At thirty-four, he’s more concerned about larger issues, like the fate of the next generation of Native Americans. He has been teaching writing workshops lately with ArtsReach, a Tucson-based program designed to provide Native American youth with avenues for creative expression. “The stories they tell,” Bitsui says sadly, shaking his head. “All violence and poverty.” Indeed, suicide among young Native American people has risen at an alarming rate over the last few years.

“I guess I’ve been fortunate,” he says. “I’m not a displaced Indian, my family lives on our land, and even though problems exist on my reservation, I had a happy upbringing compared with the ones these kids are dealing with.”

As it starts to drizzle again, the raindrops splattering on the windshield trigger his memories of monsoon season on the reservation. In the fall, the monsoons, with their heavy downpours and spectacular lightning shows, rejuvenate the landscape. “For some reason I also have this impression that up there the sun feels closer,” he says. “It must be the joy of being home, where the houses all face east and the taste of mutton always reminds me of the flavors of the land.” He ponders his words for a moment and then adds, “I suppose even I crave myth.”

For Bitsui, the second of five children born to a carpenter and a teacher’s aide, living on the Navajo reservation meant the freedom to wander the land for hours, knowing he wasn’t trespassing. He would sit on the mesa for long stretches of time and meditate while listening to his Walkman. (His musical preference at the time was heavy metal. “It relaxed me,” he says, smiling.)

He was allergic to horses and to hay, so he didn’t become a ranch hand. Instead, he was introduced to the goat- and sheepherding life by his grandparents. It was hard work, but he enjoyed it and the company of his grandmother, especially during the summers, when he wasn’t getting bused to an elementary school outside of the reservation.

“School was the only thing I didn’t like while growing up,” he says. “It’s where I learned to become invisible among the white kids in order to survive.” He contrasts that tactic with the one most of the kids in the ArtsReach program resort to, which is to be loud and confrontational. “I guess neither one works,” he says.

For the past eight years, Tucson has been his home away from home, but adaptation was a shaky process. “When I first moved there,” he says, “it was my introduction to America. And it freaked me out.”

Bitsui initially left home in 1997, at the age of twenty-one, to attend the Institute for American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, New Mexico. “I loved it there,” he says. “We were from all sorts of tribes but we were all Indian, and aspiring artists.” Bitsui wanted to become a painter, to capture the colors and textures that had given him so much pleasure as a child. But he lacked the skill. “So I decided on the next best thing: poetry.”

This was an unusual choice for a boy who grew up in a place where the nearest library was over forty miles away. Books and writing were not completely absent on the reservation, just scarce. “There were many stories around,” says Bitsui. “These stories made me see into other worlds that no longer exist. Worlds that were made alive in the retelling.” 

Under the tutelage of poet Arthur Sze, Bitsui found his voice. “I remember those first awful poems I wrote,” says Bitsui. “To this day I’m grateful to Arthur for being so patient, for believing in me.” The IAIA, however, didn’t fully prepare Bitsui for what a writing workshop would be like in a public university. With Sze’s encouragement, Bitsui applied for and was accepted to the prestigious writing program at the University of Arizona. He moved to Tucson in 2001, and when he arrived on campus, he had a flashback to his “invisible days” during his early education—feeling marginalized among the greater student population.

“I had a meltdown,” he says, refusing to elaborate, except to say that it was the first time he experienced culture shock. The faculty and students in the program were well meaning, but he rarely found workshops useful. His lyrical, elliptical style was neither personal nor anthropological; it resisted straightforward narrative and folkloric characterizations. Few readers understood what he was doing, and he began to feel claustrophobic in the often insular world of academia. “The communities writing programs promote are true gifts to poets and poetry,” he says. “But it was important for me to find poetry and attempt to define it on my own terms outside of venues where poetry is maintained.” So just as he was about to complete his MFA degree, Bitsui dropped out of the program.

“At the IAIA, I didn’t have to explain where I was coming from, let alone where I was headed to,” he says. But from the painful awareness of his otherness came a body of work that would form his first poetry collection. 

University of Arizona Press acquisitions editor Patti Hartmann heard about Bitsui’s poetry from members of Native American literary circles, such as Ofelia Zepeda, a linguist, poet, and MacArthur fellow, who is also the editor of Sun Tracks, the press’s Native American literary series. Hartmann called Bitsui to ask if he had a manuscript. Although he hadn’t finished his MFA, he did have a manuscript completed, which he sent to Hartmann. After several revisions, she accepted the book for publication, and Shapeshift was published in 2003.

The first lines of Shapeshift—“Fourteen ninety-something, / something happened”—refer to the arrival of Columbus in America and the beginning of a major shift in Native American history, culture, and life. For Bitsui, the new millennium, a few years ago, marked a time to reflect on whether Native people were surviving and thriving or heading on a path toward extinction. And the poems in Shapeshift—a collection of mythical journeys, dream images, dead ends, and reservation realities—explore this subject. 

“I also wanted to reclaim that word, shapeshift, which has a different connotation to us,” Bitsui says. “It doesn’t only signify physical transformation by power or magic; it also means spiritual or social transition into a new way of being.”

Reviewers received Shapeshift with both skepticism and excitement aroused by its stylistic risks. “Some people were baffled by the book because it did not work in a way that was palpable to certain trends in Native American poetics; others liked it because it was new and distinctive,” Bitsui says.

After the book’s release, Bitsui found himself drawn into the national poetry-reading circuit and onto the international stage. Besides traveling all over the country, he has been featured in the Fiftieth Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte at the Venice Biennial with the Indigenous Arts Action Alliance, and he’s been invited to Colombia to attend the International Poetry Festival of Medellín with Joy Harjo. Most recently he attended Poesiefestival Berlin, where he read alongside Rita Dove and John Yau. 

“Every day’s a gift,” Bitsui says, pondering the opportunities he’s had. In 2006 he received news he’d won a prestigious forty-thousand-dollar Whiting Award. At the time, though, he was in the middle of writing an elegy for his cousin. Because his family was grieving, he didn’t want to encroach on their grief with his news, and neither did he understand the magnitude of the prize until he was sitting on the stage in New York City, listening to his work being praised.

When he returned, having made the trip alone, he attempted to describe for his grandmother this place he had visited, where crowds flowed through the streets and the buildings reached high into the sky. “Oh, you went to New York City,” she responded. Bitsui chuckles at the recollection. 

As the new face of Native American literature, Bitsui takes his responsibility seriously, which is why he doesn’t turn down any offers to travel or read poetry or be interviewed. “Though I hope I’m not the only one being asked,” he says. He names two of his contemporaries, poets Santee Frazier and Orlando White, who released books earlier this year. Frazier published Dark Thirty with the University of Arizona Press, and White released Bone Light with Red Hen Press.

“I’m excited that there’s a new group out there, but I worry about what’s expected of us,” Bitsui says. He admits that one thing he’s been disappointed by in many of his presentations is the comparisons that audience members will make between him and the Native American superstar, Sherman Alexie.

“Sherman’s charismatic and funny,” Bitsui observes, “but there’s only one Sherman. The rest of us should be allowed to be who we are.”

When we finally arrive in Bisbee, it’s painfully obvious what happens when a place attempts not to change. This old copper-mining town tries to remain the same in order to cultivate tourism. The old brothel is now a hotel decorated to resemble a brothel, and the saloon’s decor includes stuffed javelina heads and hunting rifles. Most of the residents of Bisbee are white, as are the visitors. The original buildings along the main street now house expensive art galleries.

We take a walk to a copper mine, the entrance fenced to prevent tourists from leaning over the edge. “They say that one time water pooled at the bottom,” says Bitsui, “and that a flock of Canadian geese flying overhead detected it and swooped down for a drink. The water was toxic, poisoned. And the next day, the bottom of this mine glowed fluorescent white with the dead pile of birds.”

And as if on cue, it begins to rain again. “Perhaps that’s why I gave my second book that title,” Bitsui says. “The poem is a song that floods, ebbs, and is searching for a name. I feel that it’s a body of work that speaks a third language, combining Navajo sensibilities with English linearity.” 

This poetic hybrid is also what attracted Wiegers to Bitusi’s work. “That was another word-of-mouth phone call,” Bitsui says of how Wiegers first contacted him. “I met Michael briefly at an Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference. I was introduced to him by Matthew Shenoda, the Coptic poet. And Michael eventually called me up out of the blue to ask if I had a second manuscript.”

Wiegers wanted to hear Bitsui off the page, so in 2007 he accepted an invitation to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, where Bitsui was a fellow that year. “I arrived at the conference the day after he read,” Wiegers recalls, “so I pulled him aside and asked him to read a poem to me. We walked down to the pond, where I sat on a big rock while he told me nearly the entirety of the new manuscript, which was still in development. I was impressed, to say the least. I suggested to him that when he finished and was looking to publish the book, he’d have a ready ear in me.” 

As we take cover in the local coffee shop, a musician starts to set up his equipment. We are determined to make it to the saloon to have a beer once the rain stops.

“With Flood Song I wanted to go back to my beginning as an aspiring painter,” Bitsui says. “I think of many of those poems as portraits with their own elliptical stories to tell.”

Bitsui says that his ideal readers are visual artists, who discover something of their techniques in his writing style. But he confesses that even his family members are puzzled by his poetry. “They’re waiting for me to write a poem they can understand,” he says, laughing.

In the meantime, Bitsui will continue to live in Tucson, where he has been most productive in his writing. And while he’s scratching out a living as a visiting poet in various tribal schools in the area, he’s also moving forward with other projects. He has decided to return to the University of Arizona to complete his MFA and to finish a screenplay he’s been struggling with since he received a fellowship last year from the Sundance Native Initiative to adapt one of his stories for film. Bitsui doesn’t consider himself a short story writer, but as a descendant of storytellers, he couldn’t refuse the opportunity. The Sundance programmer, N. Bird Runningwater, has been patiently waiting for Bitsui to turn in the script. “It’s not poetry, though, which is hard enough,” Bitsui says.

The beer at the saloon (more like a movie set) is anticlimactic, so after one drink we head back to Tucson, making a brief stop in Tombstone, home of the O.K. Corral. It’s Wyatt Earp Days in the town, and the locals are capitalizing on the occasion with a street fair selling cheap Native American jewelry and charging for a chance to ride in a covered wagon, old Wild West style.

“I once brought my grandmother here,” Bitsui says. “And I remembered her stories about riding in a wagon in the old days, so I asked her if she wanted to relive that memory by taking a wagon ride. She said, ‘Been there, done that. It’s not a very fun ride.’”

We find our way back to I-10, going west this time, riding off into what will become the sunset. It’s been a pleasure being on the road, talking story. But all good things must come to an end. Bitsui needs to return the car by sundown. It’s a rental. 

 

Rigoberto González is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

(Photos by Jackie Alpers.)

Ten Questions for Grady Chambers

by

Staff

6.19.18

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Grady Chambers, whose debut poetry collection, North American Stadiums, was published this month by Milkweed Editions. The winner of the inaugural Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, the collection serves as a map to some of America’s more overlooked places of industry, specifically within the Midwest and central New York—places “bleached / pale by time and weather”—and as an exploration of the grace we might find in such spaces. Born and raised in Chicago, Chambers received an MFA from Syracuse University, was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and has received fellowships from the Norman Mailer Center and the New York State Summer Writers Institute. His poems have appeared in Adroit JournalForklift, Ohio; Nashville Review; Ninth LetterNew Ohio Review; and elsewhere. He lives in Philadelphia.

1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
My routine seems to change every year or two, but for the past six months or so my tendency has been to write once a week, typically on Sundays, in a block of hours beginning around eight or nine in the morning and ending in the early afternoon, and most often at a coffee shop not far from my apartment.

2. How long did it take you to write North American Stadiums
About six years, I think. The last poem in the book is the oldest, and I wrote the first draft of that poem on Memorial Day, 2012. It’s an interesting question because unlike someone setting out to write a novel, there was no real destination in mind. I didn’t (and probably this is true of writers of most books of poetry) set out to write North American Stadiums as such. The poems that comprise it are simply a curated selection from a much broader collection of writing that began in 2011 or so, when I began to be more strict with myself about making time to write. That the book contains the poems it does seems largely a result of my preferences and inclinations around the time I began thinking I should try and shape that growing stack of poems into a book. That was actually the scariest part in making this come together: the endless possible permutations of inclusion, exclusion, order; the fear of endless possibility.

3. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
Probably the way it forces a different relationship to one’s manuscript and writing. By the time I was copyediting the book for the third or fourth time I was so wholly attentive to formatting, spelling, margins—all the aesthetics of language on a page—that I didn’t even feel like I was reading the poems anymore. Thanks to the awesome people at Milkweed Editions I had the unusual opportunity to create an audiobook version of the manuscript, and as I was traveling to the sound studio I was hit with a sudden fearful sense that I’d forgotten the sound and rhythm of the poems because I’d been so wrapped up in the copyediting. But that experience of doing the recording proved to be a great one: sitting down and reading it into a microphone, it was the first time that I was just able to simply read the book without looking at it through the lens of an editor. At that late stage, the book was in its final form, and all I had to do was read what was there. In doing so I felt again the rhythm and pacing and speed (or slowness) of the poems, not their marks and margins and format.

4. Where did you first get published?
The first piece of “creative writing” I wrote that actually ended up being bound between two covers were a few poems written as part of a high school English class. As I remember it, part of the final assignment for the class was for us to collectively make and bind a book (and of course produce the writing it contained). I’m fairly sure I used a phrase along the lines of, “from the lens of my itinerant being,” and it still makes me cringe to think about.

5. What are you reading right now?
I just finished Kawabata’s last and unfinished novel, Dandelions, and have been reading around in Turgenev’s great Sketches from a Hunter’s Notebook (though the title is sometimes translated differently) and Robin Becker’s wonderful new collection of poems, The Black Bear Inside Me.

6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
I can already envision this answer producing audible groans in some readers of this interview, but in all honesty I’d probably bring Moby Dick. I love the music of so much of that book, the rhythmic and sonic propulsion of Melville’s sentences, the astounding and way-ahead-of-its-time structure of his novel; and I think the book is deeply funny. I’ve mentioned how funny I find the book to a number of people, and that comment is usually met with a perplexed look, but I think there is great humor in the narrative distance between writer Melville and narrator Ishmael. Ishmael is, to me, a narrator who is totally over the top, and doesn’t have the self-awareness to recognize that quality in himself. But Melville certainly knew it, and I can imagine him laughing as he wrote some of Ishmael’s more grandiose meditations.
 
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
I find it hard to say because I feel I have such a limited sense of how authors are perceived or rated by others. But a few collections that I think are amazing but that are maybe under-read—or at least don’t seem to be read much among writers my age—are David Ferry’s incredible book, Bewilderment, Ellen Bryant Voigt’s collection of sonnets, Kyrie, and Adrian C. Louis’s Ceremonies of the Damned. I don’t think these writers are underrated, but with so much out there and with this increasing thirst, it seems, for what’s new or what’s next, these are three books that come quickly to mind that are very worth returning to, each one remarkable in its own way.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I sleep very poorly, and that can sometimes really knock my days off course. That said, sleeplessness has also been beneficial to my writing life as, like it or not, my mind seems to be receptive to degrees of fear or strangeness or anxiety in those sleepless hours that come back in sometimes productive or interesting ways when I write.

9. What trait do you most value in your editor?
I’m not sure I have the perfect phrase for it, but something along the lines of “generative inquiry.” What I have in mind is a tendency on the part of a reader, when talking about a certain piece, to press on certain sections of the poem, to push me about the intent or meaning of a certain sequence. In doing so, they communicate their understanding of the poem and I am able to weigh it against my intention. This helps give me a sense of which sections or sequences feel flat or outside the orbit of images and ideas that the poem is working through and forces me to verbalize, and then try and put into words on the page, a sometimes originally cloudy intent.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
It’s not quite advice, but the most important thing someone has said to me about writing, the thing that has had a tangible impact on my work, is what my friend Charif Shanahan (his collection Into Each Room We Enter Without Knowing is so good) said during a workshop a couple years ago. He asked the room, “What aren’t you writing about, and why?” Though maybe to some it seems a fairly obvious thing to ask oneself, it had a pretty significant impact on me. It helped me think about and re-examine the ways I defined myself as a writer, and encouraged me to look directly at, and at least attempt to write about, things that daily occupied my mind but for various reasons I previously had overlooked, shied away from, or not thought to write about.

Grady Chambers, author of North American Stadiums.

Ten Questions for A. M. Homes

6.5.18

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features A. M. Homes, whose story collection Days of Awe, published today by Viking, “exposes the heart of an uneasy America…exploring our attachments to one another through characters who aren’t quite who they hoped to become, though there is no one else they can be.” Homes is the author of the memoir The Mistress’s Daughter and the novels This Book Will Save Your LifeMusic for TorchingThe End of AliceIn a Country of Mothers, and Jack, as well as the story collections The Safety of Objects and Things You Should Know. She lives in New York City. 

1. How long did it take you to write the stories in Days of Awe?
The stories in this collection took twelve years—stories accrue over time. I don’t sit down to write a collection of stories. I have ideas for them that can take years to form and there is a compression to storytelling, the sense that the story is already in progress by the time the reader comes to it—which means that I, like, know what it’s all about before diving in.

And there’s also an editorial/curating process—we build the collection—so once I have six to eight stories I like, I start to think about the balance, of voices within the stories, about narrative threads, ideas that appear in multiple stories—and sometimes we put a few stories aside and I write one or two more. There’s a moment when you know it’s getting close—which is very exciting. For me that was last summer. I was in Oxford, England, and knew I had two stories to finish: “Days of Awe,” the title story, which I’d literally been carrying with me for almost ten years, and “The National Caged Bird Show,” which had been with me for almost two years. Finishing those was thrilling and they’re two of my favorites in the book.  

2. Where, when, and how often do you write?
In a perfect world I write daily, starting at about 6 AM. I wake up early, I go into my office and start writing. And then around 1 PM I join the rest of the world.  

But as we know it’s not a perfect world, so I often have to fight to carve out work time—a writer’s calendar should be empty—but when most of us look at an empty calendar we think, “Great time to make a dentist appointment.” So it’s a struggle, learning to say no to things. 

3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How long it takes. The lead time is about a year.

4. Where did you first get published?
My first publications were in Folio, a student publication at American University, and the Sarah Lawrence Review and then On Our Backs, the first women-run erotica magazine, founded in 1984. They published a story of mine called “72 Hours on a Towel.”

5. What are you reading right now?
Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice by Bill Browder and The Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Denis Johnson. And I love reading history, I love biography. I’m a huge nonfiction fan.

6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
Kelly’s Textbook of Internal Medicine. I’m practical and I have a good enough imagination to otherwise entertain myself.

7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Joyce Carol Oates.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Time.

9. What trait do you most value in your editor or agent?
Honesty and a sharp red pencil.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Write the truth according to the character—from Grace Paley, who was my teacher at Sarah Lawrence College.

A. M. Homes, author of Days of Awe (Viking). 

Ten Questions for Akil Kumarasamy

6.5.18

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features debut author Akil Kumarasamy, whose collection of linked stories, Half Gods, published today by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, “portrays with sharp clarity the ways in which parents, children, and friends act as unknowing mirrors to each other, revealing in their all-too-human weaknesses, hopes, and sorrows a connection to the divine.” Kumarasamy’s fiction has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, American Short Fiction, Boston Review, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan, and has been a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the University of East Anglia. 

1. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
I usually write at home or at a café, but I’m pretty open to working anywhere. I don’t necessarily write every day; sometimes I just let an idea sit for a while, seep in my head. I might write ferociously for a week and then have a period where I don’t write at all. Maybe it’s a kind of mental crop rotation, giving the mind time to rest before the next creative burst. For Half Gods, I often wrote at night. I liked working while everyone else was sleeping. I think it made the act feel secretive, like I was tapping into some unknown frequency. Now I’m trying to write in the mornings. It feels more responsible.

2. How long did it take you to write Half Gods?
It took a few years of actual writing, but the earliest portion of the book was written in 2010. 

3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How long the process takes! From selling the manuscript to the actual publication, it takes around a year and half. I’ve been working on a second book and feel pretty involved it, so it’s interesting now having to discuss Half Gods, which to me feels like a different version of myself.  

4. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
It definitely depends on what you’re looking for. There are many paths toward publication and getting an MFA is just one of them. It can possibly offer the time to fine-tune one’s craft, financial flexibility, and community. 

5. What are you reading right now?  
I’m reading Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend and Catherine Lacey’s Certain American States, which is out in August. It’s amazing. 

6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
I would want a book on how to appreciate and thrive on a desert island while you are away from humanity and the appendix should have the directions on how to build a canoe when you/if you want to reconnect with the rest of the world. In other words, maybe some Chekov.

7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Well think about how many wonderful books don’t get translated into English. The English language is currency.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
It’s probably myself. What I think is possible.   

9. What trait do you most value in your editor or agent?
Their unwavering belief in me. It feels extraordinary.  

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
There’s no such thing as writer’s block. Sometimes you go to the computer and nothing valuable comes out and that’s okay. It’s all about how you see the writing process. You don’t need to call it writer’s block and you don’t need to feel guilty when you’re not sitting by the computer. The work requires so much of you that if the guilt doesn’t make you more productive, then the feeling is not worth it. You always have a choice in how you are going to perceive something. 

Akil Kumarasamy, author of Half Gods (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

Ten Questions for Lee Martin

6.12.18

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Lee Martin, whose new book, The Mutual UFO Network, published today by Dzanc Books, “explores the intricacies of relationships and the possibility for redemption in even the most complex misfits and loners.” It is his first story collection since his acclaimed debut, The Least You Need to Know, was published by Sarabande Books in 1996. Martin is also the author of three memoirs as well as the novels Quakertown (Penguin, 2001); The Bright Forever (Shaye Areheart, 2005), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction; River of Heaven (Shaye Areheart, 2008); Break the Skin (Crown, 2011); and Late One Night (Dzanc, 2015). He teaches in the MFA program at Ohio State University.

1. How long did it take you to write The Mutual UFO Network?
The earliest story in this collection was published in 1997, and the last one appeared in 2014. In the time since my first collection came out in 1996, I’ve published five novels, three memoirs, and a craft book, but I’ve also kept writing stories. There were times in that gap between 1996 and now when we could have tried to bring out a new collection, but I’m glad we waited until the book was truly a book rather than merely a random gathering of stories.

2. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
I’m a morning writer, and I normally work in my writing room at home, sometimes with my senior editor, Stella the Cat, on my lap. She has claws, and she holds me to task. Lately, though, I’ve discovered another writing space. My wife works remotely for a hospital in our home area of southeastern Illinois. She has to be onsite four days out of each month, and, when I can, I go with her. I end up writing in the small public library I used when I was in high school. It pleases me to know I’m writing in a place where I once read so many other people’s books and dreamed of one day having a book of my own. Sometimes people stop by and tell me stories, and sometimes I use them. I try to write at least five days a week. I used to write every day, but, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more comfortable with rest and the way it can re-energize me. For the most part, we writers are introverts, and it can become easy to withdraw from the world. I’m lucky enough to be married to an extrovert, and the weekend is now our time to engage with life outside the writing space.

3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
That I ever got published at all! Seriously, when I was starting out, I gathered so many rejections, I started to believe that door would never open for me. I couldn’t stop writing, though. It’s what gave me pleasure, and I knew even if I never got published, I’d still love moving words around on the page. That’s why I tell my students to keep doing what they love as long as they love it. As I began to publish books, I learned so much about the part of the process that doesn’t involve writing or editing. I’m talking about the behind-the-scenes work of publicity and marketing. Everything from how the sales reps work to cover design. I’m still amazed by the decisions that get made that can make or break a book before it even hits the shelves.

4. Where did you first get published? 
I published my first story in 1987 in the literary journal Sonora Review. My first collection, The Least You Need to Know, was the first winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize from Sarabande Books, and it came out in 1996.

5. What are you reading right now?  
I just finished a fascinating memoir by David Giffels called Furnishing Eternity. It’s about the author’s desire to build his own casket even though he has no immediate need for it. His aged father, an accomplished woodworker, sets out to help him. That’s the narrative spine, but the book is about so much more. With wit and warmth, Giffels explores aging and death and family and friendship. It’s a beautifully written book with not a trace of sentimentality. 

6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you? 
In our family room, there’s a length of an old door casing that my wife and I rescued from the debris of the farmhouse where my family lived when I was young. My wife turned it into this shelf, and we put old family photos and mementos on it. My mother was a teacher, and one of the things she left behind was the school bell she rang at the old country schools where she once taught. That bell sits on top of two books, To Kill a Mockingbird and The Great Gatsby. If I had to choose one to have with me on that desert island, it would probably be Gatsby. I reread it each year with continued admiration. I guess I’m a romantic at heart. The story of Daisy and Gatsby gets me every time.

7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
I’ve had the privilege of knowing a number of writers who would fall into that category. I’ve met them through their books, and sometimes I’ve been lucky enough to know them personally and to be able to call them my friends. I’m not trying to avoid the question. I’m only honestly stating the fact. I imagine there are literally thousands of writers who should be appreciated more than they are. These writers are doing work just as memorable and just as necessary as the big-name folks, but for whatever reason they haven’t broken out the way their more famous counterparts have. 

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I once told someone that any writer would gladly trade money for time. I’m not sure that’s true, but it feels true from where I sit. I’m a writer who has a hard time saying no to people, so I sometimes find my writing time being reduced due to things I’ve promised other writers, or my students, that I’ll do. I think of all the favors others did for me when I was just starting out—blurbs, letters of recommendation, etc.—and I try my best to keep giving back to the profession. As the years have gone on, I’ve begun to feel a slightly different pressure, and that’s the threat that comes from our “connected culture.” The internet, social media, e-mail, texts—they all demand that we always be available, and, if we let them, they can destroy the solitude and quiet writers need to immerse themselves fully in their work.

9. What trait do you most value in your editor or agent?
I like an editor and an agent who will tell me the truth about a manuscript, no matter how painful it may be for me to hear it. I like them to understand what I’m trying to accomplish and to be able to offer honest, but tactful, suggestions for what I need to do to fully realize my intentions. So honesty, insight, a collaborative spirit, a supportive presence, and, finally, a willingness to be a tireless champion of my work.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I see so many young writers who want to succeed immediately. They want to publish, they want to win awards, they want validation. In their desperation to attain that validation, they sometimes forget why they love to write. In every workshop I teach, I pass along a single piece of writing advice. It comes from Isak Dinesen who encouraged writers to, “Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.” We all fall prey to both hope and despair from time to time. Both seduce us into thinking about the end result of the work, and, consequently, we don’t pay attention to the process. If we can write a little with some degree of consistency and without agonizing over how good it will be, who will want to read it and praise it, etc., we can remember how much we love the mere act of putting words on the page. To be in the midst of that love is a wonderful thing. I’m firmly convinced that if we pay attention to the process, our journey will take us where we’re meant to be.

Lee Martin, author of The Mutual UFO Network.

Ten Questions for Lillian Li

by

Staff

6.26.18

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Lillian Li, whose debut novel, Number One Chinese Restaurant, is out this month from Henry Holt. Loosely based on Li’s own waitressing experience at a Peking duck restaurant in northern Virginia, the novel follows the complicated lives and loves of the people working at the fictional Beijing Duck House in Rockville, Maryland. The multigenerational, multi-voiced, and darkly comic novel “practically thumps with heartache and dark humor,” says novelist Chang-rae Lee. “If a Chinese restaurant can be seen as a kind of cultural performance,” says Peter Ho Davies, “Lillian Li takes us behind the scenes.” Li received a BA from Princeton University and an MFA from the University of Michigan. She is the recipient of a Hopwood Award in Short Fiction and Glimmer Train’s New Writer Award, and her work has appeared in Guernica, Granta, and Jezebel. She lives in Ann Arbor, where she is a bookseller at Literati Bookstore and a lecturer at the University of Michigan’s Sweetland Center for Writing.

1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write wherever is free (so usually my apartment), and I tend to write whenever I can put it off no longer (so anywhere in the late afternoon to the pre-morning hours). I find that I’m disciplined in short bursts. So I can write every day and sustain that practice for a week. Then I pat myself on the back and forget to write for a week. Rinse and repeat.

2. How long did it take you to write Number One Chinese Restaurant?
About three years. Although the bulk of that time was spent completing just the first draft. I’m a faster reviser than I am a writer.

3. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How much I would grow to depend on my editor (Barbara Jones)! She taught me so much about writing, especially on the character and sentence-level. I hadn’t expected to find such mentorship, especially since the book had already been written, but I’m thrilled I did.

4. Where did you first get published?
I was first published as a Granta New Voice, which was an online feature started by their then–fiction editor Patrick Ryan. I recently ran into Patrick at a conference and had the privilege of gushing my gratitude at him.

5. What are you reading right now?
My Education by Susan Choi. A deeply sexy, emotionally turbulent book about a graduate student who falls for a notorious professor’s equally charismatic wife. Also Vanessa Hua’s A River of Stars, which comes out August 14. Hua writes about San Francisco Chinatown with such savvy and heart. Both books are also incredibly funny.

6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain. I’ve read it so many times I’ve lost count, and his voice never ceases to thrill. So clearly it would be good company on a desert island.

7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
I don’t know about most underrated, but I wish more people talked about Jessica Hagedorn. Dogeaters remains one of the most awe-inspiring books I’ve ever read.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I only have myself to blame, but I also tend to let myself off the hook pretty easily.

9. What trait do you most value in your editor or agent?
A combination of a sharp tongue and a big heart.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Avoid the word “it” whenever possible. Which is to say, specificity whenever possible.

Lillian Li, author of Number One Chinese Restaurant. (Credit: Margarita Corporan)

Ten Questions for Akil Kumarasamy

6.5.18

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features debut author Akil Kumarasamy, whose collection of linked stories, Half Gods, published today by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, “portrays with sharp clarity the ways in which parents, children, and friends act as unknowing mirrors to each other, revealing in their all-too-human weaknesses, hopes, and sorrows a connection to the divine.” Kumarasamy’s fiction has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, American Short Fiction, Boston Review, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan, and has been a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the University of East Anglia. 

1. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
I usually write at home or at a café, but I’m pretty open to working anywhere. I don’t necessarily write every day; sometimes I just let an idea sit for a while, seep in my head. I might write ferociously for a week and then have a period where I don’t write at all. Maybe it’s a kind of mental crop rotation, giving the mind time to rest before the next creative burst. For Half Gods, I often wrote at night. I liked working while everyone else was sleeping. I think it made the act feel secretive, like I was tapping into some unknown frequency. Now I’m trying to write in the mornings. It feels more responsible.

2. How long did it take you to write Half Gods?
It took a few years of actual writing, but the earliest portion of the book was written in 2010. 

3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How long the process takes! From selling the manuscript to the actual publication, it takes around a year and half. I’ve been working on a second book and feel pretty involved it, so it’s interesting now having to discuss Half Gods, which to me feels like a different version of myself.  

4. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
It definitely depends on what you’re looking for. There are many paths toward publication and getting an MFA is just one of them. It can possibly offer the time to fine-tune one’s craft, financial flexibility, and community. 

5. What are you reading right now?  
I’m reading Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend and Catherine Lacey’s Certain American States, which is out in August. It’s amazing. 

6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
I would want a book on how to appreciate and thrive on a desert island while you are away from humanity and the appendix should have the directions on how to build a canoe when you/if you want to reconnect with the rest of the world. In other words, maybe some Chekov.

7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Well think about how many wonderful books don’t get translated into English. The English language is currency.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
It’s probably myself. What I think is possible.   

9. What trait do you most value in your editor or agent?
Their unwavering belief in me. It feels extraordinary.  

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
There’s no such thing as writer’s block. Sometimes you go to the computer and nothing valuable comes out and that’s okay. It’s all about how you see the writing process. You don’t need to call it writer’s block and you don’t need to feel guilty when you’re not sitting by the computer. The work requires so much of you that if the guilt doesn’t make you more productive, then the feeling is not worth it. You always have a choice in how you are going to perceive something. 

Akil Kumarasamy, author of Half Gods (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

Ten Questions for Lee Martin

6.12.18

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Lee Martin, whose new book, The Mutual UFO Network, published today by Dzanc Books, “explores the intricacies of relationships and the possibility for redemption in even the most complex misfits and loners.” It is his first story collection since his acclaimed debut, The Least You Need to Know, was published by Sarabande Books in 1996. Martin is also the author of three memoirs as well as the novels Quakertown (Penguin, 2001); The Bright Forever (Shaye Areheart, 2005), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction; River of Heaven (Shaye Areheart, 2008); Break the Skin (Crown, 2011); and Late One Night (Dzanc, 2015). He teaches in the MFA program at Ohio State University.

1. How long did it take you to write The Mutual UFO Network?
The earliest story in this collection was published in 1997, and the last one appeared in 2014. In the time since my first collection came out in 1996, I’ve published five novels, three memoirs, and a craft book, but I’ve also kept writing stories. There were times in that gap between 1996 and now when we could have tried to bring out a new collection, but I’m glad we waited until the book was truly a book rather than merely a random gathering of stories.

2. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
I’m a morning writer, and I normally work in my writing room at home, sometimes with my senior editor, Stella the Cat, on my lap. She has claws, and she holds me to task. Lately, though, I’ve discovered another writing space. My wife works remotely for a hospital in our home area of southeastern Illinois. She has to be onsite four days out of each month, and, when I can, I go with her. I end up writing in the small public library I used when I was in high school. It pleases me to know I’m writing in a place where I once read so many other people’s books and dreamed of one day having a book of my own. Sometimes people stop by and tell me stories, and sometimes I use them. I try to write at least five days a week. I used to write every day, but, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more comfortable with rest and the way it can re-energize me. For the most part, we writers are introverts, and it can become easy to withdraw from the world. I’m lucky enough to be married to an extrovert, and the weekend is now our time to engage with life outside the writing space.

3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
That I ever got published at all! Seriously, when I was starting out, I gathered so many rejections, I started to believe that door would never open for me. I couldn’t stop writing, though. It’s what gave me pleasure, and I knew even if I never got published, I’d still love moving words around on the page. That’s why I tell my students to keep doing what they love as long as they love it. As I began to publish books, I learned so much about the part of the process that doesn’t involve writing or editing. I’m talking about the behind-the-scenes work of publicity and marketing. Everything from how the sales reps work to cover design. I’m still amazed by the decisions that get made that can make or break a book before it even hits the shelves.

4. Where did you first get published? 
I published my first story in 1987 in the literary journal Sonora Review. My first collection, The Least You Need to Know, was the first winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize from Sarabande Books, and it came out in 1996.

5. What are you reading right now?  
I just finished a fascinating memoir by David Giffels called Furnishing Eternity. It’s about the author’s desire to build his own casket even though he has no immediate need for it. His aged father, an accomplished woodworker, sets out to help him. That’s the narrative spine, but the book is about so much more. With wit and warmth, Giffels explores aging and death and family and friendship. It’s a beautifully written book with not a trace of sentimentality. 

6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you? 
In our family room, there’s a length of an old door casing that my wife and I rescued from the debris of the farmhouse where my family lived when I was young. My wife turned it into this shelf, and we put old family photos and mementos on it. My mother was a teacher, and one of the things she left behind was the school bell she rang at the old country schools where she once taught. That bell sits on top of two books, To Kill a Mockingbird and The Great Gatsby. If I had to choose one to have with me on that desert island, it would probably be Gatsby. I reread it each year with continued admiration. I guess I’m a romantic at heart. The story of Daisy and Gatsby gets me every time.

7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
I’ve had the privilege of knowing a number of writers who would fall into that category. I’ve met them through their books, and sometimes I’ve been lucky enough to know them personally and to be able to call them my friends. I’m not trying to avoid the question. I’m only honestly stating the fact. I imagine there are literally thousands of writers who should be appreciated more than they are. These writers are doing work just as memorable and just as necessary as the big-name folks, but for whatever reason they haven’t broken out the way their more famous counterparts have. 

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I once told someone that any writer would gladly trade money for time. I’m not sure that’s true, but it feels true from where I sit. I’m a writer who has a hard time saying no to people, so I sometimes find my writing time being reduced due to things I’ve promised other writers, or my students, that I’ll do. I think of all the favors others did for me when I was just starting out—blurbs, letters of recommendation, etc.—and I try my best to keep giving back to the profession. As the years have gone on, I’ve begun to feel a slightly different pressure, and that’s the threat that comes from our “connected culture.” The internet, social media, e-mail, texts—they all demand that we always be available, and, if we let them, they can destroy the solitude and quiet writers need to immerse themselves fully in their work.

9. What trait do you most value in your editor or agent?
I like an editor and an agent who will tell me the truth about a manuscript, no matter how painful it may be for me to hear it. I like them to understand what I’m trying to accomplish and to be able to offer honest, but tactful, suggestions for what I need to do to fully realize my intentions. So honesty, insight, a collaborative spirit, a supportive presence, and, finally, a willingness to be a tireless champion of my work.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I see so many young writers who want to succeed immediately. They want to publish, they want to win awards, they want validation. In their desperation to attain that validation, they sometimes forget why they love to write. In every workshop I teach, I pass along a single piece of writing advice. It comes from Isak Dinesen who encouraged writers to, “Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.” We all fall prey to both hope and despair from time to time. Both seduce us into thinking about the end result of the work, and, consequently, we don’t pay attention to the process. If we can write a little with some degree of consistency and without agonizing over how good it will be, who will want to read it and praise it, etc., we can remember how much we love the mere act of putting words on the page. To be in the midst of that love is a wonderful thing. I’m firmly convinced that if we pay attention to the process, our journey will take us where we’re meant to be.

Lee Martin, author of The Mutual UFO Network.

Ten Questions for Christopher Kennedy

9.25.18

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Christopher Kennedy, whose fifth poetry collection, Clues From the Animal Kingdom, is out today from BOA Editions. In the collection, Kennedy sifts through the detritus of the past to uncover the memories, images, and symbols that shape an individual’s consciousness. “There is joy and dread here, in every carefully considered line,” writes Dave Eggers about the book. Looking to the natural world for inspiration, Kennedy offers prose poems that offer, as George Saunders puts it, “a moving portrait of the human heart examining itself.” Christopher Kennedy is the author of four previous poetry collections, including Ennui Prophet (BOA Editions, 2011), and Encouragement for a Man Falling to His Death (BOA Editions, 2007), which received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and a grant from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. He is a professor of English at Syracuse University where he directs the MFA program in creative writing.

1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write anywhere I happen to be at any time of day, though I tend to write first drafts at night and revise during the day. I take breaks, sometimes for months, usually because I’m teaching and want to devote my energy to my students’ work, but when I’m writing, I write every day.

2. How long did it take you to write the poems in Clues From the Animal Kingdom?
There are some lines in the poems that are decades old, but I’d say most of the poems were written between 2007 and 2016. I tend to save old poems and scavenge from them when I’m stuck working on something newer. I trust that it’s all coming from the same source and can be reshaped to resolve whatever dilemma I’m facing.

3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
I was surprised at the relationship between the poems in the collection. It feels as if it’s part poetry, part fiction, part memoir, in the sense that if you read it cover to cover there is a narrative arc, at least in the sense of moving from one emotional/psychological state to another, as well as temporal shifts that feel organic to a plot I never would have imagined would exist. 

4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I have a fantasy that book publishers could find a way to form consortiums that would allow them to open their own bookstores. I miss being able to browse shelves and strike up conversations with knowledgable staff in a place devoted to books.

5. What are you reading right now?
Mostly I’m reading my students’ work, which impresses me on a daily basis, but I was on leave last semester, so I was able to read a lot over the spring and summer. Here’s a short list of books I read and recommend. Poetry: former students Grady Chambers and Jessica Poli’s book and chapbook, respectively, North American Stadiums and Canyons. Short story collections: Samantha Hunt’s The Dark Dark, Rebecca Schiff’s The Bed Moved, and Denis Johnson’s The Largesse of the Sea Maiden. Novels: Paula Saunders’s debut, The Distance Home, and Jonathan Dee’s The Locals. I also read some unpublished stories from a collection in process by Sarah Harwell, a wonderful poet and fiction writer. They’re linked stories set in an airport, and they’re fantastic. 

6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
If I had a good dictionary, I’d have everything I need and lots of time to recreate everything I’ve ever read. That seems impractical, though, so I’d bring Denis Johnson’s The Incognito Lounge. It had a profound influence on me thirty-plus years ago, and every time I read it again, it holds up. 

7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
I could name several, but Gary Lutz comes to mind immediately. One Gary Lutz sentence is worth a thousand pictures.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I don’t have any impediments other than my own psychology. For me, writing is a constant struggle between thinking I have nothing of any importance to say and believing that when I do have something to say I won’t be able to express it properly. I have three states of being: feeling doubt, manifesting a vague desire to say something that seems important, and writing toward ground zero of that desire.

9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
I’d like to dunk a basketball, but I’d settle for writing more poems that are focused on the current socio-political scene. Some of my work has that emphasis, but I’d like to expand that part of my work.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Hayden Carruth wrote this in a letter to me several years ago: “The language of a poem is like a balloon, it must be stressed enough to make its shape full and taut, but not enough to make it explode.”

Christopher Kennedy, author of Clues From the Animal Kingdom.

(Credit: David Broda)

Ten Questions for Emily Jungmin Yoon

9.18.18

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Emily Jungmin Yoon, whose debut poetry collection, A Cruelty Special to Our Species, is out today from Ecco. In the collection, Yoon explores gender, race, and the history of sexual violence against women, focusing in particular on so-called comfort women—Koren women who worked in Japanese-occupied territories during World War II. Yoon was born in Busan in the Republic of Korea and received her BA at the University of Pennsylvania and an MFA in creative writing from New York University. She won the 2017 Tupelo Press Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize for her chapbook Ordinary Misfortunes, and has been the recipient of awards and fellowships from Ploughshares, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, and the Poetry Foundation, among others. Yoon’s poems and translations have appeared in the New Yorker, POETRY, and the New York Times Magazine, and she serves as poetry editor for the Margins, the literary magazine of the Asian American Writers Workshop. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Korean literature at the University of Chicago. 

1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write at home, usually late night. I find that poems in my head become louder when everything is quiet. I write rather sporadically now, so there isn’t a fixed schedule, but when I was writing the poems in A Cruelty Special to Our Species, I would write maybe three to five days a week.

2. How long did it take you to write A Cruelty Special to Our Species?
To completion, about four years, but a good chunk of the poems came in early 2015, in the last semester of my MFA program at NYU—that was a very fruitful period.

3. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
That time goes by so quickly! It took a little more than a year for the book to be published after the signing of the contract, and I felt like I just couldn’t wait. But after rounds of proofreading and editing, a year had already passed.

4. Where did you first get published?
My first magazine publication was the Claremont Review, a Canadian magazine that publishes works by writers and artists in the age range of 13 to 19 from around the world. It was very exciting and encouraging to see my poems in print among others.’ I’m grateful for the space that CR provides young creators.

5. What are you reading right now?
I am reading the complete works of Kim Su-young’s poetry, from 1945 to 1968. His poetry influenced a lot of other poets, and I’m interested in his relationship to language, as he was writing post-liberation and when linguistic nationalism was rampant.

6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
Maybe an instructive book on how to survive in the wild…. But for joy, Li-Young Lee’s Rose. There are so many amazing books, but Rose was my first love in poetry.

7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
She’s more unrecognized than underrated, perhaps, but: Ronyoung Kim. She was the author of Clay Walls, which is the first novel written in the U.S. about Korean immigrant experience. Published in 1986, Clay Walls was the first Korean American novel. Not many people now seem to know about her or the book, though it was nominated for the Pulitzer.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Stress from non-writing work, for sure. I have to deliberately and strategically clear out space and time to not think about any of that and focus on reading and writing poetry.

9. What trait do you most value in your editor?
I appreciate Gabriella Doob and Dan Halpern for their warmth, support, and trust. They believe in my vision and are just wonderful people.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Jericho Brown said to our class at Aspen Words, “Be your ultra-self.” I tend to be pretty self-conscious when writing; I think it’s good to be concerned and careful about specific words and their implications, but sometimes it disrupts the flow. So I try to imagine what a bolder, wilder, and more carefree me would say. Any part that doesn’t sit right can be edited later.

Emily Jungmin Yoon, author of A Cruelty Special to Our Species. 

(Credit: Jean Lechat)

Ten Questions for May-Lee Chai

by

Staff

10.23.18

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features May-Lee Chai, whose story collection Useful Phrases for Immigrants is out today from Blair, an imprint of Carolina Wren Press. Chai’s collection, which Edward P. Jones calls “a splendid gem” and Tayari Jones calls “essential reading,” is, at its essence, about migration—both physical and psychological, between cities and countries, among families and individuals. The stories are marked by complex and vividly rendered characters, Chinese American and Chinese women, men, and children who navigate relationships and the land, asking important questions about themselves, their families, and their culture. As Lisa Ko puts it, “You won’t forget these characters.” May-Lee Chai is the award-winning author of ten books, including the memoir Hapa Girl, the novel Tiger Girl, and her original translation from Chinese into English of Autobiography of Ba Jin. She is the recipient of an NEA fellowship and is an assistant professor in creative writing at San Francisco State University. 

1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
When I first started writing as a student, I used to write after midnight, after all my work was done for the day. But now I find that too tiring. I can write only on days when I’m not teaching and when all my grading and reading are done. Otherwise, I can’t turn off my editing brain to reach my subconscious, creative thoughts.

2. How long did it take you to write Useful Phrases for Immigrants?
I had been working on some of the stories for four or five years before I decided to put together a collection. Some had already been published. Once I came up with my theme, I knew which ones should go together and how to revise the others.

3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
I received the most beautiful blurb quote from Edward P. Jones. After that I thought, “I will never again receive an endorsement as wonderful, as meaningful, as generous as his. You can put this one on my tombstone!”

4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I wish it were easier for writers of color who don’t come from moneyed backgrounds to be heard and celebrated.

5. What are you reading right now?
Just finished reading Vanessa Hua’s novel A River of Stars, which is so good at taking a story that’s ripped from the headlines and then going deeper into the characters and their motivations, and I’m just starting Jamel Brinkley’s short story collection, A Lucky Man, which is full of heartbreak and longing and exquisitely crafted sentences.

6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Sei Shonagon. She was a member of the Heian Court in 10th-century Japan and wrote a “pillowbook” of diary-like entries on daily life, rituals, human relationships, all kinds of opinionated, lyric-essay-like observations. Everyone should read her.

7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
My editor at Blair, Robin Miura, has the best editors’ traits: an eagle eye and a light hand.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The current political situation is the biggest impediment to my continued well-being as a woman of color in America, so that naturally impedes the writing. It takes time and energy to resist, and it takes time and energy to heal. That leaves relatively little time for everything else.

9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
Peace of mind.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Writer Nona Caspers (The Fifth Woman) just visited my undergraduate class and told the students to learn to trust their subconscious. As an example, she said when something turns up in a writing exercise or in their notebooks, they should be willing to explore and unpack and develop what their subconscious is telling them is important. I thought that was great advice.  

May-Lee Chai, author of Useful Phrases for Immigrants

Ten Questions for Rosellen Brown

by

Staff

10.16.18

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Rosellen Brown, whose eleventh book, The Lake on Fire, is out today from Sarabande Books. The novel is an epic family narrative that begins among nineteenth-century Jewish immigrants on a failing Wisconsin farm and follows the young protagonist, Chaya, and her brother Asher, who flee to industrialized Chicago with the hopes of finding a better life. Instead, they find themselves confronted with the extravagance of the World’s Fair, during which they depend on factory work and pickpocketing to survive. The Lake on Fire is a “keen examination of social class, family, love, and revolution in a historical time marked by a tumultuous social landscape.” Rosellen Brown is the author of the novels Civil Wars, Half a Heart, Tender Mercies, Before and After, and six other previous books. Her stories have appeared in O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories , and Best Short Stories of the Century. She lives in Chicago, where she teaches in the MFA program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 

1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Where depends almost entirely on the shifting light in my apartment that, most marvelously, sits sixteen stories up and a couple of blocks from constantly-changing Lake Michigan. So I follow the sun around and sit wherever it’s brightest (often with my cat on my lap). I sometimes wonder if I’d focus better if I had one desk, one room of my own, but I’m light-thirsty and this seems to work out pretty well. As for the “how often,” when my kids were little and I had to take advantage of every minute they were in school, I’ll admit I was a lot more disciplined; I published three books in three years. Like my waistline, I’m afraid things have slackened a little, but I still try to work every day that I’m not teaching and feel like I’m cheating when I don’t at least try, or on a dry day default to reading. It’s interesting that many people worry that reading while they’re writing might influence their work. On the contrary, I’ve always read just enough (of just about anything good) until I find myself thinking, hungrily, “I want to do that!” Then I put the book or the story away and get down to it, energized by envy.

2. Where did you first get published?
This is crazy to remember: The New York Times used to—I’m talking about the fifties—publish poetry, mostly pretty bad, on their editorial page and while I was in high school I sent them, and had accepted, a sonnet on the ghost of Thomas Wolfe. (I’m not talking about Tom Wolfe but the Thomas of Look Homeward, Angel: “Oh, lost and by the wind-grieved ghost…” and so on. A book not to be read when you’re older than sixteen.) In college, I had a few poems in little magazines and one in Mademoiselle and then my coup, never to be repeated: Poetry Magazine took a sestina of mine and published it in my senior year. A sestina is always a sort of tour de force; maybe if I tried that again, they’d take another poem! As for my fiction, I didn’t start writing that until later, moving gradually from poetry to prose poetry to some pretty unconventional fiction because I didn’t really know (or care about) “the rules.” 

3. How long did it take you to write The Lake On Fire?
Oh, what a question! I just discovered, via an old letter that I happened upon, that I had begun talking about what became this book as long ago as 1987! I’m horrified. I published four books between that early hint of curiosity and my actually writing and revising it, so I was obviously not sidelined by that early—I’ll call it an itch. Somewhere along the way I wrote a first version that was set in New Hampshire. Of course, Chicago is at the center of the published novel. I could write a lot more than I have room for here about how long it takes me—and, I suspect, most writers—the coming together of two impulses to ignite a story, and that’s what happened when I moved here and learned so much about the city’s history. I sort of (but only sort of) wish I could find the original manuscript that never took fire but I have no idea what happened to it. (Good metaphor, given the name of the final book.)

4. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How wonderfully attentive an independent (read: small but not powerless) press could be, if it’s seriously well-run. I got an almost instant response from Sarah Gorham, whose Sarabande has always been one of my favorites—none of that hanging around the (virtual) mailbox waiting for somebody in New York to say yea or nay because, I trust, she didn’t have to run things past an army of marketers and others before she could say “I love it!” And their marketing has been another surprise: Really attentive and responsive, Joanna Englert is all in, efficient, and enthusiastic. Though I had a good experience at Farrar, Straus and Giroux with their publicity and marketing for my book Before and After, this is far more personal and agile.

5. What trait do you most value in an editor?
Respect for my intentions and an absence of the need to prevail. A good ear, not always available even from editors who can talk about structure or motivation and so on but who can’t hear a rhythmically perfect (or imperfect) line. I’ve had two great editors: The first, John Glusman, was just starting his family when I worked with him on Before and After, which raises some hard questions about parental responsibility, and he was deeply attuned to what I was trying to do. And my current editor, Sarah Gorham, is herself a terrific poet and essayist who knows how to listen to the rhythm of my writing, which—as someone who herself began as a poet—I take very seriously.

6. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’m hardly alone in saying that—both understandably and unforgivably—the “legacy” publishers look at their numbers, past and projected, far more attentively than I think they consider the quality of books they deem marginal. They are, like their counterparts in the entertainment industry, more sheeplike than daring.

7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Not under-rated—he gets great reviews and sometimes wins prizes—but I find too few people who know Charles Baxter’s stories and novels. I’m not sure why: Too quiet, maybe? Never brings down the house but writes with exquisite sensitivity and great good humor, with his passion for social justice sometimes stage center, sometimes lurking around the edges. I remember him saying, memorably and better than this, that what we need to do is make people less certain about their certainties.

8. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
This is still a little too much like the “who are your favorite writers?” kind of question. I hate ranking writers because it’s so apples and oranges. Two of my favorite novels, for example, are William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow and Evan Connell’s Mrs. Bridge. But then, what about Alice Munro’s The Beggar Maid, which I consider one of the most satisfying collections of (connected) stories I know? To the Lighthouse? And then, on another day, trying keep dry the suitcase I’d have rescued from whatever boat capsized and deposited me on that island, where do I put Max Frisch’s Man in the Holocene or Marilynn Robinson’s Houskeeping, novels so different you might want to find another name for their genres? And then there’s poetry. And then there’s nonfiction, at least half the entries in The Art of the Personal Essay. So many delights! How to choose? I refuse.

9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I’m a plodding, one-idea-at-a-time writer, unlike some of my friends, who are filled to overflowing with great projects jostling each other to be attended to. Then again, with eleven books behind me, I guess I shouldn’t complain. Entertainment Weekly, of all places, recently chose The Lake on Fire as one of their “20 Fall Books Not To Be Missed,” and they called me some very complimentary things, but it was kind of a backhanded compliment because they said people ought to get to know my name because I’d been flying under the radar. Then again, whoever compiled the list was probably in first grade (if that) when my last book came out so I guess that’s on me!

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice youve ever heard?
The only teacher with whom I ever took a fiction class, a fine and much undernoticed writer named George P. Elliott cautioned us, at a time when we young ‘uns were too easily snarky and judgmental, to be compassionate toward our characters. He cited a letter by Chekhov in which Chekhov suggested that, at most, we should admonish people whom we find wanting: “Look how you live, my friends. What a pity to live that way.” Hard to live up to and I fail often because cleverness is so much easier to reach for than sympathy, but I try to remember and, without too many compromises, act upon it.

Rosellen Brown, author of The Lake on Fire.

Ten Questions for Claire Fuller

10.9.18

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Claire Fuller, whose third novel, Bitter Orange, is out today from Tin House Books. A literary mystery, Bitter Orange is the story of Frances Jellico, who, in the summer of 1969, takes a job researching the architecture of a dilapidated mansion in the English countryside and finds a peephole underneath a floorboard in her new bathroom that gives her access to her neighbor’s private lives. Novelist Gabriel Tallent calls it “a twisty, thorny, darkly atmospheric page-turner.” Fuller, who didn’t start writing until she was forty, is the author of two previous books, Swimming Lessons (2017) and Our Endless Numbered Days (2015), both published by Tin House Books. She lives in Hampshire, England, with her husband and two children.

1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I worked for so many years in a nine-to-five-thirty job that I can’t get out of that habit. I’m at my desk most days for most of the day, doing bits of novel writing, in between other bits of writing, answering e-mails, and reading. I try to keep weekends free of writing, but depending on where I am in the cycle of publishing that doesn’t always work. 

2. How long did it take you to write Bitter Orange?
Almost exactly two years, and then some additional time for edits and so on. I keep a writing diary, just a line a day with my word count and whether the day has gone well or badly. Mostly it’s badly, but that helps to look back on when I’m writing the next one. 

3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How long it can take from a publisher buying a novel to that book being on the shelves in bookshops. I’m not a very patient person and having to wait so long —nineteen months in one case—is not easy. 

4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’d like there to be less focus on one lead book a season by large publishers, and instead for them to spread their publicity and marketing budgets more broadly. Industrywide it seems that only a few books get a massive push, while lots of many brilliant novels that publishers have bought are left to either sink or swim by themselves. 

5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell. It’s a sinister and strange story so mixed up and feverish that it’s hard to tell what’s real and what isn’t. Reading it is a wonderful distraction.

6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
I think Barbara Comyns could be better known. Her novels are wonderfully quirky, full of people who levitate or go mad from ergot poisoning. It’s hard to know whether she’s underrated—there are a lot of people who know her work, but probably lots more who don’t. 

7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
I’m lucky to have two amazing editors: Juliet at Penguin in the UK, and Masie at Tin House in the US. They both work very differently, and although sometimes I’m sitting in the middle trying to sort out differing advice, I value hugely what they both have to say. Juliet is very good at the high-level view of a novel, while Masie and I will have long Skype conversations about whether a ‘sleeveless vest’ is actually a thing, whether US readers will have heard of Fuzzy Felt, or if Americans eat cauliflower cheese or cauliflower with cheese sauce. I love getting into the nitty-gritty of a novel, right down to the sentence and the word level. 

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My own procrastination. Reading all my reviews (and no, it’s not possible to stop). My untidy writing room. My cat, who I got in order to have a writer’s cat, but who loves my husband more than me. Reading other people’s brilliant novels (and no, I’m not going to stop).

9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
Finish my fourth novel? Or just write the next damn sentence. When I’m only at 11,000 words all of it feels like an insurmountable task. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Write like “none of it happened, and all of it is true,” which, if I’ve got my source correct, is something Ann Patchett’s mother said. 

Claire Fuller, author of Bitter Orange.

(Credit: Adrian Harvey)

Ten Questions for Amy Bonnaffons

by

Staff

7.17.18

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Amy Bonnaffons, whose debut story collection, The Wrong Heaven, is out today from Little, Brown. In this collection of funny, strange, and inventive stories, whose “conflicted characters seek to solve their sexual and spiritual dilemmas in all the wrong places,” Bonnaffons writes about women, desire, and transformation through the lens of the fantastic. Bonnaffons received an MFA from New York University and is currently pursuing a PhD in creative writing at the University of Georgia. Her stories have been published in the Kenyon Review, the Sun, the Southampton Review, and elsewhere, and her story “Horse”—which juxtaposes one woman’s journey through IVF with her roommate’s transition from woman to animal—was performed by actresses Grace Gummer and Geraldine Hughes on This American Life.

1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Ideally every day, for two hours or so in the morning, at home or at a nearby coffee shop. I do my best to stick to that schedule, but interruptions and hiatuses are common—due to the demands of life, work, and school, or the need to replenish myself creatively.  I’ve been taking a long break for the past few months, reading and drawing a lot rather than pressuring myself to produce any new writing. 

2. How long did it take you to write The Wrong Heaven?
The first story (“Doris and Katie”) was written in 2008; the most recent story is “Horse,” written in 2016. So I’ve been working on these stories for the last decade of my life—while also writing a novel, The Regrets, forthcoming from Little, Brown.

3. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How capable and nice everyone has been. I’d heard horror stories about publishing that made me anticipate encountering a lot of incompetent jerks—but everyone I’ve worked with has been really good at their jobs, and also just so darn likable. I want to invite them all over for a potluck where we get drunk and dork out about books.

4. Where did you first get published? 
Word Riot and Kenyon Review Online.

5. What are you reading right now?
Gioconda Belli’s The Inhabited Woman; Hiromi Kawakami’s Record of a Night Too Brief; Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad; Mallory Ortberg’s The Merry Spinster; Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. I just finished Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, Myriam Gurba’s Mean, and Brittney Cooper’s Eloquent Rage.

6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you? 
Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I could read that book forever.

7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion? 
I don’t really like to rate authors, because everything’s a matter of taste, and taste is political, and hierarchy has no place in the creative life. That said, there are some authors I’ve read recently and wondered, “WHY HAS NO ONE TOLD ME ABOUT THIS PERSON BEFORE? WHY IS THIS BOOK NOT ON EVERY SYLLABUS EVER?” Sometimes I’m just late to the party—but it’s also true that women, people of color, and authors from the Global South have to fight harder to find an audience. This is changing, but we’re not yet anywhere near where we should be. 

The books I’m thinking of at the moment are Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls, The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Nigerian author Amos Tutuola, Gentleman Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos, and The Lost Lunar Baedeker by Mina Loy (why did no one make me read her in college?). I’m grateful to my professor Susan Rosenbaum to introducing me to Loy and Loos (check out her Mina Loy project), to Reginald McKnight for turning me on to Tutuola, and to Rivka Galchen’s book Little Labors, which made me run and check out Ingalls.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I’d like to say, “being super busy.” If I’m honest, I’m only medium busy, but I really like to sleep. A friend recently sent me a new-age astrology website that claimed to identify, based on birth date and time, “where in your body you generate energy.” When I entered my data it claimed that I am a rare type that “generates no energy,” should only work two to four hours per day, and needs at least ten hours of sleep per night. I’ve never felt so seen.

Seriously, though, aside from just finding the time, I think my biggest problem is pressuring myself to finish something when there’s just no energy in it. That just makes me beat myself up and get depressed. I’ve learned how to strategically take breaks and how to refresh my angle of approach when needed.

9. What trait do you most value in your editor?
Being able to pinpoint where the energy and heat is in the story, and reflecting that back to me. When you’re writing something long, like a novel, it’s easy to get lost in the weeds and to forget why you started writing in the first place. A good editor—be it friend, teacher, agent, or publishing-house professional—can show you where your work has pulse and where it doesn’t. It’s helpful sometimes if they have specific suggestions for how to get the rest of the manuscript back on track, but this isn’t always necessary. Usually, for me, once I’ve been re-oriented to what really matters, I can fix the problems myself. The two editors I’ve worked with at Little, Brown—Lee Boudreaux and Jean Garnett—have both been amazing in this respect, as has my agent, Henry Dunow, an excellent editor himself.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I’ve gotten many wonderful pieces of writing advice over the years from mentors, friends, and books. Most recently, I’ve been enormously helped by Lynda Barry—in particular by her suggestion to keep the hand moving at all times. Now, when I’m writing, I keep a sketchpad by my desk; when I pause my typing because I’m stumped, or because I need to ponder something further, I pick up a pencil and start doodling rather than staring blankly at my computer screen or looking out the window or checking my phone. I don’t know why this works, other than that it engages the right brain—but it does! 

I’m coming to believe more and more that the whole body should be engaged in the writing process, and that drawing is a particularly useful way to connect brain and body and wake up the imagination. My hypothesis—currently being tested in my own pedagogical practice—is that creative writers should be encouraged to draw and diagram as well as to get words down on paper. It also helps to collaborate with folks in other media, as we do at the journal I edit, 7×7. Collaboration can encourage spontaneity and open up fresh perspectives on one’s work. 

 

Amy Bonnaffons, author of The Wrong Heaven.

(Credit: Kristen Bach)

Ten Questions for Keith Gessen

7.10.18

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Keith Gessen, whose second novel, A Terrible Country, is out this month from Viking. A literary portrait of modern Russia, A Terrible Country tells the story of Andrei, a young academic living in New York who is called back to Moscow on the eve of the 2008 financial crisis to care for his grandmother. Once there, Andrei sees a country still grappling with the legacy of Soviet Russia and exhausted by Putin’s capitalism. “Gessen’s particular gift is his ability to effortlessly and charmingly engage with big ideas…while still managing to tell a moving and entertaining human story,” says George Saunders. “At a time when people are wondering whether art can rise to the current confusing poliltical moment, this novel is a reassurance from a wonderful and important writer.” Gessen is also the author of All the Sad Young Literary Men (Viking, 2008) and a founding editor of n+1. He is the editor of three nonfiction books and the translator or cotranslator, from Russian, of a collection of short stories, a book of poems, and a work of oral history, Nobel Prize-winner Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Diaster (Dalkey Archive Press, 2005). A contributor to the New Yorker and the London Review of Books, Gessen teaches journalism at Columbia University.

1. How long did it take you to write A Terrible Country?
It took eight years. This is a little embarrassing to admit because it’s not like the book is a thousand pages long. At one point during the writing of it a friend who works in finance asked how long it would physically take to type a book if you knew all the words already, and the answer in my case, given how fast I type, was one week. And yet it still took eight years.

2. Where, when, and how often do you write?
If I’m writing, then the answer is whenever and however I can—in notebooks, on scraps of paper, whatever. I wrote large portions of this book in the Gmail app of my old Blackberry while on the subway. That was a great writing phone. Now I use “Notes” on the iPhone—am using it right now in fact—and of course compared to the old Blackberries the keyboard on the iPhone is bullshit. Progress isn’t always progressive.

3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
It’s been ten years since I published my first/previous novel, so a lot has changed. One obvious thing is the number of new outlets that do interviews, podcasts, etc.—I thought I would find this annoying but actually I like it. I’ve met a bunch of great readers and writers already just through the various interviews.

4. Where did you first get published?
My first non-student publication was in AGNI. I sent a story to Sven Birkerts through my friend George Scialabba, and he took it. I was just out of grad school and wondering if anyone outside my workshop would ever read anything I wrote, so it was very encouraging.

5. What are you reading right now?
Sheila Heti’s Motherhood and Tony Wood’s forthcoming Russia Without Putin. Both excellent.

6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
A classic question but I find it hard to answer. Under what circumstances did I arrive on this island? Will I have an opportunity to seek revenge on the forces that put me here? And how long am I here for? Am I Lenin in Finland, just biding my time until I return, or Trotsky in Mexico, counting the days till my assassins arrive? Is this a difficult island to survive on—is it literally a desert?—or an easy one? Would I find it useful and heartening to read about someone in a similar situation, like Robinson Crusoe, or would I find it annoying because he had it so much easier? Finally, who owns the island? Do I need to pay rent?

7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Rebecca Curtis. She should be a household name.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Sloth. Indecision. Inconstancy.

9. What trait do you most value in your editor or agent?
My editor at Viking, Allison Lorentzen, is amazing. She is brilliant and ruthless and thoughtful, all at once. I guess if there’s one particular trait, at the risk of sounding cheesy, it’s passion. Or commitment, to choose a more respectable-sounding word. Either way, it’s the ability to persevere in a very tough business, living with both constant pressure and constant disappointment. You can’t keep doing it and doing it well if you don’t care.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I once heard George Saunders tell a story about being edited at the New Yorker, where his editor kept asking him to cut a highly precise number of lines—18 lines, 25 lines. And George would go do it each time thinking that the editor had a very specific vision for his story. But then he realized the editor just wanted it to be shorter. And the advice here was: There’s almost no piece of writing that can’t be improved by removing 18, then 25, then 21 lines; i.e. you can almost always make something better by making it shorter. This interview being the rare exception to that rule.

Keith Gessen, author of A Terrible Country (Viking). 

Ten Questions for Alexia Arthurs

by

Staff

7.24.18

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Alexia Arthurs, whose debut story collection, How to Love a Jamaican, is out today from Ballantine Books. Drawing on Arthurs’s own experiences growing up in Jamaica and moving with her family to Brooklyn, New York, at age twelve, the stories in this collection explore issues of race, class, gender, and family, and feature a cast of complex and richly drawn characters, from Jamaican immigrants in America to their families back home, from tight-knit island communities to the streets of New York City and small Midwestern college towns. Arthurs is a graduate of Hunter College in New York City and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and her stories have been published in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Vice, and the Paris Review, which awarded her the Plimpton Prize in 2017.

1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I love lattes and coffee shop ambiance, but whenever I try to write in public, I regret it. Everything and everyone is too loud. I need to be in the privacy and quiet of my home, at my desk with a cup of tea. I drink lots of tea when I write. My magic hours are between 12 AM and 2 AM or until I absolutely can’t keep my eyes open anymore. If I’m working on something, I try to write as often as I can—every day, every other day, whenever I can. I can go weeks without writing if the material isn’t pressing. I can’t decide if my writing is better when I feel inspired, or if it’s the process that feels more pleasant.

2. How long did it take you to write How to Love a Jamaican?
I wrote the first story, “Slack,” during my first year of graduate school—this was late 2012 or early 2013. I finished the last story during the winter of 2017.

3. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
Often writers talk about writing in an individualized way, our dreams and failures, but on the other end, it feels like a community project—it’s for the culture, for my culture. How to Love a Jamaican feels bigger than me. A surprising and beautiful realization. I’ve gotten messages from people who tell me that they were waiting on a book like mine.

4. Where did you first get published?
I published a short story called “Lobster Hand” in Small Axe.

5. What are you reading right now?
All the Names They Used for God by Anjali Sachdeva. It’s incredible. This is such a good year for short story collections.

6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
The Bible I’ve had since I was a teenager. It’s marked-up and worn, and it is one of the most precious things I own. I’m not religious anymore, or I’m still trying to figure out my relationship with religion, but my family is, and my father was a minister when I was growing up, so Biblical stories still hold personal relevance for me.

7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Whenever I’m asked this question (if I’m asked this question again—I was asked this question last week) I’m going to name short story collections I love. We need to get more people reading story collections! I really admire You Are Having a Good Time by Amie Barrodale and Are You Here For What I’m Here For? by Brian Booker.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
All of my feelings and daydreaming. It’s hard sometimes to sit still and trust the process. The other challenge is the pain of recognizing myself in my writing because my stories come from such a personal place. I don’t always feel like looking in a mirror.

9. What trait do you most value in your editor?
Kindness. Intelligence is nice, but kindness is lovelier. Andra Miller has both. I respect her as a person and as a thinker.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I took photographs in high school. There was a dark room, which now feels like a small miracle in a public high school in Brooklyn, New York. When I was graduating, my photography teacher, Mr. Solo, gave me a little book—The Mind’s Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers by Henri Cartier-Bresson. He taped one of my photographs in one of the blank pages and wrote a note saying that he hoped I would stay involved in art-making wherever life took me. Not really advice, but encouragement, which for me is the same thing. I still have that book. What he did was one of the most generous things a teacher or anyone has ever done for me.

Alexia Arthurs, author of How to Love a Jamaican.

(Credit: Kaylia Duncan)

Ten Questions for Sharlene Teo

9.4.18

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Sharlene Teo, whose debut novel, Ponti, is out today from Simon & Schuster. Praised by Tash Aw as “not just a singular debut, but a milestone in Southeast Asian literature,” Ponti is the tale of three women in modern-day Singapore: Szu, a teenager living in a dark house on a cul-de-sac; her mother, Amisa, once a beautiful actress starring in a series of cult horror movies as a beautiful, cannibalistic monster, now a hack medium performing séances with her sister; and the privileged, acid-tongued Circe. Told from the perspective of each of the three women, Ponti explores the fraught themes of friendship, memory, and belonging. A Singaporean writer based in the UK, Teo is the winner of the inaugural Deborah Rogers Writers’ Award, the 2013 David T. K. Wong Creative Writing Fellowship, and the 2014 Sozopol Fiction Fellowship. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Esquire UK, Magma Poetry, and Eunoia Review. 

1. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
I write mostly at my desk, at home. Thinking best in the morning before the weight of the day and the effluvium of social media and the news cycle settles in. When I’m in the middle of a project I’ll work on it whenever I can. In between projects, or struggling to finish something unpleasant before I can get back to fiction writing (like now), I make cryptic notes that I have trouble decoding later, as often as I can. But I read all the time, which I think is a form of thinking novelistically.

2. How long did it take you to write Ponti
The first, failed iteration took me two years: from 2012 to 2014. I restarted it and that draft took two years: 2014 to 2016. And then the editorial process.

3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How gently collaborative it’s been. My editors were exacting but never didactic. Postpublication, my publicist is a life buoy. And everything is out of my control since I handed in the final edits, including (this is hard to let go of) how people respond to it. 

4. If you could go anywhere in the world for a writing retreat where would it be? 
A really high-tech underwater retreat somewhere in the Pacific Ocean where you can see whales and jellyfish through the glass but any time you like you get taken back up to the surface to crystalline beaches. The food would be really good, fresh seafood, and everything would be sustainable and not exploitative in any way and there would be plenty of pasta available too. 

5. What are you reading right now? 
The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe. It’s claustrophobic, terrifying, and has incredible narrative momentum. I know it’s been adapted into a film already, but right now as I read it I’m imagining it as a psychological thriller codirected by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Jonathan Glazer, and Alfred Hitchcock.

6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Mary Gaitskill. I feel like she’s always been fearless, way ahead of the curve.

7. Where did you first get published?
It must have been in a creative writing anthology in Singapore, for teenaged poets. 

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My crippling self-doubt and imposter syndrome. My Eeyorish tendencies. My over-analysis and constant need for approval and comparison. 

9. What trait do you most value in your editor or agent?
Their perceptiveness, empathy, and patience. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
The Anne Lamott classic: The first draft is the down draft; get the words down. The next draft is the up draft: Fix it up, somehow. Or also (I forgot where I heard this from) to doubt yourself means you’re on to the right thing. I find that reassuring. 

Sharlene Teo, author of Ponti.

(Credit: Barney Poole)

Ten Questions for Jos Charles

8.14.18

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Jos Charles, whose new poetry collection, feeld, is out today from Milkweed Editions. Charles’s second book is a lyrical unraveling of the circuitry of gender and speech. In an inventive transliteration of the English language that is uniquely her own—like Chaucer for the twenty-first century: “gendre is not the tran organe / gendre is yes a hemorage,” she writes—Charles reclaims the language of the past to write about trans experience. “Jos Charles rearranges the alphabet to survive its ferocity against her body,” writes Fady Joudah, who selected the collection as a winner of the National Poetry Series. “Where language is weaponized, feeld is a whistleblower, a reclamation of arts domain.” Charles is the author of a previous poetry collection, Safe Space, published by Ahsahta Press in 2016, and is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship and a Monique Wittig Writer’s Scholarship. She received an MFA from the University of Arizona and lives in Long Beach, California.

1. How long did it take you to write the poems in your new book?
I began writing many of the poems in feeld in 2014; I had a compiled set of them in 2016 and completed the edited, to-be-published version in 2017.

2. Where, when, and how often do you write?  
When writing the poems that make up Safe Space, I was working retail and then an office job. So I would spend, on a productive weekday, one to two hours writing and editing and about two to three hours a day reading, researching, and taking notes. Weekends I was more intensive. With feeld, I was writing during an MFA program, which meant time was a little less discrete. I wrote an hour or two a day, edited for about two hours a day, and spent four or so hours reading and taking notes. I’ve maintained something close to that now. That said, there can be weeks I don’t write and weeks where I’m writing much more. I write at my laptop, phone, or in a notebook, and just about anywhere.

3. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The most unexpected thing is how people have found uses to my work. I say this not to self-negate, but to communicate the surprise, the praise, of people coming to find, leave, return to art.

4. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
If you can get into a funded program, yes—it is better pay, hours, and easier than working retail. If you can afford to pay for an MFA, it seems you have access to most resources the MFA provides and your money would be better spent elsewhere—like paying for someone else to get an MFA. It seems to me not worth going in debt over.

5. What are you reading right now?  
I recently reread Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and manuel arturo abreu’s transtrender, both of which are beautiful works. I recently subscribed to the Trans Women Writers Collective, which sends out a booklet of writing by a different trans woman writer each month. If you’re able, you ought to sign up for it.

6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion? 
I frequently have been finding myself recommending Eduoárd Glissant’s poetry. Le Sel noir is a particularly astounding work.

7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
Its problems are many and the same as the problems most everywhere else, just articulated in a “literary” way. I would, ideally, want the conditions that give rise to all these problems to be fundamentally removed. This would include “big” things like the United States government as it exists, has existed; profit, private ownership of public goods and labor. The old socialist hopes. It would also include those “smaller” things like behaviors and words and presumptions. In lieu of this, if not this, until this, I could see, as a kind of coping with these conditions, an extramarket or extragovernmental body that organizes material support for writers. A public fund where writers get together and try to decide what to do with the pharmaceutical, supermarket, and other such kinds of money that somehow found its way—through tax write offs, donations—to “the writing community,” to be distributed to the most vulnerable within that community. Of course, violences are not equal, so there would need to be some sort of weighted system to determine distribution of funds based on “quantifying” larger social exclusions. I imagine there’d be fewer prizes and grants and more public goods and services—like housing for writers without fixed addresses or legal support for incarcerated writers, online or mailed lending libraries. This would require middle-class, largely academic-situated writers to forgo their grants and, many having faced financial and housing instability before, unfortunately, to become adjacent to those horrors again. That’s what is at stake though. It’s a messy thought for a messy time.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I can’t think of any impediments unique to my writing life, only impediments that are obvious, manifold, to life in general that happen to additionally hinder my writing life: money, other people, myself.

9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?    
I would like to one day run a local, worker’s paper. It would include creative work, organizational events, opinion pieces, and lots of collectivizing of labor, goods. It would also inevitably be time-consuming and a financial failure.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Saeed Jones once said—and I may very well be misquoting—poets don’t make money. If they have money, it came from somewhere that wasn’t, at least initially, directly their writing. Maybe support from parents, another job, or, if lucky, eventually and in addition, a grant here and there, an academic or nonprofit job. As someone who had been writing and publishing for close to ten years before making any money off of my writing, and then certainly not enough to sustain myself, it was good to hear at that time. Which is to say, in a system that doesn’t value writing, but only the marketing possibility of the writer and the written object, to write is the “success” itself. It’s both disheartening and astonishing. So you make a market of yourself and keep what you can off the books. Along the axes of familiar identarian violences, this is typical: You cross the street to walk over there, you shut up there to speak over here, you sell your wares to buy some shoes—and if not shoes, a coke; if not a coke, a book; if not a book, a bag of rice. And what isn’t your wares? 

Jos Charles, author of feeld.

(Credit: Cybele Knowles)

Ten Questions for Jasmine Gibson

7.3.18

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Jasmine Gibson, whose debut poetry collection, Don’t Let Them See Me Like This, is out this month from Nightboat Books. In poems that inexorably tie the personal to the political, Gibson speaks to the disillusioned in moments of crisis, whether in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina or in the long, slow echo of the Syrian civial war. “Reading this collection is like listening to love poems on a dock while watching transnational cargo ships on fire and sinking,” writes poet Tonga Eisen-Martin about the collection. “Here there are no gods of private causes. Just words dashing on our behalf, only a breath’s distance in front of the beast.” Gibson is also the author of the chapbook Drapetomania, released by Commune Editions in 2015, and coauthor, with Madison Van Oort, of the chapbook TimeTheft: A Love Story (The Elephants, 2018). Originally from Philadelphia, Gibson lives in Brooklyn, New York.

1. How long did it take you to write Don’t Let Them See Me Like This?
The book was written over the course of three years. It has changed a lot from what it was originally supposed to be. I thought it would only be two years of work, which is what it was at first. Different things happened, choices made, no love lost, and now it’s a three-year-old maenad waiting to be born.

2. Where, when, and how often do you write?  
When I first started writing about five years ago, I would go to this specific bar in Manhattan’s West Village and do a whole ritual. I’d get my paycheck, get a book from St.Mark’s Bookstore, then a banh mi, and then four margaritas in I’d start writing in the darkness of the bar. I did this ritualistically: a specific day, a specific time, a specific bar, alone in the dark. I don’t do this anymore. I like writing in the sun, in bed, in the middle or after kissing. I’m a true Leo, I love love, and writing is like love. It’s painful sometimes, but it really burns you in a way that everyday stuff doesn’t really do. It reminds me of this Bobby Womack quote I saw once: “I live for love. I’ve always been tortured by love. I don’t mind the pain. I want to be the king of pain.” And in a way I, too, love to be the King of Pain, Queen of Ache.

3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
Everyone says time, but babies come when they want to come, that’s what books are like. I’d say the most surprising thing is how the publication process really makes your world smaller and prepares you for postpartum from your book. It gives you a little taste into the way people think about you and your work. It’s really truth telling.

4. Where did you first get published?
I got published first by Commune Editions. They were, at that time, the only people to really dig my work before anyone else.

5. What are you reading right now?
Raquel Salas Rivera’s Lo terciario / The Tertiary, Reek Bell’s A Great Act, and Claude McKay’s A Long Way From Home.

6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion? 
Authors outside of institutions. That’s where the most interesting work is coming from. With institutions, it’s always this bait-and-switch thing that happens that puts a straight jacket on people’s work.

7. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Myself, sometimes I’m unsure, sometimes I’m hubris. I think when I wrote TimeTheft: A Love Story with Madison Van Oort, I was able to balance out my own thoughts with her level headedness.

8. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
My most genuine response would be that it was more accessible to voices that are pushed to the margins. But also I think this response gets perverted by the publishing and literary community, which is why you have “special”(fetish) issues to talk about subjects that are just normal ways of living for a lot of people. So, I’d say: more incendiary small presses and zine makers to the front.

9. When you’re not writing, what do you like to do? 
I like to hangout with friends, drink, talk to my mom and sister, and go on dates with my partner. I like reading about strange factoids and record shopping.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
There is none really, either it’s classicist or unfeasible. I think sincerity is important to the process of writing, because the work really can speak for itself, and no one can pimp that out. So, mine is this: Get in where you fit in, and where you don’t, break it.

Jasmine Gibson, author of Don’t Let Them See Me Like This.

(Credit: Sean D. Henry-Smith)

Ten Questions for J. M. Holmes

by

Staff

8.21.18

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features J. M. Holmes, whose debut story collection, How Are You Going to Save Yourself, is out today from Little, Brown. This linked collection follows a decade in the lives of Dub, Rolls, Rye, and Gio, four young friends coming of age in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, grappling with the complexities of family history and class; the discovery of sex, drugs, and desire; and the struggle to liberate themselves from the legacies left to them as Black men in America. Holmes is, as Rebecca Makkai puts it, “not just a new voice but a new force: honest, urgent, compelling, often hilarious, and more often gut-wrenching.” Born in Denver and raised in Rhode Island, Holmes is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his stories have appeared in the Paris Review, the White Review, and H.O.W. He lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and is currently at work on a novel.

1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Starting with a simple question and I can’t even answer this one. I used to write at night a lot, very late when everything is quiet. I’m not much of a morning person. Lately, I’ve been writing on my phone at work when it’s slow and we don’t have any tickets in the kitchen—sacrilege, I know.

2. How long did it take you to write How Are You Going to Save Yourself?
Some of the stories are revamped versions of pieces I wrote as an undergrad, so I guess seven years. It pains me to say that since it makes those 250 pages seem really small. The bulk of the collection was written between 2015 and 2016, though.

3. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How little control I have over it. It is a terrifying process to release your literary babies into the world, where anybody can say anything they want about them. Also, just how long it takes from sale to shelf—slowest seventeen months of my life.

4. Where did you first get published?
I got published in some student publications as an undergrad, but the first time I got paid for anything literary was the Paris Review. (Shameless shout out to Anna, my agent. She’s dope.)

5. What are you reading right now?
Currently, I’m reading Tao: The Watercourse Way by Alan Watts and Ohio by Stephen Markley. They are very different books. The former is probably in conjunction with my answer to the publication process question. Trying to fill the Zen reserves (even though it definitely doesn’t work like that) before this process really takes off.

6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
You mean if I couldn’t have any albums? Cause music would be the first piece of art I took with me—probably [Kendrick Lamar’s] Section.80 or Channel Orange. And am I stranded for an indefinite amount of time? Cause if not I’d probably pick something long enough to keep me occupied until I’m rescued. Enough deflecting; tough question. Maybe The Brothers Karamazov. I feel like that book would satisfy my philosophy itch and still give me a plot to escape through. I’ve only read it in its entirety once, but the excerpts I’ve read here and there since then keep revealing new things to me.

7. Who is the most underrated author in your opinion?
Claude McKay or Breece D’J Pancake. The latter cause he took his own life so young and has a small body of work. The former, I don’t really know, maybe because he was writing at a time when there were a lot of literary sharks in the water—Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Richard Wright. But either way, they both deserve to be on ELA curriculums in the United States.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Paying rent.

9. What trait do you most value in your editor?
Attention to detail. I know it sounds like an obvious one, but Ben George is a meticulous dude when it comes to the written word. We’ve had debates over single words. He was also instrumental in helping me hammer out all the age and time continuities in the book.

10. What is the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Almost everything Amity Gaige has ever told me probably ranks up there. When I was graduating from college she told me to go get a job and live a little. She said, “Learn how to write and have a job and if you’re still writing and yearning to write, you’ll be fine. You’ll be a writer.” Either that or, “Don’t write drunk too often, you’ll lose the sound of your own voice.” Her husband might’ve said that one, actually. Either way, they both come from her section and they’re both true.

J. M. Holmes, author of How Are You Going to Save Yourself

(Credit: Julie Keresztes)

Ten Questions for Claire Fuller

10.9.18

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Claire Fuller, whose third novel, Bitter Orange, is out today from Tin House Books. A literary mystery, Bitter Orange is the story of Frances Jellico, who, in the summer of 1969, takes a job researching the architecture of a dilapidated mansion in the English countryside and finds a peephole underneath a floorboard in her new bathroom that gives her access to her neighbor’s private lives. Novelist Gabriel Tallent calls it “a twisty, thorny, darkly atmospheric page-turner.” Fuller, who didn’t start writing until she was forty, is the author of two previous books, Swimming Lessons (2017) and Our Endless Numbered Days (2015), both published by Tin House Books. She lives in Hampshire, England, with her husband and two children.

1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I worked for so many years in a nine-to-five-thirty job that I can’t get out of that habit. I’m at my desk most days for most of the day, doing bits of novel writing, in between other bits of writing, answering e-mails, and reading. I try to keep weekends free of writing, but depending on where I am in the cycle of publishing that doesn’t always work. 

2. How long did it take you to write Bitter Orange?
Almost exactly two years, and then some additional time for edits and so on. I keep a writing diary, just a line a day with my word count and whether the day has gone well or badly. Mostly it’s badly, but that helps to look back on when I’m writing the next one. 

3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How long it can take from a publisher buying a novel to that book being on the shelves in bookshops. I’m not a very patient person and having to wait so long —nineteen months in one case—is not easy. 

4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’d like there to be less focus on one lead book a season by large publishers, and instead for them to spread their publicity and marketing budgets more broadly. Industrywide it seems that only a few books get a massive push, while lots of many brilliant novels that publishers have bought are left to either sink or swim by themselves. 

5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell. It’s a sinister and strange story so mixed up and feverish that it’s hard to tell what’s real and what isn’t. Reading it is a wonderful distraction.

6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
I think Barbara Comyns could be better known. Her novels are wonderfully quirky, full of people who levitate or go mad from ergot poisoning. It’s hard to know whether she’s underrated—there are a lot of people who know her work, but probably lots more who don’t. 

7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
I’m lucky to have two amazing editors: Juliet at Penguin in the UK, and Masie at Tin House in the US. They both work very differently, and although sometimes I’m sitting in the middle trying to sort out differing advice, I value hugely what they both have to say. Juliet is very good at the high-level view of a novel, while Masie and I will have long Skype conversations about whether a ‘sleeveless vest’ is actually a thing, whether US readers will have heard of Fuzzy Felt, or if Americans eat cauliflower cheese or cauliflower with cheese sauce. I love getting into the nitty-gritty of a novel, right down to the sentence and the word level. 

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My own procrastination. Reading all my reviews (and no, it’s not possible to stop). My untidy writing room. My cat, who I got in order to have a writer’s cat, but who loves my husband more than me. Reading other people’s brilliant novels (and no, I’m not going to stop).

9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
Finish my fourth novel? Or just write the next damn sentence. When I’m only at 11,000 words all of it feels like an insurmountable task. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Write like “none of it happened, and all of it is true,” which, if I’ve got my source correct, is something Ann Patchett’s mother said. 

Claire Fuller, author of Bitter Orange.

(Credit: Adrian Harvey)

Ten Questions for Catherine Lacey

8.7.18

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Catherine Lacey, whose new story collection, Certain American States, is out today from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Lacey’s formidable range as a fiction writer is on full display in a dozen short stories populated by ordinary people seeking the extraordinary, from a young New Yorker trying to decipher a series of urgent, mysterious messages on a stranger’s phone (“ur heck box”) to a nameless man recently fired by “The Company” who wakes up in a purgatory of linens and pillows (“The Grand Claremont Hotel”). Lacey is the author of the novels The Answers (2017) and Nobody Is Ever Missing (2014), both published by FSG. She has won a Whiting Award, was a finalist for the NYPL’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists in 2017. Her novels have been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, and German. With Forsyth Harmon, she coauthored a nonfiction book, The Art of the Affair, published by Bloomsbury last year. Born in Mississippi, she lives in Chicago.

1. How long did it take you to write the stories in Certain American States?
The oldest story in Certain American States was written in 2012, and the newest was finished in early 2018. But I also wrote two novels during those six years, and I wrote several other stories that I did not include in the collection.

2. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write every day, usually first thing in the morning until lunch, unless there are extenuating circumstances. Writing regularly has always been the primary way I’ve avoided a nervous breakdown, so it’s unclear to me whether it’s a joyful or medicinal activity. It’s probably both.

3. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Being translated was a shock to me. It continues to be a shock. Based on reception, it seems my novels are better in Italian than English.

4. When did you realize you wanted to be a writer?
There are two senses in which a person is a writer; only one of them matters. The more important sense is that you are a person who writes. I don’t recall making the decision to be that writer; I was always writing. The second sense is that you somehow convince other people to pay you to write. I was slow to accept that I wanted to be that sort of writer, or rather I was slow to believe that it was even an option for me, so the moment I realized I had that desire is similarly difficult to track. 

5. What are you reading right now?
Mules and Men by Zora Neale Hurston. 

6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Unfortunately, it’s probably someone I’ve never read. The amount of books that were either not written or not published because the authors did not believe anyone would ever care, or could not find the people who would care, is staggering.  

7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I wish American publishers would pursue more work in translation, especially from smaller countries.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Wanting to read all the time. Illness. The weather. My own overwrought tendency toward nostalgia. 

9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
It’s always the next book. I don’t think beyond the book I’m writing and I’m always writing one.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
You can only do a day’s work in a day.

Catherine Lacey, author of Certain American States.

(Credit: Willy Somma)

The Written Image: The Art of the Affair

Creative people are drawn to each other, as notorious for falling in love as they are for driving each other insane,” writes novelist Catherine Lacey in her latest book, The Art of the Affair: An Illustrated History of Love, Sex, and Artistic Influence. “Seen a certain way, the history of art and literature is a history of all this love.” Throughout the book, out this month from Bloomsbury, Lacey maps many romantic entanglements, collaborations, and friendships between some of the most famous writers and artists of the twentieth century. Accompanied by Forsyth Harmon’s vivid watercolors of each writer and artist, the book spans many disciplines, with anecdotes about the legendary salons of Gertrude Stein, the modern-dance luminaries Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham, and denizens of the jazz world of Ella Fitzgerald.  

       Caroline Blackwood                      Robert Lowell                         Elizabeth Hardwick

Lacey excavated these connections by reading artist biographies, obituaries, articles, and letters. While many of the liaisons discussed in the book are well known—like the fraught affair between Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas and the rocky marriage between Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald—Lacey also constellates seemingly disparate sets of artists whose lives happened to intersect: how, for instance, Pablo Picasso once met and drew on the hands of the heiress and writer Caroline Blackwood (above left), who later fell in love with the poet Robert Lowell (center), who then divorced the writer and critic Elizabeth Hardwick (right), who once profiled the singer Billie Holiday, who in turn had an affair with the filmmaker Orson Welles, and so on. The book is a reminder that art is not created in a vacuum, but arises out of the chemistry, envy, and camaraderie among those who love and create it.

Ten Questions for Amitava Kumar

by

Staff

7.31.18

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Amitava Kumar, whose new novel, Immigrant, Montana, is out today from Knopf. This coming-of-age novel tells the story of Kailash, a young Indian immigrant who arrives in New York City in 1990 to study post-colonialism. What follows is a series of romantic entanglements, a trip to Montana, and the intellectual and personal awakenings of a young man exploring what it means to be home—or be without one. “In this land that was someone else’s country,” Kailash says, “I did not have a place to stand.” Kumar, who grew up in Patna, India, is the author of several books of nonfiction, including the essay collection Lunch With a Bigot: The Writer and the World (Duke University Press, 2015), and a novel, Nobody Does the Right Thing (Duke University Press, 2010). His journalism has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Guernica, Harper’s, the Nation, NPR, and elsewhere, and he has received fellowships in literature from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Ford Foundation. He is a board member of the Asian American Writers Workshop and lives in upstate New York, where he is the Helen D. Lockwood professor of English at Vassar College. 

1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write in my study. My house is right across the street from Vassar College but my study is at the back of the house and overlooks a creek. After my kids have left for school, I sit down to write and then go walking beside the water. I write every day and walk every day.

2. How long did it take you to write Immigrant, Montana?
Decades. Or, I wrote the opening scene on a train when I was going to interview for my first job, as an assistant professor at a university. Other books happened. I wrote other scenes and it wasn’t till three years ago, during a residency at Yaddo, that things fell into place.

3. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How easy it becomes once you have an agent. My last agent was sick and in the hospital when I finished my novel. He was dying. I couldn’t bother him, of course, so I sent out the book on my own. There were no takers. One of the editors made me wait for months on end. Another asked a friend whether my agent was really in the hospital. When my agent died, I acquired another agent. I had a book deal within three days.

4. Where did you first get published?
I’m old. I have been writing and publishing for such a long time that it’s difficult to remember. A part of this novel was first published years ago in a newspaper in India. But in terms of my career, to be honest, I felt I had really published when I got into the pages of Granta. Why? Because it had been a dream for so long.

5. What are you reading right now?
I’m about a hundred pages into Preti Taneja’s We That Are Young. Taneja is very alert to social hierarchies but one of the other fascinating things about the book is that it is a rewriting of King Lear and set in modern-day India. I’ve just finished reading Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry, a fascinating book for different reasons. What intrigued me most was the structure. I’m going to Milan next month, where Halliday lives, and if I bump into her I want to shower her with compliments and questions.

6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
I must confess that there are any number of big books that I haven’t read. The enforced stay on a desert island might just be the ticket. I’d be able to finally read Ulysses or Moby Dick or War and Peace.

7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
You know, one of the writers I always want to tell my students about is David Markson. This is Not a Novel is a masterpiece of formal invention. I’m surprised that when the world discusses Indian writing, the name of A. K. Ramanujan doesn’t come up more often. His poetry as well as his translations should have earned him a place in the pantheon.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Not what but who. Mark Zuckerberg. I’m kidding—but not really.

9. What trait do you most value in your editor or agent?
In my editor, the talent for seeing things whole: You are entering a room, or stepping on a stair, but you know always where you are in the house. And in my agent, who moves very fast, the ability to remind me about the virtue of patience.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
This isn’t very original. But I can’t tell you how often I’ve been consoled or encouraged by that old line from E. L. Doctorow: “Writing a book is like driving a car at night. You only see as far as your headlights go, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

Amitava Kumar, author of Immigrant, Montana.

(Credit: Michael Lionstar)

Ten Questions for Emily Jungmin Yoon

9.18.18

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Emily Jungmin Yoon, whose debut poetry collection, A Cruelty Special to Our Species, is out today from Ecco. In the collection, Yoon explores gender, race, and the history of sexual violence against women, focusing in particular on so-called comfort women—Koren women who worked in Japanese-occupied territories during World War II. Yoon was born in Busan in the Republic of Korea and received her BA at the University of Pennsylvania and an MFA in creative writing from New York University. She won the 2017 Tupelo Press Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize for her chapbook Ordinary Misfortunes, and has been the recipient of awards and fellowships from Ploughshares, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, and the Poetry Foundation, among others. Yoon’s poems and translations have appeared in the New Yorker, POETRY, and the New York Times Magazine, and she serves as poetry editor for the Margins, the literary magazine of the Asian American Writers Workshop. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Korean literature at the University of Chicago. 

1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write at home, usually late night. I find that poems in my head become louder when everything is quiet. I write rather sporadically now, so there isn’t a fixed schedule, but when I was writing the poems in A Cruelty Special to Our Species, I would write maybe three to five days a week.

2. How long did it take you to write A Cruelty Special to Our Species?
To completion, about four years, but a good chunk of the poems came in early 2015, in the last semester of my MFA program at NYU—that was a very fruitful period.

3. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
That time goes by so quickly! It took a little more than a year for the book to be published after the signing of the contract, and I felt like I just couldn’t wait. But after rounds of proofreading and editing, a year had already passed.

4. Where did you first get published?
My first magazine publication was the Claremont Review, a Canadian magazine that publishes works by writers and artists in the age range of 13 to 19 from around the world. It was very exciting and encouraging to see my poems in print among others.’ I’m grateful for the space that CR provides young creators.

5. What are you reading right now?
I am reading the complete works of Kim Su-young’s poetry, from 1945 to 1968. His poetry influenced a lot of other poets, and I’m interested in his relationship to language, as he was writing post-liberation and when linguistic nationalism was rampant.

6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
Maybe an instructive book on how to survive in the wild…. But for joy, Li-Young Lee’s Rose. There are so many amazing books, but Rose was my first love in poetry.

7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
She’s more unrecognized than underrated, perhaps, but: Ronyoung Kim. She was the author of Clay Walls, which is the first novel written in the U.S. about Korean immigrant experience. Published in 1986, Clay Walls was the first Korean American novel. Not many people now seem to know about her or the book, though it was nominated for the Pulitzer.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Stress from non-writing work, for sure. I have to deliberately and strategically clear out space and time to not think about any of that and focus on reading and writing poetry.

9. What trait do you most value in your editor?
I appreciate Gabriella Doob and Dan Halpern for their warmth, support, and trust. They believe in my vision and are just wonderful people.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Jericho Brown said to our class at Aspen Words, “Be your ultra-self.” I tend to be pretty self-conscious when writing; I think it’s good to be concerned and careful about specific words and their implications, but sometimes it disrupts the flow. So I try to imagine what a bolder, wilder, and more carefree me would say. Any part that doesn’t sit right can be edited later.

Emily Jungmin Yoon, author of A Cruelty Special to Our Species. 

(Credit: Jean Lechat)

Ten Questions for Amitava Kumar

by

Staff

7.31.18

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Amitava Kumar, whose new novel, Immigrant, Montana, is out today from Knopf. This coming-of-age novel tells the story of Kailash, a young Indian immigrant who arrives in New York City in 1990 to study post-colonialism. What follows is a series of romantic entanglements, a trip to Montana, and the intellectual and personal awakenings of a young man exploring what it means to be home—or be without one. “In this land that was someone else’s country,” Kailash says, “I did not have a place to stand.” Kumar, who grew up in Patna, India, is the author of several books of nonfiction, including the essay collection Lunch With a Bigot: The Writer and the World (Duke University Press, 2015), and a novel, Nobody Does the Right Thing (Duke University Press, 2010). His journalism has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Guernica, Harper’s, the Nation, NPR, and elsewhere, and he has received fellowships in literature from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Ford Foundation. He is a board member of the Asian American Writers Workshop and lives in upstate New York, where he is the Helen D. Lockwood professor of English at Vassar College. 

1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write in my study. My house is right across the street from Vassar College but my study is at the back of the house and overlooks a creek. After my kids have left for school, I sit down to write and then go walking beside the water. I write every day and walk every day.

2. How long did it take you to write Immigrant, Montana?
Decades. Or, I wrote the opening scene on a train when I was going to interview for my first job, as an assistant professor at a university. Other books happened. I wrote other scenes and it wasn’t till three years ago, during a residency at Yaddo, that things fell into place.

3. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How easy it becomes once you have an agent. My last agent was sick and in the hospital when I finished my novel. He was dying. I couldn’t bother him, of course, so I sent out the book on my own. There were no takers. One of the editors made me wait for months on end. Another asked a friend whether my agent was really in the hospital. When my agent died, I acquired another agent. I had a book deal within three days.

4. Where did you first get published?
I’m old. I have been writing and publishing for such a long time that it’s difficult to remember. A part of this novel was first published years ago in a newspaper in India. But in terms of my career, to be honest, I felt I had really published when I got into the pages of Granta. Why? Because it had been a dream for so long.

5. What are you reading right now?
I’m about a hundred pages into Preti Taneja’s We That Are Young. Taneja is very alert to social hierarchies but one of the other fascinating things about the book is that it is a rewriting of King Lear and set in modern-day India. I’ve just finished reading Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry, a fascinating book for different reasons. What intrigued me most was the structure. I’m going to Milan next month, where Halliday lives, and if I bump into her I want to shower her with compliments and questions.

6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
I must confess that there are any number of big books that I haven’t read. The enforced stay on a desert island might just be the ticket. I’d be able to finally read Ulysses or Moby Dick or War and Peace.

7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
You know, one of the writers I always want to tell my students about is David Markson. This is Not a Novel is a masterpiece of formal invention. I’m surprised that when the world discusses Indian writing, the name of A. K. Ramanujan doesn’t come up more often. His poetry as well as his translations should have earned him a place in the pantheon.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Not what but who. Mark Zuckerberg. I’m kidding—but not really.

9. What trait do you most value in your editor or agent?
In my editor, the talent for seeing things whole: You are entering a room, or stepping on a stair, but you know always where you are in the house. And in my agent, who moves very fast, the ability to remind me about the virtue of patience.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
This isn’t very original. But I can’t tell you how often I’ve been consoled or encouraged by that old line from E. L. Doctorow: “Writing a book is like driving a car at night. You only see as far as your headlights go, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

Amitava Kumar, author of Immigrant, Montana.

(Credit: Michael Lionstar)

Ten Questions for Idra Novey

11.6.18

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Idra Novey, whose new novel, Those Who Knew, is out today from Viking. Set in an unnamed island country, Those Who Know is the story of Lena, a college professor who knows all too well the secrets of a powerful senator whose young press secretary suddenly dies under mysterious circumstances. It is a novel about the cost of staying silent and the mixed rewards of speaking up in a divided country—a dramatic parable of power and silence and an uncanny portrait of a political leader befitting our times. Novey is the author of a previous novel, Ways to Disappear (Little, Brown, 2016), winner of the Brooklyn Eagles Prize and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction, as well as two poetry collections: Exit, Civilian (University of Georgia Press, 2012) and The Next Country (Alice James Books, 2008). Her work has been translated into ten languages, and she has translated numerous authors from Spanish and Portuguese, most recently Clarice Lispector. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her family.

1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I have the most clarity writing at home on the sofa in the early morning. Sometimes it is only one silent hour before everyone else in my apartment wakes up. On weekdays, if I’m not teaching and don’t have any other commitments, I try to get in another long stretch of writing after my children are off at school. Usually, I return to the same spot on the sofa and try to trick myself into focusing the way I did sitting in that same spot earlier in the morning.

2. How long did it take you to write Those Who Knew?
Four years. My earliest notes for the novel are from 2014 and I’ve written endless drafts of it since then.

3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
I started this novel long before a man who bragged about groping women became president and the silencing of victims of sexual assault became an international conversation. It was startling to see the issues around power imbalances and assault I had been writing about every day suddenly all over the news, especially during the Kavanaugh hearing, when the patriarchal forces that protected Brett Kavanaugh mirrored so much of what occurs in Those Who Knew

4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
Translated authors are often relegated to a separate conversation in the United States. The number of translated authors reviewed and published in this country has steadily increased since I began translating fifteen years ago, but there remains an “America First” approach to how literature is discussed in this country, which is such a disservice to writing students and readers, especially now. To see how writers in other languages have written about deep divides in their countries can illuminate new ways to write and think about what is at stake in our country now. 

5. What are you reading right now?
Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad and alongside it The Tale of the Missing Man by Manzoor Ahtesham, translated by Ulrike Stark and Jason Grunebaum.  I love juxtaposing reading at night from very different books and seeing what they might reveal about each other.

6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Of the many I could name, Chilean writer Pedro Lemebel is among my favorites. He has an extraordinary novel available in English, The Tender Matador, translated by Katherine Silver.  Every time I include The Tender Matador in a class, students end up clutching the book with both hands and commenting on how crazy it is that more readers don’t know about Lemebel. 

7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
An openness to communication. I value so many of the strengths that my editor Laura Tisdel brought to Those Who Knew and also to my first novel, which she edited as well. But on a daily basis what I treasure most about our relationship is her willingness to talk through not only changes to the novel itself, but also the cover design, and all the decisions that come up while publishing a book. 

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Paralyzing doubt. I doubt every word of every sentence I put down. And when I manage to convince myself a sentence can stay for now, the next day when I reread it, I’m often overcome with doubt all over again about whether it’s necessary and whether what goes unsaid in the sentence has the right sort of tone and resonance.  

9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
To get through even half an hour of writing without feeling paralyzed with doubt would be a welcome experience in this lifetime.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
A teacher once scribbled on a piece of writing I handed in, you should be optimistic. Optimistic about what? The note didn’t say, but that vague advice has stayed with me because it’s true: To sit down and write requires a degree of optimism. You have to trust that there is relief to be found in placing one word after another.  

Idra Novey, author of Those Who Knew.

Ten Questions for Andrea Gibson

by

Staff

11.27.18

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Andrea Gibson, whose new poetry collection, Lord of the Butterflies, is out today from Button Poetry. Exploring questions of gender, identity, love, loss, family, and politics, the poems in Gibson’s book “seamlessly spin hopelessness into hope, fire back at social norms, and challenge what it means to be human,” writes Them magazine. An LGBTQ activist and one of the most celebrated spoken-word poets in the country, Gibson (who uses gender-neutral pronouns) began their career in poetry in 1999 with a break-up poem performed at an open mic in Boulder, Colorado; since then they have gone on to win four Denver Grand Slam titles and in 2008 won the first-ever Woman of the World Poetry Slam. Gibson has performed on stages throughout the country, is the author of four previous books of poetry, and has released seven spoken-word albums. They live in Boulder. 

1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I tour quite a bit and struggle to find time to write on the road. When I’m not touring I write constantly, sometimes up to ten hours each day as it’s the most fulfilling and nourishing blessing in my life. I write at home, in any room where I can close a door behind me and have privacy because I most often write out loud, sometimes yelling, sometimes whispering at the walls, and that’s an awkward (and comical) thing to have anyone witness. I very rarely write sitting still. I pace and pace until the poem finds its way to the page.

2. How long did it take you to write Lord of the Butterflies?
It was written over the course of two years, the first poems sparked by the massacre at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, and others by the election of Trump. Like many writers, I’ve never in my life created so much as I have in response to our current political climate. I actually had to contact the editor several times to see if I could add one more poem to the book, as I was writing so much up until the final due date.

3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
This is my first book published with Button Poetry and it’s been fascinating to watch what goes into putting out a book with a publishing company that has such a large online/video/social media presence. I’d admired Button’s model for quite a while, specifically because of how many youth have fallen in love with poetry because of them, and I’ve been mesmerized by all of the different mediums they highlight in the release process.

4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’ll speak to something I’ve seen significant positive changes in over the years, something I’d like to see continue to keep changing for the better—and that’s the publication of writers who might have been previously classified as “slam poets” or “spoken word artists.” To be skilled in the art of performing one’s poem doesn’t negate how powerfully that poem can live on the page. Great poets like Danez Smith are proving that both spaces can be mastered by an artist, and it’s been beautiful to watch more and more people recognize that.

5. What are you reading right now?
I’ve been reading a lot of poetry—currently Jeanann Verlee’s Prey and Lino Annunciacion’s The Way We Move Through Water. I also just finished Peter Rock’s novel My Abandonment, which I picked up after reading it was one of Hanya Yanagihara’s favorite books. And I’m finally, after many recommendations, reading Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water.

6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
The first who comes to mind is Donte Collins, mostly because I think this author could win every prize there is to win and still be deserving of more. When I first heard Donte read I was stunned, pummeled by beauty, like that twenty-minute reading would be enough light to sustain me for a year.

7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
The ability to be blunt. As harsh as it may sound it’s really important for me to know I have an editor who is willing to say, “Take this entire poem out of the manuscript.” And that’s not to say I don’t have feelings when that happens, but that kind of honesty helps me feel significantly more solid about what I’m putting out.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I’m a very slow writer. Some wouldn’t think so because I put out new work quite often, but that’s only because of the number of hours I spend writing. It’s not rare for me to spend twelve solid hours going over and over a single stanza.

9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
It’s a dream of mine to one day write a musical. When I’m writing poems I almost always write to music, and I collaborate with musicians often during live performances. I’ve always been hyper focused on how the words and rhythm live out loud, and I’m constantly writing songs in my head. I think it would be a magical experience to collaborate on a production that features so many different artists.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
“Write what you are terrified to write.” When I was first given that advice I struggled to write for almost a year because I wasn’t yet ready to write what I was afraid to write, and I didn’t want to waste my time writing anything else. These days, I consider that advice every time I begin a poem. I pay attention to what requires courage to say, and I do my best to try to say it.

Andrea Gibson, author of Lord of the Butterflies.

Andrea Gibson, author of Lord of the Butterflies.

Ten Questions for Oyinkan Braithwaite

11.20.18

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Oyinkan Braithwaite, whose debut novel, My Sister, the Serial Killer, is out today from Doubleday. A novel of violence and sibling rivalry, My Sister, the Serial Killer follows Ayoola, the murderer in the book’s title, and quiet, practical Korede, a nurse who cleans up her younger sister’s messes. (“I bet you didn’t know that bleach masks the smell of blood,” Korede says in the novel’s first pages.) The pair work reasonably well together until Ayoola sets her sights on a handsome doctor who has long been the object of Korede’s desire. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly called My Sister, the Serial Killer “as sharp as a knife…bitingly funny and brilliantly executed, with not a single word out of place.” A graduate of London’s Kingston University, where she earned a degree in creative writing and law, Braithwaite works as a freelance writer and editor in Lagos, Nigeria. 

1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Most of the time I type on my laptop, lying on my bed. Generally, I like to write when everyone is asleep and everywhere is quiet. But if I have to, I will write on my phone, standing up, in the middle of a party. I try to write every day. It is a fantastic practice, but not an easy one.

2. How long did it take you to write My Sister, the Serial Killer?
The entire writing and editing process took about seven months.

3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
What has surprised me the most is how much takes place before a book is released. And how much of a book’s success is dependent on the publishers’ faith in the book. I have enjoyed far too much favour, warmth, encouragement and kindness from my agents and publishers, and from strangers—booksellers, book bloggers, etc.—people who do not know me, but are going out of their way to make sure that My Sister, the Serial Killer is a book that is read.

4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
The publishing business is a business at the end of the day. The literary community, however, I believe could make a bit more of an effort to bring to the spotlight books that were well written and engaging but were, for all intents and purposes, unknown.

5. What are you reading right now?
We and Me by Saskia de Coster.

6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
It surprises me when I mention Robin Hobb’s name and people don’t immediately know who she is. Clearly, I don’t know the right people. The right people would know who Robin Hobb was. Also, her books should have a TV series, and/or a movie.

7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
Frankness. And perhaps kindness. I worked with two editors on this book—Margo from Doubleday and James from Atlantic Books—and it seemed to me that they were conscious of the potential difficulty of having two different views and stances; so they went out of their way to make the process smooth for me.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Social media! Social media is distracting and it invites too many voices into your head. The world is in the room with you and it can be difficult to stay true to yourself and to your creativity.

9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
I would love to be involved in the writing and animating of a feature length animated movie. But I am still honing my skills, especially as far as animation goes; I am not very good yet!

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
“If I waited till I felt like writing , I’d never write at all.” —Ann Tyler. “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” I have learned that it isn’t wise to wait for inspiration; inspiration will meet me at my desk writing.

Oyinkan Braithwaite, author of My Sister, the Serial Killer.

(Credit: Studio 24)

Ten Questions for Nuruddin Farah

by

Staff

12.4.18

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Nuruddin Farah, whose new novel, North of Dawn, is out today from Riverhead Books. Inspired by true events, the novel follows a Somali couple living in Oslo, whose son becomes involved in jihadism in Somalia and eventually kills himself in a suicide attack. When the son’s wife and children move in with his parents in Oslo, the family finds itself confronted with questions of religion, extremism, xenophobia, displacement, and identity. Farah, who the New York Review of Books calls “the most important African novelist to emerge in the past twenty-five years,” is the author of four previous novels, most recently Hiding in Plain Sight (Riverhead, 2014), which have been translated into more than twenty languages and have won numerous awards, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Born in Baidoa, Somalia, he currently lives in Cape Town.

1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write less and less when I am on the road, travelling, or in upstate New York, teaching. But when I am in Cape Town, where I reside for much of the year, I write daily for no less than six hours.

2. How long did it take you to write North of Dawn?
It took a lot of time—two years to do the research, and nearly a year and a half to whip the text into shape. I suppose that is the nature of research-based literary fiction.

3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
That it takes up to a year or more for a book to be published after the author has submitted it.

4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
It saddens me that the shelf life of literary fiction has been drastically reduced to a few months after publication, unless the said novel becomes a commercial success or is made into a movie or the author gains some notoriety.

5. What are you reading right now?
I am currently reading Kwame Anthony Appiah’s In My Father’s House, which is on the syllabus of a course about journalism and literature I am teaching at Bard College this semester.

6. Would you recommend that writers get an MFA?
Having never taken an MFA, I am in no position to speak to this.

7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
My favorite editors have been the editors who have shown me the weaknesses of the draft texts I submit and I am grateful to them when they do.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I have found traveling away from Cape Town, where I do much of my writing, has proven to be an impediment.

9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
Taken as a whole, I am content with the body of work I’ve produced.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
That no writing is good enough until you, as an author, make a small contribution, the size of a drop, into the ocean of the world’s literature.

Nuruddin Farah, author of North of Dawn.

(Credit: Jeffrey Wilson)

Ten Questions for Andrea Gibson

by

Staff

11.27.18

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Andrea Gibson, whose new poetry collection, Lord of the Butterflies, is out today from Button Poetry. Exploring questions of gender, identity, love, loss, family, and politics, the poems in Gibson’s book “seamlessly spin hopelessness into hope, fire back at social norms, and challenge what it means to be human,” writes Them magazine. An LGBTQ activist and one of the most celebrated spoken-word poets in the country, Gibson (who uses gender-neutral pronouns) began their career in poetry in 1999 with a break-up poem performed at an open mic in Boulder, Colorado; since then they have gone on to win four Denver Grand Slam titles and in 2008 won the first-ever Woman of the World Poetry Slam. Gibson has performed on stages throughout the country, is the author of four previous books of poetry, and has released seven spoken-word albums. They live in Boulder. 

1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I tour quite a bit and struggle to find time to write on the road. When I’m not touring I write constantly, sometimes up to ten hours each day as it’s the most fulfilling and nourishing blessing in my life. I write at home, in any room where I can close a door behind me and have privacy because I most often write out loud, sometimes yelling, sometimes whispering at the walls, and that’s an awkward (and comical) thing to have anyone witness. I very rarely write sitting still. I pace and pace until the poem finds its way to the page.

2. How long did it take you to write Lord of the Butterflies?
It was written over the course of two years, the first poems sparked by the massacre at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, and others by the election of Trump. Like many writers, I’ve never in my life created so much as I have in response to our current political climate. I actually had to contact the editor several times to see if I could add one more poem to the book, as I was writing so much up until the final due date.

3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
This is my first book published with Button Poetry and it’s been fascinating to watch what goes into putting out a book with a publishing company that has such a large online/video/social media presence. I’d admired Button’s model for quite a while, specifically because of how many youth have fallen in love with poetry because of them, and I’ve been mesmerized by all of the different mediums they highlight in the release process.

4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’ll speak to something I’ve seen significant positive changes in over the years, something I’d like to see continue to keep changing for the better—and that’s the publication of writers who might have been previously classified as “slam poets” or “spoken word artists.” To be skilled in the art of performing one’s poem doesn’t negate how powerfully that poem can live on the page. Great poets like Danez Smith are proving that both spaces can be mastered by an artist, and it’s been beautiful to watch more and more people recognize that.

5. What are you reading right now?
I’ve been reading a lot of poetry—currently Jeanann Verlee’s Prey and Lino Annunciacion’s The Way We Move Through Water. I also just finished Peter Rock’s novel My Abandonment, which I picked up after reading it was one of Hanya Yanagihara’s favorite books. And I’m finally, after many recommendations, reading Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water.

6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
The first who comes to mind is Donte Collins, mostly because I think this author could win every prize there is to win and still be deserving of more. When I first heard Donte read I was stunned, pummeled by beauty, like that twenty-minute reading would be enough light to sustain me for a year.

7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
The ability to be blunt. As harsh as it may sound it’s really important for me to know I have an editor who is willing to say, “Take this entire poem out of the manuscript.” And that’s not to say I don’t have feelings when that happens, but that kind of honesty helps me feel significantly more solid about what I’m putting out.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I’m a very slow writer. Some wouldn’t think so because I put out new work quite often, but that’s only because of the number of hours I spend writing. It’s not rare for me to spend twelve solid hours going over and over a single stanza.

9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
It’s a dream of mine to one day write a musical. When I’m writing poems I almost always write to music, and I collaborate with musicians often during live performances. I’ve always been hyper focused on how the words and rhythm live out loud, and I’m constantly writing songs in my head. I think it would be a magical experience to collaborate on a production that features so many different artists.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
“Write what you are terrified to write.” When I was first given that advice I struggled to write for almost a year because I wasn’t yet ready to write what I was afraid to write, and I didn’t want to waste my time writing anything else. These days, I consider that advice every time I begin a poem. I pay attention to what requires courage to say, and I do my best to try to say it.

Andrea Gibson, author of Lord of the Butterflies.

Andrea Gibson, author of Lord of the Butterflies.

Ten Questions for Wesley Yang

11.13.18

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Wesley Yang, whose debut essay collection, The Souls of Yellow Folk, is out today from W. W. Norton. A mix of reporting, sociology, and personal history, The Souls of Yellow Folk collects thirteen essays on race and gender in America today. Titled after The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois’s classic 1903 collection, Yang’s book takes the reader “deep into the discomfort zones of racial and political discourse,” novelist Karan Mahajan writes. In addition to essays on race and whiteness, The Souls of Yellow Folk includes profile pieces on Seung-Hui Cho, the shooter who killed more than two dozen people at Virginia Tech in 2007; political scientist Francis Fukuyama; historian Tony Judt; and Internet activist Aaron Swartz. Yang has written for the New York Times, Harper’s, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, New York magazine, the New Republic, Tablet, and n+1. He lives in Montreal. 

1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write every day at one of two public libraries in Montreal. 

2. How long did it take you to write the essays in The Souls of Yellow Folk?
The essays collected in The Souls of Yellow Folk were written over the course of ten years. 

3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
This was the first book I’ve ever published so I had no expectations. I just took everything as it came and accepted it just as it was. 

4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
See above.

5. What are you reading right now?
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. by Adelle Waldman.

6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Really hard to say. I’m a big fan of Heinrich Kleist, who isn’t universally taught and known. 

7. Where was your very first publication?
I worked for a weekly newspaper in East Brunswick, New Jersey, when I graduated from Rutgers. My first publication that wasn’t straight news for a New Jersey local paper was a review of a biography of Albert Speer for Salon

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Family life and raising a child requires a writer to organize his workflow in a way that is at odds with the way writing happens, at least for me. I’ve made partial strides in this direction but many remain to be made.  

9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
This collection is a miscellany of previously published essays. Still haven’t written a book that is a single free-standing work. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Writing is a form of manual labor and should be approached in that spirit. 

 

 

Wesley Yang, author of The Souls of Yellow Folk.

(Credit: Rich Woodson)

Ten Questions for Claire Fuller

10.9.18

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Claire Fuller, whose third novel, Bitter Orange, is out today from Tin House Books. A literary mystery, Bitter Orange is the story of Frances Jellico, who, in the summer of 1969, takes a job researching the architecture of a dilapidated mansion in the English countryside and finds a peephole underneath a floorboard in her new bathroom that gives her access to her neighbor’s private lives. Novelist Gabriel Tallent calls it “a twisty, thorny, darkly atmospheric page-turner.” Fuller, who didn’t start writing until she was forty, is the author of two previous books, Swimming Lessons (2017) and Our Endless Numbered Days (2015), both published by Tin House Books. She lives in Hampshire, England, with her husband and two children.

1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I worked for so many years in a nine-to-five-thirty job that I can’t get out of that habit. I’m at my desk most days for most of the day, doing bits of novel writing, in between other bits of writing, answering e-mails, and reading. I try to keep weekends free of writing, but depending on where I am in the cycle of publishing that doesn’t always work. 

2. How long did it take you to write Bitter Orange?
Almost exactly two years, and then some additional time for edits and so on. I keep a writing diary, just a line a day with my word count and whether the day has gone well or badly. Mostly it’s badly, but that helps to look back on when I’m writing the next one. 

3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How long it can take from a publisher buying a novel to that book being on the shelves in bookshops. I’m not a very patient person and having to wait so long —nineteen months in one case—is not easy. 

4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’d like there to be less focus on one lead book a season by large publishers, and instead for them to spread their publicity and marketing budgets more broadly. Industrywide it seems that only a few books get a massive push, while lots of many brilliant novels that publishers have bought are left to either sink or swim by themselves. 

5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell. It’s a sinister and strange story so mixed up and feverish that it’s hard to tell what’s real and what isn’t. Reading it is a wonderful distraction.

6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
I think Barbara Comyns could be better known. Her novels are wonderfully quirky, full of people who levitate or go mad from ergot poisoning. It’s hard to know whether she’s underrated—there are a lot of people who know her work, but probably lots more who don’t. 

7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
I’m lucky to have two amazing editors: Juliet at Penguin in the UK, and Masie at Tin House in the US. They both work very differently, and although sometimes I’m sitting in the middle trying to sort out differing advice, I value hugely what they both have to say. Juliet is very good at the high-level view of a novel, while Masie and I will have long Skype conversations about whether a ‘sleeveless vest’ is actually a thing, whether US readers will have heard of Fuzzy Felt, or if Americans eat cauliflower cheese or cauliflower with cheese sauce. I love getting into the nitty-gritty of a novel, right down to the sentence and the word level. 

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My own procrastination. Reading all my reviews (and no, it’s not possible to stop). My untidy writing room. My cat, who I got in order to have a writer’s cat, but who loves my husband more than me. Reading other people’s brilliant novels (and no, I’m not going to stop).

9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
Finish my fourth novel? Or just write the next damn sentence. When I’m only at 11,000 words all of it feels like an insurmountable task. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Write like “none of it happened, and all of it is true,” which, if I’ve got my source correct, is something Ann Patchett’s mother said. 

Claire Fuller, author of Bitter Orange.

(Credit: Adrian Harvey)

Ten Questions for Laura Sims

1.8.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Laura Sims, whose first novel, Looker, is out today from Scribner. “A tightly coiled novel about the poison of resentment,” in the words of Idra Novey, Looker descends into the increasingly unhinged mind of a woman whose obsession with her neighbor unravels after an altercation with the beautiful actress at an annual block party. Earning comparisons to the voice of Ottessa Moshfegh and the psychological fascinations of Paula Hawkins, Sims’s novel dissects our image-obsessed, media-saturated culture while offering a compelling story of a sympathetic character on the edge. Sims is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Staying Alive (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2016), and the editor of Fare Forward: Letters From David Markson (powerHouse Books, 2014). She lives outside of New York City with her family. 

1. How long did it take you to write Looker?
About three years, off and on. I wrote the first sixty pages or so by hand, in a kind of frenzy, after hearing my narrator’s voice speak what would become the novel’s first line. Then I wrote it in bursts whenever I could. I was juggling it with teaching, library science grad school, and other writing projects at the time, but towards the end of that period it became my focal point.  

2. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
I try to write every weekday morning, when I have the most energy, from about 8AM to 11 AM. I write at home, in my upstairs office/guest room, at the library, or at a local co-working space. I like mixing it up to stave off tedium…and the threat of sleep. Working from home can definitely be dangerous in that regard; sometimes I need to leave the house to keep myself focused and motivated. 

3. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process? 
How much happens before the book comes out, and how it requires an incredibly dedicated team of people to bring a single book into the world. My own experience with publishing poetry in the small press world hadn’t prepared me for that; publishing with an indie press is also reliant on a team but that team could consist of one or two (motivated, saintly) people, wearing all sorts of hats. But in the case of commercial literary fiction, you have an agent, an editor, a marketing team, a publicist, proofreaders, lawyers, and so on, and things start to wind up at least six months before the book’s publication date. It’s a whirlwind! 

4. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? 
This is a tricky question for me. I have an MFA, and I’m very grateful to have it because it “certified” me to teach at the college level, as I’ve done for many years. But when my students ask me that same question, I pause and consider the individual. If it’s something they feel they absolutely have to do, and I can see that it feels necessary to them, then I tell them to go for it. If they see it as a way to spend two years focusing on their writing and it won’t put them into massive debt, then I say go for it. If they think it will secure some sort of future path as a writer and/or writing professor, though, that’s a longer discussion. It’s hard to get published, and teaching jobs are scarce even if you publish well. I don’t think an MFA is necessary, but at the same time it can be a good way to connect with other writers, get regular feedback, and grow as a writer. You can also do that out in the real world, though, through community workshops and just plain old life experience. 

5. What are you reading right now?
Kudos by Rachel Cusk. I love this trilogy of hers so much, I wish it would go on forever. I don’t know what she’s going to do next, but those last three books are gorgeous and important and also, somewhat magically, fun to read. I also recently read Circe by Madeline Miller, I have to add. Another beautifully written, wonderfully entertaining book, just as good as her first, Song of Achilles. I’ve been recommending all three of these to everyone I know lately.  

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
The novelist David Markson. He’s been something of a cult figure for many years, but he’s never had a breakthrough moment in the way that other “difficult” writers like W. G. Sebald have. In any case, his last four books, This Is Not a Novel, Reader’s Block, Vanishing Point, and The Last Novel, form a combined masterpiece of formal innovation and emotional resonance that have informed and influenced my writing (and life) since I began reading him in 2004. Reading Markson was a truly life-changing experience for me, and I can’t say that about many novels, even ones I’ve dearly loved.  

7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business? 
The one thing I’d change is, I think, changing already: the insularity of the literary and publishing world. Thanks to the advent of social media, blogs, etc., more of the reading public participates in a discussion that was once controlled by a select few. Booksellers, bloggers, librarians, and bookstagrammers now have a lot of say in how a book is received, and mainstream publishers have had to adapt in response. I was impressed, during the pre-publication process for Looker, at how skillfully the marketing team at Scribner used Instagram and Twitter, multiple giveaways on Goodreads and elsewhere, and good old-fashioned hand-to-hand and face-to-face marketing to get the word out about my book.   

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
Right now, just before my novel’s due to come out, the biggest impediment is…the novel that’s about to come out! No, it’s actually all of the necessary business and noise that swirls around having a book come out, all of which I’m happy to do and grateful for, but all of which is also distracting me from the essential business of sitting down and working on my next novel-in-progress. I want to blame my smartphone, but really the impediment is me.  

9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet? 
I’d like to finish my MLS degree before the year is out! I’ve been inching along towards that goal for several years now, and am currently on hiatus, but I just have a few classes to finish before I can join the corps of working librarians. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
At one point in my life, when I was juggling more things at once, trying to “do it all,” the best piece of advice came from the aforementioned novelist David Markson, who was a dear friend and told me, “Do your own fucking work!” By that he meant I should stop spending my time on smaller, largely self-assigned writing pieces, or class prep, or other things, and devote myself more fully to doing my own writing. It really did help me take a look at how I was spending my time—this advice came from someone at the end of his life, mind you. I started to say “no” to things when I could, and because of that my life is more streamlined now than it was, say, five or ten years ago. It helped me really zero in on Looker and finish it, in fact. Another excellent piece of advice was something that Richard Ford said to my husband when he met him after a reading: “Be at your station.” The two quotes go well together, actually: Butt in chair, do the work. It’s the most basic and important writing advice there is.  

Laura Sims, author of Looker.

(Credit: Jen Lee)

Ten Questions for Juliet Lapidos

1.22.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Juliet Lapidos, whose debut novel, Talent, is out today from Little, Brown. Talent is the story of Anna Brisker, a twenty-nine-year-old graduate student in English who is uninspired by—and desperately struggling to finish—her dissertation: an intellectual history of inspiration. But when she strikes up a friendship with the niece of Frederick Langley, the legendary short story writer who suffered from a supposedly fatal case of writer’s block, Anna finds a perfect case study for her dissertation. Helen Oyeyemi calls Talent a “deliciously funny, sharp, and sincere inquiry into the factors underpinning our valuations of art, labor, ourselves, and each other.” Juliet Lapidos is a senior editor at the Atlantic. Previously she was the editor of the op-ed and the Sunday Opinion sections at the Los Angeles Times, a culture editor at Slate, and an editor of the New York Times Opinion section. She has written for the Atlantic, the New York Times Book Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and the websites of the New Yorker and the New Republic.

1. How long did it take you to write Talent?
About six years, though in my defense I had a full-time job (as a journalist) that whole time. Mostly I wrote on weekends.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
When I started, I thought I knew how to write. Turns out, I was wrong. I basically taught myself as I went. I found it especially difficult to figure out how to make time move. In an early draft, I wrote a dinner scene in which I described everything—making plans, sitting down to eat, the waiter’s arrival, looking over the menu, ordering…. It took me a while to understand what I could leave unsaid.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write mostly from home, mostly from bed, on weekends, as often as I can. But since starting a family, “can” is quite rare.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The book industry gets a lot of flak but I found everyone at Little, Brown (and Borough Press, my U.K. publisher) both kind and dedicated.

5. What are you reading right now?
The Golden Ass by Apuleius

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Sheridan Le Fanu, whose Uncle Silas is creepy, sophisticated, and memorable, yet oddly overlooked in classrooms. Or, if we’re talking living authors: Monica Youn. Blackacre is a masterpiece that—IMHO—can convince people who think they don’t like modern poetry that they do, in fact, like modern poetry. 

7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
Subservience to Hollywood. Too many people seem to aspire to have their books “optioned.”

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My job and my child compete for first place on the impediments list.

9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
I suppose the real answer is honesty, but that’s dull, so I’ll say: Tolerance of ambiguity. I think a lot of contemporary editors, myself included, push too much for clarity when sometimes a little muddiness is just the thing. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
It’s actually a corporate slogan: Just do it.

 

Juliet Lapidos, author of Talent.

(Credit: Lauren Pisano)

Ten Questions for Sarah McColl

1.15.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Sarah McColl, whose memoir, Joy Enough, is out today from Liveright. “I loved my mother, and she died. Is that a story?” From the first sentences of her memoir, which Megan Stielstra calls “a stunningly beautiful and meditative map of loss,” McColl captures what it means to be a daughter. Through vivid memories, Joy Enough charts the dissolution of the author’s marriage alongside the impending loss of her mother, who is diagnosed with cancer. A book about love and grief, Joy Enough attempts to explain what people mean when they say, “You are just like your mother.” Sarah McColl was the founding editor in chief of Yahoo Food. A MacDowell fellow and Pushcart Prize nominee, her essays have appeared in the Paris Review, StoryQuarterly, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence and lives in Los Angeles.

1. How long did it take you to write Joy Enough?
For a long time I didn’t think I was writing a book. I thought I was writing essays, and then I was writing a thesis, and then I started thinking of it as my weird art project. I was so afraid to call it a book because I was afraid it wouldn’t be published, and then I would be a writer with an unpublished book in a drawer. Now I think at least one book in a drawer is a good thing. It means you’re doing the work. But I must have known there was something like a book there, whatever I called it, because I kept working on it, and I kept sending it out. That process of writing and revising took three years.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I didn’t know how to make memory conform to a narrative arc. There were discrete scenes and moments that were very vivid to me, but I struggled with how to connect one to another in some linear, continuous way. I remember expressing this frustration to one of my professors. She said, “Write the scene, hit return a few times, and keep going.” So that was my solution in the end. The return key.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I participate with a group of writers in what we call “the 250s.” We have a shared Google doc with the days of the week marked out and a column for each writer. The goal is to write 250 words five days a week. The low word count is a mind trick to get you to sit down (it’s all about the mind tricks!) and then, hopefully, sail past 250 words. But if the writing is going badly, and you stop at 250, you still have some sense of accomplishment (again, mind trick). That’s the goal, mind you, and I do not consistently achieve this goal. Sometimes I walk around thinking about an essay for six months and then sit down and write a draft in one burst. I like the fuzzy, quiet quality of the mornings and the night. I have a small studio above the garage, but I also tend to write in bed a lot.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process? 
I had no idea just how much buy-in a book requires. It’s not enough to have an agent champion a book and then for an editor to fall in love with it. The editor has to get everyone on board—sales, marketing, publicity. If your book finds a publisher, then it takes all those same people working on your behalf for a book to find its way in the world. Writing is such a solitary activity, but publishing is a completely different animal. I didn’t realize that at the outset. Sorry to get all “it takes a village,” but it really does, and I have pinched myself many times at how grateful I have felt in Liveright’s hands. 

5. What are you reading right now? 
I have a predictably overambitious new year’s resolution to read a book of poetry, a novel, a book of short stories, and a book of nonfiction each month. Right now I’m reading People Like You by Margaret Malone, which is dark and funny and sublime; Claire Fuller’s Bitter Orange, which feels marvelously escapist and lush and has been keeping me up too late; Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde, who needs no adjectives; and I’m anxiously awaiting Paige Ackerson-Kiely’s new book, Dolefully, a Rampart Stands.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
Discovering and falling in love with an author is such a private activity. When you meet someone who loves the same writer you do, it becomes a kind of shorthand for a shared aesthetic or philosophical worldview. I nearly knocked over my wine glass with excitement when I met a woman who wanted to talk about Canadian author Elizabeth Smart as much as I did. That’s not wide recognition, but it’s a form of literary community, and that’s probably more lasting in the end.

7. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? 
Getting my MFA was the best decision of my adult life, and I loved my program at Sarah Lawrence. I wanted to be able to teach at the college level, I knew what I wanted to work on, and I had some money saved to pay for part of it. But I think it depends what a writer is looking for in their creative life (structure, guidance, encouragement, time), the package offered by the school, and their long-term career goals. If you have the resources to devote two or three years to the world of language and ideas, I found it a powerful and blissful experience.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
The mental space daily life demands. Buying a birthday present, calling the insurance company, grocery shopping, dishes, e-mail. This was captured so well in the comic The Mental Load, which focuses on parenthood but applies equally to keeping the lights on and the toilet paper replenished, if you ask me. This is why I love residencies. I honestly cannot believe how much more space I have in my brain when I am not thinking about how and what to feed myself three times a day.

9. What trait do you most value in agent? 
I trust my agent, Grainne Fox, to always tell me the hard thing. That she does so with a soft touch and incomparable charm is proof she’s for me. I trust her implicitly, and we get on like a house on fire. That’s the foundation for any great relationship.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
You must find pleasure in the work itself—doing the work. Otherwise, what’s the point?

Sarah McColl, author of Joy Enough.

(Credit: Joanna Eldredge Morrissey)

Ten Questions for Hala Alyan

1.29.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Hala Alyan, whose fourth poetry collection, The Twenty-Ninth Year, is out today from Mariner Books. In wild, lyrical poems, Alyan examines the connections between physical and interior migration, occasioned by the age of twenty-nine, which, in Islamic and Western tradition, is a year of transformation and upheaval. Leaping from war-torn cities in the Middle East to an Oklahoma Olive Garden to a Brooklyn brownstone, Alyan’s poems chronicle a personal history shaped by displacement. “Alyan picks up the fragments of a broken past and reassembles them into a livable future made more dazzling for having known brokenness,” writes Kaveh Akbar. “This is poetry of the highest order.” Hala Alyan is an award-winning Palestinian American poet and novelist as well as a clinical psychologist. Her previous books include the novel Salt Houses (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) and the poetry collections Hijra (Southern Illinois University Press, 2016), Four Cities (Black Lawrence Press, 2015), and Atrium (Three Rooms Press, 2012).

1. How long did it take you to write The Twenty-Ninth Year
I wrote it in bits and pieces over a year, and then stitched it together into a coherent collection in a few weeks, which is usually how I work with poetry.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Much of it was written from a state of pain—psychic, emotional grief, a time in my life that involved a fair amount of evolution and “lying fallow,” as my friend put it. At times I found it difficult to write about an experience I was still in the middle of, which is why I had to wait to iron out the narrative until things felt more settled.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
I’m not picky about location. I make sure to write thirty minutes a day, though that generally is for fiction, which I have a harder time being disciplined about. In terms of poetry, I usually wait until I need to write, which makes for a really thrilling, cathartic experience of creation.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process? 
Just how involved and long the process can be! How many beautiful, moving parts have to work together just to create a book, and how much you need dedication and love for the process from every single person involved.

5. What are you reading right now?
At the moment, I’m rereading Virgin by Analicia Sotelo as well as The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
That’s such a difficult question, because I wish all good writing (especially by writers of color) had equal recognition—an impossible want, I know. There’s several books coming out or recently out by women of color that I’m really hoping soak up a ton of recognition: Invasive Species by Marwa Helal, To Keep the Sun Alive by Rabeah Ghaffari and A Woman is No Man by Etaf Rum.

7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I wish the different parts of the community were more integrated. Starting off, I knew virtually nothing about the publishing industry, for instance, which seems like an oversight. I would love to have more interaction with different members of the writing, reading and publishing community—to know more about what publicists do, to talk to more booksellers and libraries, to really be reminded that we’re all in this together!

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
My easily distracted nature: laundry, walking the dog, making oatmeal. Although I also think that these are necessary parts to a writing life, as is work (for me) and procrastination and daydreaming.

9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)? 
A combination of honesty and empathy, which I’ve been lucky enough to find both in my agent and the editors I’ve worked with so far. I also like a bit of tough love, because it brings out the eager student in me.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
I like to toss Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird at anyone who is even remotely interested in writing. In particular, I love her approach to breaking down a massive writing task into small, digestible pieces, and finding joy in those pieces.

Hala Alyan, author of The Twenty-Ninth Year.

(Credit: Bob Anderson)

Ten Questions for Juliet Lapidos

1.22.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Juliet Lapidos, whose debut novel, Talent, is out today from Little, Brown. Talent is the story of Anna Brisker, a twenty-nine-year-old graduate student in English who is uninspired by—and desperately struggling to finish—her dissertation: an intellectual history of inspiration. But when she strikes up a friendship with the niece of Frederick Langley, the legendary short story writer who suffered from a supposedly fatal case of writer’s block, Anna finds a perfect case study for her dissertation. Helen Oyeyemi calls Talent a “deliciously funny, sharp, and sincere inquiry into the factors underpinning our valuations of art, labor, ourselves, and each other.” Juliet Lapidos is a senior editor at the Atlantic. Previously she was the editor of the op-ed and the Sunday Opinion sections at the Los Angeles Times, a culture editor at Slate, and an editor of the New York Times Opinion section. She has written for the Atlantic, the New York Times Book Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and the websites of the New Yorker and the New Republic.

1. How long did it take you to write Talent?
About six years, though in my defense I had a full-time job (as a journalist) that whole time. Mostly I wrote on weekends.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
When I started, I thought I knew how to write. Turns out, I was wrong. I basically taught myself as I went. I found it especially difficult to figure out how to make time move. In an early draft, I wrote a dinner scene in which I described everything—making plans, sitting down to eat, the waiter’s arrival, looking over the menu, ordering…. It took me a while to understand what I could leave unsaid.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write mostly from home, mostly from bed, on weekends, as often as I can. But since starting a family, “can” is quite rare.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The book industry gets a lot of flak but I found everyone at Little, Brown (and Borough Press, my U.K. publisher) both kind and dedicated.

5. What are you reading right now?
The Golden Ass by Apuleius

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Sheridan Le Fanu, whose Uncle Silas is creepy, sophisticated, and memorable, yet oddly overlooked in classrooms. Or, if we’re talking living authors: Monica Youn. Blackacre is a masterpiece that—IMHO—can convince people who think they don’t like modern poetry that they do, in fact, like modern poetry. 

7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
Subservience to Hollywood. Too many people seem to aspire to have their books “optioned.”

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My job and my child compete for first place on the impediments list.

9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
I suppose the real answer is honesty, but that’s dull, so I’ll say: Tolerance of ambiguity. I think a lot of contemporary editors, myself included, push too much for clarity when sometimes a little muddiness is just the thing. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
It’s actually a corporate slogan: Just do it.

 

Juliet Lapidos, author of Talent.

(Credit: Lauren Pisano)

Ten Questions for Juliet Lapidos

1.22.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Juliet Lapidos, whose debut novel, Talent, is out today from Little, Brown. Talent is the story of Anna Brisker, a twenty-nine-year-old graduate student in English who is uninspired by—and desperately struggling to finish—her dissertation: an intellectual history of inspiration. But when she strikes up a friendship with the niece of Frederick Langley, the legendary short story writer who suffered from a supposedly fatal case of writer’s block, Anna finds a perfect case study for her dissertation. Helen Oyeyemi calls Talent a “deliciously funny, sharp, and sincere inquiry into the factors underpinning our valuations of art, labor, ourselves, and each other.” Juliet Lapidos is a senior editor at the Atlantic. Previously she was the editor of the op-ed and the Sunday Opinion sections at the Los Angeles Times, a culture editor at Slate, and an editor of the New York Times Opinion section. She has written for the Atlantic, the New York Times Book Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and the websites of the New Yorker and the New Republic.

1. How long did it take you to write Talent?
About six years, though in my defense I had a full-time job (as a journalist) that whole time. Mostly I wrote on weekends.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
When I started, I thought I knew how to write. Turns out, I was wrong. I basically taught myself as I went. I found it especially difficult to figure out how to make time move. In an early draft, I wrote a dinner scene in which I described everything—making plans, sitting down to eat, the waiter’s arrival, looking over the menu, ordering…. It took me a while to understand what I could leave unsaid.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write mostly from home, mostly from bed, on weekends, as often as I can. But since starting a family, “can” is quite rare.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The book industry gets a lot of flak but I found everyone at Little, Brown (and Borough Press, my U.K. publisher) both kind and dedicated.

5. What are you reading right now?
The Golden Ass by Apuleius

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Sheridan Le Fanu, whose Uncle Silas is creepy, sophisticated, and memorable, yet oddly overlooked in classrooms. Or, if we’re talking living authors: Monica Youn. Blackacre is a masterpiece that—IMHO—can convince people who think they don’t like modern poetry that they do, in fact, like modern poetry. 

7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
Subservience to Hollywood. Too many people seem to aspire to have their books “optioned.”

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My job and my child compete for first place on the impediments list.

9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
I suppose the real answer is honesty, but that’s dull, so I’ll say: Tolerance of ambiguity. I think a lot of contemporary editors, myself included, push too much for clarity when sometimes a little muddiness is just the thing. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
It’s actually a corporate slogan: Just do it.

 

Juliet Lapidos, author of Talent.

(Credit: Lauren Pisano)

Ten Questions for Laura Sims

1.8.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Laura Sims, whose first novel, Looker, is out today from Scribner. “A tightly coiled novel about the poison of resentment,” in the words of Idra Novey, Looker descends into the increasingly unhinged mind of a woman whose obsession with her neighbor unravels after an altercation with the beautiful actress at an annual block party. Earning comparisons to the voice of Ottessa Moshfegh and the psychological fascinations of Paula Hawkins, Sims’s novel dissects our image-obsessed, media-saturated culture while offering a compelling story of a sympathetic character on the edge. Sims is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Staying Alive (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2016), and the editor of Fare Forward: Letters From David Markson (powerHouse Books, 2014). She lives outside of New York City with her family. 

1. How long did it take you to write Looker?
About three years, off and on. I wrote the first sixty pages or so by hand, in a kind of frenzy, after hearing my narrator’s voice speak what would become the novel’s first line. Then I wrote it in bursts whenever I could. I was juggling it with teaching, library science grad school, and other writing projects at the time, but towards the end of that period it became my focal point.  

2. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
I try to write every weekday morning, when I have the most energy, from about 8AM to 11 AM. I write at home, in my upstairs office/guest room, at the library, or at a local co-working space. I like mixing it up to stave off tedium…and the threat of sleep. Working from home can definitely be dangerous in that regard; sometimes I need to leave the house to keep myself focused and motivated. 

3. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process? 
How much happens before the book comes out, and how it requires an incredibly dedicated team of people to bring a single book into the world. My own experience with publishing poetry in the small press world hadn’t prepared me for that; publishing with an indie press is also reliant on a team but that team could consist of one or two (motivated, saintly) people, wearing all sorts of hats. But in the case of commercial literary fiction, you have an agent, an editor, a marketing team, a publicist, proofreaders, lawyers, and so on, and things start to wind up at least six months before the book’s publication date. It’s a whirlwind! 

4. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? 
This is a tricky question for me. I have an MFA, and I’m very grateful to have it because it “certified” me to teach at the college level, as I’ve done for many years. But when my students ask me that same question, I pause and consider the individual. If it’s something they feel they absolutely have to do, and I can see that it feels necessary to them, then I tell them to go for it. If they see it as a way to spend two years focusing on their writing and it won’t put them into massive debt, then I say go for it. If they think it will secure some sort of future path as a writer and/or writing professor, though, that’s a longer discussion. It’s hard to get published, and teaching jobs are scarce even if you publish well. I don’t think an MFA is necessary, but at the same time it can be a good way to connect with other writers, get regular feedback, and grow as a writer. You can also do that out in the real world, though, through community workshops and just plain old life experience. 

5. What are you reading right now?
Kudos by Rachel Cusk. I love this trilogy of hers so much, I wish it would go on forever. I don’t know what she’s going to do next, but those last three books are gorgeous and important and also, somewhat magically, fun to read. I also recently read Circe by Madeline Miller, I have to add. Another beautifully written, wonderfully entertaining book, just as good as her first, Song of Achilles. I’ve been recommending all three of these to everyone I know lately.  

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
The novelist David Markson. He’s been something of a cult figure for many years, but he’s never had a breakthrough moment in the way that other “difficult” writers like W. G. Sebald have. In any case, his last four books, This Is Not a Novel, Reader’s Block, Vanishing Point, and The Last Novel, form a combined masterpiece of formal innovation and emotional resonance that have informed and influenced my writing (and life) since I began reading him in 2004. Reading Markson was a truly life-changing experience for me, and I can’t say that about many novels, even ones I’ve dearly loved.  

7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business? 
The one thing I’d change is, I think, changing already: the insularity of the literary and publishing world. Thanks to the advent of social media, blogs, etc., more of the reading public participates in a discussion that was once controlled by a select few. Booksellers, bloggers, librarians, and bookstagrammers now have a lot of say in how a book is received, and mainstream publishers have had to adapt in response. I was impressed, during the pre-publication process for Looker, at how skillfully the marketing team at Scribner used Instagram and Twitter, multiple giveaways on Goodreads and elsewhere, and good old-fashioned hand-to-hand and face-to-face marketing to get the word out about my book.   

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
Right now, just before my novel’s due to come out, the biggest impediment is…the novel that’s about to come out! No, it’s actually all of the necessary business and noise that swirls around having a book come out, all of which I’m happy to do and grateful for, but all of which is also distracting me from the essential business of sitting down and working on my next novel-in-progress. I want to blame my smartphone, but really the impediment is me.  

9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet? 
I’d like to finish my MLS degree before the year is out! I’ve been inching along towards that goal for several years now, and am currently on hiatus, but I just have a few classes to finish before I can join the corps of working librarians. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
At one point in my life, when I was juggling more things at once, trying to “do it all,” the best piece of advice came from the aforementioned novelist David Markson, who was a dear friend and told me, “Do your own fucking work!” By that he meant I should stop spending my time on smaller, largely self-assigned writing pieces, or class prep, or other things, and devote myself more fully to doing my own writing. It really did help me take a look at how I was spending my time—this advice came from someone at the end of his life, mind you. I started to say “no” to things when I could, and because of that my life is more streamlined now than it was, say, five or ten years ago. It helped me really zero in on Looker and finish it, in fact. Another excellent piece of advice was something that Richard Ford said to my husband when he met him after a reading: “Be at your station.” The two quotes go well together, actually: Butt in chair, do the work. It’s the most basic and important writing advice there is.  

Laura Sims, author of Looker.

(Credit: Jen Lee)

Ten Questions for Shane McCrae

by

Staff

2.12.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Shane McCrae, whose sixth poetry collection, The Gilded Auction Block, is out today from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Employing and subverting traditional meter and form, the poems in the new book confront the 2016 presidential election in the United States from both personal and historical perspectives. The poems interrogate issues of identity, freedom, racism, oppression, and inheritance, using inventive line breaks and spacing to create a sense of disruption and shift, fissures in both text and feeling. McCrae is the author of five previous books, including most recently In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), which won the 2018 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in poetry and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and The Animal Too Big to Kill (Persea Books, 2015), winner of the 2014 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award. McCrae lives in New York City and is an assistant professor of writing at Columbia University.

1. How long did it take you to write The Gilded Auction Block?
I started writing the oldest poem in the book in 2014, and I wrote the newest poem in the book in 2018—so, four years. As with all my other books, I was revising it until the very last possible moment, which in this case was, I think, November 2018.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Maybe not giving up on the long narrative poem—“The Hell Poem”—that takes up a third of the book. I’m a poet! What do I know about narrative? Nothing! But I want to learn.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write everywhere I can, whenever I can, and as often as I can—I don’t have a set place or time.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The Gilded Auction Block is my first book with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and I wasn’t expecting how many opportunities—for readings, interviews, etc.—working with a press that size would enable. I’m grateful for every one of them.

5. What are you reading right now?
Oh my gosh, kind of a lot of things? I’ll narrow the list down to one book of poetry, one book of fiction, and one book of nonfiction. I’m reading Vahni Capildeo’s Venus as a Bear, Kathryn Davis’s The Silk Road, and Thomas Dilworth’s David Jones: Engraver, Solider, Painter, Poet.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
G. C. Waldrep. I think he’s one of the best poets in America.

7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I would get rid of Twitter.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Fear, I suppose. I’m always trying to do something new, which is usually something I’m afraid of. But for the most part the new things I’m trying to do are only new in a small way—like “The Hell Poem.” I had never written a narrative poem before, so that was new to me. But it’s still strictly metrical, as all my poems are. Writing in free verse would be new to me in a big way, and I’m terrified to try.

9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
Honesty and kindness.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
The construction “there is/are” is weak. Lex Runciman gave me that advice.

Shane McCrae, author of The Gilded Auction Block.

Ten Questions for Paige Ackerson-Kiely

by

Staff

2.5.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Paige Ackerson-Kiely, whose third poetry collection, Dolefully, a Rampart Stands, is out today from Penguin Books. Set primarily in the rural northeastern United States, the poems in the new book explore poverty, captivity, violence, and the longing to disappear. Employing a range of different forms, from free verse to long prose poetry, the book considers the question of who our captors might be and examines the universal search for connection and freedom. As Michael Robbins writes at the Chicago Tribune, these poems “remind us to be absolutely shot through with anxiety and uncertainty and desire.” Ackerson-Kiely is the author of two previous poetry collections, My Love Is a Dead Arctic Explorer (Ahsahta Press, 2012) and In No One’s Land (Ahsahta Press, 2007). She lives in Peekskill, New York.

1. How long did it take you to write Dolefully, a Rampart Stands?
Once I saw the shape the poems I’d been fiddling with were making, not that long. Maybe six months? But some of the poems go way back—the earliest were written in 2010, the latest in 2018. The conversation between them was revealed to me in 2016, or thereabouts. I write a lot of stuff I end up scrapping.



2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I’m a slow-burn kind of person. It takes me a long time to commit. That doesn’t mean that I’m not working or feeling something in the intervening months or years, but it means that giving up is always within reach. The most challenging thing always is trusting that something is real / possible / important / will happen. So, in short, the length of time it takes to make a thing is always a challenge for me. The slow climb without much of a view. Trusting you will look out over the valley when you finally get there, breathless and exulted and maybe in love for a second.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Since there are so few opportunities to experience a feeling of freedom in my life, I do not allow rules and regulations to dictate my writing—it’s one thing I can control. I’ve always been a striver, and it just hasn’t brought me the satisfaction I thought it would. Also, my livelihood has never depended on a publication record. So, I’m trying to be done with striving when I have the ability to make that choice. Listen, I am middle-aged, I’m not trying to be a big deal, why should I make writing poems, something I love (and how many things do you really get to love in this life?), into another opportunity to suffer? I write when I can, wherever I am, and I am trying to accept this commitment to lawlessness. 



4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Doomsday prepper that I am, it felt like a surprise that it happened at all! And of course, lucky. And the help of those involved—from first readers to Paul Slovak, my editor at Penguin—that attention and kindness has been amazing in ways that make me feel awkward and blushy and like doing better next time.

5. What are you reading right now?
Right now I am savoring an advanced copy of Allan Peterson’s new and selected, This Luminous. He is one of the great love poets of our time, and I will fight anyone who disagrees. I’m also rereading Nicholas Muellner’s The Amnesia Pavillions, an elegant and modest book I cannot learn enough from.



6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
I mean, besides every living contemporary poet? God, I am enthusiastic about so much of what I read! It’s a great time to be alive, and all that. I return to Kerri Webster’s poetry often. Reading her makes me want to join a coven—to learn how to cast a spell like she does.



7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I wish I’d had more access as a kid, and I was a library kid through and through. My own kids were library kids. So the thing I’d want to change isn’t a function of the free market or the problem of any specific community. What I’d like to see is the U.S. government purchasing 1,500 copies of every book published in any given year (large presses and small), and distributing those copies among public and school libraries in every state. I can’t even begin to imagine how differently my life would have gone, as a confused teenager in rural New Hampshire, if I’d had access to contemporary poetry. I didn’t. And that’s criminal. It’s not just about me, but many other folks (especially in poor rural communities) interested in art. There just wasn’t anything. My parents worked hard and did their taxes by April 15th and paid for wars they didn’t agree with. Everyone I care about spent too many years looking for something else, some kind of external inspiration. It felt so good early on, like we would suss it out. But some gave up, and who can blame them? It was so hard to find, and the business of living can take everything from you. Wouldn’t it be great if, as a country, we could support our writers and artists in meaningful (by which I mean financial and otherwise) ways? To think of how that war money could be diverted to makers and others who need it to meet basic needs? To get the work of contemporary writers and artists into the hands of people who are hungry for it? They totally exist, they will always exist, and it is critical they are served. 


8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I need to be kind of exhausted—I don’t know how else to put it—in order to steady myself on the page. I am curious about so many things! The Internet is a problem for a person like me. It’s like I need to get to the end of everything before I can plant myself. I have to know how mussels are harvested, I have to see all of Franky Larouselle’s work available online, walk the perimeter of my town four times, and feel some big feeling for someone (these are a few examples from today), before my mind is relaxed enough to do its own business. 



9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
Oh, the human ones! Curiosity, devotion to beauty, vigorousness, humor, love of the underdog, an ability to call bullshit.



10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I remember when I was in my MFA program, a few of my mentors told me the most important part of being in a program would be the lasting friendships I would make. I’m sure that, jerk that I was/am, I disregarded this advice as pat. Guess what? It was totally true, for me at least. And you don’t have to go to a program—attending an MFA program is not part of this advice, though programs are great for many of us—but finding your writing soulmate: that is the best advice I ever received. And all the best writing advice since has come from my soulmate, Allison Titus. From figuring it out together. That creative relationship has been like a wish for a thousand wishes—I could not write or live without her. As I was advised.

Paige Ackerson-Kiely, author of Dolefully, a Rampart Stands.

Ten Questions for Lindsay Stern

by

Staff

2.19.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Lindsay Stern, whose debut novel, The Study of Animal Languages, is out today from Viking. A book that Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney calls “exuberant, wise, and darkly funny,” the novel follows a married couple of professors at an elite New England college who, while brilliant—he’s a philosopher, she’s a rising star in the emerging field of biolinguistics—barely seem capable of navigating their own lives. A send-up of academia and a psychological portrait of marriage, the novel is a comedy of errors that explores the limitations of language, the fragility of love, and the ways we misunderstand one another and ourselves. Lindsay Stern is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the recipient of a Watson Fellowship and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers, Inc. She is currently pursuing a PhD in comparative literature at Yale University.

1. How long did it take you to write The Study of Animal Languages?
I wrote the novel’s long-abandoned first scene in September of 2013, in a guesthouse in Phnom Penh, and sent the final draft to my editor in late March of 2018. But I wasn’t writing continuously over those years. The first draft took about six months, and then—because I was teaching and applying to graduate school at the time—I set it aside for about a year, and picked it back up during my two years at the Writers’ Workshop in Iowa. Once my agent sold it, I worked on it in spurts for about another year and a half with my editor. I remember exactly where I was when she e-mailed us saying she thought it was ready: a Metro North train to New York. It pulled into Harlem’s 125th street station, and I practically floated out onto the platform.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Realizing I had to rewrite it. The nadir of the process came the morning after my first workshop at Iowa, after the brilliant Paul Harding had had his gentle but uncompromising way with my first draft. Light was coming through my window. I had that moment of bodiless amnesia. Then the memory of our two-hour discussion came trampling back, and all the air went out of my skull.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Anywhere I can find a room of my own, green tea, and frozen peas. When I’m in the thick of a project it gets me up and to my desk by 7 AM. Because of other commitments I’ve had to take a break from that rhythm over the last few weeks, which is frustrating for me but not fatal to the work, as long as I keep the embers going internally.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Its length. There’s a phenomenon in journalism that Nick Davies has called “churnalism”—you get the point—which has not infected book publishing, thank god. I had close to two years with my editor to wrestle The Study of Animal Languages into its final form.

5. What are you reading right now?
Nicholson Baker’s Vox.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
She’s already a legend in Japan, but I think everyone should read Taeko Kono. Her story “Toddler Hunting” is a marvel of psychological exploration.

7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
The fee to access Publishers Marketplace.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
A tendency to forget that I have a limited time on earth to do it.

9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
Clarity of thought. I was wildly fortunate to land an agent, Henry Dunow, who is both a gifted editor and mensch. My brilliant editor, Lindsey Schwoeri, also lavished attention on the manuscript. Because of them The Study of Animal Languages is a stronger, clearer book.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Go there. When the work takes you somewhere deep, it can be difficult not to swim back up out of fear or squeamishness. I did that in early drafts of the book. It took great teachers to show me that the novel was avoiding its true subject matter. So: Always go there.

Ten Questions for Shane McCrae

by

Staff

2.12.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Shane McCrae, whose sixth poetry collection, The Gilded Auction Block, is out today from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Employing and subverting traditional meter and form, the poems in the new book confront the 2016 presidential election in the United States from both personal and historical perspectives. The poems interrogate issues of identity, freedom, racism, oppression, and inheritance, using inventive line breaks and spacing to create a sense of disruption and shift, fissures in both text and feeling. McCrae is the author of five previous books, including most recently In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), which won the 2018 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in poetry and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and The Animal Too Big to Kill (Persea Books, 2015), winner of the 2014 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award. McCrae lives in New York City and is an assistant professor of writing at Columbia University.

1. How long did it take you to write The Gilded Auction Block?
I started writing the oldest poem in the book in 2014, and I wrote the newest poem in the book in 2018—so, four years. As with all my other books, I was revising it until the very last possible moment, which in this case was, I think, November 2018.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Maybe not giving up on the long narrative poem—“The Hell Poem”—that takes up a third of the book. I’m a poet! What do I know about narrative? Nothing! But I want to learn.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write everywhere I can, whenever I can, and as often as I can—I don’t have a set place or time.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The Gilded Auction Block is my first book with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and I wasn’t expecting how many opportunities—for readings, interviews, etc.—working with a press that size would enable. I’m grateful for every one of them.

5. What are you reading right now?
Oh my gosh, kind of a lot of things? I’ll narrow the list down to one book of poetry, one book of fiction, and one book of nonfiction. I’m reading Vahni Capildeo’s Venus as a Bear, Kathryn Davis’s The Silk Road, and Thomas Dilworth’s David Jones: Engraver, Solider, Painter, Poet.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
G. C. Waldrep. I think he’s one of the best poets in America.

7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I would get rid of Twitter.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Fear, I suppose. I’m always trying to do something new, which is usually something I’m afraid of. But for the most part the new things I’m trying to do are only new in a small way—like “The Hell Poem.” I had never written a narrative poem before, so that was new to me. But it’s still strictly metrical, as all my poems are. Writing in free verse would be new to me in a big way, and I’m terrified to try.

9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
Honesty and kindness.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
The construction “there is/are” is weak. Lex Runciman gave me that advice.

Shane McCrae, author of The Gilded Auction Block.

Ten Questions for Brian Kimberling

2.26.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Brian Kimberling, whose second novel, Goulash, is out today from Pantheon. A book that Tessa Hadley calls “a quirky, funny, melancholy portrait of a significant European moment,” is the story of Elliot Black, who escapes small-town Indiana by moving to Prague in the late 1990s, just as the Czech Republic is moving out of the shadow of communism, and Amanda, an English teacher from the United Kingdom with whom he falls in love. The couple explore the dark history and surprising wonders of their adopted city, eventually learning that the forces reshaping Prague are also at work on them. Brian Kimberling grew up in southern Indiana and spent several years working in the Czech Republic, Mexico, and Turkey before settling in England. He received an MA in creative writing at Bath Spa University in 2010. Snapper, his first novel, was published by Pantheon in 2013.

1. How long did it take you to write Goulash
Goulash took me three and a half years. I swore up and down three years ago that there was no such thing as a “second novel” curse, that I didn’t feel under pressure, that everything was going to be alright. (My first novel, Snapper, was published in 2013). Yet many people take eight or ten novels to complete a second book if they complete it at all, and now I can see why.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Goulash is set in Prague, and although I lived there for four years, it is not my place or my culture or my people, and I didn’t want to be a brash, clumsy American stepping on all the pretty local wildflowers or the dead bodies underneath them. Goulash is being translated into Czech, which I hope is a sign that I got something right.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
In the kitchen, late morning or early afternoon, and sporadically. I write everything by hand, so later I have the dreary job of typing it all up and discovering that my word count is about half what I estimated.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process? 
That it happened at all—twice now.

5. What are you reading right now? 
Late in the Day by Tessa Hadley.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
All of them! But to a select few we will also grant cash aplenty: Tessa Hadley, Lauren Z. Collins, the fearless Samantha Harvey.

7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business? 
The literary community is too small—I’d create lots more thoughtful and appreciative readers like the ones who read interviews in Poets & Writers Magazine.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
My other life: the one comprising fatigue, childcare, rent, etc. 

9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)? 
Is this a trick question? It’s like asking me to choose between children. I have one editor in the U.S. and one in the UK as well as an agent in the UK. All three of them have, I think, taken risks on my behalf. I can go months without hearing from any of them, but I never doubt their commitment.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
Don’t shine. Don’t seek to shine. Burn. (Richard Mitchell)

Brian Kimberling, author of Goulash.

(Credit: Chris Banks)

Ten Questions for Lindsay Stern

by

Staff

2.19.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Lindsay Stern, whose debut novel, The Study of Animal Languages, is out today from Viking. A book that Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney calls “exuberant, wise, and darkly funny,” the novel follows a married couple of professors at an elite New England college who, while brilliant—he’s a philosopher, she’s a rising star in the emerging field of biolinguistics—barely seem capable of navigating their own lives. A send-up of academia and a psychological portrait of marriage, the novel is a comedy of errors that explores the limitations of language, the fragility of love, and the ways we misunderstand one another and ourselves. Lindsay Stern is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the recipient of a Watson Fellowship and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers, Inc. She is currently pursuing a PhD in comparative literature at Yale University.

1. How long did it take you to write The Study of Animal Languages?
I wrote the novel’s long-abandoned first scene in September of 2013, in a guesthouse in Phnom Penh, and sent the final draft to my editor in late March of 2018. But I wasn’t writing continuously over those years. The first draft took about six months, and then—because I was teaching and applying to graduate school at the time—I set it aside for about a year, and picked it back up during my two years at the Writers’ Workshop in Iowa. Once my agent sold it, I worked on it in spurts for about another year and a half with my editor. I remember exactly where I was when she e-mailed us saying she thought it was ready: a Metro North train to New York. It pulled into Harlem’s 125th street station, and I practically floated out onto the platform.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Realizing I had to rewrite it. The nadir of the process came the morning after my first workshop at Iowa, after the brilliant Paul Harding had had his gentle but uncompromising way with my first draft. Light was coming through my window. I had that moment of bodiless amnesia. Then the memory of our two-hour discussion came trampling back, and all the air went out of my skull.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Anywhere I can find a room of my own, green tea, and frozen peas. When I’m in the thick of a project it gets me up and to my desk by 7 AM. Because of other commitments I’ve had to take a break from that rhythm over the last few weeks, which is frustrating for me but not fatal to the work, as long as I keep the embers going internally.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Its length. There’s a phenomenon in journalism that Nick Davies has called “churnalism”—you get the point—which has not infected book publishing, thank god. I had close to two years with my editor to wrestle The Study of Animal Languages into its final form.

5. What are you reading right now?
Nicholson Baker’s Vox.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
She’s already a legend in Japan, but I think everyone should read Taeko Kono. Her story “Toddler Hunting” is a marvel of psychological exploration.

7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
The fee to access Publishers Marketplace.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
A tendency to forget that I have a limited time on earth to do it.

9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
Clarity of thought. I was wildly fortunate to land an agent, Henry Dunow, who is both a gifted editor and mensch. My brilliant editor, Lindsey Schwoeri, also lavished attention on the manuscript. Because of them The Study of Animal Languages is a stronger, clearer book.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Go there. When the work takes you somewhere deep, it can be difficult not to swim back up out of fear or squeamishness. I did that in early drafts of the book. It took great teachers to show me that the novel was avoiding its true subject matter. So: Always go there.

Ten Questions for Helen Oyeyemi

3.5.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Helen Oyeyemi, whose novel Gingerbread is out today from Riverhead Books. The story of three generations of women and the legacy of the Lee family’s famed gingerbread recipe (“devised by a person who became Harriet Lee’s great-great-great grandmother by saving Harriet’s great-great-great grandfather’s life”) Gingerbread follows its characters through encounters with jealousy, ambition, family grudges, work, wealth, and real estate. Ron Charles of the Washington Post calls the novel “a challenging, mind-bending exploration of class and female power heavily spiced with nutmeg and sweetened with molasses.” Helen Oyeyemi is the author of the story collection What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, winner of the PEN Open Book Award, along with five novels—most recently Boy, Snow, Bird, which was a finalist for the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She received a 2010 Somerset Maugham Award and a 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. In 2013 she was named one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists.

1. How long did it take you to write Gingerbread?
About six months—two of them mostly fuelled by Honey Butter Chip consumption, and I think if those first two months were measured out in terms of daily portions of Honey Butter Chips recommended for a healthy lifestyle, that would adjust the writing time to six or seven years.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Getting started. I feel like I always say that, but this time around there were four false starts as opposed to the usual one or two.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
For some reason during my first reading of this question my brain added an additional word: ‘why’ do I write as part of the question…how scary. I usually write in bed, daily, until I’ve finished writing the book. But a good portion of Gingerbread was written sitting on the floor, in a chair with no legs but excellent back support, with a very low standing desk for my laptop. I’m still not sure what it was about the posture and the position that made some act of imaginative grace feel more possible—and I’m not saying I ended up pulling any off—but it might work for others, so I’d recommend it.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
How pretty the finished copy of the book looks, and how good it is to hold.

5. What are you reading right now?
I just finished Carleton Bulkin’s quicksilver-fine translation of Vladislav Vančura’s Marketa Lazarová, and you should read it too! It’s difficult to describe the narrative tone—tones, really—but this book’s combination of earthiness, the sublime, the infernal, and the wryly metafictional is the most involving I’ve come across in a while.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Kuzhali Manickavel! Prose like a thrown knife with gossamer wings. Funny, tender, piercing, marvelous.

7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I don’t see either as being in stasis; I suppose the best you can hope for are that the changes are the ones necessary for continued survival.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The thought of having to explain what I’ve done. Or have what I’ve done explained to me, ahhhhh.

9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
An acute sense of the absurd.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
To pay no attention to writing advice?

Helen Oyeyemi, author of Gingerbread.

(Credit: Manchul Kim)

Ten Questions for Brian Kimberling

2.26.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Brian Kimberling, whose second novel, Goulash, is out today from Pantheon. A book that Tessa Hadley calls “a quirky, funny, melancholy portrait of a significant European moment,” is the story of Elliot Black, who escapes small-town Indiana by moving to Prague in the late 1990s, just as the Czech Republic is moving out of the shadow of communism, and Amanda, an English teacher from the United Kingdom with whom he falls in love. The couple explore the dark history and surprising wonders of their adopted city, eventually learning that the forces reshaping Prague are also at work on them. Brian Kimberling grew up in southern Indiana and spent several years working in the Czech Republic, Mexico, and Turkey before settling in England. He received an MA in creative writing at Bath Spa University in 2010. Snapper, his first novel, was published by Pantheon in 2013.

1. How long did it take you to write Goulash
Goulash took me three and a half years. I swore up and down three years ago that there was no such thing as a “second novel” curse, that I didn’t feel under pressure, that everything was going to be alright. (My first novel, Snapper, was published in 2013). Yet many people take eight or ten novels to complete a second book if they complete it at all, and now I can see why.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Goulash is set in Prague, and although I lived there for four years, it is not my place or my culture or my people, and I didn’t want to be a brash, clumsy American stepping on all the pretty local wildflowers or the dead bodies underneath them. Goulash is being translated into Czech, which I hope is a sign that I got something right.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
In the kitchen, late morning or early afternoon, and sporadically. I write everything by hand, so later I have the dreary job of typing it all up and discovering that my word count is about half what I estimated.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process? 
That it happened at all—twice now.

5. What are you reading right now? 
Late in the Day by Tessa Hadley.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
All of them! But to a select few we will also grant cash aplenty: Tessa Hadley, Lauren Z. Collins, the fearless Samantha Harvey.

7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business? 
The literary community is too small—I’d create lots more thoughtful and appreciative readers like the ones who read interviews in Poets & Writers Magazine.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
My other life: the one comprising fatigue, childcare, rent, etc. 

9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)? 
Is this a trick question? It’s like asking me to choose between children. I have one editor in the U.S. and one in the UK as well as an agent in the UK. All three of them have, I think, taken risks on my behalf. I can go months without hearing from any of them, but I never doubt their commitment.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
Don’t shine. Don’t seek to shine. Burn. (Richard Mitchell)

Brian Kimberling, author of Goulash.

(Credit: Chris Banks)

Ten Questions for Helen Oyeyemi

3.5.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Helen Oyeyemi, whose novel Gingerbread is out today from Riverhead Books. The story of three generations of women and the legacy of the Lee family’s famed gingerbread recipe (“devised by a person who became Harriet Lee’s great-great-great grandmother by saving Harriet’s great-great-great grandfather’s life”) Gingerbread follows its characters through encounters with jealousy, ambition, family grudges, work, wealth, and real estate. Ron Charles of the Washington Post calls the novel “a challenging, mind-bending exploration of class and female power heavily spiced with nutmeg and sweetened with molasses.” Helen Oyeyemi is the author of the story collection What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, winner of the PEN Open Book Award, along with five novels—most recently Boy, Snow, Bird, which was a finalist for the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She received a 2010 Somerset Maugham Award and a 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. In 2013 she was named one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists.

1. How long did it take you to write Gingerbread?
About six months—two of them mostly fuelled by Honey Butter Chip consumption, and I think if those first two months were measured out in terms of daily portions of Honey Butter Chips recommended for a healthy lifestyle, that would adjust the writing time to six or seven years.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Getting started. I feel like I always say that, but this time around there were four false starts as opposed to the usual one or two.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
For some reason during my first reading of this question my brain added an additional word: ‘why’ do I write as part of the question…how scary. I usually write in bed, daily, until I’ve finished writing the book. But a good portion of Gingerbread was written sitting on the floor, in a chair with no legs but excellent back support, with a very low standing desk for my laptop. I’m still not sure what it was about the posture and the position that made some act of imaginative grace feel more possible—and I’m not saying I ended up pulling any off—but it might work for others, so I’d recommend it.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
How pretty the finished copy of the book looks, and how good it is to hold.

5. What are you reading right now?
I just finished Carleton Bulkin’s quicksilver-fine translation of Vladislav Vančura’s Marketa Lazarová, and you should read it too! It’s difficult to describe the narrative tone—tones, really—but this book’s combination of earthiness, the sublime, the infernal, and the wryly metafictional is the most involving I’ve come across in a while.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Kuzhali Manickavel! Prose like a thrown knife with gossamer wings. Funny, tender, piercing, marvelous.

7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I don’t see either as being in stasis; I suppose the best you can hope for are that the changes are the ones necessary for continued survival.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The thought of having to explain what I’ve done. Or have what I’ve done explained to me, ahhhhh.

9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
An acute sense of the absurd.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
To pay no attention to writing advice?

Helen Oyeyemi, author of Gingerbread.

(Credit: Manchul Kim)

Ten Questions for Ed Pavlić

3.12.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Ed Pavlić, whose novel Another Kind of Madness is out today from Milkweed Editions. The epic story of Ndiya Grayson, a young professional with a high-end job in a Chicago law-office who meets Shame Luther, a no-nonsense construction worker who plays jazz piano at night, Another Kind of Madness moves from Chicago’s South Side to the coast of Kenya as the pair navigate their pasts as well as their uncertain future. Of the novel Jeffrey Renard Allen writes, “In these pages, Black music sounds and surrounds experience like a mysterious house people long to live in but can’t find, a quest where they find themselves ever more deeply involved.” Widely published as a poet and scholar, Ed Pavlić is the author of the collection Visiting Hours at the Color Line, winner of the 2013 National Poetry Series, as well as ‘Who Can Afford to Improvise?’: James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners and Crossroads Modernism: Descent and Emergence in African American Literary Culture.

1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I’ve always written in and around the gifts and demands of family, parenting, etc. I have no real literary credits that pre-date my life as a father and husband. In fact, often I’ve worked while pretty confused about which aspects of all of that were “gifts” and which were “demands,” demanding gifts in any case. I’ve also written in and around the work as a professor and administrator in universities. For many years I found I could compose and revise poems in the momentary midst of all of that overlapping life and labor. Most likely poems were the way I survived those overloads, kept track of enough of the mind and body, all those minds and bodies, so that I didn’t go permanently off the rails. So I could at least find my way back to the tracks when wrecks and crack-ups did—and they did, of course—occur. 

Maybe writing was and is a way to address the displacements of an upwardly mobile, cross-racially identified, working-class man amid waves and undertows in an intensely segregated, hyper-racialized, and hierarchical bureaucratic world. Or maybe, for a working class consciousness like mine, writing is just another wave of displacement? Most likely it’s both. I guess we could file most of these thoughts under the “where” I write part of the question. 

2. You write both poetry and prose; does your process differ for each form?
Essays and other longer works weren’t as immediately about or out of that tumble of pleasure and trouble, of placement, displacement and replacement, of the startling novelty and bone-bending drudgery of, say, early parenthood, or of showing up to work in the unbelievably bourgeois and indelibly white halls of academia. At least that work wasn’t doused in the texture of my tumbles and pleasures in the same way. So, I’ve written what might pass as prose, and lots of it, in times when I can work for extended periods, on days—at times weeks or even months—when I don’t have to totally leave that space tomorrow, where I didn’t arrive fresh to it today. So, if I’ve got four days “off” from the rest of the work-world, I can work away at what’s called prose on the middle days. 

3. How long did it take you to write Another Kind of Madness?
I wrote Another Kind of Madness in a way unlike anything else I’d ever written, or done. I worked on the novel only in spaces where I had at least a month in which I could be with the work unencumbered by the demands of life and employment. I began it in the summer of 2009 when the kids were old enough (and my in-laws young enough) that they could be with the grandparents in Maryland for six weeks during the summer. Stacey went to work and I turned the front porch in Georgia into a writing retreat. Working “at home” in this way was something I’d almost never done. After that summer, I worked on the book in similar breaks of a month or two, but never again at home. Instead, I worked in rented, borrowed, or gifted spaces in Montreal, at the MacDowell Colony (twice), in Istanbul, in Mombasa, and in Lamu Town on the coast of Kenya, in France, and in the West Farms section of the Bronx, a few blocks south of the Bronx Zoo one summer. 

During these strange times I floated by myself in mostly urban, unfamiliar spaces, writing a few hours a day and then spending the rest of the days and nights accompanied by the story on walks, at meals, in dreams, on errands, in reading books I found in those places, etc. I found that the story wouldn’t reveal itself amid the tumble of my life, would only appear when I could really sit, walk, and sleep with it, where it could accrue its reality in a textured and present—but also most often in a peripheral and angular—region of my attention. The pressure of my daily worlds seemed to obliterate that nimble angularity, but my comings and goings in those unfamiliar urban spaces allowed this story to happen. I remember showing up after eight months away from the book, opening a blank, unlined (yes, unlined: “free your lines, the mind will follow”) notebook and waiting for Shame, Ndiya, Junior, Colleen and them to let me know what had been happening since we last saw each other and, in return, I tried to be as honest with them as I could be about what had been happening with me. It was always as if, unknowingly, we had, in fictional-fact, been at some of the same parties.  

4. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
That it takes a village. 

And, with this book, a novel, with this novel, how dense the space between the lines is with things (references, inferences) that I don’t remember creating. So many things that never appeared to me until the ARC came between the covers. At that point I could see it as a thing outside my body, and I noticed all kinds of new things there. That was a surprise, for sure; the book was a stranger to me in a way I didn’t expect. The poems aren’t that way, essays either. I’ve left copies of the ARC around the house and, when I walk past them, I’ll pick up the book and turn to a random page and begin reading at the first new paragraph, halfway trying to catch it actively changing, as if I can catch it coming up with something else it hadn’t told me about. 

5. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’d love to see more recognition in and between writers of what happens in and around Black music, where singers are singing in an organic kind of tandem with tradition, in which songs bristle with depths and complexities quite beyond the capacities of any particular singer. And audiences seem to roll with that, we almost insist upon it. I don’t think we insist upon or even at times allow a similar kind of dimensionality with our sense of writers and writing. It happens in contemporary writing, of course; but I think it’s less obvious to readers than that similar dynamic is to listeners. Maybe readers even refuse it. Maybe I’m saying that I’d love the community of contemporary writers to read each other with the freedom and rigor (vigor) we bring to hearing the music we love the most. I struggle to do this myself. Maybe singers need to listen to each other with the freedom they read with? I don’t know. 

6. What are you reading right now?
I’m always reading multiple books, always accompanied by music in the background and foreground. Right now I’m reading Singing in a Strange Land, Nick Salvatore’s biography of C. L. Franklin (Aretha’s father); David Ritz’s Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin; Eve Dunbar’s Black Regions of the Imagination; and I just finished rereading Danielle McGuire’s At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance. My rereading of Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped begins today. Meanwhile, I’ve been listening to five discs in the changer (Aretha’s double disc set, Amazing Grace: The Complete Recordings, Marvin’s What’s Going On, and Coltrane’s Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album) on endless loop for weeks. I’m working my way into writing something about the recently released film, Amazing Grace, that was made while Aretha was recording the album with James Cleveland and his choir in Los Angeles in January 1972. Aretha performs with absolutely stunning, epic power. It’s incredible. Easily the most powerful thing I saw / heard / felt on film in 2018. 

I listen to and stream contemporary music mostly in the car. The latest song I’ve been repeating all around town is Summer Walker’s newly released “Riot,” from her EP Clear. So good. It’s like Sade’s “Is It a Crime” for the 21st century. 

7. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
Well, so many of course. The word “author” almost means “deserves wider recognition.” Though not always. I’d say Christopher Gilbert, his Turning Into Dwelling. Also the second half of Adrienne Rich’s career, especially: Your Native Land, Your Life (1986), Time’s Power (1989), An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991), Dark Fields of the Republic (1995) and Midnight Salvage (1999). Adrienne Rich is obviously a widely recognized writer, but the woman who wrote these books—meaning those poems—is mostly unknown. Also I’d say the Ghanaian writer Kojo Laing, his masterpiece Search Sweet Country

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Racial terror. A feeling that—like how the finest silt settles on every plane in a space and then somehow constitutes an immobilizing weight—one is operating in a prison to which we’ve been trained to accommodate (meaning obliterate) ourselves. But, you can’t really write—at least not very well—about that, or at least I can’t. I need to catch it when it flashes into view, before it becomes something it’s not, which is usually all we know. The need to arrest that unknowing, at times excruciating yet still unfeeling, state that takes our steps elsewhere to where we’re walking. 

So all of that and, I think, a kind of impatience that masquerades as procrastination.  

9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
I need to write my mother a letter. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
In 1976, when James Baldwin told a writer’s group in the women’s prison at Riker’s Island: “One can change any situation, even though it may seem impossible. But it must happen inside you first. Only you know what you want. The first step is very, very lonely. But later you will find the people you need, who need you, who will be supportive.” 

Over the last twenty-something years, I’ve found that to be absolutely true. I come back to that statement all the time. 

Or maybe the best is, in 1970, when Baldwin told John Hall: “Nothing belongs to you…and you do what you can with the hand life dealt you.” I think if we can proceed with that in mind we can figure a few profiles of the ways, we do, in fact, belong to each other. I’m not talking about holding hands at sunset, I’m talking about a sense of mutual consequence that moves with the power (redemptive) of accuracy. 

Ed Pavlić, author of Another Kind of Madness.

(Credit: Suncana Pavlić)

Ten Questions for Bryan Washington

3.19.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Bryan Washington, whose debut story collection, Lot, is out today from Riverhead Books. Set in Houston, the stories in Lot spring from the life a young man, the son of a Black mother and a Latino father, who works at his family’s restaurant while navigating his relationships with his brother and sister and discovering his own sexual identity. Washington then widens his lens to explore the lives of others who live in the myriad neighborhoods of Houston, offering insight into what makes a community, a family, and a life. “Lot is the confession of a neighborhood,” writes Mat Johnson, “channeled through a literary prodigy.” Bryan Washington’s  stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, BuzzFeed, Vulture, the Paris Review, Tin House, One Story, Bon Appetité, American Short Fiction, GQ, Fader, the Awl, and elsewhere. He lives in Houston.

1. How long did it take you to write the stories in Lot?
Three years-ish. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Description is always tricky for me, and that held up in every story. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I can edit wherever, but I prefer to write new stuff in the mornings. And I write most days, if I’ve got a project going. But if I don’t then I won’t. 

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Hearing back from folks about the galleys was really rad. 

5. What are you reading right now?
Xuan Juliana Wang’s Home Remedies, Morgan Parker’s Magical Negro, Pitchaya Sidbanthad’s It Rains in Bangkok, Candice Carty-Williams’s Queenie, and Yuko Tsushima’s Territory of Light. Then there’s Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We Were Briefly Gorgeous, which is probably going to change everything. 

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
More folks in the States should know about Gengoroh Tagame and My Brother’s Husband

7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
It’d be nice if the American literary community’s obsession with signal-boosting the optics of diversity were solidified into a tangible, fiscally remunerative reality for minority writers. 

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Living. 

9. Would you recommend writers attend a writing program?
If you can go for free? Sure. But there are other ways. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Mat Johnson taught me a lot, and one of the most profound things he said was to just relax. Readers can sense when you’re tense.

 

Bryan Washington, author of Lot.

(Credit: David Gracia)

Ten Questions for Ed Pavlić

3.12.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Ed Pavlić, whose novel Another Kind of Madness is out today from Milkweed Editions. The epic story of Ndiya Grayson, a young professional with a high-end job in a Chicago law-office who meets Shame Luther, a no-nonsense construction worker who plays jazz piano at night, Another Kind of Madness moves from Chicago’s South Side to the coast of Kenya as the pair navigate their pasts as well as their uncertain future. Of the novel Jeffrey Renard Allen writes, “In these pages, Black music sounds and surrounds experience like a mysterious house people long to live in but can’t find, a quest where they find themselves ever more deeply involved.” Widely published as a poet and scholar, Ed Pavlić is the author of the collection Visiting Hours at the Color Line, winner of the 2013 National Poetry Series, as well as ‘Who Can Afford to Improvise?’: James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners and Crossroads Modernism: Descent and Emergence in African American Literary Culture.

1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I’ve always written in and around the gifts and demands of family, parenting, etc. I have no real literary credits that pre-date my life as a father and husband. In fact, often I’ve worked while pretty confused about which aspects of all of that were “gifts” and which were “demands,” demanding gifts in any case. I’ve also written in and around the work as a professor and administrator in universities. For many years I found I could compose and revise poems in the momentary midst of all of that overlapping life and labor. Most likely poems were the way I survived those overloads, kept track of enough of the mind and body, all those minds and bodies, so that I didn’t go permanently off the rails. So I could at least find my way back to the tracks when wrecks and crack-ups did—and they did, of course—occur. 

Maybe writing was and is a way to address the displacements of an upwardly mobile, cross-racially identified, working-class man amid waves and undertows in an intensely segregated, hyper-racialized, and hierarchical bureaucratic world. Or maybe, for a working class consciousness like mine, writing is just another wave of displacement? Most likely it’s both. I guess we could file most of these thoughts under the “where” I write part of the question. 

2. You write both poetry and prose; does your process differ for each form?
Essays and other longer works weren’t as immediately about or out of that tumble of pleasure and trouble, of placement, displacement and replacement, of the startling novelty and bone-bending drudgery of, say, early parenthood, or of showing up to work in the unbelievably bourgeois and indelibly white halls of academia. At least that work wasn’t doused in the texture of my tumbles and pleasures in the same way. So, I’ve written what might pass as prose, and lots of it, in times when I can work for extended periods, on days—at times weeks or even months—when I don’t have to totally leave that space tomorrow, where I didn’t arrive fresh to it today. So, if I’ve got four days “off” from the rest of the work-world, I can work away at what’s called prose on the middle days. 

3. How long did it take you to write Another Kind of Madness?
I wrote Another Kind of Madness in a way unlike anything else I’d ever written, or done. I worked on the novel only in spaces where I had at least a month in which I could be with the work unencumbered by the demands of life and employment. I began it in the summer of 2009 when the kids were old enough (and my in-laws young enough) that they could be with the grandparents in Maryland for six weeks during the summer. Stacey went to work and I turned the front porch in Georgia into a writing retreat. Working “at home” in this way was something I’d almost never done. After that summer, I worked on the book in similar breaks of a month or two, but never again at home. Instead, I worked in rented, borrowed, or gifted spaces in Montreal, at the MacDowell Colony (twice), in Istanbul, in Mombasa, and in Lamu Town on the coast of Kenya, in France, and in the West Farms section of the Bronx, a few blocks south of the Bronx Zoo one summer. 

During these strange times I floated by myself in mostly urban, unfamiliar spaces, writing a few hours a day and then spending the rest of the days and nights accompanied by the story on walks, at meals, in dreams, on errands, in reading books I found in those places, etc. I found that the story wouldn’t reveal itself amid the tumble of my life, would only appear when I could really sit, walk, and sleep with it, where it could accrue its reality in a textured and present—but also most often in a peripheral and angular—region of my attention. The pressure of my daily worlds seemed to obliterate that nimble angularity, but my comings and goings in those unfamiliar urban spaces allowed this story to happen. I remember showing up after eight months away from the book, opening a blank, unlined (yes, unlined: “free your lines, the mind will follow”) notebook and waiting for Shame, Ndiya, Junior, Colleen and them to let me know what had been happening since we last saw each other and, in return, I tried to be as honest with them as I could be about what had been happening with me. It was always as if, unknowingly, we had, in fictional-fact, been at some of the same parties.  

4. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
That it takes a village. 

And, with this book, a novel, with this novel, how dense the space between the lines is with things (references, inferences) that I don’t remember creating. So many things that never appeared to me until the ARC came between the covers. At that point I could see it as a thing outside my body, and I noticed all kinds of new things there. That was a surprise, for sure; the book was a stranger to me in a way I didn’t expect. The poems aren’t that way, essays either. I’ve left copies of the ARC around the house and, when I walk past them, I’ll pick up the book and turn to a random page and begin reading at the first new paragraph, halfway trying to catch it actively changing, as if I can catch it coming up with something else it hadn’t told me about. 

5. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’d love to see more recognition in and between writers of what happens in and around Black music, where singers are singing in an organic kind of tandem with tradition, in which songs bristle with depths and complexities quite beyond the capacities of any particular singer. And audiences seem to roll with that, we almost insist upon it. I don’t think we insist upon or even at times allow a similar kind of dimensionality with our sense of writers and writing. It happens in contemporary writing, of course; but I think it’s less obvious to readers than that similar dynamic is to listeners. Maybe readers even refuse it. Maybe I’m saying that I’d love the community of contemporary writers to read each other with the freedom and rigor (vigor) we bring to hearing the music we love the most. I struggle to do this myself. Maybe singers need to listen to each other with the freedom they read with? I don’t know. 

6. What are you reading right now?
I’m always reading multiple books, always accompanied by music in the background and foreground. Right now I’m reading Singing in a Strange Land, Nick Salvatore’s biography of C. L. Franklin (Aretha’s father); David Ritz’s Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin; Eve Dunbar’s Black Regions of the Imagination; and I just finished rereading Danielle McGuire’s At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance. My rereading of Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped begins today. Meanwhile, I’ve been listening to five discs in the changer (Aretha’s double disc set, Amazing Grace: The Complete Recordings, Marvin’s What’s Going On, and Coltrane’s Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album) on endless loop for weeks. I’m working my way into writing something about the recently released film, Amazing Grace, that was made while Aretha was recording the album with James Cleveland and his choir in Los Angeles in January 1972. Aretha performs with absolutely stunning, epic power. It’s incredible. Easily the most powerful thing I saw / heard / felt on film in 2018. 

I listen to and stream contemporary music mostly in the car. The latest song I’ve been repeating all around town is Summer Walker’s newly released “Riot,” from her EP Clear. So good. It’s like Sade’s “Is It a Crime” for the 21st century. 

7. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
Well, so many of course. The word “author” almost means “deserves wider recognition.” Though not always. I’d say Christopher Gilbert, his Turning Into Dwelling. Also the second half of Adrienne Rich’s career, especially: Your Native Land, Your Life (1986), Time’s Power (1989), An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991), Dark Fields of the Republic (1995) and Midnight Salvage (1999). Adrienne Rich is obviously a widely recognized writer, but the woman who wrote these books—meaning those poems—is mostly unknown. Also I’d say the Ghanaian writer Kojo Laing, his masterpiece Search Sweet Country

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Racial terror. A feeling that—like how the finest silt settles on every plane in a space and then somehow constitutes an immobilizing weight—one is operating in a prison to which we’ve been trained to accommodate (meaning obliterate) ourselves. But, you can’t really write—at least not very well—about that, or at least I can’t. I need to catch it when it flashes into view, before it becomes something it’s not, which is usually all we know. The need to arrest that unknowing, at times excruciating yet still unfeeling, state that takes our steps elsewhere to where we’re walking. 

So all of that and, I think, a kind of impatience that masquerades as procrastination.  

9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
I need to write my mother a letter. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
In 1976, when James Baldwin told a writer’s group in the women’s prison at Riker’s Island: “One can change any situation, even though it may seem impossible. But it must happen inside you first. Only you know what you want. The first step is very, very lonely. But later you will find the people you need, who need you, who will be supportive.” 

Over the last twenty-something years, I’ve found that to be absolutely true. I come back to that statement all the time. 

Or maybe the best is, in 1970, when Baldwin told John Hall: “Nothing belongs to you…and you do what you can with the hand life dealt you.” I think if we can proceed with that in mind we can figure a few profiles of the ways, we do, in fact, belong to each other. I’m not talking about holding hands at sunset, I’m talking about a sense of mutual consequence that moves with the power (redemptive) of accuracy. 

Ed Pavlić, author of Another Kind of Madness.

(Credit: Suncana Pavlić)

Ten Questions for Geffrey Davis

by

Staff

4.30.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Geffrey Davis, whose second poetry collection, Night Angler, is out today from BOA Editions. The book, which won the 2018 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, is both a love letter to a son and a meditation on parenthood, family, race, and loss. “The poems in Geffrey Davis’s Night Angler sing in both ecstatic joy and tremendous lament,” writes Oliver de la Paz. “Poetry and prayer have never shared so close a breath.” Davis is the author of a previous poetry collection, Revising the Storm (BOA Editions, 2014), which won the 2013 A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the 2015 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry. Davis has won the Anne Halley Poetry Prize, the Dogwood Prize in Poetry, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and fellowships from Bread Loaf, Cave Canem, and the Vermont Studio Center. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Davis teaches for the University of Arkansas MFA in Creative Writing & Translation and the Rainier Writing Workshop low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University. 

1. How long did it take you to write Night Angler?
It took me almost four years to have a full first draft of this book—and then another year or so of revisions and restructuring to get it ready for production.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
In the middle of drafting the poems that would become this collection, I realized I was essentially working on a book-length love letter to my son, though not all the pieces address the child directly—one that chronicled and questioned and sometimes intervened upon certain (parental) desires for breaking cycles and discovering new rituals for family. While the stakes and timeliness of the book’s address meant that I couldn’t have waited to write the book, I had no idea of when/how to place it into my son’s hands once it was finished. However, just days after advance copies of Night Angler arrived, as sometimes children have the grace of doing, he simply took that impossible in/decision out of my hands. I was taking a late afternoon nap and woke to him reading aloud to my wife from the book. It’s been a long time since I’ve tried that hard to fight back tears so that the voice across from me would keep speaking.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
My writing practice tends to be pretty unpredictable, pretty sporadic, and is usually dictated by a particular image, observation, question, etc. seeming louder or more urgent than the general noise of the day—or than the night. Lately, I’ve been writing more often in the middle of the night.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
That the ending of it rang so clear—to me, anyway. With my first book, Revising the Storm, although I was submitting it to prizes, I still felt like someone had tapped me on the shoulder while in the middle of working and asked to publish it. I was so grateful to Dorianne Laux, who selected it for the 2013 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, and to BOA Editions for inviting me to recognize that book’s doneness. Who knows what would have happened to its shape and voice had I been allowed to keep at it like I was prepared to!? Because I deeply needed that collaboration the first time around, I wasn’t expecting to feel the ending of Night Angler for myself, and definitely not as unmistakably as I did.

5. What are you reading right now?
I’ve been reading more graphic novels and science fiction lately. I loved Victor LaValle’s Destroyer (an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) and am finishing N. K. Jemisin’s The Stone Sky, the third book in her Broken Earth series.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
I’m always excited to put a Julia Kasdorf book into people’s hands, especially her collection Poetry in America, and I love talking with new people about Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon’s Open Interval.

7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I appreciate interviews like this for the opportunity to discuss process and reveal struggles, but I wish our books, as art objects, had better ways of showing more of the practice and work and failure that go into making them.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Time. And presence—in particular, distinguishing between the importance of staying present in moments of lived connection and the urge for investigating new possible poetic connections.

9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
Articulating precisely what about a piece of writing they believe in, and why.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
As an undergraduate writer, the poet David Biespiel invited me to understand that there are things a poem needs that will not feel poetic.

Geffrey Davis, author of Night Angler.

Ten Questions for Alison C. Rollins

by

Staff

4.23.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Alison C. Rollins, whose debut poetry collection, Library of Small Catastrophes, is out today from Copper Canyon Press. Drawing on Jorge Luis Borges’s fascination with the library, Rollins uses the concept of the archive to uncover and investigate ideas of loss, progress, and decay. As Terrance Hayes writes of the book, “The small and large darknesses catalogued here make this a book of remarkable depth.” Rollins was born and raised in St. Louis and currently works as a librarian for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Hayden’s Ferry ReviewMissouri ReviewPoetry, and elsewhere. A Cave Canem and Callaloo Fellow, she was a 2016 recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship.

1. How long did it take you to write Library of Small Catastrophes?
The poems in Library of Small Catastrophes were written over a three-to-four-year span. However, I would venture to assert that the book has taken a lifetime to write in terms of the necessity to live, experience, read, and hone my craft over time. Robert Hayden in the poem “The Tattooed Man” has the phrase: “all art is pain suffered and outlived.” While I don’t hope to glorify suffering in the service of artistic practice I do think it is important to celebrate living, awareness, observation, and the act of being present in the world. Many of the poems in this book are based on experiences that I have witnessed or been a part of and I had to live them and be present within them to in turn translate them into poems. I want to equally highlight time and labor because this sort of question can in some ways place greater value on Library of Small Catastrophes as a product rather than on the living required to make the physical object of a book. I don’t seek to glorify suffering but living requires exposure to both joy and pain (in often highly unbalanced ways for certain bodies in the context of the United States). I wish to celebrate living and to do so not always in relationship to measured productivity or a finished product such as a book.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
It was challenging to accept that with the birth of the book all the other seemingly limitless possibilities for the project in turn died. There is a certain finitude to publishing a book that makes me a little uncomfortable in the sense that the work becomes a fairly static thing. I can’t continue to edit, reorder, change the cover art, etc. To go back to question one, I try to privilege the concept of being in process over something that is finalized. In Parable of the Sower Octavia Butler writes, “The only lasting truth is change.” If Butler is right, which I think she is, we all need to work towards increasing our tolerance to change.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
A large majority of the poems in Library of Small Catastrophes were written during the day at work in libraries. I don’t have a daily writing practice or formal schedule. I read on the bus ride to work and I write in stolen moments while at work. Much of my writing is in direct contact with other forms of labor that I am directly engaged in. Writing retreats have been especially helpful to me to carve out writing-intensive periods where I can focus.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Having to contextualize the book from a marketing and press standpoint was something that was not initially on my radar. I hadn’t really thought of the skill necessary to step back and frame the work within the context of a blurb or a synopsis. It is a really interesting and rather separate endeavor from writing the actual individual poems that came to make up the collection. To articulately explain what you see the overall project as functioning to do can be oddly challenging and unexpected at the end of the publication process.

5. What are you reading right now?
I just finished Marian Engel’s Bear, Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, and Kiese Laymon’s Heavy. I’m currently reading Renee Gladman’s Juice, Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, and Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic. I am a librarian and voracious reader so this literally changes every other day.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
This question depends a lot on context, realities about how literary canons function, systemic inequity, as well as how “wider recognition” is being defined and measured. This is a very difficult question to answer but I will offer in response the names of three poets: CM Burroughs, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Dawn Lundy Martin. I will also say Phillis Wheatley for good measure.

7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I am probably a lofty romantic but I wish people in the “literary community” extended more grace to one another and more often than not embraced curiosity and awe as lifestyles. I wish that people read more widely and embodied a belief that there is space at the table for everyone—and in turn found this notion to be freeing rather than threatening. While I realize sales-driven approaches and the economics of the publishing industry are arguably necessary evils, I wish that as an industry we didn’t underestimate readers and their capacity or desire for strong innovative writing. I would argue that all people are hungry for access to beautiful words, fresh ideas, and moving storytelling. Lastly, I am surely imperfect but I genuinely strive on a fundamental level to be a kind person. I don’t think extending grace to myself and others should result in my being viewed as any less talented, intellectual, and critically rigorous. We could all use more kindness.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Time. In How to Write an Autobiographical Novel Alexander Chee writes, “Time is our mink, our Lexus, our mansion. In a room full of writers of various kinds, time is probably the only thing that can provoke widespread envy, more than acclaim. Acclaim, which of course means access to money, which then becomes time.” I could not agree more.

9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
I value most an editor with an expansive imagination. More specifically, I appreciate an editor that does not succumb to a limited imagination in terms of my identity/subject/position in the world and what that means in relationship to my writing and the potential readers of my work.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Terrance Hayes relayed the Thelonious Monk quote, “A genius is the one most like himself” during a craft talk at a writing retreat that I attended a few years ago. It truly resonated with me because without sounding cliché I think writing should be connected to the constant ever-evolving work of discovering, (re)imagining, and (re)claiming one’s own selfhood.

Alison C. Rollins, author of Library of Small Catastrophes.

(Credit: Maya Ayanna Darasaw)

Ten Questions for Kenji C. Liu

by

Staff

4.16.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Kenji C. Liu, whose second poetry collection, Monsters I Have Been, is out today from Alice James Books. Using an invented method he calls “frankenpo” (or Frankenstein poetry), Liu takes an existing text and remixes it, resurrecting older work to create new poetry that investigates the intersections between toxic masculinity, violence, and marginalization. A book that Douglas Kearney calls “sharp, protean, dextrous, and discontent,” Liu’s collection “shows where the bodies have been buried, and that many won’t stay dead. No doubt, this book is alive as hell.” Kenji C. Liu is the author of a previous poetry collection, Map of an Onion (Inlandia Institute, 2016), winner of the 2015 Hillary Gravendyk Poetry Prize, and two chapbooks. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Apogee, Barrow Street, the Progressive, the Rumpus, and other publications. A Kundiman fellow and an alumnus of the VONA/Voices workhop, the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, and the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, he lives in Los Angeles.

1. How long did it take you to write Monsters I Have Been?
It took about three years, coming on the heels of my first collection. I was trying to figure out what to do next, and received some great advice from Jaswinder Bolina while at the Kundiman retreat. He suggested I pick a line or idea from my first collection that still felt juicy and go all the way down the rabbit hole with it. I did, and Monsters I Have Been is a direct result.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Since the book looks at various types of masculinities, I had to seriously reflect on how to write responsibly about gender. Toxic and conventional masculinities were easier, considering that there are always fresh examples in the news ad nauseam, though I did also try to give them some complexity without excusing away their violence. Unconventional masculinities were more challenging because I didn’t want to replicate dominant forms of representational violence. So I decided to approach these via some of the ways I’ve experienced being racially gendered, misgendered, and sexualized as an Asian American man.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
What’s kept me going is a semi-underground, e-mail–based writing accountability group where you sign up to write every day for a month. Recently I haven’t had time for it, but for many years I joined in for months at a time. When I participate, I write everywhere and anytime, often just a sentence or line per day. I might be at work, in transit, or even stranger places. After doing this consistently for years, writing feels like a habit, something you do every day like brushing your teeth. Writing becomes less “special,” which I consider to be a good thing.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
There wasn’t anything in particular about the publication process, but the DIY digital marketing campaign I undertook to promote the book ahead of publication created some unexpected results. Drawing on my experience in design and marketing, I decided to focus on an Instagram account (@monstersihavebeen) dedicated solely to the themes of the book, which cross-posted to Facebook and Twitter. I found this created a lot of advance interest, and really helped me gauge the book’s audience ahead of time.

5. What are you reading right now?
The Inheritance of Haunting by Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes, 2018 winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize; I Even Regret Night, poems of Lalbihari Sharma, an indentured Indian servant in the Caribbean, translated by Rajiv Mohabir; American Sutra, on religious freedom and Japanese American Buddhists imprisoned in U.S. concentration camps during World War II, by Duncan Ryuken Williams; and Oculus by Sally Wen Mao.

6. Which authors, in your opinion, deserve wider recognition?
Vickie Vértiz, Muriel Leung, Sesshu Foster, Angela Peñaredondo, Mia Ayumi Malhotra.

7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I experience my corner of the poetry community as very generous and caring, but I have many issues with professionalizing poetry as a career with certain prizes and residencies you “have to” achieve—it can make people greedy, competitive, and encourage a perception of the world based on lack. I think the poetry community works better when it is cooperative and generous. Poetry shouldn’t be just another capitalist product.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Money and time.

9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
I need to sense that they understand what my project is trying to do at a fundamental level. Alice James Books seems to have had that understanding immediately, which I’m grateful for because Monsters I Have Been might take some time for the reader’s brain to adjust to if you have conventional expectations of poetry. If an editor, press, reviewer, or anyone else doesn’t seem to understand the project, it’s clearly not a good fit.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
What I actually think of is a writing prompt I received from the poet Suheir Hammad many years ago. She asked us to write about a traumatic experience, and also to find something in the environment of the memory that was beautiful. For me, I think this has translated into ongoing writing advice—to look for beauty and grace even in the challenging material, whenever possible.

Kenji C. Liu, author of Monsters I Have Been

(Credit: Margarita Corporan)

Ten Questions for Gala Mukomolova

by

Staff

4.9.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Gala Mukomolova, whose debut poetry collection, Without Protection, is out today from Coffee House Press. Mukomolova, who arrived with her family in New York when she was ten years old as a Jewish refugee from Russia, weaves together personal narrative and fable in her poems to interrogate ideas of identity, family, sexuality, and violence. Taking inspiration from Slavic folklore, several of Mukomolova’s poems reimagine the story of Vasilyssa, the young girl left to fend for herself against the witch Baba Yaga, to explore the ways in which a queer immigrant woman situates herself in a new country, navigating trauma, homophobia, displacement, and desire. Mukomolova earned an MFA from the University of Michigan and is the author of the chapbook One Above One Below: Positions & Lamentations (YesYes Books, 2018). Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, PEN AmericanPANK, and elsewhere, and in 2016 she won the 92 Street Y Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize. She also writes horoscopes and articles on astrology for NYLON.

1. How long did it take you to write Without Protection?
Without Protection took me anywhere between four and six years to write. Primarily because the Vasilyssa poems were originally from a separate project. Although, in hindsight, I can see how they were gathering together like a coven that would eventually conjure up the rest of the book.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Living through it was the most challenging thing. I wrote this book through some of the hardest, darkest moments in my young life. I wrote it through dealing with my father’s death and my long-term girlfriend’s departure. I wrote it through the pain of opening my heart again and through the inevitable heartbreak that resulted. Sometimes writing these poems was a reminder that I was still alive and sometimes I resented the reminder.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write all the time but I often do it for work which, if you don’t know, really gets in the way of what some might call the poet’s call. My astrology writings are a place where I exercise my creative freedoms, and I write articles sometimes twice a week. I’m surprised at what lyricism NYLON lets me publish. I’m grateful for it. Otherwise, when I’m avoiding admin work or emotional work, a poem will come to me. Sometimes every week or so, sometimes nothing for months.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
How I stopped being able to see the book. I felt almost blind to it. I had to look at each edited line individually like a bird fallen from the nest that I had to tenderly brush off and return.

5. What are you reading right now?
Marwa Helal’s Invasive species, Yanyi’s Year of Blue Water, Elaine Castillo’s America Is Not the Heart, Agnes Martin’s Writings, Melody Beattie’s The New Codependency, and Jessica Dore’s Tarot Card of the Day Twitter posts.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
francine j. harris is a poetic genius with a smoky quartz for a heart and she should have many awards and many readers and possibly a temple devoted to her where one leaves sweet little offerings.

7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’m not in the publishing business and don’t feel I have enough information to speak to that but in terms of the literary community, one thing I would change is the obsession people at large seem to develop with that one good white man. The moment one good white man appears to exist, people are ready to tattoo that man’s poems all over their bodies and eat their words like holy wafers.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Coming from financial precarity, living without a net, and spending most of my time hustling to makes ends meet is a pretty huge impediment. That and all the dissociation—but sometimes it does work in my favor, like when the paper swallows me like a genie bottle.

9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
The ability to approach the poem, not as they would want it but as they have perceived you, the writer, aiming to approach it. An editor who crafts a new lens for each writer they work with.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
If what you’re writing begins to scare you, don’t stop—it’s about to get real good.

Gala Mukomolova, author of Without Protection

Ten Questions for Emily Skaja

by

Staff

4.2.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Emily Skaja, whose debut poetry collection, Brute, is out today from Graywolf Press. The winner of the 2018 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets—an annual prize for a first book of poems that includes $5,000, publication, and a six-week residency at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbria, Italy—Skaja’s debut is an elegy to the end of a relationship that confronts love, loss, violence, grief, and rage. “What do we do with brokenness?” asks prize judge Joy Harjo, who selected the winning manuscript. “We document it, as Skaja has done in Brute. We sing of the brokenness as we emerge from it. We sing the holy objects, the white moths that fly from our mouths, and we stand with the new, wet earth that has been created with our terrible songs.” Emily Skaja grew up in rural Illinois and is a graduate of the MFA program at Purdue University. Her poems have been published in Best New Poets, Blackbird, Crazyhorse, FIELD, and Gulf Coast. She lives in Memphis.

1. How long did it take you to write Brute?
Five years. I started writing the poems in Brute in 2012. About three years into it, I had a book-length manuscript, but it felt incomplete to me. I wound up cutting or revising more than half of it, and then I spent another two years rethinking, rewriting, and rearranging it before I fully understood what shape it should take. In that time, I changed so much as a person that the manuscript began to feel closed off to me. Trying to write back into it was like being in conversation with a ghost of myself—a voice that draped itself in my clothes and spoke about my experiences, but from the point of view of someone who was a few steps removed from me. I found that in order to keep working on the book, I had to write my way back into it in a way that honored the time and distance that separated the new self from the ghost. As a result, there are a lot of poems in the book in which I address my younger self and try to reassemble her memories with the wisdom of recovery.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
There’s a lot of mystery in my writing process, and I have the suspicion that I’m doing all the steps out of order. At the outset, I never know where any project is going. I start with a pile of drafts and look for signs of my own obsessions, and then I try to understand why I keep returning to a particular idea, feeling, or image. No matter how many times I reassure myself that I am, in fact, in charge of this process, I always feel as if I’m the last person to understand what I’m writing toward. It’s only in revision that I can see how consistently I’ve written about a particular idea, and then I can revise and cut and rework the poems as needed. Writing Brute was a painful process of self-discovery because my analysis of the obsessions in the manuscript required me to address parts of myself and my past that still felt raw. Initially, I believed that I was just writing a series of sad love poems, and then about halfway through drafting the book I realized that I was writing about grief and power and self-abandonment and rage. The poems are about my own experiences with abusive relationships, so changing my mind about the book also meant changing my mind about my life, and that proved to be very difficult.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write late at night at a big table I once painted bright orange during some heady HGTV-evangelist period of my life. I go through irregular seasons of writing. Something will trigger a writing cycle and I will work on fifteen poems in a row, and then I’ll experience a long, fallow period where I have no impulse to write at all. My strategy is to feed the fallow period with heavy reading. I try to be patient with myself when I’m not writing, but I’m much less forgiving if I’m behind on reading.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The most surprising and gratifying part so far has been gaining a community of sympathetic readers. For a long time, I was writing these poems from a place of shame, so it has meant so much to me to hear from other people who have shared the same experiences or felt an emotional resonance with these poems.

5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Notes to Self by Emilie Pine, The Far Field by Madhuri Vijay, Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky, and Build Yourself a Boat by Camonghne Felix. I recently finished Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden, which I loved so much I know I will read it a second time. I also loved The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh and Milkman by Anna Burns.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Ingrid Rojas Contreras, whose brilliant essay “All Good Science Fiction Begins This Way” I have admired and taught for years, and who recently published a novel I also loved, Fruit of the Drunken Tree.

7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I would like to see more widespread initiatives to support writers of color, especially women and nonbinary writers.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing process?
I think my own brain is my worst impediment. I spend a few hours every day so consumed by dread that I can’t make myself do anything, so I sometimes daydream about all the amazing projects I could finish if I could reallocate those dread hours.

9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
I love to work with editors who can look at a line or a poem that isn’t quite right and help investigate what its curiosities are or what ideas it’s trying to find its way into.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
The wonderful Don Platt once advised me to “go hard into the weird and stay there.”

Emily Skaja, author of Brute

(Credit: Kaitlyn Stoddard Photography)

Ten Questions for Emily Skaja

by

Staff

4.2.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Emily Skaja, whose debut poetry collection, Brute, is out today from Graywolf Press. The winner of the 2018 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets—an annual prize for a first book of poems that includes $5,000, publication, and a six-week residency at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbria, Italy—Skaja’s debut is an elegy to the end of a relationship that confronts love, loss, violence, grief, and rage. “What do we do with brokenness?” asks prize judge Joy Harjo, who selected the winning manuscript. “We document it, as Skaja has done in Brute. We sing of the brokenness as we emerge from it. We sing the holy objects, the white moths that fly from our mouths, and we stand with the new, wet earth that has been created with our terrible songs.” Emily Skaja grew up in rural Illinois and is a graduate of the MFA program at Purdue University. Her poems have been published in Best New Poets, Blackbird, Crazyhorse, FIELD, and Gulf Coast. She lives in Memphis.

1. How long did it take you to write Brute?
Five years. I started writing the poems in Brute in 2012. About three years into it, I had a book-length manuscript, but it felt incomplete to me. I wound up cutting or revising more than half of it, and then I spent another two years rethinking, rewriting, and rearranging it before I fully understood what shape it should take. In that time, I changed so much as a person that the manuscript began to feel closed off to me. Trying to write back into it was like being in conversation with a ghost of myself—a voice that draped itself in my clothes and spoke about my experiences, but from the point of view of someone who was a few steps removed from me. I found that in order to keep working on the book, I had to write my way back into it in a way that honored the time and distance that separated the new self from the ghost. As a result, there are a lot of poems in the book in which I address my younger self and try to reassemble her memories with the wisdom of recovery.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
There’s a lot of mystery in my writing process, and I have the suspicion that I’m doing all the steps out of order. At the outset, I never know where any project is going. I start with a pile of drafts and look for signs of my own obsessions, and then I try to understand why I keep returning to a particular idea, feeling, or image. No matter how many times I reassure myself that I am, in fact, in charge of this process, I always feel as if I’m the last person to understand what I’m writing toward. It’s only in revision that I can see how consistently I’ve written about a particular idea, and then I can revise and cut and rework the poems as needed. Writing Brute was a painful process of self-discovery because my analysis of the obsessions in the manuscript required me to address parts of myself and my past that still felt raw. Initially, I believed that I was just writing a series of sad love poems, and then about halfway through drafting the book I realized that I was writing about grief and power and self-abandonment and rage. The poems are about my own experiences with abusive relationships, so changing my mind about the book also meant changing my mind about my life, and that proved to be very difficult.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write late at night at a big table I once painted bright orange during some heady HGTV-evangelist period of my life. I go through irregular seasons of writing. Something will trigger a writing cycle and I will work on fifteen poems in a row, and then I’ll experience a long, fallow period where I have no impulse to write at all. My strategy is to feed the fallow period with heavy reading. I try to be patient with myself when I’m not writing, but I’m much less forgiving if I’m behind on reading.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The most surprising and gratifying part so far has been gaining a community of sympathetic readers. For a long time, I was writing these poems from a place of shame, so it has meant so much to me to hear from other people who have shared the same experiences or felt an emotional resonance with these poems.

5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Notes to Self by Emilie Pine, The Far Field by Madhuri Vijay, Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky, and Build Yourself a Boat by Camonghne Felix. I recently finished Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden, which I loved so much I know I will read it a second time. I also loved The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh and Milkman by Anna Burns.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Ingrid Rojas Contreras, whose brilliant essay “All Good Science Fiction Begins This Way” I have admired and taught for years, and who recently published a novel I also loved, Fruit of the Drunken Tree.

7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I would like to see more widespread initiatives to support writers of color, especially women and nonbinary writers.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing process?
I think my own brain is my worst impediment. I spend a few hours every day so consumed by dread that I can’t make myself do anything, so I sometimes daydream about all the amazing projects I could finish if I could reallocate those dread hours.

9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
I love to work with editors who can look at a line or a poem that isn’t quite right and help investigate what its curiosities are or what ideas it’s trying to find its way into.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
The wonderful Don Platt once advised me to “go hard into the weird and stay there.”

Emily Skaja, author of Brute

(Credit: Kaitlyn Stoddard Photography)

Ten Questions for Gala Mukomolova

by

Staff

4.9.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Gala Mukomolova, whose debut poetry collection, Without Protection, is out today from Coffee House Press. Mukomolova, who arrived with her family in New York when she was ten years old as a Jewish refugee from Russia, weaves together personal narrative and fable in her poems to interrogate ideas of identity, family, sexuality, and violence. Taking inspiration from Slavic folklore, several of Mukomolova’s poems reimagine the story of Vasilyssa, the young girl left to fend for herself against the witch Baba Yaga, to explore the ways in which a queer immigrant woman situates herself in a new country, navigating trauma, homophobia, displacement, and desire. Mukomolova earned an MFA from the University of Michigan and is the author of the chapbook One Above One Below: Positions & Lamentations (YesYes Books, 2018). Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, PEN AmericanPANK, and elsewhere, and in 2016 she won the 92 Street Y Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize. She also writes horoscopes and articles on astrology for NYLON.

1. How long did it take you to write Without Protection?
Without Protection took me anywhere between four and six years to write. Primarily because the Vasilyssa poems were originally from a separate project. Although, in hindsight, I can see how they were gathering together like a coven that would eventually conjure up the rest of the book.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Living through it was the most challenging thing. I wrote this book through some of the hardest, darkest moments in my young life. I wrote it through dealing with my father’s death and my long-term girlfriend’s departure. I wrote it through the pain of opening my heart again and through the inevitable heartbreak that resulted. Sometimes writing these poems was a reminder that I was still alive and sometimes I resented the reminder.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write all the time but I often do it for work which, if you don’t know, really gets in the way of what some might call the poet’s call. My astrology writings are a place where I exercise my creative freedoms, and I write articles sometimes twice a week. I’m surprised at what lyricism NYLON lets me publish. I’m grateful for it. Otherwise, when I’m avoiding admin work or emotional work, a poem will come to me. Sometimes every week or so, sometimes nothing for months.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
How I stopped being able to see the book. I felt almost blind to it. I had to look at each edited line individually like a bird fallen from the nest that I had to tenderly brush off and return.

5. What are you reading right now?
Marwa Helal’s Invasive species, Yanyi’s Year of Blue Water, Elaine Castillo’s America Is Not the Heart, Agnes Martin’s Writings, Melody Beattie’s The New Codependency, and Jessica Dore’s Tarot Card of the Day Twitter posts.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
francine j. harris is a poetic genius with a smoky quartz for a heart and she should have many awards and many readers and possibly a temple devoted to her where one leaves sweet little offerings.

7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’m not in the publishing business and don’t feel I have enough information to speak to that but in terms of the literary community, one thing I would change is the obsession people at large seem to develop with that one good white man. The moment one good white man appears to exist, people are ready to tattoo that man’s poems all over their bodies and eat their words like holy wafers.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Coming from financial precarity, living without a net, and spending most of my time hustling to makes ends meet is a pretty huge impediment. That and all the dissociation—but sometimes it does work in my favor, like when the paper swallows me like a genie bottle.

9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
The ability to approach the poem, not as they would want it but as they have perceived you, the writer, aiming to approach it. An editor who crafts a new lens for each writer they work with.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
If what you’re writing begins to scare you, don’t stop—it’s about to get real good.

Gala Mukomolova, author of Without Protection

Ten Questions for Emily Skaja

by

Staff

4.2.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Emily Skaja, whose debut poetry collection, Brute, is out today from Graywolf Press. The winner of the 2018 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets—an annual prize for a first book of poems that includes $5,000, publication, and a six-week residency at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbria, Italy—Skaja’s debut is an elegy to the end of a relationship that confronts love, loss, violence, grief, and rage. “What do we do with brokenness?” asks prize judge Joy Harjo, who selected the winning manuscript. “We document it, as Skaja has done in Brute. We sing of the brokenness as we emerge from it. We sing the holy objects, the white moths that fly from our mouths, and we stand with the new, wet earth that has been created with our terrible songs.” Emily Skaja grew up in rural Illinois and is a graduate of the MFA program at Purdue University. Her poems have been published in Best New Poets, Blackbird, Crazyhorse, FIELD, and Gulf Coast. She lives in Memphis.

1. How long did it take you to write Brute?
Five years. I started writing the poems in Brute in 2012. About three years into it, I had a book-length manuscript, but it felt incomplete to me. I wound up cutting or revising more than half of it, and then I spent another two years rethinking, rewriting, and rearranging it before I fully understood what shape it should take. In that time, I changed so much as a person that the manuscript began to feel closed off to me. Trying to write back into it was like being in conversation with a ghost of myself—a voice that draped itself in my clothes and spoke about my experiences, but from the point of view of someone who was a few steps removed from me. I found that in order to keep working on the book, I had to write my way back into it in a way that honored the time and distance that separated the new self from the ghost. As a result, there are a lot of poems in the book in which I address my younger self and try to reassemble her memories with the wisdom of recovery.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
There’s a lot of mystery in my writing process, and I have the suspicion that I’m doing all the steps out of order. At the outset, I never know where any project is going. I start with a pile of drafts and look for signs of my own obsessions, and then I try to understand why I keep returning to a particular idea, feeling, or image. No matter how many times I reassure myself that I am, in fact, in charge of this process, I always feel as if I’m the last person to understand what I’m writing toward. It’s only in revision that I can see how consistently I’ve written about a particular idea, and then I can revise and cut and rework the poems as needed. Writing Brute was a painful process of self-discovery because my analysis of the obsessions in the manuscript required me to address parts of myself and my past that still felt raw. Initially, I believed that I was just writing a series of sad love poems, and then about halfway through drafting the book I realized that I was writing about grief and power and self-abandonment and rage. The poems are about my own experiences with abusive relationships, so changing my mind about the book also meant changing my mind about my life, and that proved to be very difficult.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write late at night at a big table I once painted bright orange during some heady HGTV-evangelist period of my life. I go through irregular seasons of writing. Something will trigger a writing cycle and I will work on fifteen poems in a row, and then I’ll experience a long, fallow period where I have no impulse to write at all. My strategy is to feed the fallow period with heavy reading. I try to be patient with myself when I’m not writing, but I’m much less forgiving if I’m behind on reading.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The most surprising and gratifying part so far has been gaining a community of sympathetic readers. For a long time, I was writing these poems from a place of shame, so it has meant so much to me to hear from other people who have shared the same experiences or felt an emotional resonance with these poems.

5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Notes to Self by Emilie Pine, The Far Field by Madhuri Vijay, Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky, and Build Yourself a Boat by Camonghne Felix. I recently finished Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden, which I loved so much I know I will read it a second time. I also loved The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh and Milkman by Anna Burns.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Ingrid Rojas Contreras, whose brilliant essay “All Good Science Fiction Begins This Way” I have admired and taught for years, and who recently published a novel I also loved, Fruit of the Drunken Tree.

7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I would like to see more widespread initiatives to support writers of color, especially women and nonbinary writers.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing process?
I think my own brain is my worst impediment. I spend a few hours every day so consumed by dread that I can’t make myself do anything, so I sometimes daydream about all the amazing projects I could finish if I could reallocate those dread hours.

9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
I love to work with editors who can look at a line or a poem that isn’t quite right and help investigate what its curiosities are or what ideas it’s trying to find its way into.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
The wonderful Don Platt once advised me to “go hard into the weird and stay there.”

Emily Skaja, author of Brute

(Credit: Kaitlyn Stoddard Photography)

Ten Questions for Alison C. Rollins

by

Staff

4.23.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Alison C. Rollins, whose debut poetry collection, Library of Small Catastrophes, is out today from Copper Canyon Press. Drawing on Jorge Luis Borges’s fascination with the library, Rollins uses the concept of the archive to uncover and investigate ideas of loss, progress, and decay. As Terrance Hayes writes of the book, “The small and large darknesses catalogued here make this a book of remarkable depth.” Rollins was born and raised in St. Louis and currently works as a librarian for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Hayden’s Ferry ReviewMissouri ReviewPoetry, and elsewhere. A Cave Canem and Callaloo Fellow, she was a 2016 recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship.

1. How long did it take you to write Library of Small Catastrophes?
The poems in Library of Small Catastrophes were written over a three-to-four-year span. However, I would venture to assert that the book has taken a lifetime to write in terms of the necessity to live, experience, read, and hone my craft over time. Robert Hayden in the poem “The Tattooed Man” has the phrase: “all art is pain suffered and outlived.” While I don’t hope to glorify suffering in the service of artistic practice I do think it is important to celebrate living, awareness, observation, and the act of being present in the world. Many of the poems in this book are based on experiences that I have witnessed or been a part of and I had to live them and be present within them to in turn translate them into poems. I want to equally highlight time and labor because this sort of question can in some ways place greater value on Library of Small Catastrophes as a product rather than on the living required to make the physical object of a book. I don’t seek to glorify suffering but living requires exposure to both joy and pain (in often highly unbalanced ways for certain bodies in the context of the United States). I wish to celebrate living and to do so not always in relationship to measured productivity or a finished product such as a book.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
It was challenging to accept that with the birth of the book all the other seemingly limitless possibilities for the project in turn died. There is a certain finitude to publishing a book that makes me a little uncomfortable in the sense that the work becomes a fairly static thing. I can’t continue to edit, reorder, change the cover art, etc. To go back to question one, I try to privilege the concept of being in process over something that is finalized. In Parable of the Sower Octavia Butler writes, “The only lasting truth is change.” If Butler is right, which I think she is, we all need to work towards increasing our tolerance to change.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
A large majority of the poems in Library of Small Catastrophes were written during the day at work in libraries. I don’t have a daily writing practice or formal schedule. I read on the bus ride to work and I write in stolen moments while at work. Much of my writing is in direct contact with other forms of labor that I am directly engaged in. Writing retreats have been especially helpful to me to carve out writing-intensive periods where I can focus.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Having to contextualize the book from a marketing and press standpoint was something that was not initially on my radar. I hadn’t really thought of the skill necessary to step back and frame the work within the context of a blurb or a synopsis. It is a really interesting and rather separate endeavor from writing the actual individual poems that came to make up the collection. To articulately explain what you see the overall project as functioning to do can be oddly challenging and unexpected at the end of the publication process.

5. What are you reading right now?
I just finished Marian Engel’s Bear, Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, and Kiese Laymon’s Heavy. I’m currently reading Renee Gladman’s Juice, Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, and Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic. I am a librarian and voracious reader so this literally changes every other day.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
This question depends a lot on context, realities about how literary canons function, systemic inequity, as well as how “wider recognition” is being defined and measured. This is a very difficult question to answer but I will offer in response the names of three poets: CM Burroughs, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Dawn Lundy Martin. I will also say Phillis Wheatley for good measure.

7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I am probably a lofty romantic but I wish people in the “literary community” extended more grace to one another and more often than not embraced curiosity and awe as lifestyles. I wish that people read more widely and embodied a belief that there is space at the table for everyone—and in turn found this notion to be freeing rather than threatening. While I realize sales-driven approaches and the economics of the publishing industry are arguably necessary evils, I wish that as an industry we didn’t underestimate readers and their capacity or desire for strong innovative writing. I would argue that all people are hungry for access to beautiful words, fresh ideas, and moving storytelling. Lastly, I am surely imperfect but I genuinely strive on a fundamental level to be a kind person. I don’t think extending grace to myself and others should result in my being viewed as any less talented, intellectual, and critically rigorous. We could all use more kindness.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Time. In How to Write an Autobiographical Novel Alexander Chee writes, “Time is our mink, our Lexus, our mansion. In a room full of writers of various kinds, time is probably the only thing that can provoke widespread envy, more than acclaim. Acclaim, which of course means access to money, which then becomes time.” I could not agree more.

9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
I value most an editor with an expansive imagination. More specifically, I appreciate an editor that does not succumb to a limited imagination in terms of my identity/subject/position in the world and what that means in relationship to my writing and the potential readers of my work.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Terrance Hayes relayed the Thelonious Monk quote, “A genius is the one most like himself” during a craft talk at a writing retreat that I attended a few years ago. It truly resonated with me because without sounding cliché I think writing should be connected to the constant ever-evolving work of discovering, (re)imagining, and (re)claiming one’s own selfhood.

Alison C. Rollins, author of Library of Small Catastrophes.

(Credit: Maya Ayanna Darasaw)

Ten Questions for Julie Orringer

5.7.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Julie Orringer, whose third book, the novel The Flight Portfolio, is out today from Knopf. Based on the true story of Varian Fry, a young New York journalist and editor who in 1940 was the head of the Emergency Rescue Committee, designed to protect artists and writers from being deported to Nazi concentration camps and to send intellectual treasures back to the United States, The Flight Portfolio returns to the same territory, Europe on the brink of World War II, that thrilled readers of Orringer’s debut novel, The Invisible Bridge. Andrew Sean Greer calls it “ambitious, meticulous, big-hearted, gorgeous, historical, suspenseful, everything you want a novel to be.” Orringer is also the author of the award-winning short story collection How to Breathe Underwater, which was a New York Times Notable Book. She lives in Brooklyn.

1. How long did it take you to write The Flight Portfolio?
Nine years, more or less. While researching my last novel, The Invisible Bridge, which also took place during the Second World War, I read about the American journalist Varian Fry’s heroic work in Marseille: His mission was to locate celebrated European artists who’d fled to France from the Nazi-occupied countries and arrange their safe passage to the States. The job was fraught with moral complications—given limited time and resources, who would Fry choose to save?—and the historical account seemed to miss certain essential elements, particularly those surrounding Fry’s personal life (he had a number of well-documented relationships with men, a fact that historians elided, denied, or shuddered away from, as if to suggest that it’s not acceptable to be a hero of the Holocaust if one also happens to be gay).  Researching Fry’s life and mission took the better part of four years—a time during which I moved three times and gave birth to my two children—and writing and revision occupied the five years that followed. Which is not to suggest that no writing occurred during the initial research, nor that there was ever a time when the research ceased—it continued, in fact, through the last day I could change a word of the draft.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Undoubtedly it was the research into Fry’s work in Marseille, a detailed record of which exists in biographies, interviews, letters, ephemera, and even still in living memory: Fry’s last surviving associate, Justus Rosenberg, is a professor emeritus of languages and literature at Bard College, and was kind enough to speak to me about his experiences. Twenty-seven boxes of Fry’s letters, papers, photographs, and other writings reside in the Rare Books and Manuscripts collection at Columbia’s Butler Library; I spent many hours immersed in those files, learning what I could about what kept Fry up at night, what obsessed him by day, what he struggled with, how he triumphed, and how he thought about his own work years later.  I spent a year at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, where Fry studied as an undergraduate; there I had the chance to examine his recently unsealed student records, which include not only his grade transcripts and his application, but also letters from his father, his professors, the dean, and various close associates, many of them arguing either for or against Fry’s expulsion from Harvard for a variety of infractions that included spotty attendance, raucous partying, destruction of school property, reckless driving, and, ultimately, the placing of a For Sale sign on Dean Greenough’s lawn. Then there were the dozens—hundreds, ultimately thousands—of Fry’s clients, whose lives and work I felt I must know before I wrote the book.  And of course I had to go to Marseille, where I visited the places Fry lived and worked, at least those that still exist (the marvelous Villa Air Bel, where he lived with a group of Surrealist writers and artists, was razed decades ago).  The nearly impossible task was to clear space among all that was known for what could not be known—space where I could make a narrative that would honor Fry’s experience but would move beyond what could have been recorded at the time.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write five or six days a week at the Brooklyn Writers’ Space. I’m married to another fiction writer, my former Iowa MFA classmate Ryan Harty, and, as I mentioned, we have two young children; we have a carefully worked-out schedule that allows each of us a couple of long writing days each week (eight hours or so) and a number of shorter ones (five hours). Often I write at night, too, especially if I’m starting something new or working on a short story or a nonfiction piece.     

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The inestimable benefit of sharing a very early draft with my editor, Jordan Pavlin. Jordan edited my two previous books, but I’d never before shown her anything that hadn’t been revised six or seven times. This novel involved so much risk, and took so long to complete, that I felt I needed her insight and support long before I’d written three or four versions. Did the novel strike the right balance between history and fiction? Had I captured the characters’ essential struggles clearly? How to address problems of pacing, continuity, clarity? Jordan’s exacting readings—not just one, but three or four—echoed my own doubts and provided necessary perspective and reassurance. And her comments pulled no punches. She was scrupulously honest. She was rigorous. She challenged me to do better. And my desire to meet her standards was, as it always is, fueled as much by my ardent admiration for her as a human being as by my deep respect for her literary mind.    

5. What trait do you most value in an editor?   
See above.

6. What are you reading right now?
Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise, which cuts a little too close at times to my own 1980’s experience in a high school drama group—one that took itself at least as seriously as Choi’s Citywide Academy for the Performing Arts. She hits all the notes with dead-on precision: favoritism toward certain students by charismatic teachers, intrigue surrounding highly-charged relationships, endless quoting of Monty Python, jobs at TCBY, the dire importance of having a car and/or friends with cars, etc. But the true brilliance of the book is its structure: A first section in which the subjective experience of high school students is rendered with respect and utter seriousness; a second section that brings a questioning (and revenge-seeking) adult sensibility to bear upon the first; and a third section that sharpens the earlier sections into clearer resolution still, suggesting the persistent consequences of those seemingly trivial sophomore liaisons. 

7. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Here are three new writers whose work I’ve found risk-laced, challenging, and full of fierce delights: Ebony Flowers, Rona Jaffe-winning cartoonist and disciple of Lynda Barry, whose brilliant debut short story collection, Hot Comb, will be published by Drawn and Quarterly in June; shot through with tender and intelligent humor, it’s an incisive examination of cultural and familial tensions in black women’s lives. Domenica Phetteplace is another of my favorite new writers; her marvelous short story “Blue Cup,” a futurist skewering of commerce-driven life in the Bay Area, involves a young woman whose job requires her to deliver tailored social experiences to clients at an exclusive dining club; the story is narrated by the artificial intelligence software that co-inhabits her mind. And Anjali Sachdeva’s All the Names they Used for God is a story collection that merges the real and the supernatural with genre-breaking bravery, employing a prose so precise that you follow her into marvelous realms without question: Ice caves, exploding steel mill furnaces, an ocean inhabited by an elusive mermaid whose fleshy, tentacle-like hair still haunts my dreams.

8. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’d love to see more works in translation published in this country—for more publishing houses to commit seriously to the cultivation and dissemination of international literature.  I admire the work of New York Review Books, Restless Books, and Europa Editions in this arena. I loved, for example, Restless Books’ recently published translation of Marcus Malte’s The Boy, a Prix Femina-winning novel about a young man who spent the first fourteen years of his life in mute isolation in the wilds of France. The story of this young man’s entry into the early twentieth-century world—first into a rural setting, then Paris, and finally the battlefields of the First World War—is the story of what makes us human, and casts our world in a stark new light. Even stories as place-specific as The Boy have much to reveal about all our lives; and, just as importantly, they illuminate and particularize the vast array of human experiences different from our own. One of literature’s great powers is its ability to act as a tonic against xenophobia; there’s never been a moment when that power has been more urgently needed.

9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The finite nature of the twenty-four-hour day. But places like the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, seek to explode that limitation by removing barriers to creative freedom.  At MacDowell, where every artist gets a secluded studio, meticulously prepared meals, and unlimited uninterrupted time to work, there’s a kind of magical speeding-up of the creative process. You don’t necessarily fail less often; you fail faster, and recover faster. The people who dedicate their professional lives to the running of those programs are literature’s great guardians and cultivators.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
It would be impossible to identify the best, because I’ve been the fortunate recipient of much wonderful advice from writers like Marilynne Robinson, James Alan MacPherson, Tobias Wolff, Elizabeth Tallent, and John L’Heureux, for more years than I care to consider. But I can tell you about a piece of advice I chose not to take: A prominent writer once told me, at a barbecue at a friend’s house in Maine, that if I wanted to take myself seriously as a writer, I’d better reconsider my desire to have children. For each child I had, this writer told me, I was sacrificing a book. Now I can say with certainty that my writing life has been immeasurably enriched and transformed by having become a parent. And if parenthood is demanding, both of time and emotional energy—as of course it is—life with children reminds me always of why writing feels essential: At its best and most rigorous, it illuminates—both for writer and reader—the richness and complexity of the human world, and forces us to make a deep moral consideration of our role in it.

Julie Orringer, author of The Flight Portfolio.

(Credit: Brigitte Lacombe)

Ten Questions for Geffrey Davis

by

Staff

4.30.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Geffrey Davis, whose second poetry collection, Night Angler, is out today from BOA Editions. The book, which won the 2018 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, is both a love letter to a son and a meditation on parenthood, family, race, and loss. “The poems in Geffrey Davis’s Night Angler sing in both ecstatic joy and tremendous lament,” writes Oliver de la Paz. “Poetry and prayer have never shared so close a breath.” Davis is the author of a previous poetry collection, Revising the Storm (BOA Editions, 2014), which won the 2013 A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the 2015 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry. Davis has won the Anne Halley Poetry Prize, the Dogwood Prize in Poetry, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and fellowships from Bread Loaf, Cave Canem, and the Vermont Studio Center. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Davis teaches for the University of Arkansas MFA in Creative Writing & Translation and the Rainier Writing Workshop low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University. 

1. How long did it take you to write Night Angler?
It took me almost four years to have a full first draft of this book—and then another year or so of revisions and restructuring to get it ready for production.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
In the middle of drafting the poems that would become this collection, I realized I was essentially working on a book-length love letter to my son, though not all the pieces address the child directly—one that chronicled and questioned and sometimes intervened upon certain (parental) desires for breaking cycles and discovering new rituals for family. While the stakes and timeliness of the book’s address meant that I couldn’t have waited to write the book, I had no idea of when/how to place it into my son’s hands once it was finished. However, just days after advance copies of Night Angler arrived, as sometimes children have the grace of doing, he simply took that impossible in/decision out of my hands. I was taking a late afternoon nap and woke to him reading aloud to my wife from the book. It’s been a long time since I’ve tried that hard to fight back tears so that the voice across from me would keep speaking.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
My writing practice tends to be pretty unpredictable, pretty sporadic, and is usually dictated by a particular image, observation, question, etc. seeming louder or more urgent than the general noise of the day—or than the night. Lately, I’ve been writing more often in the middle of the night.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
That the ending of it rang so clear—to me, anyway. With my first book, Revising the Storm, although I was submitting it to prizes, I still felt like someone had tapped me on the shoulder while in the middle of working and asked to publish it. I was so grateful to Dorianne Laux, who selected it for the 2013 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, and to BOA Editions for inviting me to recognize that book’s doneness. Who knows what would have happened to its shape and voice had I been allowed to keep at it like I was prepared to!? Because I deeply needed that collaboration the first time around, I wasn’t expecting to feel the ending of Night Angler for myself, and definitely not as unmistakably as I did.

5. What are you reading right now?
I’ve been reading more graphic novels and science fiction lately. I loved Victor LaValle’s Destroyer (an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) and am finishing N. K. Jemisin’s The Stone Sky, the third book in her Broken Earth series.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
I’m always excited to put a Julia Kasdorf book into people’s hands, especially her collection Poetry in America, and I love talking with new people about Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon’s Open Interval.

7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I appreciate interviews like this for the opportunity to discuss process and reveal struggles, but I wish our books, as art objects, had better ways of showing more of the practice and work and failure that go into making them.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Time. And presence—in particular, distinguishing between the importance of staying present in moments of lived connection and the urge for investigating new possible poetic connections.

9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
Articulating precisely what about a piece of writing they believe in, and why.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
As an undergraduate writer, the poet David Biespiel invited me to understand that there are things a poem needs that will not feel poetic.

Geffrey Davis, author of Night Angler.

Ten Questions for Xuan Juliana Wang

5.14.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Xuan Juliana Wang, whose debut story collection, Home Remedies, is out today from Hogarth. In a dozen electrified stories, Wang captures the unheard voices of a new generation of Chinese youth via characters that are navigating their cultural heritage and the chaos and uncertainty of contemporary life, from a pair of synchronized divers at the Beijing Olympics on the verge of self-discovery to a young student in Paris who discovers the life-changing possibilities of a new wardrobe. As Justin Torres writes, Wang “is singing an incredibly complex song of hybridity and heart.” Xuan Juliana Wang was born in Heilongjiang, China, and grew up in Los Angeles. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and earned her MFA from Columbia University. She has received fellowships and awards from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Cite des Arts International, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Elizabeth George Foundation. She is a fiction editor at Fence and teaches at UCLA. 

1. How long did it take you to write the stories in Home Remedies?
All of my twenties and the early part of my thirties.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I would have to say the loneliness of falling out of step with society. When I’m out celebrating a friend who has just made a huge stride in their career, someone would ask me, “Hey how’s that book coming along?” Then having to tell them that I have a desk in an ex-FBI warehouse and I’ll be sitting there in the foreseeable future, occasionally looking out the window, trying to make imaginary people behave themselves. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I keep a regular journal where I describe interesting things I’d seen or heard the day before as well as random plot ideas. That’s something I like to do every day, preferably first thing in the morning or right before bed. My ideal writing environment is a semi-public place, like a shared office, or a library as long as I can avoid making eye-contact with people around me. When I’m really getting going on an idea I am capable of sitting for eight hours a day, many days in a row. I was forced to play piano as a child so I have no trouble forcing myself to do anything.  

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
It made me feel a deep kinship with anyone who has ever published a book. I want to clutch them, look into their eyes and say, “I understand now.”

5. What are you reading right now?
King of the Mississippi by Mike Freedman. I just picked up Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires and it’s great! I’m putting off finishing The Unpassing by Chia Chia Lin because it’s so gorgeously written I am savoring it. 

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Wang Shuo. He’s like the Chinese Chuck Palahniuk. I wish he could be translated more and better. 

7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I wish publishers would open up their own bookstores, or sell books in unexpected places, so people could interact with books in-person. There isn’t a single bookstore within a fifteen-mile radius of the city where I grew up in LA. 

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Health insurance. 

9. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? 
Yes. But choose wisely. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Victor Lavalle gave us a lot of practical advice in his workshop. The one I use the most often is: Take the best part of your story and move it to first page and start there. Challenge yourself to make the rest rise to the level of that.

Xuan Juliana Wang, author of the story collection Home Remedies.

(Credit: Ye Rin Mok)

Ten Questions for Julie Orringer

5.7.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Julie Orringer, whose third book, the novel The Flight Portfolio, is out today from Knopf. Based on the true story of Varian Fry, a young New York journalist and editor who in 1940 was the head of the Emergency Rescue Committee, designed to protect artists and writers from being deported to Nazi concentration camps and to send intellectual treasures back to the United States, The Flight Portfolio returns to the same territory, Europe on the brink of World War II, that thrilled readers of Orringer’s debut novel, The Invisible Bridge. Andrew Sean Greer calls it “ambitious, meticulous, big-hearted, gorgeous, historical, suspenseful, everything you want a novel to be.” Orringer is also the author of the award-winning short story collection How to Breathe Underwater, which was a New York Times Notable Book. She lives in Brooklyn.

1. How long did it take you to write The Flight Portfolio?
Nine years, more or less. While researching my last novel, The Invisible Bridge, which also took place during the Second World War, I read about the American journalist Varian Fry’s heroic work in Marseille: His mission was to locate celebrated European artists who’d fled to France from the Nazi-occupied countries and arrange their safe passage to the States. The job was fraught with moral complications—given limited time and resources, who would Fry choose to save?—and the historical account seemed to miss certain essential elements, particularly those surrounding Fry’s personal life (he had a number of well-documented relationships with men, a fact that historians elided, denied, or shuddered away from, as if to suggest that it’s not acceptable to be a hero of the Holocaust if one also happens to be gay).  Researching Fry’s life and mission took the better part of four years—a time during which I moved three times and gave birth to my two children—and writing and revision occupied the five years that followed. Which is not to suggest that no writing occurred during the initial research, nor that there was ever a time when the research ceased—it continued, in fact, through the last day I could change a word of the draft.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Undoubtedly it was the research into Fry’s work in Marseille, a detailed record of which exists in biographies, interviews, letters, ephemera, and even still in living memory: Fry’s last surviving associate, Justus Rosenberg, is a professor emeritus of languages and literature at Bard College, and was kind enough to speak to me about his experiences. Twenty-seven boxes of Fry’s letters, papers, photographs, and other writings reside in the Rare Books and Manuscripts collection at Columbia’s Butler Library; I spent many hours immersed in those files, learning what I could about what kept Fry up at night, what obsessed him by day, what he struggled with, how he triumphed, and how he thought about his own work years later.  I spent a year at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, where Fry studied as an undergraduate; there I had the chance to examine his recently unsealed student records, which include not only his grade transcripts and his application, but also letters from his father, his professors, the dean, and various close associates, many of them arguing either for or against Fry’s expulsion from Harvard for a variety of infractions that included spotty attendance, raucous partying, destruction of school property, reckless driving, and, ultimately, the placing of a For Sale sign on Dean Greenough’s lawn. Then there were the dozens—hundreds, ultimately thousands—of Fry’s clients, whose lives and work I felt I must know before I wrote the book.  And of course I had to go to Marseille, where I visited the places Fry lived and worked, at least those that still exist (the marvelous Villa Air Bel, where he lived with a group of Surrealist writers and artists, was razed decades ago).  The nearly impossible task was to clear space among all that was known for what could not be known—space where I could make a narrative that would honor Fry’s experience but would move beyond what could have been recorded at the time.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write five or six days a week at the Brooklyn Writers’ Space. I’m married to another fiction writer, my former Iowa MFA classmate Ryan Harty, and, as I mentioned, we have two young children; we have a carefully worked-out schedule that allows each of us a couple of long writing days each week (eight hours or so) and a number of shorter ones (five hours). Often I write at night, too, especially if I’m starting something new or working on a short story or a nonfiction piece.     

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The inestimable benefit of sharing a very early draft with my editor, Jordan Pavlin. Jordan edited my two previous books, but I’d never before shown her anything that hadn’t been revised six or seven times. This novel involved so much risk, and took so long to complete, that I felt I needed her insight and support long before I’d written three or four versions. Did the novel strike the right balance between history and fiction? Had I captured the characters’ essential struggles clearly? How to address problems of pacing, continuity, clarity? Jordan’s exacting readings—not just one, but three or four—echoed my own doubts and provided necessary perspective and reassurance. And her comments pulled no punches. She was scrupulously honest. She was rigorous. She challenged me to do better. And my desire to meet her standards was, as it always is, fueled as much by my ardent admiration for her as a human being as by my deep respect for her literary mind.    

5. What trait do you most value in an editor?   
See above.

6. What are you reading right now?
Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise, which cuts a little too close at times to my own 1980’s experience in a high school drama group—one that took itself at least as seriously as Choi’s Citywide Academy for the Performing Arts. She hits all the notes with dead-on precision: favoritism toward certain students by charismatic teachers, intrigue surrounding highly-charged relationships, endless quoting of Monty Python, jobs at TCBY, the dire importance of having a car and/or friends with cars, etc. But the true brilliance of the book is its structure: A first section in which the subjective experience of high school students is rendered with respect and utter seriousness; a second section that brings a questioning (and revenge-seeking) adult sensibility to bear upon the first; and a third section that sharpens the earlier sections into clearer resolution still, suggesting the persistent consequences of those seemingly trivial sophomore liaisons. 

7. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Here are three new writers whose work I’ve found risk-laced, challenging, and full of fierce delights: Ebony Flowers, Rona Jaffe-winning cartoonist and disciple of Lynda Barry, whose brilliant debut short story collection, Hot Comb, will be published by Drawn and Quarterly in June; shot through with tender and intelligent humor, it’s an incisive examination of cultural and familial tensions in black women’s lives. Domenica Phetteplace is another of my favorite new writers; her marvelous short story “Blue Cup,” a futurist skewering of commerce-driven life in the Bay Area, involves a young woman whose job requires her to deliver tailored social experiences to clients at an exclusive dining club; the story is narrated by the artificial intelligence software that co-inhabits her mind. And Anjali Sachdeva’s All the Names they Used for God is a story collection that merges the real and the supernatural with genre-breaking bravery, employing a prose so precise that you follow her into marvelous realms without question: Ice caves, exploding steel mill furnaces, an ocean inhabited by an elusive mermaid whose fleshy, tentacle-like hair still haunts my dreams.

8. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’d love to see more works in translation published in this country—for more publishing houses to commit seriously to the cultivation and dissemination of international literature.  I admire the work of New York Review Books, Restless Books, and Europa Editions in this arena. I loved, for example, Restless Books’ recently published translation of Marcus Malte’s The Boy, a Prix Femina-winning novel about a young man who spent the first fourteen years of his life in mute isolation in the wilds of France. The story of this young man’s entry into the early twentieth-century world—first into a rural setting, then Paris, and finally the battlefields of the First World War—is the story of what makes us human, and casts our world in a stark new light. Even stories as place-specific as The Boy have much to reveal about all our lives; and, just as importantly, they illuminate and particularize the vast array of human experiences different from our own. One of literature’s great powers is its ability to act as a tonic against xenophobia; there’s never been a moment when that power has been more urgently needed.

9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The finite nature of the twenty-four-hour day. But places like the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, seek to explode that limitation by removing barriers to creative freedom.  At MacDowell, where every artist gets a secluded studio, meticulously prepared meals, and unlimited uninterrupted time to work, there’s a kind of magical speeding-up of the creative process. You don’t necessarily fail less often; you fail faster, and recover faster. The people who dedicate their professional lives to the running of those programs are literature’s great guardians and cultivators.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
It would be impossible to identify the best, because I’ve been the fortunate recipient of much wonderful advice from writers like Marilynne Robinson, James Alan MacPherson, Tobias Wolff, Elizabeth Tallent, and John L’Heureux, for more years than I care to consider. But I can tell you about a piece of advice I chose not to take: A prominent writer once told me, at a barbecue at a friend’s house in Maine, that if I wanted to take myself seriously as a writer, I’d better reconsider my desire to have children. For each child I had, this writer told me, I was sacrificing a book. Now I can say with certainty that my writing life has been immeasurably enriched and transformed by having become a parent. And if parenthood is demanding, both of time and emotional energy—as of course it is—life with children reminds me always of why writing feels essential: At its best and most rigorous, it illuminates—both for writer and reader—the richness and complexity of the human world, and forces us to make a deep moral consideration of our role in it.

Julie Orringer, author of The Flight Portfolio.

(Credit: Brigitte Lacombe)

Ten Questions for Sara Collins

5.21.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Sara Collins, whose debut novel, The Confessions of Frannie Langton, is out today from Harper. Both a suspenseful gothic mystery and a historical novel, Collins’s debut tells the story of a slave’s journey from a Jamaican plantation to an English prison, where she is tried for a brutal double murder she cannot remember. “With as much psychological savvy as righteous wrath, Sara Collins twists together slave narrative, bildungsroman, love story, and crime novel to make something new,” wrote Emma Donoghue. Sara Collins grew up in Grand Cayman. She studied law at the London School of Economics and worked as a lawyer for seventeen years before earning a master’s degree in creative writing at Cambridge University, where she was the recipient of the 2015 Michael Holroyd Prize for Creative Writing. She lives in London. 

1. How long did it take you to write The Confessions of Frannie Langton
My agent signed me with only a partial manuscript, and I had to write feverishly in order to finish it in just under two years. But the novel had been simmering for all the decades I’d spent wondering why a Black woman had never been the star of her own gothic romance. My dissatisfaction about that state of affairs grew so strong over time that it finally nudged me in the direction of writing my own. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
At times there was nothing more terrifying than the distance between the novel in my head and the one making its way onto the page. I had to force myself to accept the failure of my first attempts. I’m always terrified that the rough and rambling sentences that come out first, as a kind of advance party, will be all I can manage. They trick me into trying to polish them as I go. And that slows me down.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
Either at my desk overlooking a quiet canal patrolled by iguanas in Grand Cayman or at my kitchen table in London overlooking my courtyard garden, and now sometimes in bed, to avoid the intense back pain I get after sitting for long periods. When working on a novel, I write every day, 8:00 AM to 7:00 PM, following very strict routines: starting and finishing at the same time, and aiming to get a certain quota of work done. Over time I’ve developed a Pavlovian response to my rituals: When I take the first sip of coffee at 8:00 AM, my brain flips a switch and I’m in writing mode.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process? 
I wrote the novel in isolation, but I’ve now done numerous radio and podcast interviews, panel and bookshop appearances, essays and columns. Writing requires withdrawal, publishing demands engagement. It’s the shock of wandering out of a tunnel onto a stage.

5. What are you reading right now? 
I’m reading Clarie Messud’s The Woman Upstairs. The writing feels electric and alive, crackling with anger, which I think we should have more of in novels. One of my top reads of recent months was André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name. I’m going to start John Banville’s The Book of Evidence next.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
James Baldwin. He is unparalleled: as a writer, as an intellectual, as a man. Yes, he’s fairly widely recognized, but it should be wider.

7. What is one thing you’d do differently if you could have a do-over? 
I would definitely take more days off. 

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
When I’m so immersed in a project that I don’t want to look up, let alone talk to anyone, I feel like I’m being pulled between novel and family. What many people won’t admit is that it’s impossible to write a novel without a pinch of selfishness, and you have to beg your loved ones to forgive you for it. 

9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)? 
Each of my editors, and my agent, saw straight through my manuscript to the novel I wanted to write, not the one I’d written. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I often quote Annie Lamott quoting the coach in Cool Runnings (a film I dislike, but which apparently produced this great line): “If you weren’t enough before the gold medal, you won’t be enough afterwards.”

Sara Collins, author of The Confessions of Frannie Langton.

Ten Questions for Xuan Juliana Wang

5.14.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Xuan Juliana Wang, whose debut story collection, Home Remedies, is out today from Hogarth. In a dozen electrified stories, Wang captures the unheard voices of a new generation of Chinese youth via characters that are navigating their cultural heritage and the chaos and uncertainty of contemporary life, from a pair of synchronized divers at the Beijing Olympics on the verge of self-discovery to a young student in Paris who discovers the life-changing possibilities of a new wardrobe. As Justin Torres writes, Wang “is singing an incredibly complex song of hybridity and heart.” Xuan Juliana Wang was born in Heilongjiang, China, and grew up in Los Angeles. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and earned her MFA from Columbia University. She has received fellowships and awards from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Cite des Arts International, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Elizabeth George Foundation. She is a fiction editor at Fence and teaches at UCLA. 

1. How long did it take you to write the stories in Home Remedies?
All of my twenties and the early part of my thirties.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I would have to say the loneliness of falling out of step with society. When I’m out celebrating a friend who has just made a huge stride in their career, someone would ask me, “Hey how’s that book coming along?” Then having to tell them that I have a desk in an ex-FBI warehouse and I’ll be sitting there in the foreseeable future, occasionally looking out the window, trying to make imaginary people behave themselves. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I keep a regular journal where I describe interesting things I’d seen or heard the day before as well as random plot ideas. That’s something I like to do every day, preferably first thing in the morning or right before bed. My ideal writing environment is a semi-public place, like a shared office, or a library as long as I can avoid making eye-contact with people around me. When I’m really getting going on an idea I am capable of sitting for eight hours a day, many days in a row. I was forced to play piano as a child so I have no trouble forcing myself to do anything.  

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
It made me feel a deep kinship with anyone who has ever published a book. I want to clutch them, look into their eyes and say, “I understand now.”

5. What are you reading right now?
King of the Mississippi by Mike Freedman. I just picked up Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires and it’s great! I’m putting off finishing The Unpassing by Chia Chia Lin because it’s so gorgeously written I am savoring it. 

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Wang Shuo. He’s like the Chinese Chuck Palahniuk. I wish he could be translated more and better. 

7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I wish publishers would open up their own bookstores, or sell books in unexpected places, so people could interact with books in-person. There isn’t a single bookstore within a fifteen-mile radius of the city where I grew up in LA. 

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Health insurance. 

9. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? 
Yes. But choose wisely. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Victor Lavalle gave us a lot of practical advice in his workshop. The one I use the most often is: Take the best part of your story and move it to first page and start there. Challenge yourself to make the rest rise to the level of that.

Xuan Juliana Wang, author of the story collection Home Remedies.

(Credit: Ye Rin Mok)

Ten Questions for Julie Orringer

5.7.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Julie Orringer, whose third book, the novel The Flight Portfolio, is out today from Knopf. Based on the true story of Varian Fry, a young New York journalist and editor who in 1940 was the head of the Emergency Rescue Committee, designed to protect artists and writers from being deported to Nazi concentration camps and to send intellectual treasures back to the United States, The Flight Portfolio returns to the same territory, Europe on the brink of World War II, that thrilled readers of Orringer’s debut novel, The Invisible Bridge. Andrew Sean Greer calls it “ambitious, meticulous, big-hearted, gorgeous, historical, suspenseful, everything you want a novel to be.” Orringer is also the author of the award-winning short story collection How to Breathe Underwater, which was a New York Times Notable Book. She lives in Brooklyn.

1. How long did it take you to write The Flight Portfolio?
Nine years, more or less. While researching my last novel, The Invisible Bridge, which also took place during the Second World War, I read about the American journalist Varian Fry’s heroic work in Marseille: His mission was to locate celebrated European artists who’d fled to France from the Nazi-occupied countries and arrange their safe passage to the States. The job was fraught with moral complications—given limited time and resources, who would Fry choose to save?—and the historical account seemed to miss certain essential elements, particularly those surrounding Fry’s personal life (he had a number of well-documented relationships with men, a fact that historians elided, denied, or shuddered away from, as if to suggest that it’s not acceptable to be a hero of the Holocaust if one also happens to be gay).  Researching Fry’s life and mission took the better part of four years—a time during which I moved three times and gave birth to my two children—and writing and revision occupied the five years that followed. Which is not to suggest that no writing occurred during the initial research, nor that there was ever a time when the research ceased—it continued, in fact, through the last day I could change a word of the draft.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Undoubtedly it was the research into Fry’s work in Marseille, a detailed record of which exists in biographies, interviews, letters, ephemera, and even still in living memory: Fry’s last surviving associate, Justus Rosenberg, is a professor emeritus of languages and literature at Bard College, and was kind enough to speak to me about his experiences. Twenty-seven boxes of Fry’s letters, papers, photographs, and other writings reside in the Rare Books and Manuscripts collection at Columbia’s Butler Library; I spent many hours immersed in those files, learning what I could about what kept Fry up at night, what obsessed him by day, what he struggled with, how he triumphed, and how he thought about his own work years later.  I spent a year at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, where Fry studied as an undergraduate; there I had the chance to examine his recently unsealed student records, which include not only his grade transcripts and his application, but also letters from his father, his professors, the dean, and various close associates, many of them arguing either for or against Fry’s expulsion from Harvard for a variety of infractions that included spotty attendance, raucous partying, destruction of school property, reckless driving, and, ultimately, the placing of a For Sale sign on Dean Greenough’s lawn. Then there were the dozens—hundreds, ultimately thousands—of Fry’s clients, whose lives and work I felt I must know before I wrote the book.  And of course I had to go to Marseille, where I visited the places Fry lived and worked, at least those that still exist (the marvelous Villa Air Bel, where he lived with a group of Surrealist writers and artists, was razed decades ago).  The nearly impossible task was to clear space among all that was known for what could not be known—space where I could make a narrative that would honor Fry’s experience but would move beyond what could have been recorded at the time.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write five or six days a week at the Brooklyn Writers’ Space. I’m married to another fiction writer, my former Iowa MFA classmate Ryan Harty, and, as I mentioned, we have two young children; we have a carefully worked-out schedule that allows each of us a couple of long writing days each week (eight hours or so) and a number of shorter ones (five hours). Often I write at night, too, especially if I’m starting something new or working on a short story or a nonfiction piece.     

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The inestimable benefit of sharing a very early draft with my editor, Jordan Pavlin. Jordan edited my two previous books, but I’d never before shown her anything that hadn’t been revised six or seven times. This novel involved so much risk, and took so long to complete, that I felt I needed her insight and support long before I’d written three or four versions. Did the novel strike the right balance between history and fiction? Had I captured the characters’ essential struggles clearly? How to address problems of pacing, continuity, clarity? Jordan’s exacting readings—not just one, but three or four—echoed my own doubts and provided necessary perspective and reassurance. And her comments pulled no punches. She was scrupulously honest. She was rigorous. She challenged me to do better. And my desire to meet her standards was, as it always is, fueled as much by my ardent admiration for her as a human being as by my deep respect for her literary mind.    

5. What trait do you most value in an editor?   
See above.

6. What are you reading right now?
Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise, which cuts a little too close at times to my own 1980’s experience in a high school drama group—one that took itself at least as seriously as Choi’s Citywide Academy for the Performing Arts. She hits all the notes with dead-on precision: favoritism toward certain students by charismatic teachers, intrigue surrounding highly-charged relationships, endless quoting of Monty Python, jobs at TCBY, the dire importance of having a car and/or friends with cars, etc. But the true brilliance of the book is its structure: A first section in which the subjective experience of high school students is rendered with respect and utter seriousness; a second section that brings a questioning (and revenge-seeking) adult sensibility to bear upon the first; and a third section that sharpens the earlier sections into clearer resolution still, suggesting the persistent consequences of those seemingly trivial sophomore liaisons. 

7. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Here are three new writers whose work I’ve found risk-laced, challenging, and full of fierce delights: Ebony Flowers, Rona Jaffe-winning cartoonist and disciple of Lynda Barry, whose brilliant debut short story collection, Hot Comb, will be published by Drawn and Quarterly in June; shot through with tender and intelligent humor, it’s an incisive examination of cultural and familial tensions in black women’s lives. Domenica Phetteplace is another of my favorite new writers; her marvelous short story “Blue Cup,” a futurist skewering of commerce-driven life in the Bay Area, involves a young woman whose job requires her to deliver tailored social experiences to clients at an exclusive dining club; the story is narrated by the artificial intelligence software that co-inhabits her mind. And Anjali Sachdeva’s All the Names they Used for God is a story collection that merges the real and the supernatural with genre-breaking bravery, employing a prose so precise that you follow her into marvelous realms without question: Ice caves, exploding steel mill furnaces, an ocean inhabited by an elusive mermaid whose fleshy, tentacle-like hair still haunts my dreams.

8. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’d love to see more works in translation published in this country—for more publishing houses to commit seriously to the cultivation and dissemination of international literature.  I admire the work of New York Review Books, Restless Books, and Europa Editions in this arena. I loved, for example, Restless Books’ recently published translation of Marcus Malte’s The Boy, a Prix Femina-winning novel about a young man who spent the first fourteen years of his life in mute isolation in the wilds of France. The story of this young man’s entry into the early twentieth-century world—first into a rural setting, then Paris, and finally the battlefields of the First World War—is the story of what makes us human, and casts our world in a stark new light. Even stories as place-specific as The Boy have much to reveal about all our lives; and, just as importantly, they illuminate and particularize the vast array of human experiences different from our own. One of literature’s great powers is its ability to act as a tonic against xenophobia; there’s never been a moment when that power has been more urgently needed.

9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The finite nature of the twenty-four-hour day. But places like the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, seek to explode that limitation by removing barriers to creative freedom.  At MacDowell, where every artist gets a secluded studio, meticulously prepared meals, and unlimited uninterrupted time to work, there’s a kind of magical speeding-up of the creative process. You don’t necessarily fail less often; you fail faster, and recover faster. The people who dedicate their professional lives to the running of those programs are literature’s great guardians and cultivators.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
It would be impossible to identify the best, because I’ve been the fortunate recipient of much wonderful advice from writers like Marilynne Robinson, James Alan MacPherson, Tobias Wolff, Elizabeth Tallent, and John L’Heureux, for more years than I care to consider. But I can tell you about a piece of advice I chose not to take: A prominent writer once told me, at a barbecue at a friend’s house in Maine, that if I wanted to take myself seriously as a writer, I’d better reconsider my desire to have children. For each child I had, this writer told me, I was sacrificing a book. Now I can say with certainty that my writing life has been immeasurably enriched and transformed by having become a parent. And if parenthood is demanding, both of time and emotional energy—as of course it is—life with children reminds me always of why writing feels essential: At its best and most rigorous, it illuminates—both for writer and reader—the richness and complexity of the human world, and forces us to make a deep moral consideration of our role in it.

Julie Orringer, author of The Flight Portfolio.

(Credit: Brigitte Lacombe)

Ten Questions for Geffrey Davis

by

Staff

4.30.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Geffrey Davis, whose second poetry collection, Night Angler, is out today from BOA Editions. The book, which won the 2018 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, is both a love letter to a son and a meditation on parenthood, family, race, and loss. “The poems in Geffrey Davis’s Night Angler sing in both ecstatic joy and tremendous lament,” writes Oliver de la Paz. “Poetry and prayer have never shared so close a breath.” Davis is the author of a previous poetry collection, Revising the Storm (BOA Editions, 2014), which won the 2013 A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the 2015 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry. Davis has won the Anne Halley Poetry Prize, the Dogwood Prize in Poetry, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and fellowships from Bread Loaf, Cave Canem, and the Vermont Studio Center. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Davis teaches for the University of Arkansas MFA in Creative Writing & Translation and the Rainier Writing Workshop low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University. 

1. How long did it take you to write Night Angler?
It took me almost four years to have a full first draft of this book—and then another year or so of revisions and restructuring to get it ready for production.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
In the middle of drafting the poems that would become this collection, I realized I was essentially working on a book-length love letter to my son, though not all the pieces address the child directly—one that chronicled and questioned and sometimes intervened upon certain (parental) desires for breaking cycles and discovering new rituals for family. While the stakes and timeliness of the book’s address meant that I couldn’t have waited to write the book, I had no idea of when/how to place it into my son’s hands once it was finished. However, just days after advance copies of Night Angler arrived, as sometimes children have the grace of doing, he simply took that impossible in/decision out of my hands. I was taking a late afternoon nap and woke to him reading aloud to my wife from the book. It’s been a long time since I’ve tried that hard to fight back tears so that the voice across from me would keep speaking.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
My writing practice tends to be pretty unpredictable, pretty sporadic, and is usually dictated by a particular image, observation, question, etc. seeming louder or more urgent than the general noise of the day—or than the night. Lately, I’ve been writing more often in the middle of the night.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
That the ending of it rang so clear—to me, anyway. With my first book, Revising the Storm, although I was submitting it to prizes, I still felt like someone had tapped me on the shoulder while in the middle of working and asked to publish it. I was so grateful to Dorianne Laux, who selected it for the 2013 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, and to BOA Editions for inviting me to recognize that book’s doneness. Who knows what would have happened to its shape and voice had I been allowed to keep at it like I was prepared to!? Because I deeply needed that collaboration the first time around, I wasn’t expecting to feel the ending of Night Angler for myself, and definitely not as unmistakably as I did.

5. What are you reading right now?
I’ve been reading more graphic novels and science fiction lately. I loved Victor LaValle’s Destroyer (an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) and am finishing N. K. Jemisin’s The Stone Sky, the third book in her Broken Earth series.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
I’m always excited to put a Julia Kasdorf book into people’s hands, especially her collection Poetry in America, and I love talking with new people about Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon’s Open Interval.

7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I appreciate interviews like this for the opportunity to discuss process and reveal struggles, but I wish our books, as art objects, had better ways of showing more of the practice and work and failure that go into making them.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Time. And presence—in particular, distinguishing between the importance of staying present in moments of lived connection and the urge for investigating new possible poetic connections.

9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
Articulating precisely what about a piece of writing they believe in, and why.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
As an undergraduate writer, the poet David Biespiel invited me to understand that there are things a poem needs that will not feel poetic.

Geffrey Davis, author of Night Angler.

Ten Questions for Alison C. Rollins

by

Staff

4.23.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Alison C. Rollins, whose debut poetry collection, Library of Small Catastrophes, is out today from Copper Canyon Press. Drawing on Jorge Luis Borges’s fascination with the library, Rollins uses the concept of the archive to uncover and investigate ideas of loss, progress, and decay. As Terrance Hayes writes of the book, “The small and large darknesses catalogued here make this a book of remarkable depth.” Rollins was born and raised in St. Louis and currently works as a librarian for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Hayden’s Ferry ReviewMissouri ReviewPoetry, and elsewhere. A Cave Canem and Callaloo Fellow, she was a 2016 recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship.

1. How long did it take you to write Library of Small Catastrophes?
The poems in Library of Small Catastrophes were written over a three-to-four-year span. However, I would venture to assert that the book has taken a lifetime to write in terms of the necessity to live, experience, read, and hone my craft over time. Robert Hayden in the poem “The Tattooed Man” has the phrase: “all art is pain suffered and outlived.” While I don’t hope to glorify suffering in the service of artistic practice I do think it is important to celebrate living, awareness, observation, and the act of being present in the world. Many of the poems in this book are based on experiences that I have witnessed or been a part of and I had to live them and be present within them to in turn translate them into poems. I want to equally highlight time and labor because this sort of question can in some ways place greater value on Library of Small Catastrophes as a product rather than on the living required to make the physical object of a book. I don’t seek to glorify suffering but living requires exposure to both joy and pain (in often highly unbalanced ways for certain bodies in the context of the United States). I wish to celebrate living and to do so not always in relationship to measured productivity or a finished product such as a book.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
It was challenging to accept that with the birth of the book all the other seemingly limitless possibilities for the project in turn died. There is a certain finitude to publishing a book that makes me a little uncomfortable in the sense that the work becomes a fairly static thing. I can’t continue to edit, reorder, change the cover art, etc. To go back to question one, I try to privilege the concept of being in process over something that is finalized. In Parable of the Sower Octavia Butler writes, “The only lasting truth is change.” If Butler is right, which I think she is, we all need to work towards increasing our tolerance to change.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
A large majority of the poems in Library of Small Catastrophes were written during the day at work in libraries. I don’t have a daily writing practice or formal schedule. I read on the bus ride to work and I write in stolen moments while at work. Much of my writing is in direct contact with other forms of labor that I am directly engaged in. Writing retreats have been especially helpful to me to carve out writing-intensive periods where I can focus.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Having to contextualize the book from a marketing and press standpoint was something that was not initially on my radar. I hadn’t really thought of the skill necessary to step back and frame the work within the context of a blurb or a synopsis. It is a really interesting and rather separate endeavor from writing the actual individual poems that came to make up the collection. To articulately explain what you see the overall project as functioning to do can be oddly challenging and unexpected at the end of the publication process.

5. What are you reading right now?
I just finished Marian Engel’s Bear, Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, and Kiese Laymon’s Heavy. I’m currently reading Renee Gladman’s Juice, Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, and Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic. I am a librarian and voracious reader so this literally changes every other day.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
This question depends a lot on context, realities about how literary canons function, systemic inequity, as well as how “wider recognition” is being defined and measured. This is a very difficult question to answer but I will offer in response the names of three poets: CM Burroughs, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Dawn Lundy Martin. I will also say Phillis Wheatley for good measure.

7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I am probably a lofty romantic but I wish people in the “literary community” extended more grace to one another and more often than not embraced curiosity and awe as lifestyles. I wish that people read more widely and embodied a belief that there is space at the table for everyone—and in turn found this notion to be freeing rather than threatening. While I realize sales-driven approaches and the economics of the publishing industry are arguably necessary evils, I wish that as an industry we didn’t underestimate readers and their capacity or desire for strong innovative writing. I would argue that all people are hungry for access to beautiful words, fresh ideas, and moving storytelling. Lastly, I am surely imperfect but I genuinely strive on a fundamental level to be a kind person. I don’t think extending grace to myself and others should result in my being viewed as any less talented, intellectual, and critically rigorous. We could all use more kindness.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Time. In How to Write an Autobiographical Novel Alexander Chee writes, “Time is our mink, our Lexus, our mansion. In a room full of writers of various kinds, time is probably the only thing that can provoke widespread envy, more than acclaim. Acclaim, which of course means access to money, which then becomes time.” I could not agree more.

9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
I value most an editor with an expansive imagination. More specifically, I appreciate an editor that does not succumb to a limited imagination in terms of my identity/subject/position in the world and what that means in relationship to my writing and the potential readers of my work.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Terrance Hayes relayed the Thelonious Monk quote, “A genius is the one most like himself” during a craft talk at a writing retreat that I attended a few years ago. It truly resonated with me because without sounding cliché I think writing should be connected to the constant ever-evolving work of discovering, (re)imagining, and (re)claiming one’s own selfhood.

Alison C. Rollins, author of Library of Small Catastrophes.

(Credit: Maya Ayanna Darasaw)

Ten Questions for Domenica Ruta

5.28.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Domenica Ruta, whose novel, Last Day, is out today from Spiegel & Grau. The fates of three sets of characters converge during the celebration of an ancient holiday anticipating the planet’s demise. A bookish wunderkind looks for love from a much older tattoo artist she met at last year’s Last Day BBQ; a young woman with a troubled past searches for her long-lost adoptive brother; three astronauts on the International Space Station contemplate their lives on Earth from afar. Last Day brings these characters and others together as they embark on a last-chance quest for redemption. Domenica Ruta is the author of the New York Times best-selling memoir With or Without You (Spiegel & Grau, 2013). A graduate of Oberlin College, Ruta received an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas in Austin. Her short fiction has been published in the Boston Review, the Indiana Review, and Epoch. Her essays have appeared in Ninth Letter, New York magazine, and elsewhere. She reviews books for the New York Times, Oprah.com, and the American Scholar, and works as an editor, curator, and advocate for solo moms at ESME.com. She lives in New York City.

1. How long did it take you to write Last Day?
I started playing around with it immediately after my memoir, With or Without You, was published, but I was also writing another novel at the same time, trying to see which one would win my full attention. When I found out I was pregnant, I began pounding the keys of my laptop every day for a couple of hours to force out an ugly first draft before I became a single mother. In the first six months of my son’s life I wrote nothing. After that I worked a little at a time whenever I could, meaning whenever I could afford childcare. So the short answer is five years, but not continuously.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
The most challenging thing for me as an author of this and probably any book I write is the way publishing is a performative act of maturation. Writers grow up in public. If you compare the first book written by your favorite author with one they wrote fifteen or twenty years later the difference in quality is almost always astounding. And this is the same human using the same tools. So it is challenging for me to let go of a work and set it free into the world when I am positive I could still make it better, if only I had a few more decades. But that’s what the next book is for, and the one after that.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write mostly in bed, with occasional commutes to my kitchen table. I try to write every week, sometimes every day, sometimes not. As a mother of a small child, there is no set schedule. I write when I can, usually when the kid is at school, and other pockets I can find.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
When my publisher and editor, Cindy Spiegel, lost her incredible imprint Spiegel & Grau after a banner year, just a few months before Last Day was published—this was not something I ever expected would happen.

5. What are you reading right now?
In Love with the World by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche and Secrets We Kept by Kristal Sital.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Why doesn’t the Octavia Butler estate have ten different Netflix specials in the works right now?

7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing Last Day, what would say?
I wish I had something that would create the mystique of myself as a precious artist, alchemist of verbs and nouns, thinker of Big Thoughts, but to be perfectly honest, if I could go back in time before this novel I would advise myself to get savvy about the whole social media game. It is so important for authors to market themselves and their work in this way, which I was totally oblivious to until very recently. 

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Self-doubt, self-hatred, self-sabotage; I love more than anything to be alone in my imagination, but sometimes it is a dangerous place.

9. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
Not unless it is fully funded. I cannot in good conscience recommend that anyone without a trust fund or wealthy no-strings-attached parents/patrons go into debt for a degree in the arts. Read every single interview in the Paris Review instead; you will learn there are as many different ways to write a book as there are writers. Read widely across genres and write terrible drafts of things you are ashamed of. But if an MFA program is fully funded, then definitely go. Being a professional student is the most fun job I’ve ever had.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Anne Lamott said something along the lines of “write a shitty first draft.” This is the only way I can summon the courage to write anything. I am human and flawed and this is never more evident than when I see it spelled out in my words on a screen or a sheet of paper. But as bad as that first draft may be—and sometimes it’s not as bad as my first impression of it is—I have a chance to make it better one day at a time. That is the craft. That is what makes a writer: the willingness to rewrite a thousand times if necessary. 

Domenica Ruta, author of Last Day.

(Credit: Charlie Mahoney)

Ten Questions for Sara Collins

5.21.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Sara Collins, whose debut novel, The Confessions of Frannie Langton, is out today from Harper. Both a suspenseful gothic mystery and a historical novel, Collins’s debut tells the story of a slave’s journey from a Jamaican plantation to an English prison, where she is tried for a brutal double murder she cannot remember. “With as much psychological savvy as righteous wrath, Sara Collins twists together slave narrative, bildungsroman, love story, and crime novel to make something new,” wrote Emma Donoghue. Sara Collins grew up in Grand Cayman. She studied law at the London School of Economics and worked as a lawyer for seventeen years before earning a master’s degree in creative writing at Cambridge University, where she was the recipient of the 2015 Michael Holroyd Prize for Creative Writing. She lives in London. 

1. How long did it take you to write The Confessions of Frannie Langton
My agent signed me with only a partial manuscript, and I had to write feverishly in order to finish it in just under two years. But the novel had been simmering for all the decades I’d spent wondering why a Black woman had never been the star of her own gothic romance. My dissatisfaction about that state of affairs grew so strong over time that it finally nudged me in the direction of writing my own. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
At times there was nothing more terrifying than the distance between the novel in my head and the one making its way onto the page. I had to force myself to accept the failure of my first attempts. I’m always terrified that the rough and rambling sentences that come out first, as a kind of advance party, will be all I can manage. They trick me into trying to polish them as I go. And that slows me down.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
Either at my desk overlooking a quiet canal patrolled by iguanas in Grand Cayman or at my kitchen table in London overlooking my courtyard garden, and now sometimes in bed, to avoid the intense back pain I get after sitting for long periods. When working on a novel, I write every day, 8:00 AM to 7:00 PM, following very strict routines: starting and finishing at the same time, and aiming to get a certain quota of work done. Over time I’ve developed a Pavlovian response to my rituals: When I take the first sip of coffee at 8:00 AM, my brain flips a switch and I’m in writing mode.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process? 
I wrote the novel in isolation, but I’ve now done numerous radio and podcast interviews, panel and bookshop appearances, essays and columns. Writing requires withdrawal, publishing demands engagement. It’s the shock of wandering out of a tunnel onto a stage.

5. What are you reading right now? 
I’m reading Clarie Messud’s The Woman Upstairs. The writing feels electric and alive, crackling with anger, which I think we should have more of in novels. One of my top reads of recent months was André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name. I’m going to start John Banville’s The Book of Evidence next.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
James Baldwin. He is unparalleled: as a writer, as an intellectual, as a man. Yes, he’s fairly widely recognized, but it should be wider.

7. What is one thing you’d do differently if you could have a do-over? 
I would definitely take more days off. 

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
When I’m so immersed in a project that I don’t want to look up, let alone talk to anyone, I feel like I’m being pulled between novel and family. What many people won’t admit is that it’s impossible to write a novel without a pinch of selfishness, and you have to beg your loved ones to forgive you for it. 

9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)? 
Each of my editors, and my agent, saw straight through my manuscript to the novel I wanted to write, not the one I’d written. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I often quote Annie Lamott quoting the coach in Cool Runnings (a film I dislike, but which apparently produced this great line): “If you weren’t enough before the gold medal, you won’t be enough afterwards.”

Sara Collins, author of The Confessions of Frannie Langton.

Ten Questions for Xuan Juliana Wang

5.14.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Xuan Juliana Wang, whose debut story collection, Home Remedies, is out today from Hogarth. In a dozen electrified stories, Wang captures the unheard voices of a new generation of Chinese youth via characters that are navigating their cultural heritage and the chaos and uncertainty of contemporary life, from a pair of synchronized divers at the Beijing Olympics on the verge of self-discovery to a young student in Paris who discovers the life-changing possibilities of a new wardrobe. As Justin Torres writes, Wang “is singing an incredibly complex song of hybridity and heart.” Xuan Juliana Wang was born in Heilongjiang, China, and grew up in Los Angeles. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and earned her MFA from Columbia University. She has received fellowships and awards from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Cite des Arts International, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Elizabeth George Foundation. She is a fiction editor at Fence and teaches at UCLA. 

1. How long did it take you to write the stories in Home Remedies?
All of my twenties and the early part of my thirties.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I would have to say the loneliness of falling out of step with society. When I’m out celebrating a friend who has just made a huge stride in their career, someone would ask me, “Hey how’s that book coming along?” Then having to tell them that I have a desk in an ex-FBI warehouse and I’ll be sitting there in the foreseeable future, occasionally looking out the window, trying to make imaginary people behave themselves. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I keep a regular journal where I describe interesting things I’d seen or heard the day before as well as random plot ideas. That’s something I like to do every day, preferably first thing in the morning or right before bed. My ideal writing environment is a semi-public place, like a shared office, or a library as long as I can avoid making eye-contact with people around me. When I’m really getting going on an idea I am capable of sitting for eight hours a day, many days in a row. I was forced to play piano as a child so I have no trouble forcing myself to do anything.  

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
It made me feel a deep kinship with anyone who has ever published a book. I want to clutch them, look into their eyes and say, “I understand now.”

5. What are you reading right now?
King of the Mississippi by Mike Freedman. I just picked up Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires and it’s great! I’m putting off finishing The Unpassing by Chia Chia Lin because it’s so gorgeously written I am savoring it. 

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Wang Shuo. He’s like the Chinese Chuck Palahniuk. I wish he could be translated more and better. 

7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I wish publishers would open up their own bookstores, or sell books in unexpected places, so people could interact with books in-person. There isn’t a single bookstore within a fifteen-mile radius of the city where I grew up in LA. 

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Health insurance. 

9. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? 
Yes. But choose wisely. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Victor Lavalle gave us a lot of practical advice in his workshop. The one I use the most often is: Take the best part of your story and move it to first page and start there. Challenge yourself to make the rest rise to the level of that.

Xuan Juliana Wang, author of the story collection Home Remedies.

(Credit: Ye Rin Mok)

Ten Questions for Nicole Dennis-Benn

6.4.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Nicole Dennis-Benn, whose second novel, Patsy, is out today from Liveright, an imprint of W. W. Norton. The novel tells the story of two women, Patsy and her daughter, Tru. After leaving behind Tru for a life she’s always wanted in New York, Patsy ends up working as a nanny caring for wealthy children while Tru rebuilds a faltering relationship with her father back in Jamaica. Jumping back and forth between narratives in New York and Jamaica, Dennis-Benn has created “a stunningly powerful intergenerational novel,” as Alexander Chee writes, “about the price—the ransom really—women must pay to choose themselves, their lives, their value, their humanity.” Nicole Dennis-Benn is the author of Here Comes the Sun, a New York Times Notable Book and winner of the Lambda Literary Award. Born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, she teaches at Princeton and lives with her wife in Brooklyn, New York.

1. How long did it take you to write Patsy?
For me, the process begins way before I put pen to paper. Patsy was conceived in the fall of 2012, when I started as an adjunct at the College of Staten Island. I was writing Here Comes the Sun at the time, but would scribble notes about my early morning travel on the subway and the Staten Island Ferry while commuting with other immigrants going to their various jobs. I began to wonder about these peoples’ lives—what versions of themselves they brought to America and what they left behind in their countries of origin. Here they were in America, hustling to get to their jobs on time, their heads bowed underneath vacation ads displaying white sand beaches in places some once called home. Struck by this irony, I began to write. The character of Patsy came to me and refused to leave, even through the publication of my first novel and well after. So, this book has been with me for seven years.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Writing the story of a woman, a mother who defies cultural and societal norms by abandoning her daughter in her quest for personal freedom, and by choosing to love the way she wants to love with her childhood best friend, Cicely. It took me some time to get comfortable with that angle of the story, but I realized early on that I couldn’t judge Patsy the way other people might. I had to be open to telling her story and portraying her as authentically as possible, knowing that there are women who grapple with this very same dilemma—feeling forced into motherhood by societal pressures, unable to live up to the high standards of the maternal role. Patsy didn’t have the opportunity to explore her own identity before becoming a mother. Her greatest desire is to find her place in the world, trying to define herself in a world that already defines her. Once I started to listen to that, I no longer found it challenging to step into her shoes and walk the miles with her. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
Lately, I’ve been writing on the New Jersey Transit during my commute to Princeton, where I’ve been teaching this past year. But I mostly write in my study. Early morning and mid-afternoon are the perfect times for me. I try to write every day. If that isn’t possible—since we’re human and we need breathers—I read, watch television, and spend time with my loved ones. I find that the majority of my inspiration comes from just living my life, so I take my non-writing time as seriously as I do my writing.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process? 
I was once that reader who devoured books without ever thinking about the process of how those books got to me in the first place. I didn’t know the sheer amount of work it took behind the scenes for a book to get on my bookshelf. I’m grateful for the team I have and for the opportunity to reach so many people. 

5. What are you reading right now? 
I’m reading Warsan Shire’s Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth. It’s one of the best poetry collections I’ve read in a while.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
There are so many authors who I think deserve wider recognition. There’s Sanderia Faye, author of Mourner’s Bench; Tracy Chiles McGhee, author of Melting the Blues; Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, author of Blue Talk and Love; JP Howard, an exceptional poet and author of Say Mirror; and Cheryl Boyce Taylor, who has written several collections of poetry, including my favorite, Arrival. 

7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing Patsy, what would say? 
I would tell myself to relax, breathe, and trust the process. 

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
When I was first published, I used to read reviews on Goodreads and Amazon. But a very good mentor, who happens to be a renowned author, told me never to do that since reviews are really conversations between readers—that an author has no business being in that conversation unless she’s invited. That made perfect sense to me. Once I was able to block out that extra noise—both good and bad—I was able to completely focus on my next project.

9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
That would be diversifying the gate keepers, not just in terms of race, but also class and culture. Expand the industry so that we have all different types of people of color; that there would be no such thing as a model minority of the year, but a celebration of everyone. Though I’ve been lucky to be surrounded and championed by people who understand me and get what I’m doing, deep down I question my belonging. I know that many writers of color who are in the game are anxious that the door might close soon—that our time might be up when the industry yawns and moves on to the next thing. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
Elizabeth Strout once told me to keep my head down and write. That’s the greatest advice I’ve ever gotten. At the end of the day, we have to remind ourselves why we write and why it’s important for us to tell these stories. The universe will take care of the rest. 

Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of the novel Patsy.

Ten Questions for Domenica Ruta

5.28.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Domenica Ruta, whose novel, Last Day, is out today from Spiegel & Grau. The fates of three sets of characters converge during the celebration of an ancient holiday anticipating the planet’s demise. A bookish wunderkind looks for love from a much older tattoo artist she met at last year’s Last Day BBQ; a young woman with a troubled past searches for her long-lost adoptive brother; three astronauts on the International Space Station contemplate their lives on Earth from afar. Last Day brings these characters and others together as they embark on a last-chance quest for redemption. Domenica Ruta is the author of the New York Times best-selling memoir With or Without You (Spiegel & Grau, 2013). A graduate of Oberlin College, Ruta received an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas in Austin. Her short fiction has been published in the Boston Review, the Indiana Review, and Epoch. Her essays have appeared in Ninth Letter, New York magazine, and elsewhere. She reviews books for the New York Times, Oprah.com, and the American Scholar, and works as an editor, curator, and advocate for solo moms at ESME.com. She lives in New York City.

1. How long did it take you to write Last Day?
I started playing around with it immediately after my memoir, With or Without You, was published, but I was also writing another novel at the same time, trying to see which one would win my full attention. When I found out I was pregnant, I began pounding the keys of my laptop every day for a couple of hours to force out an ugly first draft before I became a single mother. In the first six months of my son’s life I wrote nothing. After that I worked a little at a time whenever I could, meaning whenever I could afford childcare. So the short answer is five years, but not continuously.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
The most challenging thing for me as an author of this and probably any book I write is the way publishing is a performative act of maturation. Writers grow up in public. If you compare the first book written by your favorite author with one they wrote fifteen or twenty years later the difference in quality is almost always astounding. And this is the same human using the same tools. So it is challenging for me to let go of a work and set it free into the world when I am positive I could still make it better, if only I had a few more decades. But that’s what the next book is for, and the one after that.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write mostly in bed, with occasional commutes to my kitchen table. I try to write every week, sometimes every day, sometimes not. As a mother of a small child, there is no set schedule. I write when I can, usually when the kid is at school, and other pockets I can find.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
When my publisher and editor, Cindy Spiegel, lost her incredible imprint Spiegel & Grau after a banner year, just a few months before Last Day was published—this was not something I ever expected would happen.

5. What are you reading right now?
In Love with the World by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche and Secrets We Kept by Kristal Sital.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Why doesn’t the Octavia Butler estate have ten different Netflix specials in the works right now?

7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing Last Day, what would say?
I wish I had something that would create the mystique of myself as a precious artist, alchemist of verbs and nouns, thinker of Big Thoughts, but to be perfectly honest, if I could go back in time before this novel I would advise myself to get savvy about the whole social media game. It is so important for authors to market themselves and their work in this way, which I was totally oblivious to until very recently. 

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Self-doubt, self-hatred, self-sabotage; I love more than anything to be alone in my imagination, but sometimes it is a dangerous place.

9. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
Not unless it is fully funded. I cannot in good conscience recommend that anyone without a trust fund or wealthy no-strings-attached parents/patrons go into debt for a degree in the arts. Read every single interview in the Paris Review instead; you will learn there are as many different ways to write a book as there are writers. Read widely across genres and write terrible drafts of things you are ashamed of. But if an MFA program is fully funded, then definitely go. Being a professional student is the most fun job I’ve ever had.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Anne Lamott said something along the lines of “write a shitty first draft.” This is the only way I can summon the courage to write anything. I am human and flawed and this is never more evident than when I see it spelled out in my words on a screen or a sheet of paper. But as bad as that first draft may be—and sometimes it’s not as bad as my first impression of it is—I have a chance to make it better one day at a time. That is the craft. That is what makes a writer: the willingness to rewrite a thousand times if necessary. 

Domenica Ruta, author of Last Day.

(Credit: Charlie Mahoney)

Ten Questions for Mona Awad

6.11.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Mona Awad, whose new novel, Bunny, is published today by Viking. A riveting exploration of female relationships, desire, and the creative and destructive power of the imagination, Bunny is the story of Samantha Heather Mackey, an outsider in the MFA program at New England’s Warren University, a scholarship student who prefers the company of her own dark imagination. Repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort, who call one another “Bunny,” Samantha is nevertheless intrigued when she receives an invitation to the group’s fabled “Smut Salon” and she begins a descent into the Bunny cult and their ritualistic off-campus workshop, where the edges of reality start to blur. Mona Awad is the award-winning author of 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. The recipient of an MFA in fiction from Brown University and a PhD in English and creative writing from the University of Denver, she has published work in Time, VICE, Electric Literature, McSweeney’s, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. 

1. How long did it take you to write Bunny?
Two years. Three months to write the first draft and then a year and a half of revision

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Not giving up on it. I had a blast writing the first draft of Bunny and just let myself take risks and go down rabbit holes, but in the revision, I had to really reign it in and flesh it out. That took time. It didn’t help that every time I described the novel to someone, I burst out laughing because the story sounded so crazy to me. And then I’d panic. I’d think: what I’m writing is clearly insane. Pushing through that and continuing to embrace the madness of it was scary. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
When I’m working on a book, I try to write every morning for at least a few hours. I work in bed, at my desk or in the Writer’s Room of Boston. I’m pretty rigid about it, just because it really does help build momentum with the story and the voice to work on a story every day. Once I feel I’m emotionally inside the world of the story, I begin to work at night too. Towards the end, I work whenever I possibly can. 

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Just how much people are interested in reality when we’re talking about fiction, in which parts of the story actually literally happened to you (the author). In some ways, I get it. Fiction is a reflection/refraction of reality, in some ways fiction is the ultimate form of memoir so it makes sense for people to be curious about how much of the writer’s actual life is mirrored in the story, but to me the most exciting things are always the things I make up. In my view, that’s the most telling stuff in the novel, not the stuff that literally maps to something that literally happened. 

5. What are you reading right now?
Right now, I’m reading Tea Mutonji’s Shut Up, You’re Pretty and John Waters’s Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder. I’m enjoying them both immensely. 

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Russell Hoban. I love the way he weaves the magical into the everyday and I love the way he writes loneliness. The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz is a brilliant work of fabulist fiction, but it’s also a real meditation on the bond between a father and a son, and the desire for and cost of personal freedom. Turtle Diary is wonderful too. It’s just about two lonely people who decide to free a turtle at the London Zoo, but the characters are handled with such empathy, nuance and depth. 

7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing Bunny, what would say?
Trust yourself more. 

8. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
Depends on the writer, the program and the project. I was very fortunate. My MFA was fully funded and when I started it, I was already halfway finished with my first novel, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, which I completed there and turned into my MFA thesis. There was also a writer on the faculty, Brian Evenson, whom I admired deeply and was very keen to work with. So I knew exactly what I planned to do while I was there, I just needed time and space to work, and some guidance and encouragement from a community I could trust. I was also older—in my thirties—when I did it. So although I had lots of growing to do as a writer, I’d already found my voice, knew what I was going to work on and I’d lived a little. I think all of those factors contributed to why it was such a successful experience for me. It might not be the right thing for someone else and I don’t believe that you need it to write.

9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Me. My own insecurities and impatience and shortcomings that show up when I write. Also my difficulty getting a routine going. My best work comes out of a sustained, daily practice of writing and sometimes that isn’t possible.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Write the shitty first draft. A finished story is better than a perfect story that just lives in your mind. And be curious. So much can come of being willing to shut up and pay close attention to the world around you. 

Mona Awad, author of Bunny.

Ten Questions for Nicole Dennis-Benn

6.4.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Nicole Dennis-Benn, whose second novel, Patsy, is out today from Liveright, an imprint of W. W. Norton. The novel tells the story of two women, Patsy and her daughter, Tru. After leaving behind Tru for a life she’s always wanted in New York, Patsy ends up working as a nanny caring for wealthy children while Tru rebuilds a faltering relationship with her father back in Jamaica. Jumping back and forth between narratives in New York and Jamaica, Dennis-Benn has created “a stunningly powerful intergenerational novel,” as Alexander Chee writes, “about the price—the ransom really—women must pay to choose themselves, their lives, their value, their humanity.” Nicole Dennis-Benn is the author of Here Comes the Sun, a New York Times Notable Book and winner of the Lambda Literary Award. Born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, she teaches at Princeton and lives with her wife in Brooklyn, New York.

1. How long did it take you to write Patsy?
For me, the process begins way before I put pen to paper. Patsy was conceived in the fall of 2012, when I started as an adjunct at the College of Staten Island. I was writing Here Comes the Sun at the time, but would scribble notes about my early morning travel on the subway and the Staten Island Ferry while commuting with other immigrants going to their various jobs. I began to wonder about these peoples’ lives—what versions of themselves they brought to America and what they left behind in their countries of origin. Here they were in America, hustling to get to their jobs on time, their heads bowed underneath vacation ads displaying white sand beaches in places some once called home. Struck by this irony, I began to write. The character of Patsy came to me and refused to leave, even through the publication of my first novel and well after. So, this book has been with me for seven years.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Writing the story of a woman, a mother who defies cultural and societal norms by abandoning her daughter in her quest for personal freedom, and by choosing to love the way she wants to love with her childhood best friend, Cicely. It took me some time to get comfortable with that angle of the story, but I realized early on that I couldn’t judge Patsy the way other people might. I had to be open to telling her story and portraying her as authentically as possible, knowing that there are women who grapple with this very same dilemma—feeling forced into motherhood by societal pressures, unable to live up to the high standards of the maternal role. Patsy didn’t have the opportunity to explore her own identity before becoming a mother. Her greatest desire is to find her place in the world, trying to define herself in a world that already defines her. Once I started to listen to that, I no longer found it challenging to step into her shoes and walk the miles with her. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
Lately, I’ve been writing on the New Jersey Transit during my commute to Princeton, where I’ve been teaching this past year. But I mostly write in my study. Early morning and mid-afternoon are the perfect times for me. I try to write every day. If that isn’t possible—since we’re human and we need breathers—I read, watch television, and spend time with my loved ones. I find that the majority of my inspiration comes from just living my life, so I take my non-writing time as seriously as I do my writing.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process? 
I was once that reader who devoured books without ever thinking about the process of how those books got to me in the first place. I didn’t know the sheer amount of work it took behind the scenes for a book to get on my bookshelf. I’m grateful for the team I have and for the opportunity to reach so many people. 

5. What are you reading right now? 
I’m reading Warsan Shire’s Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth. It’s one of the best poetry collections I’ve read in a while.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
There are so many authors who I think deserve wider recognition. There’s Sanderia Faye, author of Mourner’s Bench; Tracy Chiles McGhee, author of Melting the Blues; Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, author of Blue Talk and Love; JP Howard, an exceptional poet and author of Say Mirror; and Cheryl Boyce Taylor, who has written several collections of poetry, including my favorite, Arrival. 

7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing Patsy, what would say? 
I would tell myself to relax, breathe, and trust the process. 

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
When I was first published, I used to read reviews on Goodreads and Amazon. But a very good mentor, who happens to be a renowned author, told me never to do that since reviews are really conversations between readers—that an author has no business being in that conversation unless she’s invited. That made perfect sense to me. Once I was able to block out that extra noise—both good and bad—I was able to completely focus on my next project.

9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
That would be diversifying the gate keepers, not just in terms of race, but also class and culture. Expand the industry so that we have all different types of people of color; that there would be no such thing as a model minority of the year, but a celebration of everyone. Though I’ve been lucky to be surrounded and championed by people who understand me and get what I’m doing, deep down I question my belonging. I know that many writers of color who are in the game are anxious that the door might close soon—that our time might be up when the industry yawns and moves on to the next thing. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
Elizabeth Strout once told me to keep my head down and write. That’s the greatest advice I’ve ever gotten. At the end of the day, we have to remind ourselves why we write and why it’s important for us to tell these stories. The universe will take care of the rest. 

Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of the novel Patsy.

Ten Questions for Catherine Chung

6.18.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Catherine Chung, whose second novel, The Tenth Muse, is out today from Ecco. Growing up with a Chinese mother (who eventually abandons the family) and an American father who served in World War II (but refuses to discuss the past), the novel’s protagonist, Katherine, finds comfort and beauty in the way mathematics brings meaning and order to chaos. As an adult she embarks on a quest to solve the Riemann hypothesis, the greatest unsolved mathematical problem of her time, and turns to a theorem that may hold the answer to an even greater question: Who is she? Catherine Chung is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a Director’s Visitorship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Her first novel, Forgotten Country, was a Booklist, Bookpage, and San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2012. She has published work in the New York Times, the Rumpus, and Granta, and is a fiction editor at Guernica. She lives in New York City.

1. How long did it take you to write The Tenth Muse?
From when I first had the idea to when I turned in the first draft, it took about five years, with many starts and stops in between.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
My mind! My mind is the biggest challenge in everything I do. I write to try to set myself free, and then find myself snagged on my own limitations. It’s maddening and absurd and so, so humbling. With this book, it was a tie between trying to learn the math I was writing about—which I should have seen coming—and having to confront certain habits of mind I didn’t even know I had. I found myself constantly reining my narrator in, even though I meant for her to be fierce and brilliant and strong. She’s a braver person than me, and I had to really fight my impulse to hold her back, to let her barrel ahead with her own convictions and decisions, despite my own hesitations and fears. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write where I can, when I can. I’ve written in bathtubs of hotel rooms so as not to wake my companions, I’ve written on napkins in restaurants, I’ve written on my phone on the train, sitting under a tree or on a rock, and on my own arm in a pinch. I’ve walked down streets repeating lines to myself when I’ve been caught without a pen or my phone. I’ve also written on my laptop or in a notebook at cafes and in libraries or in bed or at my dining table. As to how often I write, it depends on childcare, what I’m working on, on deadlines, on life!

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
I wish it didn’t turn me into a crazy person, but it does. A pleasant surprise is just how kind so many people have been—withdrawing from the real world to write can be very isolating; it was lovely to emerge and be reminded of the community I write to be a part of.

5. What are you reading right now?
Right now I’m reading Honeyfish—an absolutely gorgeous collection of poetry by Lauren Alleyne, and the wonderful The Weil Conjectures—forthcoming!—about the siblings Simone and Andre Weil, by Karen Olsson. I’m in love with Christine H. Lee’s column Backyard Politics, which is about urban farming, family, trauma, love, resilience, growth—basically everything I care about. It’s been a very good few year of reading for me! I’m obsessed with Ali Smith and devoured her latest, Spring. I thought Women Talking by Miriam Toews and Trust Exercise by Susan Choi were both extraordinary. Helen Oyeyemi is one of my absolute favorites, and Gingerbread was pure brilliance and spicy delight. Jean Kwok’s recent release, Searching for Sylvie Lee, is a stunner; Mary Beth Keane’s Ask Again, Yes broke me with its tenderness and humanity; and Tea Obreht’s forthcoming Inland is magnificent. It took my breath away.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Ali Smith and Tove Jansson are both widely recognized, especially in their home countries—but I feel like they should be more widely read here than they are. I didn’t discover Smith until last year, and when I did it was like a hundred doors opening in my mind at once: She’s so playful and wise, she seems to know everything and can bring together ideas that seem completely unrelated until she connects them in surprising and beautiful ways, and her work is filled with such warmth and good humor. And Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book is so delicious, so sharp and clean and clear with the purity and wildness of nature and childhood. Ko Un is a Korean poet who’s well known in Korea, but not here—he’s incredible, his poems changed my idea of what poetry is and what it can do. I routinely e-mail his poems to people, just so they know. Bae Suah and Eun Heekyung are Korean fiction writers I admire—I really like reading work in translation because the conventions of storytelling are different everywhere, and I love being reminded of that, and being shown the ways my ideas of story can be exploded. Also, how Rita Zoey Chin’s memoir Let the Tornado Come isn’t a movie or TV show yet, I don’t know. Same with Dan Sheehan’s novel Restless Souls and Vaddey Ratner’s devastating In The Shadow of the Banyan. And Samantha Harvey is a beautiful, thoughtful, revelatory writer who I’m surprised isn’t more widely read in the States.

7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing The Tenth Muse, what would say?
I’d say, “Hey, I know you’re worried about things like finishing and selling this book, and also health insurance and finding a job and not ending up on the street, and all that will more or less work out, but more pressingly, here I am from the future, freaking out because apparently I’ve figured out time travel and also either bypassed or am creating various temporal paradoxes by visiting you now. Clearly we have bigger issues than this book you’re working on or the current moment you’re in, so can you take a moment to help me figure some things out? Like how should I now divide my time between the present and the past? Am I obligated to try to change the outcome of various historical events? Should I visit the distant, distant past before there were people? Should I visit the immediate future? Do I even want to know what happens next and if I do will I become obsessed with trying to edit my life and history in the way that I edit my stories? Help!”

8. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
I don’t see it as a one-size-fits-all situation—I think sure, why not, if it’s fully funded and you feel like you’re getting something out of it. Otherwise, no. The key is to protect your own writing and trust your gut as far as what you want and need.

9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My mind, always my mind! Related: self-doubt, self-censorship, and shame.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Back in my twenties, when I was writing my first book, I was eating breakfast at the MacDowell Colony, and this older writer asked me where he could find my published work. I said nowhere. I had an essay coming out in a journal soon, but that was it. He was astonished that I’d been let in and made a big production out of my never having published before, offering to read my forthcoming essay and give me a grade on it. It was weird, but it also sort of bounced off me. Anyway, there was a British poet sitting next to me at that breakfast named Susan Wicks, and some days later, as I was going to fetch some wood (it was winter, we all had our own fireplaces and wood delivered to our porches—have I mentioned MacDowell is paradise?) I opened the side door to my porch, and a little letter fluttered to the ground. It was dated the day of the breakfast, and it was from Susan Wicks. It said: Dear Cathy, I was so angry at the conversation that happened at breakfast! If you are here, it is because you deserve to be here. And you should know there is nothing more precious than this moment of anonymity when no one is watching you. You will never have this freedom again. Enjoy it. Have fun! And have a nice day! And then she drew a smiley face and signed her name. Susan Wicks. I think of her and that advice and her kindness all the time.

Catherine Chung, author of The Tenth Muse.

(Credit: David Noles)

Ten Questions for Chanelle Benz

6.25.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Chanelle Benz, whose novel The Gone Dead is out today from Ecco. As the novel opens, Billie James returns to the shack she inherited from her father, a renowned Black poet who died unexpectedly when Billie was four years old, in the Mississippi Delta. As she encounters the locals, including the McGees, a family whose history is entangled with hers, she finds out that she herself went missing the day her father died. The mystery intensifies as “the narrator and narrative tug at Mississippi’s past and future with equal force,” Kiese Laymon writes. Chanelle Benz has published short stories in Guernica, Granta, Electric Literature, the American Reader, Fence, and the Cupboard. She is the recipient of an O. Henry Prize. Her story collection The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead was published in 2017 by Ecco Press and was named a Best Book of 2017 by the San Francisco Chronicle. It was also longlisted for the 2018 PEN/Robert Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and the 2017 Story Prize. It won the 2018 Sergio Troncoso Award for Best First Fiction and the Philosophical Society of Texas 2018 Book Award for fiction. She lives in Memphis, where she teaches at Rhodes College.

1. How long did it take you to write The Gone Dead
About five years, though some of that time I was also working on finishing my story collection.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Getting the voice of the main protagonist right. I tried different points of view, dialing it up and down, but it wasn’t until I shifted my attention to developing the voices of the characters around her that she finally came into relief.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
I write in bed, at the dining room table, and occasionally in my actual office. When I’m on a deadline, I try to dedicate some hours late morning/early afternoon, or every other day if I’m teaching. I also write at night if need be—I have a small child so I can’t afford to be particular. But I’ve always tried to be flexible because I came up in the theatre which demands you come onstage whenever and however you may be feeling.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process? 
That some readers see the book as a thriller or mystery, which I’m totally comfortable with, but it was unexpected. I felt that I was structuring the novel the only way it could work. But then so many of the stories I am drawn to are mysteries, whether existential, psychological, or the more classic murder mystery.

5. What are you reading right now? 
Casey Cep’s The Furious Hours and Daisy Johnston’s Everything Under.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
Jennifer Clement’s work is so fantastic, so luminous, so cutting that I don’t understand why she’s not wildly famous.

7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing The Gone Dead, what would say? 
Don’t be careful; definitely not in the first draft. I was so worried when I began the book about doing the time and its people justice that for quite a while I didn’t let my imagination take the lead, which can happen when grappling with the dark side of history.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
Student loan debt.

9. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
Yes, as long as it doesn’t put them in debt. I found that the time and space to write was an incredible, powerful gift.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
That’s impossible for me to narrow down! But I often think of something the theatre director and theorist Jerzy Grotowski said: “Whenever the ground shakes beneath your feet, go back to your roots.” (I may be paraphrasing there.) I interpret this as whenever you fail or meet with rejection or some experience that saps your heart, that you remember why you started writing, what you fell in love with reading, whatever it was that first inspired you.

Chanelle Benz, author of the novel The Gone Dead.

(Credit: Kim Newmoney)

Ten Questions for Catherine Chung

6.18.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Catherine Chung, whose second novel, The Tenth Muse, is out today from Ecco. Growing up with a Chinese mother (who eventually abandons the family) and an American father who served in World War II (but refuses to discuss the past), the novel’s protagonist, Katherine, finds comfort and beauty in the way mathematics brings meaning and order to chaos. As an adult she embarks on a quest to solve the Riemann hypothesis, the greatest unsolved mathematical problem of her time, and turns to a theorem that may hold the answer to an even greater question: Who is she? Catherine Chung is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a Director’s Visitorship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Her first novel, Forgotten Country, was a Booklist, Bookpage, and San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2012. She has published work in the New York Times, the Rumpus, and Granta, and is a fiction editor at Guernica. She lives in New York City.

1. How long did it take you to write The Tenth Muse?
From when I first had the idea to when I turned in the first draft, it took about five years, with many starts and stops in between.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
My mind! My mind is the biggest challenge in everything I do. I write to try to set myself free, and then find myself snagged on my own limitations. It’s maddening and absurd and so, so humbling. With this book, it was a tie between trying to learn the math I was writing about—which I should have seen coming—and having to confront certain habits of mind I didn’t even know I had. I found myself constantly reining my narrator in, even though I meant for her to be fierce and brilliant and strong. She’s a braver person than me, and I had to really fight my impulse to hold her back, to let her barrel ahead with her own convictions and decisions, despite my own hesitations and fears. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write where I can, when I can. I’ve written in bathtubs of hotel rooms so as not to wake my companions, I’ve written on napkins in restaurants, I’ve written on my phone on the train, sitting under a tree or on a rock, and on my own arm in a pinch. I’ve walked down streets repeating lines to myself when I’ve been caught without a pen or my phone. I’ve also written on my laptop or in a notebook at cafes and in libraries or in bed or at my dining table. As to how often I write, it depends on childcare, what I’m working on, on deadlines, on life!

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
I wish it didn’t turn me into a crazy person, but it does. A pleasant surprise is just how kind so many people have been—withdrawing from the real world to write can be very isolating; it was lovely to emerge and be reminded of the community I write to be a part of.

5. What are you reading right now?
Right now I’m reading Honeyfish—an absolutely gorgeous collection of poetry by Lauren Alleyne, and the wonderful The Weil Conjectures—forthcoming!—about the siblings Simone and Andre Weil, by Karen Olsson. I’m in love with Christine H. Lee’s column Backyard Politics, which is about urban farming, family, trauma, love, resilience, growth—basically everything I care about. It’s been a very good few year of reading for me! I’m obsessed with Ali Smith and devoured her latest, Spring. I thought Women Talking by Miriam Toews and Trust Exercise by Susan Choi were both extraordinary. Helen Oyeyemi is one of my absolute favorites, and Gingerbread was pure brilliance and spicy delight. Jean Kwok’s recent release, Searching for Sylvie Lee, is a stunner; Mary Beth Keane’s Ask Again, Yes broke me with its tenderness and humanity; and Tea Obreht’s forthcoming Inland is magnificent. It took my breath away.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Ali Smith and Tove Jansson are both widely recognized, especially in their home countries—but I feel like they should be more widely read here than they are. I didn’t discover Smith until last year, and when I did it was like a hundred doors opening in my mind at once: She’s so playful and wise, she seems to know everything and can bring together ideas that seem completely unrelated until she connects them in surprising and beautiful ways, and her work is filled with such warmth and good humor. And Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book is so delicious, so sharp and clean and clear with the purity and wildness of nature and childhood. Ko Un is a Korean poet who’s well known in Korea, but not here—he’s incredible, his poems changed my idea of what poetry is and what it can do. I routinely e-mail his poems to people, just so they know. Bae Suah and Eun Heekyung are Korean fiction writers I admire—I really like reading work in translation because the conventions of storytelling are different everywhere, and I love being reminded of that, and being shown the ways my ideas of story can be exploded. Also, how Rita Zoey Chin’s memoir Let the Tornado Come isn’t a movie or TV show yet, I don’t know. Same with Dan Sheehan’s novel Restless Souls and Vaddey Ratner’s devastating In The Shadow of the Banyan. And Samantha Harvey is a beautiful, thoughtful, revelatory writer who I’m surprised isn’t more widely read in the States.

7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing The Tenth Muse, what would say?
I’d say, “Hey, I know you’re worried about things like finishing and selling this book, and also health insurance and finding a job and not ending up on the street, and all that will more or less work out, but more pressingly, here I am from the future, freaking out because apparently I’ve figured out time travel and also either bypassed or am creating various temporal paradoxes by visiting you now. Clearly we have bigger issues than this book you’re working on or the current moment you’re in, so can you take a moment to help me figure some things out? Like how should I now divide my time between the present and the past? Am I obligated to try to change the outcome of various historical events? Should I visit the distant, distant past before there were people? Should I visit the immediate future? Do I even want to know what happens next and if I do will I become obsessed with trying to edit my life and history in the way that I edit my stories? Help!”

8. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
I don’t see it as a one-size-fits-all situation—I think sure, why not, if it’s fully funded and you feel like you’re getting something out of it. Otherwise, no. The key is to protect your own writing and trust your gut as far as what you want and need.

9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My mind, always my mind! Related: self-doubt, self-censorship, and shame.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Back in my twenties, when I was writing my first book, I was eating breakfast at the MacDowell Colony, and this older writer asked me where he could find my published work. I said nowhere. I had an essay coming out in a journal soon, but that was it. He was astonished that I’d been let in and made a big production out of my never having published before, offering to read my forthcoming essay and give me a grade on it. It was weird, but it also sort of bounced off me. Anyway, there was a British poet sitting next to me at that breakfast named Susan Wicks, and some days later, as I was going to fetch some wood (it was winter, we all had our own fireplaces and wood delivered to our porches—have I mentioned MacDowell is paradise?) I opened the side door to my porch, and a little letter fluttered to the ground. It was dated the day of the breakfast, and it was from Susan Wicks. It said: Dear Cathy, I was so angry at the conversation that happened at breakfast! If you are here, it is because you deserve to be here. And you should know there is nothing more precious than this moment of anonymity when no one is watching you. You will never have this freedom again. Enjoy it. Have fun! And have a nice day! And then she drew a smiley face and signed her name. Susan Wicks. I think of her and that advice and her kindness all the time.

Catherine Chung, author of The Tenth Muse.

(Credit: David Noles)

Ten Questions for Peter Orner

7.2.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Peter Orner, whose story collection Maggie & Other Stories is out today from Little, Brown. Forty-four interlocking stories—some as short as a few paragraphs, none longer than twenty pages—are paired with a novella, “Walt Kaplan Is Broke,” that together form a composite portrait of life so intricately drawn, line by line, strand by strand, that it shimmers with the heaviness and lightness of the human experience. As Yiyun Li wrote in her prepublication praise, “This book, exquisitely written, is as necessary and expansive as life.” Peter Orner is the author of two novels, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo and Love and Shame and Love, and two story collections, Esther Stories and Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge. His latest book, Am I Alone Here?, a memoir, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Orner’s fiction and nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly, Granta, the Paris Review, McSweeney’s, the Southern Review, and many other publications. 

1. How long did it take you to write Maggie Brown & Others?
Hard to say. Stories come slow and I try not to force them. One, “An Ineffectual Tribute to Len” I began in 1999. Many of the others I carried around for years before I managed to put them right, or sort of right. The novella took about ten years. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
For me the stories in a collection should be both disparate and—somehow—cohesive. Cohesive isn’t the right word. They should talk to each other, I guess is what I’m trying to say. And I like for stories to talk to each other across generations, across geography. So they can’t all be speaking in the same voice, and yet, like I say, they’re communicating, or at least trying to. This takes years and a lot of fiddling, in the sense of fiddling as tinkering—and fiddling as in fiddling around, riffing, etc. (I flunked violin, but I still have aspirations.) 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Whenever I’m not reading, and I read all the time. I squeeze some of my own stuff inbetween. Mornings are the best when my head is a little less cluttered. 

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Though this is my sixth book, I take nothing for granted. When the book comes in the mail I’m still astonished by the physicality of it. For days I walk around with it, sleep with it. It’s weird. I wish I wasn’t serious.  

5. What are you reading right now? 
The poetry of Ada Limón.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
Randal Kenan, author of Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, a seminal story collection published in the early ’90s. 

7. Do you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
It’s like asking, “So, should I marry this guy?” Well, I dunno. Is he kind? How about the snoring? If the question is, does a writer need an MFA? No. Can it help to be surrounded by other neurotics who love literature? Sometimes. Sure. Doesn’t make it any less lonely though, which as it should be. 

8. What has changed about your writing process over the years, since writing your first book? 
If anything, I feel less confident than ever I’m going to be able to make a story work. Back around the time of Esther Stories I remember days when I felt I could make a story out of anything. I was kidding myself, but sometimes kidding yourself tricks you into working harder. 

9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
Myself, myself, myself.  

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
My old teacher and friend Andre Dubus would often say: “You got to walk around with it. Walk around with it. You’ll get it.” He meant, in a sense, that sometimes you got to get up and leave the story, walk around, live a little—and when you least expect it, there’s your ending. 

Peter Orner, author of Maggie Brown & Other Stories.

(Credit: Pawel Kruk)

Ten Questions for Chanelle Benz

6.25.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Chanelle Benz, whose novel The Gone Dead is out today from Ecco. As the novel opens, Billie James returns to the shack she inherited from her father, a renowned Black poet who died unexpectedly when Billie was four years old, in the Mississippi Delta. As she encounters the locals, including the McGees, a family whose history is entangled with hers, she finds out that she herself went missing the day her father died. The mystery intensifies as “the narrator and narrative tug at Mississippi’s past and future with equal force,” Kiese Laymon writes. Chanelle Benz has published short stories in Guernica, Granta, Electric Literature, the American Reader, Fence, and the Cupboard. She is the recipient of an O. Henry Prize. Her story collection The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead was published in 2017 by Ecco Press and was named a Best Book of 2017 by the San Francisco Chronicle. It was also longlisted for the 2018 PEN/Robert Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and the 2017 Story Prize. It won the 2018 Sergio Troncoso Award for Best First Fiction and the Philosophical Society of Texas 2018 Book Award for fiction. She lives in Memphis, where she teaches at Rhodes College.

1. How long did it take you to write The Gone Dead
About five years, though some of that time I was also working on finishing my story collection.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Getting the voice of the main protagonist right. I tried different points of view, dialing it up and down, but it wasn’t until I shifted my attention to developing the voices of the characters around her that she finally came into relief.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
I write in bed, at the dining room table, and occasionally in my actual office. When I’m on a deadline, I try to dedicate some hours late morning/early afternoon, or every other day if I’m teaching. I also write at night if need be—I have a small child so I can’t afford to be particular. But I’ve always tried to be flexible because I came up in the theatre which demands you come onstage whenever and however you may be feeling.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process? 
That some readers see the book as a thriller or mystery, which I’m totally comfortable with, but it was unexpected. I felt that I was structuring the novel the only way it could work. But then so many of the stories I am drawn to are mysteries, whether existential, psychological, or the more classic murder mystery.

5. What are you reading right now? 
Casey Cep’s The Furious Hours and Daisy Johnston’s Everything Under.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
Jennifer Clement’s work is so fantastic, so luminous, so cutting that I don’t understand why she’s not wildly famous.

7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing The Gone Dead, what would say? 
Don’t be careful; definitely not in the first draft. I was so worried when I began the book about doing the time and its people justice that for quite a while I didn’t let my imagination take the lead, which can happen when grappling with the dark side of history.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
Student loan debt.

9. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
Yes, as long as it doesn’t put them in debt. I found that the time and space to write was an incredible, powerful gift.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
That’s impossible for me to narrow down! But I often think of something the theatre director and theorist Jerzy Grotowski said: “Whenever the ground shakes beneath your feet, go back to your roots.” (I may be paraphrasing there.) I interpret this as whenever you fail or meet with rejection or some experience that saps your heart, that you remember why you started writing, what you fell in love with reading, whatever it was that first inspired you.

Chanelle Benz, author of the novel The Gone Dead.

(Credit: Kim Newmoney)

Ten Questions for Peter Orner

7.2.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Peter Orner, whose story collection Maggie & Other Stories is out today from Little, Brown. Forty-four interlocking stories—some as short as a few paragraphs, none longer than twenty pages—are paired with a novella, “Walt Kaplan Is Broke,” that together form a composite portrait of life so intricately drawn, line by line, strand by strand, that it shimmers with the heaviness and lightness of the human experience. As Yiyun Li wrote in her prepublication praise, “This book, exquisitely written, is as necessary and expansive as life.” Peter Orner is the author of two novels, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo and Love and Shame and Love, and two story collections, Esther Stories and Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge. His latest book, Am I Alone Here?, a memoir, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Orner’s fiction and nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly, Granta, the Paris Review, McSweeney’s, the Southern Review, and many other publications. 

1. How long did it take you to write Maggie Brown & Others?
Hard to say. Stories come slow and I try not to force them. One, “An Ineffectual Tribute to Len” I began in 1999. Many of the others I carried around for years before I managed to put them right, or sort of right. The novella took about ten years. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
For me the stories in a collection should be both disparate and—somehow—cohesive. Cohesive isn’t the right word. They should talk to each other, I guess is what I’m trying to say. And I like for stories to talk to each other across generations, across geography. So they can’t all be speaking in the same voice, and yet, like I say, they’re communicating, or at least trying to. This takes years and a lot of fiddling, in the sense of fiddling as tinkering—and fiddling as in fiddling around, riffing, etc. (I flunked violin, but I still have aspirations.) 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Whenever I’m not reading, and I read all the time. I squeeze some of my own stuff inbetween. Mornings are the best when my head is a little less cluttered. 

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Though this is my sixth book, I take nothing for granted. When the book comes in the mail I’m still astonished by the physicality of it. For days I walk around with it, sleep with it. It’s weird. I wish I wasn’t serious.  

5. What are you reading right now? 
The poetry of Ada Limón.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
Randal Kenan, author of Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, a seminal story collection published in the early ’90s. 

7. Do you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
It’s like asking, “So, should I marry this guy?” Well, I dunno. Is he kind? How about the snoring? If the question is, does a writer need an MFA? No. Can it help to be surrounded by other neurotics who love literature? Sometimes. Sure. Doesn’t make it any less lonely though, which as it should be. 

8. What has changed about your writing process over the years, since writing your first book? 
If anything, I feel less confident than ever I’m going to be able to make a story work. Back around the time of Esther Stories I remember days when I felt I could make a story out of anything. I was kidding myself, but sometimes kidding yourself tricks you into working harder. 

9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
Myself, myself, myself.  

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
My old teacher and friend Andre Dubus would often say: “You got to walk around with it. Walk around with it. You’ll get it.” He meant, in a sense, that sometimes you got to get up and leave the story, walk around, live a little—and when you least expect it, there’s your ending. 

Peter Orner, author of Maggie Brown & Other Stories.

(Credit: Pawel Kruk)

Ten Questions for Caite Dolan-Leach

7.2.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Caite Dolan-Leach, whose novel We Went to the Woods is out today from Random House. Certain that society is on the verge of economic and environmental collapse, five millennials flee to Upstate New York to transform an abandoned farm, once the site of a turn-of-the-century socialist commune, into a utopian compound called Homestead. What starts out as an idyllic sanctuary, however, soon turns dark, deeply isolating, and deadly. Caite Dolan-Leach is a writer and literary translator. She was born in the Finger Lakes region of New York and is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin and the American University in Paris. Her first novel, Dead Letters, was published by Random House in 2017.

1. How long did it take you to write We Went to the Woods
I worked on it for about two and a half years.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
I started the book before the 2016 elections, and my feelings about the characters and their sense of political doom really changed—I had to take a moment to reconsider what they were trying to do and their motivations for doing it. It definitely slowed me down.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
I travel a bit, so the “where” tends to be a variable: sometimes my desk at home, sometimes a café in a different country, sometimes a hotel room. But I work best in the mid-morning, and I try to write at least four days a week.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process? 
This is my second book with Random House, so there weren’t too many surprises. But I’m always struck—and deeply grateful—at how many people are involved in a book’s life, and how much time and effort goes into the publication process. As a young reader, I don’t think I imagined the dozens of people who contribute to just one manuscript, and as a writer, it’s simply amazing.

5. What are you reading right now? 
I just got back from Italy, so I’ve been reading some Italian novels: Sabbia nera by Christina Scalia, and L’amica geniale by Elena Ferrante—I read the English translation a few years ago, but I’ve missed working in Italian, so I’m re-immersing.

6. Who do you trust to be the first reader of your work? 
My husband is always the first person who sets eyes on anything I write.

7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing We Went to the Woods, what would say? 
Don’t do an outline! I did a pretty detailed outline for this book, and I think it changed how I approached the process, and ultimately made it harder.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
Myself. 

9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
I think it’s pretty obvious that we need to be more inclusive as a community. But since I also work as a translator, I’d specifically like to see more books coming from other languages—particularly under-represented ones.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I can’t remember who said it to me, but it’s a truism that I deploy often: Don’t be precious about your writing. By which I mean: Let people read your work, and listen to what they say about it. Obviously, you shouldn’t share until you’re ready, but I think fearing criticism or worrying that people might dislike your work gets in the way of what you really want to write.

Caite Dolin-Leach, author of We Went to the Woods.

(Credit: Dominique Cabrelli)

Ten Questions for Helen Phillips

7.9.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Helen Phillips, whose novel The Need is out today from Simon & Schuster. The Need is an existential thriller about Molly, a scientist and mother of two young children. When a masked intruder appears in her home and demonstrates an eerie familiarity with the inner workings of her life, Molly falls down a mind-bending rabbit hole. A paleobotanist who has recently uncovered an array of peculiar artifacts at her fossil quarry, Molly eventually learns the true identity of the intruder, forcing her to confront an almost impossible moral decision with far-reaching repercussions for her children. Helen Phillips is the author of the story collections Some Possible Solutions (Henry Holt, 2016), which received the 2017 John Gardner Fiction Book Award, and And Yet They Were Happy (Leapfrog Press, 2011); the novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat (Henry Holt, 2015), a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and the children’s adventure book Here Where the Sunbeams Are Green (Delacorte Press, 2012). A graduate of Yale and the Brooklyn College MFA program, she is an associate professor at Brooklyn College. Born and raised in Colorado, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband, artist Adam Douglas Thompson, and their children.

1. How long did it take you to write The Need
I began the long, chaotic document of notes that would grow into The Need in February of 2015, and I handed the final draft in to my editor in September of 2018. But the urgency to write a book about motherhood arose in me in the summer of 2012, when my daughter was born and my sister died, though it took me some years to approach the material. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
The most challenging thing about writing the book was the emotional task of trying to evoke grief on the page. I shied away from that pain in the first draft. When I went back in to revise, it required me to go on an emotional journey. I have never before written something where the primary challenge was not one of craft or character or structure but rather of emotion. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
During the semester, when I’m teaching at Brooklyn College, I typically write one hour a day, five days a week, sometimes in my shared office on campus and sometimes at home. I put on a timer and protect that hour. The moment the timer rings, I’m off to teach or to prepare for class. 

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Simon & Schuster sent me on a pre-publication tour to meet with independent booksellers at Winter Institute in Albuquerque, and in Seattle, the Bay Area, Boston, and New York. It was fascinating to meet indie booksellers from across the country. For one thing, indie booksellers are (unsurprisingly) a very smart, funny, and thoughtful group. And I was surprised and excited by the positivity they seem to feel about the industry overall—they are selling a good number of books, hosting a lot of events, playing a central role in their communities. 

5. What are you reading right now? 
I recently finished Mira Jacob’s Good Talk and Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School, both of which I loved. I’m currently reading Darcey Steinke’s riveting Flash Count Diary. Next up is Rumaan Alam’s That Kind of Mother. And my book tour reads will include Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive, Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias, and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
The Swedish writer Karin Tidbeck, whose novel Amatka is an exquisitely written evocation of a dystopian society where everything that isn’t properly labeled with a name-tag turns to sludge. One of my favorite books in recent years.  

7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing The Need, what would you say?
Don’t be scared of the tension and grief that has to be present in this book.  

8. What has changed about your writing process over the years, since writing your first book? 
When I wrote my first published book, And Yet They Were Happy, as well as three other long-since-thrown-away novels before it, I had a lot more time to write. I had an administrative job and was teaching night classes, but still I could fit in three to four hours of writing time before going to work. When I became a mother, my daily writing time shifted from four hours per day to one hour per day. But it’s a quality-over-quantity thing, or so I tell myself; now I shove the energy of four hours into my single hour. 

9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
The biggest impediment to my writing life is also the biggest inspiration for my writing life: my children. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
I always go to Samuel Beckett’s “Fail again. Fail better.” And, Toni Morrison’s “A failure is just information.” Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about Isak Dinesen’s “I write a little every day, without hope, without despair.” 

Helen Phillips, author of The Need.

Ten Questions for Caite Dolan-Leach

7.2.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Caite Dolan-Leach, whose novel We Went to the Woods is out today from Random House. Certain that society is on the verge of economic and environmental collapse, five millennials flee to Upstate New York to transform an abandoned farm, once the site of a turn-of-the-century socialist commune, into a utopian compound called Homestead. What starts out as an idyllic sanctuary, however, soon turns dark, deeply isolating, and deadly. Caite Dolan-Leach is a writer and literary translator. She was born in the Finger Lakes region of New York and is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin and the American University in Paris. Her first novel, Dead Letters, was published by Random House in 2017.

1. How long did it take you to write We Went to the Woods
I worked on it for about two and a half years.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
I started the book before the 2016 elections, and my feelings about the characters and their sense of political doom really changed—I had to take a moment to reconsider what they were trying to do and their motivations for doing it. It definitely slowed me down.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
I travel a bit, so the “where” tends to be a variable: sometimes my desk at home, sometimes a café in a different country, sometimes a hotel room. But I work best in the mid-morning, and I try to write at least four days a week.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process? 
This is my second book with Random House, so there weren’t too many surprises. But I’m always struck—and deeply grateful—at how many people are involved in a book’s life, and how much time and effort goes into the publication process. As a young reader, I don’t think I imagined the dozens of people who contribute to just one manuscript, and as a writer, it’s simply amazing.

5. What are you reading right now? 
I just got back from Italy, so I’ve been reading some Italian novels: Sabbia nera by Christina Scalia, and L’amica geniale by Elena Ferrante—I read the English translation a few years ago, but I’ve missed working in Italian, so I’m re-immersing.

6. Who do you trust to be the first reader of your work? 
My husband is always the first person who sets eyes on anything I write.

7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing We Went to the Woods, what would say? 
Don’t do an outline! I did a pretty detailed outline for this book, and I think it changed how I approached the process, and ultimately made it harder.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
Myself. 

9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
I think it’s pretty obvious that we need to be more inclusive as a community. But since I also work as a translator, I’d specifically like to see more books coming from other languages—particularly under-represented ones.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I can’t remember who said it to me, but it’s a truism that I deploy often: Don’t be precious about your writing. By which I mean: Let people read your work, and listen to what they say about it. Obviously, you shouldn’t share until you’re ready, but I think fearing criticism or worrying that people might dislike your work gets in the way of what you really want to write.

Caite Dolin-Leach, author of We Went to the Woods.

(Credit: Dominique Cabrelli)

Ten Questions for Courtney Maum

7.16.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Courtney Maum, whose novel Costalegre is published today by Tin House Books. The story of fourteen-year-old Lara, whose mother, the quixotic American heiress Leonora Calaway, has brought her and a group of surrealist artists to an isolated compound in Costalegre, on the coast of Mexico, in 1937, Costalegre is a portrait of a young girl looking for someone to love her. Inspired by the relationship between Peggy Guggenheim and her daughter, Pegeen, the novel is, as Samantha Hunt wrote in her prepublication praise, “as heady, delirious, and heartbreaking as a young girl just beginning to fall in love with the world.” Courtney Maum is also the author of the novels Touch (Putnam, 2017) and I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You (Touchstone, 2014); the chapbook Notes From Mexico (Cupboard Pamphlet, 2012); and the handbook Before and After the Book Deal, forthcoming from Catapult. Her writing has been widely published in such outlets as BuzzFeed; the New York Times; O, the Oprah Magazine; and Modern Loss. She is the founder of the Cabins, a learning collaborative in Norfolk, Connecticut.

1. How long did it take you to write Costalegre?
It was a two-part process. I researched for the better part of a year, and I had a very specific way in which I “digested” my research. I’d transcribe notes into a journal, and when it was full, I would yellow-highlight the most salient facts, and then those would go into a new journal, and from that journal, I would do the yellow-highlighting filtration thing again. Rinse and repeat until I put all of my favorite facts onto a giant piece of sturdy watercolor paper. By that point, I’d basically memorized the stand-out events that I wanted to use, so when I sat down to write the book, I was able to do so very quickly, as if I was writing a diary of events I’d actually lived; of dreams that I’d had. I had a first draft completed in a month. Things changed in revision, of course, but it’s probably the first time in my career that my first draft so closely resembles the finished one. Usually my first draft is just a blueprint of what is to come, and most of the text in that draft doesn’t survive the revision process.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
You know, I have to say that I enjoyed absolutely everything about writing Costalegre. I enjoyed the research, I adored the writing process, and I had a really good experience editing it with Masie Cochran at Tin House. I think the hardest part of writing this particular book was knowing that it would have to transition from this private, curious thing into a “product” that the public would find out about, would not find out about. Would buy, would not buy. This is my third novel, so I’ve learned by now that you can’t plan or “expect” anything in publishing. Plus, I work in marketing and branding on the side, so it’s extra challenging for me to turn off the part of my brain that understands market forces, book sales, public relations, and all that. Definitely the most challenging thing was to not think about the commercial viability of this project so that I could write the book I needed to write.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write my best at home, alone, in silence. I have a nice desk in my bedroom with a lovely view of our yard. That is where I write best. I have a Draconian schedule that has worked well for me over the years. I front load my week: Mondays and Tuesdays are for my writing, only. Other writing—blurbs, book reviews, essays, my marketing and branding work—I tackle that on the other days. I find I’m less resentful about replying to e-mails and whatnot if I’ve given my own writing everything I’ve got in the beginning of the week.

If I have a good week and feel confident about where I am in terms of my writing, I sometimes take Fridays off, and that’s when I’ll do out-of-the-house errands and other domestic stuff that I’ve been avoiding. I try not to work on the weekends, ever. I find that I function best when I’m excited to get back to the writing. If you force yourself to the desk when you’re not feeling it, creative writing feels like a slog. Listen, it can’t feel magical every day, of course, but writing does have the potential to be an act of joy.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process? 
Well, I suppose the most unexpected thing is how different every book publication feels. There really isn’t a magic formula. You can have a book that “got all the things” in terms of media, and it still doesn’t sell for some reason; or you can have a sleeper book that suddenly becomes a cult hit. This is a generalization, but I do feel that many publishers still believe in the existence of that “magic formula.” Maybe the formula existed at some point, but today, with three novels behind me and a nonfiction book on the way, I’ve come to believe that your book’s fate is actually in the hand of readers. There has to be something about your book that makes people want to disappear inside the story. You can’t manufacture that kind of alchemy. It’s out of your control. This can be hard for writers to accept.

5. What are you reading right now?
I’m currently reading a galley of Cameron Dezen Hammon’s This Is My Body. I’m trying to work on an experimental memoir about female desire and reproductive psychology, so I’m finding Cameron’s memoir about her various religious and romantic obsessions really interesting to read. The idea of religious faith—of having it versus not having it—is much on my mind as my five-year-old starts to ask me big questions about life and death and purpose and all that. I grew up without a religion and I often question if I am doing a disservice to my daughter by not presenting her with some religious options. Can this be outsourced? Is there like a religion catering service that will come to your house and present a smorgasbord of all the different options? A religious tasting flight of sorts? Hit me up if there is, I’d like to know about it.

6. Who do you trust to be the first reader of your work?
Myself? (I’m laughing here.) For better or for worse, I’m not the writer who has a circle of trusted writer friends who I workshop new writing with. I didn’t go through an MFA program, and I’ve lived for well over a decade in a really rural area, so I think that I’d been DIY-ing the writing thing for so long, when I finally did grow a writing community that I trusted—and still trust—I’d come to rely so heavily on myself that I just kept doing it. This being said, I think I’m a good reader of my own work. I’m very savage with myself in terms of edits. So I’m my own first reader. When I feel ready for outside criticism and feedback, the manuscript goes to my agent and my husband at the same time.

7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing Costalegre, what would you say?
Oh, that “me” wouldn’t have listened to anything that the “hindsight” me would have to say! Pre-Costalegre me was hell-bent on writing Costalegre, in secret, in a very specific way. I just would have brought that version of me some water and a bowl of mixed nuts and let her do her thing.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
I find it really challenging—especially now that I am a mother—to toggle between the feral, creative, striving version of myself and the version that has to set a behavioral example for my daughter, plan for the meals that we’ll be eating and all that. It’s not just the parenthood thing, though. I’m a very hard worker. I love to work intensely. Left to my own devices, I would hole up in my house and write for five days straight and live on Miso soup and cheese. But my husband is very French, very civilized. He works from home as well and wants me to eat lunch with him and for us both to chat about our days. I find that incredibly difficult to do on work days. This pushing and pulling. I don’t want to “chat,” I want to be alone with the narrative problems in my head and a soft-boiled egg and the work. That’s just on work days though. I’m less of a wildebeest on the weekends.

9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
Well, I have an entire book coming out on this topic called Before and After the Book Deal: A writer’s guide to finishing, publishing, promoting and surviving your first book so “longer letter later” as we used to say. For starters though, I think that publishers should provide their authors with some version of health insurance and compensation for talk therapy.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
“If you have a cliché in your writing, put a funny hat on it and make it dance around.” Alexander Chee said that in a writers workshop that I took with him a long while ago. I’ve never let it go.

Courtney Maum, author of the novel Costalegre.

(Credit: Colin Lane)

Ten Questions for Helen Phillips

7.9.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Helen Phillips, whose novel The Need is out today from Simon & Schuster. The Need is an existential thriller about Molly, a scientist and mother of two young children. When a masked intruder appears in her home and demonstrates an eerie familiarity with the inner workings of her life, Molly falls down a mind-bending rabbit hole. A paleobotanist who has recently uncovered an array of peculiar artifacts at her fossil quarry, Molly eventually learns the true identity of the intruder, forcing her to confront an almost impossible moral decision with far-reaching repercussions for her children. Helen Phillips is the author of the story collections Some Possible Solutions (Henry Holt, 2016), which received the 2017 John Gardner Fiction Book Award, and And Yet They Were Happy (Leapfrog Press, 2011); the novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat (Henry Holt, 2015), a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and the children’s adventure book Here Where the Sunbeams Are Green (Delacorte Press, 2012). A graduate of Yale and the Brooklyn College MFA program, she is an associate professor at Brooklyn College. Born and raised in Colorado, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband, artist Adam Douglas Thompson, and their children.

1. How long did it take you to write The Need
I began the long, chaotic document of notes that would grow into The Need in February of 2015, and I handed the final draft in to my editor in September of 2018. But the urgency to write a book about motherhood arose in me in the summer of 2012, when my daughter was born and my sister died, though it took me some years to approach the material. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
The most challenging thing about writing the book was the emotional task of trying to evoke grief on the page. I shied away from that pain in the first draft. When I went back in to revise, it required me to go on an emotional journey. I have never before written something where the primary challenge was not one of craft or character or structure but rather of emotion. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
During the semester, when I’m teaching at Brooklyn College, I typically write one hour a day, five days a week, sometimes in my shared office on campus and sometimes at home. I put on a timer and protect that hour. The moment the timer rings, I’m off to teach or to prepare for class. 

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Simon & Schuster sent me on a pre-publication tour to meet with independent booksellers at Winter Institute in Albuquerque, and in Seattle, the Bay Area, Boston, and New York. It was fascinating to meet indie booksellers from across the country. For one thing, indie booksellers are (unsurprisingly) a very smart, funny, and thoughtful group. And I was surprised and excited by the positivity they seem to feel about the industry overall—they are selling a good number of books, hosting a lot of events, playing a central role in their communities. 

5. What are you reading right now? 
I recently finished Mira Jacob’s Good Talk and Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School, both of which I loved. I’m currently reading Darcey Steinke’s riveting Flash Count Diary. Next up is Rumaan Alam’s That Kind of Mother. And my book tour reads will include Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive, Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias, and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
The Swedish writer Karin Tidbeck, whose novel Amatka is an exquisitely written evocation of a dystopian society where everything that isn’t properly labeled with a name-tag turns to sludge. One of my favorite books in recent years.  

7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing The Need, what would you say?
Don’t be scared of the tension and grief that has to be present in this book.  

8. What has changed about your writing process over the years, since writing your first book? 
When I wrote my first published book, And Yet They Were Happy, as well as three other long-since-thrown-away novels before it, I had a lot more time to write. I had an administrative job and was teaching night classes, but still I could fit in three to four hours of writing time before going to work. When I became a mother, my daily writing time shifted from four hours per day to one hour per day. But it’s a quality-over-quantity thing, or so I tell myself; now I shove the energy of four hours into my single hour. 

9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
The biggest impediment to my writing life is also the biggest inspiration for my writing life: my children. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
I always go to Samuel Beckett’s “Fail again. Fail better.” And, Toni Morrison’s “A failure is just information.” Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about Isak Dinesen’s “I write a little every day, without hope, without despair.” 

Helen Phillips, author of The Need.

Ten Questions for Jana Prikryl

7.23.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Jana Prikryl, whose poetry collection No Matter is out today from Tim Duggan Books. Called “one of the most original voices of her generation” by critic James Wood, Prikryl follows up her acclaimed debut, The After Party (Tim Duggan Books, 2016), with a collection of sonnets, free verse, and invented forms rooted in themes of loss, self-reliance, and redemption, pivoting from love poems to elegies for a fraught culture worth saving. Born in Czechoslovakia, Prikryl fled to Austria with her family when she was five; a year later she moved to Canada and, in 2016, a few months before the presidential election, she became a U.S. citizen. Prikryl’s poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, the Paris Review, and the New York Review of Books, where she is a senior editor and the poetry editor.

1. How long did it take you to write the poems in No Matter?
Nine months, plus a few years—nine months was the length of my fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, where I had an amazing five days a week to write in 2017 and 2018. That’s where most of the book was written. But I’d started a number of the poems in 2015, as soon as I’d handed in The After Party, my first book. And a couple are slightly revised from things I rediscovered in decades-old notebooks. And I kept writing, at a trickle, for a few months after I returned to New York last summer. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Tolerating myself on the page during my first few months at Radcliffe. I’d never before had such a stretch of time for writing, and it was a tremendous gift that produced the intensity and cohesion of the book, but it was agony to be thrust into daily contact with my first drafts. I had to plow through them to reach the lines that felt charged in some way, and develop those. That started to happen about a third of the way through the fellowship, and then things got interesting. But the first few months my spouse had to put up with much groaning when I came home from “the office” every night.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Anywhere, when some unexpected words occur to me, if I can. I work full-time as an editor, and my son is a toddler, and my husband is an artist who takes care of our boy much of the week, so on weekends I am parenting while my husband works. Some days I can focus on the subway, during my commute, and tap things into my phone.

4. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
I don’t exactly have one—it depends on what I’ve written and what I fear its weaknesses are. My spouse, Colin Gee, is a performing artist and a very sensitive and voracious reader, and if something is just not true he will hear it. My oldest friend, Jé Wilson, is a fiction writer who knows everything about me, has read everything ever written, and delivers very sound judgments. I have a handful of good friends who are brilliant and sophisticated readers too, and sometimes I send things to one of them. But I also feel that no one can really help me with poems, as opposed to essays. Each one is like a trial I get to undergo alone.

5. What are you reading right now?
Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work, Ivone Margulies’s Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday, and Robert Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematograph, among other things.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
The very great essayist Louise Glück.

7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started the first poems in No Matter, what would you say?
I am tempted to reply: Don’t worry so much about how dark and angry the book is becoming. But crucial to writing the book was the panic I started feeling about halfway through because of its darkness and anger—I wouldn’t want to have avoided reckoning with the book’s tone or meaning. In fact, if I could go back I’d tell myself to get to the gym every day, take advantage of the ridiculously convenient Harvard pool—I’m a swimmer—while you have the chance. Live a little. But then, I wouldn’t have wanted to live more and write less, etc.

8. How do you balance your day job with your writing?
I don’t think I do at the moment! Before I had a child I tried to devote evenings and weekends to writing, but it was always a stretch to write on weeknights. I work best in the mornings and I find it much easier to get started if I know I have all day to noodle around. 

9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Some depressing joint custody between my full-time job and the lack of subsidized childcare in this country. I’m lucky to have an intellectually stimulating job that I care about. But writing something good demands time, just sitting with it and staring and rewriting, and this kind of time is a luxury most working parents do not have.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Read widely.

Jana Prikryl, author of No Matter.

(Credit: Willy Somma)

Ten Questions for Courtney Maum

7.16.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Courtney Maum, whose novel Costalegre is published today by Tin House Books. The story of fourteen-year-old Lara, whose mother, the quixotic American heiress Leonora Calaway, has brought her and a group of surrealist artists to an isolated compound in Costalegre, on the coast of Mexico, in 1937, Costalegre is a portrait of a young girl looking for someone to love her. Inspired by the relationship between Peggy Guggenheim and her daughter, Pegeen, the novel is, as Samantha Hunt wrote in her prepublication praise, “as heady, delirious, and heartbreaking as a young girl just beginning to fall in love with the world.” Courtney Maum is also the author of the novels Touch (Putnam, 2017) and I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You (Touchstone, 2014); the chapbook Notes From Mexico (Cupboard Pamphlet, 2012); and the handbook Before and After the Book Deal, forthcoming from Catapult. Her writing has been widely published in such outlets as BuzzFeed; the New York Times; O, the Oprah Magazine; and Modern Loss. She is the founder of the Cabins, a learning collaborative in Norfolk, Connecticut.

1. How long did it take you to write Costalegre?
It was a two-part process. I researched for the better part of a year, and I had a very specific way in which I “digested” my research. I’d transcribe notes into a journal, and when it was full, I would yellow-highlight the most salient facts, and then those would go into a new journal, and from that journal, I would do the yellow-highlighting filtration thing again. Rinse and repeat until I put all of my favorite facts onto a giant piece of sturdy watercolor paper. By that point, I’d basically memorized the stand-out events that I wanted to use, so when I sat down to write the book, I was able to do so very quickly, as if I was writing a diary of events I’d actually lived; of dreams that I’d had. I had a first draft completed in a month. Things changed in revision, of course, but it’s probably the first time in my career that my first draft so closely resembles the finished one. Usually my first draft is just a blueprint of what is to come, and most of the text in that draft doesn’t survive the revision process.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
You know, I have to say that I enjoyed absolutely everything about writing Costalegre. I enjoyed the research, I adored the writing process, and I had a really good experience editing it with Masie Cochran at Tin House. I think the hardest part of writing this particular book was knowing that it would have to transition from this private, curious thing into a “product” that the public would find out about, would not find out about. Would buy, would not buy. This is my third novel, so I’ve learned by now that you can’t plan or “expect” anything in publishing. Plus, I work in marketing and branding on the side, so it’s extra challenging for me to turn off the part of my brain that understands market forces, book sales, public relations, and all that. Definitely the most challenging thing was to not think about the commercial viability of this project so that I could write the book I needed to write.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write my best at home, alone, in silence. I have a nice desk in my bedroom with a lovely view of our yard. That is where I write best. I have a Draconian schedule that has worked well for me over the years. I front load my week: Mondays and Tuesdays are for my writing, only. Other writing—blurbs, book reviews, essays, my marketing and branding work—I tackle that on the other days. I find I’m less resentful about replying to e-mails and whatnot if I’ve given my own writing everything I’ve got in the beginning of the week.

If I have a good week and feel confident about where I am in terms of my writing, I sometimes take Fridays off, and that’s when I’ll do out-of-the-house errands and other domestic stuff that I’ve been avoiding. I try not to work on the weekends, ever. I find that I function best when I’m excited to get back to the writing. If you force yourself to the desk when you’re not feeling it, creative writing feels like a slog. Listen, it can’t feel magical every day, of course, but writing does have the potential to be an act of joy.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process? 
Well, I suppose the most unexpected thing is how different every book publication feels. There really isn’t a magic formula. You can have a book that “got all the things” in terms of media, and it still doesn’t sell for some reason; or you can have a sleeper book that suddenly becomes a cult hit. This is a generalization, but I do feel that many publishers still believe in the existence of that “magic formula.” Maybe the formula existed at some point, but today, with three novels behind me and a nonfiction book on the way, I’ve come to believe that your book’s fate is actually in the hand of readers. There has to be something about your book that makes people want to disappear inside the story. You can’t manufacture that kind of alchemy. It’s out of your control. This can be hard for writers to accept.

5. What are you reading right now?
I’m currently reading a galley of Cameron Dezen Hammon’s This Is My Body. I’m trying to work on an experimental memoir about female desire and reproductive psychology, so I’m finding Cameron’s memoir about her various religious and romantic obsessions really interesting to read. The idea of religious faith—of having it versus not having it—is much on my mind as my five-year-old starts to ask me big questions about life and death and purpose and all that. I grew up without a religion and I often question if I am doing a disservice to my daughter by not presenting her with some religious options. Can this be outsourced? Is there like a religion catering service that will come to your house and present a smorgasbord of all the different options? A religious tasting flight of sorts? Hit me up if there is, I’d like to know about it.

6. Who do you trust to be the first reader of your work?
Myself? (I’m laughing here.) For better or for worse, I’m not the writer who has a circle of trusted writer friends who I workshop new writing with. I didn’t go through an MFA program, and I’ve lived for well over a decade in a really rural area, so I think that I’d been DIY-ing the writing thing for so long, when I finally did grow a writing community that I trusted—and still trust—I’d come to rely so heavily on myself that I just kept doing it. This being said, I think I’m a good reader of my own work. I’m very savage with myself in terms of edits. So I’m my own first reader. When I feel ready for outside criticism and feedback, the manuscript goes to my agent and my husband at the same time.

7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing Costalegre, what would you say?
Oh, that “me” wouldn’t have listened to anything that the “hindsight” me would have to say! Pre-Costalegre me was hell-bent on writing Costalegre, in secret, in a very specific way. I just would have brought that version of me some water and a bowl of mixed nuts and let her do her thing.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
I find it really challenging—especially now that I am a mother—to toggle between the feral, creative, striving version of myself and the version that has to set a behavioral example for my daughter, plan for the meals that we’ll be eating and all that. It’s not just the parenthood thing, though. I’m a very hard worker. I love to work intensely. Left to my own devices, I would hole up in my house and write for five days straight and live on Miso soup and cheese. But my husband is very French, very civilized. He works from home as well and wants me to eat lunch with him and for us both to chat about our days. I find that incredibly difficult to do on work days. This pushing and pulling. I don’t want to “chat,” I want to be alone with the narrative problems in my head and a soft-boiled egg and the work. That’s just on work days though. I’m less of a wildebeest on the weekends.

9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
Well, I have an entire book coming out on this topic called Before and After the Book Deal: A writer’s guide to finishing, publishing, promoting and surviving your first book so “longer letter later” as we used to say. For starters though, I think that publishers should provide their authors with some version of health insurance and compensation for talk therapy.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
“If you have a cliché in your writing, put a funny hat on it and make it dance around.” Alexander Chee said that in a writers workshop that I took with him a long while ago. I’ve never let it go.

Courtney Maum, author of the novel Costalegre.

(Credit: Colin Lane)

Ten Questions for Helen Phillips

7.9.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Helen Phillips, whose novel The Need is out today from Simon & Schuster. The Need is an existential thriller about Molly, a scientist and mother of two young children. When a masked intruder appears in her home and demonstrates an eerie familiarity with the inner workings of her life, Molly falls down a mind-bending rabbit hole. A paleobotanist who has recently uncovered an array of peculiar artifacts at her fossil quarry, Molly eventually learns the true identity of the intruder, forcing her to confront an almost impossible moral decision with far-reaching repercussions for her children. Helen Phillips is the author of the story collections Some Possible Solutions (Henry Holt, 2016), which received the 2017 John Gardner Fiction Book Award, and And Yet They Were Happy (Leapfrog Press, 2011); the novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat (Henry Holt, 2015), a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and the children’s adventure book Here Where the Sunbeams Are Green (Delacorte Press, 2012). A graduate of Yale and the Brooklyn College MFA program, she is an associate professor at Brooklyn College. Born and raised in Colorado, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband, artist Adam Douglas Thompson, and their children.

1. How long did it take you to write The Need
I began the long, chaotic document of notes that would grow into The Need in February of 2015, and I handed the final draft in to my editor in September of 2018. But the urgency to write a book about motherhood arose in me in the summer of 2012, when my daughter was born and my sister died, though it took me some years to approach the material. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
The most challenging thing about writing the book was the emotional task of trying to evoke grief on the page. I shied away from that pain in the first draft. When I went back in to revise, it required me to go on an emotional journey. I have never before written something where the primary challenge was not one of craft or character or structure but rather of emotion. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
During the semester, when I’m teaching at Brooklyn College, I typically write one hour a day, five days a week, sometimes in my shared office on campus and sometimes at home. I put on a timer and protect that hour. The moment the timer rings, I’m off to teach or to prepare for class. 

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Simon & Schuster sent me on a pre-publication tour to meet with independent booksellers at Winter Institute in Albuquerque, and in Seattle, the Bay Area, Boston, and New York. It was fascinating to meet indie booksellers from across the country. For one thing, indie booksellers are (unsurprisingly) a very smart, funny, and thoughtful group. And I was surprised and excited by the positivity they seem to feel about the industry overall—they are selling a good number of books, hosting a lot of events, playing a central role in their communities. 

5. What are you reading right now? 
I recently finished Mira Jacob’s Good Talk and Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School, both of which I loved. I’m currently reading Darcey Steinke’s riveting Flash Count Diary. Next up is Rumaan Alam’s That Kind of Mother. And my book tour reads will include Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive, Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias, and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
The Swedish writer Karin Tidbeck, whose novel Amatka is an exquisitely written evocation of a dystopian society where everything that isn’t properly labeled with a name-tag turns to sludge. One of my favorite books in recent years.  

7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing The Need, what would you say?
Don’t be scared of the tension and grief that has to be present in this book.  

8. What has changed about your writing process over the years, since writing your first book? 
When I wrote my first published book, And Yet They Were Happy, as well as three other long-since-thrown-away novels before it, I had a lot more time to write. I had an administrative job and was teaching night classes, but still I could fit in three to four hours of writing time before going to work. When I became a mother, my daily writing time shifted from four hours per day to one hour per day. But it’s a quality-over-quantity thing, or so I tell myself; now I shove the energy of four hours into my single hour. 

9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
The biggest impediment to my writing life is also the biggest inspiration for my writing life: my children. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
I always go to Samuel Beckett’s “Fail again. Fail better.” And, Toni Morrison’s “A failure is just information.” Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about Isak Dinesen’s “I write a little every day, without hope, without despair.” 

Helen Phillips, author of The Need.

Ten Questions for Sarah Elaine Smith

7.30.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Sarah Elaine Smith, whose novel, Marilou Is Everywhere, is out today from Riverhead Books. Cindy, the fourteen-year-old narrator of Smith’s debut novel, lives alone with her two older brothers in rural Pennsylvania, deprived of adult supervision and a consistent source of healthy food. “[M]y brothers and I had turned basically feral since our mother had gone off for a number of months and we were living free, according to our own ideas and customs,” she says. When her living situation becomes untenable, Cindy escapes her own family’s poverty by assuming the identity of Jude Vanderjohn, a glamorous teen who has gone missing from an affluent, cultured home. Author Julie Buntin calls Marilou Is Everywhere “a haunting novel about craving escape so badly you’re willing to erase yourself.” Sarah Elaine Smith holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an MFA in poetry from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas in Austin.

1. How long did it take you to write Marilou Is Everywhere?
About three years. I wrote each draft over three months, then let it sit unwatched for three months. I don’t know why, but that cycle and length of time made sense to me.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
It took me forever to find an ending that felt true to the characters. I wanted desperately to write a sexier ending, and by “sexier” I mean more bleak. I wanted to punish Cindy for what she did, and my trusted readers very rightly reflected that it seemed a little harsh, some of the places where I had her ending up. It was humbling to surrender my own idea of myself as a merciless artiste and write that most gauche of all things, a happy ending. Which is not to say that the ending is without some bleakness, some consequences.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Usually I write fiction at home because the refreshments are cheap—and also because I can’t shake some performative posture when I’m writing my made-up people in a public place. I will go out to get other kinds of work done—e-mails, essays, lesson plans—because it helpfully breaks up my day. I’m a full-time writer, so I could easily go an entire day without speaking a single word to another human. My cat, Nellie Belle, on the other hand, does hear frequent words from me. I try to engineer grocery trips and errands and coffee dates so I don’t get too cooped up and wild-eyed. I typically write every day and I try to do it as early in the morning as possible, because everything I do after that feels like it’s just fun.

4. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
My future self, I’m afraid. There are a lot of brilliant readers in my life, but I usually take their feedback as a mirror of what’s currently on the page rather than a set of directives I should follow to improve the book. 

My current self, however, is a really terrible and mean reader of my work, and I don’t trust her at all. She usually throws all the worst critiques at me while I’m working on something new. She would be really happy if I never wrote anything again, unless it emerged pure and perfect on the first try. My future self on the other hand, is usually delighted by the hidden energy and animus in whatever I wrote before.

5. What are you reading right now?
I’ve been diving back into Larry Levis, one of my absolute favorite poets, someone whose work I’ve had in my ear for a long time. I love that he uses plain language to get at the wildly mobile emptiness of the world, all the ways he describes that silence. I’m someone who has always seen a great deal of emptiness inside the ordinary, and I don’t mean that as a dramatic emotional statement, or not merely as a dramatic emotional statement, anyway. But when he writes, “There are two worlds,” I know exactly. It feels like home to me. And I think there’s also a tremendous comedy that rides alongside that emptiness, like the line “I still had two friends, but they were trees.” I take great comfort in his work. It feels like comfort to me, to recognize myself in how someone else sees the world.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Well, Larry Levis for one! Although he’s no secret among poets, but very few poets are secrets among poets anyway. 

The fact that there are no movies based on Octavia Butler’s work is a shock to me.

7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Marilou Is Everywhere, what would you say? 
I would say: I love you, babe. You’re going to have to be a different person to write the end of this book, but that’s a good thing. Whenever one thing doesn’t work out, it’s only because something better is going to take its place.

8. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? 
Why not? But only if it doesn’t cost money or incur debt. Debt is the last thing writers need, and the least helpful aid to actual real-life writing. And to me, that should be the goal of getting an MFA: to find your way into a life of writing, not just a job or book contract. I found my time at MFA programs to be intense, fun, and instructive in lots of noncurricular ways. It’s popular to bash them as style factories where your edges get sanded down, but it’s been my experience that any group of readers, whether in a formal setting or not, will collectively steer you toward the expected. I think it’s important to keep your own heart’s guidance at the front, no matter who’s reading your stuff.

In truth, I think MFAs are effective because they put you in the orbit of people who do what you want to do. You see people who were like you in some way finishing their books, selling their books, and it makes it feel a little more possible that you can do it too. Not to knock any of the other amazing things, like genius peers—who make stellar friends, too—or brilliant teachers, and not to obscure the tremendous privilege that comes with being in a program where agents visit and actually want to read your work. Those things are real, absolutely. But I mention the mirror effect because I don’t hear people talk about it as often, and because it’s not exclusive to MFAs. Anyone can find writers who come from where they come from, or lived some of the same experiences, and those examples have expanded me at least as much as anything I’ve learned in a classroom.

9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Self-doubt, shitty little rules I’ve made up for myself, jealousy, ego. I don’t want to even claim those qualities as part of myself, but it’s true. To cope with those things, I’ve made up a lot of tricks for myself. For example: I think about the ways that Procter & Gamble or whatever makes money off my self-doubt. That usually shifts my determination. Nobody benefits from my fear except the people who want to sell me Lean Pockets and compulsory femininity—and fuck those people. They’re not going to get that dollar, not today!

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I’ve got two. From Terrance Hayes, in an interview from jubilat, I think, paraphrased: If you’re blocked, it just means that there’s some invisible rule you’re afraid of breaking. So figure out what the rule is, and break it. 

And from the playwright Sherry Kramer, paraphrased yet again, because this came from cocktail party chatter, if you can believe it. But it goes something like: People always want to write something strange or surprising, and they think they have to go somewhere out there to find it. But nothing is stranger than the moment you’re in. If you begin in this moment and tell what’s happening with all the clarity you can, it will be stranger than anything you can imagine.  

Sarah Elaine Smith, author of the novel Marilou Is Everywhere.

(Credit: Jason Kirker)

Ten Questions for Jana Prikryl

7.23.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Jana Prikryl, whose poetry collection No Matter is out today from Tim Duggan Books. Called “one of the most original voices of her generation” by critic James Wood, Prikryl follows up her acclaimed debut, The After Party (Tim Duggan Books, 2016), with a collection of sonnets, free verse, and invented forms rooted in themes of loss, self-reliance, and redemption, pivoting from love poems to elegies for a fraught culture worth saving. Born in Czechoslovakia, Prikryl fled to Austria with her family when she was five; a year later she moved to Canada and, in 2016, a few months before the presidential election, she became a U.S. citizen. Prikryl’s poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, the Paris Review, and the New York Review of Books, where she is a senior editor and the poetry editor.

1. How long did it take you to write the poems in No Matter?
Nine months, plus a few years—nine months was the length of my fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, where I had an amazing five days a week to write in 2017 and 2018. That’s where most of the book was written. But I’d started a number of the poems in 2015, as soon as I’d handed in The After Party, my first book. And a couple are slightly revised from things I rediscovered in decades-old notebooks. And I kept writing, at a trickle, for a few months after I returned to New York last summer. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Tolerating myself on the page during my first few months at Radcliffe. I’d never before had such a stretch of time for writing, and it was a tremendous gift that produced the intensity and cohesion of the book, but it was agony to be thrust into daily contact with my first drafts. I had to plow through them to reach the lines that felt charged in some way, and develop those. That started to happen about a third of the way through the fellowship, and then things got interesting. But the first few months my spouse had to put up with much groaning when I came home from “the office” every night.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Anywhere, when some unexpected words occur to me, if I can. I work full-time as an editor, and my son is a toddler, and my husband is an artist who takes care of our boy much of the week, so on weekends I am parenting while my husband works. Some days I can focus on the subway, during my commute, and tap things into my phone.

4. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
I don’t exactly have one—it depends on what I’ve written and what I fear its weaknesses are. My spouse, Colin Gee, is a performing artist and a very sensitive and voracious reader, and if something is just not true he will hear it. My oldest friend, Jé Wilson, is a fiction writer who knows everything about me, has read everything ever written, and delivers very sound judgments. I have a handful of good friends who are brilliant and sophisticated readers too, and sometimes I send things to one of them. But I also feel that no one can really help me with poems, as opposed to essays. Each one is like a trial I get to undergo alone.

5. What are you reading right now?
Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work, Ivone Margulies’s Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday, and Robert Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematograph, among other things.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
The very great essayist Louise Glück.

7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started the first poems in No Matter, what would you say?
I am tempted to reply: Don’t worry so much about how dark and angry the book is becoming. But crucial to writing the book was the panic I started feeling about halfway through because of its darkness and anger—I wouldn’t want to have avoided reckoning with the book’s tone or meaning. In fact, if I could go back I’d tell myself to get to the gym every day, take advantage of the ridiculously convenient Harvard pool—I’m a swimmer—while you have the chance. Live a little. But then, I wouldn’t have wanted to live more and write less, etc.

8. How do you balance your day job with your writing?
I don’t think I do at the moment! Before I had a child I tried to devote evenings and weekends to writing, but it was always a stretch to write on weeknights. I work best in the mornings and I find it much easier to get started if I know I have all day to noodle around. 

9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Some depressing joint custody between my full-time job and the lack of subsidized childcare in this country. I’m lucky to have an intellectually stimulating job that I care about. But writing something good demands time, just sitting with it and staring and rewriting, and this kind of time is a luxury most working parents do not have.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Read widely.

Jana Prikryl, author of No Matter.

(Credit: Willy Somma)

Ten Questions for Courtney Maum

7.16.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Courtney Maum, whose novel Costalegre is published today by Tin House Books. The story of fourteen-year-old Lara, whose mother, the quixotic American heiress Leonora Calaway, has brought her and a group of surrealist artists to an isolated compound in Costalegre, on the coast of Mexico, in 1937, Costalegre is a portrait of a young girl looking for someone to love her. Inspired by the relationship between Peggy Guggenheim and her daughter, Pegeen, the novel is, as Samantha Hunt wrote in her prepublication praise, “as heady, delirious, and heartbreaking as a young girl just beginning to fall in love with the world.” Courtney Maum is also the author of the novels Touch (Putnam, 2017) and I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You (Touchstone, 2014); the chapbook Notes From Mexico (Cupboard Pamphlet, 2012); and the handbook Before and After the Book Deal, forthcoming from Catapult. Her writing has been widely published in such outlets as BuzzFeed; the New York Times; O, the Oprah Magazine; and Modern Loss. She is the founder of the Cabins, a learning collaborative in Norfolk, Connecticut.

1. How long did it take you to write Costalegre?
It was a two-part process. I researched for the better part of a year, and I had a very specific way in which I “digested” my research. I’d transcribe notes into a journal, and when it was full, I would yellow-highlight the most salient facts, and then those would go into a new journal, and from that journal, I would do the yellow-highlighting filtration thing again. Rinse and repeat until I put all of my favorite facts onto a giant piece of sturdy watercolor paper. By that point, I’d basically memorized the stand-out events that I wanted to use, so when I sat down to write the book, I was able to do so very quickly, as if I was writing a diary of events I’d actually lived; of dreams that I’d had. I had a first draft completed in a month. Things changed in revision, of course, but it’s probably the first time in my career that my first draft so closely resembles the finished one. Usually my first draft is just a blueprint of what is to come, and most of the text in that draft doesn’t survive the revision process.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
You know, I have to say that I enjoyed absolutely everything about writing Costalegre. I enjoyed the research, I adored the writing process, and I had a really good experience editing it with Masie Cochran at Tin House. I think the hardest part of writing this particular book was knowing that it would have to transition from this private, curious thing into a “product” that the public would find out about, would not find out about. Would buy, would not buy. This is my third novel, so I’ve learned by now that you can’t plan or “expect” anything in publishing. Plus, I work in marketing and branding on the side, so it’s extra challenging for me to turn off the part of my brain that understands market forces, book sales, public relations, and all that. Definitely the most challenging thing was to not think about the commercial viability of this project so that I could write the book I needed to write.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write my best at home, alone, in silence. I have a nice desk in my bedroom with a lovely view of our yard. That is where I write best. I have a Draconian schedule that has worked well for me over the years. I front load my week: Mondays and Tuesdays are for my writing, only. Other writing—blurbs, book reviews, essays, my marketing and branding work—I tackle that on the other days. I find I’m less resentful about replying to e-mails and whatnot if I’ve given my own writing everything I’ve got in the beginning of the week.

If I have a good week and feel confident about where I am in terms of my writing, I sometimes take Fridays off, and that’s when I’ll do out-of-the-house errands and other domestic stuff that I’ve been avoiding. I try not to work on the weekends, ever. I find that I function best when I’m excited to get back to the writing. If you force yourself to the desk when you’re not feeling it, creative writing feels like a slog. Listen, it can’t feel magical every day, of course, but writing does have the potential to be an act of joy.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process? 
Well, I suppose the most unexpected thing is how different every book publication feels. There really isn’t a magic formula. You can have a book that “got all the things” in terms of media, and it still doesn’t sell for some reason; or you can have a sleeper book that suddenly becomes a cult hit. This is a generalization, but I do feel that many publishers still believe in the existence of that “magic formula.” Maybe the formula existed at some point, but today, with three novels behind me and a nonfiction book on the way, I’ve come to believe that your book’s fate is actually in the hand of readers. There has to be something about your book that makes people want to disappear inside the story. You can’t manufacture that kind of alchemy. It’s out of your control. This can be hard for writers to accept.

5. What are you reading right now?
I’m currently reading a galley of Cameron Dezen Hammon’s This Is My Body. I’m trying to work on an experimental memoir about female desire and reproductive psychology, so I’m finding Cameron’s memoir about her various religious and romantic obsessions really interesting to read. The idea of religious faith—of having it versus not having it—is much on my mind as my five-year-old starts to ask me big questions about life and death and purpose and all that. I grew up without a religion and I often question if I am doing a disservice to my daughter by not presenting her with some religious options. Can this be outsourced? Is there like a religion catering service that will come to your house and present a smorgasbord of all the different options? A religious tasting flight of sorts? Hit me up if there is, I’d like to know about it.

6. Who do you trust to be the first reader of your work?
Myself? (I’m laughing here.) For better or for worse, I’m not the writer who has a circle of trusted writer friends who I workshop new writing with. I didn’t go through an MFA program, and I’ve lived for well over a decade in a really rural area, so I think that I’d been DIY-ing the writing thing for so long, when I finally did grow a writing community that I trusted—and still trust—I’d come to rely so heavily on myself that I just kept doing it. This being said, I think I’m a good reader of my own work. I’m very savage with myself in terms of edits. So I’m my own first reader. When I feel ready for outside criticism and feedback, the manuscript goes to my agent and my husband at the same time.

7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing Costalegre, what would you say?
Oh, that “me” wouldn’t have listened to anything that the “hindsight” me would have to say! Pre-Costalegre me was hell-bent on writing Costalegre, in secret, in a very specific way. I just would have brought that version of me some water and a bowl of mixed nuts and let her do her thing.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
I find it really challenging—especially now that I am a mother—to toggle between the feral, creative, striving version of myself and the version that has to set a behavioral example for my daughter, plan for the meals that we’ll be eating and all that. It’s not just the parenthood thing, though. I’m a very hard worker. I love to work intensely. Left to my own devices, I would hole up in my house and write for five days straight and live on Miso soup and cheese. But my husband is very French, very civilized. He works from home as well and wants me to eat lunch with him and for us both to chat about our days. I find that incredibly difficult to do on work days. This pushing and pulling. I don’t want to “chat,” I want to be alone with the narrative problems in my head and a soft-boiled egg and the work. That’s just on work days though. I’m less of a wildebeest on the weekends.

9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
Well, I have an entire book coming out on this topic called Before and After the Book Deal: A writer’s guide to finishing, publishing, promoting and surviving your first book so “longer letter later” as we used to say. For starters though, I think that publishers should provide their authors with some version of health insurance and compensation for talk therapy.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
“If you have a cliché in your writing, put a funny hat on it and make it dance around.” Alexander Chee said that in a writers workshop that I took with him a long while ago. I’ve never let it go.

Courtney Maum, author of the novel Costalegre.

(Credit: Colin Lane)

Ten Questions for Jess Row

8.6.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Jess Row, whose essay collection White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination is out today from Graywolf Press. In essays exploring race in the imaginative life of Americans, from the end of the civil rights era to the present, Row ties the movement of white Americans into segregated communities, such as suburbs and gentrified neighborhoods, to white writers setting their stories in isolated or “emotionally insulated” landscapes. In close readings of work by Don DeLillo, Annie Dillard, Richard Ford, and David Foster Wallace, he illustrates how these and other writers have cleared imaginitive space for themselves at the expense of engaging with race. Jess Row is the author of the novel Your Face in Mine and the story collections The Train to Lo Wu and Nobody Ever Gets Lost. White Flights is his first book of nonfiction. One of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists of 2007, he lives in New York and teaches at the College of New Jersey.

1. How long did it take you to write the essays in White Flights?
Quite a while! I began writing essays about race and American fiction back around the time I started writing my novel Your Face in Mine, which takes us all the way back to 2010. I published the essay that contained the kernel of the book’s argument, “White Flights,” in the Boston Review in 2013. But honestly most of the writing took place after I signed up with Graywolf in the spring of 2015. I’d say at least 80 percent of the book was written in a focused way between 2015 and 2018.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Because whiteness is a vast and amorphous subject—because it largely exists without being talked about, identified, or even noticed—the biggest challenge was narrowing down what I wanted to say and which writers I wanted to engage with. There are so many white writers whose work could have been part of this project—Annie Proulx, Ann Beattie, and then of course many postwar writers like Cheever and Malamud and Updike and Bellow, all of whom play a part in the construction of American literary whiteness and what might be called the “white sensibility.” But I couldn’t do it all.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Whenever I can. My kids are nine and twelve, and much of my life revolves around them, of course; I have a full time academic job at the College of New Jersey, which involves a long commute from my home in New York, so my writing time has to be very carefully carved out and protected. I try to dedicate whole working days to writing, at best three (but usually two) days a week during the academic year. I would not have been able to finish this book without a Guggenheim grant, which allowed me to take off a whole year from teaching—the first time I’ve done that since I started working full time in 2001. I also was invited to be a visiting professor at NYU in 2016 to 2017, which meant I didn’t have to travel to work, and I wrote a lot of the book then as well.

4. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
My wife, Sonya, absolutely. She’s very honest, and almost always right, although we’ll argue forever about what goes into that “almost.”

5. What are you reading right now?
I read a lot of books at once, and I only read books on paper, which may explain why I’m nursing a shoulder injury this summer! Books are heavy. Among other things I’m reading Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, her dystopian novel about climate change and the collapse of the U.S. state, which I’ve honestly been afraid to read until now—and for good reason. It’s astonishingly, horrifyingly accurate for a novel written in 1993. I’m also reading Uwe Johnson’s mammoth novel Anniversaries, which was translated just recently for the first time from German and published by NYRB Classics last year. It’s in some ways very similar to the novel I’m working on now, The New Earth, in that Johnson was trying to capture the feeling of New York at a chaotic and terrible moment, 1969, and I’m doing a version of the same thing (not just in New York, but rooted in New York) in 2018.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
For years my standard answer to this question was James Baldwin, whose Another Country is probably the single most important American novel of them all, in my humble opinion—but Baldwin has now received a share of his long-overdue recognition. So I’ll say Henry Dumas, another great writer of the 1960s who was killed by the police in New York in 1968. His collected works, Echo Tree, is a book everyone should own.

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?
Fiona McCrae, who acquired the book at Graywolf, and I had a lot of conversations in the early stages about the role of anger and antagonism in literary criticism. Some of the essays I originally published in magazines that went into the first draft of White Flights were, for lack of a better word, snarky. Intentionally so. She was concerned that the book be as thoughtful and exploratory as it could possibly be, and she didn’t want anything I wrote to be perceived as a cheap shot. As I got further into the project, it became clear to me that she was entirely right, not because anger isn’t a necessary part of criticism, but because, in my view, the anger has to be directed at the structural forces that make racism work (and the political leaders who consciously and intentionally make use of those forces). In most cases—not all—the white writers I talk about in White Flights aren’t intentionally racist; in many cases they’re trying hard not to be racist, but in simply telling stories the way they want to tell them, they’re exposing the structure and formation of a racist culture (and, unfortunately, sometimes perpetuating it.) Which is something I have done too. I’m as implicated in this as anyone.

8. How do you balance your day job with your writing?
Writers are artists, which means that (in my experience, anyway) we have to work hard to protect our creative time, our imaginations, in the midst of all the other parts of our lives—not just work but family, bills, laundry, taxes, car repairs, and so on. For me it’s all about creating psychic, emotional boundaries, so that I have time to feel free and unencumbered while I’m working, no matter what else is going on. That’s a real struggle, of course. I don’t really believe in balance; I believe in trying to sustain a feeling of wholeness, which means, in large part, taking care of other things you need to do so that you can feel free in your work, and also realizing that success in your career is only one part of a larger whole, which involves paying attention to your physical health, your relationships, your children and partner, your religious practice, your financial obligations, and so on.

9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I have many fewer impediments to my writing life than most writers, god knows! The impediments I do have are mostly emotional, and are shared by just about every writer I’ve ever met: self-doubt, envy and the constant urge to compare oneself with others, anxiety about success, fear of not finding the right material, or not doing right by your material, fear of cultural irrelevance, wanting more readers, worries about the changing nature of publishing (and whether publishing will exist in any recognizable form twenty or thirty years from now). And on top of all of that, in the present moment, wondering whether any kind of art can address the crises of racist nationalism and environmental collapse in our time.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Neither of these are pieces of writing advice, but they’re two of the most meaningful things I’ve ever encountered about making art. First, from Liz Phair, in the context of a song in which she’s addressing a romantic partner: “Everything you say is so obnoxious, funny, true, and mean.” That’s more of a credo for my fiction than my nonfiction, because I don’t want to be mean, particularly in the context of a book like White Flights, but I would like to be true, obnoxious (in the sense of pointing out the obvious) and at least a little bit funny. The second, from Peter Tosh: “Live clean, and let your works be seen.” That’s a life motto that can interpreted many ways, and some will find it vague and useless, but I’ve tried to live by it in my own way since I first heard it in high school.

Jess Row, author of the essay collection White Flights.

(Credit: Sarah Shatz)

Ten Questions for Sarah Elaine Smith

7.30.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Sarah Elaine Smith, whose novel, Marilou Is Everywhere, is out today from Riverhead Books. Cindy, the fourteen-year-old narrator of Smith’s debut novel, lives alone with her two older brothers in rural Pennsylvania, deprived of adult supervision and a consistent source of healthy food. “[M]y brothers and I had turned basically feral since our mother had gone off for a number of months and we were living free, according to our own ideas and customs,” she says. When her living situation becomes untenable, Cindy escapes her own family’s poverty by assuming the identity of Jude Vanderjohn, a glamorous teen who has gone missing from an affluent, cultured home. Author Julie Buntin calls Marilou Is Everywhere “a haunting novel about craving escape so badly you’re willing to erase yourself.” Sarah Elaine Smith holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an MFA in poetry from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas in Austin.

1. How long did it take you to write Marilou Is Everywhere?
About three years. I wrote each draft over three months, then let it sit unwatched for three months. I don’t know why, but that cycle and length of time made sense to me.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
It took me forever to find an ending that felt true to the characters. I wanted desperately to write a sexier ending, and by “sexier” I mean more bleak. I wanted to punish Cindy for what she did, and my trusted readers very rightly reflected that it seemed a little harsh, some of the places where I had her ending up. It was humbling to surrender my own idea of myself as a merciless artiste and write that most gauche of all things, a happy ending. Which is not to say that the ending is without some bleakness, some consequences.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Usually I write fiction at home because the refreshments are cheap—and also because I can’t shake some performative posture when I’m writing my made-up people in a public place. I will go out to get other kinds of work done—e-mails, essays, lesson plans—because it helpfully breaks up my day. I’m a full-time writer, so I could easily go an entire day without speaking a single word to another human. My cat, Nellie Belle, on the other hand, does hear frequent words from me. I try to engineer grocery trips and errands and coffee dates so I don’t get too cooped up and wild-eyed. I typically write every day and I try to do it as early in the morning as possible, because everything I do after that feels like it’s just fun.

4. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
My future self, I’m afraid. There are a lot of brilliant readers in my life, but I usually take their feedback as a mirror of what’s currently on the page rather than a set of directives I should follow to improve the book. 

My current self, however, is a really terrible and mean reader of my work, and I don’t trust her at all. She usually throws all the worst critiques at me while I’m working on something new. She would be really happy if I never wrote anything again, unless it emerged pure and perfect on the first try. My future self on the other hand, is usually delighted by the hidden energy and animus in whatever I wrote before.

5. What are you reading right now?
I’ve been diving back into Larry Levis, one of my absolute favorite poets, someone whose work I’ve had in my ear for a long time. I love that he uses plain language to get at the wildly mobile emptiness of the world, all the ways he describes that silence. I’m someone who has always seen a great deal of emptiness inside the ordinary, and I don’t mean that as a dramatic emotional statement, or not merely as a dramatic emotional statement, anyway. But when he writes, “There are two worlds,” I know exactly. It feels like home to me. And I think there’s also a tremendous comedy that rides alongside that emptiness, like the line “I still had two friends, but they were trees.” I take great comfort in his work. It feels like comfort to me, to recognize myself in how someone else sees the world.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Well, Larry Levis for one! Although he’s no secret among poets, but very few poets are secrets among poets anyway. 

The fact that there are no movies based on Octavia Butler’s work is a shock to me.

7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Marilou Is Everywhere, what would you say? 
I would say: I love you, babe. You’re going to have to be a different person to write the end of this book, but that’s a good thing. Whenever one thing doesn’t work out, it’s only because something better is going to take its place.

8. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? 
Why not? But only if it doesn’t cost money or incur debt. Debt is the last thing writers need, and the least helpful aid to actual real-life writing. And to me, that should be the goal of getting an MFA: to find your way into a life of writing, not just a job or book contract. I found my time at MFA programs to be intense, fun, and instructive in lots of noncurricular ways. It’s popular to bash them as style factories where your edges get sanded down, but it’s been my experience that any group of readers, whether in a formal setting or not, will collectively steer you toward the expected. I think it’s important to keep your own heart’s guidance at the front, no matter who’s reading your stuff.

In truth, I think MFAs are effective because they put you in the orbit of people who do what you want to do. You see people who were like you in some way finishing their books, selling their books, and it makes it feel a little more possible that you can do it too. Not to knock any of the other amazing things, like genius peers—who make stellar friends, too—or brilliant teachers, and not to obscure the tremendous privilege that comes with being in a program where agents visit and actually want to read your work. Those things are real, absolutely. But I mention the mirror effect because I don’t hear people talk about it as often, and because it’s not exclusive to MFAs. Anyone can find writers who come from where they come from, or lived some of the same experiences, and those examples have expanded me at least as much as anything I’ve learned in a classroom.

9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Self-doubt, shitty little rules I’ve made up for myself, jealousy, ego. I don’t want to even claim those qualities as part of myself, but it’s true. To cope with those things, I’ve made up a lot of tricks for myself. For example: I think about the ways that Procter & Gamble or whatever makes money off my self-doubt. That usually shifts my determination. Nobody benefits from my fear except the people who want to sell me Lean Pockets and compulsory femininity—and fuck those people. They’re not going to get that dollar, not today!

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I’ve got two. From Terrance Hayes, in an interview from jubilat, I think, paraphrased: If you’re blocked, it just means that there’s some invisible rule you’re afraid of breaking. So figure out what the rule is, and break it. 

And from the playwright Sherry Kramer, paraphrased yet again, because this came from cocktail party chatter, if you can believe it. But it goes something like: People always want to write something strange or surprising, and they think they have to go somewhere out there to find it. But nothing is stranger than the moment you’re in. If you begin in this moment and tell what’s happening with all the clarity you can, it will be stranger than anything you can imagine.  

Sarah Elaine Smith, author of the novel Marilou Is Everywhere.

(Credit: Jason Kirker)

Ten Questions for Jana Prikryl

7.23.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Jana Prikryl, whose poetry collection No Matter is out today from Tim Duggan Books. Called “one of the most original voices of her generation” by critic James Wood, Prikryl follows up her acclaimed debut, The After Party (Tim Duggan Books, 2016), with a collection of sonnets, free verse, and invented forms rooted in themes of loss, self-reliance, and redemption, pivoting from love poems to elegies for a fraught culture worth saving. Born in Czechoslovakia, Prikryl fled to Austria with her family when she was five; a year later she moved to Canada and, in 2016, a few months before the presidential election, she became a U.S. citizen. Prikryl’s poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, the Paris Review, and the New York Review of Books, where she is a senior editor and the poetry editor.

1. How long did it take you to write the poems in No Matter?
Nine months, plus a few years—nine months was the length of my fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, where I had an amazing five days a week to write in 2017 and 2018. That’s where most of the book was written. But I’d started a number of the poems in 2015, as soon as I’d handed in The After Party, my first book. And a couple are slightly revised from things I rediscovered in decades-old notebooks. And I kept writing, at a trickle, for a few months after I returned to New York last summer. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Tolerating myself on the page during my first few months at Radcliffe. I’d never before had such a stretch of time for writing, and it was a tremendous gift that produced the intensity and cohesion of the book, but it was agony to be thrust into daily contact with my first drafts. I had to plow through them to reach the lines that felt charged in some way, and develop those. That started to happen about a third of the way through the fellowship, and then things got interesting. But the first few months my spouse had to put up with much groaning when I came home from “the office” every night.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Anywhere, when some unexpected words occur to me, if I can. I work full-time as an editor, and my son is a toddler, and my husband is an artist who takes care of our boy much of the week, so on weekends I am parenting while my husband works. Some days I can focus on the subway, during my commute, and tap things into my phone.

4. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
I don’t exactly have one—it depends on what I’ve written and what I fear its weaknesses are. My spouse, Colin Gee, is a performing artist and a very sensitive and voracious reader, and if something is just not true he will hear it. My oldest friend, Jé Wilson, is a fiction writer who knows everything about me, has read everything ever written, and delivers very sound judgments. I have a handful of good friends who are brilliant and sophisticated readers too, and sometimes I send things to one of them. But I also feel that no one can really help me with poems, as opposed to essays. Each one is like a trial I get to undergo alone.

5. What are you reading right now?
Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work, Ivone Margulies’s Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday, and Robert Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematograph, among other things.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
The very great essayist Louise Glück.

7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started the first poems in No Matter, what would you say?
I am tempted to reply: Don’t worry so much about how dark and angry the book is becoming. But crucial to writing the book was the panic I started feeling about halfway through because of its darkness and anger—I wouldn’t want to have avoided reckoning with the book’s tone or meaning. In fact, if I could go back I’d tell myself to get to the gym every day, take advantage of the ridiculously convenient Harvard pool—I’m a swimmer—while you have the chance. Live a little. But then, I wouldn’t have wanted to live more and write less, etc.

8. How do you balance your day job with your writing?
I don’t think I do at the moment! Before I had a child I tried to devote evenings and weekends to writing, but it was always a stretch to write on weeknights. I work best in the mornings and I find it much easier to get started if I know I have all day to noodle around. 

9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Some depressing joint custody between my full-time job and the lack of subsidized childcare in this country. I’m lucky to have an intellectually stimulating job that I care about. But writing something good demands time, just sitting with it and staring and rewriting, and this kind of time is a luxury most working parents do not have.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Read widely.

Jana Prikryl, author of No Matter.

(Credit: Willy Somma)

Ten Questions for Karen Skolfield

8.13.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Karen Skolfield, whose second poetry collection, Battle Dress, is published today by W. W. Norton. In Battle Dress, Skolfield, a U.S. Army veteran, offers a fierce yet intimate glimpse of a soldier’s training, mental conditioning, and combat preparation as well as a searing examination of the long-term repercussions of war and how they become embedded in our language and psyche. “A terrific and sometimes terrifying collection—morally complex, rhythmic, tough-minded, and original,” writes Rosanna Warren, who chose the book as winner of the 2018 Barnard Women Poets Prize. Karen Skolfield is the author of a previous poetry collection, Frost in the Low Areas. She teaches writing to engineers at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

1. How long did it take you to write the poems in Battle Dress?
Most were written in the five years after my first book came out. A handful were written in grad school, not long after I finished my second enlistment. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Staying on topic. I’ve never had to do that before with poetry, and it meant I had both short-term and long-term goals in the writing stage. It was the difference between writing a poem I cared about and writing a book I cared about. Then, after Battle Dress was accepted, it was hard to go back to writing poems that were not about the military. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I get a ton of writing done at residencies. Battle Dress—plus many other non-military poems I snuck in—would not exist without my residencies at Ucross, Hedgebrook, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Vermont Studio Center. But I can’t go away all the time, so I do at least one “30 poems in 30 days” per year with friends, plus I write on an irregular basis the rest of the year. If I hadn’t already been discharged from the Army (honorably discharged, thank you very much) I am sure they would kick me out now for my lack of discipline and my deep love of 8:00 AM wake-ups. I remain in awe of writers who manage a regular writing life. You write at 5:00 every morning? Whoa, I bow in your direction.

4. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
I have three readers I lean on heavily: Brandon Amico, Kristin Bock, and Janet Bowdan, all poets. They see really different things and react in their own ways to my work: Brandon is over the moon when I write anything, but when it gets down to editing he pulls no punches. Kristin believes in my work before I ever do and convinces me that good things will come; she’s excellent at seeing the possibilities in poem intensity and ordering. Janet very kindly stomps on my poems and then offers ideas on how to rebuild them. 

5. What are you reading right now?
I’m finishing Brandon Courtney’s This, Sisyphus from YesYes Books. Courtney is a poet and a Navy veteran and I’m in absolute awe of his lyricism and musical ear. It’s a book I’m both enjoying and learning from in terms of craft and how to build a book, how to make a collection of poems work together.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Janet Mock. She’s well known to adult readers, but her books should be required reading for middle- and high-school students everywhere. Redefining Realness is taught at my son’s high school and I am sure it has changed—and saved—lives. 

7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Battle Dress, what would you say? 
I’d go back a ways and ask the seventeen-year-old, newly enlisted me to take notes, please, lots of them. I’d ask kindly, because I know what’s coming and she’s just so young. Battle Dress is invented, but it relies heavily on my seven years in the Army, and I’d love a better account of my enlistment than the pitch and yaw of memory, the few letters I managed to save. 

8. What trait do you most value in a poetry editor? 
As a poet, I largely take for granted how talented and efficient poetry editors are. What gets me in the gut is how kind they invariably are even as, I am sure, they are overworked. I’ve received the nicest comments and editing from literary journals—George David Clark and Cate Lycurgus from 32 Poems, and Don Bogen at The Cincinnati Review are recent examples in my world, but there have been so many others. Poets Rosanna Warren and Nancy Eimers, the judges who chose my two books for publication, wrote such nice notes and gave such thoughtful editing suggestions that I had to pause multiple times while reading. 

Similarly, Jill Bialosky and Drew Weitman at Norton and the folks at Barnard College have taken great care and thoughtfully passed along all the congratulations and comments they’ve received about my book. You know, poet here, starving for praise, and they weren’t required to take the time out of their work days, but they did, and it means a lot. And when I got the style sheet and copy editing queries from Norton I got teary. Having top copy editors see and consider not just the drive of the poems but the structure, make sure every comma and capitalization was correct, was deeply touching. I was stunned—something I wrote had earned that level of care. 

9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Myself. The world is both really fun and really demanding and it’s hard to look away. Lately I can add some physical difficulties to this—neck, spine—that severely limit my time at the keyboard, but that just comes back to me, doesn’t it? 

Wait. Everyone says this, don’t they? (Checks last zillion answers on the P&W website.) Yeah, pretty much. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all just give ourselves up? Think of all the writing we’d get done! 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
It’s necessary to write terrible lines, awful drafts, half-hearted poems. Write ten in a row if needed. Throw pencils, get mad, take a walk. Swear off poetry, read a chapter of a post-apocalyptic novel, wash the dishes. Feel better? Back to writing. Repeat as necessary. 

For some reason, this is advice I need to hear again and again.  Every poem I write is either my delight or torment, a feather or a lash. But I don’t know how to be less invested, even in my poems that sound nonchalant to a reader.

Karen Skolfield, author of the poetry collection Battle Dress.

(Credit: Michael Medeiros)

Ten Questions for Jess Row

8.6.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Jess Row, whose essay collection White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination is out today from Graywolf Press. In essays exploring race in the imaginative life of Americans, from the end of the civil rights era to the present, Row ties the movement of white Americans into segregated communities, such as suburbs and gentrified neighborhoods, to white writers setting their stories in isolated or “emotionally insulated” landscapes. In close readings of work by Don DeLillo, Annie Dillard, Richard Ford, and David Foster Wallace, he illustrates how these and other writers have cleared imaginitive space for themselves at the expense of engaging with race. Jess Row is the author of the novel Your Face in Mine and the story collections The Train to Lo Wu and Nobody Ever Gets Lost. White Flights is his first book of nonfiction. One of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists of 2007, he lives in New York and teaches at the College of New Jersey.

1. How long did it take you to write the essays in White Flights?
Quite a while! I began writing essays about race and American fiction back around the time I started writing my novel Your Face in Mine, which takes us all the way back to 2010. I published the essay that contained the kernel of the book’s argument, “White Flights,” in the Boston Review in 2013. But honestly most of the writing took place after I signed up with Graywolf in the spring of 2015. I’d say at least 80 percent of the book was written in a focused way between 2015 and 2018.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Because whiteness is a vast and amorphous subject—because it largely exists without being talked about, identified, or even noticed—the biggest challenge was narrowing down what I wanted to say and which writers I wanted to engage with. There are so many white writers whose work could have been part of this project—Annie Proulx, Ann Beattie, and then of course many postwar writers like Cheever and Malamud and Updike and Bellow, all of whom play a part in the construction of American literary whiteness and what might be called the “white sensibility.” But I couldn’t do it all.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Whenever I can. My kids are nine and twelve, and much of my life revolves around them, of course; I have a full time academic job at the College of New Jersey, which involves a long commute from my home in New York, so my writing time has to be very carefully carved out and protected. I try to dedicate whole working days to writing, at best three (but usually two) days a week during the academic year. I would not have been able to finish this book without a Guggenheim grant, which allowed me to take off a whole year from teaching—the first time I’ve done that since I started working full time in 2001. I also was invited to be a visiting professor at NYU in 2016 to 2017, which meant I didn’t have to travel to work, and I wrote a lot of the book then as well.

4. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
My wife, Sonya, absolutely. She’s very honest, and almost always right, although we’ll argue forever about what goes into that “almost.”

5. What are you reading right now?
I read a lot of books at once, and I only read books on paper, which may explain why I’m nursing a shoulder injury this summer! Books are heavy. Among other things I’m reading Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, her dystopian novel about climate change and the collapse of the U.S. state, which I’ve honestly been afraid to read until now—and for good reason. It’s astonishingly, horrifyingly accurate for a novel written in 1993. I’m also reading Uwe Johnson’s mammoth novel Anniversaries, which was translated just recently for the first time from German and published by NYRB Classics last year. It’s in some ways very similar to the novel I’m working on now, The New Earth, in that Johnson was trying to capture the feeling of New York at a chaotic and terrible moment, 1969, and I’m doing a version of the same thing (not just in New York, but rooted in New York) in 2018.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
For years my standard answer to this question was James Baldwin, whose Another Country is probably the single most important American novel of them all, in my humble opinion—but Baldwin has now received a share of his long-overdue recognition. So I’ll say Henry Dumas, another great writer of the 1960s who was killed by the police in New York in 1968. His collected works, Echo Tree, is a book everyone should own.

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?
Fiona McCrae, who acquired the book at Graywolf, and I had a lot of conversations in the early stages about the role of anger and antagonism in literary criticism. Some of the essays I originally published in magazines that went into the first draft of White Flights were, for lack of a better word, snarky. Intentionally so. She was concerned that the book be as thoughtful and exploratory as it could possibly be, and she didn’t want anything I wrote to be perceived as a cheap shot. As I got further into the project, it became clear to me that she was entirely right, not because anger isn’t a necessary part of criticism, but because, in my view, the anger has to be directed at the structural forces that make racism work (and the political leaders who consciously and intentionally make use of those forces). In most cases—not all—the white writers I talk about in White Flights aren’t intentionally racist; in many cases they’re trying hard not to be racist, but in simply telling stories the way they want to tell them, they’re exposing the structure and formation of a racist culture (and, unfortunately, sometimes perpetuating it.) Which is something I have done too. I’m as implicated in this as anyone.

8. How do you balance your day job with your writing?
Writers are artists, which means that (in my experience, anyway) we have to work hard to protect our creative time, our imaginations, in the midst of all the other parts of our lives—not just work but family, bills, laundry, taxes, car repairs, and so on. For me it’s all about creating psychic, emotional boundaries, so that I have time to feel free and unencumbered while I’m working, no matter what else is going on. That’s a real struggle, of course. I don’t really believe in balance; I believe in trying to sustain a feeling of wholeness, which means, in large part, taking care of other things you need to do so that you can feel free in your work, and also realizing that success in your career is only one part of a larger whole, which involves paying attention to your physical health, your relationships, your children and partner, your religious practice, your financial obligations, and so on.

9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I have many fewer impediments to my writing life than most writers, god knows! The impediments I do have are mostly emotional, and are shared by just about every writer I’ve ever met: self-doubt, envy and the constant urge to compare oneself with others, anxiety about success, fear of not finding the right material, or not doing right by your material, fear of cultural irrelevance, wanting more readers, worries about the changing nature of publishing (and whether publishing will exist in any recognizable form twenty or thirty years from now). And on top of all of that, in the present moment, wondering whether any kind of art can address the crises of racist nationalism and environmental collapse in our time.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Neither of these are pieces of writing advice, but they’re two of the most meaningful things I’ve ever encountered about making art. First, from Liz Phair, in the context of a song in which she’s addressing a romantic partner: “Everything you say is so obnoxious, funny, true, and mean.” That’s more of a credo for my fiction than my nonfiction, because I don’t want to be mean, particularly in the context of a book like White Flights, but I would like to be true, obnoxious (in the sense of pointing out the obvious) and at least a little bit funny. The second, from Peter Tosh: “Live clean, and let your works be seen.” That’s a life motto that can interpreted many ways, and some will find it vague and useless, but I’ve tried to live by it in my own way since I first heard it in high school.

Jess Row, author of the essay collection White Flights.

(Credit: Sarah Shatz)

Ten Questions for Jonathan Vatner

8.20.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Jonathan Vatner, whose debut novel, Carnegie Hill, is out today from Thomas Dunne Books. Ushering the reader inside the world of New York City’s wealthy elite—the upper-crust denizens of Carnegie Hill, to be exact, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan—Vatner constructs a narrative web of deception and secrecy through which Penelope “Pepper” Bradford, who is having second thoughts about her financier fiancé, is forced to navigate. “You won’t envy these people for a second but you’ll have a great time watching them undo and fix themselves,” writes Joan Silber. Jonathan Vatner is an award-winning journalist who has written for The New York TimesO, The Oprah MagazinePoets & Writers Magazine; and many other publications. He has an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College and a BA in cognitive neuroscience from Harvard University. He lives in Yonkers, New York, with his husband and cats.

1. How long did it take you to write Carnegie Hill?
I started writing it in the summer of 2013 as linked stories that all took place in the same apartment building on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I finished a draft in January of 2015. Some of my readers told me it wasn’t working either as short stories or as a novel, so I spent another year making it more novel-like, stretching a few plots throughout the book. I signed with my agent in early 2016, and we had trouble selling it—true agony!—so before he sent it out again, I spent another eight months reworking it. We sold the book in early 2017, and I spent another year revising it with my editors at St. Martin’s. I think I finally stopped tinkering with it in September of 2018. So, five years.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I struggled a lot with character likability. I’ve long bristled at this demand placed on writers: It’s not enough to make characters lifelike; readers have to like them too! The truth is, though, I’ve put down plenty of books because I hated the characters so much I stopped caring what happened to them.

In Carnegie Hill, a lot of characters were acting out and didn’t know why—their blindness turned off readers. I worked really hard at not softening the most shocking scenes but instead preparing the reader with backstory and context. And then placing those characters in situations where they could be their best selves.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I wrote most of Carnegie Hill in two places: after hours at my job, and on weekends on my couch. Maybe six or seven times I carved out a week for a residency, either something I applied to or a friend’s house or a little vacation with my writing group.

Last year, however, I moved to Yonkers from New York City, and I ride a commuter train forty minutes each way to work. That’s when I write. Having to come to the page twice a day for short bursts gets me writing very fast; there’s very little wasted time. I’ve never been so productive in my life.

4. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
A legion of readers shaped Carnegie Hill in important ways…it’s very humbling to accept that I could not have written this book on my own. Of everyone who read it, I think I trusted my husband’s feedback more than anyone else’s. He’s very psychologically attuned, and he understood what I was trying to do, so I took his advice on how to get there. Another reader I trust in a different way is my friend Phil, who is also not a professional writer and who always reads my chapters first from a place of pure appreciation. Knowing that the work has value from the outset helps me weather the criticisms that inevitably follow.

5. What are you reading right now?
I’m halfway through a bunch of books. On audio I’m listening to Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips, which is such a sophisticated and complex novel I can’t believe it’s her first—and I can feel the gut punch waiting for me at the end. I’m loving Very Nice by Marcy Dermansky—it’s like eating candy that happens to satisfy all your nutritional needs. On my nightstand I have two excellent books of poems by LGBTQ poets, Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith and High Ground Coward by Alicia Mountain. And on a completely different note, I’m reading an advance copy of my friend Christy Harrison’s Anti-Diet—it makes you realize just how pervasive and unnecessary dieting is. When it comes out in December, I think it’s going to change the national conversation about diet culture.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
At AWP a few years back I picked up a pocket-size book, published by A Strange Object, called Misadventure by Nicholas Grider. It’s a collection of intricately crafted and mysterious short stories about bondage. I found the craft of those stories and their subject matter deeply compelling, and I think about them all the time.

Also: A truly legendary professor at Sarah Lawrence, David Hollander, published a novel straight out of grad school and, because it didn’t sell through the advance, he had trouble finding another publisher willing to take a risk on him. And his writing is virtuosic and funny and surprising, like a David Foster Wallace or a Stanley Elkin. Almost twenty years later, his second novel, Anthropica, is coming out next spring from a new imprint called Dead Rabbits. I am mightily looking forward to it.

7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business? 
The thing that seems scariest to me is the likelihood that if you’re with a major publisher and you don’t have success right out of the gate, you won’t get another book deal. I recognize that there are lots of fantastic independent presses—and self-publishing, to boot—but the financial prospects of those routes are generally unsustainable. Not only does the specter of commercial failure keep me up at night, the idea that one book could end a career implies that all of an author’s output over an entire career is basically interchangeable, that an author is what people buy, rather than a book.

8. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
I was thrilled with the program at Sarah Lawrence College from beginning to end. It helped me take myself seriously as a novelist and an artist, it connected me with other serious writers who are publishing great work, and it sparked a growth trajectory in my craft that has continued to this day. It also greased the wheels of the publishing process: My fellow alumna, novelist Christine Reilly, recommended me to her agent, and my professors wrote bighearted blurbs to help promote my novel.

One reason the MFA was the right choice for me, I think, was that I was eight years out of college, and I’d had time to: A) get some life experience, and B) crave school again. I wouldn’t recommend the MFA to people who don’t know for sure that they want to be writers; there were some of these people in my program, and I watched them struggle. I think one would get more insight into questions of career by working in a few different industries.

9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Having to make a living! But I also think that if I didn’t have a job—at least a few days a week—I wouldn’t know how to fill my days, and I’d be depressed.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
It came from my thesis advisor at Sarah Lawrence, Brian Morton: Don’t be subtle. After hearing that advice, I began noticing that even in classic literature, authors make their points explicitly, again and again. Obviously there are times when subtlety is called for, and readers usually appreciate the challenge of connecting a few dots. But for the most part, I’ve found success by telling readers what I want them to know.

Jonathan Vatner, author of the novel Carnegie Hill.

(Credit: Smiljana Peros)

Ten Questions for Karen Skolfield

8.13.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Karen Skolfield, whose second poetry collection, Battle Dress, is published today by W. W. Norton. In Battle Dress, Skolfield, a U.S. Army veteran, offers a fierce yet intimate glimpse of a soldier’s training, mental conditioning, and combat preparation as well as a searing examination of the long-term repercussions of war and how they become embedded in our language and psyche. “A terrific and sometimes terrifying collection—morally complex, rhythmic, tough-minded, and original,” writes Rosanna Warren, who chose the book as winner of the 2018 Barnard Women Poets Prize. Karen Skolfield is the author of a previous poetry collection, Frost in the Low Areas. She teaches writing to engineers at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

1. How long did it take you to write the poems in Battle Dress?
Most were written in the five years after my first book came out. A handful were written in grad school, not long after I finished my second enlistment. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Staying on topic. I’ve never had to do that before with poetry, and it meant I had both short-term and long-term goals in the writing stage. It was the difference between writing a poem I cared about and writing a book I cared about. Then, after Battle Dress was accepted, it was hard to go back to writing poems that were not about the military. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I get a ton of writing done at residencies. Battle Dress—plus many other non-military poems I snuck in—would not exist without my residencies at Ucross, Hedgebrook, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Vermont Studio Center. But I can’t go away all the time, so I do at least one “30 poems in 30 days” per year with friends, plus I write on an irregular basis the rest of the year. If I hadn’t already been discharged from the Army (honorably discharged, thank you very much) I am sure they would kick me out now for my lack of discipline and my deep love of 8:00 AM wake-ups. I remain in awe of writers who manage a regular writing life. You write at 5:00 every morning? Whoa, I bow in your direction.

4. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
I have three readers I lean on heavily: Brandon Amico, Kristin Bock, and Janet Bowdan, all poets. They see really different things and react in their own ways to my work: Brandon is over the moon when I write anything, but when it gets down to editing he pulls no punches. Kristin believes in my work before I ever do and convinces me that good things will come; she’s excellent at seeing the possibilities in poem intensity and ordering. Janet very kindly stomps on my poems and then offers ideas on how to rebuild them. 

5. What are you reading right now?
I’m finishing Brandon Courtney’s This, Sisyphus from YesYes Books. Courtney is a poet and a Navy veteran and I’m in absolute awe of his lyricism and musical ear. It’s a book I’m both enjoying and learning from in terms of craft and how to build a book, how to make a collection of poems work together.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Janet Mock. She’s well known to adult readers, but her books should be required reading for middle- and high-school students everywhere. Redefining Realness is taught at my son’s high school and I am sure it has changed—and saved—lives. 

7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Battle Dress, what would you say? 
I’d go back a ways and ask the seventeen-year-old, newly enlisted me to take notes, please, lots of them. I’d ask kindly, because I know what’s coming and she’s just so young. Battle Dress is invented, but it relies heavily on my seven years in the Army, and I’d love a better account of my enlistment than the pitch and yaw of memory, the few letters I managed to save. 

8. What trait do you most value in a poetry editor? 
As a poet, I largely take for granted how talented and efficient poetry editors are. What gets me in the gut is how kind they invariably are even as, I am sure, they are overworked. I’ve received the nicest comments and editing from literary journals—George David Clark and Cate Lycurgus from 32 Poems, and Don Bogen at The Cincinnati Review are recent examples in my world, but there have been so many others. Poets Rosanna Warren and Nancy Eimers, the judges who chose my two books for publication, wrote such nice notes and gave such thoughtful editing suggestions that I had to pause multiple times while reading. 

Similarly, Jill Bialosky and Drew Weitman at Norton and the folks at Barnard College have taken great care and thoughtfully passed along all the congratulations and comments they’ve received about my book. You know, poet here, starving for praise, and they weren’t required to take the time out of their work days, but they did, and it means a lot. And when I got the style sheet and copy editing queries from Norton I got teary. Having top copy editors see and consider not just the drive of the poems but the structure, make sure every comma and capitalization was correct, was deeply touching. I was stunned—something I wrote had earned that level of care. 

9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Myself. The world is both really fun and really demanding and it’s hard to look away. Lately I can add some physical difficulties to this—neck, spine—that severely limit my time at the keyboard, but that just comes back to me, doesn’t it? 

Wait. Everyone says this, don’t they? (Checks last zillion answers on the P&W website.) Yeah, pretty much. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all just give ourselves up? Think of all the writing we’d get done! 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
It’s necessary to write terrible lines, awful drafts, half-hearted poems. Write ten in a row if needed. Throw pencils, get mad, take a walk. Swear off poetry, read a chapter of a post-apocalyptic novel, wash the dishes. Feel better? Back to writing. Repeat as necessary. 

For some reason, this is advice I need to hear again and again.  Every poem I write is either my delight or torment, a feather or a lash. But I don’t know how to be less invested, even in my poems that sound nonchalant to a reader.

Karen Skolfield, author of the poetry collection Battle Dress.

(Credit: Michael Medeiros)

Ten Questions for Jess Row

8.6.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Jess Row, whose essay collection White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination is out today from Graywolf Press. In essays exploring race in the imaginative life of Americans, from the end of the civil rights era to the present, Row ties the movement of white Americans into segregated communities, such as suburbs and gentrified neighborhoods, to white writers setting their stories in isolated or “emotionally insulated” landscapes. In close readings of work by Don DeLillo, Annie Dillard, Richard Ford, and David Foster Wallace, he illustrates how these and other writers have cleared imaginitive space for themselves at the expense of engaging with race. Jess Row is the author of the novel Your Face in Mine and the story collections The Train to Lo Wu and Nobody Ever Gets Lost. White Flights is his first book of nonfiction. One of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists of 2007, he lives in New York and teaches at the College of New Jersey.

1. How long did it take you to write the essays in White Flights?
Quite a while! I began writing essays about race and American fiction back around the time I started writing my novel Your Face in Mine, which takes us all the way back to 2010. I published the essay that contained the kernel of the book’s argument, “White Flights,” in the Boston Review in 2013. But honestly most of the writing took place after I signed up with Graywolf in the spring of 2015. I’d say at least 80 percent of the book was written in a focused way between 2015 and 2018.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Because whiteness is a vast and amorphous subject—because it largely exists without being talked about, identified, or even noticed—the biggest challenge was narrowing down what I wanted to say and which writers I wanted to engage with. There are so many white writers whose work could have been part of this project—Annie Proulx, Ann Beattie, and then of course many postwar writers like Cheever and Malamud and Updike and Bellow, all of whom play a part in the construction of American literary whiteness and what might be called the “white sensibility.” But I couldn’t do it all.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Whenever I can. My kids are nine and twelve, and much of my life revolves around them, of course; I have a full time academic job at the College of New Jersey, which involves a long commute from my home in New York, so my writing time has to be very carefully carved out and protected. I try to dedicate whole working days to writing, at best three (but usually two) days a week during the academic year. I would not have been able to finish this book without a Guggenheim grant, which allowed me to take off a whole year from teaching—the first time I’ve done that since I started working full time in 2001. I also was invited to be a visiting professor at NYU in 2016 to 2017, which meant I didn’t have to travel to work, and I wrote a lot of the book then as well.

4. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
My wife, Sonya, absolutely. She’s very honest, and almost always right, although we’ll argue forever about what goes into that “almost.”

5. What are you reading right now?
I read a lot of books at once, and I only read books on paper, which may explain why I’m nursing a shoulder injury this summer! Books are heavy. Among other things I’m reading Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, her dystopian novel about climate change and the collapse of the U.S. state, which I’ve honestly been afraid to read until now—and for good reason. It’s astonishingly, horrifyingly accurate for a novel written in 1993. I’m also reading Uwe Johnson’s mammoth novel Anniversaries, which was translated just recently for the first time from German and published by NYRB Classics last year. It’s in some ways very similar to the novel I’m working on now, The New Earth, in that Johnson was trying to capture the feeling of New York at a chaotic and terrible moment, 1969, and I’m doing a version of the same thing (not just in New York, but rooted in New York) in 2018.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
For years my standard answer to this question was James Baldwin, whose Another Country is probably the single most important American novel of them all, in my humble opinion—but Baldwin has now received a share of his long-overdue recognition. So I’ll say Henry Dumas, another great writer of the 1960s who was killed by the police in New York in 1968. His collected works, Echo Tree, is a book everyone should own.

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?
Fiona McCrae, who acquired the book at Graywolf, and I had a lot of conversations in the early stages about the role of anger and antagonism in literary criticism. Some of the essays I originally published in magazines that went into the first draft of White Flights were, for lack of a better word, snarky. Intentionally so. She was concerned that the book be as thoughtful and exploratory as it could possibly be, and she didn’t want anything I wrote to be perceived as a cheap shot. As I got further into the project, it became clear to me that she was entirely right, not because anger isn’t a necessary part of criticism, but because, in my view, the anger has to be directed at the structural forces that make racism work (and the political leaders who consciously and intentionally make use of those forces). In most cases—not all—the white writers I talk about in White Flights aren’t intentionally racist; in many cases they’re trying hard not to be racist, but in simply telling stories the way they want to tell them, they’re exposing the structure and formation of a racist culture (and, unfortunately, sometimes perpetuating it.) Which is something I have done too. I’m as implicated in this as anyone.

8. How do you balance your day job with your writing?
Writers are artists, which means that (in my experience, anyway) we have to work hard to protect our creative time, our imaginations, in the midst of all the other parts of our lives—not just work but family, bills, laundry, taxes, car repairs, and so on. For me it’s all about creating psychic, emotional boundaries, so that I have time to feel free and unencumbered while I’m working, no matter what else is going on. That’s a real struggle, of course. I don’t really believe in balance; I believe in trying to sustain a feeling of wholeness, which means, in large part, taking care of other things you need to do so that you can feel free in your work, and also realizing that success in your career is only one part of a larger whole, which involves paying attention to your physical health, your relationships, your children and partner, your religious practice, your financial obligations, and so on.

9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I have many fewer impediments to my writing life than most writers, god knows! The impediments I do have are mostly emotional, and are shared by just about every writer I’ve ever met: self-doubt, envy and the constant urge to compare oneself with others, anxiety about success, fear of not finding the right material, or not doing right by your material, fear of cultural irrelevance, wanting more readers, worries about the changing nature of publishing (and whether publishing will exist in any recognizable form twenty or thirty years from now). And on top of all of that, in the present moment, wondering whether any kind of art can address the crises of racist nationalism and environmental collapse in our time.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Neither of these are pieces of writing advice, but they’re two of the most meaningful things I’ve ever encountered about making art. First, from Liz Phair, in the context of a song in which she’s addressing a romantic partner: “Everything you say is so obnoxious, funny, true, and mean.” That’s more of a credo for my fiction than my nonfiction, because I don’t want to be mean, particularly in the context of a book like White Flights, but I would like to be true, obnoxious (in the sense of pointing out the obvious) and at least a little bit funny. The second, from Peter Tosh: “Live clean, and let your works be seen.” That’s a life motto that can interpreted many ways, and some will find it vague and useless, but I’ve tried to live by it in my own way since I first heard it in high school.

Jess Row, author of the essay collection White Flights.

(Credit: Sarah Shatz)

Ten Questions for Crystal Hana Kim

8.27.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Crystal Hana Kim, whose novel, If You Leave Me, is out in paperback today from William Morrow. This intergenerational saga is set in motion when sixteen-year-old Haemi Lee, forced to flee with her mother and brother to a refugee camp in Busan, South Korea, in 1951, decides to find a husband in order to ensure the safety of her family. Her decision to marry Jisoo despite her feelings for his cousin Kyunghwan, has repercussions that are felt generations later. If You Leave Me was named a best book of 2018 by the Washington Post, ALA Booklist, Cosmopolitan, and others. It was also longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Kim’s work has been published in Elle Magazine, the Paris Review, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and an MSEd from Hunter College. She is a Teach For America alum and has taught elementary school, high school, and collegiate writing. She is a contributing editor at Apogee Journal.

1. How long did it take you to write If You Leave Me
When I began my MFA studies in 2011, I started experimenting with different voices and perspectives. This is when I created the main characters Haemi, Solee, Kyunghwan, Jisoo, and Hyunki. At that point, I didn’t think I could write a novel yet; there was too much to learn. An interconnected short story collection sounded more attainable, so that’s the form I decided on. But in 2014, in my last semester of the MFA, my teacher Ben Metcalf convinced me to tear the collection apart and create a novel about the first generation of characters. I think it took me until early 2016 to finish the book. Then I had to find an agent, and then of course an editor, so my novel didn’t come out until August 2018. I’ve learned that writing is not for the impatient.   

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Maintaining the confidence to continue. In graduate school, I received constant feedback and encouragement about my work. But in the years after, without the structure of school, I felt as if I was in a free fall. There were days and weeks when I wasn’t sure if my writing was good enough—and by extension, if I was good enough. Self-doubt is always the most challenging for writers, isn’t it? All the research I had to do for the book is a close second though.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
My writing schedule fluctuates wildly depending on what my sources of income are at the moment. Right now, I’m transitioning from working in the nonprofit space to freelancing and teaching, which is less stable but also allows for more writing time. I like to write at home at my desk. I take lots of notes by hand but write the actual manuscript on my laptop. Sometimes I listen to binaural beats or ocean waves. Sometimes I just put in headphones and listen to nothing. I often use the Freedom app to block out the internet because I am compulsive about checking e-mail. 

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process? 
The nerves! Everyone told me publishing is a terrifying process, but I’m not an anxious person so I thought I’d be fine. I was wrong. If You Leave Me is fictional, but I still felt so vulnerable and tender, as if a layer of my skin had been peeled off. 

This sounds naïve, but another unexpected thing was hearing from so many different types of readers. As a debut author without a lot of prior publications, I honestly wondered who would read my book. But then I heard from Korean Americans, immigrants from other countries, war veterans, and mothers who had experienced postpartum depression. The variety of responses was overwhelming in the best way. 

5. What are you reading right now? 
A Pale View of the Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro. It’s eerie and haunting. I’m worried I’ll get nightmares. The next book on my list is the short story anthology Everyday People, edited by Jennifer Baker. 

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
I love Mercè Rodoreda’s work. She was a prolific Catalan author. I’d recommend starting with The Time of the Doves. I also love the Library of Korean Literature’s translated books. I recently discovered Seo Hajin’s short story collection A Good Family. Each of her stories explores the meaning of family and the secrets we keep from each other in stark, slightly strange, intelligent prose.  

7. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
This is a tough question because there’s no right answer. The MFA is what you make of it. You’ll be provided with time, community, and feedback. Hopefully, you’ll also learn to read more widely, to think critically, to teach in a collegiate setting, and form lasting friendships with other writers. But the actually writing, which is the most important part, is up to you. I will say that I always tell my students that it’s not worth going into debt over an MFA.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
Money and time, which are, of course, related. 

9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
We need more diversity across the spectrum, meaning in terms of race, sexuality, gender, class, nationality, ability. This needs to happen behind the scenes in the publishing world, too. I’m seeing more diverse writers—particularly in the YA world—but I don’t think there’s been as much change in editors, publicists, heads of publishing, etc. Also, we should do away with blurbs. Asking for blurbs is the worst. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
I’ve been thinking about Toni Morrison a lot these days and I recently found this quote via Jamel Brinkley. Here’s what Toni said about character, which is helping me as I draft my second novel: “All the characters in my book, whether they are successful or not, they’re all pushed into that place where all the definitions of themselves are suspicious…. The circumstances have to be invented so that the characters…have to simply be stripped down, and made very lean, so that you can see who you are.” 

One more piece of advice, from James Baldwin, which I have taped above my desk: “You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone.” 

Crystal Hana Kim, author of If You Leave Me.

Ten Questions for Jonathan Vatner

8.20.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Jonathan Vatner, whose debut novel, Carnegie Hill, is out today from Thomas Dunne Books. Ushering the reader inside the world of New York City’s wealthy elite—the upper-crust denizens of Carnegie Hill, to be exact, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan—Vatner constructs a narrative web of deception and secrecy through which Penelope “Pepper” Bradford, who is having second thoughts about her financier fiancé, is forced to navigate. “You won’t envy these people for a second but you’ll have a great time watching them undo and fix themselves,” writes Joan Silber. Jonathan Vatner is an award-winning journalist who has written for The New York TimesO, The Oprah MagazinePoets & Writers Magazine; and many other publications. He has an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College and a BA in cognitive neuroscience from Harvard University. He lives in Yonkers, New York, with his husband and cats.

1. How long did it take you to write Carnegie Hill?
I started writing it in the summer of 2013 as linked stories that all took place in the same apartment building on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I finished a draft in January of 2015. Some of my readers told me it wasn’t working either as short stories or as a novel, so I spent another year making it more novel-like, stretching a few plots throughout the book. I signed with my agent in early 2016, and we had trouble selling it—true agony!—so before he sent it out again, I spent another eight months reworking it. We sold the book in early 2017, and I spent another year revising it with my editors at St. Martin’s. I think I finally stopped tinkering with it in September of 2018. So, five years.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I struggled a lot with character likability. I’ve long bristled at this demand placed on writers: It’s not enough to make characters lifelike; readers have to like them too! The truth is, though, I’ve put down plenty of books because I hated the characters so much I stopped caring what happened to them.

In Carnegie Hill, a lot of characters were acting out and didn’t know why—their blindness turned off readers. I worked really hard at not softening the most shocking scenes but instead preparing the reader with backstory and context. And then placing those characters in situations where they could be their best selves.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I wrote most of Carnegie Hill in two places: after hours at my job, and on weekends on my couch. Maybe six or seven times I carved out a week for a residency, either something I applied to or a friend’s house or a little vacation with my writing group.

Last year, however, I moved to Yonkers from New York City, and I ride a commuter train forty minutes each way to work. That’s when I write. Having to come to the page twice a day for short bursts gets me writing very fast; there’s very little wasted time. I’ve never been so productive in my life.

4. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
A legion of readers shaped Carnegie Hill in important ways…it’s very humbling to accept that I could not have written this book on my own. Of everyone who read it, I think I trusted my husband’s feedback more than anyone else’s. He’s very psychologically attuned, and he understood what I was trying to do, so I took his advice on how to get there. Another reader I trust in a different way is my friend Phil, who is also not a professional writer and who always reads my chapters first from a place of pure appreciation. Knowing that the work has value from the outset helps me weather the criticisms that inevitably follow.

5. What are you reading right now?
I’m halfway through a bunch of books. On audio I’m listening to Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips, which is such a sophisticated and complex novel I can’t believe it’s her first—and I can feel the gut punch waiting for me at the end. I’m loving Very Nice by Marcy Dermansky—it’s like eating candy that happens to satisfy all your nutritional needs. On my nightstand I have two excellent books of poems by LGBTQ poets, Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith and High Ground Coward by Alicia Mountain. And on a completely different note, I’m reading an advance copy of my friend Christy Harrison’s Anti-Diet—it makes you realize just how pervasive and unnecessary dieting is. When it comes out in December, I think it’s going to change the national conversation about diet culture.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
At AWP a few years back I picked up a pocket-size book, published by A Strange Object, called Misadventure by Nicholas Grider. It’s a collection of intricately crafted and mysterious short stories about bondage. I found the craft of those stories and their subject matter deeply compelling, and I think about them all the time.

Also: A truly legendary professor at Sarah Lawrence, David Hollander, published a novel straight out of grad school and, because it didn’t sell through the advance, he had trouble finding another publisher willing to take a risk on him. And his writing is virtuosic and funny and surprising, like a David Foster Wallace or a Stanley Elkin. Almost twenty years later, his second novel, Anthropica, is coming out next spring from a new imprint called Dead Rabbits. I am mightily looking forward to it.

7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business? 
The thing that seems scariest to me is the likelihood that if you’re with a major publisher and you don’t have success right out of the gate, you won’t get another book deal. I recognize that there are lots of fantastic independent presses—and self-publishing, to boot—but the financial prospects of those routes are generally unsustainable. Not only does the specter of commercial failure keep me up at night, the idea that one book could end a career implies that all of an author’s output over an entire career is basically interchangeable, that an author is what people buy, rather than a book.

8. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
I was thrilled with the program at Sarah Lawrence College from beginning to end. It helped me take myself seriously as a novelist and an artist, it connected me with other serious writers who are publishing great work, and it sparked a growth trajectory in my craft that has continued to this day. It also greased the wheels of the publishing process: My fellow alumna, novelist Christine Reilly, recommended me to her agent, and my professors wrote bighearted blurbs to help promote my novel.

One reason the MFA was the right choice for me, I think, was that I was eight years out of college, and I’d had time to: A) get some life experience, and B) crave school again. I wouldn’t recommend the MFA to people who don’t know for sure that they want to be writers; there were some of these people in my program, and I watched them struggle. I think one would get more insight into questions of career by working in a few different industries.

9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Having to make a living! But I also think that if I didn’t have a job—at least a few days a week—I wouldn’t know how to fill my days, and I’d be depressed.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
It came from my thesis advisor at Sarah Lawrence, Brian Morton: Don’t be subtle. After hearing that advice, I began noticing that even in classic literature, authors make their points explicitly, again and again. Obviously there are times when subtlety is called for, and readers usually appreciate the challenge of connecting a few dots. But for the most part, I’ve found success by telling readers what I want them to know.

Jonathan Vatner, author of the novel Carnegie Hill.

(Credit: Smiljana Peros)

Ten Questions for Karen Skolfield

8.13.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Karen Skolfield, whose second poetry collection, Battle Dress, is published today by W. W. Norton. In Battle Dress, Skolfield, a U.S. Army veteran, offers a fierce yet intimate glimpse of a soldier’s training, mental conditioning, and combat preparation as well as a searing examination of the long-term repercussions of war and how they become embedded in our language and psyche. “A terrific and sometimes terrifying collection—morally complex, rhythmic, tough-minded, and original,” writes Rosanna Warren, who chose the book as winner of the 2018 Barnard Women Poets Prize. Karen Skolfield is the author of a previous poetry collection, Frost in the Low Areas. She teaches writing to engineers at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

1. How long did it take you to write the poems in Battle Dress?
Most were written in the five years after my first book came out. A handful were written in grad school, not long after I finished my second enlistment. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Staying on topic. I’ve never had to do that before with poetry, and it meant I had both short-term and long-term goals in the writing stage. It was the difference between writing a poem I cared about and writing a book I cared about. Then, after Battle Dress was accepted, it was hard to go back to writing poems that were not about the military. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I get a ton of writing done at residencies. Battle Dress—plus many other non-military poems I snuck in—would not exist without my residencies at Ucross, Hedgebrook, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Vermont Studio Center. But I can’t go away all the time, so I do at least one “30 poems in 30 days” per year with friends, plus I write on an irregular basis the rest of the year. If I hadn’t already been discharged from the Army (honorably discharged, thank you very much) I am sure they would kick me out now for my lack of discipline and my deep love of 8:00 AM wake-ups. I remain in awe of writers who manage a regular writing life. You write at 5:00 every morning? Whoa, I bow in your direction.

4. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
I have three readers I lean on heavily: Brandon Amico, Kristin Bock, and Janet Bowdan, all poets. They see really different things and react in their own ways to my work: Brandon is over the moon when I write anything, but when it gets down to editing he pulls no punches. Kristin believes in my work before I ever do and convinces me that good things will come; she’s excellent at seeing the possibilities in poem intensity and ordering. Janet very kindly stomps on my poems and then offers ideas on how to rebuild them. 

5. What are you reading right now?
I’m finishing Brandon Courtney’s This, Sisyphus from YesYes Books. Courtney is a poet and a Navy veteran and I’m in absolute awe of his lyricism and musical ear. It’s a book I’m both enjoying and learning from in terms of craft and how to build a book, how to make a collection of poems work together.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Janet Mock. She’s well known to adult readers, but her books should be required reading for middle- and high-school students everywhere. Redefining Realness is taught at my son’s high school and I am sure it has changed—and saved—lives. 

7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Battle Dress, what would you say? 
I’d go back a ways and ask the seventeen-year-old, newly enlisted me to take notes, please, lots of them. I’d ask kindly, because I know what’s coming and she’s just so young. Battle Dress is invented, but it relies heavily on my seven years in the Army, and I’d love a better account of my enlistment than the pitch and yaw of memory, the few letters I managed to save. 

8. What trait do you most value in a poetry editor? 
As a poet, I largely take for granted how talented and efficient poetry editors are. What gets me in the gut is how kind they invariably are even as, I am sure, they are overworked. I’ve received the nicest comments and editing from literary journals—George David Clark and Cate Lycurgus from 32 Poems, and Don Bogen at The Cincinnati Review are recent examples in my world, but there have been so many others. Poets Rosanna Warren and Nancy Eimers, the judges who chose my two books for publication, wrote such nice notes and gave such thoughtful editing suggestions that I had to pause multiple times while reading. 

Similarly, Jill Bialosky and Drew Weitman at Norton and the folks at Barnard College have taken great care and thoughtfully passed along all the congratulations and comments they’ve received about my book. You know, poet here, starving for praise, and they weren’t required to take the time out of their work days, but they did, and it means a lot. And when I got the style sheet and copy editing queries from Norton I got teary. Having top copy editors see and consider not just the drive of the poems but the structure, make sure every comma and capitalization was correct, was deeply touching. I was stunned—something I wrote had earned that level of care. 

9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Myself. The world is both really fun and really demanding and it’s hard to look away. Lately I can add some physical difficulties to this—neck, spine—that severely limit my time at the keyboard, but that just comes back to me, doesn’t it? 

Wait. Everyone says this, don’t they? (Checks last zillion answers on the P&W website.) Yeah, pretty much. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all just give ourselves up? Think of all the writing we’d get done! 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
It’s necessary to write terrible lines, awful drafts, half-hearted poems. Write ten in a row if needed. Throw pencils, get mad, take a walk. Swear off poetry, read a chapter of a post-apocalyptic novel, wash the dishes. Feel better? Back to writing. Repeat as necessary. 

For some reason, this is advice I need to hear again and again.  Every poem I write is either my delight or torment, a feather or a lash. But I don’t know how to be less invested, even in my poems that sound nonchalant to a reader.

Karen Skolfield, author of the poetry collection Battle Dress.

(Credit: Michael Medeiros)

Ten Questions for Jillian Weise

9.3.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Jillian Weise, whose poetry collection Cyborg Detective is out today by BOA Editions. The poems in Weise’s third collection investigate and challenge the ways in which nondisabled writers have appropriated disabled bodies. “Populated with a variety of voices that speak with a sort of sly candor that can only be prompted by the most intimate inquiries, this book is a true ventriloquist act,” writes Cate Marvin. “With a thrilling lack of remorse, Weise targets the mundane viciousness of everday hypocrisy like a heat-seeking missile.” Jillian Weise is the author of two previous poetry collections, The Amputee’s Guide to Sex, which was reissued in a tenth anniversary edition by Soft Skull Press in 2017, and The Book of Goodbyes (BOA Editions, 2013), which won the 2013 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and the 2013 Isabella Gardner Award from BOA Editions, as well as the speculative novel, The Colony (Soft Skull Press, 2010). She hosts a series of online videos satirizing literary ableism under the persona Tipsy Tullivan.

1. How long did it take you to write Cyborg Detective?
I’m still writing it. One of the poems in the book, “Attack List,” continues on Twitter. Since I am an actual cyborg—and not a tryborg who writes about or with machines while stuck in the ontological position of pure human—I make cyborg poems. What is a cyborg poem? I don’t know yet. It’s certainly not Fluxus, not Flarf: Those are tryborg poems. Maybe it’s a poem that jumps from page to screen and never ends. Or a poem that hacks the DNA of the short story “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver. Or a poem that glitches on Dickinson’s #745 (“Renunciation—is a piercing Virtue”). Or a poem that renounces esteemed keywords. Those are all poems in the book. But I lay no claim to defining the genre. We cyborgs are just getting started.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I internalize a lot of static from nondisabled writers and nondisabled literary conventions. When I’m writing or making, sometimes the static interrupts: This is gimmick. This is trick. This is too mean. Too much. Here’s another interruption that, for years, I believed: The writer’s ability or disability is irrelevant to art. So I had to uninstall all that and trust my crip and queer instincts.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Tonight, in my office, I figured out how to place the poem “Confession” at Dateline NBC, the New Yorker, True Crime Daily, Variety, VICE News, W Magazine, and WIRED all at once. I’m into guerrilla practices and code-as-accommodation and getting in sideways. It is not very different than daily life for us disabled writers. We often get into a building—whether restaurant or reading—through a side door or a back alley.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Peter Conners, publisher of BOA Editions, accepted the manuscript a while ago and said something like, “Now that you have the security of the contract, go and write whatever you want and make whatever you want.” It gave me an unexpected jolt toward new forms.

5. What are you reading right now?
I just finished an article titled “Algorithmic Disability Discrimination” by Mason Marks and it is bleak, so what else? I loved “Possibilities in Cyborg (Cripborg) Bodies” by Mallory Kay Nelson, Ashley Shew, and Bethany Stevens. I’m in the middle of Sophie Collins’s Who Is Mary Sue? The poems are brilliant.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
I cannot name only one. If I could revise The Norton Anthology of Poetry, it would include the openly disabled poets Hazel Hall, Josephine Miles, Larry Eigner, June Jordan, Pat Parker, Laura Hershey, and Constance Merritt. Then I’d ask the poets Raymond Antrobus, John Lee Clark and Meg Day to confirm that it’s basically a Hearing anthology. Norton has just published About Us: Essays From the NYT Disability Series, expertly edited by Peter Catapano and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. I should add that I’m biased; I’m in the anthology. So I imagine Norton is already remedying the erasure of disabled and Deaf writers in their other anthologies.

7. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
The answer to this question is top secret.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I have this recurring fantasy that I’m born disabled five hundred years from now on a comet with tons of disabled people and we all have healthcare and none of us has to set up a GoFundMe and we all write poems and none of us has to explain plastic straws to anyone. Sometimes the discourse on disability infringes on my imagination. The discourse includes things like the plastic straw debate, the latest book by a mother-of, father-of, thief-of disabled person and all the ableist devotion to diagnosing Trump with a mental illness. There are far more fascinating conversations we could be having on disability. For the most part, we are not having those conversations in the public sphere. 

9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
The publishing industry should allocate 50 percent of its budget to finding and soliciting and publishing and promoting books by disabled and Deaf and neurodivergent writers until the moment when our books reach equity with all their books about us. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I return over and over to this passage—“I didn’t know it could be done. I had never seen it done. I had, in fact, been told it couldn’t be done”—from Julia Alvarez’s “On Finding a Latino Voice.”

Jillian Weise, author of Cyborg Detective.

Ten Questions for Crystal Hana Kim

8.27.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Crystal Hana Kim, whose novel, If You Leave Me, is out in paperback today from William Morrow. This intergenerational saga is set in motion when sixteen-year-old Haemi Lee, forced to flee with her mother and brother to a refugee camp in Busan, South Korea, in 1951, decides to find a husband in order to ensure the safety of her family. Her decision to marry Jisoo despite her feelings for his cousin Kyunghwan, has repercussions that are felt generations later. If You Leave Me was named a best book of 2018 by the Washington Post, ALA Booklist, Cosmopolitan, and others. It was also longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Kim’s work has been published in Elle Magazine, the Paris Review, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and an MSEd from Hunter College. She is a Teach For America alum and has taught elementary school, high school, and collegiate writing. She is a contributing editor at Apogee Journal.

1. How long did it take you to write If You Leave Me
When I began my MFA studies in 2011, I started experimenting with different voices and perspectives. This is when I created the main characters Haemi, Solee, Kyunghwan, Jisoo, and Hyunki. At that point, I didn’t think I could write a novel yet; there was too much to learn. An interconnected short story collection sounded more attainable, so that’s the form I decided on. But in 2014, in my last semester of the MFA, my teacher Ben Metcalf convinced me to tear the collection apart and create a novel about the first generation of characters. I think it took me until early 2016 to finish the book. Then I had to find an agent, and then of course an editor, so my novel didn’t come out until August 2018. I’ve learned that writing is not for the impatient.   

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Maintaining the confidence to continue. In graduate school, I received constant feedback and encouragement about my work. But in the years after, without the structure of school, I felt as if I was in a free fall. There were days and weeks when I wasn’t sure if my writing was good enough—and by extension, if I was good enough. Self-doubt is always the most challenging for writers, isn’t it? All the research I had to do for the book is a close second though.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
My writing schedule fluctuates wildly depending on what my sources of income are at the moment. Right now, I’m transitioning from working in the nonprofit space to freelancing and teaching, which is less stable but also allows for more writing time. I like to write at home at my desk. I take lots of notes by hand but write the actual manuscript on my laptop. Sometimes I listen to binaural beats or ocean waves. Sometimes I just put in headphones and listen to nothing. I often use the Freedom app to block out the internet because I am compulsive about checking e-mail. 

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process? 
The nerves! Everyone told me publishing is a terrifying process, but I’m not an anxious person so I thought I’d be fine. I was wrong. If You Leave Me is fictional, but I still felt so vulnerable and tender, as if a layer of my skin had been peeled off. 

This sounds naïve, but another unexpected thing was hearing from so many different types of readers. As a debut author without a lot of prior publications, I honestly wondered who would read my book. But then I heard from Korean Americans, immigrants from other countries, war veterans, and mothers who had experienced postpartum depression. The variety of responses was overwhelming in the best way. 

5. What are you reading right now? 
A Pale View of the Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro. It’s eerie and haunting. I’m worried I’ll get nightmares. The next book on my list is the short story anthology Everyday People, edited by Jennifer Baker. 

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
I love Mercè Rodoreda’s work. She was a prolific Catalan author. I’d recommend starting with The Time of the Doves. I also love the Library of Korean Literature’s translated books. I recently discovered Seo Hajin’s short story collection A Good Family. Each of her stories explores the meaning of family and the secrets we keep from each other in stark, slightly strange, intelligent prose.  

7. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
This is a tough question because there’s no right answer. The MFA is what you make of it. You’ll be provided with time, community, and feedback. Hopefully, you’ll also learn to read more widely, to think critically, to teach in a collegiate setting, and form lasting friendships with other writers. But the actually writing, which is the most important part, is up to you. I will say that I always tell my students that it’s not worth going into debt over an MFA.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
Money and time, which are, of course, related. 

9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
We need more diversity across the spectrum, meaning in terms of race, sexuality, gender, class, nationality, ability. This needs to happen behind the scenes in the publishing world, too. I’m seeing more diverse writers—particularly in the YA world—but I don’t think there’s been as much change in editors, publicists, heads of publishing, etc. Also, we should do away with blurbs. Asking for blurbs is the worst. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
I’ve been thinking about Toni Morrison a lot these days and I recently found this quote via Jamel Brinkley. Here’s what Toni said about character, which is helping me as I draft my second novel: “All the characters in my book, whether they are successful or not, they’re all pushed into that place where all the definitions of themselves are suspicious…. The circumstances have to be invented so that the characters…have to simply be stripped down, and made very lean, so that you can see who you are.” 

One more piece of advice, from James Baldwin, which I have taped above my desk: “You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone.” 

Crystal Hana Kim, author of If You Leave Me.

Ten Questions for Jonathan Vatner

8.20.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Jonathan Vatner, whose debut novel, Carnegie Hill, is out today from Thomas Dunne Books. Ushering the reader inside the world of New York City’s wealthy elite—the upper-crust denizens of Carnegie Hill, to be exact, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan—Vatner constructs a narrative web of deception and secrecy through which Penelope “Pepper” Bradford, who is having second thoughts about her financier fiancé, is forced to navigate. “You won’t envy these people for a second but you’ll have a great time watching them undo and fix themselves,” writes Joan Silber. Jonathan Vatner is an award-winning journalist who has written for The New York TimesO, The Oprah MagazinePoets & Writers Magazine; and many other publications. He has an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College and a BA in cognitive neuroscience from Harvard University. He lives in Yonkers, New York, with his husband and cats.

1. How long did it take you to write Carnegie Hill?
I started writing it in the summer of 2013 as linked stories that all took place in the same apartment building on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I finished a draft in January of 2015. Some of my readers told me it wasn’t working either as short stories or as a novel, so I spent another year making it more novel-like, stretching a few plots throughout the book. I signed with my agent in early 2016, and we had trouble selling it—true agony!—so before he sent it out again, I spent another eight months reworking it. We sold the book in early 2017, and I spent another year revising it with my editors at St. Martin’s. I think I finally stopped tinkering with it in September of 2018. So, five years.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I struggled a lot with character likability. I’ve long bristled at this demand placed on writers: It’s not enough to make characters lifelike; readers have to like them too! The truth is, though, I’ve put down plenty of books because I hated the characters so much I stopped caring what happened to them.

In Carnegie Hill, a lot of characters were acting out and didn’t know why—their blindness turned off readers. I worked really hard at not softening the most shocking scenes but instead preparing the reader with backstory and context. And then placing those characters in situations where they could be their best selves.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I wrote most of Carnegie Hill in two places: after hours at my job, and on weekends on my couch. Maybe six or seven times I carved out a week for a residency, either something I applied to or a friend’s house or a little vacation with my writing group.

Last year, however, I moved to Yonkers from New York City, and I ride a commuter train forty minutes each way to work. That’s when I write. Having to come to the page twice a day for short bursts gets me writing very fast; there’s very little wasted time. I’ve never been so productive in my life.

4. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
A legion of readers shaped Carnegie Hill in important ways…it’s very humbling to accept that I could not have written this book on my own. Of everyone who read it, I think I trusted my husband’s feedback more than anyone else’s. He’s very psychologically attuned, and he understood what I was trying to do, so I took his advice on how to get there. Another reader I trust in a different way is my friend Phil, who is also not a professional writer and who always reads my chapters first from a place of pure appreciation. Knowing that the work has value from the outset helps me weather the criticisms that inevitably follow.

5. What are you reading right now?
I’m halfway through a bunch of books. On audio I’m listening to Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips, which is such a sophisticated and complex novel I can’t believe it’s her first—and I can feel the gut punch waiting for me at the end. I’m loving Very Nice by Marcy Dermansky—it’s like eating candy that happens to satisfy all your nutritional needs. On my nightstand I have two excellent books of poems by LGBTQ poets, Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith and High Ground Coward by Alicia Mountain. And on a completely different note, I’m reading an advance copy of my friend Christy Harrison’s Anti-Diet—it makes you realize just how pervasive and unnecessary dieting is. When it comes out in December, I think it’s going to change the national conversation about diet culture.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
At AWP a few years back I picked up a pocket-size book, published by A Strange Object, called Misadventure by Nicholas Grider. It’s a collection of intricately crafted and mysterious short stories about bondage. I found the craft of those stories and their subject matter deeply compelling, and I think about them all the time.

Also: A truly legendary professor at Sarah Lawrence, David Hollander, published a novel straight out of grad school and, because it didn’t sell through the advance, he had trouble finding another publisher willing to take a risk on him. And his writing is virtuosic and funny and surprising, like a David Foster Wallace or a Stanley Elkin. Almost twenty years later, his second novel, Anthropica, is coming out next spring from a new imprint called Dead Rabbits. I am mightily looking forward to it.

7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business? 
The thing that seems scariest to me is the likelihood that if you’re with a major publisher and you don’t have success right out of the gate, you won’t get another book deal. I recognize that there are lots of fantastic independent presses—and self-publishing, to boot—but the financial prospects of those routes are generally unsustainable. Not only does the specter of commercial failure keep me up at night, the idea that one book could end a career implies that all of an author’s output over an entire career is basically interchangeable, that an author is what people buy, rather than a book.

8. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
I was thrilled with the program at Sarah Lawrence College from beginning to end. It helped me take myself seriously as a novelist and an artist, it connected me with other serious writers who are publishing great work, and it sparked a growth trajectory in my craft that has continued to this day. It also greased the wheels of the publishing process: My fellow alumna, novelist Christine Reilly, recommended me to her agent, and my professors wrote bighearted blurbs to help promote my novel.

One reason the MFA was the right choice for me, I think, was that I was eight years out of college, and I’d had time to: A) get some life experience, and B) crave school again. I wouldn’t recommend the MFA to people who don’t know for sure that they want to be writers; there were some of these people in my program, and I watched them struggle. I think one would get more insight into questions of career by working in a few different industries.

9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Having to make a living! But I also think that if I didn’t have a job—at least a few days a week—I wouldn’t know how to fill my days, and I’d be depressed.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
It came from my thesis advisor at Sarah Lawrence, Brian Morton: Don’t be subtle. After hearing that advice, I began noticing that even in classic literature, authors make their points explicitly, again and again. Obviously there are times when subtlety is called for, and readers usually appreciate the challenge of connecting a few dots. But for the most part, I’ve found success by telling readers what I want them to know.

Jonathan Vatner, author of the novel Carnegie Hill.

(Credit: Smiljana Peros)

Ten Questions for Oliver Baez Bendorf

9.10.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Oliver Baez Bendorf, whose second poetry collection, Advantages of Being Evergreen, is published today by Cleveland State University Poetry Center. A vessel of both memories and dreams, Advantages of Being Evergreen documents and mends fractured relationships—between humans, between humans and nature—amid political and climate crises. “These are poems that never shy from the shocking violence and cruelty of the world,” writes Gabrielle Calvocoressi. “I don’t know when I’ve read a book that is so gentle and ferocious at the same time.” Oliver Baez Bendorf is the author of a previous poetry collection, The Spectral Wilderness, which Mark Doty selected for the 2013 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize at Kent State University Press. His poems have also appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, BOMB, and the anthology Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics. Bendorf is currently an assistant professor of poetry at Kalamazoo College in Michigan.

1. How long did it take you to write Advantages of Being Evergreen?
I’d say my whole life. Another way of putting it is that I sat down and wrote the poems over a three-year period. Then I revised my butt off during my fellowship year at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing (2017–2018). I’m grateful for that time, which made so much possible. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Nearly everything about writing a book is hard. The hope is that it’s harder, in some way, not to. But revision and letting go were the most challenging parts for me. I kept dragging my feet during the final round of line edits because I knew that once they were done the book would be out of my hands. Once I printed out the manuscript, though, and leaned into those “final moments” with each poem, that stage of the process became a blessing, and it felt good. I was also really grateful to have supportive and smart editorial help from my press, Cleveland State University Poetry Center. It seems to me that the interval between letting go of a manuscript and having a book “forthcoming” can invite all kinds of gremlins. All the fears, doing their dance.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write in a composition notebook as often as I can. I also have a typewriter, which is useful for moving things from my notebook onto a typewritten page without the endless distractions of the internet. These days, every Sunday by noon, I owe one hundred words to my e-mail writing group. Usually I write those at my desk in Michigan, looking out into the backyard, but I write them wherever I am on Sunday mornings. A few weeks ago I wrote them from my friend Alex’s house in Charlotte, North Carolina. 

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
That I could love the way the book looks and feels so much. I wanted a really beautiful tangible object for these poems and I’m so happy that I got it. 

5. What are you reading right now?
Too much news. I like to stay informed but there’s a saturation point where I have to back away. I read a bunch of books at the beginning of the summer, and wrote about some of them for Tarpaulin Sky. The new critical edition of The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions from Nightboat Books is incredible and life-giving. I’m starting to work my way through a stack of things for some updates to my fall syllabus. And I’ve been diving back into historical accounts and records of the Community of True Inspiration, which became the Amana Colonies in Iowa. My ancestors on my father’s side were part of that community and it’s been amazing to learn more about the history as an adult. 

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Rane Arroyo, 1954–2010. I only came to his work a few years ago myself, so I’ve been working to spread the word. He was a gay Puerto Rican poet and playwright who was raised in Chicago and lived and taught in Toledo for many years. His voice is so present, generous, warm, and full of joy even when incisive and unbearably sad. That’s such a queer combination to me—how wonder and play continue after loss. A lot of his work is in conversation with Emily Dickinson and Pablo Neruda, through direct address. Also, the preface he wrote to his The Buried Sea: New and Selected (2008) is one of the best writers’ statements I’ve ever read. 

7. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
I have a handful of close friends and mentors whose ways of looking at my work teach me how to see it more clearly for myself. Some of those people are poets but not all are. 

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
E-mail and fear of failure.

9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
I keep thinking there must be a better way to do Q&As after readings. Q&As sometimes feel like being back in grade school ducking dodgeballs. So many writers I know, and I’ll say that marginalized writers seem to bear the brunt of this, field oddball and careless comments and questions during Q&As. Often these seem to come from a belief that someone is entitled to more: more trauma, more background, more details, more emotional labor, just more. But to give a good reading, a writer has already given a lot. And these kinds of questions take without necessarily acknowledging what’s already been given. I think many would agree that it’d be absurd to expect a musician to do a Q&A after a live show, yet the Q&A after an author reading remains ubiquitous. Giving a good reading is hard work and it’s the live show. If people want more from a particular writer, I hope they will turn to the words that are on the page, to what’s been written: buy their book, then buy their other books. Read their work online; read interviews they’ve given. If someone wants to buy a book and ask a question as the writer signs it, that seems like a fair exchange, if they are respectful. I’m happy to talk about my work on my own terms, like in this interview, or when I’m visiting a class where students have read my work and prepared for a great conversation. If Q&As must continue, here are some ideas. For starters, never surprise writers with a Q&A after a reading—always ask in advance. They’re not neutral, innocuous, or easy for all. I recently read some other ideas that I thought were great as far as reforming the Q&A. The first: to take a very short break after the reading ends and before the Q&A starts, so that people don’t ask questions just to release steam or break the silence. Another was to have people write down the question they plan to ask, and turn to the person next to them to ask for feedback on whether the question is decent and respectful. That might sound ridiculous, but a little peer review goes a long way. I personally don’t mind the notorious “question that is actually a comment,” because it gives a break from having my brain picked, which is a grotesque image and also how it often feels. I love giving readings and I love meeting readers. So how can we have the most humane connections and treat each other with care? 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
So much of the writing advice that’s changed things for me came from my teacher, Lynda Barry. Here’s one: “Don’t forget to start it all by writing by hand. Your hand! It’s right there!” 

Oliver Baez Bendorf, author of Advantages of Being Evergreen.

(Credit: Faylita Hicks)

Ten Questions for Jillian Weise

9.3.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Jillian Weise, whose poetry collection Cyborg Detective is out today by BOA Editions. The poems in Weise’s third collection investigate and challenge the ways in which nondisabled writers have appropriated disabled bodies. “Populated with a variety of voices that speak with a sort of sly candor that can only be prompted by the most intimate inquiries, this book is a true ventriloquist act,” writes Cate Marvin. “With a thrilling lack of remorse, Weise targets the mundane viciousness of everday hypocrisy like a heat-seeking missile.” Jillian Weise is the author of two previous poetry collections, The Amputee’s Guide to Sex, which was reissued in a tenth anniversary edition by Soft Skull Press in 2017, and The Book of Goodbyes (BOA Editions, 2013), which won the 2013 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and the 2013 Isabella Gardner Award from BOA Editions, as well as the speculative novel, The Colony (Soft Skull Press, 2010). She hosts a series of online videos satirizing literary ableism under the persona Tipsy Tullivan.

1. How long did it take you to write Cyborg Detective?
I’m still writing it. One of the poems in the book, “Attack List,” continues on Twitter. Since I am an actual cyborg—and not a tryborg who writes about or with machines while stuck in the ontological position of pure human—I make cyborg poems. What is a cyborg poem? I don’t know yet. It’s certainly not Fluxus, not Flarf: Those are tryborg poems. Maybe it’s a poem that jumps from page to screen and never ends. Or a poem that hacks the DNA of the short story “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver. Or a poem that glitches on Dickinson’s #745 (“Renunciation—is a piercing Virtue”). Or a poem that renounces esteemed keywords. Those are all poems in the book. But I lay no claim to defining the genre. We cyborgs are just getting started.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I internalize a lot of static from nondisabled writers and nondisabled literary conventions. When I’m writing or making, sometimes the static interrupts: This is gimmick. This is trick. This is too mean. Too much. Here’s another interruption that, for years, I believed: The writer’s ability or disability is irrelevant to art. So I had to uninstall all that and trust my crip and queer instincts.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Tonight, in my office, I figured out how to place the poem “Confession” at Dateline NBC, the New Yorker, True Crime Daily, Variety, VICE News, W Magazine, and WIRED all at once. I’m into guerrilla practices and code-as-accommodation and getting in sideways. It is not very different than daily life for us disabled writers. We often get into a building—whether restaurant or reading—through a side door or a back alley.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Peter Conners, publisher of BOA Editions, accepted the manuscript a while ago and said something like, “Now that you have the security of the contract, go and write whatever you want and make whatever you want.” It gave me an unexpected jolt toward new forms.

5. What are you reading right now?
I just finished an article titled “Algorithmic Disability Discrimination” by Mason Marks and it is bleak, so what else? I loved “Possibilities in Cyborg (Cripborg) Bodies” by Mallory Kay Nelson, Ashley Shew, and Bethany Stevens. I’m in the middle of Sophie Collins’s Who Is Mary Sue? The poems are brilliant.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
I cannot name only one. If I could revise The Norton Anthology of Poetry, it would include the openly disabled poets Hazel Hall, Josephine Miles, Larry Eigner, June Jordan, Pat Parker, Laura Hershey, and Constance Merritt. Then I’d ask the poets Raymond Antrobus, John Lee Clark and Meg Day to confirm that it’s basically a Hearing anthology. Norton has just published About Us: Essays From the NYT Disability Series, expertly edited by Peter Catapano and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. I should add that I’m biased; I’m in the anthology. So I imagine Norton is already remedying the erasure of disabled and Deaf writers in their other anthologies.

7. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
The answer to this question is top secret.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I have this recurring fantasy that I’m born disabled five hundred years from now on a comet with tons of disabled people and we all have healthcare and none of us has to set up a GoFundMe and we all write poems and none of us has to explain plastic straws to anyone. Sometimes the discourse on disability infringes on my imagination. The discourse includes things like the plastic straw debate, the latest book by a mother-of, father-of, thief-of disabled person and all the ableist devotion to diagnosing Trump with a mental illness. There are far more fascinating conversations we could be having on disability. For the most part, we are not having those conversations in the public sphere. 

9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
The publishing industry should allocate 50 percent of its budget to finding and soliciting and publishing and promoting books by disabled and Deaf and neurodivergent writers until the moment when our books reach equity with all their books about us. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I return over and over to this passage—“I didn’t know it could be done. I had never seen it done. I had, in fact, been told it couldn’t be done”—from Julia Alvarez’s “On Finding a Latino Voice.”

Jillian Weise, author of Cyborg Detective.

Ten Questions for Crystal Hana Kim

8.27.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Crystal Hana Kim, whose novel, If You Leave Me, is out in paperback today from William Morrow. This intergenerational saga is set in motion when sixteen-year-old Haemi Lee, forced to flee with her mother and brother to a refugee camp in Busan, South Korea, in 1951, decides to find a husband in order to ensure the safety of her family. Her decision to marry Jisoo despite her feelings for his cousin Kyunghwan, has repercussions that are felt generations later. If You Leave Me was named a best book of 2018 by the Washington Post, ALA Booklist, Cosmopolitan, and others. It was also longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Kim’s work has been published in Elle Magazine, the Paris Review, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and an MSEd from Hunter College. She is a Teach For America alum and has taught elementary school, high school, and collegiate writing. She is a contributing editor at Apogee Journal.

1. How long did it take you to write If You Leave Me
When I began my MFA studies in 2011, I started experimenting with different voices and perspectives. This is when I created the main characters Haemi, Solee, Kyunghwan, Jisoo, and Hyunki. At that point, I didn’t think I could write a novel yet; there was too much to learn. An interconnected short story collection sounded more attainable, so that’s the form I decided on. But in 2014, in my last semester of the MFA, my teacher Ben Metcalf convinced me to tear the collection apart and create a novel about the first generation of characters. I think it took me until early 2016 to finish the book. Then I had to find an agent, and then of course an editor, so my novel didn’t come out until August 2018. I’ve learned that writing is not for the impatient.   

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Maintaining the confidence to continue. In graduate school, I received constant feedback and encouragement about my work. But in the years after, without the structure of school, I felt as if I was in a free fall. There were days and weeks when I wasn’t sure if my writing was good enough—and by extension, if I was good enough. Self-doubt is always the most challenging for writers, isn’t it? All the research I had to do for the book is a close second though.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
My writing schedule fluctuates wildly depending on what my sources of income are at the moment. Right now, I’m transitioning from working in the nonprofit space to freelancing and teaching, which is less stable but also allows for more writing time. I like to write at home at my desk. I take lots of notes by hand but write the actual manuscript on my laptop. Sometimes I listen to binaural beats or ocean waves. Sometimes I just put in headphones and listen to nothing. I often use the Freedom app to block out the internet because I am compulsive about checking e-mail. 

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process? 
The nerves! Everyone told me publishing is a terrifying process, but I’m not an anxious person so I thought I’d be fine. I was wrong. If You Leave Me is fictional, but I still felt so vulnerable and tender, as if a layer of my skin had been peeled off. 

This sounds naïve, but another unexpected thing was hearing from so many different types of readers. As a debut author without a lot of prior publications, I honestly wondered who would read my book. But then I heard from Korean Americans, immigrants from other countries, war veterans, and mothers who had experienced postpartum depression. The variety of responses was overwhelming in the best way. 

5. What are you reading right now? 
A Pale View of the Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro. It’s eerie and haunting. I’m worried I’ll get nightmares. The next book on my list is the short story anthology Everyday People, edited by Jennifer Baker. 

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
I love Mercè Rodoreda’s work. She was a prolific Catalan author. I’d recommend starting with The Time of the Doves. I also love the Library of Korean Literature’s translated books. I recently discovered Seo Hajin’s short story collection A Good Family. Each of her stories explores the meaning of family and the secrets we keep from each other in stark, slightly strange, intelligent prose.  

7. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
This is a tough question because there’s no right answer. The MFA is what you make of it. You’ll be provided with time, community, and feedback. Hopefully, you’ll also learn to read more widely, to think critically, to teach in a collegiate setting, and form lasting friendships with other writers. But the actually writing, which is the most important part, is up to you. I will say that I always tell my students that it’s not worth going into debt over an MFA.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
Money and time, which are, of course, related. 

9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
We need more diversity across the spectrum, meaning in terms of race, sexuality, gender, class, nationality, ability. This needs to happen behind the scenes in the publishing world, too. I’m seeing more diverse writers—particularly in the YA world—but I don’t think there’s been as much change in editors, publicists, heads of publishing, etc. Also, we should do away with blurbs. Asking for blurbs is the worst. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
I’ve been thinking about Toni Morrison a lot these days and I recently found this quote via Jamel Brinkley. Here’s what Toni said about character, which is helping me as I draft my second novel: “All the characters in my book, whether they are successful or not, they’re all pushed into that place where all the definitions of themselves are suspicious…. The circumstances have to be invented so that the characters…have to simply be stripped down, and made very lean, so that you can see who you are.” 

One more piece of advice, from James Baldwin, which I have taped above my desk: “You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone.” 

Crystal Hana Kim, author of If You Leave Me.

Ten Questions for Anne Boyer

9.17.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Anne Boyer, whose memoir, The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care, is out today from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. In incisive prose, Boyer documents the diagnosis and treatment of her highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer and critiques how “the ideological regime of cancer”—as much as the malignant cells—determines the experience of illness. In the face of overtreatment, pharmaceutical greed, and the expectation of survivor heroism, Boyer turns to the long lineage of women writers examining illness with intellect and vulnerability for company: Kathy Acker, Eve Sedgwick, and Audre Lorde, to name a few. Boyer also articulates the possibilities for care in friendship—the present-day relationships that carried her through an otherwise compromised and corrupted social world. “Anne Boyer’s radically unsentimental account of cancer and the ‘carcinogenosphere’ obliterates cliché,” writes Ben Lerner. “By demonstrating how her utterly specific experience is also irreducibly social, she opens up new spaces for thinking and feeling together.” Anne Boyer is the recipient of a 2018 Whiting Award for poetry and nonfiction. She is the author of the essay collection A Handbook of Disappointed Fate and several poetry collections, including Garments Against Women, winner of the 2016 CLMP Firecracker Award. She was born and raised in Kansas and currently teaches creative writing at the Kansas City Art Institute. 

1. How long did it take you to write The Undying
The Undying took around four and a half years from first word to last edit. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Cancer was, including the devastating effects of its treatment, its disabling aftermath, and its crushing ideological and social weight, felt both individually and collectively. The diminishment of life under our present conditions makes cancer—around which all the other ordinary problems of life gather and heighten—almost too much to bear thinking about without collapsing in sadness or rage. It would have been easier to survive and turn away and try to forget. I had lost my strength and much of my capacity to think when I needed both the most, and I had to learn the humility of writing a difficult book while often weak, upset, and confused. But I had made a bargain with myself that if I lived, I would give a book of what I learned back to the world in return—an act of gratitude and sometimes vengeance—and I made it through. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
When everything is going okay, I like to write every morning on my sofa until around lunchtime, but in times when things are more stressful and erratic, I write whenever I can steal the time away from my paid work and my obligations to the people around me. When things are at their best and there are few demands on my time, I write from morning to night, and being able to write like that is my perfect day. 

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process? 
I marvel at all the production and post-production work, the teams of brilliant and devoted people required, not just the editors and agents and publicists, but everyone else, paid and unpaid: reviewers, booksellers, assistants, teachers, interns, event organizers, designers, warehouse workers, librarians, and the people who do the infrastructural and maintenance work of all the places devoted to literature, the people who deliver books, maintain databases, clean rooms, and the people who care for all the people doing all of the above. It comes together in a way that foregrounds the name of the writer, but every book on the shelf is there because of all of these efforts, and the efforts of everyone around the writer, too, and all the other writers and the people who helped them who came before, and the people involved with the social movements and struggles that made it possible for so many of us to write and publish. A single name on a book is a ruthless abridgement of the facts. 

5. What are you reading right now? 
Edith Grossman’s translation of Don Quixote, which is the perfect novel of middle age.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
Bhanu Kapil, Lisa Robertson, Verity Spott, Ryan Eckes, Precious Okoyomon, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, Wendy Trevino, Jackie Wang, Nat Raha, Diana Hamilton, and Nikki Wallschlaeger are all poets or poetry-allied writers making fantastic work right now. As far as nonfiction, I am eager to read a book by Chloe Watlington. Her recent piece in Commune Magazine was astonishing.

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?
Both of them have told me this in so many ways, which is why I work with them: Write what you need to and don’t worry about it being strange.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
Capitalism, which continues to devour the living world that we need as our home and to consume the hours of everyone’s lives for the profit of the very few, setting people against each other for the mere preservation of life and pressurizing gendered and racialized forms of oppression. There’s no writing without time, without air to breathe and potable water, without a body and earth that supports life, without each other. 

9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
Capitalism.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Clement of Alexandria: “To write all things in a book is to put a sword in the hands of a child.” 

 

Anne Boyer, author of The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care.

Ten Questions for Oliver Baez Bendorf

9.10.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Oliver Baez Bendorf, whose second poetry collection, Advantages of Being Evergreen, is published today by Cleveland State University Poetry Center. A vessel of both memories and dreams, Advantages of Being Evergreen documents and mends fractured relationships—between humans, between humans and nature—amid political and climate crises. “These are poems that never shy from the shocking violence and cruelty of the world,” writes Gabrielle Calvocoressi. “I don’t know when I’ve read a book that is so gentle and ferocious at the same time.” Oliver Baez Bendorf is the author of a previous poetry collection, The Spectral Wilderness, which Mark Doty selected for the 2013 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize at Kent State University Press. His poems have also appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, BOMB, and the anthology Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics. Bendorf is currently an assistant professor of poetry at Kalamazoo College in Michigan.

1. How long did it take you to write Advantages of Being Evergreen?
I’d say my whole life. Another way of putting it is that I sat down and wrote the poems over a three-year period. Then I revised my butt off during my fellowship year at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing (2017–2018). I’m grateful for that time, which made so much possible. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Nearly everything about writing a book is hard. The hope is that it’s harder, in some way, not to. But revision and letting go were the most challenging parts for me. I kept dragging my feet during the final round of line edits because I knew that once they were done the book would be out of my hands. Once I printed out the manuscript, though, and leaned into those “final moments” with each poem, that stage of the process became a blessing, and it felt good. I was also really grateful to have supportive and smart editorial help from my press, Cleveland State University Poetry Center. It seems to me that the interval between letting go of a manuscript and having a book “forthcoming” can invite all kinds of gremlins. All the fears, doing their dance.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write in a composition notebook as often as I can. I also have a typewriter, which is useful for moving things from my notebook onto a typewritten page without the endless distractions of the internet. These days, every Sunday by noon, I owe one hundred words to my e-mail writing group. Usually I write those at my desk in Michigan, looking out into the backyard, but I write them wherever I am on Sunday mornings. A few weeks ago I wrote them from my friend Alex’s house in Charlotte, North Carolina. 

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
That I could love the way the book looks and feels so much. I wanted a really beautiful tangible object for these poems and I’m so happy that I got it. 

5. What are you reading right now?
Too much news. I like to stay informed but there’s a saturation point where I have to back away. I read a bunch of books at the beginning of the summer, and wrote about some of them for Tarpaulin Sky. The new critical edition of The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions from Nightboat Books is incredible and life-giving. I’m starting to work my way through a stack of things for some updates to my fall syllabus. And I’ve been diving back into historical accounts and records of the Community of True Inspiration, which became the Amana Colonies in Iowa. My ancestors on my father’s side were part of that community and it’s been amazing to learn more about the history as an adult. 

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Rane Arroyo, 1954–2010. I only came to his work a few years ago myself, so I’ve been working to spread the word. He was a gay Puerto Rican poet and playwright who was raised in Chicago and lived and taught in Toledo for many years. His voice is so present, generous, warm, and full of joy even when incisive and unbearably sad. That’s such a queer combination to me—how wonder and play continue after loss. A lot of his work is in conversation with Emily Dickinson and Pablo Neruda, through direct address. Also, the preface he wrote to his The Buried Sea: New and Selected (2008) is one of the best writers’ statements I’ve ever read. 

7. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
I have a handful of close friends and mentors whose ways of looking at my work teach me how to see it more clearly for myself. Some of those people are poets but not all are. 

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
E-mail and fear of failure.

9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
I keep thinking there must be a better way to do Q&As after readings. Q&As sometimes feel like being back in grade school ducking dodgeballs. So many writers I know, and I’ll say that marginalized writers seem to bear the brunt of this, field oddball and careless comments and questions during Q&As. Often these seem to come from a belief that someone is entitled to more: more trauma, more background, more details, more emotional labor, just more. But to give a good reading, a writer has already given a lot. And these kinds of questions take without necessarily acknowledging what’s already been given. I think many would agree that it’d be absurd to expect a musician to do a Q&A after a live show, yet the Q&A after an author reading remains ubiquitous. Giving a good reading is hard work and it’s the live show. If people want more from a particular writer, I hope they will turn to the words that are on the page, to what’s been written: buy their book, then buy their other books. Read their work online; read interviews they’ve given. If someone wants to buy a book and ask a question as the writer signs it, that seems like a fair exchange, if they are respectful. I’m happy to talk about my work on my own terms, like in this interview, or when I’m visiting a class where students have read my work and prepared for a great conversation. If Q&As must continue, here are some ideas. For starters, never surprise writers with a Q&A after a reading—always ask in advance. They’re not neutral, innocuous, or easy for all. I recently read some other ideas that I thought were great as far as reforming the Q&A. The first: to take a very short break after the reading ends and before the Q&A starts, so that people don’t ask questions just to release steam or break the silence. Another was to have people write down the question they plan to ask, and turn to the person next to them to ask for feedback on whether the question is decent and respectful. That might sound ridiculous, but a little peer review goes a long way. I personally don’t mind the notorious “question that is actually a comment,” because it gives a break from having my brain picked, which is a grotesque image and also how it often feels. I love giving readings and I love meeting readers. So how can we have the most humane connections and treat each other with care? 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
So much of the writing advice that’s changed things for me came from my teacher, Lynda Barry. Here’s one: “Don’t forget to start it all by writing by hand. Your hand! It’s right there!” 

Oliver Baez Bendorf, author of Advantages of Being Evergreen.

(Credit: Faylita Hicks)

Ten Questions for Jillian Weise

9.3.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Jillian Weise, whose poetry collection Cyborg Detective is out today by BOA Editions. The poems in Weise’s third collection investigate and challenge the ways in which nondisabled writers have appropriated disabled bodies. “Populated with a variety of voices that speak with a sort of sly candor that can only be prompted by the most intimate inquiries, this book is a true ventriloquist act,” writes Cate Marvin. “With a thrilling lack of remorse, Weise targets the mundane viciousness of everday hypocrisy like a heat-seeking missile.” Jillian Weise is the author of two previous poetry collections, The Amputee’s Guide to Sex, which was reissued in a tenth anniversary edition by Soft Skull Press in 2017, and The Book of Goodbyes (BOA Editions, 2013), which won the 2013 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and the 2013 Isabella Gardner Award from BOA Editions, as well as the speculative novel, The Colony (Soft Skull Press, 2010). She hosts a series of online videos satirizing literary ableism under the persona Tipsy Tullivan.

1. How long did it take you to write Cyborg Detective?
I’m still writing it. One of the poems in the book, “Attack List,” continues on Twitter. Since I am an actual cyborg—and not a tryborg who writes about or with machines while stuck in the ontological position of pure human—I make cyborg poems. What is a cyborg poem? I don’t know yet. It’s certainly not Fluxus, not Flarf: Those are tryborg poems. Maybe it’s a poem that jumps from page to screen and never ends. Or a poem that hacks the DNA of the short story “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver. Or a poem that glitches on Dickinson’s #745 (“Renunciation—is a piercing Virtue”). Or a poem that renounces esteemed keywords. Those are all poems in the book. But I lay no claim to defining the genre. We cyborgs are just getting started.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I internalize a lot of static from nondisabled writers and nondisabled literary conventions. When I’m writing or making, sometimes the static interrupts: This is gimmick. This is trick. This is too mean. Too much. Here’s another interruption that, for years, I believed: The writer’s ability or disability is irrelevant to art. So I had to uninstall all that and trust my crip and queer instincts.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Tonight, in my office, I figured out how to place the poem “Confession” at Dateline NBC, the New Yorker, True Crime Daily, Variety, VICE News, W Magazine, and WIRED all at once. I’m into guerrilla practices and code-as-accommodation and getting in sideways. It is not very different than daily life for us disabled writers. We often get into a building—whether restaurant or reading—through a side door or a back alley.

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Peter Conners, publisher of BOA Editions, accepted the manuscript a while ago and said something like, “Now that you have the security of the contract, go and write whatever you want and make whatever you want.” It gave me an unexpected jolt toward new forms.

5. What are you reading right now?
I just finished an article titled “Algorithmic Disability Discrimination” by Mason Marks and it is bleak, so what else? I loved “Possibilities in Cyborg (Cripborg) Bodies” by Mallory Kay Nelson, Ashley Shew, and Bethany Stevens. I’m in the middle of Sophie Collins’s Who Is Mary Sue? The poems are brilliant.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
I cannot name only one. If I could revise The Norton Anthology of Poetry, it would include the openly disabled poets Hazel Hall, Josephine Miles, Larry Eigner, June Jordan, Pat Parker, Laura Hershey, and Constance Merritt. Then I’d ask the poets Raymond Antrobus, John Lee Clark and Meg Day to confirm that it’s basically a Hearing anthology. Norton has just published About Us: Essays From the NYT Disability Series, expertly edited by Peter Catapano and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. I should add that I’m biased; I’m in the anthology. So I imagine Norton is already remedying the erasure of disabled and Deaf writers in their other anthologies.

7. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
The answer to this question is top secret.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I have this recurring fantasy that I’m born disabled five hundred years from now on a comet with tons of disabled people and we all have healthcare and none of us has to set up a GoFundMe and we all write poems and none of us has to explain plastic straws to anyone. Sometimes the discourse on disability infringes on my imagination. The discourse includes things like the plastic straw debate, the latest book by a mother-of, father-of, thief-of disabled person and all the ableist devotion to diagnosing Trump with a mental illness. There are far more fascinating conversations we could be having on disability. For the most part, we are not having those conversations in the public sphere. 

9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
The publishing industry should allocate 50 percent of its budget to finding and soliciting and publishing and promoting books by disabled and Deaf and neurodivergent writers until the moment when our books reach equity with all their books about us. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I return over and over to this passage—“I didn’t know it could be done. I had never seen it done. I had, in fact, been told it couldn’t be done”—from Julia Alvarez’s “On Finding a Latino Voice.”

Jillian Weise, author of Cyborg Detective.

Ten Questions for Maaza Mengiste

9.24.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Maaza Mengiste, whose novel The Shadow King is out today from W. W. Norton. At once intimate portrait and sweeping history, The Shadow King tells the story of Hirut, an orphaned servant who comes of age during the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. Travelling with the army led by the man she serves, Hirut, like the other women, is forbidden to fight. But as the war rages on and the emperor abandons the country into exile, Hirut helps disguise a villager in his likeness to inspire courage and becomes a warrior herself—the guard to the new “Shadow King.” Often shifting perspective to tell the stories of both Hirut and a cast of Ethiopian and Italian characters, Mengiste’s narration is unflinching, fair, and always complex. She speaks into silence, finding language for the trauma and courage—for the life—of a woman at war. “A beautiful and devastating work of women holding together a world ripping itself apart,” writes Marlon James. “They will slip into your dreams and overtake your memories.” Maaza Mengiste is the author of a previous novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze (W. W. Norton, 2010), which the Guardian named among the ten best contemporary African books. Her essays have also appeared in Granta, the Massachusetts Review, the New Yorker, and other publications. Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, she currently lives in New York City. 

1. How long did it take you to write The Shadow King
It took about nine years to write The Shadow King. I had no idea the challenges that awaited me! I thought that after writing one book, the next would be easier. It was completely the opposite.   

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
The hardest thing was figuring out how I wanted to tell this story of war. I knew the facts surrounding Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia. I knew the details of the subsequent war. I’d read the articles, seen the reels, and looked at the published photographs depicting both sides. I didn’t know how all of this would take shape in a novel though, and that was because I didn’t know what story I wanted to tell about this particular war. What I eventually came to understand, from looking at several varied accounts of this conflict, was that history was biased. History is a narrative created by human beings who are biased, and make mistakes. I began to look into the gaps and erasures, the silences left deliberately or in error, and see what emerged. I started moving away from official accounts and archives, and instead started going through personal journals, diaries, and photographs of those involved in this war. I started talking to descendants of those who fought in the war. I started to “read” photographs taken by Italian soldiers stationed in Ethiopia, setting the images on a historical timeline, and attempting to understand what was happening in the background, in that area, when the photo was shot. Incrementally, slowly, another history emerged. With that second history came a new voice: insistent, demanding to be heard, often contradictory of a narrative that one of the characters was trying to establish. I went with that and gave myself the freedom to develop a new structure, a new way of telling. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
I wrote this book at my desk, at many desks across several cities in New York and throughout the United States. I wrote this in different parts of Europe and in Ethiopia. I wrote at night after teaching and on weekends. I isolated myself for extended days and weeks and wrote. I wrote every day and, on those days when I had no time, I kept a small notebook for notes. I didn’t always feel like writing but I still made myself sit down and do it. I practiced discipline and worked towards inspiration.  

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process? 
That moment when you understand that the manuscript is now in other hands at your publisher’s office and they are going to read it for other ways to bring the story alive. For so many years, it had just been me and this book.   

5. What are you reading right now? 
I just finished Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte, which is fantastic. I’m reading Tishani Doshi’s beautiful and evocative Small Days and Nights, which comes out in January. I haven’t let Mona Eltahawy’s The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls out of my sight; it’s riveting and absolutely brilliant. And I am completely engrossed in Jaquira Díaz’s stunning memoir, Ordinary Girls. It’s breathtakingly good.  

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
The late Dasa Drndic, who is getting wider recognition now after her death, but should be read by many more. Her book Trieste is spectacular, as are her others. Emmanuel Iduma has been breaking new ground in art criticism, fiction, and nonfiction and doing so well. His work is incredible. Read A Stranger’s Pose.  

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?
When my very patient editor said, “Now I know why it took you so long to write this book.” It made all the years of frustration and fatigue and leaps of faith worth it.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
My human need for sleep. 

9. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started The Shadow King, what would you say?
Hang in there, kid. This is going to take a while but don’t give up. Be fearless.  

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
From the late Dasa Drndic, who said to me: “Fuck story.” She meant, forget what you think you want to say. Forget what you know. Look at form, find the voice, let it roam freely and follow it. It will tell you the narrative. 

 

Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King.

(Credit: Nina Subin)

Ten Questions for Anne Boyer

9.17.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Anne Boyer, whose memoir, The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care, is out today from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. In incisive prose, Boyer documents the diagnosis and treatment of her highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer and critiques how “the ideological regime of cancer”—as much as the malignant cells—determines the experience of illness. In the face of overtreatment, pharmaceutical greed, and the expectation of survivor heroism, Boyer turns to the long lineage of women writers examining illness with intellect and vulnerability for company: Kathy Acker, Eve Sedgwick, and Audre Lorde, to name a few. Boyer also articulates the possibilities for care in friendship—the present-day relationships that carried her through an otherwise compromised and corrupted social world. “Anne Boyer’s radically unsentimental account of cancer and the ‘carcinogenosphere’ obliterates cliché,” writes Ben Lerner. “By demonstrating how her utterly specific experience is also irreducibly social, she opens up new spaces for thinking and feeling together.” Anne Boyer is the recipient of a 2018 Whiting Award for poetry and nonfiction. She is the author of the essay collection A Handbook of Disappointed Fate and several poetry collections, including Garments Against Women, winner of the 2016 CLMP Firecracker Award. She was born and raised in Kansas and currently teaches creative writing at the Kansas City Art Institute. 

1. How long did it take you to write The Undying
The Undying took around four and a half years from first word to last edit. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Cancer was, including the devastating effects of its treatment, its disabling aftermath, and its crushing ideological and social weight, felt both individually and collectively. The diminishment of life under our present conditions makes cancer—around which all the other ordinary problems of life gather and heighten—almost too much to bear thinking about without collapsing in sadness or rage. It would have been easier to survive and turn away and try to forget. I had lost my strength and much of my capacity to think when I needed both the most, and I had to learn the humility of writing a difficult book while often weak, upset, and confused. But I had made a bargain with myself that if I lived, I would give a book of what I learned back to the world in return—an act of gratitude and sometimes vengeance—and I made it through. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
When everything is going okay, I like to write every morning on my sofa until around lunchtime, but in times when things are more stressful and erratic, I write whenever I can steal the time away from my paid work and my obligations to the people around me. When things are at their best and there are few demands on my time, I write from morning to night, and being able to write like that is my perfect day. 

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process? 
I marvel at all the production and post-production work, the teams of brilliant and devoted people required, not just the editors and agents and publicists, but everyone else, paid and unpaid: reviewers, booksellers, assistants, teachers, interns, event organizers, designers, warehouse workers, librarians, and the people who do the infrastructural and maintenance work of all the places devoted to literature, the people who deliver books, maintain databases, clean rooms, and the people who care for all the people doing all of the above. It comes together in a way that foregrounds the name of the writer, but every book on the shelf is there because of all of these efforts, and the efforts of everyone around the writer, too, and all the other writers and the people who helped them who came before, and the people involved with the social movements and struggles that made it possible for so many of us to write and publish. A single name on a book is a ruthless abridgement of the facts. 

5. What are you reading right now? 
Edith Grossman’s translation of Don Quixote, which is the perfect novel of middle age.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
Bhanu Kapil, Lisa Robertson, Verity Spott, Ryan Eckes, Precious Okoyomon, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, Wendy Trevino, Jackie Wang, Nat Raha, Diana Hamilton, and Nikki Wallschlaeger are all poets or poetry-allied writers making fantastic work right now. As far as nonfiction, I am eager to read a book by Chloe Watlington. Her recent piece in Commune Magazine was astonishing.

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?
Both of them have told me this in so many ways, which is why I work with them: Write what you need to and don’t worry about it being strange.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
Capitalism, which continues to devour the living world that we need as our home and to consume the hours of everyone’s lives for the profit of the very few, setting people against each other for the mere preservation of life and pressurizing gendered and racialized forms of oppression. There’s no writing without time, without air to breathe and potable water, without a body and earth that supports life, without each other. 

9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
Capitalism.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Clement of Alexandria: “To write all things in a book is to put a sword in the hands of a child.” 

 

Anne Boyer, author of The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care.

Ten Questions for Oliver Baez Bendorf

9.10.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Oliver Baez Bendorf, whose second poetry collection, Advantages of Being Evergreen, is published today by Cleveland State University Poetry Center. A vessel of both memories and dreams, Advantages of Being Evergreen documents and mends fractured relationships—between humans, between humans and nature—amid political and climate crises. “These are poems that never shy from the shocking violence and cruelty of the world,” writes Gabrielle Calvocoressi. “I don’t know when I’ve read a book that is so gentle and ferocious at the same time.” Oliver Baez Bendorf is the author of a previous poetry collection, The Spectral Wilderness, which Mark Doty selected for the 2013 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize at Kent State University Press. His poems have also appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, BOMB, and the anthology Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics. Bendorf is currently an assistant professor of poetry at Kalamazoo College in Michigan.

1. How long did it take you to write Advantages of Being Evergreen?
I’d say my whole life. Another way of putting it is that I sat down and wrote the poems over a three-year period. Then I revised my butt off during my fellowship year at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing (2017–2018). I’m grateful for that time, which made so much possible. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Nearly everything about writing a book is hard. The hope is that it’s harder, in some way, not to. But revision and letting go were the most challenging parts for me. I kept dragging my feet during the final round of line edits because I knew that once they were done the book would be out of my hands. Once I printed out the manuscript, though, and leaned into those “final moments” with each poem, that stage of the process became a blessing, and it felt good. I was also really grateful to have supportive and smart editorial help from my press, Cleveland State University Poetry Center. It seems to me that the interval between letting go of a manuscript and having a book “forthcoming” can invite all kinds of gremlins. All the fears, doing their dance.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write in a composition notebook as often as I can. I also have a typewriter, which is useful for moving things from my notebook onto a typewritten page without the endless distractions of the internet. These days, every Sunday by noon, I owe one hundred words to my e-mail writing group. Usually I write those at my desk in Michigan, looking out into the backyard, but I write them wherever I am on Sunday mornings. A few weeks ago I wrote them from my friend Alex’s house in Charlotte, North Carolina. 

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
That I could love the way the book looks and feels so much. I wanted a really beautiful tangible object for these poems and I’m so happy that I got it. 

5. What are you reading right now?
Too much news. I like to stay informed but there’s a saturation point where I have to back away. I read a bunch of books at the beginning of the summer, and wrote about some of them for Tarpaulin Sky. The new critical edition of The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions from Nightboat Books is incredible and life-giving. I’m starting to work my way through a stack of things for some updates to my fall syllabus. And I’ve been diving back into historical accounts and records of the Community of True Inspiration, which became the Amana Colonies in Iowa. My ancestors on my father’s side were part of that community and it’s been amazing to learn more about the history as an adult. 

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Rane Arroyo, 1954–2010. I only came to his work a few years ago myself, so I’ve been working to spread the word. He was a gay Puerto Rican poet and playwright who was raised in Chicago and lived and taught in Toledo for many years. His voice is so present, generous, warm, and full of joy even when incisive and unbearably sad. That’s such a queer combination to me—how wonder and play continue after loss. A lot of his work is in conversation with Emily Dickinson and Pablo Neruda, through direct address. Also, the preface he wrote to his The Buried Sea: New and Selected (2008) is one of the best writers’ statements I’ve ever read. 

7. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
I have a handful of close friends and mentors whose ways of looking at my work teach me how to see it more clearly for myself. Some of those people are poets but not all are. 

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
E-mail and fear of failure.

9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
I keep thinking there must be a better way to do Q&As after readings. Q&As sometimes feel like being back in grade school ducking dodgeballs. So many writers I know, and I’ll say that marginalized writers seem to bear the brunt of this, field oddball and careless comments and questions during Q&As. Often these seem to come from a belief that someone is entitled to more: more trauma, more background, more details, more emotional labor, just more. But to give a good reading, a writer has already given a lot. And these kinds of questions take without necessarily acknowledging what’s already been given. I think many would agree that it’d be absurd to expect a musician to do a Q&A after a live show, yet the Q&A after an author reading remains ubiquitous. Giving a good reading is hard work and it’s the live show. If people want more from a particular writer, I hope they will turn to the words that are on the page, to what’s been written: buy their book, then buy their other books. Read their work online; read interviews they’ve given. If someone wants to buy a book and ask a question as the writer signs it, that seems like a fair exchange, if they are respectful. I’m happy to talk about my work on my own terms, like in this interview, or when I’m visiting a class where students have read my work and prepared for a great conversation. If Q&As must continue, here are some ideas. For starters, never surprise writers with a Q&A after a reading—always ask in advance. They’re not neutral, innocuous, or easy for all. I recently read some other ideas that I thought were great as far as reforming the Q&A. The first: to take a very short break after the reading ends and before the Q&A starts, so that people don’t ask questions just to release steam or break the silence. Another was to have people write down the question they plan to ask, and turn to the person next to them to ask for feedback on whether the question is decent and respectful. That might sound ridiculous, but a little peer review goes a long way. I personally don’t mind the notorious “question that is actually a comment,” because it gives a break from having my brain picked, which is a grotesque image and also how it often feels. I love giving readings and I love meeting readers. So how can we have the most humane connections and treat each other with care? 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
So much of the writing advice that’s changed things for me came from my teacher, Lynda Barry. Here’s one: “Don’t forget to start it all by writing by hand. Your hand! It’s right there!” 

Oliver Baez Bendorf, author of Advantages of Being Evergreen.

(Credit: Faylita Hicks)

Ten Questions for Kimberly Reyes

by

Staff

10.1.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Kimberly Reyes, whose debut poetry collection, Running to Stand Still, is out today from Omnidawn. Rich in literary and pop culture references, the voice of Running to Stand Still is both specific and wide-ranging. Quotations from artists as disparate as Frank Bidart and The Killers splice and introduce poems. In one section, Reyes repurposes screenshots of text messages; in another, partial strikethroughs enable multiple readings. Through this juxtaposing of different forms and language, Reyes weaves a deeply intimate portrait out of impossibly expansive themes: modern life, Black womanhood, family history, and technology. “The brilliance of these poems is their achievement of discomfit as they simultaneously travel distance and move inward,” writes Valerie Wallace. Kimberly Reyes is also the author of a poetry chapbook, Warning Coloration (dancing girl press, 2018), and a collection of essays, Life During Wartime (Fourteen Hills, 2018). Her poems have appeared in Columbia JournalCosmonauts Avenue, and New American Writing, among other publications. A second-generation New Yorker, Reyes is currently a Fulbright fellow studying Irish literature and film at University College Cork in Ireland.

1. How long did it take you to write Running to Stand Still
All in all, about five years. I didn’t know the collection would become a book as I was writing the early versions of the poems that appear in the first few sections. But those poems became the chapbook Warning Coloration. That’s when I really started to see a narrative that I knew I had to do justice to in book form.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Sitting with and then ultimately bypassing the fear of what others might think. The book is a lot about the external gaze, and it’s no secret (if you’ve read the book) that I’ve had a problem with prioritizing other people’s opinions about me over my own for a long time. It’s a tough habit to break.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
Honestly, not nearly enough. I’m in that loop of applying for fellowships, scholarships, and grants so that I can write, but then the next application cycle comes around and I need to be applying again instead of writing. I also might have some undiagnosed case of ADHD or maybe we are all just a bit frazzled with the state of the world today, but it’s not always easy to sit and focus. When I do find time to write, it’s like I’m back to myself. I’m back home. And that currently happens once a week or so. When I lived in San Francisco I lived in a heavenly cottage that had a half room with a loft and a big, garden-facing window so I would use that space as an office and write there. Now, as a Fulbright fellow in Cork, Ireland, I usually write upstairs in my bedroom, on my bed, using my nightstand as a desk, staring at the rain, and I feel just as productive.

4. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? 
It depends if it’s poetry or prose, but for poetry my dear friend Irène Mathieu. We were roommates as Callaloo fellows, and she’s just a brilliant writer and reader of poetry—honest, sharp, and hilarious. For prose I don’t send out anything of importance without first sending it to a friend I’ve known since junior high school, Rachel Sur. She pulls zero punches and that’s precisely what I need, especially because so much of my writing deals with sensitive subjects. The work has to be done honestly and correctly, and she definitely has my back as far as that’s concerned. Our thirty-year friendship means that she knows when I’m bullshitting before I even do.

5. What are you reading right now?
I just finished reading Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, and whew, no kidding. Whew. What an amazingly raw and honest and beautiful and insightful work. That’s the kind of book that helped me sit down for my weekly writing session and just have at it. It’s a call to art, so to speak. It’s an example of the kind of honesty and reflection that can heal us.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Oh man, how to even begin? I won’t point out anyone in particular. I’ll just say people outside of the MFA networking world. I love reading the slush-pile success stories.

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? 
I went through a round of edits with Rusty Morrison that was everything I wanted it to be. She started by saying: We can publish this manuscript as is now, that’s fine, it’s a good book, but let’s make it great. I loved that artistic faith and freedom.

8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Running to Stand Still, what would you say? 
Don’t work with people who don’t respect you or your art. Publication isn’t worth that sacrifice. You put too much blood on the page to have something in the world that doesn’t feel professional. I learned that lesson the hard way with the project right before this book. I will revisit that project and make it what it should be, but the time and energy that incarnation of it took away from me… I’m not sure it was worth it. Working with Omnidawn was healing and affirming and this book is my true firstborn.

9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
The networking, marketing machine. I talk about how socially awkward I can be all the time and I’m certainly not the only writer with that affliction and I just think the publishing community I know isn’t very tolerant of that. So many of our favorite writers were absolute recluses and we loved them for that, yet they wouldn’t be published nowadays. I like having my reclusive moments, and while it may not be good for my career it’s certainly good for my writing.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I think it was: Don’t read writers you don’t like. I can’t actually remember who said that but that sentiment was transformative for me because we are taught, especially in MFA culture, to slog through writing we don’t necessarily feel because it’s a good exercise in reading and expanding our horizons. But there’s way too much stuff out there to be moved by and to enjoy instead of wasting time with a backlog of books you loathe. It’s important to challenge yourself and to branch out, but life’s too short and there aren’t enough hours in the day for that kind of pain. 

 

Kimberly Reyes, author of Running to Stand Still.

Ten Questions for Maaza Mengiste

9.24.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Maaza Mengiste, whose novel The Shadow King is out today from W. W. Norton. At once intimate portrait and sweeping history, The Shadow King tells the story of Hirut, an orphaned servant who comes of age during the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. Travelling with the army led by the man she serves, Hirut, like the other women, is forbidden to fight. But as the war rages on and the emperor abandons the country into exile, Hirut helps disguise a villager in his likeness to inspire courage and becomes a warrior herself—the guard to the new “Shadow King.” Often shifting perspective to tell the stories of both Hirut and a cast of Ethiopian and Italian characters, Mengiste’s narration is unflinching, fair, and always complex. She speaks into silence, finding language for the trauma and courage—for the life—of a woman at war. “A beautiful and devastating work of women holding together a world ripping itself apart,” writes Marlon James. “They will slip into your dreams and overtake your memories.” Maaza Mengiste is the author of a previous novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze (W. W. Norton, 2010), which the Guardian named among the ten best contemporary African books. Her essays have also appeared in Granta, the Massachusetts Review, the New Yorker, and other publications. Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, she currently lives in New York City. 

1. How long did it take you to write The Shadow King
It took about nine years to write The Shadow King. I had no idea the challenges that awaited me! I thought that after writing one book, the next would be easier. It was completely the opposite.   

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
The hardest thing was figuring out how I wanted to tell this story of war. I knew the facts surrounding Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia. I knew the details of the subsequent war. I’d read the articles, seen the reels, and looked at the published photographs depicting both sides. I didn’t know how all of this would take shape in a novel though, and that was because I didn’t know what story I wanted to tell about this particular war. What I eventually came to understand, from looking at several varied accounts of this conflict, was that history was biased. History is a narrative created by human beings who are biased, and make mistakes. I began to look into the gaps and erasures, the silences left deliberately or in error, and see what emerged. I started moving away from official accounts and archives, and instead started going through personal journals, diaries, and photographs of those involved in this war. I started talking to descendants of those who fought in the war. I started to “read” photographs taken by Italian soldiers stationed in Ethiopia, setting the images on a historical timeline, and attempting to understand what was happening in the background, in that area, when the photo was shot. Incrementally, slowly, another history emerged. With that second history came a new voice: insistent, demanding to be heard, often contradictory of a narrative that one of the characters was trying to establish. I went with that and gave myself the freedom to develop a new structure, a new way of telling. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
I wrote this book at my desk, at many desks across several cities in New York and throughout the United States. I wrote this in different parts of Europe and in Ethiopia. I wrote at night after teaching and on weekends. I isolated myself for extended days and weeks and wrote. I wrote every day and, on those days when I had no time, I kept a small notebook for notes. I didn’t always feel like writing but I still made myself sit down and do it. I practiced discipline and worked towards inspiration.  

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process? 
That moment when you understand that the manuscript is now in other hands at your publisher’s office and they are going to read it for other ways to bring the story alive. For so many years, it had just been me and this book.   

5. What are you reading right now? 
I just finished Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte, which is fantastic. I’m reading Tishani Doshi’s beautiful and evocative Small Days and Nights, which comes out in January. I haven’t let Mona Eltahawy’s The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls out of my sight; it’s riveting and absolutely brilliant. And I am completely engrossed in Jaquira Díaz’s stunning memoir, Ordinary Girls. It’s breathtakingly good.  

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
The late Dasa Drndic, who is getting wider recognition now after her death, but should be read by many more. Her book Trieste is spectacular, as are her others. Emmanuel Iduma has been breaking new ground in art criticism, fiction, and nonfiction and doing so well. His work is incredible. Read A Stranger’s Pose.  

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?
When my very patient editor said, “Now I know why it took you so long to write this book.” It made all the years of frustration and fatigue and leaps of faith worth it.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
My human need for sleep. 

9. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started The Shadow King, what would you say?
Hang in there, kid. This is going to take a while but don’t give up. Be fearless.  

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
From the late Dasa Drndic, who said to me: “Fuck story.” She meant, forget what you think you want to say. Forget what you know. Look at form, find the voice, let it roam freely and follow it. It will tell you the narrative. 

 

Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King.

(Credit: Nina Subin)

Ten Questions for Anne Boyer

9.17.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Anne Boyer, whose memoir, The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care, is out today from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. In incisive prose, Boyer documents the diagnosis and treatment of her highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer and critiques how “the ideological regime of cancer”—as much as the malignant cells—determines the experience of illness. In the face of overtreatment, pharmaceutical greed, and the expectation of survivor heroism, Boyer turns to the long lineage of women writers examining illness with intellect and vulnerability for company: Kathy Acker, Eve Sedgwick, and Audre Lorde, to name a few. Boyer also articulates the possibilities for care in friendship—the present-day relationships that carried her through an otherwise compromised and corrupted social world. “Anne Boyer’s radically unsentimental account of cancer and the ‘carcinogenosphere’ obliterates cliché,” writes Ben Lerner. “By demonstrating how her utterly specific experience is also irreducibly social, she opens up new spaces for thinking and feeling together.” Anne Boyer is the recipient of a 2018 Whiting Award for poetry and nonfiction. She is the author of the essay collection A Handbook of Disappointed Fate and several poetry collections, including Garments Against Women, winner of the 2016 CLMP Firecracker Award. She was born and raised in Kansas and currently teaches creative writing at the Kansas City Art Institute. 

1. How long did it take you to write The Undying
The Undying took around four and a half years from first word to last edit. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Cancer was, including the devastating effects of its treatment, its disabling aftermath, and its crushing ideological and social weight, felt both individually and collectively. The diminishment of life under our present conditions makes cancer—around which all the other ordinary problems of life gather and heighten—almost too much to bear thinking about without collapsing in sadness or rage. It would have been easier to survive and turn away and try to forget. I had lost my strength and much of my capacity to think when I needed both the most, and I had to learn the humility of writing a difficult book while often weak, upset, and confused. But I had made a bargain with myself that if I lived, I would give a book of what I learned back to the world in return—an act of gratitude and sometimes vengeance—and I made it through. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
When everything is going okay, I like to write every morning on my sofa until around lunchtime, but in times when things are more stressful and erratic, I write whenever I can steal the time away from my paid work and my obligations to the people around me. When things are at their best and there are few demands on my time, I write from morning to night, and being able to write like that is my perfect day. 

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process? 
I marvel at all the production and post-production work, the teams of brilliant and devoted people required, not just the editors and agents and publicists, but everyone else, paid and unpaid: reviewers, booksellers, assistants, teachers, interns, event organizers, designers, warehouse workers, librarians, and the people who do the infrastructural and maintenance work of all the places devoted to literature, the people who deliver books, maintain databases, clean rooms, and the people who care for all the people doing all of the above. It comes together in a way that foregrounds the name of the writer, but every book on the shelf is there because of all of these efforts, and the efforts of everyone around the writer, too, and all the other writers and the people who helped them who came before, and the people involved with the social movements and struggles that made it possible for so many of us to write and publish. A single name on a book is a ruthless abridgement of the facts. 

5. What are you reading right now? 
Edith Grossman’s translation of Don Quixote, which is the perfect novel of middle age.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
Bhanu Kapil, Lisa Robertson, Verity Spott, Ryan Eckes, Precious Okoyomon, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, Wendy Trevino, Jackie Wang, Nat Raha, Diana Hamilton, and Nikki Wallschlaeger are all poets or poetry-allied writers making fantastic work right now. As far as nonfiction, I am eager to read a book by Chloe Watlington. Her recent piece in Commune Magazine was astonishing.

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?
Both of them have told me this in so many ways, which is why I work with them: Write what you need to and don’t worry about it being strange.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
Capitalism, which continues to devour the living world that we need as our home and to consume the hours of everyone’s lives for the profit of the very few, setting people against each other for the mere preservation of life and pressurizing gendered and racialized forms of oppression. There’s no writing without time, without air to breathe and potable water, without a body and earth that supports life, without each other. 

9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
Capitalism.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Clement of Alexandria: “To write all things in a book is to put a sword in the hands of a child.” 

 

Anne Boyer, author of The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care.

Ten Questions for Saeed Jones

by

Staff

10.8.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Saeed Jones, whose memoir, How We Fight For Our Lives, is out today from Simon & Schuster. Raised in Texas, Jones begins his story in Lewisville, Texas, where as a twelve-year-old boy he discovered his mother’s copy of James Baldwin’s Another Country. “Holding Another Country in my hands, I felt that the book was actually holding me,” he writes. “Sad, sexy, and reeking of jazz, the story had its arm around my waist.” Tracing his journey of finding and fighting for a life of his own—from Lewisville to Memphis and across the Atlantic and back again—Jones describes necessary distances and cleavings, but also pays tribute to home and particularly the love and labor of his single mother, who died in 2011. “Both love song and battle cry,” writes Jacqueline Woodson of the memoir. “Brilliant as fuck and, at times, heartbreaking as hell.” Saeed Jones is also the author of a poetry collection, Prelude to Bruise, winner of the 2015 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award and finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award and a Lambda Literary Award. A graduate of Kentucky University and Rutgers University in Newark, Jones currently lives in Columbus, Ohio. 

1. How long did it take you to write How We Fight for Our Lives?
The earliest iteration of the book was an essay about the most beautiful man I’ve ever kissed trying to kill me. I started writing it a few days after it happened in January 2008. I wrote what eventually became the first chapter of the book when I was in graduate school. I think I always knew this book was coming, one way or another. I started writing in earnest in 2011, sold the book on proposal in 2015, and finally finished it at some point last year. Now I find myself in the bizarre position of having to figure out who I am without this book’s writing process being a part of my daily life. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Because the book is about me, whenever I was struggling with a part of the book I’d begin to wonder if I was struggling because I don’t really know who I am. I thought that surely, if I knew who I was, writing about myself would’ve been easier. It was a vicious loop and very depressing. The process of writing a memoir can swallow you whole if you aren’t careful. I started therapy in 2017, which helped tremendously. I thank my therapist in the Acknowledgements for that reason. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
When I’m home in Columbus, I wake up around 8:00 AM, listen to a podcast while I drink coffee, and then write until I’m hungry around 11:00 AM or noon. I probably write five or six days a week. My desk is up against the window; there is a lot of light, which is important to me, and good views of shirtless men jogging up and down the street, which is also important to me.

4. What are you reading right now? 
I’m reading Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino. I keep highlighting every other paragraph and then reading what I’ve highlighted out loud. Experiencing her work with my eyes just isn’t enough; I want to hear it too. And this morning, I plucked Michael Lee’s chapbook Secondly, Finally from my shelf. The first poem is so good, it made me mad. Like, how dare you? That’s my version of a starred review. I’m excited to read his new book, The Only Worlds We Know

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
I will not rest until every person in America has read The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. She’s hardly an unknown writer, and that book, rightfully, has received a great deal of praise. But look at what’s going on in our country. Clearly every American hasn’t read it yet, which frankly is traitorous. 

6. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
I think it’s essential that we get more comfortable talking about money, contracts, and the business that enables our art to reach readers wherever they might be. The idea that it’s rude to talk candidly about book deals and contract negotiations serves the publishers very well but endangers writers, especially emerging writers. A healthy discourse about money would expose just how much publishing depends on the scam of white privilege, which is why gatekeepers work so hard to delay and derail the conversation. 

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? 
Honestly, what sticks with me the most is what my editor and agent didn’t say. They never said “Where is that damn book?!” or “Why is it taking so long?” My editor only gave me concrete deadlines when I would ask for them. They protected me and allowed me to do what I needed to do. I was so anxious about finishing the book but I couldn’t rush the process. A quickly written memoir is a memoir full of lies. At one point, I was at a literary gala and someone at my table made a joke—“Oh, so you’re the writer who is taking so long.” I cried when I got home that night. And even now I picture his face every time I’m within striking range of a punching bag. 

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
White people. 

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? 
My editor Jon Cox is, simply put, the most intelligent reader I’ve ever had the privilege of working with closely. I always marvel at the insight in his notes. He’s also incredibly handsome and nice. It’s very overwhelming. Anyway, I trust him with my writing almost as much as I trust myself. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
Rigoberto González helped me understand that my success as a writer would hinge on my success as a reader. I’ve translated that advice into a ratio. For every poem or page I write, I try to read three times as much work by other people. I don’t have a ledger or anything but you get the idea.

Saeed Jones, author of How We Fight For Our Lives.

Ten Questions for Kimberly Reyes

by

Staff

10.1.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Kimberly Reyes, whose debut poetry collection, Running to Stand Still, is out today from Omnidawn. Rich in literary and pop culture references, the voice of Running to Stand Still is both specific and wide-ranging. Quotations from artists as disparate as Frank Bidart and The Killers splice and introduce poems. In one section, Reyes repurposes screenshots of text messages; in another, partial strikethroughs enable multiple readings. Through this juxtaposing of different forms and language, Reyes weaves a deeply intimate portrait out of impossibly expansive themes: modern life, Black womanhood, family history, and technology. “The brilliance of these poems is their achievement of discomfit as they simultaneously travel distance and move inward,” writes Valerie Wallace. Kimberly Reyes is also the author of a poetry chapbook, Warning Coloration (dancing girl press, 2018), and a collection of essays, Life During Wartime (Fourteen Hills, 2018). Her poems have appeared in Columbia JournalCosmonauts Avenue, and New American Writing, among other publications. A second-generation New Yorker, Reyes is currently a Fulbright fellow studying Irish literature and film at University College Cork in Ireland.

1. How long did it take you to write Running to Stand Still
All in all, about five years. I didn’t know the collection would become a book as I was writing the early versions of the poems that appear in the first few sections. But those poems became the chapbook Warning Coloration. That’s when I really started to see a narrative that I knew I had to do justice to in book form.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Sitting with and then ultimately bypassing the fear of what others might think. The book is a lot about the external gaze, and it’s no secret (if you’ve read the book) that I’ve had a problem with prioritizing other people’s opinions about me over my own for a long time. It’s a tough habit to break.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
Honestly, not nearly enough. I’m in that loop of applying for fellowships, scholarships, and grants so that I can write, but then the next application cycle comes around and I need to be applying again instead of writing. I also might have some undiagnosed case of ADHD or maybe we are all just a bit frazzled with the state of the world today, but it’s not always easy to sit and focus. When I do find time to write, it’s like I’m back to myself. I’m back home. And that currently happens once a week or so. When I lived in San Francisco I lived in a heavenly cottage that had a half room with a loft and a big, garden-facing window so I would use that space as an office and write there. Now, as a Fulbright fellow in Cork, Ireland, I usually write upstairs in my bedroom, on my bed, using my nightstand as a desk, staring at the rain, and I feel just as productive.

4. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? 
It depends if it’s poetry or prose, but for poetry my dear friend Irène Mathieu. We were roommates as Callaloo fellows, and she’s just a brilliant writer and reader of poetry—honest, sharp, and hilarious. For prose I don’t send out anything of importance without first sending it to a friend I’ve known since junior high school, Rachel Sur. She pulls zero punches and that’s precisely what I need, especially because so much of my writing deals with sensitive subjects. The work has to be done honestly and correctly, and she definitely has my back as far as that’s concerned. Our thirty-year friendship means that she knows when I’m bullshitting before I even do.

5. What are you reading right now?
I just finished reading Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, and whew, no kidding. Whew. What an amazingly raw and honest and beautiful and insightful work. That’s the kind of book that helped me sit down for my weekly writing session and just have at it. It’s a call to art, so to speak. It’s an example of the kind of honesty and reflection that can heal us.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Oh man, how to even begin? I won’t point out anyone in particular. I’ll just say people outside of the MFA networking world. I love reading the slush-pile success stories.

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? 
I went through a round of edits with Rusty Morrison that was everything I wanted it to be. She started by saying: We can publish this manuscript as is now, that’s fine, it’s a good book, but let’s make it great. I loved that artistic faith and freedom.

8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Running to Stand Still, what would you say? 
Don’t work with people who don’t respect you or your art. Publication isn’t worth that sacrifice. You put too much blood on the page to have something in the world that doesn’t feel professional. I learned that lesson the hard way with the project right before this book. I will revisit that project and make it what it should be, but the time and energy that incarnation of it took away from me… I’m not sure it was worth it. Working with Omnidawn was healing and affirming and this book is my true firstborn.

9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
The networking, marketing machine. I talk about how socially awkward I can be all the time and I’m certainly not the only writer with that affliction and I just think the publishing community I know isn’t very tolerant of that. So many of our favorite writers were absolute recluses and we loved them for that, yet they wouldn’t be published nowadays. I like having my reclusive moments, and while it may not be good for my career it’s certainly good for my writing.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I think it was: Don’t read writers you don’t like. I can’t actually remember who said that but that sentiment was transformative for me because we are taught, especially in MFA culture, to slog through writing we don’t necessarily feel because it’s a good exercise in reading and expanding our horizons. But there’s way too much stuff out there to be moved by and to enjoy instead of wasting time with a backlog of books you loathe. It’s important to challenge yourself and to branch out, but life’s too short and there aren’t enough hours in the day for that kind of pain. 

 

Kimberly Reyes, author of Running to Stand Still.

Ten Questions for Maaza Mengiste

9.24.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Maaza Mengiste, whose novel The Shadow King is out today from W. W. Norton. At once intimate portrait and sweeping history, The Shadow King tells the story of Hirut, an orphaned servant who comes of age during the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. Travelling with the army led by the man she serves, Hirut, like the other women, is forbidden to fight. But as the war rages on and the emperor abandons the country into exile, Hirut helps disguise a villager in his likeness to inspire courage and becomes a warrior herself—the guard to the new “Shadow King.” Often shifting perspective to tell the stories of both Hirut and a cast of Ethiopian and Italian characters, Mengiste’s narration is unflinching, fair, and always complex. She speaks into silence, finding language for the trauma and courage—for the life—of a woman at war. “A beautiful and devastating work of women holding together a world ripping itself apart,” writes Marlon James. “They will slip into your dreams and overtake your memories.” Maaza Mengiste is the author of a previous novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze (W. W. Norton, 2010), which the Guardian named among the ten best contemporary African books. Her essays have also appeared in Granta, the Massachusetts Review, the New Yorker, and other publications. Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, she currently lives in New York City. 

1. How long did it take you to write The Shadow King
It took about nine years to write The Shadow King. I had no idea the challenges that awaited me! I thought that after writing one book, the next would be easier. It was completely the opposite.   

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
The hardest thing was figuring out how I wanted to tell this story of war. I knew the facts surrounding Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia. I knew the details of the subsequent war. I’d read the articles, seen the reels, and looked at the published photographs depicting both sides. I didn’t know how all of this would take shape in a novel though, and that was because I didn’t know what story I wanted to tell about this particular war. What I eventually came to understand, from looking at several varied accounts of this conflict, was that history was biased. History is a narrative created by human beings who are biased, and make mistakes. I began to look into the gaps and erasures, the silences left deliberately or in error, and see what emerged. I started moving away from official accounts and archives, and instead started going through personal journals, diaries, and photographs of those involved in this war. I started talking to descendants of those who fought in the war. I started to “read” photographs taken by Italian soldiers stationed in Ethiopia, setting the images on a historical timeline, and attempting to understand what was happening in the background, in that area, when the photo was shot. Incrementally, slowly, another history emerged. With that second history came a new voice: insistent, demanding to be heard, often contradictory of a narrative that one of the characters was trying to establish. I went with that and gave myself the freedom to develop a new structure, a new way of telling. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
I wrote this book at my desk, at many desks across several cities in New York and throughout the United States. I wrote this in different parts of Europe and in Ethiopia. I wrote at night after teaching and on weekends. I isolated myself for extended days and weeks and wrote. I wrote every day and, on those days when I had no time, I kept a small notebook for notes. I didn’t always feel like writing but I still made myself sit down and do it. I practiced discipline and worked towards inspiration.  

4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process? 
That moment when you understand that the manuscript is now in other hands at your publisher’s office and they are going to read it for other ways to bring the story alive. For so many years, it had just been me and this book.   

5. What are you reading right now? 
I just finished Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte, which is fantastic. I’m reading Tishani Doshi’s beautiful and evocative Small Days and Nights, which comes out in January. I haven’t let Mona Eltahawy’s The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls out of my sight; it’s riveting and absolutely brilliant. And I am completely engrossed in Jaquira Díaz’s stunning memoir, Ordinary Girls. It’s breathtakingly good.  

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
The late Dasa Drndic, who is getting wider recognition now after her death, but should be read by many more. Her book Trieste is spectacular, as are her others. Emmanuel Iduma has been breaking new ground in art criticism, fiction, and nonfiction and doing so well. His work is incredible. Read A Stranger’s Pose.  

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?
When my very patient editor said, “Now I know why it took you so long to write this book.” It made all the years of frustration and fatigue and leaps of faith worth it.

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? 
My human need for sleep. 

9. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started The Shadow King, what would you say?
Hang in there, kid. This is going to take a while but don’t give up. Be fearless.  

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
From the late Dasa Drndic, who said to me: “Fuck story.” She meant, forget what you think you want to say. Forget what you know. Look at form, find the voice, let it roam freely and follow it. It will tell you the narrative. 

 

Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King.

(Credit: Nina Subin)

Ten Questions for Adrienne Brodeur

by

Staff

10.15.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Adrienne Brodeur, whose memoir, Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me, is out today from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. When Brodeur was fourteen years old, her mother woke her in the middle of the night to confess she had kissed a close family friend. Brodeur describes the intoxicating effects of being chosen as her mother’s confidante—of protecting the secret for nearly a decade—without obscuring the costs of the affair that followed. Brodeur traces her own life as much as her mother’s, and uses the past to think carefully about how to move forward in her relationship with her own daughter. Leaning into the most difficult memories, Wild Game is a testament to the possibilities of writing and art as means to find personal clarity. The novelist Ruth Ozeki describes the memoir as a “courageous act of radical self-reflection and truth telling, Brodeur untangles karmic threads that bind families together across generations.” Over the course of her career in publishing, Adrienne Brodeur has been a writer, editor, and administrator. She is the author of the novel Man Camp (Random House, 2005); she was cofounder and editor in chief of Zoetrope: All Story and an editor at Harcourt. In 2013 she joined Aspen Woods, a literary arts nonprofit, where she currently serves as executive director. 

1. How long did it take you to write Wild Game
It took a lifetime to process and about two and a half years to write. With memoir, it’s less about the events of your past—the past is always there—and more about what you make of those events, your consciousness about them. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
The most challenging thing was getting my relationship with my mother right and avoiding depicting our relationship as black-and-white. I heeded the advice of Vivian Gornick, who wrote that “for the drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent.” That line was taped to my computer screen as I wrote Wild Game

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
When I’m in the thick of a project—which currently, I’m not—I write daily in my home office. I start at 5:00 AM with a cup of strong coffee and don’t stop until my son wakes up and comes in for a snuggle, usually around 7:00 AM.

4. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?
Early on, my agent told me that I should write my memoir like I was writing a novel, scene by scene. That guidance was revelatory. 

5. What are you reading right now? 
I’m listening to Toni Morrison narrate Beloved on Audible, which is an amazing way to experience the poetry of her writing, and I’m reading Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino, a lucid, bold and thought-provoking collection of essays. 

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
There are many. At the top of my list is Peter Rock, who writes one strange and beautiful novel after the next. 

7. How do you balance your day job with your writing?
I’m lucky to have a day job that I feel passionately about, as the executive director of Aspen Words, a literary nonprofit. I balance the two—if you can call it that—by compartmentalizing them. Typically, I’m finished writing long before my work day begins. I take a walk in between to shift gears, and then once I’m in work mode, I rarely look back. 

8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Wild Game, what would you say?
I would tell myself to stop worrying about what others might think and just go for it. I would remind myself that I need to write this memoir in order to own my own story, make peace with it, and move toward a brighter future. I would tell myself that it’s going to be challenging to reveal so much about my life, but it will also be cathartic and empowering. 

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
I have many trusted readers, each of whom offered unique and thoughtful perspectives on Wild Game, making it a better book. That said, I did have one unexpectedly amazing reader—a friend who is not part of the literary community—who gave me brilliant feedback as well as encouragement when I was stuck. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
Read like your work depends on it. It does.

 

 

Adrienne Brodeur, author of Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me.

(Credit: Julia Comes)

Ten Questions for Saeed Jones

by

Staff

10.8.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Saeed Jones, whose memoir, How We Fight For Our Lives, is out today from Simon & Schuster. Raised in Texas, Jones begins his story in Lewisville, Texas, where as a twelve-year-old boy he discovered his mother’s copy of James Baldwin’s Another Country. “Holding Another Country in my hands, I felt that the book was actually holding me,” he writes. “Sad, sexy, and reeking of jazz, the story had its arm around my waist.” Tracing his journey of finding and fighting for a life of his own—from Lewisville to Memphis and across the Atlantic and back again—Jones describes necessary distances and cleavings, but also pays tribute to home and particularly the love and labor of his single mother, who died in 2011. “Both love song and battle cry,” writes Jacqueline Woodson of the memoir. “Brilliant as fuck and, at times, heartbreaking as hell.” Saeed Jones is also the author of a poetry collection, Prelude to Bruise, winner of the 2015 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award and finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award and a Lambda Literary Award. A graduate of Kentucky University and Rutgers University in Newark, Jones currently lives in Columbus, Ohio. 

1. How long did it take you to write How We Fight for Our Lives?
The earliest iteration of the book was an essay about the most beautiful man I’ve ever kissed trying to kill me. I started writing it a few days after it happened in January 2008. I wrote what eventually became the first chapter of the book when I was in graduate school. I think I always knew this book was coming, one way or another. I started writing in earnest in 2011, sold the book on proposal in 2015, and finally finished it at some point last year. Now I find myself in the bizarre position of having to figure out who I am without this book’s writing process being a part of my daily life. 

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Because the book is about me, whenever I was struggling with a part of the book I’d begin to wonder if I was struggling because I don’t really know who I am. I thought that surely, if I knew who I was, writing about myself would’ve been easier. It was a vicious loop and very depressing. The process of writing a memoir can swallow you whole if you aren’t careful. I started therapy in 2017, which helped tremendously. I thank my therapist in the Acknowledgements for that reason. 

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
When I’m home in Columbus, I wake up around 8:00 AM, listen to a podcast while I drink coffee, and then write until I’m hungry around 11:00 AM or noon. I probably write five or six days a week. My desk is up against the window; there is a lot of light, which is important to me, and good views of shirtless men jogging up and down the street, which is also important to me.

4. What are you reading right now? 
I’m reading Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino. I keep highlighting every other paragraph and then reading what I’ve highlighted out loud. Experiencing her work with my eyes just isn’t enough; I want to hear it too. And this morning, I plucked Michael Lee’s chapbook Secondly, Finally from my shelf. The first poem is so good, it made me mad. Like, how dare you? That’s my version of a starred review. I’m excited to read his new book, The Only Worlds We Know

5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? 
I will not rest until every person in America has read The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. She’s hardly an unknown writer, and that book, rightfully, has received a great deal of praise. But look at what’s going on in our country. Clearly every American hasn’t read it yet, which frankly is traitorous. 

6. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
I think it’s essential that we get more comfortable talking about money, contracts, and the business that enables our art to reach readers wherever they might be. The idea that it’s rude to talk candidly about book deals and contract negotiations serves the publishers very well but endangers writers, especially emerging writers. A healthy discourse about money would expose just how much publishing depends on the scam of white privilege, which is why gatekeepers work so hard to delay and derail the conversation. 

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? 
Honestly, what sticks with me the most is what my editor and agent didn’t say. They never said “Where is that damn book?!” or “Why is it taking so long?” My editor only gave me concrete deadlines when I would ask for them. They protected me and allowed me to do what I needed to do. I was so anxious about finishing the book but I couldn’t rush the process. A quickly written memoir is a memoir full of lies. At one point, I was at a literary gala and someone at my table made a joke—“Oh, so you’re the writer who is taking so long.” I cried when I got home that night. And even now I picture his face every time I’m within striking range of a punching bag. 

8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
White people. 

9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? 
My editor Jon Cox is, simply put, the most intelligent reader I’ve ever had the privilege of working with closely. I always marvel at the insight in his notes. He’s also incredibly handsome and nice. It’s very overwhelming. Anyway, I trust him with my writing almost as much as I trust myself. 

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? 
Rigoberto González helped me understand that my success as a writer would hinge on my success as a reader. I’ve translated that advice into a ratio. For every poem or page I write, I try to read three times as much work by other people. I don’t have a ledger or anything but you get the idea.

Saeed Jones, author of How We Fight For Our Lives.

Ten Questions for Kimberly Reyes

by

Staff

10.1.19

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Kimberly Reyes, whose debut poetry collection, Running to Stand Still, is out today from Omnidawn. Rich in literary and pop culture references, the voice of Running to Stand Still is both specific and wide-ranging. Quotations from artists as disparate as Frank Bidart and The Killers splice and introduce poems. In one section, Reyes repurposes screenshots of text messages; in another, partial strikethroughs enable multiple readings. Through this juxtaposing of different forms and language, Reyes weaves a deeply intimate portrait out of impossibly expansive themes: modern life, Black womanhood, family history, and technology. “The brilliance of these poems is their achievement of discomfit as they simultaneously travel distance and move inward,” writes Valerie Wallace. Kimberly Reyes is also the author of a poetry chapbook, Warning Coloration (dancing girl press, 2018), and a collection of essays, Life During Wartime (Fourteen Hills, 2018). Her poems have appeared in Columbia JournalCosmonauts Avenue, and New American Writing, among other publications. A second-generation New Yorker, Reyes is currently a Fulbright fellow studying Irish literature and film at University College Cork in Ireland.

1. How long did it take you to write Running to Stand Still
All in all, about five years. I didn’t know the collection would become a book as I was writing the early versions of the poems that appear in the first few sections. But those poems became the chapbook Warning Coloration. That’s when I really started to see a narrative that I knew I had to do justice to in book form.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? 
Sitting with and then ultimately bypassing the fear of what others might think. The book is a lot about the external gaze, and it’s no secret (if you’ve read the book) that I’ve had a problem with prioritizing other people’s opinions about me over my own for a long time. It’s a tough habit to break.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write? 
Honestly, not nearly enough. I’m in that loop of applying for fellowships, scholarships, and grants so that I can write, but then the next application cycle comes around and I need to be applying again instead of writing. I also might have some undiagnosed case of ADHD or maybe we are all just a bit frazzled with the state of the world today, but it’s not always easy to sit and focus. When I do find time to write, it’s like I’m back to myself. I’m back home. And that currently happens once a week or so. When I lived in San Francisco I lived in a heavenly cottage that had a half room with a loft and a big, garden-facing window so I would use that space as an office and write there. Now, as a Fulbright fellow in Cork, Ireland, I usually write upstairs in my bedroom, on my bed, using my nightstand as a desk, staring at the rain, and I feel just as productive.

4. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? 
It depends if it’s poetry or prose, but for poetry my dear friend Irène Mathieu. We were roommates as Callaloo fellows, and she’s just a brilliant writer and reader of poetry—honest, sharp, and hilarious. For prose I don’t send out anything of importance without first sending it to a friend I’ve known since junior high school, Rachel Sur. She pulls zero punches and that’s precisely what I need, especially because so much of my writing deals with sensitive subjects. The work has to be done honestly and correctly, and she definitely has my back as far as that’s concerned. Our thirty-year friendship means that she knows when I’m bullshitting before I even do.

5. What are you reading right now?
I just finished reading Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, and whew, no kidding. Whew. What an amazingly raw and honest and beautiful and insightful work. That’s the kind of book that helped me sit down for my weekly writing session and just have at it. It’s a call to art, so to speak. It’s an example of the kind of honesty and reflection that can heal us.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Oh man, how to even begin? I won’t point out anyone in particular. I’ll just say people outside of the MFA networking world. I love reading the slush-pile success stories.

7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? 
I went through a round of edits with Rusty Morrison that was everything I wanted it to be. She started by saying: We can publish this manuscript as is now, that’s fine, it’s a good book, but let’s make it great. I loved that artistic faith and freedom.

8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Running to Stand Still, what would you say? 
Don’t work with people who don’t respect you or your art. Publication isn’t worth that sacrifice. You put too much blood on the page to have something in the world that doesn’t feel professional. I learned that lesson the hard way with the project right before this book. I will revisit that project and make it what it should be, but the time and energy that incarnation of it took away from me… I’m not sure it was worth it. Working with Omnidawn was healing and affirming and this book is my true firstborn.

9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
The networking, marketing machine. I talk about how socially awkward I can be all the time and I’m certainly not the only writer with that affliction and I just think the publishing community I know isn’t very tolerant of that. So many of our favorite writers were absolute recluses and we loved them for that, yet they wouldn’t be published nowadays. I like having my reclusive moments, and while it may not be good for my career it’s certainly good for my writing.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I think it was: Don’t read writers you don’t like. I can’t actually remember who said that but that sentiment was transformative for me because we are taught, especially in MFA culture, to slog through writing we don’t necessarily feel because it’s a good exercise in reading and expanding our horizons. But there’s way too much stuff out there to be moved by and to enjoy instead of wasting time with a backlog of books you loathe. It’s important to challenge yourself and to branch out, but life’s too short and there aren’t enough hours in the day for that kind of pain. 

 

Kimberly Reyes, author of Running to Stand Still.

Go to Source

Author: squong

  • If you’re an artist, up to a creative challenge, and love this story, enter your email here. Click here for more info.

Date:
  • June 27, 2021
Share: