Through its collections, exhibitions, workshops, and events, the Center for Book Arts (CBA) has sought to uplift and “democratize” all aspects of the art and craft of bookmaking from bookbinding and letterpress printing to illustrating and beyond, since its founding fifty years ago, in 1974. The latest initiative along these lines is its newly established Small Press Incubator fellowship, which launched in October. The fellowship supports BIPOC writers, poets, and textual artists and “equips participants with the essential skills, context, and supportive community needed to start and sustain a small press.”
Camilo Otero, CBA’s artists program manager, and Tyler Roarty, its educational programs manager, say that the Small Press Incubator fellowship is “deeply intertwined” with the center’s mission and goals. The fellowship acknowledges and addresses the huge inequities that have been foundational to mainstream publishing and that disproportionately affect BIPOC creatives; it furthermore recognizes that “book arts have historically served as a powerful medium for marginalized artists to express their ideas outside the restrictive systems of conventional publication and gallery representation.”
The Small Press Incubator fellowship, which concluded its application process in mid-August, is funded in part by support from the Poetry Foundation. Four Small Press Incubator fellows were chosen from applicants to participate in an immersive program spanning eight weeks, from October 21 to December 13, 2024. Otero and Roarty say that the program places “a high value on projects that are deeply connected to the communities the applicants are part of” and that engage “meaningfully with community-specific themes and needs.” While fellows don’t need to have previous experience in publishing, CBA hopes that fellows are interested in sustaining their projects beyond the fellowship period in order to “make a lasting impact.”
Fellows are given a stipend of $2,000 plus an additional $1,000 for materials they can use to plan and launch their respective publishing projects, whether it’s a zine, a chapbook, or visual textual art. Fellows also get paired with mentors with publishing expertise who provide personalized guidance and feedback to help fellows develop and refine their publishing projects. In addition, Small Press Incubator fellows attend lectures by industry experts and participate in workshops that cover all aspects of the publishing process, including designing a chapbook, printing, bookbinding, editorial marketing and communication, editorial production, administration, and small press distribution. “By fostering a strong, supportive relationship,” the fellowship coordinators say, “mentors play a crucial role in helping fellows achieve long-term success and lasting impact in their publishing endeavors.” The program will culminate with the fellows presenting their plans for these projects, and the center’s coordinators hope fellows stay involved in the community beyond the fellowship.
CBA aspires for the Small Press Incubator fellowship to be a “transformative experience” and for “each fellow [to leave] the program with a clearer vision for their work, the confidence to pursue their goals, and the tools to sustain their publishing efforts in the long term,” Otero and Roarty say. “Ultimately we aim to see [the fellows] succeed not just during the fellowship, but as they continue to develop and share their voices in the wider world of publishing.”
On a broader level, CBA’s aim is that fellows spur necessary and enduring change through their projects and demonstrate what is possible when the publishing aspirations of BIPOC writers and artists are meaningfully supported through mentorship and community. “Our goal is for these projects to evolve into sustainable ventures that continue to serve and enrich their communities,” the fellowship coordinators say. “We also hope that these projects will inspire other emerging voices to explore and contribute to the book arts, helping to build a more inclusive and diverse publishing landscape.”
The Center for Book Arts’ half-century commitment to promoting greater access in the book arts space has created a supportive and collaborative bookmaking community. The Small Press Incubator fellowship plants the seeds for a more diverse and equitable vision of publishing and provides a community in which it can grow.
Kavita Das is the author of Poignant Song: The Life and Music of Lakshmi Shankar and Craft and Conscience: How to Write About Social Issues, inspired by the Writing With Conscience workshop she created and teaches.
In October, twenty disabled artists were announced as the first class of Disability Futures Fellows and received grants of $50,000 each, to be used in whatever way is most useful in supporting their work. The new fellowships celebrate disability culture by honoring accomplished practitioners in a wide variety of fields, including writing, theater, dance, architecture, painting, and garment making. Developed by the Ford Foundation in partnership with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the initiative is administered by United States Artists, a national arts funding organization in Chicago.
The awards are part of ongoing research conducted by, for, and with disabled practitioners to understand what they want and need from such fellowships, from accessible applications to flexible funds disbursal, because for many disabled artists a monetary award can too easily turn into a punishment. “I will die without my benefits; I get my health insurance through Medicare,” says fellow Riva Lehrer, a painter and the author of Golem Girl (One World, 2020). Full-time employment that offers health benefits can be difficult to maintain for many disabled people for whom hospital stays are more frequent, and eligibility for federal health care benefits is often affected by fluctuations in income. “People need to understand that if getting an award means that you lose your basic benefits and especially your health care, then you’re in much worse shape than otherwise,” says Lehrer.
“That’s something that we had to learn,” says Margaret Morton, director of the Creativity and Free Expression team of the Ford Foundation. “In that research and that work with disabled practitioners, we were able to gain a sense from their perspective of how they wanted to engage.” Individualized attention to the needs of each fellow is key, especially in terms of funds disbursal—some recipients opted to take their award over the course of several years to avoid jeopardizing life-supporting federal funds. The structure of the award is still being revised, and Morton believes it will continue on a two-year basis rather than an annual one.
As a blind writer I have noticed that it’s still quite rare to find disability mentioned in statements of diversity for grants, residencies, or literary journals. The Disability Futures award suggests that disability culture will become more overtly integral to arts and culture generally. Even if they have not been on the mainstream radar, “disabled, sick, Mad, neurodivergent and Deaf writers and artists aren’t new,” fellow Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha wrote in an e-mail. “We’ve been out here doing this work for a long time!” The author or coeditor of nine books, including Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories From the Transformative Justice Movement (AK Press, 2020), Piepzna-Samarasinha points out that for many people, disability is not about culture, but rather “deficiency,” which leads to situations wherein “you go to the bookstore and ask where the disabled section is and you get a blank stare and uncomfortable laughter.”
Ableism in the publishing industry can only be dismantled if people with disabilities are involved at every level of book creation. Disability activist, media maker, journalist, and Disability Futures fellow Alice Wong is one editor effecting this change. Of her work on Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories From the Twenty-First Century (Vintage, 2020), Wong writes: “It was a thrill and privilege to edit an anthology featuring thirty-seven pieces by disabled people who all have powerful and personal stories across different communities and fields. As a disabled editor, I intentionally curated these stories for us, by us and think of it like a Spotify playlist or mixtape from me to the disability community.”
Although the fellows are largely grateful for the award, some also voice misgivings. Eli Clare, author of Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling With Cure (Duke University Press, 2017), wrote in an e-mail: “As a white, disabled, genderqueer activist-poet, I dream of a world without police and prisons; without psych wards, group homes, and nursing homes; without capitalism and white supremacy. All of this leaves me unsettled about accepting money from private foundations that often have histories of supporting racism and eugenics and current funding practices that destabilize radical grassroots organizing.” As a result, Clare plans “to use and redistribute the money to create fierce survival, fierce beauty, fierce ugliness, and fierce dreams.”
No one can know what impact Disability Futures, the first major fellowship of its kind, will ultimately have. Disabled artists have occasionally won awards in the past, but not on this scale. “I think that the critical mass factor is key,” DeafBlind poet, essayist, and translator John Lee Clark wrote in an e-mail. “Now we have twenty disabled artists as the recipients of what is the rough equivalent of winning a Guggenheim. That is quite a message.”
The 2020 fellows reveal the wealth of talent in the disability community, as well as the diversity within it. Considering disabled Americans make up approximately 20 percent of the population, we cannot help but intersect with other often-marginalized identities. For fellow Jen Deerinwater, journalist, memoirist, and founder of the Crushing Colonialism collective, intersectionality is at the core of writing and activism. “Who I am cannot be separated out. Yes, I’m Indigenous. Yes, I’m Two Spirit, I’m disabled. But those things all go together. They don’t exist within silos.”
Deerinwater hopes that the Disability Futures award will “make other people in the arts go, ‘Hey, we need to start working with and listening to and taking direction from disabled and Deaf and ill creatives.’”
M. Leona Godin is a writer, a performer, and an educator who is blind. Her first book, There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness, is forthcoming from Pantheon in summer 2021.
From left: Writers and 2020 Disability Futures fellows Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Eli Clare, and Alice Wong. (Credit: Piepzna-Samarasinha: Jesse Manuel Graves; Clare: Samuel Lurie; Wong: Eddie Hernandez Photography)
In the first letter Danny Harris wrote to Gary Fine from solitary confinement, he made what seemed to Fine like a simple request. “‘Books are like a window to the world,’” Fine remembers Harris writing. “‘I have no window.’” He wondered if Fine could send him one.
Fine, who works at the Durland Alternatives Library on the Cornell University campus in Ithaca, New York, responded that he was sorry, but his library didn’t send books into prisons. When, to his surprise, he received a follow-up soon after thanking him for writing to Harris “like I’m a real person,” it got Fine thinking: Maybe he could send Harris some books. The epistolary relationship they developed over the next several years eventually grew into something much bigger. Prisoner Express, the sprawling literature-by-mail program Fine oversees from his corner of Cornell, has provided windows to the world for more than thirty thousand people living in incarceration in forty-nine states since its inception in 2004.
Prisoner Express doesn’t send its correspondents just any books; its packages are curated by a mix of Cornell students and committed locals, part of a team of some four hundred volunteers that also includes remote contributors. Skimming the multicolored multiplicity of used books the program collects for this purpose, a volunteer might first find titles to fit “bodyweight workout, exercise, atheism, and witchcraft/occult,” as one recent letter requested, then move on to “science fiction, historic fiction, tearjerkers, the classics, The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” The task also requires taking into account the particulars of prison mail regulations, which vary by institution and may require hard-, soft-, or no-cover books, or specify maximum numbers per shipment. If participants are writing from facilities that allow only one or two books at a time, for example, Fine might send them a Norton anthology—something juicy.
These days, dictionaries are Prisoner Express’s most requested books. They used to be hard to source, but with definitions as close as the nearest screen, Fine now finds hundreds of them at book sales. Other perennially popular genres include self-help, chess, ancient history, and philosophy. Once the head of a white-power prison gang wrote asking for Nazi history; Fine sent him a book by Elie Wiesel. Years later he received a letter from the man’s lawyer, along with a donation. His client, the lawyer wrote, had read the book and then told the members of his gang to have their swastika tattoos removed.
Fine is deeply familiar with a book’s power, as a survivor of child abuse that saw him locked in a room and starved for days at a time. “If I could get a book wherever I was being held, it made all the difference in the world,” he says. So when prisoners receive their packages, each comes with a personalized, handwritten note, since many early book recipients told Fine that the mail they received was the most important thing in their lives at the time.
As the program grew, Fine started asking his correspondents to respond to short personal prompts; he then collated the results and sent them to the group. Reading the narratives of other people’s similar experiences was powerful, particularly for those who wrote from solitary confinement or deep social isolation, and they told him so.
Prisoner Express now runs a broad variety of educational programs on topics from meditation and chess to screenwriting and ocean science—all using this Socratic-dialogue-by-mail model, which Fine compares in its unifying power and rhythm to a church’s call-and-response. The program’s songwriting teacher figured out a way to have her students, scattered across prisons, write a song together. Last year Fine managed to get his hands on five hundred copies of Slaughterhouse-Five and led a book club. The science education volunteer named her newsletter “Plasmodesmata,” which refers to “channels to exchange information between cells” in biology.
Fine says that although books can provide respite, Prisoner Express’s programming is not about escapism. Instead it is “material that takes you deeper inside yourself, a chance for reflection, exploration, and healing,” he argues. Dave Gordon, a participant for fifteen of his more than twenty years of incarceration for conviction of a sex offense, credits Prisoner Express’s journaling program (in which volunteers respond through letters to the innermost thoughts of people in prison) with the personal growth that allowed him to eventually be granted parole. In prison Gordon read continually—by his estimate, some sixteen hundred books during his sentence—and wrote twelve hundred pages in his first year of journaling. “I wanted to understand where I had failed in society,” he says. “How come my values weren’t strong enough to keep me from going to prison? Something was broken in me.” Gordon eventually used what clarity he found in his books and writings to educate others, preparing presentations about emotional development and vulnerability aimed at other sex offenders.
He joins a chorus of people in prison all over the United States who credit Prisoner Express with not just their education, but their well-being and survival. Jonathan Holeman, who is serving multiple life sentences with no possibility of parole, recently wrote to Fine to say that Prisoner Express helped him to get his GED diploma and to encourage about twenty others to do the same. Prisoner Express “motivated me to keep learning during a time in life when I had little belief in hope for anything better,” he wrote.
In a letter to Prisoner Express’s volunteers, Christopher Banks wrote, “You all become our families because you’re all there more than other people for us.” And Keith Pertusio put it simply: “Thanks for motivating me to write. It is a part of my recovery. I am a better person when I write.”
Gordon maintains that without Prisoner Express, he would have died by suicide long ago. He chokes up remembering a day when, after a prison presentation, a young man approached him. The man hadn’t known how to tell his mother about his crime, he said, and had been planning on killing himself. “I know now that something was broke inside of me,” Gordon remembers the man saying. “I can tell my mama that I know what it is now, I’m going to fix it, and that this will never happen again. That she can be proud of me.”
Gordon pauses, taking a deep breath. “That emotional catharsis that happens between you and someone seeing the light is so powerful. And I couldn’t have achieved that without Prisoner Express.”
Alissa Greenberg is a volunteer editor at the San Quentin State Prison newspaper, San Quentin News; a staff writer at Nova on PBS; a contributing editor of Bay Nature magazine; and an occasional freelance journalist, reporting stories at the intersection of community, culture, science, and business.
Gary Fine (center) and Prisoner Express volunteers at a 2020 book sale in Ithaca, New York. (Credit: Courtesy of Gary Fine)
In the fall of 2009 writer Doran Larson put out a call for essays from incarcerated people and prison staff about what life was like inside, and five years later, in 2014, Michigan State University Press published a selection of them as Fourth City: Essays From the Prison in America. But the essays never stopped coming. “I’m holding a handwritten essay that just arrived today,” Larson said in August. “Once people knew there was a venue where someone would read their work, they kept writing.” Instead of letting this steady stream of essays go unread, Larson decided to create the American Prison Writing Archive (APWA), an open-source archive of essays by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people, as well as correctional officers and staffers. Accessible to anyone online, the APWA (apw.dhinitiative.org) is a “virtual meeting place” to “spread the voices of unheard populations.”
With more than 2.2 million people in its prisons and jails, the United States incarcerates a higher percentage of its population than any other country in the world. But most Americans don’t know anything about life inside, which can leave them both indifferent to those who live and work there and divorced from the justice system their tax dollars reinforce. Larson hopes to rectify this disconnect with the APWA, and after receiving a $262,000 grant in March from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the archive is poised to do just that.
Larson, who teaches literature and creative writing at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, first became involved with the incarcerated population when a friend invited him to a discussion group at Attica Correctional Facility, a New York state prison. Larson listened to men speak about how they were coping with being in prison and was “floored by the honesty and earnestness of those conversations,” he says. A few months later he started a writing group at Attica and became interested in prison writing as a genre. “I spent two summers at the Library of Congress reading all the prison writing I could. I wanted to start an undergraduate course on it. There are a few anthologies of [work by] political prisoners like Martin Luther King Jr. and some small collections from prison writing workshops, but I couldn’t find a wide, national sampling from currently incarcerated people.”
With more than 1,200 essays from people all across the country, the APWA fills that need. The database currently holds three million words’ worth of writing, enough to fill more than eighteen volumes the size of Fourth City, which is a hefty 338 pages. “While reading individual essays can be moving and inspiring, it’s reading in the aggregate that’s valuable and instructive,” says Larson. “One of the extraordinary things has been to see the same themes emerging: staff violence, neglect and abuse at home, drug and alcohol addiction, police aggression.” These shared experiences are part of what inspired Larson to name the collection Fourth City—to represent the fact that the prison and jail population in the United States is larger than that of Houston, Texas, currently the fourth largest city in the country, and that stories told from inside any prison in the nation can seem as if they’re all coming from the same place.
The APWA is part of Hamilton College’s Digital Humanities Initiative. With additional funding for the archive from the NEH grant, Larson plans to continue to solicit, preserve, digitize, and disseminate the work of incarcerated people and prison workers and to hire a part-time assistant. The grant will also go toward finishing an online tool that will allow anyone to transcribe handwritten essays into fully searchable texts and to improve the site’s search functions so users can search by author attribute (race, religion, age, ethnicity), keyword, location, and more.
Larson hopes the archive will be a resource that people will use regularly for academic, policy, and social research. “In the age of big data, we’re trying to help create the era of big narrative, people writing very concretely about what works and doesn’t work,” he says. “Policy-makers might consult this to investigate: How much human pain might be caused because of this policy? When does the law become little more than legalized suffering?” Larson published a book last July, Witness in the Era of Mass Incarceration (Rowman & Littlefield), that compared prison writing in Ireland, Africa, and the United States; he is currently working on another book about the archive tentatively titled “Ethics in the Era of Mass Incarceration.”
The APWA doesn’t espouse any political view. “The advocacy is done by the writers,” Larson says. “You read ten Holocaust or slave narratives and no one has to tell you what the message is. The difference is that there is a fixed number of slave and Holocaust narratives. But this collection will continue to grow.”
Gila Lyons has written about feminism, mental health, and social justice for Salon, Vox, Cosmopolitan, the Huffington Post, Good Magazine, and other publications. Find her on Twitter, @gilalyons, or on her website, gilalyons.com.
Doran Larson, founder of the American Prison Writing Archive.
Every Tuesday morning, twenty to thirty writers gather in a meeting room in the basement of the Cathedral Church of St. Paul on Tremont Street in Boston. Each member of the Black Seed Writers Group gets a pen and a yellow legal pad and, after catching up with one another, sits down and gets to work. The writing they produce will eventually fill the pages of the Pilgrim, a literary magazine celebrating its fifth anniversary this December. The Pilgrim looks like just about any of the small literary magazines lining the shelves of local bookstores and cafés, but it is different in one major respect: Its contributors are all part of Boston’s homeless community.
The Pilgrim is the brainchild of James Parker, a contributing editor and cultural columnist for the Atlantic. In 2011, while on a sixty-mile pilgrimage with the MANNA ministry of the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, Parker was inspired to launch the writers group and journal with the idea of pilgrimage as a guiding theme. “Homelessness is a state of acute pilgrimage,” writes Parker on the journal’s website, “a condition of material and occasionally moral emergency, and thus a place where the world reveals itself under the pressure, or the pouring-in, of a higher reality.” When he returned from his own pilgrimage, Parker established the Black Seed Writers Group to give homeless people in downtown Boston an opportunity to gather, write, and share their work. The group is named for the nearby café where it first met, but its ranks soon swelled beyond the café’s capacity and it moved to the cathedral next door. Each week, Parker provides a few open-ended prompts to get the writers going. There is no formal workshop, and anyone who is homeless, recently housed, or transitioning into a home is welcome to join. Members of the group come and go, though each week there are at least a few regulars.
“If we’re the Black Seed Writers Group,” says Margaret Miranda, a writer in the group, “the people helping us are mission figs: They surround the black seeds at the center, they’re nurturing, and they’re on a mission. Besides,” she adds, “think of the literary significance of figs.” (When Miranda presented her metaphor to Parker, he asked her if that makes him a mad vegetable. Miranda replied, “In forty years, you will be.”) In addition to Parker, the other volunteers who help facilitate the workshop include Kate Glavin, an MFA student at the University of Massachusetts in Boston; Libby Gatti, a diocese intern; and James Kraus, a graphic artist who refers to himself as “the other James.”
Miranda and several other regulars set the group’s tone: After a few minutes of greeting and banter, they settle into their various writing processes and work diligently through the hour. A man named Joe dictates into his phone and transcribes his recording; Steven thumbs through a dictionary; Cody paces back and forth before plunging into his work. Rob, a wiry writer in a Red Sox hoodie, brews the coffee.
“This is the most punk-rock thing I’ve ever been part of,” says Parker, who first connected with the homeless community through music. At age twenty-two, Parker was immersed in Washington, D.C.’s independent music scene, and discovered the city’s Community for Creative Non-Violence (CCNV), a thriving facility for the homeless, through the liner notes of a music album. Parker lived at CCNV as a volunteer for several months, but soon moved to Boston and lost touch with the homeless community over the next two decades, until founding the writers group.
After each session, Parker gathers all the work and splits it among himself and the other volunteers to transcribe. He then prints the writing in packets that he distributes the following Tuesday. Within a week of attending the Black Seed Writers Group, therefore, every participant is a published author; additionally, the packet entices writers to return the next week. Parker then chooses work from these packets to include in the Pilgrim, which he publishes eight to ten times per year. The Pilgrim is printed right where it’s produced; the administration at the church lets Parker use its printers, and subscription fees—the journal has a circulation of a few hundred—provide funding for the paper and ink.
As a writer himself, Parker believes fervently in the power of publication. While he was writing his first book, his wife had one of the chapters printed as a chapbook, and it transformed the way Parker approached his work: “It was so powerful to me to have something published,” he says. When he founded the Pilgrim, the heart of his mission was to publish as many voices as possible—particularly those that would normally go unheard. In 2015, according to government census figures, the homeless population of Boston was 7,663—a 5.6 percent increase from the previous year. Since it was established, in December 2011, the Pilgrim has published more than 150 different writers.
The Pilgrim does not have a specific style; instead, writers are encouraged to find their own style, and to push their voices deeper. Participants write poems, stories, memoirs, prayers, protests, and everything in between. One regular attendee, Rolando, is a journalist who catalogues various aspects of life at the shelter through a series of bullet points that create something between a list, a poem, and an essay. One week he wrote about lost property; the next week he categorized the various safety nets at the shelter. Cody writes prophetic images from his imagination. He describes a dream cover for his book, were he to write one: a rendering of the globe with a seven-headed serpentine monster crawling out of a deep chasm in the center.
In 2014 Parker expanded the Pilgrim to include a book imprint, No Fixed Address Press. Its first publication was Paul Estes’s science fiction novel, Razza Freakin’ Aliens, a madcap space opera featuring the intergalactic adventures of Dave the Spy, who encounters many multispecies creatures, such as rebel alien cats that yell, “Hairrbawlz, kill ’em all!” This year, the press published Miranda’s debut collection of poetry, Dressing Wounds on Tremont Street. The book is at once devotional and jocular, weaving together portentous subjects with light banter; think John Donne meets Kenneth Koch.
Now, Parker says, No Fixed Address Press is concentrating on what he calls broadsheets—chapbook-length collections that are easier, cheaper, and quicker to produce than full-length books. Any profits that the Pilgrim and No Fixed Address Press might bring in from sales go directly into producing the next publications. Parker is excited to watch the group’s reach naturally expand, but is careful to avoid a “dissipation of essence,” as he puts it. As the group grows, it’s important for Parker to maintain an environment of openness, encouragement, and safety—an intimate space where members can nurture each other as writers. “We want growth that’s real growth,” said Parker. “Growth as writers.”
Adrienne Raphel is the author of What Was It For (Rescue Press, 2017) and But What Will We Do (Seattle Review, 2016). Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Paris Review Daily, Poetry, Lana Turner Journal, Prelude, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a doctoral candidate at Harvard University.
For Chicago teenagers with a passion for writing, there is no shortage of resources. Young Chicago Authors; 826CHI, a branch of the youth writing organization started by writer Dave Eggers; StoryStudio Chicago; and Writopia Lab, among other programs, have been offering writing workshops, open mics, summer camps, and poetry slams for kids throughout the city for decades. But a new organization has a more specific goal in mind for Chicago teens: to offer them hands-on experience in editing and publishing their peers. Launched last year by poet and educator Jennifer Steele, [Y]volve Publishing (YP) is an extension of Revolving Door Arts Foundation, which Steele founded in 2014 to empower and publish young and emerging writers and to get them actively involved in the publishing industry. Steele runs the organization almost exclusively on her own, with some help from a volunteer board that includes writers Fred Sasaki and Kenyatta Rogers. While Steele has other projects in the works for the organization, including workshops for young and new mothers, an anthology about postpartum depression, and a reading series, her primary focus is currently YP and its inaugural project, the Teen Chapbook Series, which features poetry chapbooks written and edited by teens.
The chapbook series began last summer, when Steele asked four teenagers on the slam poetry team she coaches to each write five poems and then expand that work into a chapbook-length collection. The four young poets—Nyvia Taylor, Semira Truth Garrett, Kai Wright, and Jalen Kobayashi—worked with one another, along with Steele, to edit their poems. “Each book has been a personal journey for these writers, as they explore personal ideas and also think about how to expand the craft of their writing,” says Steele. “Semira, for instance, was really interested in learning how to write short poems. Jalen has learned about truth versus fact when writing a poem. And Nyvia has been writing brave poems that are confronting difficult, personal subjects.”
The chapbooks, each featuring artwork the poets chose themselves, were published in May. Steele also invited four established poets, including CM Burroughs and Jacob Saenz, to write introductions to the chapbooks. For the young poets, seeing their words in print has had a powerful impact. “When you have a hard copy of something, it’s forever,” says Kobayashi in a video on the press’s website. “As poets, we share our work on social media, but that can only get you so far. Once you actually have that physical copy of all your words on the page, nobody can take that from you.” Wright agrees: “I’m just a little Chicago kid from the West Side, but to be able to put my work out there in a permanent way—these are just my words that are here and nobody can take my story, or my truth, or my life away from me as a result of that.”
The Teen Chapbook Series will be published annually, and next year’s series will be expanded to include fiction and nonfiction. (Submissions will open this month, and the chapbooks will be released in Spring 2018.) Steele is also in the process of developing a teen editorial board, which will oversee the production of each book in the series from start to finish. “We’re hoping to have a full-fledged publishing program that includes graphic design, marketing, and promotion teams by 2018,” Steele says. Students will create a call for submissions, read and select manuscripts, and then be paired with a more established editor or writer to edit the selected manuscripts. They will also work on every stage of production, from layout and design to promotion. Steele plans for the press to release three to five chapbooks through the series each year and to put out other books as well. This summer she is working with a group of teens to curate, edit, design, and publish a book of poetry and fashion photography centering around the Gwendolyn Brooks centennial, which is being celebrated this year in Chicago. The anthology will be published in October.
By teaching teens how to publish books, Steele believes she will help equip them with both entrepreneurial and collaborative experience that will be applicable within and beyond the creative industry. By taking on the role of an editor, publisher, or marketing executive, Steele says, the young people involved with the YP will acquire marketable skills before they even graduate high school. She also hopes to reach more teens by bringing YP books into classrooms. Starting in the 2017–2018 school year, she plans to provide the chapbooks to teachers in Chicago schools and help them develop lesson plans based on each book’s content or theme. “We often hear from teachers that they wish they had more books written by teens to share with their students, so we’re hoping this could fill that need,” she says. “As far as I know, there aren’t many collections of poetry being taught in the classroom, let alone collections by teens.”
Steele’s commitment to empowering teens is partially motivated by her own experiences as a young person. “I didn’t know I could be an editor,” she says. “I thought if I got my English degree, I was just going to be a high school English teacher. But if someone had told me that I could be editing a magazine, I probably would have made different choices. We’re trying to create these experiences for kids at this age so they can make more informed choices about what they’re interested in doing. That’s the underlying point of all of this: creating, through the literary arts, skills that can be transferable to any career path they’re interested in.”
Tara Jayakar is the founder and editor of Raptor Editing. She lives in New York City.
[Y]volve Publishing’s poets (from left) Semira Truth Garrett, Jalen Kobayashi, Kai Wright, and Nyvia Taylor.
Last night in New York City, at a historic ceremony at Gracie Mansion, nineteen-year-old Amanda Gorman of Los Angeles was named the first national youth poet laureate. The unprecedented title, to be awarded annually, honors a teen poet who demonstrates not only extraordinary literary talent but also a proven record of community engagement and youth leadership.
For Gorman, poetry and civic outreach aren’t separate interests. The Harvard University freshman knows firsthand that creative writing can build confidence and a sense of community among young people whose voices are often underrepresented in mainstream dialogue. In 2016 she founded One Pen One Page, a nonprofit organization that provides an “online platform and creative writing programs for student storytellers to change the world.” She continues to serve as the organization’s executive director.
Gorman’s own writing often addresses the intersections of race, feminism, and adolescence, as well as the changing landscape of her native Los Angeles. For both her poetry and her advocacy, Gorman has been recognized by Forbes, the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, the YoungArts Foundation, and the OZY Genius Awards. She has also performed on The Today Show, ABC Family, and Nickelodeon News, and helped introduce Hillary Clinton at the 2017 Global Leadership Awards.
“For me, being able to stand on a stage as a spoken word poet, as someone who overcame a speech impediment, as the descendent of slaves who would have been prosecuted for reading and writing, I think it really symbolizes how, by pursuing a passion and never giving up, you can go as far as your wildest dreams,” said Gorman at the ceremony on Wednesday evening. “This represents such a significant moment because never in my opinion have the arts been more important than now.”
The event represented the culmination of years of work by arts organizations across the country. In 2009 literary arts nonprofit Urban Word NYC, in partnership with the New York City Campaign Finance Board and Mayor’s Office, began bestowing the annual title of New York City youth poet laureate on one visionary poet between the ages of fourteen and nineteen. Michael Cirelli, executive director of Urban Word NYC, says the program was founded on a belief that “young poets deserve to be in spaces of power, privilege, and governance, and to have their voices front and center of the sociopolitical dialogue happening in our city.”
Since the inception of New York’s youth poet laureate program, arts and literacy organizations in over thirty-five cities have followed suit, launching their own youth laureateship positions. As it spread nationally, the program garnered support from the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Society of America, and PEN Center USA, among other major poetry organizations. Finally, in 2016, the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities partnered with Urban Word to bring the program to the national level.
Last July a jury of prominent poets, including U.S. poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, Brooklyn poet laureate Tina Chang, and Academy of American Poets executive director Jen Benka, narrowed the pool of local laureates down to five national finalists. Poets were evaluated on the caliber and subject matter of their poems, as well as their commitment to serving their communities through volunteer and advocacy work, and each finalist was selected to represent a geographic region of the country (Northeast, Southeast, South, Midwest, and West). Along with Gorman, Hajjar Baban of Detroit, Nkosi Nkululeko of New York City, Lagnajita Mukhopadhyay of Nashville, and Andrew White of Houston were named the first annual regional laureates and finalists for the inaugural national youth poet laureateship.
Each finalist received a book deal with independent press Penmanship Books, which published Gorman’s first poetry collection, The One for Whom Food Is Not Enough, in 2015. Over the past year, the finalists have also had the opportunity to perform for large audiences at renowned venues, including the Poetry Foundation, the Kennedy Center, and the White House. As the national youth poet laureate, Gorman will continue to give readings and participate in events across the country throughout her yearlong term.
“The role of poetry, especially in marginalized communities, is to provide a voice to those who are traditionally silenced,” says Cirelli, “and the best way to effect social change is to provide platforms for youth to tell their stories. We hope to leverage our work to allow these diverse stories to be told in spaces that have historically omitted youth voices, and to energize and engage the issues that they are most passionate about.”
The ceremony at Gracie Mansion featured performances by three of the finalists, as well as a roster of current and former New York City youth poets laureate. The performers were introduced by a group of acclaimed poets, including American Book Prize winner Kimiko Hahn and four-time National Poetry Slam champion Patricia Smith. Nkululeko recited a poem about his hair, a metaphor through which he discussed his relationship with his mother and collective African American history. Baban, who was named runner-up for the national title, recited a sestina on language, family, and her Muslim name. Finally, Gorman delivered a poem about how her speech impediment led her to discover writing.
“I am so grateful to be part of this cohort of young creatives who are taking up their pens to have a voice for what is right and what is just,” Gorman said in her acceptance speech. “I don’t just want to write—I want to do right as well.”
Maggie Millner is Poets & Writers Magazine’s Diana and Simon Raab Editorial Fellow.
In 2008 the Library of Congress, the Children’s Book Council, and the nonprofit organization Every Child a Reader established the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature position to celebrate and promote books for children and young adult readers. The current ambassador, graphic novelist and recent MacArthur “Genius” Grant recipient Gene Luen Yang, started his term in January 2016. Yang has devoted much of his work to his Reading Without Walls Challenge, which encourages kids to read books with unfamiliar characters, topics, and formats. Yang is the perfect advocate for such an undertaking: His popular graphic novels American Born Chinese and Boxers & Saints have pushed against cultural stereotypes and blurred the lines between the comic-book and book-publishing industries. More than halfway through his two-year term, Yang spoke about his work as the ambassador.
What inspired you to come up with the Reading Without Walls Challenge? We want kids to read outside their comfort zones, and we want them to do it in three ways. One: We want them to read about characters who don’t look like them or live like them. Two: We want them to read about topics they don’t know anything about. And three: We want them to read books in different formats. So if they normally read only graphic novels for fun, we want them to try a chapter book, and if they read only chapter books for fun, we want them to try a graphic novel.
What are you planning next? Right now we’re trying to promote the Reading Without Walls program. We’ve put together a bunch of downloadable materials: recommended reading lists, posters, and certificates of completion. We’re hoping librarians, booksellers, and teachers will download, print, and use these materials to promote the initiative with their classes. And we’re trying to do a wider national push for the summer.
What else is involved in the national ambassador position? It’s pretty flexible. I have a few speaking engagements—I was at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C., in the fall, which was a ton of fun. I’m going to go again this year, and I’ve done a few school visits, some of them in person, some of them over Skype. We’ve tried some online stuff. I have a video podcast called the Reading Without Walls podcast—it’s just me having conversations about children’s books with people I really like. I had one that came out with Lois Lowry, who wrote The Giver; another one with Patrick Ness, who wrote A Monster Calls. I also do a monthly column at Book Riot about making comics, and we’re probably going to start another podcast this year.
Why do you think it’s important for kids to read books with characters who don’t look or live like them? There are studies that show that fiction in particular builds empathy—that when you read about characters who don’t look or live like you, you begin to understand them a little bit better. You understand what makes you similar and how vast the differences are, and it helps you to be a little bit more compassionate toward people who are different from you. Right now it seems like—not just in America, but around the world—we need a little more empathy. And I include myself in that too. I worry about how technology affects us. Just recently with the presidential election, there was all of [this research] about how Facebook basically shows you stuff you like to read. And then even beyond that, you can literally read about yourself all day. You could just fill your whole day with pure narcissism because of digital media. And I think fiction is the exact opposite of that. Well-written fiction pulls you out of your own mind space and helps you see into the thoughts and lives of somebody else.
Can you think of a book where you were reading without walls as a kid? As an Asian American kid growing up in America in the eighties, almost every book that I read was outside of my own walls, because they were about kids that were part of the majority culture. I do think that maybe gender-wise there were books that pushed me outside of my walls. Like almost every kid in the eighties, I loved Beverly Cleary and I loved the Ramona books. I think as a character Ramona really broke stereotypes and cultural norms about the way little girls should act, because she was creative and rambunctious and kind of loud. And there was a lot of overlap in the way she saw the world and the way I saw the world as a little kid. So I think that that pushed me out. And there were also books that mirrored my life. I started collecting comics in the fifth grade and got really obsessed with superheroes. I wonder if part of that obsession comes from the fact that these superheroes negotiated two different identities—Superman wasn’t just Superman, he was also Clark Kent. In some ways that mirrored my own reality since I had a Chinese name at home and an American name at school; I lived under two different sets of expectations. And Superman is actually an immigrant too—he deals with the cultures of both Krypton and America.
Have your experiences as a graphic novelist informed the challenge, especially the part about reading in different formats? Yes, absolutely. I think in America, up until pretty recently, the comic-book market and the book market were really two separate entities. They had their own stores, distribution systems, norms, and readerships. It’s only in the last ten or fifteen years that they’ve started working together. I really think I’ve been a beneficiary of that merging, and it’s exciting to see. It’s exciting to see how publishers and authors who are prominent in one area are starting to embrace the work from the authors in the other area. More and more we’re seeing publishers who typically only publish prose books start to add graphic novels to their list. On the other side, we’re starting to see comic-book publishers recruit writers who are primarily known for their prose, like Ta-Nehisi Coates over at Marvel.
Do you think that’s because people’s opinions or the form itself is changing? Can you diagnose why that shift is happening? I think there are three prominent comic cultures in the world. There’s the American one; there’s an Asian one that’s centered primarily around Japan, and there’s a European one centered around France and French-speaking Belgium. And in those other two cultures, comics have been prominent for a long time. If you go to Japan, there will be people of every age and gender reading graphic novels and manga on the subways. In France, it’s the same way: They televise the comic awards shows. In both of those cultures, it’s always been a big deal. It’s only in America that comics have been in this backwater. And that really goes back to the 1950s when the child psychologist Fredric Wertham wrote a book called Seduction of the Innocent, in which he argued that comic books cause juvenile delinquency. The United States Congress took it very seriously and had a series of congressional hearings where they called comic-book authors, publishers, and artists to Washington, D.C., to testify to see if comics actually caused juvenile delinquency. These hearings lasted for a few weeks, but didn’t end conclusively—there was no congressional decision that came out of it. But they damaged the reputation of comics in the eyes of the American public, and that lasted for decades. That didn’t happen in Japan or France. I feel what happened in Japan and France was a much more natural development of the medium, whereas in America it was stunted. It wasn’t until the last couple of decades that people have forgotten about what happened in the fifties. People have finally started to realize that comics don’t cause juvenile delinquency.
What draws you to working with and writing for young people? I think it’s kind of my natural storytelling voice. When I first started writing comics, I was a self-publisher. I was working at a tiny scale. I would Xerox comics and I’d try to sell them at shows. I’d sell probably a dozen or two—tiny scale. And when you’re working at that level, you don’t think about demographics. I wasn’t actually categorized as a young-adult author until I signed with First Second, my primary publisher. They come out of the book world, not the comic-book world. In the book world age demographics are huge; that’s how booksellers decide where to shelve their books and how to sell them. So I was categorized there. It’s not something I had in my head when I first started, but I think it sits well—probably because I was a high-school teacher for a long time. I taught high-school computer science for seventeen years, so I was just surrounded by teenage voices, and a lot of that just bleeds into you. When you spend so much time in the hallways of a school, the voices of those hallways just kind of get into you.
Dana Isokawa is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Yesterday, the Academy of American Poets launched a new online poetry resource targeted at teenage readers and writers of poetry. The initiative was conceived after the organization conducted a survey of visitors to its Web site and found that 75 percent of users developed an interest in poetry before the age of eighteen.
The new home page features writing resources and a collection of poems for teens, as well as links to the organization’s discussion forum and a comprehensive index of Web sites and reference materials for poets. A “Leave Your Mark” feature prompts teen users to share indispensable lines of poetry, upcoming events, and to create virtual poetry notebooks of their own design featuring poems, writer profiles, and interviews culled from the Academy’s site.
Young writers are also prompted to sign up for the “Street Team” newsletter, which will notify them of poetry projects and contests in which they could participate. Planned programs include the Free Verse Photo Project, in which a line of poetry is written using a temporary medium and photographed before it disappears, the National Poetry Writing Month challenge and pledge drive, and Poem In Your Pocket Day.
The home page initiative was funded by close to five hundred Academy members, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, which supports advancement of artistic inquiry and scholarship, and the graduating class of 2008 from Holmdel High School in New Jersey.
Early in March a box was erected outside the Association for the Advancement of Mexican Americans (AAMA) in Houston. Orange and with a slightly pitched roof, the box stands on a short post and bears illustrations by John Parra from the children’s book Little Libraries, Big Heroes (Clarion Books, 2019). It is large enough to hold at least twenty books for neighborhood residents to borrow and read.
This box is a Little Free Library, the work of the eponymous Wisconsin-based nonprofit that seeks to increase both access to and love for reading within communities. When the organization’s founder, Todd Bol, first placed a schoolhouse-shaped box in his yard in 2009 as a memorial to his mother, he wanted to foster book exchanges among his neighbors. In 2012, Bol founded the related nonprofit, and when he died in 2018 there were more than seventy-five thousand Little Free Libraries in eighty-eight countries. In Bol’s New York Times obituary, his brother Tony spoke of the program’s success: “What was powerful about it was that all you needed was the idea…. You just build it, or order it, then put it up in your yard, like a public art monument.”
The box outside the AAMA isn’t just any Little Free Library—it’s the one hundred thousandth Little Free Library in the world, and it was made possible through the Impact Library Program, an initiative launched in 2016 that has so far provided more than one thousand no-cost boxes to applicants in communities where books are scarce. Recipients commit to setting up the library and maintaining it for at least a year, taking a picture and sharing its story, and holding a book-related neighborhood activity. Applications are also frequently part of larger initiatives to build connection around books; Denver’s Montbello neighborhood, for instance, hopes to eventually erect numerous libraries along “walkable loops throughout the community for families to enjoy [for] walking and bicycle riding.”
Along with fostering community and a love of reading, the Impact Library Program seeks to improve literacy nationwide. According to the U.S. Department of Education and the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, forty-two million adults in the United States cannot read in English at a third-grade level—and a lack of access to books contributes to this crisis. This lack is often particularly pronounced in Native communities, and a special branch of the Impact Library Program, the Native Library Initiative, has so far placed sixty-nine book-sharing boxes on tribal lands. The poet Heid E. Erdrich says in a short video about the initiative, “Little Free Libraries are not just going to be in suburban yards and on street corners anymore; there are Little Free Libraries popping up on reservations and in Native communities across the United States.” An Impact Library Program application from Jamie P. in South Dakota, who received a box in 2018, described the need for a local book exchange: Their reservation the size of Connecticut had only one library, few families owned vehicles, the schools were overburdened, and not many people had internet access.
The Impact Library Program’s mission to expand access to books near children’s homes has only grown more important since the donation of AAMA’s orange box in March. In May the Associated Press noted an increase in Little Free Libraries during the COVID-19 pandemic, both in their original capacity as book-sharing locations and as “little free pantries” offering canned food donations, jigsaw puzzles, handmade masks, and more. Between March and September 2020 the Impact Library Program saw 40 percent more applications than during the same period in 2019, and according to Shelby King, the director of programs at Little Free Library, these applications frequently cite pandemic-related school and library closures as reasons a book-sharing box would make a difference.
Candice Arancibia, a third-grade teacher and literacy coach who received a box for her home near the Mexico-California border through the Impact Library Program in September, applied after noticing that during distance learning her students have limited access to books—and those they do have “often aren’t those of the BIPOC experience.” She hopes her new box will make it easy for children from local schools to come by and find books that resonate with them.
King says the importance of sharing diverse books has been a common refrain in recent applications. In response, Little Free Library has launched the Read in Color initiative, through which library stewards and others can pledge to share books that incorporate experiences and perspectives from people of many different identities. Distributing both diverse and anti-racist books is particularly important, Arancibia says, because “it’s not until we begin to share our stories that we can actually begin to be seen, and we start to understand people and build empathy.”
Emma Hine is the author of Stay Safe, which received the 2019 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry and will be published in January 2021 by Sarabande Books.
Young readers at Jenks East Elementary in Jenks, Oklahoma, have access to books through the seventy-five thousandth Little Free Library, built through the Impact Library Program. (Credit: Jenks East Elementary)
Two buzzwords that continue to be redefined in today’s connection-oriented culture are sharing and community, with social networking making the dissemination of literature, art, and ideas among friends and neighbors as simple as the click of an icon. But what happens when we want to share cultural objects outside the electronic box, in material form? Artist Colin McMullan, founder of the Kindness and Imagination Development Society (KIDS), has found one way to take this act of real-time exchange to the streets, literally, with his Corner Library project.
The original KIDS Corner Library, first installed in 2007 in downtown New Haven, Connecticut, is a miniature book depository about the size of a doghouse, complete with white clapboard siding and a bright orange door, and full of donated graphic novels, zines, pamphlets, and books published by small presses and artists, as well as CDs, DVDs, maps, and other curiosities—a small-scale collection of the literature and resources one might find at a local library. The structure, which served New Haven’s readers for six months, found a new home last April on the corner of Leonard and Withers streets in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. A message on its door reads, “Welcome! This library is meant to encourage us all to publish and share information about local resources, issues, events, the many personal matters we care about deeply.” Potential patrons are encouraged to contact the two librarians, McMullan and Gabriela Alva, for a library card and the code to the door’s lock.
The library operates on the honor system: Every object in the collection has a slip of paper attached, on which the borrower writes down her name and the date borrowed. The slip is then left in a box inside the library, and the item is due back two weeks later. To donate, anyone can bring an item to the library for processing, or prepare the book for borrowing herself and shelve it based on where she thinks it belongs. “These libraries are meant to encourage local exchange and to help neighbors meet, know, and help one another in physical space with issues and interests that matter to them daily, right here and now,” says McMullan. “The Internet is an incredible information tool, but it doesn’t satisfy a need we have for real-space interchange among people.”
As of this writing, the Williamsburg branch of the Corner Library has about fifty members and is attracting a growing interest from the community. “One day I walked to the library and found a box full of donations, very carefully chosen,” says Alva, who is working on a Tumblr blog featuring images of all the library’s holdings. “It had books, photocopied articles, CDs, and an amazing horror book. The reaction has been great so far.”
At a time when underfunded public libraries have been forced to cut staff and hours of operation, McMullan doesn’t see his project as having the potential to provide a replacement for such institutions, but as offering a meaningful alternative experience. “The idea of microlibraries challenging the public-library system is pretty far fetched,” says McMullan. “However, I can say that one mom I met at the Corner Library in Williamsburg was pleased that it was available to her and her kids 24/7, as opposed to the limited hours of the nearby Brooklyn Public Library location, because sometimes her family has a hard time getting there during open hours.”
McMullan has a few other New York City microlibraries in development, partnering with volunteer librarians such as Christine Licata in Manhattan. Located outside Taller Boricua/Puerto Rican Workshop at the Julia de Burgos Latino Cultural Center, Licata’s EAsT Harlem branch specializes in recipes and seeds. He also envisions building a microlibrary in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, in cooperation with the Center for Book Arts, where he is a resident artist. And he has plans for a branch located between Brooklyn’s Prospect Heights and Crown Heights neighborhoods.
Norman Stevens, head librarian emeritus of the University of Connecticut, also recruited McMullan to help erect a Corner Library as part of a new downtown development in Storrs, Connecticut. “I was intrigued by Colin’s project as a means of extending some of the concepts of the original American public library into today’s too-electronic age, and returning to a smaller, more personal, comfortable, and user-driven—not just user-friendly—approach,” says Stevens.
The user-powered spirit of the Corner Library is the force behind a similar book-sharing initiative with roots in the Midwest. The Little Free Library project, founded in 2009 by social entrepreneurs Todd Bol and Rick Brooks, launched with a structure about half the size of McMullan’s, built to resemble a one-room schoolhouse and installed near Bol’s home in Hudson, Wisconsin. The project, which uses a “take a book, return a book” model, has since provided unique microlibraries to dozens of U.S. neighborhoods, and a handful of far-flung locales in Australia, Bulgaria, and India, among other countries. Anyone can participate in the project by ordering a prebuilt library or building a new one using blueprints provided on the website, www.littlefreelibrary.org.
McMullan is looking for community collaborators too. “If anyone is interested in being a librarian,” he says, “I would say, Get in touch.”
Poets & Writers Magazine takes a look inside the Corner Library, a tiny book depository serving the community in Brooklyn, New York’s Williamsburg neighborhood.
For the past two years the literary nonprofit House of SpeakEasy has been bringing books to neighborhoods in and around New York City in the back of its bookmobile, a festive maroon box truck outfitted with bookshelves and movable side panels that serves as a pop-up bookstore and donation center wherever it’s parked. This June, in collaboration with storytelling organization Narrative 4, the bookmobile will undertake its longest journey yet, traveling fifteen hundred miles from New York City to New Orleans and making stops in seven states along the way.
During this expedition, called the Poetry to the People Tour, representatives from House of SpeakEasy and Narrative 4 will host events and donate books to local libraries, schools, and prisons. The truck will then roll into New Orleans on the first day of Narrative 4’s annual Global Summit, a five-day event for teens and young adults to share stories and build leadership skills. “I knew that we were heading to New Orleans for the summit, so I had a wild idea to drive there and give out books in underserved spaces along the way,” says Rob Spillman, who works with Narrative 4 and is more widely known as the editor and cofounder of Tin House, which published its final issue in June. “The House of SpeakEasy team and the Narrative 4 team both loved the idea, so we joined forces.” Spillman also contacted DonorsChoose.org, a nonprofit that connects potential donors with teachers in public schools, to identify classrooms with specific book needs and help map the tour’s route.
Running from June 13 to June 21, the tour will make stops in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Spillman will share driving duties with Jeff Waxman, partnerships director of House of SpeakEasy, and a few guest poets will even take brief stints behind the wheel. Over the course of their winding southward journey, the motorists will distribute more than four thousand books to prisons, libraries such as the Floyd County Public Library in Kentucky, and schools such as Plum High School in Pittsburgh.
While the donated books encompass a range of genres from self-help to literary fiction, according to the needs of each institution, events on the tour will emphasize poetry, which Spillman and Waxman agree is a particularly galvanizing outlet for young people today. “Right now poetry feels incredibly urgent,” Spillman says. “It is able to address the current, horribly unsettled moment better than most prose. The poets on the rise today—Morgan Parker, Danez Smith, Tommy Pico, Solmaz Sharif, Natalie Diaz, Kaveh Akbar, Ross Gay, Rickey Laurentiis—are also reflective of the real diversity of our country. Their poetry connects with teens in an immediate, visceral manner.” The tour’s schedule of events reflects that belief: On June 14 the Free Library of Philadelphia will host a story exchange, a workshop, and a reading featuring local teens alongside Philadelphia poet laureate Raquel Salas Rivera and writer and educator Rayna Guy. And on June 15 poets Jenny Johnson and Rickey Laurentiis will perform at the Carnegie Mellon Library in Pittsburgh.
The tour has naturally grown out of both organizations’ work to produce creative events that bring people together through stories or books. In addition to selling and donating books from the windows of its bookmobile, House of SpeakEasy hosts a series of literary cabarets in New York City that feature prominent writers and thinkers reading and riffing on a given theme. The organization also subsidizes tickets for teachers and students to attend literary events for free and sends working writers into classrooms and community centers throughout the city. Narrative 4, which has chapters in twelve countries on four continents, conducts story exchanges—events in which participants pair off to swap their stories and then retell those stories to the larger group—among people with different perspectives who wouldn’t otherwise meet, such as teens from public and private high schools or refugees and public opponents of refugee resettlement.
The organizers want the tour to bring this work to communities they have not reached before. “The mission of Narrative 4 is to harness the power of the story exchange to equip and embolden young adults to improve their lives, their communities, and the world,” Spillman says. “We are all about making connections through story, and the Poetry to the People Tour allows us to share stories and poems in person and make in-person connections across age, race, class, and geographic differences.”
Maggie Millner is a poet and teacher from rural upstate New York. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the New Yorker, Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, and ZYZZYVA. Previously she was the Diana & Simon Raab Editorial Fellow at Poets & Writers Magazine.
The House of SpeakEasy’s bookmobile at the Brooklyn Book Festival in 2017.
If you want to get a sense of where contemporary poetry is headed, there’s no better place to start than with recently published debut collections. Each year sees a rich, diverse lineup of debut poets whose work offers fresh perspectives, exciting new ideas and experiences of language, and unexplored subject matter. Even tried-and-true poetic topics—history, the beloved, nature, family, identity—are explored, interrogated, and lit up in new ways. This past year is no exception: In 2015, debut poets took on everything from Chinese unicorns and Mesoamerican shape-shifters to jazz trumpeter Chet Baker and The Real Housewives television franchise. They wrote sonnet cycles, erasures, conceptual poems, and lyric poems that skip across the page and open their readers’ eyes, illuminating ideas at turns thrilling, devastating, and always alive.
For our eleventh annual look at debut poets, we selected ten of the most compelling debuts published in 2015. The work of these featured poets runs the gamut, though each book celebrates the ways in which language, as Hannah Sanghee Park says, “shifts, morphs, steals, and fractures through time.” We asked all our poets to share the stories behind both the genesis of their poems and the publication of their collections—how they navigate publication and how to, as Alicia Jo Rabins puts it, “forge ahead despite setbacks and rejections and silence while also holding the whole endeavor lightly.” Their answers prove that there is no single path from a manuscript to a published book, and that inspiration can be found in the most ordinary and unusual of places—from the former home of a much-admired poet or a yard full of weeds to a drive on the freeway along the U.S.–Mexico border. But there is one common thread woven throughout: the invocation to submit to one’s obsessions, to write past the machinations of the publishing industry and the expectations of others and into the refuge of language.
Robin Coste Lewis Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems Knopf
“Once, I thought I was a person with a body, the body of something peering out, enchanted and tossed.” –from “On the Road to Sri Bhuvaneshwari”
How it began: Actually, I began writing poetry because of a very serious accident that left me with permanent traumatic brain injury. At one point in my recovery (because reading, writing, and speaking made me very symptomatic), my doctors told me I could only read one sentence a day, only write one sentence a day. After that shock began to wear off, I decided to use their prognosis as a formal writing restraint. I spent many months not trying to write a poem, but trying to write only one very fine line. It sounds romantic, but it wasn’t. At first, I was profoundly depressed. After years of teaching literature and writing, what was a life without books? Writing a line a day was an experience in tremendous discipline. It was thrilling to work again, yes, but to work silently in bed for hours, without writing or typing, working just inside my head, was also very macabre. Slowly, my illness became a sort of game. I’d find the milk in the oven and crack up laughing. It was pure poetry, brain damage. It was profoundly humbling.
In short, all those skills artists must acquire—stillness, concentration, discipline, compression, wrestling with the ego, all of it—walked in the door, hand in hand, with brain damage. That’s the real story behind my book. Poetry was the means by which I learned to reenter the world after traumatic brain injury. What compelled me to write was the desire to continue living an engaged life. Poetry allowed me to reenter my work, but from a different door.
Inspiration: Epic literature, especially Sanskrit epics and comparative mythology. I’m also quite nuts about Sanskrit court poetry. Another court I love to visit is the royal kingdom of jazz. What both Sanskrit poetry and jazz have in common, I think, is their mysterious and masterful use of silence, their ability to achieve their goal by laying it on thick while pulling way back simultaneously. Any art form that can balance sublime expression with tacit restraint has me from hello. I’m also inspired deeply by individual, quiet responses to history. I love the historical nerd-freak no one wants to research because they are too strange or eccentric or unconventional to make anyone proud. I am compelled by people who simply do their work, whatever that might be, quietly. Quiet devotion is a primary source of inspiration for me, however that manifests. I usually find much of that in the colored ancient world. And then, of course, I swing the other way toward that entire, ongoing waterfall of post-modern, post-colonial, often queer, cultural production, which makes me just swoon.
Writer’s Block Remedy: Honestly, I have never reached an impasse with my writing. My impasse is that I can’t stop writing. It’s not cute. I’m completely hypergraphic. This is not to say, however, that any of the madness I write is any good. I merely mean to saythat not being able to write isn’t my issue. However, what occurs before writing—that’s where my demons skip and play rope. I used to think the longest road I’ve ever traveled was from my bed to my desk. All of those voices inside my head that tell me, “No, you can’t say…” or, “No, you better not…” or, “What would [fill in the blank] do or say or think?” I don’t know how to describe this, but I know it had something to do with being born in the sixties, being a child in the sixties and witnessing just heinous experiences without any true developmental ability to articulate it. We all had a profound sense of injustice growing up. It was impossible not to feel that, watching profound degradation so common it felt like air. Our education was a travesty. So just holding a pencil when I was younger was very difficult for me. No one took our minds seriously. As a child, all I had heard was that, historically, I, as an African American, was not believed to possess a real mind; or I, like my ancestors, only had three-fifths of a brain. I mean, lest we forget, our bodies were once dissected, literally. So my struggle has never been within language. Language has always, always, been a refuge.
What has never felt natural, however, is this sickening history wherein bodies like mine were positioned to play the role of buffoon. It’s a rare moment indeed that I pick up my pen and do not immediately remember that in America it was considered illegal for black bodies to read and write. Just holding a pencil for me is deliciously transgressive. So history is my impasse—nothing else. What keeps me going? The work of others. Others, definitely.
Writing Prompt: When I was at Harvard, Jamaica Kincaid once said in our workshop, “Write about that which most embarrasses you.” I think that’s profoundly good advice. It’s so easy, isn’t it, to climb atop a soapbox and recite a poem about the ways in which we believe the world is fucked up? When I write that way, I’m certain all I’m doing is insulting my reader. Who, for example, doesn’t know the whole world is in cinders? And so I believe my work can be more effective, can reach deeper inside the reader if I say, “It is I who feel profoundly fucked up,” and then explore why meticulously. I like to use tenderness as a weapon, a seduction, a door to leave ajar so that my reader will walk inside the poem and feel safe, even in the face of profound historical horror. Trust me, I’m not saying all poems should begin with shame or embarrassment as a motivation, not by any means. I like writing all kinds of poems in all kinds of forms. I’m simply saying that instead of using writing prompts, I sometimes ask myself, “Well, what are you most avoiding?” And for me that’s a good place to begin.
Advice: I’m not sure I’m the right person to give advice about first books. I am fifty-one after all. Don’t get me wrong, I love my age, and I love that I’m just now publishing my first book, but it seems as if the “debut” has become a sort of genre, a particular ideal regarding what constitutes a first collection. I’ve known for a long while that my work has never fit into that schematic. My book, primarily, is about the history of race and Western art. It’s an experiment in archive. It’s not really what first-book publishers are looking for. Also, many debut prizes and grants have age limits or requirements. So by the time I settled into raising my son and finding my place in my work, my writing was already disqualified from even applying because I was older. Ultimately, it’s worked out just fine. And anyways, I don’t think I really had much to offer any reader when I was thirty-five. I was a mess. What could I have done with a page at thirty-five besides romanticize being a thirty-five-year-old mess? I am more of a tortoise than a hare. I like what taking my time reveals.
Also, I adamantly don’t believe that because one writes it follows naturally that one must also publish. I’ve written books for one person, and shared it only with that sublime audience of one. I’ve burned others. Virginia Woolf said rather famously that writing is a far greater pleasure than being read. I’m from that camp, I think. I’m deeply suspicious of the market.
So, I guess this is a long way of saying that if I have any advice to poets trying to publish their first book it’s this: Try not to look up too often at what others are doing. Your work is interesting because it’s yours, not because of where it lands in the publishing world. Ignore literary fashions and stay close to your own hand. Try not to please anyone or any particular audience. Find out what the real work is inside of you, then find the courage to do it well. Resist the temptation to be clever. It’s sexy, but it’s a sure sign that your mask has control of you, and not the other way around. Just do your work.
What’s next: I’m revising the other two manuscripts I finished while at New York University. The first, “To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness,” is about the Arctic and its history of both colonialism and exploration. I use this history as an allegory for post-colonial desires for subjectivity. Besides the circumpolar diaspora and the history of expansionism, the book pivots primarily around African American Arctic explorer Matthew Henson. Henson codiscovered the North Pole, but was reluctantly given historical credit, due to race relations not only in the United States, but in the sciences specifically. I’m also revising another collection that I also began at NYU, a project titled “The Pickaninny Wins!,” a double-erasure of a 1931 children’s book originally titled The Pickaninny Twins.
Age: 51.
Hometown: Compton, California.
Residence: Los Angeles.
Job: I’m a PhD candidate in poetry at the University of Southern California. It’s a hybrid PhD, so I do both creative and critical work. That is, I write poetry, and research-wise, I work on the historical relationship between African American photography and African American poetry.
Does your job allow time to write? Is this a serious question?
Time spent writing the book: All in all, the whole book probably took five or six years—with brain damage and a new child thrown in for good measure.
Alicia Jo Rabins Divinity School American Poetry Review (Honickman First Book Prize)
“Let me teach you about beauty: a slanted shipwreck draped in its own torn sails.” –from “The Magic”
How it began: I am obsessed with a few consistent themes: how weird it is to live in time; the magic of teaching and learning; the closeness and distance between people; and the mysteries of living in a body, like sex, love, travel, food, beauty, death.
Inspiration: Ancient Jewish texts are a huge influence and inspiration for me: the practical, the mystical, and especially the intersection of the two. I also draw on yoga, ritual, and spiritual practice in general. Music is a big part of my life too—both the experience of making music in many different genres and touring itself have defined and marked my life. Kenneth Koch taught me, in college, not to take myself too seriously in my poems. New York City inspired me tremendously for years, and since moving to Portland I’ve been inspired by the forests and plants, the weeds in my garden. Having children is immense and mind-blowing and inspiring, and I draw a lot of inspiration from my dreams as well.
Influences: Anne Carson, James Joyce (Ulysses in particular), Sylvia Plath, Christopher Smart, John Donne, J. S. Bach, Pablo Neruda, Laurie Anderson, Harryette Mullen, Brenda Shaughnessy, Julio Cortázar, Lucille Clifton, Yoko Ono. And so many of my contemporaries and friends, whom I won’t name for fear of inevitably leaving some out.
Writer’s Block Remedy: Because I usually write in a stream-of-consciousness mode and edit later, I don’t really experience impasses. Something is always happening, even if it’s only the breath. I did stop writing for three years in my early twenties, though. I had studied poetry intensely in college and felt like I had strained my reading and writing muscle, and that my relationship to writing was too ego-based and needed a dramatic reset. I completely let writing go and promised myself I would only start again if it returned naturally, without any pressure or ambition or intention. I was glad when it came back a few years later, and my relationship to poetry was transformed. I guess it’s important to me to maintain some paradoxical mix of being stubbornly devoted to poetry, enough to forge ahead despite setbacks and rejections and silence, while also holding the whole endeavor lightly.
Advice: The best advice I ever got was at an artist training from Creative Capital: If you aren’t getting rejected from 90 percent of the things you apply to, you aren’t aiming high enough. It flipped the script for me so that rejections meant I was doing my job, rather than failing at it. Along the same lines, I try to separate the work of being an artist into two parts: my writing self, who is sensitive and passionate and all that stuff, and my personal assistant self, who just sits down with a cup of coffee and submits poems without any emotional investment. Or, to put it briefly, play the long game.
What’s next: I’m writing my second book of poetry, about motherhood and giving birth and gardening and midwifery goddesses and how psychedelic the whole experience of pregnancy, birth, and early parenthood is. I’m also touring with my songwriting project Girls in Trouble(we just released our third album), and with my solo chamber-rock opera A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff. AndI’m slowly moving towards writing a nonfiction book I’ve been mulling over for a while now.
Age: 38.
Hometown: I was born in Portland, Oregon, and grew up in Towson, Maryland. I also lived in New York City and Northampton, Massachusetts, for years and they both feel like home.
Residence: Portland, Oregon.
Job: I patch together a living between my work as a writer, musician, composer, performer, and teacher of Torah. As Eileen Myles says, “There are so many different packages for the same energy to travel through.”
Does your job allow time to write? This isn’t an easy question for me to answer. On the one hand, I’d love more focused time to write, but on the other hand, the line between “writing” and “job” is blurry in my life—songwriting is part of how I make my living, for example—and I have always written in the nooks and crannies of my day. Also, for the record, I find that being a parent of two young children demands more consistent presence of mind than any job I’ve ever had, and (alongside all the great stuff) is therefore more of a challenge for me in terms of writing time.
Time spent writing the book: The oldest poem in the book is eighteen years old and, amazingly, in exactly the same form it was in when I wrote it in college. It wasn’t originally part of the book, but I added it back in somewhere during the editing process. The rest of them were written over the past twelve or so years, though almost all of them were continually revised while I submitted and resubmitted the manuscript. It almost feels like two different processes—eighteen years of writing the poems and seven of intentionally editing the manuscript. Wow, that’s a long time.
Time spent finding a home for it: Five years, though I edited it throughout, so it was a very different book by the end.
Three favorite words: Amethyst. Sage. Antediluvian.
Alicia Jo Rabins reads “How To Travel” featuring the face of Alicia McDaid. Video by Zak Margolis on Vimeo. Check out another recent reading Rabins gave in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as part of the Poetry in America series.
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Jay Deshpande Love the Stranger YesYes Books
“But we will never have enough of being wrong about the other, not once.” –from “Amor Fati”
How it began: The earliest pieces of the book came together during my MFA, but it had a very different form and was wrapped around a couple series of poems that ultimately didn’t belong. I’ve always been drawn towards the love poem and lyric descriptions of beauty, but in that period I began to experiment more with the unfamiliar and the disturbing. I found my poems coming alive at the moments when the erotic and the alien braided together. At some point I started to see how the loss of the beloved is not just an occasion for utterance, but also an opportunity for greater reckoning with what it means to be human, and alone, and therefore deeply connected. Following these themes, I wrote a chapbook called “Love the Stranger” shortly after grad school; it was another year before I realized that it held the keys to this book.
Inspiration: Visually, René Magritte’s work was an essential influence on the book. Also middle-period Federico Fellini. Denis Johnson’s poems have always been a major touchstone for me, and they helped to shape parts of Love the Stranger. Environmentally, I took great inspiration from a residency at the Saltonstall Arts Colony in upstate New York. A lot of unseen and necessary work happened there in the woods and on the trails.
Influences: Denis Johnson, Marie Howe, Timothy Donnelly, Ben Lerner, Lyn Hejinian, Rainer Maria Rilke, John Ashbery, Bianca Stone, Richard Siken, Lucie Brock-Broido, E. M. Forster, Marilynne Robinson. Among visual artists, Dorothea Tanning’s work in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, and Diana Al-Hadid’s sculptures.
Writer’s Block Remedy: I have long conversations with my brother, who is a musician and writer, about why we do what we do. I reread Michael Ondaatje. I think about Frank Ocean’s songwriting. I play old standards on the piano and explore chords until I remember that some parts of experience stay blissfully outside of words. And then I go spend time with the people I love and try to learn from them. I’ve also found that I have trouble writing when my work has moved away from the physicality of pencil and paper for too long. Then I’ll print out a number of pages of poetry (mine and others’) and mark them up excessively.
Writing Prompt: Just to get the lede out and free things up, I like to take an old poem of mine and perform a phonetic English-to-English mistranslation on it. “I, too, dislike it” becomes “Why’d you ignite this?”; “A certain slant of light” becomes “The skirt and pants of night,” etc. The goal is to keep the music and change everything else.
Advice: Read widely and make it your job to really consider the character of different presses: what’s the range of authors they publish, what qualities and ideas do their books seem to value, how do their books feel in your hands.
What’s next: In addition to writing individual poems to push my voice in new directions, I’m at work on an essay collection and a book of translations of the Egyptian poet Georges Henein.
Age: 31.
Hometown: Boston.
Residence: New York City.
Job: I write for Slate and other magazines.
Does your job allow time to write? It’s a constant navigation, but at the moment it works pretty well.
Time spent writing the book: About five years.
Time spent finding a home for it: It took one year; I sent it to six places. It was a finalist for the 2014 Kundiman Poetry Prize, and then was accepted by YesYes Books during its open reading period.
Three favorite words:These kinds of lists always make me squirmy! But if it’s absolutely necessary: sandwiches; flensing; and, if it can count as one word, chocolate milk.
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Hannah Sanghee Park The Same-Different Louisiana State University Press (Walt Whitman Award)
“Just what they said about the river: rift and ever.
And nothing was left for the ether there either.” –from “Bang”
How it began: I had a lengthy first manuscript I was editing and sending out, and wanted a change of pace and page. I was aiming for concision. At the book’s inception, I was researching myth and folklore in Korea, in the hopes that I would write a manuscript about stories. I found that a lot of Korean stories had counterparts elsewhere (with its own cultural DNA), and that mix of universality and specificity was compelling. But at its simplest, the book is a paean to what comprises storytelling—language, in its words, sounds, imagery, and meanings. It was at the end of my research that I found H. D.’s Trilogy. I kept these H. D. lines on a Post-It above me as I wrote: “her book is our book; written / or unwritten, its pages will reveal // a tale of a Fisherman, / a tale of a jar or jars, // the same—different—the same attributes, / different yet the same as before.”
Inspiration: International folklore, fairy tales, and mythology—shape-shifters, hybrids, dualities, and metamorphoses. The same could be said about language as well—how it shifts, morphs, steals, and fractures through time. I’ve always loved form, prosody, and wordplay. When I started writing: H. D., James Baldwin, and Marina Tsvetaeva. The letters of Philip Larkin, John Keats, and Sylvia Plath. The bulk of it: everyone mentioned, Gerard Manley Hopkins, James Merrill, Samuel Beckett, a physical dictionary and thesaurus. Poetry by my friends and mentors. The editing and the end—Don Mee Choi and Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman. And in full circle, I turned back to H. D., Baldwin, and Tsvetaeva in different forms—short stories, plays, and nonfiction. When I was finishing the book, I was also learning how to write screenplays, which was helpful in economy and setting. But the running fount has always been the communities I’ve been lucky to be a part of. Wherever I go, I have met brilliant people who make me a better writer: professors, colleagues, peers. The book was written in Korea, Washington, New Hampshire, and California, and the natural landscapes influenced the book’s backdrop.
Influences: This is an ongoing, disparate anthology, so to keep it short—other than the poets I’ve mentioned above, my immediate community is always influential. Since moving to Los Angeles, I’ve been stunned by these local powerhouses: Kima Jones, Blas Falconer, Ashaki Jackson, Marci Vogel, and others. And the many poets I’ve met and hope to meet who are keeping poetry alive. Recently, the students in the 2015 Poetry Out Loud Competition inspired me—I experienced familiar poems in new ways.
Writer’s Block Remedy: I read, or watch films or TV. I used to be a night writer, and my excuse was that there were no distractions—I’m off work, everyone around me has gone to sleep. But sometimes I need to clean, cook, decide now’s the time to take up a new activity, and then write. As if expending all this other energy, or resting my mind allows the mind to reset. Writing doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and open dialogue is necessary. I call people—usually my writing partner, Jane Shim—to discuss ideas. What keeps me going is the belief that even if writing is frustrating or maddening, it’s ultimately worth it. Petrarch: “And so desire carries me along.” And caffeine, too. Getting the ball rolling in the right direction sometimes feels Sisyphean, but when it starts, the speed and the growth is euphoric. No distraction is great enough. Writing is like a labyrinth. Sometimes there’s a reward at the end of it; sometimes you’re pursued by Sallie Mae and her Echidna spawn Navient. But nothing feels better than actually moving through it.
Writing Prompt: How much a word can be dissected, rearranged, and reimagined—imagined etymologies, defamiliarization, constraint-based writing. In short, the intersection of structure and play.
Advice: Keep reading, writing, rewriting, and sending, even when it seems like there’s a void. Dream big (a bromide that’s useful), and go there. That’s what I needed to hear in the publication process. Every time my writing boomerangs back to me, there’s a chance to reassess my work and my thoughts. I know form rejection boilerplate, but I also know the generous people in my life who have cheered me on. Having both rejection and support provides a kind of ballast. Knowing why you write despite x is invaluable—the pure joy of creating is as powerful as the final creation.
What’s next: Writing scripts, rewriting scripts, treatments, short stories, and starting a new poetry book.
Age: 29.
Hometown: Federal Way, Washington.
Residence: Los Angeles.
Job: Freelance writer.
Does your job allow time to write? Yes, but personal writing requires juggling. It’s a constant turning of a lazy Susan—a little here, a pass there, but all that matters is movement.
Time spent writing the book: For this book specifically, about one and a half to two years. It was fast because I had the luxury of a fellowship and a residency. I did a two-month residency at the MacDowell Colony (paradise) where I kept to a tight schedule. I woke up early, ate breakfast, and went back to my Internet-less studio and wrote. As I ate lunch, I read. Then I wrote until dinner. When I came back from unwinding, I’d write until I needed to sleep. Rinse and repeat. I’m naturally lazy, so I need this kind of structure. The bulk of the book was written then, because most of the day could be devoted to writing. However, a poem I wrote about five years ago made it in as well—a long-lost relative finding her family.
Time spent finding a home for it: Before this book, I sent my first manuscript out for about four to five years. When I was satisfied with The Same-Different, the plan was to send to a few places each cycle, as I was on a tight budget. But I lucked out, and The Same-Different was accepted in its first submission round.
Three favorite words: Cleave, move, empathy.
Hannah Sanghee Park reads from The Same-Different at the Academy of American Poets’s 2014 Poets Forum Awards Ceremony.
Jonathan Fink The Crossing Dzanc Books
“The bodies hang like chimes within the boughs. Perhaps the height is welcome to the dead” –from “The Crossing”
How it began: What poetry offers, and what set me off writing this book, is the visceral engagement with language that welcomes attention to imagery, tone, rhythm, narrative, metaphor, politics, ethics, humor, myth, and justice, among many other things. Like a painter who simply likes the smell of paint or a potter who likes the feel of clay, the pleasure of embarking on a writing project, for me, always resides in the tactile pleasures of language.
Inspiration: W. H. Auden has a great line, “Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings,” and I often feel inspired to write about personal, imagined, or historical material about which I have mixed feelings. The poems in The Crossing vary from an eighteen-section poem about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire to individual poems about myth, art, and my personal experience growing up in West Texas. In all cases, I was inspired to write these poems not because I knew what I wanted to say about the subjects, but because I felt compelled to explore and investigate the complicated material through poetry.
Influences: Too many to name, of course, although I would say, of contemporary poets, Jane Kenyon for the singular, resonate image; Marie Howe for book structure and thematic commitment; and B. H. Fairchild for lyrical, narrative expansiveness. I’ve also been immensely fortunate to work with wonderful writing mentors and teachers, including Natasha Trethewey, Mary Karr, George Saunders, Junot Díaz, Brooks Haxton, Michael Burkard, and Robert Flynn—all stunning writers who are unfailingly generous, constructive, and kind.
Writer’s Block Remedy: Raymond Carver defined a writer as someone who is willing to stare at something longer than anyone else. For me, that experience has been true; there is no trick to overcoming a writing impasse other than continuing to return to what I’ve written, looking for unexplored possibilities and/or unfulfilled expectations.
Advice: Submit to your obsessions, whatever they are. Resistance is futile. An honestly obsessive collection always resonates much more fully with a reader or editor than a collection constructed with an eye toward the market or some imagined palatable consensus. Remember that a camel is a horse designed by a committee.
What’s next: Dzanc is bringing out a finished second collection of my poetry, a book-length sonnet sequence titled, “Barbarossa: The German Invasion of the Soviet Union and the Siege of Leningrad.” I’m also nearing completion of a nonfiction collection primarily consisting of place-based immersive and investigative essays. Some topics include the fracking boom in Midland, Texas; the D. B. Cooper plane hijacking and parachute jump; the changing scope of U.S.–Cuba relations; and the failings and successes of the criminal justice system as seen through the lens of an assault trial in Pensacola, Florida; among other essays. I’m also working on new individual poems.
Age: 40.
Hometown: Abilene, Texas.
Residence: Pensacola, Florida.
Job: Associate professor and director of creative writing at the University of West Florida.
Does your job allow time to write? Yes, in the sense that my job contributes to the conditions that help make writing possible, but no job has ever prevented me from writing if I felt compelled to write.
Time spent writing the book: Approximately six years.
Time spent finding a home for it: Another six years after finishing and publishing the individual poems.
Jonathan Fink reads from The Crossing, published by Dzanc Books.
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Rickey Laurentiis Boy With Thorn University of Pittsburgh Press (Cave Canem Poetry Prize)
“I want to be released from it. I want its impulses stunned to lead. This body. Its breath. Let it. Let the whole pageant end.” –from “One Country”
How it began: I think about a friend and fellow poet, Phillip B. Williams, with whom I shared a suite at my first Cave Canem retreat in the summer of 2008. He had a manuscript then (actually several), but wouldn’t share it with me to read until I had something manuscript-length to share with him. So, that’s what I think Cave Canem must mean by fellowship: that kind of camaraderie, support, and push, however hard. I eventually did produce a manuscript and shared it with Phillip, but it was one very different in many ways from the Boy With Thorn that would eventually find publication. We helped shaped each other’s books along through the many years, but more importantly we helped compel each other’s poems. Poems first.
Inspiration: I’m likely to be inspired by anything in the right context: an overheard conversation on the street, a song, literary criticism, philosophy, a personal experience or, as is most present in my book, visual art. I was profoundly influenced and inspired by a course I took while at Sarah Lawrence College—queer theory, with Julie Abraham. That course threw a hammer into my ways of thinking. And not because it attempted to rebuild the pieces (although, in some ways, it did), but because it made me more aware of the pieces themselves and the various social/political discourses that have shaped them.
Influences: Here are some artists: Glenn Ligon, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Björk, Piero della Francesca, Wangechi Mutu, Georgia O’Keeffe, David Bailly, Kara Walker, Edgar Degas, Judy Chicago, Yoko Ono, Jay DeFeo, Caravaggio, Auguste Rodin, Romare Bearden, Frida Kahlo, Anonymous. And I remain deeply influenced, in particular, by Jessye Norman’s rendition of “Deep River,” which she sung at a special concert with Kathleen Battle at Carnegie Hall in 1990 and most of which you can find recorded on YouTube.
Writer’s Block Remedy: My obsessions keep me going. I think about visual art and how, in the example of an artist like Mark Rothko, who explores the same terrain canvas after canvas, or at least seems to, I learned to recognize and trust my obsessions: the images, concepts, figures, and motifs that repeat in my head. Obsessions are ideas that I can at least remember are there at those anxious moments I’m willing to believe in a thing like “writer’s block.” But writer’s block, simply speaking, doesn’t exist if one’s willing to look back at all one has done and, realizing knowledge is always limited, thinks, “Nope, I need to try this again.” I still believe that.
Writing Prompt: Outside of what I offer to my students, I’m not sure I think about writing in terms of prompts, at least not thematic ones. If I chose any, they’re usually prompts that put restraints on the form or structure of the poem. A part of me vaguely remembers diagramming sentences as a young Catholic school student and so, in some ways, that finds itself in the pleasure I get from trying to sustain a single sentence over the course of a poem, or at least over several lines. There’s something about that exercise that seems dancerly to me, rhythmic.
Advice: So, there are thirty-three poems in my book—but that doesn’t mean I only wrote thirty-three poems. Of course I wrote way more than that at various stages in my growth and education as a poet—some that made the cut; some that I realize were the equivalent of a pianist practicing her scales; some that only exist as a single ghost line in another poem; some that might eventually find a home in a future collection, who knows. My point is to say that the process takes time, so much time, and, while I’m a fan of putting artificial restraints on a poem so as to get to more creative uses of language, I’m not a fan of artificial time restraints on publication. Just as I think that there’s something potentially problematic in knowing too much about what a poem is about when starting, so too I think there’s a problem in trying to know or demand when you should publish a book. Let the book tell you. And when it does send only to places that carry books you can’t live without.
What’s next: What they don’t tell you is that the second your first book is accepted for publication at a press (or wins a contest), let alone when it is physically published and released, all the poems you begin to write suddenly sound in a slightly different key, so to speak. The poems are suddenly working under the slight burden of knowledge that they may one day become (or that you need them to become) a second (or third or fourth) book. I am working hard now to try to get back to the kind of specific ignorance one writes from before the first book gets published: when you’re simply writing poem by poem because of some insistence that you have to; this poem must be written, alone, individual, not as a sequence necessarily, not because of some “theme” or “project,” but simply because it demands itself to be written, and for you to write and learn by it.
Age: 26.
Hometown: New Orleans.
Residence: New York City.
Job: Currently, I teach a course at Columbia University and at the Saturday Program at the Cooper Union. I’m also the director of an after-school writing and literacy program at the Harlem Children’s Zone.
Does your job allow time to write? No—but that’s a good thing. When I’ve been fortunate enough to be invited to some residencies, for instance, I’ve found that the sudden surplus of free, unstructured time can do harm to my writing process, insofar as I begin to occupy my time in other ways besides writing new work. Residences are great for editing older drafts or for ordering a book. But it’s in the gaps, in the minutes I steal when I’m on a crowded subway, when I’m in a less-than-exciting meeting or when I should be asleep, for example, that I find myself writing the most new material.
Time spent writing the book: The earliest poem in the book I wrote as a first-year at Sarah Lawrence College for a class (my first poetry class ever!) with Suzanne Gardinier. That was in the fall of 2007. The last poem I wrote that was also included in the book was written somewhere in late January/early February of 2014, after having seen one of my favorite Basquiat paintings in the flesh in a exhibit in New Orleans earlier that Christmas. So it would seem, then, that it took seven years to write all thirty-three poems that comprise Boy With Thorn (it took two years, alone, to complete one in particular). I was born on February 7. Seven’s always been my favorite number.
Time spent finding a home for it: Maybe about a year after Phillip first brought the idea to my mind that I could write toward a manuscript, I sent it out to a handful of contests. To my surprise, the manuscript was honorably mentioned for Red Hen Press’s Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award and was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. But I’ll remind you that this manuscript I’m referring to was, in significant ways, still very different from the book I would come to publish. After that, somehow, and quite suddenly, I wasn’t interested so much in rushing towards book publication. I concerned myself with the quality of the poems themselves, and with seeing them enter the world individually. So there was a large gulf of time when I didn’t submit a single manuscript to any contest or publisher, which mostly paralleled my graduation from Sarah Lawrence and matriculation into the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis. A year after I had received my MFA and had moved back to New York City, I sent my new manuscript to at least two publishers and four contests—four specific contests that either had a history of awarding books I admire or were being judged by poets I greatly enjoy. I didn’t get as much as a nod from three of them but, again to my surprise, I won one! And that it was the Cave Canem Prize just seemed so coming-full-circle perfect! Anyway, depending on how you read this narrative, you can say it took several years to find a publisher, or only a few months.
Rickey Laurentiis reads two poems from Boy With Thorn, published by University of Pittsburgh Press.
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Natalie Scenters-Zapico The Verging Cities Center for Literary Publishing
“You forgot to weed your eyes,so brush has grown wild in your stare.” –from “When the Desert Made Us Visible”
How it began: Homesickness. I wrote most of these poems while I was living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I felt deeply haunted by things in my past that I had spent a lot of time ignoring: femicide, narco-violence, and the effect our broken immigration system had on me and the people around me. Suddenly, I felt compelled to face these things in a way I had never had an interest in before. For some reason, being away from the site of my liminality gave me the bravery to voice what had been silenced in me for so long. I also became very interested in the ways that people who are not from El Paso–Juárez were representing my border cities in art and pop culture. I wanted to write down my love affair with a place so often depicted as violent and corrupt.
Inspiration: The drive from Albuquerque to El Paso, Texas, and from Ciudad Juárez to Chihuahua was a huge source of inspiration. I would also drive the border freeway and take in that space, that in-between space, that illusion that is so physically damaging. And, of course, late-night conversations with my husband who is a border-rhetorics scholar, and who for most of our relationship was undocumented. When we fell in love, we also fell in love with each other’s pain, and the two cities that held us suspended in that pain.
Influences: While working on the collection: David Dorado Romo’s Ringside Seat to a Revolution, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, Norma Elia Cantú’s Canícula, Alejandro Morales’s The Rag Doll Plagues, and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 spent a lot of time on my desk. These books deeply influenced the way that I conceive of borders and of my sister cities, El Paso–Ciudad Juárez. I also spent time with Federico García Lorca, Miguel Hernández, Anna Kamieńska’s notebooks, Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary, Rigoberto González, Alberto Ríos, and Benjamin Alire Sáenz.
Writer’s Block Remedy: I cook something that takes a while to make, but that I know how to make well. The repetitive motions of cooking keep me grounded in the body, but allow me the freedom to let my mind wander. I also like knowing that many women before me spent so much time in that domestic space, and I remind myself how important it is that I choose to be there, but that I don’t have to be there.
Writing Prompt: I spend a lot of time looking at the art books for the Bienal Ciudad Juárez–El Paso art shows, and then writing ekphrastic poems or flash fictions. It keeps me connected to where I’m from while helping me to see the border in new ways.
Advice: It is as important to know what you’re trying to accomplish in your collection as it is to know what it actually accomplishes. Sometimes placing your own will on a collection is the worst thing you can do.
What’s next: I’m in the early stages of working on the next book, which deals with border-security technologies, surveillance, and weapons. I’m interested in depictions of violence, how we consume that violence, and render that violence in art.
Age: 27.
Hometown: El Paso, Texas.
Residence: Salt Lake City.
Job: I teach high school English and creative writing.
Does your job allow time to write? It is always a struggle for me to write as a high school teacher. I have to schedule time for me to physically sit at my desk and write.
Time spent writing the book: It took me four years of obsessively writing and revising in constant rotation.
Time spent finding a home for it: One year.
Three favorite words: Sobremesa, cariño, and teeth.
Natalie Scenters-Zapico reads from The Verging Cities, published by The Center for Literary Publishing.
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Corina Copp The Green Ray Ugly Duckling Presse
“Let rest here my lyre and Hear soon the moon’s fair Lecture in black” –from “Pro Magenta”
How it began: I was reading Mark Ford’s biography of Raymond Roussel when I first came across mention of the green ray. In the same month, I saw Éric Rohmer’s Le rayon vert, and I attended a François Laruelle lecture. The notes from all three came to be the poem “Pro Magenta,” which set me into thinking about synchronicity and how I compose. The wheels of the actual manuscript were put into motion a few years later, when Ugly Duckling Presse editor Abraham Adams proposed a book project.
Inspiration: These poems range in composition date from 2010 to 2015, so what resonates now as far as inspiration goes is a list that I’ll spare you—but they are distinct, and each poem holds one or another source (or many simultaneously) in (I hope) different ways. Jean Day’s Enthusiasm: Odes & Otium was formative for me when thinking about devotion and source materials and how to think and write alongside inspiration itself, to construe it as an interlocutor, or a threat, or a friend, or a fetish, etc.
Influences: When I first started seriously writing poetry, I was reading Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, Laura Riding Jackson; and I was obsessed with Alice Notley and Carla Harryman. Then Miles Champion introduced me to Tom Raworth and Jean Day—they both had a big impact. I had another turn when I really read Lisa Robertson, who led me to read Hannah Arendt. Richard Maxwell, the playwright, was another turning point; and the work of Big Dance Theater, Thomas Bradshaw, Kristen Kosmas. For a few years now, Ingeborg Bachmann, Marguerite Duras. And my friends are influential. They’re all brilliant. Can I say brilliant?
Writer’s Block Remedy: I’m easily comforted and astonished. By that turn from feeling like New York City’s rag doll, in particular; from that real desire to leave my life and start a new one; from that exhaustion; from walking into a diner or taking a train. I have to be in that place to write; I have to have a connection to future good feeling in general if I expect myself to write. Also: film and bibliomancy, both. Or Robert Ashley, an example. Opening to pages/sounds/images of work that I love will always help. Going to the library, feeling overwhelmed. But I can go for months without writing; I am often waiting to feel angry, or any emotional event, or just a deadline to push me. But accepting the stretches of not writing is okay, too. I mean: If I feel alert and awake and thoughtful and without remorse, then I am listening, which for me is also writing. I compulsively transcribe overheard dialogue or I note exchanges between people or how they are physically positioned. If I’ve gone months without this sort of openness, then I’m probably depressed and not writing. To help me accept that, I remember something Doris Lessing said—to paraphrase, you must use these energies while you have them, you will lose them; you are more clever now than you will be later. Terrifying.
Writing Prompt: Feeling constrained.
Advice: I took a strange route, and had faith I’d eventually get to work with people who cared about the poems. Having faith in those relationships is important.
What’s next: I’m working on an essay/score that reads and writes through the reading of the painter Alan Reid. The piece will appear in a monograph of his work that should be out in the spring.
Age: 36.
Hometown: I was born in Lawrence, Kansas, and grew up in Boulder, Colorado, and New Orleans.
Residence: New York City.
Job: I usually have two to three part-time jobs. I am currently a staff writer for the Poetry Foundation, I freelance copyedit and proofread, and I coordinate a master’s program in international finance and economic policy at Columbia University.
Does your job allow time to write? I’ve made it this far. But the answer is no, not at all. I would always prefer to be writing, to put it gently.
Time spent writing the book: About four or five years.
Time spent finding a home for it: I was very, very lucky in that Ugly Duckling approached me for the book. This was initially around 2012 or 2013, but I still had to finish writing it. We changed the date of publication a few times. They were patient with me.
Three favorite words: “Mom” and “or” and “Dad.”
Corina Copp reads an early version of her poems from The Green Ray, published by Ugly Duckling Presse, for the sixth Antibody Series in 2014.
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Morgan Parker Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night Switchback Books (Gatewood Prize)
“If I hear you’re talking shit about me in your confessional interview, please know seven birds have fallen dead at my feet right out of the sky.” –from “If My Housemate Fucks With Me I Would Get So Real (Audition Tape Take 1)”
How it began: This book started as my MFA thesis at NYU. It was embarrassingly large—something like 120 pages—so I spent the summer after graduation editing it, reordering it, and trimming it down in preparation for sending it out to contests and presses. The first book is a weird thing—mine contains some of the first poems I ever wrote, back in college. Of course, when I was writing those, I had no idea I was writing a book. I was playing around with new forms and registers and confessions, and it was only in grad school that I started thinking about the poems as a collection. There isn’t a “project” in this book, there isn’t a linear narrative or one central event, so in conceptualizing the book, I spent a lot of time thinking about my obsessions, taking in a lot of art and TV and movies and music and poems, and meditating on the themes they have in common.
Inspiration: Television. The Real World and The Real Housewives franchises have been particularly inspirational for me—something about the strangeness and boldness of reality TV, its dark comedy, is a really important lens in my work. Jay Z and Beyoncé are also super important figures in my work—or rather, symbols of them, the idea of them. In general, media and pop culture always have a lot of space in my poetic brain. They’ve got everything I want to talk about: loneliness, performance, representations of femininity, insecurity, family, sociocultural inequity, glitter.
Influences: My collaborator Angel Nafis; my peers Danez Smith, Charif Shanahan, Nate Marshall, Natalie Eilbert, Rio Cortez, Monica McClure, Wendy Xu (I could go on forever here); my big brother Matthew Rohrer; my poetry auntie Eileen Myles; Terrance Hayes, Tracy K. Smith, Evie Shockley, Matthew Zapruder, Cate Marvin, Anne Sexton, Lucille Clifton, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes; visual artists Mickalene Thomas, Carrie Mae Weems, Keith Haring, Glenn Ligon, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, William Pope.L.
Writer’s Block Remedy: If I feel stuck, I stop writing for a while. Or I write in another genre for a bit. I read. I go look at art. I have good conversation with friends over wine. Lately I’ve been trying to honor silence rather than being anxious about it. The itchy, restless feeling always comes back; the poems always emerge. I’m realizing more and more that “writing” is only a tiny aspect of writing poetry.
Writing Prompt: Formal poetry. Specifically sonnets and pantoums. Usually, I edit the drafts until they’re unrecognizable as formal poems, but constraint really helps my writing process. Honestly, I see prompts as rules to break, something to rebel against.
Advice: Submit widely, but also be strategic and thoughtful: Don’t submit to a press you aren’t familiar with or whose work you don’t love; don’t submit to a press whose aesthetic isn’t up your alley. A press is really a home for a book—and for you, the poet, as well—so I think it’s important (and often neglected in conversation) to remember the relationship continues past manuscript acceptance. It’s an intimate thing. Also, know that as you’re submitting, you should keep editing. Don’t be so stubborn you can’t see room for improvement. Finally, make the waiting time productive. Write new poems, go to readings, meet new writers, build community.
What’s next: I’m editing my second collection, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, and getting it ready for publication with Tin House Books in 2017. I’m also at work on a young adult novel loosely based on my teen years spent coming to terms with my identity and depression in a conservative, religious suburb—it’s my first foray into fiction, and an exciting challenge. There’s also a rumor floating around that there may be an essay collection in my future.
Age: 28.
Hometown: Highland, California.
Residence: New York City.
Job: Editor for Little A Books and Day One, adjunct assistant professor of undergraduate creative writing at Columbia University.
Does your job allow time to write? Sometimes. I write at night, on the weekends, and in transit (buses, trains, planes). I wish I were one of those people who could wake up and write before work, but I’m a snooze-button person. Ideally, I block out a day each weekend to write or edit. I’ve also been known to take vacation days to hole away uninterrupted.
Time spent writing the book: They were written and edited over the course of five years.
Morgan Parker reads two poems from Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night, published by Switchback Books.
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Richie Hofmann Second Empire Alice James Books (Beatrice Hawley Award)
“I have nothing to confess. I don’t yet know that I possess a body built for love.” –from “Idyll”
How it began: I began writing the first poems in this book while I was working on the book collection at the James Merrill House in Stonington, Connecticut—a magical, haunted place full of Merrill’s things, his furniture, his books. It was inspiring to inhabit that physical space with the spirit of someone whose art had meant the world to me. His “The Book of Ephraim” was one of the first contemporary poems I loved. To be showering in his shower, sleeping in his bed, staring into that mirror. There, among his art and belongings, my desire to write poetry was given new dramatic force.
Inspiration: Love; sexuality; history; music, especially opera and art song.
Influences: My teachers, foremost. Jorie Graham’s Erosion. Benjamin Britten’s operas and song cycles. Daniel Mendelsohn’s essays. French and Italian poetry in translation. Stephen Sondheim lyrics. Installations by Félix González-Torres.
Writer’s Block Remedy: Sometimes it’s important for me to get outside of poetry, or outside of literature altogether. To listen to music, look at a painting or sculpture or installation, see a concert, attend a lecture on something strange but intriguing. These other arts not only provoke new subjects, but they might offer new ways of thinking formally as well.
Writing Prompt: Write a poem in which your own name is invoked and explored.
Advice: Cut almost everything. Make your book as lean and dynamic as possible. Give yourself time to grow toward and away from poems, and see what new object you can create by subtracting and pruning and chiseling away.
What’s next: My new manuscript of poems explores my family’s history in Germany: my ancestors who owned a small bakery on the Rhine and my own childhood years spent in Munich. It’s about inheritance, history, power, violence, privilege, gender and sexuality, childhood, bookmaking, typography, and Mozart.
Age: 28.
Hometown: Haddon Heights, New Jersey.
Residence: Chicago.
Job: PhD student in English at Emory University in Atlanta.
Does your job allow time to write? It often does—in that reading and researching and working through critical questions is an essential part of writing poetry for me. Though I’d have to say, I like teaching even better, because I find interacting with people (usually) more stimulating than solitary research and writing.
Time spent writing the book: Four to five years.
Time spent finding a home for it: A year and a half.
Three favorite words: Exquisite, please, future.
Dana Isokawa is the assistant editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
The debut has a certain allure: an air of freshness, the promise of an exciting, original voice. Here is the new. Here is something you haven’t yet heard. And while that certainly might be the case with a poetry debut, it can also be true of a poet’s second, fifth, or tenth book—artistic innovation can happen at any stage in a writer’s life. What does make a debut uniquely exciting, though, is its sense of beginning—that the arc of a poet’s career has just begun, that the ball has just been tossed into the air. For our twelfth annual look at debut poets, we asked ten poets to share the inspirations and processes behind their first collections, and what emerged were stories of beginnings: how a book begins and how a poem begins, certainly, but also how a writer’s attraction to poetry begins. “I wanted to know if my sadness could ever be useful,” explains Ocean Vuong. “[It’s the desire] to get closer to whatever it is that’s always just beyond reach or sight,” says Justin Boening. “It was fun,” says Phillip B. Williams.
The ten poets in this year’s feature wrote some of the most compelling debuts published in 2016 and represent a range of styles and backgrounds. From the sparse, demanding elegance of Eleanor Chai’s lyrics, to the irreverent, kaleidoscopic roaming of Tommy Pico’s book-length poem, to the linguistic opulence and sheer nerve of Safiya Sinclair’s work, these ten encompass many of the impulses and registers of contemporary poetry. We asked for their insight on inspiration, publishing, and writing through impasses, and two commonalities—among many—surfaced. One: that inspiration might lie in paying attention to what appears small or insignificant—how Carolina Ebeid will listen to every “little bell” of an Arvo Pärt piano piece for inspiration, how Ari Banias will pursue the feeling elicited by something as minor as the behind-the-knee wrinkles in someone’s pants. And two: the advice to not be in a rush to publish. To take one’s time and question, as Solmaz Sharif does, what it means to be an artist and not just a person who publishes a book. Or to wait, like Jana Prikryl, for the poem to emerge that helps the others fall into place. These poets’ words are a reminder that it’s not a race, but a process of fashioning poems that can connect with the world, that can confront the “roots and wide-ranging shadows of words,” as Safiya Sinclair puts it, and explore language as we know it.
Ari Banias Anybody W. W. Norton
“Mostly a name feels like the crappy overhang I huddle under while rain skims the front of me.
I admit it keeps me visible, the cool compromise of efficient lighting, the agreement to call this that.”
—from “Recognition Is the Misrecognition You Can Bear”
How it began: I wrote Anybody out of the conditions of my life, and out of a will to connect more than divide. I was writing into loneliness and the social, and as a way to be alone with myself while also being and thinking with others. It was a process of concretizing and externalizing those conversations I was having in my head and out loud, with people dead and living, in my life or not, with the culture at large, and with other selves—past, present, future, parallel. As a younger queer writer especially, there were books I needed but couldn’t find, either because no one had published them or because they hadn’t yet been written. So I was probably writing this book, however unconsciously, to address that self, those selves.
Inspiration: The need to counter alienation and death. Humor, my immediate surroundings, memory. Sometimes just wanting to figure out how I felt about something could be enough. Poems could come from a question, an irritation, or even from a desire to get at my response to an object—like, Why does this tree, that I’m fairly certain doesn’t know I exist, evoke deep feeling in me? It’s embarrassing! And, What am I bringing to it—I mean all the baggage (cultural, historical, and otherwise) I’m carting around when I look at a tree (or a broken chair, or the behind-the-knee wrinkles in someone’s pants in front of me in line, or, really, anything) and find myself thrown off by unexpected feeling. As long as I’m attentive and willing to follow through, past what’s easy or comfortable, a poem can start almost anywhere.
In her piece “The Untroubled Mind,” the painter Agnes Martin writes, “Nothing that happens in your life makes inspiration / When your eyes are open / You see beauty in anything.” I’d add that I think of “beauty” here not in the classical sense but more like meaning, importance. Martin [writes later in] this same piece: “The wiggle of a worm as important as the assassination of a president.” They happen in the same world, never entirely independent of one another. And maybe the one I think of as small is in fact enormous. Even if a poem doesn’t directly point at these connections, to keep them near, to refuse to forget or evade them—that did and does inspire me.
Influences: More than I could possibly name. Some voices: Nina Simone, Arthur Russell, Odetta, Elizabeth Cotten, and the rembetika singer Roza Eskenazi. Some books: Alice Notley’s Mysteries of Small Houses, James Baldwin’s essays, George Oppen’s Of Being Numerous, Brenda Hillman’s Loose Sugar, Lorine Niedecker’s Paean to Place, June Jordan’s Collected Poems, Joy Ladin’s Transmigrations, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “terrible sonnets,” Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, Hilton Als’s The Women, Juliana Spahr’s The Transformation, David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives, Guy Davenport’s translations of Archilochos and Sappho. And Roland Barthes, Elizabeth Bishop, Fred Moten, Frank O’Hara, Yannis Ritsos, Adrienne Rich, Muriel Rukeyser, Walt Whitman, and William Carlos Williams.
Writer’s Block Remedy: Conversations with others ignite and recalibrate me, without fail. A few winters ago I came to a sort of crisis point with poetry. I wasn’t sure how or why, but poems began to repel me—I couldn’t write them, and I could hardly read them. Lineation looked melodramatic and grotesque. I couldn’t stomach even a whiff of solemnity. Poems were like giant echo chambers. Not coincidentally, that was my third year in a row living in fairly isolated circumstances away from loved ones, and I was feeling disconnected. I didn’t know what else to do so I started writing letter-poems to close friends. Immediately detail, texture, and volition returned to the act of writing. It was like the electricity came on again. Somewhere I’d lost the sense of purpose and direction created by that fundamental exchange of one person speaking to another. A good lesson.
Advice: It seems obnoxious to tell people not to get discouraged by how long it takes to publish a book, because it can be a very long time, and who wouldn’t get discouraged? For me publication never seemed a given—only writing did. What I told myself, and still do, is this: Keep working. Follow the shape of your mind’s particulars (its rhythms, its oddities) like a bloodhound, and take the poems as far as you possibly can, so that they are utterly yours, so that you’re writing in that singular way that singular thing no one but you can write. Each time. As Hopkins (whom I’ll take way out of context here) said, “more wreck and less discourse.”
What’s next: Along with writing new poems, I am translating contemporary poets from the Modern Greek. It’s a relief to get outside my own head and work out problems of language and expression through someone else’s poems, while still being in music. And I welcome the different sense of responsibility. Finding my way back into Greek, which was my first language, is also its own private homecoming, with all the associated awkwardness and joy of that.
Age: 38.
Hometown: I was born in Los Angeles, and grew up in the suburbs of Chicago.
Residence: Berkeley, California.
Job: I work at Small Press Distribution.
Time spent writing the book: Nine years.
Time spent finding a home for it: I started sending out a mess of consecutively numbered pages I thought was a book nine years ago. The early drafts look very little like what came to be published. It took about four years of sending out versions of what’s now the book before it was accepted.
Ocean Vuong Night Sky With Exit Wounds Copper Canyon Press
“There is so much I need to tell you—but I only earned one life.”
—from “Untitled (Blue, Green, and Brown): oil on canvas: Mark Rothko: 1952”
How it began: I wanted to know if my sadness could ever be useful.
Inspiration: Fire escapes. I was walking in New York City one day years ago and saw this big, white fire escape. And I thought to myself, “That’s it. That’s what a poem should do. Be a place where we can move further toward ourselves, which really means moving further toward our fears.” And medical marijuana. And Gushers fruit snacks.
Influences: Li-Young Lee, Federico García Lorca, Frank O’Hara, Yusef Komunyakaa, Arthur Rimbaud, Anne Carson, Emily Dickinson, Matsuo Bashō, Gwendolyn Brooks, Garrett Hongo, Amiri Baraka, Troye Sivan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Thomston, Thao Nguyen, Kobayashi Issa, Etta James, Ben Lerner, Luther Vandross, Michel Foucault, Alexander Chee, Little Richard, Virginia Woolf, Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir, Susan Sontag, Maggie Nelson, Mark Rothko, Frank Ocean, Bad Future, Whitney Houston, Patsy Cline, Lyoto Machida, C. D. Wright, Amy Winehouse, Yoko Ono, Al Green, Sinn Sisamouth, Childish Gambino, Ralph Stanley, Max Richter, Nils Frahm, Joel P West, James Blake, and Vince Staples.
Writer’s Block Remedy: When I am stuck, I don’t like to force out work or words. I just walk away from the desk—sometimes not returning for weeks at a time. I find a quiet place in the day and stop. If I’m at home, I lie down on the carpet. Then I do this thing where I just say thank you to all the things and people who have helped me. Of course, simply saying thank you does not awaken any creative force; it just reminds me that the work I am doing is not validated by quantity, but rather by the connection it builds between the world and myself. When my own work is not coming along, I try to stop and recognize the people doing the same challenging, at times unforgiving, art—and I feel happy. I think it’s hard, in our day and age, not to think, It’s me against the world, or, I have to do this for my career because everyone else is hammering away and if I stop now, I will fall behind and be forgotten. But that’s a toxic and self-defeating gaze. I think we are more productive—even in stillness—when we can recognize one another, when we say to each other, Thank you for doing this with me. Thank you for carrying on when I cannot.
Advice: Hustling can be good—but make sure what you’re pushing is gold (to you).
What’s next: I’m working on being a better son.
Age: 28.
Hometown: Hartford, Connecticut.
Residence: New York City.
Job: Writer and teacher.
Time spent writing the book: Eight yearsafter believing that I could be a poet. But I think really it took me all of my life.
Time spent finding a home for it: Eight months. I was lucky.
“To all the girls Bernini loved before I’d say, caveat emptor.”
—from “Benvenuto Tisi’s Vestal Virgin Claudia Quinta Pulling a Boat with the Statue of Cybele”
How it began: The book started as individual poems written over about a decade. I was finally galvanized into bringing some of them together by the long sequence that forms the second half of the book, “Thirty Thousand Islands.” The sequence gave me a new way of thinking about loss and literary history and nature and men and Canada and Europe; as it grew I sensed it was a foil to the more ad hoc poems I had written up till then. So the book emerged from this encounter between different forms of poetry, which seems apt since many of my poems tend to spark from the friction between different voices or points of view.
Inspiration: There are some ekphrastic poems in The After Party—one about a great, overlooked Buster Keaton movie, another about a not very good Renaissance painting. I like taking in all kinds of art—especially paintings, photographs, movies—and thinking about its implications, formal and historical. But I’m also taken with something Frank O’Hara once said: “Sometimes I think that writing a poem is such a moral crisis I get completely sick of the whole situation.” What kind of experience or vision or formal experiment can really justify taking up the reader’s time? Parts of my book attempt to think about European history and the ways my own ancestors experienced it; what gives me the authority to speak for those individuals? In other words, what kind of poem could do so? I find these sorts of questions inspiring.
Influences: I don’t feel qualified to name my own influences—and the writing I revere most seems too distant a beacon to enter into my own stuff—but there are writers I’ve loved over so many years they feel like family. I’d include Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charlotte Brontë, John Berryman, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, and Don Marquis.
Writer’s Block Remedy: I tend to sit with the impasse, partly because I have a day job and write essays as well (and recently had a baby) so life can throw me off course very easily, and partly because I think impasses are trying to tell me something so it would be imprudent to ignore them.But when I really must go on I get energy from hazelnut gelato; whiskey; the Metropolitan Museum; swimming; dips into Flann O’Brien or Jane Austen or Laurence Sterne; dips into Twitter, which so far is the clearest source of dissent I’ve found against the fascism that the Republican Party is happily riding into power; dear friends whose work is new and great, and conversely random lines in magazines that irritate me. Getting pissed off is, in the absence of anything else, a reliable stimulant.
Advice: Every voice needs something different so it’s unlikely my experience will apply to anyone else. But what’s been most valuable to me is time—to let the words stew, and let myself stew, and in fact resist publication for as long as possible.Once you’re ready I recommend an Excel spreadsheet. Maybe this is common knowledge but it was a revelation to me: A spreadsheet helps to compartmentalize the painful chore of sending things out and really cleanses it of emotion. You just record rejections and can very clearly see where else something might be sent.
What’s next: Mostly diaper changes and tummy times. Occasionally noodling away at things that may or may not make it into a second book.
Age: 41.
Hometown: My teens were spent in Ancaster, Ontario, which feels hometown-iest to me. I was born in Ostrava (in what was then Czechoslovakia), and when I was five my family fled and lived in an Austrian village for a year. From the age of six I grew up in a few towns in southern Ontario—so it’s complicated.
Residence: New York City.
Job: Senior editor at the New York Review of Books.
Time spent writing the book: Too long. But the too-longness varies a lot: One of the poems is around fifteen years old, some started almost a decade ago and had to marinate for years before they were finished, and some were written in half an hour, with minor revision. In general I revise heavily and take long gaps between glances at poems, so I can hear them afresh when I return.
Time spent finding a home for it: I spent a decade avoiding gathering my poems into a manuscript—it felt somehow presumptuous. About a year after I started bringing the poems together, Tim Duggan read my work in the London Review of Books and the New Yorker and got in touch, asking if I had a manuscript. I took a few more months to revise it and once I sent it to him he got back to me quickly. So I’ve been very lazy and very lucky.
Carolina Ebeid You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior Noemi Press
“We live in a copy of Eden, a copy
that depends on violence.”
—from “Albeit”
How it began: The book isn’t defined by a unifying project. Many of its poems did not begin with a particular book in mind. However, when I was placing the poems side by side to see how many pages I had, I noted an orbital pull forming. They were already set in a certain orbit of tone, subject matter, and high-lyric style. Identifying this motion allowed me to see more clearly which subsequent poems would be accepted into this circle.
Inspiration: For a few years I listened to a musical piece by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt called Für Alina. It is a composition for the piano, spare and slow. It sounds like little bells being struck. Pärt has said that, when he was making this work, he “had a need to concentrate on each sound so that every blade of grass would be as important as a flower.” I have thought the same about poems. Also, the visual vocabulary of certain films has inspired many of these poems, deeply. Movies such as The Spirit of the Beehive, Ratcatcher, In the Mood for Love, and Days of Heaven hold something arcane, a strange quietness. Perhaps they withhold (it’s a better word). What has moved me to write after seeing these films is how much they withhold. I am drawn to poems that can dance like that, in a relationship of what is said and what is left unsaid.
Influences: The books of Lucie Brock-Broido, Anne Carson, and Briget Pegeen Kelly have been early and lasting influences. In my PhD work, I’ve delved into the fragments and letters of Emily Dickinson, the poetry of Raúl Zurita and Cecilia Vicuña, the multimedia art of Caroline Bergvall, as well as the various adaptations of Antigone—which I hope will all be future influences.
Writer’s Block Remedy: Always, the engrossing work of translating poetry from Spanish is a spark. I also turn to looking through old lexicons, field guides no longer in print, medieval bestiaries or glossaries of birds, and early photography.
Advice: Three things. One: Listen to your innermost self—a self that has been forming aesthetic principles by the books you’ve read, by your various experiences and identities—and try to lower the volume of well-intentioned critiques that stifle your work. Two: If you are fortunate, you will find a trusted reader-editor-confidant-friend, one who will open your work and imagination. Take care to develop that relationship. My primary reader also happens to be my partner, Jeffrey Pethybridge. Three: Try not to send out your manuscript blindly, which can deplete one’s inner and outer resources. Rather, choose presses whose author lists exhilarate you, and remember that small presses are in a golden age; they’re making vital and sparkling books.
What’s next: A long sequence of small poems called “The M Notebooks,” M being a character made up of various persons, such as the biblical Saint Miriam (a myrrh-bearer), the Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta, and Russian writer Nadezhda Mandelstam. The sequence is a convergence, confluence, conflagration of speakers. Also, a couple of essays on the work of Ana Mendieta, as well as research on the literature of sleep, descent, and dream-space.
Age: 40.
Hometown: West New York, New Jersey.
Residence: Denver.
Job: I teach while I also pursue a PhD in the creative writing program at the University of Denver.
Time spent writing the book: The bulk of the poems were written in Austin during my three MFA years at the Michener Center.
Time spent finding a home for it: About three years.
How it began: The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—namely, how quickly the nation mobilized to invade these countries when just months earlier we were living in the myth of indefinite and obvious peace. That peace, of course, did not exist then, either, but I remember, for example, an Army recruiter visiting my AP Government class in spring 2001 and saying, as part of his pitch to join the Army and see the world, that were we to join the Army, we would not be fighting in any wars, anyway.
Inspiration: Conversations with friends—especially Samira Yamin, Ari Banias, and Brandon Som. The various books and artists they have pressed upon me. The stellar work they put into the world.
Influences: June Jordan, Muriel Rukeyser, Mahmoud Darwish, C. D. Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Charles Reznikoff, William Carlos Williams, Adrienne Rich, Leonel Rugama, Walt Whitman, and Claudia Rankine.
Writer’s Block Remedy: If the causes are perfectionistic, I pull out the collected poems of a poet I greatly admire and flip through to remind myself how many mediocre poems their oeuvre contains. It is my duty, I remind myself, to write even those mediocre, messy poems. These failures are the ones that create openings in the conversation for subsequent writers and poets to enter—I’m not trying to kill the conversation, after all. I pull out journals—André Gide’s, Franz Kafka’s, Susan Sontag’s—to remind myself how long the process is and how often the sense of failure or impasse hits. I watch a movie.
Advice: Write a book you want to fight for. Fight for it. I am, after all this, though, a little hesitant to keep the conversation on first books or debuts. I am a product of an industry that emphasizes first books—it’s where the prizes are, it’s what the MFA programs are gearing you up for with your thesis, it’s what our conversations with our peers are about, it’s what we buy because we want to support our friends. I’m not entirely sure who this “we” is, as someone both inside and outside of it, as someone not wanting to presume you are a similar product, fellow writer. But there is something, something shifting the collective attention (of presses, of journals) to younger poets—an attention that does not exist for a poet’s second or fourth book and that doesn’t again until I don’t know when. A blessing, maybe, that turning away of the gaze—it’s likely due to sales. We are not necessarily taught how to be artists, how to commit to artists and attend to their failures, their sustained conversation—a conversation that would undoubtedly challenge and even dismantle said industry. We are taught instead how to publish our first books. Product, not process. I don’t have answers about “how to be an artist”; I’m not trying to make it sound like I do. But I do want to have that conversation. What do you want to do as a writer in the world? What do you see the arc of your writing life to be? How is your first book a launch to that arc? To discuss the book itself, the writers themselves—myself included—is a misdirection. Or as Forough Farrokhzad said: “Remember the flight / the bird will die.”
What’s next: Translations of Forough Farrokhzad. And some secret stuff.
Age: 33.
Hometown: I haven’t worked out the answer to this question for myself. Los Angeles is probably the closest I will get to a hometown.
Residence: Oakland.
Job: I’m a lecturer in creative writing at Stanford University.
Time spent writing the book: I started working with the Department of Defense’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms in earnest at the end of 2007. The earliest poems in the book are from 2008. But some of the pieces and images are reworked from 2003, even. By 2012 or 2013 I had pretty much worked out all the conceptual elements and the general frame of the book, though I added and removed poems up until the last deadline. The most freeing realization was that I could ditch poems that had been previously published in journals and that I liked, generally speaking. I could create a book rather than a collection, I mean.
Time spent finding a home for it: I started sending the book out in 2009, which was massively premature, but I don’t regret it. I drew up a very short list of dream first-book prizes and vowed to continue sending out yearly until I was disqualified from doing so.
Phillip B. Williams Thief in the Interior Alice James Books
“I’m listening to Alice Coltrane to feel Blacker than God”
—from “Eleggua and Eshu Ain’t the Same”
How it began: It was fun. I used to write several manuscripts at a time. One year I was working on three books simultaneously. My first attempt at a book was in 2008 (“I Empire,” read as “first empire”), the second was in 2009 (“Thief in the Interior,” which was not the same book as the one that was eventually published), and the third was in 2010 (“In Vulnerabilities”). Eventually I released a chapbook called Bruised Gospels in 2010, and because I do not want poems in chapbooks to appear in my full-lengths, I was “forced” to restructure the main manuscript, “I Empire,” which remained the backbone of my debut.It had many, many names, to my friend Rickey Laurentiis’s entertainment. He and I exchanged different versions of our books for years. I distinctly remember two titles he had before Boy With Thorn that I do not think he would mind me sharing. The first was “Mirror God”and the second was “Down Atlantis.” If there were any others, I cannot remember. My failed titles were “Grace,” “Grace and Empire,” “Dancing on an Upturned Bed,” “Darling,” “Shame No Tongue,” “Lie Down,” and “Witness.”Going through this process with Rickey over the course of four to five years helped push me along. All I knew is that I wanted a book before I turned thirty. My book was published a month before my thirtieth birthday.
Inspiration: The book On Black Men by David Marriott was always on my mind while writing. The work of my peers. The work of those who have become ancestors.
Influences: Essex Hemphill, Jorie Graham, Terrance Hayes, Sonia Sanchez, the racism of Wallace Stevens seems its own kind of artist or shadow of the artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Mary Jo Bang, Wangechi Mutu, Nina Simone, Leontyne Price, Björk, John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, Kerry James Marshall, Federico García Lorca, Lucille Clifton, Henry Dumas, Carl Phillips, Douglas Kearney, J. Michael Martinez, Dawn Lundy Martin, Octavio Paz, Camille T. Dungy, Evie Shockley, Frank Bidart, Alvin Ailey, Judith Jamison, Alonzo King, Clifford Williams, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Sylvia Plath and her fascination with the word nigger, Claudia Rankine, Carolyn Rogers, Thylias Moss, James Baldwin, afropessimism as a theoretical framework, Mahmoud Darwish, Toni Morrison, Meshell Ndegeocello, Suji Kwock Kim, Larry Levis, Sunni Patterson.
Writer’s Block Remedy: I go for months without writing and then write nonstop for about a month or so. An impasse for me is a sign that I simply have nothing to say, and that is fine. I had to learn that it was fine not to write. As far as what keeps me going, I’m still not sure. Something just clicks on and stays on until it runs its course. I frequently add to a Notes document any lines I come up with or words I need to look up. My memory is very poor, so I do not retain what I read. Sometimes, in order to assist with retention, I have to activate the knowledge, meaning implement it into something tangible like a poem. The joy in this is that most things I read are fresh when I return to them. The downside is that it takes me forever to do scholarly work and I’m not the best person to speak with about books or even single poems unless they are in front of me.
Advice: Just write. Study first, then write. We cannot control the reception of our work, but we can decimate our imaginations by trying to write “for the people.” Who are these monolithic people? Why think so little of them and call that kindness? Recently, there seems to be this idea that one has to write for someone else or a specific group. So many folks want to be mouthpieces for a community for which they’ve set low standards reminiscent of the oppressive forces they claim to want to counteract. In that writing, it is assumed what these potential readers will and will not understand. In the same instant that this idea wants to be communal and welcoming, it is also condescending and ostracizing. We have enough low expectations set on us by others, especially if we are persons of color, women, part of genderqueer and LGBT communities, and/or any other marginalized group. Almost every poem I’ve written my mother has seen. She may or may not understand each one but she has read those poems and encouraged me to keep going. She tells me what she loves and what touches her. So do my nonliterary friends and family members. It’s not up to me to assume there are restraints on their ability to understand me. My poems aren’t a standardized test that my friends need help cheating on, or that can even be “passed.” Though we have limitations, language barriers, literacy barriers, and other factors, we are also complex and capable if allowed to be.
What’s next: I’m working on trying to eat right and go to bed on time.
Age: 30.
Hometown: Chicago.
Residence: Bennington, Vermont.
Job: I am a visiting professor in English at Bennington College.I try to make some kind of living off my work but not to the point of distraction. Writing does keep me alive, even during those times it does not make money.
Time spent writing the book: The longest poem in the book I started in 2005 and it was a single-page poem. It continued to grow across different iterations of the book until it became a twenty-page poem while I attended Washington University in St. Louis for my MFA. I was convinced to shrink it down to fourteen pages and officially finished it in the spring of 2014, nine years later. Many of the poems I wrote that were originally in the book did not make the final edit. Most of the poems that made it I wrote during my MFA, so about two years.
Time spent finding a home for it: It depends on which version of the book we’re talking about. In my naiveté I submitted manuscripts to contests as early as 2009. They were unready projects that I would have regretted if they were published. It only took a few months for what was to become Thief in the Interior to find a publisher. When it started finalizing for prizes and open submissions I knew it would eventually get picked up.
Eleanor Chai Standing Water Farrar, Straus and Giroux
“This, I’ve seen. I see it always. I carry it in my torso as surely as a Buddhist lives in the skin of his own corpse.”
—from “Little Girl’s Auricle”
How it began: I can’t say I was compelled to write a book. I was compelled to write poems. I am not a native speaker of English, but I no longer speak my native language (Korean) for complicated and disorienting reasons. Finding shapes in language that hold for longer than the instant of speaking has always felt crucial to me.
Inspiration: I am happiest when I am completely and obsessively engaged. Nothing absorbs me as thoroughly as trying to get a poem on the page. So I suppose living the life I wish to live is what inspires me.
Influences: I spent years transcribing the complete correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore. For a few hours each night for six years I was dropped into their intimate “Dear—.” Their devotion to their poems and to poetry continues to move me. Alongside one of her letters, as an afterthought, Bishop wrote: “And did you like the 4 Quartets?” exactly so, with the number 4 and the word Quartets. The “And,” the casual usage, the numeral 4—not the word Four written out—thrilled me. It felt spontaneous, in real time (which it was) and I felt a sliver of how it may have been to read the Four Quartets as a newly made thing, without the edifice of criticism bracing it. The Four Quartets constitutes at least one of my Ten Thousand Things. To see it considered before it aged into its full regalia made me feel closer to its nascence, its being made. I’ve also had the great gift of deep friendship with Frank Bidart. He is one of the finest, most exacting makers I know. His obsessive devotion to the needs of a poem stuns me. I love T. S. Eliot too much. I love Louise Glück. I love James Baldwin. I love Ezra Pound. I love Clarice Lispector. I love Mark Strand. I love Walt Whitman. I love Frank Bidart. I love Marguerite Duras. I love Winnicott and Freud. I love Bishop. I love Robert Frost. I love Louise Bourgeois. I love Toni Morrison. I love Van Gogh’s letters. I LOVE The Tibetan Book of the Dead. I love ethnographies.
Writer’s Block Remedy: I turn to silence, or rather, I surrender to it. Silence, and superior voices. And panic.
Advice: I wish I had some useful advice. Mine was a strange path.
What’s next: I am working on one new poem. Hopefully I will be able to write it and hopefully more will come. I am also trying to compose, or rather assemble, Mark Strand’s oral memoir from tapes we made in Nova Scotia and some of his unpublished writing. I am following the practice and principles he used in making his beautiful, singular collages from paper he himself made. I think of his sentences as his “paper” and I am trying to tear that material and place it on the page into a compelling narrative of his life. It’s such fine material; the task is daunting but animating.
Age: 49.
Hometown: My hometown is a complicated question. I was moved around quite a lot as a child. I suppose I would say Seoul, South Korea,though I’ve not been home in many years.
Residence: New York City.
Job: I started a school in Westport, Connecticut.My daughters are now both in college so I am trying to give myself the time and space to write poems, finish editing the Bishop-Moore letters with the meticulous Saskia Hamilton, and work on Mark Strand’s oral memoir. Working at the school demanded all of my energy when I was there.
Time spent writing the book: I have no idea how long it took me to write this book. Decades.I knew that my daughters’ time in my everyday care would not last forever. I’ve always been achingly clear that I had eighteen years to share our days, to participate, even shape what would be our holy, our minute particular (William Blake). I am devoted to the minute particular. Much that I value in life resides there. I did not have a childhood with my mother, so being a mother to my children every day and night seemed a privilege and a miracle.
Time spent finding a home for it: I was very fortunate that Jonathan Galassi, my editor [for the Bishop-Moore letters], liked my poems and took my book.
Justin Boening Not on the Last Day, but on the Very Last Milkweed Editions (National Poetry Series)
“does sadness leave us? Is that the source of sadness?”
—from “Banquet”
How it began: The book’s title is taken from the thorny end of a Kafka parable called “The Coming of the Messiah.” It finishes: “The messiah will come on the day after he is no longer required, he will come on the day after his arrival, he will come not on the last day, but on the very last.” I’ve seen others attempt to negotiate these paradoxes by changing the definition of last day or very last. I guess that makes as much sense as anything else. But for me, this is a portrait of a savior who comes, not belatedly, but by not coming at all. I think it may have been this parable that put me on the road toward writing a book of failures, of mistakes, which is how I’ve come to understand the collection—a book where one learns to become a god by being unrecognizable, for example, or where one rules the world by being the only one in it. I don’t know. I’m probably the last one who should be talking about such things. More generally, though, I think what compelled me to write this book may have been distance from God. For me, poetry is an expression of this desire to reach out, not to communicate per se, but to get closer to whatever it is that’s always just beyond reach or sight. Maybe that sounds too lofty, but it’s a longing I’ve felt all my life, and a longing I’ve often associated with the essence of whatever it is I’ve called “human.” Stevens finishes his poem “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour” by saying, “We make a dwelling in the evening air / In which being there together is enough.” I think that about sums it up for me—what compelled me to write these poems.
Inspiration: The unshakable belief that poetry is absolutely necessary, that it’s inextricably linked to language itself, and that, therefore, it’s one of the most human things we’re allowed to participate in.
Influences: As far as writers go, I return most often toFranz Kafka, Wallace Stevens, Clarice Lispector, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath,Mark Strand, and Lucie Brock-Broido.
Writer’s Block Remedy: I almost never push it. If a poem is frustrating me I walk away, watch some YouTube, read writers who know what they’re doing. Distraction is good for poetry, I think, maybe because it breeds uncertainty. In fact, I feel I do my best writing when I’m not writing at all.
Advice: Hold off as long as you can. And once you lose your patience, only send the work to people and presses you already respect and trust.
What’s next: Lately I’ve been putting a lot of my energy into a new magazine and press called Horsethief Books that Devon Walker-Figueroa and I have started together. As far as my own poems go, with the loss of so many friends and luminaries I’ve been writing elegies as of late.
Age: I’m 35and will be turning 36 on February 13 (yes, I was born on a Friday).
Hometown: I was born in Saratoga Hospital, on a holiday down to see the ponies. I call Glens Falls, New York, my hometown though, since I ate my first corn on the cob there, stole my first bike there, etc. I moved to New York City when I was six—pretty young—so that’s a home for me as well, though not my origins. Recently, I was eating a 1:00 AM chicken fried steak in Missoula, Montana, at a dive called the Ox. Two guys, who had just finished playing poker at the front card table, stood up suddenly from their counter stools. One guy walloped the other guy in the eye, snatched up his rucksack, and hustled out the front door. No one called the cops. Few were alarmed. That’s the place I’ve lived the longest, actually—Missoula is another home.
Residence: Iowa City.
Job: A living? Maybe you could call it that.I teach and edit, mostly.
Time spent writing the book: Well, there are some whispers from poems I wrote while I was a graduate student, but they’re really only whispers. The oldest poem in the book is one I wrote the moment after I handed in my graduate thesis—that was in 2011. The newest poem is one I wrote in 2015. So I guess that means four years?
Time spent finding a home for it: I sent out bashfully in 2013, and then in earnest until the book was taken in 2015.
Safiya Sinclair Cannibal University of Nebraska Press (Prairie SchoonerBook Prize)
“Tell the hounds who undress me with their eyes—I have nothing to hide. I will spread myself
wide.”
—from “Center of the World”
How it began: I began writing poetry as an act of survival. Faced with the silencing exile of womanhood in an oppressive household and a patriarchal society that discouraged me from speaking and thinking, the only way to make sense of my burgeoning selfhood was here on the page, by writing it down. Then, plagued still with the strange linguistic exile of writing in English, the language of the colonist, while dancing wildly in the brazen self of Jamaican patois, the only way to unfracture this amputated history was by making a home for myself on the page, and building new modes of language by writing poetry.
When I was younger I was very dismayed by how little of myself and my family I could trace into the past, and was very inspired by the oral folklore and storytelling tradition passed down by my mother and my aunts. It became very clear to me that this oral folklore and storytelling was a matriarchal tradition—a way of preserving our history, both family history and Jamaican history. This not only incited and inspired me to write Cannibal, but it was also a way of saving my own life, of making a record of our songs and mother tongue, and paying tribute to the women who have woven our words and days into existence.
Finally, it was imperative for me to confront the macabre history of the Caribbean itself—to expose the postcolonial roots of violence here; to explore how being “Caribbean” was so closely linked to being “savage,” being cannibal. By confronting the ugly language and prejudices that continue to plague all people of the African diaspora, I hoped to renarrativize the toxic gaze of white supremacy at home and abroad, to shatter its fictions through the shared ritual of poetry.
Inspiration: Always in my ear is the ghost meter of the Caribbean Sea, its old rhythm and singing. The possessed tempo of Pocomania, and the fire-root of duende. I am continually inspired by the fertile landscape of Jamaica, which fevers my dreams—our lush hills and blooms, our heavy fruit trees. The way nothing here grows politely. The wild animal of my childhood and its green river of memory.
I’m fascinated by Goethe’s lifelong search for the “Primal Plant,” from which grew my own notion of the black woman’s body as that elusive Primal Plant, the first site of exile. Early on in college I was very startled by Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, which showed me the wild possibilities of breaking form, how I could build my own labyrinth of mythification as a way to honor and transfigure family, a way to alchemize our folklore. I’ve also been writing from a desire to dismantle Western texts like Shakespeare’s The Tempest, to repossess Caliban as a throat through which the poems could sing, our one-drop rhythm transgressing violence and its lingering exile, a linguistic rebellion forged here through the music of linguistic mastery.
Influences: The poets, artists, and writers who feed the fire and bloodroot of my family tree are Sylvia Plath, Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton, Frida Kahlo, James Baldwin, Federico García Lorca, Caliban, Aimé Césaire, Caravaggio, Franz Kafka, Gabriel García Márquez, Paul Celan, Rita Dove, Wangechi Mutu, Derek Walcott, and Kamau Brathwaite.
Writer’s Block Remedy: I can’t say I’ve ever truly reached an impasse in my work. There’s still so much unwritten of Jamaican history, folklore, and culture, still so much of our rich lives that I need to give voice to, in my own small way. Because I read so feverishly, and am always engaging with topics outside of my field—mostly science, history, and philosophy—I’m always finding new ways to enter into a poem, then discovering how many ideas are already in dialogue with each other in that lyric space. I am often so possessed with language, with the roots and wide-ranging shadows of words, that I’m always chasing one word or another down a new corridor of inquiry. If I hit a wall, I’ll listen to music that opens a window unto memory and centers me in a specific time and place, or I’ll reread authors who’ve dazzled and nurtured me, who take the top of my head off. Both English and Jamaican patois are two deep oceans ready-made for diving. And I dive, unabashedly. There, I find the far-reaching tentacles of naming and wording in our society so expansive that I would have enough material to interpret for a lifetime.
Advice: Take your time. Read widely, expand your references and vocabulary; make the poems sing.Nowadays I think there is such a rush to publish a first book, and many poets might feel pressured to send something out that isn’t quite ready. My strongest advice is to be unafraid of waiting, to sit with your words and work until you’ve cultivated them into something flourishing. Live inside the book until you’re certain you’ve grown something lasting, a bloom of your absolute best self. You only have one first; make it count.
What’s next: I’m currently working on a memoir about growing up in a strict Rastafarian household in Jamaica, and feeling estranged in my own country (Jamaica is a heavily Christian country, and Rastafarians are an oft-ostracized minority.) At that same time, I began feeling exiled by my blooming womanhood, and eventually had no choice but to rebel against a religion and a home that made no room for me.
Age: 32.
Hometown: Montego Bay, Jamaica.
Residence: Los Angeles.
Job: I’m a third-year doctoral student at the University of Southern California, where I’m getting my PhD in literature and creative writing.
Time spent writing the book: The bulk of the poems were written in the three years I was in the MFA program at the University of Virginia. The book was my final thesis, and I spent a few months after that rearranging, focusing, and editing the manuscript. One poem snuck into Cannibal that was written in college six or seven years ago. After the book was accepted, I was still tinkering a bit with structuring, and I knew it needed three more poems (circling around a specific theme) to make it cohesive and complete in my mind, so I slipped three new poems into the manuscript, right down to the wire. Those last three poems were completed in September 2015.
Time spent finding a home for it: I waited to send out the manuscript (and most of its poems) until I felt certain that it was ready to breathe on its own full-bloodedly. The fall after I graduated from the University of Virginia I started submitting Cannibal to prizes, and was really fortunate to have the book accepted to a couple of places by the summer of 2015. Cannibal won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry that June. So it was a year or less of sending it out into the world until it was accepted—a fitting nine months.
“The stars are anxious. What version of yrself do you see when you close yr eyes?”
—from “IRL”
How it began: I was torn between a stable relationship and predictable future with a boring dude, and an exciting but uneven fling with a pretty young thing. It kind of broke open all the similar divisions inside me: how to transition into my thirties; hailing from the foothills of rural California but living in the busiest city in America; being a modern, queer, indigenous person with a lot of inherent self-love in a world that tries to deny me life, dignity, liberty, etc.
Inspiration: Survivors, femininity, experiences that happen within the span of ninety minutes (like movies [sometimes sex]).
Influences: A. R. Ammons, Beyoncé, Mariah Carey, Amy Winehouse, Janet Jackson, Nicki Minaj, June Jordan, Muriel Rukeyser, Jeffrey Yang, Sherman Alexie, James Welch, Joy Harjo, Louise Erdrich, Chun Li, Storm, etc.
Writer’s Block Remedy: I watch a movie—or a film, if that’s your vibe. Seeing something begin, build, and end in a certain amount of time gives me faith in a creative faculty.
Advice: Keep the faith, b, keep the faith.
What’s next: I’m working with Tin House to finish up the final edits on Nature Poem, the follow-up to IRL coming out May 2017. I’m about halfway through writing book number three, Junk, and have started Food—the final book in the four-part series I started with IRL. Also a roundtable-discussion-type podcast called “Food 4 Thot” about four multiracial, queer writers in New York City discussing literature, sexuality, and pop culture (hashtag elevator pitch) whom I met at the 2016 Tin House Summer Writer’s Workshop. Teaching long-poem workshops. Also being a good friend, a good lay, and a good human.
Age: 33.
Hometown: The Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation.
Residence: New York City.
Job: I have approximately sixty-nine side piece jobs, including teaching/touring/freelance stuff, and a main thing that involves writing—but I’m not at liberty to talk about it just yet. If I told you I’d prolly have to kill you.
Time spent writing the book: Officially, I wrote the book from May to August 2014 in an office in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, facing the entire trunk of Manhattan, but in a way I was writing the book for thirty years.
Time spent finding a home for it: I sent it to allllll the book contests and once or twice even got a personalized rejection, but mostly sturdy no’s from everybody. I don’t blame them, it’s a weird nonstandard poem and the initial manuscript was probs 70 percent realized. Sampson Starkweather at Birds, LLC saw me read one night in the city and asked me to send him something. Thankfully they had enough faith in my voice and work ethic to help me guide the book toward its final form.
The ten poetry collections featured in our thirteenth annual roundup of debut poets offer a glimpse of the wide range of contemporary poetry. Each of the books, published in 2017, shows just how much poetry can do. Eve L. Ewing’s Electric Arches tells stories that reckon with history and imagine a better future, while Layli Long Soldier’s WHEREAS and sam sax’s Madness reclaim language that has been distorted by governments and institutions of power. Emily Skillings’s Fort Not reveals the tendencies of our culture and society through the trappings of modern life, as does Chen Chen’s When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities. Kaveh Akbar’s Calling a Wolf a Wolf and Jenny Johnson’s In Full Velvet both give voice to the interior—Akbar to the ongoing work of faith, Johnson to the vagaries of the heart and desire. Joseph Rios’s Shadowboxing and Airea D. Matthews’s Simulacra create personas and alter egos that argue and spar with one another, while William Brewer’s I Know Your Kind clears a path for understanding others. And all ten collections do what poetry does best: inhabit the many possibilities of language and form as well as attend to, as Seamus Heaney put it, “the lift and frolic of the words in themselves.”
We asked the poets to share the stories and influences behind their books, and they responded with a list of inspirations as varied as their collections, from the food of April Bloomfield and music of Flying Lotus to the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and words of Adrienne Rich. When we asked the poets to offer advice to writers who are stuck or looking to publish their first book, however, their answers coalesced around some common suggestions: Take a break when you’re struggling with a piece. Permit yourself to write one or two or thirty or a hundred lousy poems. Most of all, reach out to the people who can keep you afloat. Listen to your family’s stories, as Chen and sax do, or talk with your kids, as Matthews advises. Or, as Johnson and Rios suggest, call up your friends, encourage one another, and then hold one another accountable for getting the work done.
Writing poetry can often feel lonely or frustrating or even futile—especially during a year of political turmoil and soul-searching—and these poets remind us to turn to whatever will protect our capacity for wonder and allow each of us to be our “whole self on the page,” as Rios says. They remind us to be attentive to the world, and they urge us to be ready for whatever scrap of language or feeling might help us pass from silence into speaking and jolt a poem into being.
How it began: When I got sober, poetry became my life raft. Every poem in Calling a Wolf a Wolf was written from a few months to a few years after I got sober. I had no idea what to do with myself, what to do with my physical body or my time. I had no relationship to any kind of living that wasn’t predicated on the pursuit of narcotic experience. In a very real way, sobriety sublimated one set of addictions (narcotic) into another (poetic). The obsessiveness, the compulsivity, is exactly the same. All I ever want to do today is write poems, read poems, talk about poems. But this new obsession is much more fun (and much easier on my physiological/psychological/spiritual self ).
Inspiration: The searching earnestness of the people I’ve met in recovery. They’ve taught me how to talk about myself without mythologizing, without casting myself as some misunderstood hero maligned by the world. I think (hope!) that resistance to flattening my narrative into some easy self-serving hero’s journey is one of the central features of Calling a Wolf a Wolf.
Influences: Franz Wright, Abbas Kiarostami, Mary Ruefle, Kazim Ali, Daniel Johnston, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Carl Phillips, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Nicholson Baker, Dan Barden, Kathy Acker, all writers for The Simpsons from 1990–1999, Fanny Howe, Eduardo C. Corral, Jean Valentine, francine j. harris, the verve of Marc Bolan, the voice of Kate Bush, the sneer of Justin Pearson/The Locust, the frequency of Eric Bemberger’s guitar, Sohrab Sepehri, Russell Edson, Lydia Lunch, Zbigniew Herbert, Joanna Newsom, Heather Christle, Patricia Smith, Anne Carson, Robert Olen Butler, Bruce Nauman’s neon art, Vic Ketchman, my mother.
Writer’s block remedy: I don’t really believe in writer’s block. If I sit down to write in earnest and give myself enough time, eventually I’ll walk away with something. Even if it turns out to be nothing (which is usually the case), I’m still training and preparing my instincts for the next poem. Even bad poems that go nowhere provide compost for the good ones to come. That said, I do believe in refractory periods, periods spent rebuilding one’s relationship with silence. Ellen Bryant Voigt talks about how in order to strike, a cobra also needs to recoil. I have recoil periods in which I throw myself into my reading, a kind of active listening. So much of Calling a Wolf a Wolf works by hypersaturation, by these breathless rushes of language. It’s been immensely useful for me to go back into silence, to reclaim a bit of psychic quiet to take back into the poems.
Advice: Be kind to yourself and to other poets. There are so many people in the world who would conspire against our joy, who would mistake our reverent wonder for idleness. Against everything, we have to protect our permeability to wonder. That’s the nucleus around which all interesting art orbits.
Finding time to write: I’m one of those people who wakes up obnoxiously early to get in my hours before the world really starts up. I like to get into my poem-writing while my brain is still gummy with dream logic, before the mundane argle-bargle of the everyday comes in.
What’s next: Rebuilding a relationship with silence. Being the best professor and mentor I can be. Orienting myself toward gratitude despite a political moment working very hard to prevent that. Being in love and planning a wedding. Being an uncle. Touring with the book. Staying alive one day at a time.
Hometown: Not sure exactly—I was born in Tehran, Iran, then moved to Pennsylvania, to New Jersey, to Wisconsin, to Indiana, to Florida, and now back to Indiana.
Residence: Lafayette, Indiana.
Job: I teach in the MFA program at Purdue University.
Time spent writing the book: The honest answer is twenty-eight years, maybe even longer than that, but to answer the question I think you’re actually asking, the oldest recognizable poem in the book is about five years old. That’s fairly fast, actually. There are a number phrases and images I cannibalized from poems much, much older than that, though.
Time spent finding a home for it: Not very long. Carey Salerno, my editor at Alice James, saw a poem of mine published by the Poetry Society of America and wrote to me asking if I had a manuscript. I actually wasn’t really done with Calling a Wolf a Wolf yet, but I sent her what I had with the caveat that I still needed time to continue building and rearranging and reimagining. She liked what she saw and took the leap. I couldn’t imagine working with a smarter, more generous, more compassionate editor. So much of what is good about the book is the result of her patient guidance and mentorship.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: Nicole Sealey’s Ordinary Beast (Ecco) is a collection I think people will still be reading in fifty years. Javier Zamora’s Unaccompanied (Copper Canyon Press). William Brewer’s I Know Your Kind (Milkweed Editions). Airea D. Matthews’s Simulacra (Yale University Press). Cortney Lamar Charleston’s Telepathologies (Saturnalia Books). Safia Elhillo’s The January Children (University of Nebraska Press). Layli Long Soldier’s WHEREAS (Graywolf Press). Eve L. Ewing’s Electric Arches (Haymarket Books).
Airea D. Matthews Simulacra Yale University Press (Yale Series of Younger Poets)
but I knew it was a winged thing, a puncture, a black and wicked door.
—from “Rebel Prelude”
How it began: My life and the lives of the people who have affected me were the impetus for the book. I’d had undiagnosed mental illness for a very long time, and I wanted to get to the root of it. It started with a question, actually. I asked myself if I had inherited hunger and instability. As I wrote the book, the universe handed me small parts of a very complicated answer.
Inspiration: Books, people, and technology—Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s The Blue and Brown Books, Albert Camus’s The Stranger and The Rebel, Franz Kafka’s absurdity, Greek and Sumerian myths, the wit of Twitter and Facebook, the days of Motorola Q, Anne Sexton, Gertrude Stein, my family and friends. In short, everyday life—private and public.
Influences: Aside from the nods in Simulacra to my poetic lineage, Nora Chassler, Vievee Francis, Rachel McKibbens, and Ladan Osman are some of my greatest artistic inspirations. They’ve all taught me more about community, poetry, and history through their generosity and friendship than I could ever hope to learn in a book. As literary exemplars, I’d have to say Rita Dove, Simone De Beauvoir, Anne Carson, Alice Notley, Haruki Murakami, Samuel Beckett, Italo Calvino, Muriel Rukeyser, Marina Tsvetaeva, Carl Phillips, Louise Glück, Antonio Porchia, Cecília Meireles, Wisława Szymborska, Heraclitus, Rainer Maria Rilke, Robert Hayden, and Zora Neale Hurston.
Writer’s block remedy: When I lose language it’s almost entirely because I am too focused on myself at that moment. And so, I step back. I consciously get outside of myself by unplugging and planting myself in public spaces at odd hours of the day. My perspective shifts because, in public, my gaze moves toward other forms of subjectivity—nature, outside conversations, cityscapes, etc. I am also a big fan of stepping away from work to listen to my kids’ observations about life and/or ask them how they’d work through a problem. Young souls are closer to Edenic wisdom. They understand human nature and the journey in a way that seems to elude the more grizzled traveler.
Advice: Listen to yourself, your hand, your gut, your pen, your mind. Be authentically who you are as a writer. Your work has its own logic and its own tools; honor them. And, finally, wear comfortable shoes because the journey toward making the impossible possible is rugged, long, and lovely.
Finding time to write: I suppose I don’t find time as much as I make time. I have long practiced jotting down at least one observation every day—anything from watching a child play to documenting arguments. I find that those observations help me sustain focus when I sit to write in longer form.
What’s next: I am trying to gain fluency in my body’s primitive language, my instincts. The next collection, “under/class,” will be driven entirely by those instincts and will almost definitely be outside of definition and genre—social criticism, poetry, and short stories.
Hometown: I grew up in Trenton, but I spent twenty years in Detroit. Detroit is the place where I matured into a writer.
Residence: The City of Brotherly Love (and car horns), Philadelphia.
Job: Assistant professor of creative writing at Bryn Mawr College. The college was voted one of the most beautiful campuses in the country (and not just the grounds); the people are exceptional humans.
Time spent writing the book: The poems were in my body my whole life, perceiving and altering the way I interacted with the world. Somatically, I would say it took me forty-plus years. But, in a more linear view, it took a solid five years to commit them to paper and have them coalesce into a collection.
Time spent finding a home for it: I heard “no” and “not quite right” so often, I started to answer to them. Interestingly, I had a hard time getting individual poems published, which explains why my publishing acknowledgements are fairly lean in the book. I sent the manuscript out thirty times in some form or fashion, under two different titles. It was rejected twenty-eight times. It was accepted twice, and I went with Yale.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: ALL OF THEM! It’s hard to name only a few, but here’s my feeble attempt: Kaveh Akbar’s Calling a Wolf a Wolf, Ife-Chudeni A. Oputa’s Rummage (Little A), Chelsea Dingman’s Thaw (University of Georgia Press), Layli Long Soldier’s WHEREAS, sam sax’s Madness, Nicole Sealey’s Ordinary Beast, and Charif Shanahan’s Into Each Room We Enter Without Knowing (Southern Illinois University Press).
William Brewer I Know Your Kind Milkweed Editions (National Poetry Series)
All the things I meant to do are burnt spoons
hanging from the porch like chimes.
—from “Naloxone”
How it began: In the broadest sense, I saw the opiate epidemic start to swallow up my home state. Eventually it made its way into my life in specific ways, including a day when someone came to me and my partner and told us they had developed a heroin addiction. I was extremely angry with them and brushed them off, but quickly after that—by which I mean within a matter of minutes—I was overwhelmed with repulsion toward myself for how quickly I had slipped into such a damning, limited, and unsophisticated view of what this person had just confessed. Here they were at their most vulnerable, and I couldn’t be less humane. I was enacting the shame and stigmatization that is our culture’s default. I hated that and wanted to push against it.
Inspiration: There are maybe five hundred books and writers I’d like to name if I had the space and time, but I Know Your Kind is particularly indebted to Virginia Woolf, Carl Phillips, Denis Johnson, the Inferno, Paradise Lost, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, Timothy Donnelly, John Berryman, and Walt Whitman.
Influences: I am constantly nourished, refreshed and challenged by Herman Melville, Don DeLillo, Caravaggio’s paintings, most of Stanley Kubrick, early Terrence Malick, LCD Soundsystem and Radiohead, the food of April Bloomfield, Gabrielle Hamilton, and the Joe Beef cookbook. More recently I have been nourished, refreshed, and challenged by Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Louise Glück, Lydia Davis, Joy Williams, Karen Solie, Isaac Babel, Teju Cole, and Blade Runner (new and original).
Writer’s block remedy: If my writing is stuck, it’s because I haven’t read enough. Sometimes I pretend this isn’t the case, but I’m always wrong.
Advice: I’d suggest thinking about what your book is doing as a composition. How does it read? What are its sources of heat and thrust? Does it have an arc? An architecture? A book can be a kind of random collection of poems and still be organized in such a way that creates drama, tension, interaction, and a greater composition.
Finding time to write: The Stegner affords me a great deal of writing time, for which I’m extremely grateful.
Time spent writing the book: The oldest poems in the book are about four to five years old, though a large chunk was written in a fit of about eighteen months. It’s hard to say because some poems existed in a kind of shadow form for years before they were fully realized.
Time spent finding a home for it: Long answer, five years; short answer, approximately eighteen months.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: Nicole Sealey’s Ordinary Beast. Elizabeth Metzger’s The Spirit Papers (University of Massachusetts Press). And I’m excited to read Emily Skillings’s Fort Not (The Song Cave).
Chen Chen When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities BOA Editions (A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize)
My job is to trick
myself into believing there are new ways to find impossible honey.
—from “Spell to Find Family”
How it began: The book happened poem by poem. I didn’t have a very specific project in mind. I wanted to write poems that excited me sonically and formally, that surprised me in their turns, that grappled with a wide array of subjects, such as: family, immigration, queerness, race, misrecognition, labor, pop culture, mortality, love, and “growing up” in a really broad sense. “Growing up” as something ongoing, unfinishable—not a linear process but a messy, multidirectional one. This theme of “growing up” became clearer the more poems I wrote and the more I saw them as being in conversation with one another.
The process of putting together my MFA thesis and working with my advisor, Bruce Smith, helped me take the step from a pile of poems to a poetry collection. After the book won the Poulin Prize, the judge, Jericho Brown, was so generous with his time and insights and helped me reshape and reenvision the manuscript. “Write the book you want to read,” Jericho said. It was the deepest encouragement as well as the most daunting challenge. And I felt that Jericho had inhabited the book in its ideal form, its most compelling state. He saw the potential, and he got me excited to revise.
I cut out about fifteen pages—poems involving this complicated relationship between a queer son and his unaccepting mother that were getting in the way of the book’s main movement. The book went from four sections to three, with that one poem (“Self-Portrait as So Much Potential”) set off on its own at the very beginning (a suggestion from my poet friend Jess Smith). And many poems underwent significant revision, mostly cuts and tightening up of language. I tend to be expansive and want to throw everything in, including the kitchen sink and everything from every kitchen on the planet going back to when kitchen sinks first became a thing; I’m fortunate to have such smart readers and editors who will tell me when my maximalist tendencies are working and I need to pull back.
Inspiration: Robert Hayden. Jean Valentine. Walt Whitman. Joseph O. Legaspi. Nikky Finney. Paul Celan. Audre Lorde. Allen Ginsberg, especially Howl. Richard Siken’s Crush. Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems. My former teachers Aracelis Girmay, Martín Espada, Deborah Gorlin, Bruce Smith, and Michael Burkard. Sarah Gambito, especially a poem called “Immigration,” which includes the line, “So what if I don’t love you.” Marilyn Chin’s Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen and Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore. Pablo Neruda, especially his odes, his poems about the Spanish Civil War, and his book TheBook of Questions. I love the range of Neruda’s work. In the United States he’s known for his early love poems, but he wrote so many different kinds of poetry, including some of the most moving political poems. Other inspirations: Buffy the Vampire Slayer; my mother (who is a fabulous storyteller); Tegan and Sara; Paul Klee paintings and their delightful titles; cross-country running; the trees of New England; the Texas sun; the Japanese gay porn star Koh Masaki; guanacos (an animal related to the llama); reduced-sodium soy sauce; Frank Ocean; my high school French teachers; my partner, Jeff Gilbert; our dog, Mr. Rupert Giles (named after the British librarian character in Buffy).
Writer’s block remedy: I have to take breaks. Walk around. Talk to people I like. Watch some TV. Eat a snack. Do a different form of work. I really like doing my laundry; I don’t know why, but I find it meditative and satisfying. It’s weird how much I like doing laundry because I’m not super cleanly when it comes to other things, like my desk, where I do the actual writing. But, nine times out of ten, doing laundry and then putting away all my clothes in a very organized fashion helps me return to the writing with a fresh mind and a sense of calm. When that doesn’t work, I have to accept the draft isn’t going anywhere, at least not at the moment, and I have to will myself to stop staring at the computer screen. And then it’s wonderful to realize that I have a totally different draft or at least some bundle of notes I could attend to. The well doesn’t dry up. I just have to look somewhere else and stop fixating on what I thought was going to be the next poem.
Advice: Believe in your work. Don’t write what you think will get you published. My book got picked up quickly, but it took a longer time for many of the individual poems to get published in journals. Rejection will continue to happen after your book comes out, so really know, for yourself, what you like about your writing. You don’t want to feel like you’re experiencing success from something that doesn’t fully belong to you. It’s so satisfying when someone does (finally!) appreciate the weird thing you’re doing, your weird thing. I’m going to sound Hallmark-y, but I’m serious: Don’t compromise on your heart.
Finding time to write: I’ve found that I’m a much happier person when I make time to write, so I try to do that first. Before answering e-mails, before checking the news and social media, before getting up to take a shower sometimes. First thing. Then I feel like I’ve had at least this small moment to tend to my spirit, to honor what’s most alive or mysterious in how I’m seeing or engaging with the world. I like to try getting a whole draft out, but even a couple lines or one image can make the moment glow, and I can carry that with me into the rest of the day. But, to be honest, much of the time I just try to squeeze in some writing here and there.
What’s next: A second collection of poems, tentatively titled “Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency.” A lyric craft essay on Asian American poets and the politics of humor. Some personal essays, but who knows if they’re actually poems, not essays.
Hometown: Amherst, Massachusetts, by way of Fort Worth, Texas, and Xiamen, China.
Residence: Lubbock, Texas.
Job: Doctoral student at Texas Tech University.
Time spent writing the book: The oldest poem is about six years old, but that includes a year of not even looking at it. I started it in college, then sort of abandoned it. This is a poem called “Race to the Tree,” which is probably the most narrative piece in my book. It took a long time to figure out the structure, though it ended up being pretty simple. Simplicity can take years, I guess. I was making edits on this poem up to the last minute before I had to turn in the final manuscript to my publisher. The other poems didn’t take quite that long. Most of my book was written during my MFA, and then I didn’t look at it for a little while after submitting it to contests and reading periods. I revised and revised after the book was picked up in Spring 2016. I work well with deadlines, so I’m glad that I had about five months (and not more than that) until the final manuscript was due last fall. It was a good amount of time for revisions—not too short that I felt rushed and not too long that I felt like I was overthinking everything. Well, I still overthought and over-obsessed, but not for terribly long!
Time spent finding a home for it: I was extremely lucky. I sent my book out to only seven places. One round of submissions in Fall/Winter 2015. I was mentally preparing myself to keep sending it out for many rounds. When I’ve submitted chapbook manuscripts, it’s taken more time and perseverance. When I apply for fellowships and residencies, it often takes a couple attempts at least. So I was stunned to learn that my book was a finalist for Waywiser Press’s Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize and then the winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize at BOA Editions. I was stunned and continue to feel deeply grateful to the readers and editors who’ve responded with such enthusiasm for my work. And it’s been a dream working with BOA.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: Layli Long Soldier’s WHEREAS. Keegan Lester’s this shouldn’t be beautiful but it was & it was all i had so i drew it (Slope Editions). Nico Amador’s Flower Wars (Newfound), which is one of the best chapbooks I’ve ever read; I’m excited to see what’s next for this poet. I’m painfully behind on new poetry collections, but I’m especially looking forward to reading Javier Zamora’s Unaccompanied and E. J. Koh’s A Lesser Love (Pleiades Press).
they mailed me from Mississippi in a metal ice chest
—from “how i arrived”
How it began: It started as a collection of mostly autobiographical poems that were varyingly interesting but not really cohesive. I talked with the publisher of Haymarket Books about the possibility of doing something with them, and it became one of those great iterative conversations where, through the process of talking something through with an active and curious listener, you have a chance to articulate for yourself what you’re really interested in doing. I realized that I wanted to write a book that would enter my own autobiographical coming-of-age story through a rewriting of my city’s past and future, through joy and magic, and that I wanted the book to speak to adolescent black girls and young adult black women. After that I was able to revise the manuscript into something with a lot more focus.
Inspiration: Reading Citizen by Claudia Rankine and seeing its use of visual art and prose. Walking around Chicago, driving around Chicago, biking around Chicago. Seeing visual art—for instance, the poem “The Device” was inspired by a series of masks I saw in the African art gallery at the Art Institute of Chicago. Going to the National Museum of African American History and Culture and seeing “the Mothership” that used to land onstage when Parliament-Funkadelic and George Clinton performed. Watching the film that Beyoncé made to accompany Lemonade and listening to A Seat at the Table by Solange; both pieces engage in elements of magic and world-building and, in the case of Solange’s album, a cohesion and clarity of aesthetic that I find inspiring. Listening to the album Heavn by Jamila Woods. Listening to Flying Lotus. A million other things.
Influences: Gwendolyn Brooks—I was writing the show No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks when I was editing Electric Arches. Ross Gay. Fatimah Asghar. Jamila Woods. Kevin Coval. Nate Marshall. Hanif Abdurraqib. Patricia Smith. Studs Terkel. Danez Smith.
Writer’s block remedy: I write in multiple genres, so often I just try to turn my attention to something else or step away from a project if it needs a little more time to incubate—although I often find it helpful to interrogate myself somewhat about the nature of the impasse. Am I tired? Hungry? Distracted? Is this idea bad? Is it something I’ve lost interest in? Am I trying to make an argument that I don’t actually have the evidence to make yet? Do I need another pair of eyes? Reflecting and being honest with myself about what’s going on usually helps me move forward. I’m also patient with myself. Everything doesn’t have to be written just this minute. Sometimes it’s okay to go read a book or ride a bike.
Advice: I think I was so eager to publish my book—and also perhaps somewhat lacking in confidence in myself—that I was at risk of going with any press that came along. I’m so grateful that I ended up with Haymarket, which I think was just perfect for me for so many reasons. If that hadn’t happened, I think there’s an alternate universe where the book is out on some other press in a much diminished form. I think it’s worth it to be patient and find the right press that believes not just in your book in the abstract, but in your entire vision for how you’d like it to live and operate in the world. I also think it’s worthwhile to ask yourself, “Which of these poems really are exciting to me?” and try to figure out which poems serve as the core thematic foundations of the book, and then edit and cut mercilessly around those foundations.
Finding time to write: It’s my job, which means it’s nonnegotiable, and we have to find the time for things that are nonnegotiable. I clear a path for it in whatever ways I can. Sometimes that means having a very disciplined morning writing session or a daylong retreat, and sometimes that means doing things the old-fashioned way—scribbling notes on a train or a bus.
What’s next: I recently finished my second book, When the Bell Stops Ringing, a work of nonfiction about the mass closure of public schools in Chicago and the history of racism in the city. I’m working on kicking off some new research projects that I hope will result in my second academic book, though that’s a very long process. And on Sunday mornings, little by little, I’ve been working on some fiction.
Job: Professor at the University of Chicago and writer.
Time spent writing the book: Three years.
Time spent finding a home for it: About a year.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: Three collections I both enjoyed and learned from were Safia Elhillo’s The January Children, Nicole Sealey’s Ordinary Beast, and sam sax’s Madness.
Let us speak without occasion of relations of our choosing!
—from “Gay Marriage Poem”
How it began: There’s a scene in a somewhat dated film from 1983, Lianna, directed by John Sayles, in which the protagonist goes to a lesbian bar for the first time with her lover. The next morning, as she’s walking down the street, she is newly able to integrate a private way of being, seeing, and desiring into her public sphere. Through an exchange of looks, you see her recognizing that all along there existed a community of other queer folks. Suddenly she’s moving through a space where future friends or lovers are newly possibly everywhere—choosing a plum at the fruit stand or on the far side of a street smiling at you as you smile back. Kind of like an audience for a poem that you weren’t sure existed but who you kept writing and revising for just in case.
Inspiration: Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity by Bruce Bagemihl, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity by José Esteban Muñoz, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality by Gayle Salamon.
Influences: Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde are poets I read when I know I could be living and writing more courageously. A few other writers whose poems have been especially strong mentors are Rita Dove, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Marilyn Hacker, and Larry Levis.
Writer’s block remedy: I often turn to my dear friend and fellow poet Soham Patel, who always reminds me that it’s okay to play. And then we do—though we live in different cities, we get on the phone, laugh a lot, give each other exercises, and hold each other accountable.
Advice: Don’t listen to the voices of those who fear the power in what you have made and will make. Trust your closest readers and the reciprocal spaces that nourish you and give you strength.
Finding time to write: Like many poets I know, I am resourceful. I memorize poems that I love by others, which helps me think through my own while walking home along a busy road muffled by traffic. I carry a pocket-sized notebook when I go for a run. I have a little desk in an attic by a third-floor window where I slow down to revise. But many poems begin in the interstices of the day, when my mind is in motion.
What’s next: I recently cowrote a one-act play with playwright and friend Paul Kruse. It’s called Boundary Layer. The play takes place in a mysterious world covered in the most humble of life forms—moss. The last two people on a lonely planet, Sam and Dusty, are left to negotiate unexpected desires, relationships, and boundaries as they step outside of what is safe, familiar, and human.
Job: I teach at the University of Pittsburgh and at the Rainier Writing Workshop, Pacific Lutheran University’s low-residency MFA program. Before I taught college, I was a public school teacher.
Time spent writing the book: Eight years. In “Invisibility in Academe,” Adrienne Rich says that when someone “describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing. Yet you know you exist and others like you, that this is a game with mirrors.” I share this because I spent eight years writing, but also eight years working through some sort of “psychic disequilibrium.” Often I was writing, but at the same time I was teaching, loving, showing up for others, organizing, dancing: choosing to be in spaces where I could better see myself. To write my book, I had to widen my sense of my work in relation to others.
Time spent finding a home for it: I was quite lucky—I sent my book out for about a year. Then I won a Whiting Award. The weekend of the awards ceremony in New York City, I gave a reading from my unpublished manuscript. After the reading, I was approached by an editor at Sarabande.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: What’s Hanging on the Hush (Ahsahta Press) by Lauren Russell, Unaccompanied by Javier Zamora, and The Virginia State Colony For Epileptics and Feebleminded (Persea Books) by Molly McCully Brown.
sam sax Madness Penguin Books (National Poetry Series)
you either love the world or you live in it
—from “Warning: Red Liquid”
How it began: The seed for this book was actually just an exercise I gave myself. I’d come across a list of reasons for admission to a mental asylum in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, in the 1800s that included examples such as “kicked in the head by a horse,” “tobacco and masturbation,” and “novel reading,” which I thought would all make lovely titles for poems. So I went to the woods (a residency at the Blue Mountain Center) but found I couldn’t write poems within that stricture. Instead I refocused my attention on the precise moment in history when homosexuality was taken out of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and how that act of depathologizing has affected the way we think about and embody queerness and desire today. I began to work sequentially, incorporating my own relationship and my family’s relationship with mental health as both patients and practitioners. Through this process I discovered how clearly you can draw a line between so much of the inherited, lived, and systemic violence we experience and perpetuate today back to those early diagnoses.
Inspiration: Some of my research materials were The Birth of the Clinic and Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault. The DSM-I from 1952. The collected paintings of Francisco Goya and Hieronymus Bosch. Freud’s idea of the pleasure principle. Talking with my grandpa. The Sawbones podcast.
Influences: My friends. The folks I started writing with and have grown alongside over many years have unequivocally had the most impactful and life-altering affect on my writing and personhood. Some of those folks are Franny Choi, Cameron Awkward-Rich, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Danez Smith, Fatimah Asghar, as well as countless other geniuses I’m lucky enough to be around. I’d also say there’s a litany of smart, politicized, literary, sad homosexuals from the present back to Hart Crane flinging himself off the deck of that ship who have made my work possible.
Writer’s block remedy: Give up and start something new. There are many poems to be written. If something isn’t working, I feel totally fine putting it aside and writing toward what has the most urgency and energy around it. Another thing that frees me up from the internal and newly external pressures of writing poems is being a-okay making terrible ones. I try to think of each new piece of writing as an experiment until it transcends that and becomes a poem. There’s something about the lack of preciousness around this process that helps me think of them as disposable until they become indispensable. Also each experiment and almost poem that doesn’t meet the world helps me accrue knowledge that will inform the next thing I write.
Advice: Everyone’s journey is different, and I can’t think of any catchall prescriptive advice outside of: Don’t be a jerk. It can be a really crummy process. For the longest time not having a book made me quite sad, and I always found it mad frustrating when someone who was already established told me to take my time and that it would work out how it’s supposed to. Although that turned out true in my case, I don’t necessarily think this is good advice. If you’ve finished one project, move on to another. You can always return to edit what you’ve already written. The doldrums that sometimes arise from not having a book can be dangerous. Madness is the sixth or seventh full manuscript I put together over eight or so years of writing, and to be honest, had any of those initial books been published, it would have been bad news. The time it took to get these books into the world has been invaluable for their life as books and for mine as a writer. So if you can stomach the patience, go for it. If not, publish chaps! Self-publish zines (I made like twenty as a younger punk writer.) There are lots of ways to get your work out into the world that isn’t as precious, lauded, and seemingly impossible as the first book object. Fuck it up. Make your poems indispensable to the world and let publishers fight over the privilege of supporting your work.
Finding time to write: I find time to write in the mornings before other obligations, during a spare hour at the coffee shop, on trains, buses. I’ve been trying to broaden my notion of what writing is to include the passive moments—a shift in perspective where looking at the world is just as important as writing it down.
What’s next: I’ve got two books in the works. There’s a collection of poems that’s currently circling around a sequence of Anthropocene / Apocalypse poems that attempt to celebrate queer joy in community and loneliness as the world burns. I’m also working on a novel, which is a queer Jewish coming-of-age story told in nonlinear fragments from the perspective of someone who’s just lit their self on fire outside of Trump Tower.
Hometown: Born in Manhattan, went to high school in Mamaroneck, New York.
Residence: Brooklyn, New York.
Job: I teach poetry and give readings.
Time spent writing the book: A little over a year. I wrote the drafts and skeletons for two-thirds of the book in the month I was up at a residency, and I spent the next year editing and refining. The rest of the book I wrote in and out of graduate school.
Time spent finding a home for it: Well, I’d just had my first book, which will be published second, picked up by Wesleyan University Press. The process of writing and sending it out took five to six years, although the book is wildly different from earlier versions I’d sent out. I had finished writing that first book and was tired of waiting for it to be accepted, so I decided to write a second book. I sent Madness out on a whim to the National Poetry Series and was expecting to have a multiyear journey of searching for a publisher, but amazingly Terrance Hayes selected the book. We had to push back my first book, Bury It, by a year so that the two books wouldn’t be in competition with each other.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: Oy. This year has been ridiculously plump with incredible and dangerous first books. Here’s my list of poets whose first books this year took the top of my head off: Nicole Sealey, Kaveh Akbar, Erika L. Sánchez, Ife-Chudeni A. Oputa, Tyree Daye, Meg Freitag, Chen Chen, Eve L. Ewing, Layli Long Soldier, William Brewer, Chelsea Dingman, Javier Zamora, and I am SURE I’m leaving some wonderful books off this list.
I was never here. I’m not coming back. I’m at sea.
—from “Crystal Radio”
How it began: This book is a collection of mostly discrete poems that I wrote in graduate school (a handful were written in the time before and after). I never set off to write it; I looked back and gathered things I’d previously written and arranged them and drew out connections among them. It’s more of an act of returning. I think many first books begin this way, by remembering what’s been done already. Some of the shared attentions and themes of the book include depression, gender, color, painting and visual art, toxic white femininity, cloudiness, somatic experience, cantankerousness, jealousy, sex, light, America, collage, feelings without names, looming dread, boredom, water. I think in a larger sense I wanted to create a space where a state of not quite knowing felt expert, delightful, powerful.
Inspiration: I feel a little corny saying this, but my friends are my greatest inspiration. I am about to coteach a class on the poetics of refusal with a friend, the poet and artist Simone Kearney, at Parsons School of Design. Our conversations around this subject, around phenomenology and Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, Virginia Woolf’s On Being Ill, and other texts that draw out these “slow states,” have really helped to create an environment for my work to emerge. The workshops and seminars I attended at Columbia were also instrumental. My students inspire me every week with their risk-taking and generosity. John Cleese’s character, Basil Fawlty, in the 1970s British sitcom Fawlty Towers shaped a lot of my early fascination with language, as did my father’s yellow legal pads, my mother’s excellent malapropisms and non sequiturs (“mind like a steel sieve”/ “letting the can of worms out of the bag”), and my brother’s baroque prose and steady diet of cyberpunk novels. I am a dedicated follower of a Twitter account of Yiddish proverbs.
Influences: John Ashbery, A. R. Ammons, Marcella Durand, Laura (Riding) Jackson, Eileen Myles, Francis Ponge, Sei Shōnagon, Mary Ruefle, Douglas Kearney, Susan Howe, Myung Mi Kim, Ariana Reines, Claudia Rankine, F. T. Prince, Emily Hunt, H. D., Harryette Mullen, Adam Fitzgerald, Alice Notley, Fernando Pessoa, my teachers Timothy Donnelly and Dorothea Lasky, Wayne Koestenbaum, Tracie Morris, Édouard Levé, Kim Hyesoon, Jorie Graham, Lucy Ives, Lyn Hejinian, Elizabeth Bishop, Jorge Luis Borges, James Schuyler, Lisa Robertson, Ali Power, Emily Dickinson, William Wordsworth, my dance teacher Alexandra Beller.
Writer’s block remedy: I usually reach an impasse because I need to take a minute to recharge, so I listen to that. I quiet down my writer mind and enter a reading-seeing phase that may last weeks or months. I use a lot of repetition and anaphora in my work (some of which gets cut later) because I find the experience of repeating oneself to be both necessary in our times and deeply clarifying and stimulating. To repeat a phrase is both to stabilize it in the memory of the writer and reader and to question its soundness, as in Gertrude Stein’s “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” The rose is both etched in our mind and transformed, transmogrified. When I still made dances, I was obsessed with repetition and resultant exhaustion, and I often repeat as a way of entering or reentering a poem. I think I learned how to do this by listening to Anne Waldman and Dorothea Lasky.
One question I am still grappling with is how to negotiate a balance between “innovation,” constraint, and intuition. The painter Jane Freilicher put it best, I think, when she said, “To strain after innovation, to worry about being on ‘the cutting edge’ (a phrase I hate), reflects a concern for a place in history or one’s career rather than the authenticity of one’s painting.” There’s also, I think, a quieter quote somewhere about her letting go of the pressure to be innovative, and that she felt she could really paint after that, but I can’t seem to find it anywhere.
This sounds a little strange, but I like to think of my life so far as a writer as a kind of oscillation between states of openness and movement and states of stillness and solitude. There are islands of production, productivity, and then pockets of…nothing. I think I am grateful to my depression in this way, in that it often forces me to be still.
Advice: Support other writers by editing their books, teaching their work, inviting them to read, publishing them, letting them sleep on your couch, etc. Put your work in the hands of only people you know to be caring and dedicated. I am grateful that being a poet is perhaps more of a career path than it once was, and I know that being heard and read is vital to the form. That being said, I do find the professionalization of poetry (in which we all engage) to be in some ways hurtful to the writing itself. It’s okay to turn it off sometimes, this drive toward productivity. When you are writing, you are not involved in career making; you are being a poet. You are also a poet when you are teaching or walking around or doing your day job or looking at art. Don’t partition off your daily life from your writing life.
Eileen Myles once visited an undergraduate poetry workshop taught by Jennifer Firestone that I was taking, and she said something like: “There is something to being a poet that has nothing to do with writing poetry. It’s an identity.” This was such a relief for me when I heard it almost ten years ago, and yet I’m still not sure what it means. Perhaps what it means to me keeps changing. I like that.
Finding time to write: I am a very slow writer. I only sit down to write a poem a handful of times per month, but I find I am constantly jotting down fragments, recording phrases, and “puttering” (to borrow one of my mother’s favorite terms) over lines. I usually use my phone to record these, either as a note or in a voice memo. These scraps gleaned from daily life become the scaffolding of many of my poems. I’ve been commuting to teach this semester and have also found that being on a train (with no Wi-Fi!) and gently zooming through a landscape is very conducive to writing. I just have to stay ahead of the motion sickness.
What’s next: I’m working on a book-length poem sequence called “Mother of Pearl” about the environment and whether or not I want to eventually have children. It uses fragments of language from the anonymous Middle English poem “Pearl,” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, lyrics from Roxy Music’s song “Mother of Pearl,” and probably a few more sources. It is a very different experience than writing Fort Not, both because it is more of a project book than a collection, and because it relies on and is building itself around found language. I also want to start writing a novel but don’t quite know how.
Residence: Brooklyn, New York, and sometimes Hudson, New York.
Job: Assistant to poets and an adjunct professor.
Time spent writing the book: Five years. I wrote the poem “Canary” in thirty minutes before a poetry reading at the Center for Book Arts in 2013 and didn’t change a word. I began the poem “Parallelogram” in 2014 and didn’t finish it until 2016, revising it well into 2017.
Time spent finding a home for it: I think I had a pretty rare experience in that the Song Cave (run by the incredible Alan Felsenthal and Ben Estes) was the first and only press to which I sent the manuscript, so not long. The deadline for the Song Cave’s 2016 open reading period (and my partner Danniel Schoonebeek’s gentle nudging to put it in my calendar) was one of the primary motivators for getting the initial manuscript together.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: William Brewer’s incredible I Know Your Kind comes to mind, and Nicole Sealey’s Ordinary Beast. Tongo Eisen-Martin’s second book, Heaven Is All Goodbyes (City Lights Books), is one of my favorite books of the year, along with Alan Felsenthal’s debut, Lowly (Ugly Duckling Presse). I am incredibly excited for Samantha Zighelboim’s The Fat Sonnets, which will be coming out in 2018 from Argos Books.
Joseph Rios Shadowboxing: Poems & Impersonations Omnidawn Publishing
I am the American, güey
—from “Southpaw Curse”
How it began: It was a long while before I started thinking about a book. Willie Perdomo helped me with that at a Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation workshop. That’s when I found my alter ego, Josefo. Willie got me to conceptualize a project that could be built around this character. That was in 2012. It took another three years to mold the work into something that felt whole. I read John Berryman’s Mr. Bones character [from The Dream Songs] and Zbigniew Herbert’s Mr. Cogito and fell in love with the notion of characters living full lives inside poems. It’s a thin veil, of course, but it worked for me. I was able to hide behind this character that looked and sounded like me, had the same memories and experiences as me, but was allowed to live apart from me.
Inspiration: My grandmother’s stories, my grandfather’s stories, the dudes I dug trenches with, the packinghouse where I used to work, wrench turners at my uncle’s airplane shop, jornaleros I picked up at Home Depot in Cypress Park, in Oakland, Marina del Rey, Daly City. My cousin Gabe’s vinyl collection, Dro’s Navy stories, dysfunctional romantic relationships, regret, mistakes, degenerate behavior, survival, and healing. You know, all that stuff you talk about when you and your cousin Erica are drunk and crying at four in the morning. Also, watching people I love get sick and pass away. All that loss, too much loss. Mourning, of course.
Influences: Javier O. Huerta, Michele Serros, Richard Pryor, Douglas Kearney, Warren G, Andrés Montoya, Rafa Cardenas, John Berryman, Zbigniew Herbert, D’Angelo, Art Laboe, and the Rocky films.
Writer’s block remedy: My poetry community, without a doubt. As I write this, I’m sitting across from my poet-cousin Sara Borjas. We met up to get some work done. I really couldn’t do a damn thing without these people.
Advice: Keep writing. Keep grinding. Send to presses that are publishing work you give a shit about. Don’t water down your voice because you think that’s what it takes to get a book. My homie Chiwan Choi asks us, “Why sell out in a zero-dollar industry?” It might sound corny, but be your whole self on the page. There isn’t much out there more terrifying to the powers that be than a bunch of people being their whole damn selves on the page. They straight up ban those books in places like Arizona. We need more of those books.
Finding time to write: I have to make time or it doesn’t happen. I get lazy. I work nights and weekends. Weekdays are usually free for poet work. I have people around me who keep me accountable.
What’s next: Tough question. I feel so far away from anything that resembles a second collection. I’m trying very hard to resist the producer mentality and to just enjoy this book and reflect on the journey I took to get here.
Job: I work at a venue called Civic Center Studios in downtown Los Angeles.
Time spent writing the book: Seven years, give or take.
Time spent finding a home for it: I submitted a previous version of the book as early as 2011. It was premature, without a doubt, but sending to contests kept me engaged in the work. I’m deadline driven that way.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: For real, 2017 needs to calm down. Where do I begin? Mai Der Vang’s Afterland (Graywolf Press). Javier Zamora’s Unaccompanied. Vickie Vértiz’s Palm Frond With Its Throat Cut (University of Arizona Press). Nicole Sealey’s Ordinary Beast. Jennifer Maritza McCauley’s Scar On/Scar Off (Stalking Horse Press). Vanessa Angélica Villarreal’s Beast Meridian (Noemi Press).
Now make room in the mouth for grassesgrassesgrasses
—from “Part 1: These Being the Concerns”
How it began: The first half of WHEREAS is a collection of poems that date back over the last decade. There was no particular setting off or intent for those poems except the desire to write. The second half of the book is a response to the 2009 Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans. For those pieces, it was a kind of frustration and outrage—lifelong and on slow boil—that propelled me.
Inspiration: My daughter, motherhood, and watching the younger generation. The land—the artfulness of the land, its endurance and change, its nonverbal lessons. And people—unexpected encounters as well as long-term relationships. I am always profoundly struck by the surprising things people say and do. People are poems, in themselves.
Influences: My daughter’s dad, the poet Orlando White, was as an important influence on my development as a writer, as were the poets he introduced me to—bpNichol and Aram Saroyan—whose works I return to over and over. Frida Kahlo and Zitkala-Sa speak to me as women artists of mixed heritage who elevated indigenous art, philosophies, and histories within contemporary considerations of art. And definitely the Native poets of my generation, previous generations, and the upcoming; their works are my touchstones. I turn to their pages both for inspiration and as conversation; I look and listen to how they handle language, form, line, and the big, sliding boulders of content.
Writer’s block remedy: Conversation—e-mails and phone calls—with other poets. Talking things out really helps the energy start moving again. There’s also conversation with the page: I will open a book of poems and keep the pages turned upward, next to my laptop. Sometimes just a glance toward the page helps invigorate my belief that whatever I’m working on, it can be written. I have others to hold my hand, figuratively speaking. And, when a piece has stopped and won’t move no matter how much I try, I need to take a break and do nothing for a while. Relaxing my brain is very important! I need to watch Netflix or hang out with my daughter; I need to laugh and not think about poetry at all.
Advice: Write as honestly as you can. Write what’s most important to you.
Finding time to write: I work at night from around 10 PM to 4 or 5 AM. I sleep in, in the morning. But it’s worth it. The night is an uninterrupted block of time that I really need.
What’s next: A new manuscript titled “2.” In this, I am working with ideas of duality, multiplicity, mixed heritage, failure versus success (the illusion of both), love and its failure, love and its necessity. Mostly, I am working with “2,” even at the most basic biological level, as the beginnings of pain and, likewise, belonging.
Hometown: I grew up in the Southwest; I don’t have a single hometown. But I have lived in Santa Fe the longest and feel most at home here.
Residence: Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Job: Write, make art, do readings.
Time spent writing the book: A few of the poems date back ten years or so, not long after my daughter was born in 2006. And I began my response to the Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans—the poems in Part II—in 2010 or 2011. Altogether, the response pieces took me about six years.
Time spent finding a home for it: A number of years ago, Jeff Shotts from Graywolf Press read my poem “Ȟe Sápa” online at the Kenyon Review. He messaged me about the poem and asked if I had a manuscript to read. At the time, I didn’t, but I told him that I was working on one. It took several years after receiving his message for me to finish WHEREAS. But we kept in touch and, although I was prepared to send my manuscript to other presses if Graywolf did not accept it, Graywolf ended up being the only press I submitted to when the manuscript was ready.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: Mai Der Vang’s Afterland and Bojan Louis’s Currents (BkMk Press).
Ten years ago, Poets & Writers Magazine launched its annual Debut Poets series—a feature that aimed, quite simply, to highlight some of the best first books of poetry published in the previous year. In the decade since then, the series has grown into something all its own, bringing to light some of the most inspired, and inspiring, emerging poets from across the country—along with the ambitious, vital, and lasting collections they create. A number of the poets we’ve featured have gone on to become familiar names in the national writing community—Dan Albergotti, Todd Boss, Jericho Brown, Victoria Chang, Michael Cirelli, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Aracelis Girmay, Dana Goodyear, Tyehimba Jess, Dorothea Lasky, Joseph O. Legaspi, Alex Lemon, Ada Limón, and Justin Marks, to name just a few from the early years. But what’s most remarkable, when looking back through this list of poets (which you can see in full starting on page 90), is that all of them, regardless of how prolific or well known, made a commitment to writing, dedicating themselves to bringing words to life despite the jobs, everyday obligations, and myriad challenges that inevitably arise as time ticks along.
In celebration of our tenth annual Debut Poets roundup, we reached out to those poets—all 111 of them (one, Landis Everson, sadly, passed away in 2007)—and asked them to recommend their favorite debut collections of 2014. A good number responded, building for us a longlist of some of the year’s most exciting books. From that we selected the ten poets featured in the following pages. The task was not easy: We looked at both the work within those collections and at the poets themselves, in an attempt to curate not only a broad range of voice, style, content, and form, but also a diverse list of poets representing a unique breadth of age, background, and experience. These ten poets find inspiration in everything from neuroscience, outer space, black holes, and race to Anglo-Saxon elegies, Vietnamese musicals, honey badgers, and Nina Simone. Despite their many differences, though, they all point to a sense of wonder, exploration, curiosity, and community as essential to their writing—and they are all creating urgent, powerful, and important work. And what connects them even more fundamentally is that regardless of where they come from, what they do for a living, or where they draw inspiration, they all do it for the same reasons: for love of the work, and, as Sally Wen Mao puts it, to break into the silence, disarm the solitude, and find a place where poetry lives.
Sally Wen Mao MAD HONEY SYMPOSIUM Alice James Books
Abandon hive. If the hornet breaks the heat net,
save yourself. Abandon yen. Abandon majesty. Spit the light out because it sears you so. —from “Apiology, With Stigma”
HOW IT BEGAN: In early 2012, I decided that the poems I had collected needed to transform into a manuscript. What compelled me? Probably the naked trees on Linn Street, my tiny yellow living room full of books and ghosts, or the radio silence of the days. Those winter days were short and frigid: Every day I walked past a frozen waterfall and slipped on cracked ice. I knew I had to write to break into that silence, disarm that solitude.
INSPIRATION: The earliest incarnation of this manuscript was a thesis project I titled “A Field Guide to Trapped Animals.” In this manuscript, I sought trapped animals: the honey badger, Laika the space dog, endangered flightless birds such as the kakapo, taxidermists’ specimens, disgruntled pandas in captivity, a flock of doomed pigeons. I admired the honey badger for its inane yet marvelous tenacity to sate its appetites for dangerous animals. From that obsession I found bees, and the magical honeys that they can make, including mad honey (meli chloron), a noxious honey made from rhododendrons or azaleas or oleanders that causes drunkenness, hallucinations, and heart palpitations in humans. There I was able to find the manuscript’s spine—humans who poison themselves for the sake of their desires.
INFLUENCES: Ai, for her poems are fire escapes into the terrifying psyches of others. Lorca, for his theory of the duende, and his poems that wander through the darkest and loneliest spaces in New York City. Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, for Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, one of my earliest introductions to poetry. Most recently Cathy Park Hong and Bhanu Kapil, women writers whose hugely exciting works transgress boundaries and shift borders in terms of subject, syntax, and form.
WHAT’S NEXT: I’m working on a new manuscript, Oculus, that maps out the border between exposure and invisibility: ghosts, cinema, digital life, and Internet voyeurism. In this manuscript, Anna May Wong, the Chinese American film actress who peaked in the 1920s and 1930s, acquires a time machine and travels through time searching for her perfect role. Along the way, she meets some of her contemporaries (Josephine Baker and Zora Neale Hurston), and some of her successors (Bruce Lee), and she is dismayed to see some of the future films that continue to cast Asian Americans in a stereotypical light. Other poems in this manuscript are about magnetic levitation trains, Chinese bodies exposed in the Bodies Exhibition, a model who wears a homeless man’s pants, and girls competing for a national singing competition.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: Sometimes the writing stops, but there is never enough material for a poet’s arsenal. I look for high places and vantage points, new spaces to invade and interrogate. I look for old books in science libraries. I research poetic obsessions or I try to look for new ones. I visit contemporary-art museums, natural-history museums, planetariums, space museums, botanical gardens, science libraries, bookstores, parties, concerts, or arboretums. I love the feeling of movement, of being on a train heading to someplace unknown. My entire self is built around this wonder, this movement, this search for adventure. I seek adventures, and they float back as poems eventually.
ADVICE: Be impermeable. Research your presses: Read their books, see if you like their covers, get to know their submission and evaluation process. It’s like finding an apartment, really: Send your manuscript to those presses that you could envision as a home for your poems to live. The key is to find a place where your poems live.
AGE: 27.
RESIDENCE: Brooklyn, New York.
JOB: I’m an instructor in the Asian American Studies program at Hunter College in New York, where I teach Asian American Poetics, and a teaching artist at several sites around Brooklyn.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? Yes, thankfully, but who knows for how long. In the mornings I write, or late into the night with a cup of milk tea.
Sally Wen Mao reads five poems from Mad Honey Symposium, published by Alice James Books.
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Charlotte Boulay FOXES ON THE TRAMPOLINE Ecco
As much as I wanted that boy saved, I wanted him eaten. —from “Watson and the Shark”
HOW IT BEGAN: I’ve written poetry since high school, and graduate school helped me think about ways a disparate collection of poems might become a more or less cohesive whole. Foxes isn’t a book “project,” although it has some themes and interests that run throughout. These include exploring ideas associated with journeys, both concrete and abstract, as well as questions about desire and loss.
INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCES: I’ve joked that in almost any of my poems you can find references to animals and weather, but I think these are less inspirations than touch points that help me structure my concerns. I spent time in my early twenties living in India, and that was certainly an education, as well as an inspiration. I’m also continually inspired by visual art—paintings and photography and sculpture can do things that words can’t, but poetry can create a dialogue with them. This book owes a debt to Cy Twombly, whose work continues to fascinate me. In working on Foxes, I particularly relied on and admired the work of poets Saskia Hamilton, Nancy Willard, Robert Hass, and Susan Hutton.
WHAT’S NEXT: I’m working on both poems and essays. I’d love to write a second book more quickly than this one, but we’ll see.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: I try to get outside and take a walk, if I’m smart, and if not I try to turn as far away from my own obsessions as possible, to get out of my own head. That may be how I discovered the YouTube home video of foxes jumping on a trampoline in someone’s backyard—aimless Web surfing. What keeps me going is reaching for the moment when a poem comes together, when it becomes itself and something separate from me.
ADVICE: Keep going. Cycles of feeling good about your work that alternate with doubt that any of it is worthwhile are completely normal. Listen to the judgments and suggestions you get from readers you trust, test them out, and then throw them away if they don’t feel right. Submit to all the places where you’ve always dreamed of being published. Don’t hold anything back.
AGE: 36.
RESIDENCE: Philadelphia.
JOB: I’m a grant writer at the Franklin Institute science museum.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? This is something I continue to struggle with. I thought that leaving teaching and entering a 9-5 job would leave me freer to write without the burdens of grading and office hours, but in fact I’m pretty invested in my day job, and it often occupies my thoughts both inside and outside the office. I do make more money than I did as an adjunct, though, so that’s something, but I have much less time off. I’m still figuring out how to make more room in my daily routine for poetry. I’m not very good at writing in small snatches of time, but I’m working on it, and hoping it will help me in ways I haven’t discovered yet.
TIME SPENT WRITING THE BOOK: I worked slowly on the book for about seven years.
TIME SPENT FINDING A HOME FOR IT: I sent it out to contests two years in a row, but had to withdraw from a few the second year after Ecco took it. My editor contacted me to ask for the manuscript after seeing a poem of mine in print, so that can still happen.
Charlotte Boulay reads the poem “Fleet” from Foxes on the Trampoline, published by Ecco. For more of Boulay’s work, visit www.charlotteboulay.com.
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Hieu Minh Nguyen THIS WAY TO THE SUGAR Write Bloody Publishing
Sometimes you don’t die when you’re supposed to, and sometimes you do. —from “Flight”
HOW IT BEGAN: For a long time, I didn’t know how to write about my traumas. I found myself writing the same poems over and over again, even if they didn’t make any sense to the world, even if I was the only person who would understand the significance of something as basic as a peach. I guess the hope was that if I could write the poems, if I could speak about my trauma in a way that didn’t seem careless, I could stop trying to explain myself. It is stupid to feel the need to explain yourself at all, but I spent a lot of time being ashamed of my experiences as a son, a body, a survivor, and I believe in the importance of confession as a tool to combat shame.
INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCES: So many movies! Since a lot of my book talks about my childhood, I spent a lot of time archiving my past, which meant interviewing my mother, visiting old neighborhoods, and watching movies from when I was younger. I spent endless nights watching and rewatching cai luong, which are essentially Vietnamese musicals. I was obsessed. Because my start in poetry began in spoken-word and slam poetry, many of my earlier influences came from performance poets, often poets who could transcend the arbitrary boundaries between the performance world and the written one, such as Rachel McKibbens, Bao Phi, and Patricia Smith. Through my participation in the performance world, I was lucky enough to have been introduced to the work of poets outside of spoken word, including Li-Young Lee, Anne Sexton, and Philip Levine.
WHAT’S NEXT: Currently I am applying to college. I abstained from going to college directly after high school, but now it seems like the right time. So basically a lot of my time has been spent writing college admission essays and studying for the ACT. It’s pretty terrifying; I haven’t done math in six years. As for poetry, I am currently working on poems about time travel.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: I spend a lot of my time alone in my apartment writing, so when I come to a block, I feel like I’ve taken all I can from that space and need time to let it recharge. Usually, it requires engaging in something visual and half-social, like writing alone in a public location.
ADVICE: Give yourself permission to not explain everything.
AGE: 23.
RESIDENCE: Minneapolis.
JOB: Right now I am on a book tour, but when I’m back home I work at a haberdashery, selling fancy hats to fancy people.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? My job has been incredibly supportive; I’m very lucky. I’ve been able to take large chunks of time off of work to focus on writing or traveling, and am always welcomed back.
TIME SPENT WRITING THE BOOK: Most of the poems in the book were less than two years old, some even a few months old, by the time it was released.
TIME SPENT FINDING A HOME FOR IT: I started submitting the early version of the manuscript about two years before it got accepted.
Hieu Minh Nguyen reads a poem from This Way to the Sugar, published by Write Bloody Publishing. For more videos of Nguyen’s work visit www.hieuminhnguyen.com.
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Saeed Jones PRELUDE TO BRUISE Coffee House Press
in this town everything born black also burns. —from “Anthracite”
HOW IT BEGAN: The poems exist in the space between the reality of my life as a gay black man from the American South and the mythology I often dreamed of in my isolation. With that said, I wrote about half of the poems in the book before Boy, the character we follow throughout the collection, appeared to me. I wrote a poem in which a boy wakes up from a beautiful dream to find his father standing silently in the doorway of his bedroom. The silence of that moment—the interior and exterior worlds colliding—stunned me. Prelude to Bruise exists in the form it does now because I wanted to know what happened next and why.
INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCES: Homer’s The Odyssey, the last few collections Alexander McQueen designed before he took his own life, the way Toni Morrison involves landscapes and weather in the plot of her novels, and Nina Simone’s music. The poems of Lucie Brock-Broido, Patricia Smith, Rigoberto González, Anna Journey, Eduardo Corral, Jericho Brown, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and Audre Lorde. The essays of June Jordan, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Susan Sontag.
WHAT’S NEXT: I’m writing a memoir that charts a course from 1998, when I was 12, the year Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. were killed in hate crimes, to 2008, the year a straight man invited me into his bedroom, stripped down to his boxer shorts, and tried to kill me.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: When I’m struggling to write, I tend to begin reading in even more earnest than usual—earnest in the sense of pushing myself to read work beyond what I regard as my intellectual home and artistic neighborhood. I read to find work that will jolt me out of my usual habits and ways of approaching whatever I’m working on. Usually this works, but now and then it doesn’t. I’ve yet to be blocked in the sense of not being able to write for an extended period of time. Much more likely, I get frustrated because I hate what I’m writing and can’t tell if I should keep going or go in a different direction entirely. Reading then is like consulting a map for the best path forward.
ADVICE: Read five poems for every one poem that you write. You have to understand the broader landscape and community in which your work exists.
AGE: 29.
RESIDENCE: New York City.
JOB: I’m the editor of BuzzFeed LGBT.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? I’ve essentially finished one book and started another in the two years I’ve been working at BuzzFeed.
TIME SPENT WRITING THE BOOK: I worked on the book for five or six years.
TIME SPENT FINDING A HOME FOR IT: I submitted my manuscript to two contests; it was a finalist for the 2012 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. A few months later, Erika Stevens from Coffee House Press e-mailed me and said she wanted to talk. I was thrilled because Coffee House has published work by writers I love and respect, Patricia Smith among them. In retrospect, it all happened pretty quickly. I know I’m very lucky. Friends had told me to brace myself for a long haul so I tried to resist expectations. I’m glad my book wasn’t picked up as soon as I started submitting it; the act of being rejected and having to wait forced me to keep working at it.
Saeed Jones reads five poems from Prelude to Bruise for BuzzFeed. For more of Jones’s work visit theferocity.tumblr.com.
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Bianca Stone SOMEONE ELSE’S WEDDING VOWS Tin House/Octopus Books
What man does is build whole universes out of miniscule disasters and educational degrees. —from “The Future is Here”
HOW IT BEGAN: After I graduated from NYU’s graduate writing program in 2009 these poems just flooded in. I thought I’d be publishing my thesis, but that was just a stepping-stone to this book. When I look at Someone Else’s Wedding Vows, I realize that so many of these poems speak to past poems I’ve written. That’s important to me, to have my work never be static, moving forward but with those older poems still vital. For this book I wanted to write out the complexities of human love; how rich, but also how destructive it can be—and always somehow deeply inspiring. Being loved by someone is a great responsibility. And loving someone can be very hard, if part of their love is problematic.
INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCES: I’ve always been drawn to science, especially neuroscience. I feel that poets look at the world so differently because of something to do with the way their brains are wired: It’s not the normal, happy, healthy brain. It’s something else entirely. I also find inspiration in art—from reading comic books to sitting for hours in the Byzantine section of the Metropolitan Museum—as well as space travel, religion, and mythology. In addition, Vermont, where I’m from, is very important to the landscape in my poems, and I’m endlessly inspired by my friends and colleagues, all the amazing poets I know: listening to them, reading their books, collaborating with them. That’s really what keeps me going sometimes. I grew up spending a huge amount of time with my grandmother, the late poet Ruth Stone, and her poetry is ingrained in me. As is the work of my mother, novelist Abigail Stone. But of course I paved my own way too. I fell in love with Sylvia Plath and William Butler Yeats early on. Contemporary poets like John Ashbery, Sharon Olds, Claudia Rankine, Anne Carson, and Mark Strand have been hugely influential.
WHAT’S NEXT: I’m writing a lot of poems, some of which feels like a kind of memoir-essay-elegy-poetry hybrid book. I’m exploring narrative storytelling within the surreal. I’m also working a lot on what I call my Poetry Comics: that’s visual art and the lyrical working together, without one explaining the other. I use pen and ink with watercolor to do this. I find combining the text and image one of the most challenging things, but one that can be very exciting. We’ve been seeing a lot more of visual art in the writing world. I think it’s generative for students, too, to think about other means to express themselves and break out of the institutional bubble. Lastly, I’m in the (massive) process of rescuing and fixing up Ruth Stone’s house in Goshen, Vermont, and turning it into a nonprofit writers retreat and artist space.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: Sometimes I’m not feeling anything and I take a break from myself, find a well-written, engaging book of poetry and immerse myself. Getting out of your own head is just the key. Drawing or painting, too, lets my mind rebuild.
ADVICE: Be patient. Rather than focus on book contests, focus on making a community of support. Do readings, start magazines, take classes; make connections with like-minded poets and use those connections. Once you have a good, solid, thriving community of contemporaries, everything follows.
AGE: 31.
RESIDENCE: New York City.
JOB: I think this is a great question for writers, because usually it’s not as simple as saying, “I’m a poet!” Although, I always say that first, bluntly, without apology or pretention. I love people’s reactions. Usually they say, “Not a lot of money in that, huh?” and I say, “We actually make it work!” Really, there’s always so much more to being a writer than people think. Being a writer means you usually do many things, all of which is informed by your creativity. My livelihood comes from being a personal assistant to a poet at NYU. I also teach online classes in poetry and the visual image, guest lecture and teach, and do poetry-related freelance illustration. I’m also the chair of the Ruth Stone Foundation and editor-cofounder of Monk Books.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? I work from home mostly, and my work involves lots of multi-tasking. It’s a blessing and a curse because everything I do is self-motivation based. It’s hard sometimes to pick which task to focus all my energy on. But yes, compared to everyone else I know, I have lots of glorious writing time. I just have to make myself do work-work and poetry-work equally.
TIME SPENT WRITING THE BOOK: About four or five years. It went through so many revisions, editing, cutting, and adding. I was editing poems right up until the last second. It’s a lot of deciding what’s working, and what you’re clinging to that perhaps should be let go.
TIME SPENT FINDING A HOME FOR IT: Four years. I submitted to a lot of contests, which is really a crapshoot. I started to realize I needed to find other ways to get it in someone’s hands. A lot of times that happens at poetry readings, when you get along with someone who is a publisher, and they like your poems, you’re like, “Well, guess that I have this book you can look at!”
Bianca Stone reads a poem from Someone Else’s Wedding Vows, along with original illustrations and animation by the poet, for Tin House. For more of Stone’s videos visit vimeo.com/tinhouse.
Sara Eliza Johnson BONE MAP Milkweed Editions (National Poetry Series)
all moments will shine if you cut them open, glisten like entrails in the sun. —from “As the Sickle Moon Guts a Cloud”
HOW IT BEGAN: The book began as a seafaring narrative—influenced in part by a stormy winter in Provincetown, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod—and expanded outward into the world of Bone Map. As the poems expanded outward, as they further considered the contemporary American moment, they also became more visceral and brutal, and eventually I realized I was writing an organic and ancient violence into the book, that the book was in some sense about violence as origin.
INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCES: I immersed myself in the materials of strange, old worlds (ones often as alluring as they are terrifying): Grimm’s Fairy Tales, the 1967 Czech film Marketa Lazarová, the Anglo-Saxon elegies and riddles, the sixth-century voyage of Saint Brendan the Navigator, Schubert’s song cycle Die Winterreise. The poets and artists who have particularly influenced me include Lorca, Plath, Celan, Ingmar Bergman, and the Polish artist Zdzisław Beksinski, who said, “I wish to paint in such a manner as if I were photographing dreams.”
WHAT’S NEXT: I’m still in the early stages of the next book, but it’s one preoccupied with the apocalyptic moment. I’m writing a lot about human annihilation and alien or inhuman spaces, such as primordial earth, future earth, outer space, and deep sea.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: I’m always looking for new sources of fascination to spark my imagination: a book on black holes or human evolution, a visually exciting film, a visit to a museum or the aquarium. If I’m experiencing writer’s block or feel stuck in a comfort zone, I’ll more aggressively seek those sources out. It’s in part this curiosity—and the potential to transform my curiosities into art—that keeps me writing and creating.
ADVICE: Don’t be afraid to cut the dead weight. Beware of nostalgically clinging to poems that marked artistic milestones for you. And just because a piece is good—or has been published in a grand venue—doesn’t mean it belongs in the project you’ve undertaken. If you think of the book as a dynamic, breathing thing, or as a unique textual place, every page should seem indispensable when you read through it.
AGE: 30.
RESIDENCE: Salt Lake City.
JOB: I’m a PhD student in the creative writing program at the University of Utah, where I also teach.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? Though often my academic and creative work intersect, it is not always easy to balance work obligations and writing, especially because it can be a challenge to switch on the creative regions of the brain at will. It is not only necessary to carve out the time to write, but the mental space as well. To get myself in the right headspace, I usually clear my desk of papers and books, put on some music (headphones are essential), and pour some coffee if it’s daytime or (just a little) bourbon if it’s night.
TIME SPENT WRITING THE BOOK: About five years.
TIME SPENT FINDING A HOME FOR IT: Bone Map was selected for the National Poetry Series in its first round of submissions. The NPS was the fourth book contest to which I submitted the manuscript.
Sara Eliza Johnson reads the poem “Dear Rub” from Bone Map. For more of Johnson’s work visit saraelizajohnson.com.
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F. Douglas Brown ZERO TO THREE University of Georgia Press (Cave Canem Poetry Prize)
my body, rain drenched on the inside and you arriving faster than the next song —from “The Talk”
HOW IT BEGAN: What initiated this book was the birth of my son, then that of my daughter, five years later. It really came together thanks to the Cave Canem retreat and the influence the writers gave then and continue to give. I am both a Cave Canem and Kundiman fellow, and the folks who are connected to these two phenomenal organizations are generous, intelligent, and the best advocates for poetry that I know. They all helped me push and delve deep into the work. When my father died five years ago, so many poems erupted. When I stepped back and looked at the body of work, a book made sense.
INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCES: My kids and father were the immediate sources for this. As I mentioned, the poets of Cave Canem and Kundiman really push all of us involved to believe in the work we’re doing. However, back in ‘99 or so, I was in the MA Creative Writing Program at San Francisco State University, where I took a class called “What the Body Knows.” Toni Mirosevich and the rest of the class helped push me to see my father body as a vehicle for exploring my growing baby who was walking, talking, and figuring out the world. Music also factors into my work. I recently wrote a poem trying to imitate the cadence of Beyoncé’s song “Flawless.” Cornelius Eady’s You Don’t Miss Your Water and Yusef Komunyakaa’s serial poem “Songs for My Father” were also big inspirations. Both helped me take mere observation and make it stand up to the duty of fatherhood. Later, Natasha Trethewey’s books helped me reexamine pain, and [learn] how to open the voices of fatherhood that had been surrounding me as a parent.
WHAT’S NEXT: I am working on two projects: first, more fatherhood poems, and second, my namesake. The fatherhood poems are a collaborative work with poet Geffrey Davis, who I met at the Cave Canem retreat in 2012. At that time he was a new father, and what we shared regarding fatherhood—mostly our attempts to be better fathers—inspired us to continue via poetry. We are conducting workshops together, discussing poems on fatherhood from seminal poets, and doing our own work to complete what we hope to be a manuscript. Whatever it becomes, the work is good thus far, and liberating.
My complete name is Frederick Douglas Brown. How could one named after such a remarkable figure avoid it? In my work I am specifically responding to the paintings of Frederick Douglass’s life by the Harlem Renaissance painter Jacob Lawrence. My ekphrasis poems have been a pleasant journey for me. I have been able to do plenty of research, but I hope to view the Lawrence work face-to-face before releasing a final manuscript. As it is, I have completed fifteen poems.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: Reading is the best cure for me when the words are not coming together on the page or are nowhere near the page. Reading gives me permission to try new approaches. If I’m stuck or in a rut, an imitation poem helps. To see my friends publish work helps too. There is a bit of competition in every poet, and I don’t want to fall behind. I let that happen before, but Cave Canem teaches us how valuable our voice is.
ADVICE: Two things were told to me that really helped me finalize the work: 1) This is not your thesis. Approach it as a means to speak to a larger audience. 2) Friend and poet Jenny Factor told me, “Doug, this is not the only book of poems you’ll write about your kids or your dad.”
AGE: 42.
RESIDENCE: Los Angeles.
JOB: I’m an English teacher at Loyola High School of Los Angeles. I’m also a deejay on the side.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? Most of the time is does not! I have been a teacher for twenty years. From my experience, teaching and writing dip from the same well. When I am “on” in the classroom, rarely does that translate to being “on” in my writing. I am accustomed to having my hands in as many projects as possible: parenting, writing, teaching, deejaying, etc. When I am at my best as a writer or teacher, my job is singularly that. This, of course, excludes fatherhood, which asks/needs me to be whatever my kids need.
TIME SPENT WRITING THE BOOK: This work took sixteen years to complete. The poems about my kids took a while, mostly because I did not want the book or any individual poems to be a slideshow of my family. Also, many of the poems explore the mystery of fatherhood, so the logic of the poems, like parenting, had to be thoroughly sifted. I was learning how to be a father as I was writing the poems (and still am). The poems about my father came rather quickly: I waited a year after his death, and then started writing them. The drafts were strong and needed minor tweaking, but tweaking nonetheless.
TIME SPENT FINDING A HOME FOR IT: I submitted the manuscript on three separate occasions. The first two submissions were a year before I won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize in 2013.
F. Douglas Brown reads two poems from Zero to Three, published by University of Georgia Press. For more of Brown’s work visit fdouglasbrown.com.
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Cindy Williams Gutiérrez THE SMALL CLAIM OF BONES Bilingual Press
Garland my bones with those who have gone before, colli, And the ones who have gone before them, colli. Return, Return.” —from “If I Were a Nahua Poet”
HOW IT BEGAN: When I entered the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA Program (graduation was a gift to myself for my fiftieth birthday), I knew I wanted to explore two things: Mesoamerican poetics, specifically Aztec “flower and song,” and the poetry of feminist Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, who secured a cell of her own 250 years before Virginia Woolf insisted on her own room. I realized later that this was my way of bridging borders as well as history. I was born and raised in a Texas town on the border of Mexico, and my father worked for the U.S. Immigration Service on the bridges in Brownsville for more than thirty years. Though he is the “Williams” in Williams Gutiérrez, he was raised in a Mexican mining camp in Santa Bárbara, Chihuahua. Primarily of Welsh and German ethnicity, he was also one-quarter Cherokee and had an abiding respect for native peoples and their way of life. My mother’s heritage (the “Gutiérrez” in Williams Gutiérrez) can be traced to a sixteenth-century land grant from the King of Spain. In exploring Mexico’s history as a backdrop for my own mixed heritage, I realized that I was not bicultural (Anglo and Hispanic), as I had thought growing up, but rather multicultural—braiding together my father’s indigenous and Anglo roots with my mother’s Hispanic heritage.
INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCES: My father has been my muse. He was a history buff and loved telling stories about Mexico. He was also always fascinated by women’s lot throughout history: He read voraciously and spoke often about the misogynistic treatment of Mary Magdalene, Joan of Arc, Sor Juana, even Marilyn Monroe. Early on, he made me believe I could do anything, that the world was mine. In high school, he’d return from his shift on the bridge after midnight and read my English papers. I would awaken to a full, handwritten page of thoughtful remarks. I reference this in the poem “The Gift,” which is the seminal poem in the first section of my book. I would also have to say that Charles Martin, my first mentor at Stonecoast, inspired (and terrified!) me when he suggested I create poems in the voices of Nahua poet-princes. This book would not have been born without his provocation. Aside from Sor Juana and Nezahualcoyotl and other Mesoamerican poets, my literary guiding lights are Yeats and Lorca—both tapped into ancestral memory and revived the local imagination. I draw inspiration from the silent and silenced voices of history.
WHAT’S NEXT: I’m searching for homes for my manuscripts that have remained tucked in my computer for the past two years. I also have an idea incubating for a play inspired by a Rumi poem. And today I awoke with an idea for a chapbook inspired by—no surprise—women’s lot. Though my father passed away a year and a half ago, he still speaks to me in my sleep.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: I haunt cafés. All I need is the aroma of coffee and a strong dose of people-watching (and the accompanying eavesdropping) and something (some image, line, dialogue, idea) will emerge.
ADVICE: I have found that the more I write about my writing, the better I can shape my collections. An abstract is a beautiful thing: It encapsulates your intention for the book in less than a page. More than once, this has helped me perform the hardest task of all—prune poems from a budding manuscript.
AGE: 56.
RESIDENCE: Oregon City, Oregon.
JOB: I split my time between my careers as a business consultant and as a literary artist. My firm, Sage Marketing Associates, has provided strategic planning and marketing consulting services to West Coast–based global technology companies, regional healthcare organizations, and local nonprofits since 1997. I am also a poet-dramatist, producer, and educator. I have taught poetry (mostly in English, sometimes in Spanish) to every grade from kindergarten to twelfth through the Portland Art Museum, the Right Brain Initiative, Wordstock, and Writers in the Schools. I also teach poetry to adults at my home in the country and at Studio 410 in Portland, Oregon, where I offer an annual ekphrastic poetry class in response to Russell J. Young’s photographs.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? I have striven to piece together a writing life since 1997 when I left my job as a marketing executive in Silicon Valley (I have a Bachelor’s degree in Computing Science and a Wharton MBA). Consulting has afforded me the flexibility to become a serious writer as well as to return to graduate school to earn my MFA and, afterward, to teach. It continues to be a challenging balancing act, particularly because I am equally devoted to theatre, which is incredibly consuming, especially in the role of producer. My most recent production was Words That Burn—a dramatization of World War II experiences of William Stafford, Lawson Inada, and Guy Gabaldón (in their own words), which I created and coproduced in commemoration of the William Stafford Centennial. The show was featured in Milagro Theatre’s 2014 La Luna Nueva festival, which celebrates Hispanic Heritage Month in Portland, Oregon.
TIME SPENT WRITING THE BOOK: Two years. I wrote the poems during my first two semesters at Stonecoast and then spent the last semester editing and shaping them into a collection. But the collection wasn’t in its finished form for another few months after graduation.
TIME SPENT FINDING A HOME FOR IT: During the 2009 AWP book fair, I shopped my manuscript around and received interest from Arizona State University’s Bilingual Press. I followed up three months later with a book proposal and my manuscript. About a year and a half after that, I received the press’s letter of acceptance. In the meantime, I received fifteen rejections.
Cindy Williams Gutiérrez reads the poem “Micacuicatl, Or Song For The Dead” from The Small Claim of Bones. Original pre-Hispanic music by Gerardo Calderón (www.grupo-condor.com). For more of Gutiérrez’s work visit grito-poetry.com.
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Danniel Schoonebeek AMERICAN BARRICADE YesYes Books
The question of whether the idea of America is dead is not a question. —from “Correction”
HOW IT BEGAN: There’s this feeling in the United States that the country is somehow finished. I wanted to peel off that scab, and peel off the scabs I found underneath, which for me were family power dynamics, the American workforce, taboos of love, the rifts surrounding gender and class, the problem of having a name and a history, the misnomer of the word America. I wanted to dig into that American disgust.
INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCES: In place of inspiration, which I don’t think I feel, what I feel instead is camaraderie. And to that end the names can be endless. But Rukeyser and Woolf, global protest, James Agee, the Clash, running in winter, August Wilson, gunpowder tea, Eileen Myles, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, postcards, the Anti-Rent War, anxiety, Poet in New York, C. D. Wright, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the Occupy movement, Paul Thomas Anderson, living in a cabin, Claudia Rankine, rush hour, Allyson Paty, percussion, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Frank Bidart, night walks, Austria, Walker Evans, Sarah Kane, Camus, shaving, Simone Weil, Jules Renard, Marina Tsvetaeva.
WHAT’S NEXT: I’m finishing a book of prose, a travelogue called C’est la guerre. It details a two-month reading tour I did in support of American Barricade last year. C’est la guerre will be published by Poor Claudia in 2015. (I sometimes hear grovelers say that certain poems feel like prose broken into lines, and I think C’est la guerre is maybe poetry broken into prose; I want to see who’ll grovel at that). And I’m also, every day, writing poems that will be my second book of poetry. Which so far appears to be about problems of capital.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: It helps me to think of a poem as a house you can demolish. When the lines aren’t budging but I know they can move, I like to start knocking down walls and prying up floorboards and putting the rooms back together the wrong way, with new lighting and banisters. Experimental editing is something I urge upon myself, and more times than I can count it’s resulted in a radically different poem that I had to essentially destroy in order to make.
ADVICE: Any advice people give only distracts other people from writing the book they need to write.In my life and in my writing I’ve been grateful when I can stop and remind myself to revolt against what revolts me. Always unsettle myself into myself, if you will. I’m always asking myself to write the poem and the book and the sentence that I don’t want to write.
AGE: 28.
RESIDENCE: Brooklyn, New York, and the Catskills.
JOB: I write books and read poems aloud for a living. I publish poems written by other people and I have conversations about art and politics for a living. At some point we all have to make our own distinctions between living and money. To make money I work as an editor, a booking agent, and an occasional book critic.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? It’s a little war every day, and you have to antagonize the conflict in a new way every day. The simple answer is never. I find that most jobs are the opposite of writing, or creating any art that will matter to people. I felt this for the first time when I was young, and ever since then I’ve written poetry from a place where the poems want to jam themselves into the gearworks of this problem.
TIME SPENT WRITING THE BOOK: About four years. Some of the poems were drafted and edited for years. A few poems were written in a fever pitch and finished within a week or two.
TIME SPENT FINDING A HOME FOR IT: My publisher was actually the one who found me. I read a poem in a really crowded basement bar in Boston about two years ago and she was in the audience; she got in touch with me a few days later and asked if I’d written a book. I wish that scenario happened more in poetry. Before that I mailed the book around to publishers for about a year.
Danniel Schoonebeek reads five poems from American Barricade. For more of Schoonebeek’s work visit dannielschoonebeek.tumblr.com.
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Tarfia Faizullah SEAM Southern Illinois University Press (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award)
How thin the seam between the world and the world: a few layers of muscle and fat, a sheet wrapped around a corpse: glass so easily ground into sand. —from “Reading Tranströmer in Bangladesh”
HOW IT BEGAN: I learned about the widespread rape of Bangladeshi women by the Pakistani Army during the 1971 Liberation War. I wanted to know more, and I applied for a Fulbright fellowship to go to Bangladesh and interview the women. A number of them are still alive. Seam emerged from my time there.
INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCES: The courage of other artists who share beautiful and difficult stories about the conversations taking place between their interior and exterior lives. I’m in awe of Detroit poets: Vievee Francis, Nandi Comer, francine j. harris, Jamaal May, Matthew Olzmann, and Tommye Blount. I’m moved by Eugenia Leigh’s Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows and David Tomas Martinez’s Hustle. I always return to poets in translation such as Rumi, Hikmet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Anna Akhmatova, César Vallejo, and Tomas Tranströmer.
WHAT’S NEXT: A second book of poems, Register of Eliminated Villages, and a memoir, Kafir.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: I try to get into the physicality of what the vastness inside and around me looks like. I listen to the train going past our house and wonder at the science and magic that collided to create its vibrations. I wonder who decided to write the informational signs at the top of a mountain during a hike, and what that person looks like. The world isn’t material for my poems; it’s its own fabric and when I’m not writing, I’m disconnected from it. For me, what keeps me going is mindfully rolling around in the world and feeling it in my whole body.
ADVICE: Let yourself be surprised. Relentlessly do the work of making every word of every line of every poem sing. Make mistakes and let them lead you into unexpected and wondrous places. A quote that has become my mantra is by the poet Russell Edson, who said, “Desire and patience takes us where we want to go.”
AGE: 34.
RESIDENCE: Detroit.
JOB: I teach at the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program as the Nicholas Delbanco Visiting Professor in Poetry, and codirect the Organic Weapon Arts Chapbook Press and Video Series with Jamaal May.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? Absolutely. Even when it doesn’t seem like there’s time, there’s always more.
Tarfia Faizullah reads the poem “Instructions for the Interviewer” from Seam, published by Southern Illinois University Press. For more of Faizullah’s work visit tfaizullah.com.
Melissa Faliveno is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
[Credits]
Ilustrations by Eugene Smith; books by David Hamsley
Since its inception in 2010, Instagram has spawned whole new genres of visual entertainment. From tattoo artists to cookie decorators, savvy users of the photo- and video-sharing platform have attracted viral followings that often galvanize lucrative commercial ventures offline. The same goes for poetry: Not only has the platform served as a launchpad for some of the most widely read poets in recent history, but it has also helped them sell thousands—sometimes millions—of books.
In fact, books by “Instapoets” constituted nearly half of all poetry book sales in 2017, which, according to NPD BookScan, nearly doubled since 2016. Leading the sales roster was Rupi Kaur, whose debut collection, Milk and Honey (Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2015), sold more than a million copies in print last year and who boasts in excess of 2.6 million followers on Instagram, including pop star Ariana Grande. Kaur’s second book, The Sun and Her Flowers, also published by Andrews McMeel, debuted at the No. 1 spot on the New York Times paperback best-seller list when it was released in October 2017; it stayed there for twenty weeks and has sold more than 1.2 million copies. Kaur’s poetry epitomizes the prevailing Instapoetic style, with its epigrammatic brevity, plain language, and empowering messages, and she also supplements her verse with glamorous selfies and hand-drawn illustrations. But while Kaur may be the highest-grossing poet of the moment, she is hardly alone in making the successful transition from social media to print; twelve of the twenty best-selling poets of 2017 got their start on Instagram.
Other writers on that list include Amanda Lovelace, r.h. Sin, and the pseudonymous Atticus, whose debut collection, Love Her Wild, was published last year by Simon & Schuster’s Atria Books imprint. The book was a national best-seller and landed Atticus among the top ten best-selling poets of 2017. His Instagram following has also more than doubled since the book’s publication, currently comprising more than 700,000 fans. Like Love Her Wild, most commercially successful books by Instapoets contain a number of poems that don’t appear on the authors’ social media pages, incentivizing serious fans to buy a copy, and the books differ from most traditional poetry collections in their inclusion of photography and illustrations, maintaining the visual quality that has helped make Instagram so popular. Social media can also serve as a free marketing tool; Instapoets often advertise book deals, discounts, new editions, and tour dates online.
Still, as Sarah Cantin, senior editor at Atria Books, points out, “Viral online followings do not guarantee commercial book sales.” Instead Cantin attributes the success of Love Her Wild to Atticus’s talent for storytelling across a range of mediums, as well as the book’s pleasing design and the cultural hunger for pithy, motivational writing that “makes the reader feel seen.”
Sara Sargent, executive editor at HarperCollins Children’s Books, echoes this sentiment. “Instapoetry is the height of feeling that your lived experience is shared,” says Sargent, who recently edited Light Filters In, the debut collection of eighteen-year-old Instapoet Caroline Kaufman, published in May. Sargent sees books like Kaufman’s straddling several markets; they’re poetry but with a young adult spin, supplemental artwork, and even dimensions of the self-help genre. “Instapoetry is part of the growing cultural trend around self-care and self-discovery,” she says. “Journaling, coloring books, self-help: It all has to do with our commitment to figuring out who we are.”
No publisher has cornered that market more effectively than Andrews McMeel, which, in addition to being one of the first companies to produce adult coloring books, published eleven of the top twenty best-selling poets last year, including Kaur, Sin, and Lovelace. Kirsty Melville, McMeel’s president and publisher, ascribes the wild success of the Instapoets in her catalogue to “the emotional intensity, passion, and message of their work, which resonates with us at a time when many young people feel disaffected from the mainstream.” She adds: “I think the digital age has facilitated a connection between writers and readers. In addition, although these poets share their work online, publication in book form is also cherished. The book is one of the oldest, most successful, and most valued inventions for sharing ideas.”
But as Instapoetry has taken up more and more space on poetry shelves at bookstores around the world, the craze has also had its fair share of detractors, who consider the writing trite and unrefined, bearing a tenuous relationship to poetic traditions before and beyond the Internet. (A 2017 article from Deadspin calls Kaur’s poetry “pitiful, vapid, exploitative, and possibly plagiarized.”) When asked whether Instapoetry might function as a gateway to other kinds of poetry, editors and writers give mixed responses; many think the Internet subgenre is helping to reinvigorate a cultural interest in poetry in general, while others consider Instapoetry a pop phenomenon with little connection to the literary world. Still others refute the distinction altogether.
Related or not, book sales are up for both traditional print poetry and Instapoetry. “Poetry on the whole feels revitalized right now,” says Cantin. “If more bookstores create table displays featuring poets of all backgrounds, if more young people, in particular, feel that poetry is relevant to their daily lives, so much the better for the publishing industry and for readers alike.” When asked why he thinks people continue to buy poetry in an age when new technologies threaten to replace the old, Atticus replied with his signature Instapoetic brevity: “There’s a magic there you can’t find online.”
Maggie Millner holds an MFA from New York University and lives in Brooklyn. Previously she was the Diana & Simon Raab Editorial Fellow at Poets & Writers Magazine.
In 1952 in New York City, Barbara Holdridge and Marianne Roney recorded Dylan Thomas reciting a few of his poems, including the famous villanelle “Do not go gentle into that good night.” Released on vinyl later that year, the recording offered a rare chance to hear Thomas, who worked for years as a radio broadcaster, read the poem and its memorable last refrain, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” It also marked the launch of Caedmon Records, a label dedicated to restoring the spoken tradition of poetry and stories and creating, as its slogan read, “a third dimension for the printed page.” Caedmon Records became Caedmon Audio when it was acquired by HarperCollins in 1987 and made the switch from vinyl to CDs. To this day, the label is still often credited as having laid the foundation for the audiobook industry.
Caedmon’s vinyl recordings seemed to be a thing of the past until January, when HarperAudio/Caedmon announced a new series of literary vinyl, to be released throughout 2018. The imprint’s first title, a recording of actor Nate Corddry reading Joe Hill’s story “Dark Carousel,” came out in April, and records by Nikki Giovanni, Neil Gaiman, and Daniel Handler (also known as Lemony Snicket) will be released later this year.
HarperCollins isn’t the only big publisher to venture into vinyl. In February Hachette Audio launched a new vinyl audiobook series with its first title, David Foster Wallace’s This Is Water. Later this year the imprint will release recordings by David Sedaris, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Amanda Palmer, among others. Both HarperCollins and Hachette are looking to capitalize on the unexpected revival of vinyl in recent years, despite the format’s near-demise in the 1980s with the introduction of CDs. According to the Recording Industry Association of America, revenues from vinyl were as high in 2015 as they were in 1988. Jeff Bowers of Wax, the independent record label partnering with both Hachette Audio and Harper Audio, said in a January press release, “This well-curated, thoughtful series of spoken-word releases is a response to the tremendous growth in audiobooks and vinyl, part of a new moment in what has become a listening revolution.”
In the foreground of this revolution are Third Man Books and Fonograf Editions, independent literary presses committed to recording language on vinyl. Even as music streaming dominates as a listening format, Third Man Books and Fonograf Editions aim for a literary listening experience that is both meaningful and tangible, that necessitates the physicality and fuller sound of a vinyl record. “People were saying fifteen, twenty years ago that records were going to go away,” says Chet Weise, cofounder of Third Man Books. “People said paper books were going to go away too. The craze is settling down, and paper books are still a majority of what people read. There is something to [their] tangibility. It isn’t just rationalizing that these things we love are worth something and should stay around.”
Third Man Books is the partner publisher of Third Man Records, launched in 2001 by multi-Grammy-winning musician Jack White in Detroit. In 2014 Third Man Records claimed the best-selling vinyl album since Pearl Jam’s Vitalogy in 1994 with White’s Lazaretto. The label also boasts “the world’s only live venue with direct-to-acetate recording capabilities” in Nashville, where writers as well as musicians can record their work straight to vinyl. “For me, poetry has to exist in the audio spectrum—got to hear those words with some breath behind them,” says Weise. “It’s music, and if we believe that music sounds best on vinyl and is best presented on vinyl, we’re going to put poetry on vinyl too.”
Third Man Books released its inaugural title, Language Lessons: Volume 1, in 2014, a box set that includes an anthology of contemporary poetry and prose by writers and musicians such as C. D. Wright, Adrian Matejka, Richard Hell, and Tav Falco, plus two vinyl LPs of jazz, psychedelic punk, poetry, blues, and pop, and five poetry broadsides. Since then Third Man Books has maintained a multimedia aesthetic; its April release, Destruction of Man, a book-length poem about farming by Abraham Smith, includes photography and an audio flexi disc of Smith reading his own poetry.
Jeff Alessandrelli, the director of Fonograf Editions, shares Weise’s reverence for literary vinyl. “It allows for a listening experience that is also an emotional experience,” he says. “When I listen to an MP3, I don’t get the same emotional sensation that I get when I listen to a record.”
Fonograf Editions, an imprint of Portland, Oregon–based independent publisher Octopus Books, was established in 2016. Since then the vinyl-only poetry press has quickly garnered national attention by releasing records featuring readings by Rae Armantrout, Eileen Myles, and Alice Notley, who performed her work live in Seattle. Fonograf’s latest record, Harmony Holiday’s The Black Saint and the Sinnerman, released in March, features poetry by Holiday along with music sampled from Charles Mingus’s 1963 album, The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady.
“We live in a digital age, and I think in a lot of ways that’s great; it streamlines a lot of experiences,” says Alessandrelli. “But I think increasingly there’s going to be both the desire and a need for things that are tactile and for things that you can hold on to, and that means something greater than an MP3.” For more and more readers, listeners, record labels, and publishers, that something can be found with a needle traversing the grooves on a vinyl record.
Thea Prieto writes and edits for Portland Review, Propeller Magazine, the Gravity of the Thing, and Oregon Music News. Her website is theaprieto.com.
In celebration of Short Story Month, we’ve assembled ten of our favorite audio recordings of authors reading from story collections featured in Page One: Where New and Noteworthy Books Begin over the past five years. All of them were recorded exclusively for Poets & Writers Magazine and illustrate the irresistible and inspiring power of the short form.
Roxane Gay reads “Florida” from Difficult Women (Grove Press, 2017).
With so many good books being published every month, some literary titles worth exploring can get lost in the stacks. Page One offers the first lines of a dozen recently released books, including Mary Gaitskill’s Somebody With a Little Hammer and Lesley Nneka Arimah’s What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky, for a glimpse into the worlds of these new and noteworthy titles.
“Manacled to a whelm.” Fast (Ecco, May 2017) by Jorie Graham. Fourteenth book, poetry collection. Agent: None. Editor: Daniel Halpern. Publicist: Martin Wilson.
“On occasion, the two women went to lunch and she came home offended by some pettiness.” The Dinner Party (Little, Brown, May 2017) by Joshua Ferris. Fourth book, first story collection. Agent: Julie Barer. Editor: Reagan Arthur. Publicist: Carrie Neill.
“I’ve been dreaming about my violin.” Gone: A Girl, a Violin, a Life Unstrung (Crown Publishing Group, April 2017) by Min Kym. First book, memoir. Agent: Annabel Merullo. Editor: Rachel Klayman. Publicist: Rebecca Welbourn.
“That year, toward the end of my childhood, I was living in Jacmel, a coastal village in Haiti.” Hadriana in All My Dreams (Akashic Books, May 2017) by René Depestre, translated from the French by Kaiama L. Glover. Fifteenth of twenty-seven books, third of four novels. Agent: None. Editor: Johnny Temple. Publicist: Susannah Lawrence.
“Ezinma fumbles the keys against the lock and doesn’t see what came behind her: Her father as a boy when he was still tender, vying for his mother’s affection.” What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky (Riverhead, April 2017) by Lesley Nneka Arimah. First book, story collection. Agent: Samantha Shea. Editor: Rebecca Saletan. Publicist: Claire McGinnis.
“Descending the subway stairs / in a crowd of others, slow / steps, everyone a little / hunched in their coats, probably / as unhappy as I was / to have to go to work.” The Others (Wave Books, May 2017) by Matthew Rohrer. Eighth book, poetry collection. Agent: None. Editor: Matthew Zapruder. Publicist: Ryo Yamaguchi.
“I’ll begin our story with that afternoon, after we hadn’t spoken for a year—like so many years when we didn’t speak—when you pulled up next to me on my walk to work and offered me a ride.” Sunshine State (Harper Perennial, April 2017) by Sarah Gerard. Second book, first essay collection. Agent: Adriann Ranta. Editor: Erin Wicks. Publicist: Martin Wilson.
“It was summer.” Woman No. 17 (Hogarth, May 2017) by Edan Lepucki. Second book, novel. Agent: Erin Hosier. Editor: Lindsay Sagnette. Publicist: Rachel Rokicki.
“When Albert Murray said / the second law adds up to / the blues that in other words / ain’t nothing nothing he meant it” Field Theories (Nightboat Books, April 2017) by Samiya Bashir. Third book, poetry collection. Agent: None. Editor: Kazim Ali. Publicist: Lindsey Boldt.
With so many good books being published every month, some literary titles worth exploring can get lost in the stacks. Page One offers the first lines of a dozen recently released books, including How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee.
“By some concoction of sugar, prescription painkillers, rancor, and cocaine, my father, Gregory Pardlo, Sr., began killing himself after my parents separated in 2007.” Air Traffic: A Memoir of Ambition and Manhood in America (Knopf, April 2018) by Gregory Pardlo. Third book, first memoir. Agent: Rob McQuilkin. Editor: Maria Goldverg. Publicist: Jessica Purcell.
“Strangers are building a new house next door.” Negative Space (New Directions, April 2018) by Luljeta Lleshanaku, translated from the Albanian by Ani Gjika. Eleventh book, poetry collection. Agent: None. Editor: Jeffrey Yang. Publicist: Mieke Chew.
“Tucker had been walking for six hours through early morning ground fog that rose in shimmering waves.” Country Dark (Grove Press, April 2018) by Chris Offutt. Seventh book, second novel. Agent: Nicole Aragi. Editor: Amy Hundley. Publicist: John Mark Boling.
“The book lied.” That Kind of Mother (Ecco, May 2018) by Rumaan Alam. Second book, novel. Agent: Julie Barer. Editor: Megan Lynch. Publicist: Sonya Cheuse.
“It’s a love story, the famous violinist had said, and even though Jana knew it was not, those were the words that knocked around her brain when she began to play on stage.” The Ensemble (Riverhead Books, May 2018) by Aja Gabel. First book, novel. Agent: Andrea Morrison. Editor: Laura Perciasepe. Publicist: Liz Hohenadel.
“Frenching with a mouthful of M&M’s dunno if I feel polluted / or into it—the lights go low across the multiplex Temple of // canoodling and Junk food” Junk (Tin House Books, May 2018) by Tommy Pico. Third book, poetry collection. Agent: None. Editor: Tony Perez. Publicist: Sabrina Wise.
“When I was five years old, back when my old man was still sort of around, I watched a promotional video for Disneyland that my mom got in the free box of VHS tapes at the library.” Lawn Boy (Algonquin Books, April 2018) by Jonathan Evison. Fifth book, novel. Agent: Mollie Glick. Editor: Chuck Adams. Publicist: Brooke Csuka.
Nearly half the world’s languages are endangered to some extent, with one language becoming extinct roughly every two weeks, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Barring swift revitalization efforts, more than 2,500 of the nearly 7,000 tongues spoken in the world today are predicted to disappear by the end of the century. More than two hundred, such as Peru’s Panobo and Angola’s Kwisi languages, have become extinct since 1950.
Losing a language is not like losing a precious ancient artifact, such as a piece of jewelry or a Grecian urn. A language is not a synchronic object, encapsulating a culture at a single moment in time, but rather a dynamic force that binds people together within a shared, ongoing history. When a language vanishes, it takes with it something intrinsic and irreplaceable about human experience in general and a marginalized culture in particular. Chris McCabe, the poetry librarian at Southbank Centre’s National Poetry Library in London, had this in mind when he launched the Endangered Poetry Project, which seeks to collect poetry written in endangered languages and archive it in the library’s permanent holdings.
McCabe first conceived of the project, which launched in the fall, after coming across a striking bit of literary trivia: Instead of the official Latin expected of him, Dante composed the Divine Comedy in a medieval Tuscan vernacular. “That got me thinking about how many great poems there might be out there in dialects and endangered languages,” says McCabe. “After looking into endangered languages more closely, I realized how many languages are under threat.”
At the time, Southbank Centre’s National Poetry Library already included poems in more than two hundred languages. Within its first three months, the Endangered Poetry Project had ushered in over a dozen more, including the Shetlandic dialect of Scots as well as Kristang, a severely endangered creole language spoken in Singapore and parts of Malaysia by a community of mixed Portuguese and Asian descent. McCabe and his team crowdsource poems from around the world, and encourage anyone familiar with a well-known poem in an endangered language to submit it through the project’s website (www.southbankcentre.co.uk/endangered-poetry). After collecting both written and audio versions of each poem, staff members at the National Poetry Library then print them on handmade paper and store them in a specially made conservation box. Although the foremost goal of the initiative is to gather poems in their original languages, McCabe also strives to procure English translations whenever possible. There are also plans to make some poems accessible online, and McCabe says that the initiative will “continue in perpetuity to gather poems from languages under risk.”
The fear of losing language—and specifically losing the poetry of a language, which can often help crystallize and communicate the experiential and linguistic information of a given culture—is part of what motivates McCabe, who is also a widely published poet and writer. “Poetry has a place in most cultures and languages where other art forms might not have gained traction,” he says. “This could easily have to do with economic factors—poetry costs nothing to create, especially in oral forms—and also with the fact that when a language comes into existence, it becomes the material for the human imagination to capture events, ideas, and emotions.”
The Endangered Poetry Project owes some of its early success to a rousing inaugural event in October during the fiftieth anniversary of Poetry International, a biennial poetry festival in London founded at the Southbank Centre by poet Ted Hughes in 1967. During the event, called “Seven Thousand Words for Human,” multinational poets Joy Harjo, Nineb Lamassu, Gearóid Mac Lochlainn, and Nick Makoha read pieces they had written for the occasion in languages such as the Ugandan Luganda and Muscogee Creek. Southbank Centre translator-in-residence and festival organizer Stephen Watts furnished English translations of each poem, and a member of the public even volunteered to recite a poem in the Logudorese dialect of Sardinian.
Another highlight for McCabe was the moment, a few weeks later, when he received a selection of poet Claude Vigée’s “Schwàrzi Sengessle Flàckere ém Wénd” (“Black Nettles Blaze in the Wind”), a long Alsatian requiem written in tribute to the language, which was banned in schools in the Alsace region after World War II. The poem is special to McCabe because it captures the anguish of losing one’s native tongue: “Our hoarse voices, broken long ago / Suddenly stopped: / Already, on our school bench, / In the thrall of the forceps of language / We felt like tongue-cripples / Tangled up in our songs.”
Maggie Millner teaches creative writing at New York University, where she is pursuing an MFA in poetry. Previously she was the Diana & Simon Raab Editorial Fellow at Poets & Writers Magazine.
The National Poetry Library at the Southbank Centre in London.
In 1992 in Reno, Nevada, a group of scholars and writers founded the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) to promote interdisciplinary research and conversation about the connections between humans and the natural world. Comprising professionals in both the humanities and the sciences, ASLE encourages collaboration, supports environmental education, and convenes a community around the twin goals of literary excellence and ecological sustainability. Now, twenty-five years later, the organization is more robust—and necessary—than ever.
The intersections of poetry and conservation biology, or speculative fiction and environmental activism, may not seem intuitive. But in the early 1990s many scholars working at the crossroads of these increasingly siloed disciplines sought a way to share ideas and enlist creative, scientific, and ethical advice from specialists in other fields. With the advent of ASLE, members gained access to a directory of multidisciplinary scholars, as well as environmental studies curricula, a list of awards and grants, mentoring programs, and a bibliography of ecological writing, among other resources. In 1993, ASLE launched the semiannual (now quarterly) journal ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, which publishes academic articles in addition to poetry, nonfiction, and book reviews.
Since 1995, ASLE has also hosted a biennial conference, each event held in a different U.S. city, at which intellectual cross-pollination and collaboration can happen in person. The twelfth conference, titled “Rust/Resistance: Works of Recovery,” took place in June and doubled as a celebration of ASLE’s twenty-fifth anniversary. Hosted by Wayne State University in Detroit, the 2017 conference featured more than eight hundred presenters as well as keynote addresses by writers and environmentalists such as poet Ross Gay and historian and novelist Tiya Miles. According to ASLE copresident Christoph Irmscher, these conferences serve as “sustained intellectual experiences in which an array of amazing speakers complements the serious conversations that take place in individual panels.”
ASLE’s quarter-centennial comes at a critical moment. As an organization committed equally to literature and to environmentalism, ASLE and its membership are doubly threatened by the massive rollbacks in arts and climate spending proposed by the Trump administration. The White House’s 2018 budget plan, unveiled in May, would slash funding to the Environmental Protection Agency by nearly a third, eliminating 20 percent of its workforce and leaving the agency with its smallest budget in forty years, adjusting for inflation. Predicated on a staunch denial of the urgent reality of climate change, the plan proposes crippling reductions to programs that clean up toxic waste, determine the safety of drinking water, and research and predict natural disasters, among others.
In June, President Trump announced that the United States will also be withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, an agreement between nearly two hundred nations to reduce emissions and mitigate global warming that was adopted by consensus in 2015. “As we have known ever since Rachel Carson, the environmental crisis can only be addressed globally, not within traditional national boundaries,” says Irmscher. Branches of ASLE have been established in nearly a dozen countries or regions outside the United States, including Brazil, India, and Japan, and this year’s ASLE conference drew around a thousand members from twenty-five countries. Irmscher describes the organization’s international, interdisciplinary conferences as its “pièce de résistance against Trumpian unilateralism.”
The Trump administration’s proposed 2018 budget would also eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities. Though such cuts seem unlikely at this point—Congress thus far having upheld federal funding for both agencies—the proposal itself is indicative of an attitude that devalues the importance of art and literature to American life and culture. In light of such threats, Irmscher looks to literature for models of political environmentalism. “Panels and presentations on Thoreau’s Walden—to mention one of the intellectual progenitors of ASLE—can no longer ignore the fact that his philosophy of resistance has assumed new importance in an era when the government systematically suppresses scientific evidence,” he says.
In a sense, the joint disavowal of both environmental protection and the arts can be seen as a confirmation of what ASLE has always known: that these disciplines are deeply linked and even interdependent—that, as Rachel Carson once said, “No one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.” In the face of these most recent threats, ASLE will continue to serve as a meeting point. “In a climate that discourages innovation, scientists have adopted new roles as dissenters and protesters,” says Irmscher. “As they unite and march, they find new allies in the arts and humanities that have long spoken truth to power. ASLE, whose core mission is to promote collaboration and public dialogue, provides an organizational framework for such new alliances.”
Maggie Millner teaches creative writing at NYU, where she is pursuing her MFA in poetry. Previously, she served as Poets & Writers Magazine’s Diana and Simon Raab Editorial Fellow.
The Wednesday morning after Election Day delivered a political shock for just about everyone, including writers—but hot on the heels of the electoral surprise came an existential dilemma: How could writers attend to the quotidian concerns of sentence structure, agent-hunting, and sending out work when America was so divided on seemingly every major issue—from reproductive and LGBTQ rights to immigration laws and the environment? Like much of America that morning, many writers turned to their friends and colleagues for answers. “On Facebook, everyone was saying, ‘Now more than ever we need fiction, art, and books,’” says writer Anna March, who had spent time in Pennsylvania that week, knocking on doors for Hillary Clinton with her mother. “I got a little bit panicky. I thought, ‘Oh my God, are people really thinking that art is going to save us?’ Because it’s really about organizing and getting out the vote.” Similarly, fiction writer Paula Whyman, based in Bethesda, Maryland, described the morning after the election as a rare world-changing moment. “As a fiction writer I had a lot of questions in my mind about what would happen to fiction and how we would go on working,” she says. “Does it really matter now?”
Both Whyman and March reached for similar outlets to channel their doubts and reassert the power of writing. Whyman answered a call on Facebook by her friend, the writer Mikhail Iossel, for help launching a new publication and with a small group started Scoundrel Time, an international online journal intended to foster artistic expression in the face of political repression and fear. March, eager to harness the energy of the arts community for political activism, decided to start Roar Feminist Magazine, an online publication that would provide a platform for politically informed fiction, poetry, and essays—as well as a way to strike back against an election that frequently devolved into disrespectful language, most notably the leaked Access Hollywood tape showing Donald Trump making lewd comments about women. “We wanted to do something that was both literature and revolution,” says March.
These efforts are part of a growing number of projects and events started by writers, editors, and literary organizations in response to the election and the current political climate. Poet Erin Belieu and PEN America organized Writers Resist rallies, which brought out thousands of writers and citizens in cities all across the United States on January 15, five days before the presidential inauguration, to “defend free expression, reject hatred, and uphold truth in the face of lies and misinformation.” Poet Major Jackson started a collaborative poem, “Renga for Obama,” at the Harvard Review, while the Boston Review released the poetry chapbook Poems for Political Disaster, and Melville House published What We Do Now, an essay collection focused on “standing up for your values in Trump’s America.”
Roar and Scoundrel Time both launched in late January—Roar on Inauguration Day and Scoundrel Time ten days later—and have since produced an impressive body of work and attracted large followings in just a few short months. “The idea of starting a new journal would be laughed at otherwise,” says Whyman. “There are so many excellent journals doing beautiful work that I in no way want to compete. But I think of this as something entirely different.”
Indeed, the interest both magazines have received in terms of financial support and submissions suggest that the audience is engaged. With a very small inheritance from her grandmother, who died shortly before the election, March was able to launch the Roar website and with her collaborators held a successful crowdfunding campaign that raised $12,000 in just a few months. The Roar staff includes Sarah Sandman and Bethanne Patrick as executive editors, Jagjeet Khalsa as production editor, and several section editors, including novelist Porochista Khakpour and humor writer Cynthia Heimel. The title is a play on the “pussy” motif that appeared on posters and signs, and in knitted hats, after Trump’s infamous Access Hollywood remarks were made public. According to March, the journal’s mission involves “roaring, not meowing.”
The most prominent feature of Roar, which publishes three new pieces each day, is a section called “My Abortion,” in which women relate their experiences with abortion. The daily column serves to remind readers of what’s at stake under the strongly antiabortion Trump administration. Other columns include the Roar Meter, which uses numbers to tell a story: “Number of votes by which Hillary Clinton won the popular vote: 2,864,974 / Number of Americans who receive Planned Parenthood services: 2,840,000” reads the beginning of one entry. A column called Fight This Hate highlights “a small selection of hate crimes and/or harassment,” alongside fiction, poetry, and art sections. “Think about if Guernica met the Nation or VQR met Mother Jones,” says March. “We want to be at the intersection of the finest writing and political activism.” The editors plan to expand in the spring by publishing six pieces a day and bringing on more explicitly political writers.
Scoundrel Time (named for the 1976 book by Lillian Hellman about the McCarthy era) is, in Whyman’s words, “a place for artists to respond as artists” to the postelection reality. “There are wonderful and thoughtful journalists and commentators, people at think tanks, and activists in every realm doing important things,” says Whyman. “But this is a place for artists to speak to what’s going on from their particular perspective. We can keep telling one another stories, and those stories will draw people in and give them some relief.” The journal is a registered nonprofit organization, and the all-volunteer staff plans to look into nonprofit partnerships. Slightly less confrontational in tone than Roar (though no less political), Scoundrel Time publishes fiction, photography, poetry, essays, and dispatches from around the world, with a focus on content that’s current. “The strongest argument I can think of for satire and parody is that despots and authoritarian regimes of all stripes hate it so,” Tony Eprile writes in a February essay tying recent Saturday Night Live sketches to a long tradition of political subversion through mockery. Fiction writer Jodi Paloni also spearheads an Action section, encouraging readers to make calls and show up to protests.
Scoundrel Time and Roar also drummed up support at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference in Washington, D.C. in February. Whyman and her fellow Scoundrel Time founders gathered in the lobby of the Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue and read aloud from James Baldwin, Emma Lazarus, and Claudia Rankine. Meanwhile, Roar supporters wearing pink “pussy hats” handed out pink Roar-branded condoms and stickers at the bookfair. They weren’t the only ones making a statement at AWP: Split This Rock, a D.C.–based organization focused on poetry and social change, collaborated with organizations such as VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and CantoMundo to hold a candlelight vigil for freedom of expression outside the White House, during which writers such as Kazim Ali, Ross Gay, and Carolyn Forché delivered speeches about the importance of writing and art.
Scoundrel Time plans to organize similar actions in the future, but for now it carries on that spirit of standing together and holding space, albeit online, for writers to freely speak their minds. With their new journals, both Whyman and March hope they can help writers to, as Whyman says, “hang on to our humanity and feel like [we] can gain understanding.”
Sarah M. Seltzer is a writer of fiction, creative nonfiction, journalism, and ill-advised tweets. A lifelong New Yorker, she is the deputy editor of the culture website Flavorwire.com.
Protesters march on Trump Tower in New York City as part of the Writers Resist rallies in January.
In a little over two months, we the people will choose the forty-fifth president of the United States. Between now and then, the nominees will present their policy proposals and debate the issues, shaping a national conversation about some awfully big and important topics. But before we get to those televised debates (the first of three is scheduled for September 26 at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York) we wanted to give some of our most thoughtful and articulate citizens—poets and writers—a chance to offer their perspective. Because, as former U.S. poet laureate Rita Dove remarked, “Our nation needs to learn to value its independent writers and artists as the heralds of a richly textured, inclusive national identity.”
The request was simple: Imagine you are face-to-face with the next president—whoever that may be—and, in a few sentences, write about what you hope to see addressed in the next four years. It turns out something pretty great happens when you ask writers to convey, without a lot of political grandstanding, what is most important to them. The contours of some of America’s biggest issues—education, health care, gun violence, racism, immigration, and the environment among them—start to come into sharper focus, the collective discourse rises above the rhetoric of political pundits, and the pomp and circumstance of the political process falls away, so that we are left with a discussion of real problems, real concerns, and, if not solutions, then at least some honest ideas that may inspire action of real, lasting value.
Dear President,
“The countless complex problems facing the world require complex critical thinking. Please reinvest in public higher education systems like UC, SUNY, CUNY, and the other once-strong and accessible state systems of higher education. Restore and privilege humanities and arts education at the K–12 and higher-ed levels. Reduce the military budget and make a real commitment to social and educational infrastructure.” —Kazim Ali
★
“Please listen to the stories being told right now by the scientists who study, and the citizens who live, amid the catastrophic changes taking place across the planet. They are not fiction; without courageous leadership they will become fate.” —Steve Almond
★
“Your critics, most of them, would have called me a superpredator back then, when the memory of the pistol was heavy in my palm—so that’s not my focus. But now, unlike then, you have power, and I’m left to wonder what you will call the young men and women lost in the system, those who walked down paths they regret. Do they earn your scorn, your mercy?” —Reginald Dwayne Betts
★
“I would like President Clinton to know that I support her and her agenda fully, especially as it relates to education, the arts, and the environment. The single greatest problem facing our species is the erosion of the environmental conditions that allowed us to evolve and thrive and tap out messages like this one on our phones and computers. We are doomed, yes, but later rather than sooner, I hope.” —T. C. Boyle
★
“Once the body arrives in the world it immediately becomes fragile—fragile in that it needs nourishment, protection, education, and endless chances; bodies of color, in particular, have had these basic human rights revoked, and it continues. I call for a protection of these bodies through a reassessment of the justice system and retraining of authorities who violate the civil liberties of citizens of color through racial profiling, stop-and-frisk, and abuse; human life is at stake, and my wish is that the next four years will reflect back the beauty and not the wreckage of our existence.” —Tina Chang
★
“America has often seen itself as a beacon of democracy, but the American project has always been about a settler project of inclusion and exclusion: democracy for those imagined as real Americans, and inequality for slaves, immigrants, black and brown bodies, and those who live in places the United States has colonized or destabilized, most recently Iraq and Libya. I hope that you can see yourself not just as a standard-bearer for a global economic elite, but as a force for equality and justice for all.” —Ken Chen
★
“There’s so much I could ask of you—a list of demands—but first to ensure our safety as citizens. Too many lives have been lost to gun violence—mass shootings, gang related, and otherwise—and now it is more than a false dilemma, it’s a reality that can no longer be ignored.” —Nicole Dennis-Benn
★
“There is no present or future without immigrants; white supremacy (and all of its sequelae) is one of the gravest threats to our democracy.” —Junot Díaz
★
“I want an America with tougher gun laws. I want an America that nurtures and embraces diversity.”—Chitra Divakaruni
★
“Eight million metric tons of plastic are dumped into the oceans every year. Our government has to get involved in legislation that reduces one-use plastics, invests in alternative-packaging ideas, and dramatically decreases pollution in the oceans, or by 2050 there will be more plastic in the sea than fish.” —Anthony Doerr
★
“If we are ever to attain our forefathers’ aspirations for ‘a more perfect union,’ educating our young—not only in the sciences, but also the arts—cannot, dare not, be neglected. If our children are unable to say what they mean, no one will know how they feel; if they cannot imagine different worlds, they are stumbling through a darkness made all the more sinister by its lack of reference points.” —Rita Dove
★
“I would say to the president that she should work to dismantle the global culture of corruption present at all levels of society, which prevents any meaningful change or accountability, and whose primary victims are the powerless and disenfranchised. This complicity is a symptom of larger systems of discourse and economy that exist to preserve the status quo, and I would say that in the absence of means to transform those systems outright, she should start, at the level of the law and of media, to model ways of addressing concrete problems with transparency and tenacity, showing that even at the most entrenched levels of corruption, change can be effected.” —Robert Fernandez
★
“The stakes are too high for you to ignore the grievances voiced by those of us who believed you when you spoke of progress and equality. We can’t afford for you to go slow.” —Angela Flournoy
★
“Climate change—stop dicking around. War—use only as the ultimate last resort.” —Ben Fountain
★
“I’d like our next president to know compassion and compromise. I’d also like her to know how thrilled I was when I received a thank-you note from her husband after I sent Chelsea a birthday card when I was fifteen.” —Carrie Fountain
★
“The occupation of Palestine by Israel—mass incarceration, presumption of guilt, withholding of resources, wanton destruction of human life, all underscored by the creation of physical barriers and the emotional propaganda of persecution, exclusion, mythmaking, and fear—are mirrored, one by one, in the policies of institutionalized racism in the United States. Unless we face this singular fact, and acknowledge our collective culpability as architects and sponsors of state terrorism here in our American cities, and in our foreign policy regarding Palestine (which is the bedrock of all other foreign policy), we will continue to be unable to fulfill the potential of our democracy for our people, and remain excoriated abroad for our impotence and hypocrisy.” —Ru Freeman
★
“Dear Madam President, our undocumented families are not silent or invisible in our hearts. May they be just as present in your actions as we continue to build this home, this country, together.” —Rigoberto González
★
“None of the problems of this country will be solved without things getting messy, and without your commitment to listen, truly listen, and to govern for the people who have the least in this country—black and brown women of color, undocumented women, trans and lesbian women, poor women, the people you usually wish to have behind you at a podium but rarely invite to the room where decisions are being made. Invite us in and listen and then act.” —Kaitlyn Greenidge
★
“President Clinton, after celebrating with a tall flute of Prosecco, please make gun reform your first order of business. In four years, I hope to live in a country where the pen is mightier than the gun (and the money that keeps it in power).” —Eleanor Henderson
★
“Ms. President, I want you to know that the power of having our first woman as president doesn’t escape me; I’ve been waiting for this my entire life. And I want you, as the first woman president of the United States, to place the liberation and justice of historically marginalized people at the center of your work— terrifying, hard, necessary work. We need this more than ever.” —Tanwi Nandini Islam
★
“I would like the next president to know that the 2016 presidential campaign has awoken a sizable portion of this country’s electorate to the limitations of a two-party system that is beholden more to its own status quo than the interests of its constituencies; that we are more awake than ever to the corruption of politicians who claim allegiance to ‘the people,’ but whose votes and policies are purchased outright by producers of weaponry and manufacturers of economic disparity. I would like the next president to know that we will be watching and taking note of their promises to Wall Street and the military-industrial complex, that we will call out their positions on trade deals that betray American workers, their complicity with a prison-industrial complex that seeks profit from incarceration, their commitment to a justice system that frees criminals in uniform while killing people of color with impunity, and that we will organize beyond their scarecrows of fear to create a movement capable of replacing this oligarchy with the highest of this nation’s ideals: democracy.” —Tyehimba Jess
★
“Madam President, thank you for sparing us your opponent’s dismal and clownish stupidity, his blind and blinding hate. I’m still scared, though. I’m scared that you think beating him will be the hardest part of your job, and I’m scared of what’s happening to the environment, to our schools and water supply and our tolerance, scared of people being out of work and people being hooked on painkillers and people not being allowed to use the restroom where they feel most comfortable. I don’t give a rip if you’re honest or transparent or running a thousand different e-mail servers, but I need you to be compassionate and smart and clear-eyed, to be decent and flexible and open-minded, to be afraid with me—with all of us—and despite our fears, not least yours, I need you to be brave and resilient and, well, hopeful.”—Bret Anthony Johnston
★
“I’d like to talk about government subsidies for mental-health care. We tend to speak about mental health after some extreme event, like a shooting spree, but mental health is an everyday thing. So many people—especially poor people and minorities—are suffering in silent pain.”—Tayari Jones
★
“Make fighting bigotry a priority—bigotry of all sorts, from race to sexuality to gender to class. I feel it’s especially the responsibility of our candidates this time around, as this very election unleashed a whole new wave of intense bigotry directed at all sorts of minorities—so I feel like it is the urgent responsibility of the elected official to face this and work to increase the dialogue, education, and awareness required to heal and advance.” —Porochista Khakpour
★
“I watch my students invest in cultural, economic, and financial change despite their pessimism and frequent belief that we live within a system that profits from their disenfranchisement. How do we convince the next generation of thinkers that their engagement and participation in the political system matters as they watch so much of the progress facilitated by activists of the past dismantled?” —Ruth Ellen Kocher
★
“Madam President, please pay more attention to, support, and build up public education. Our schools are the democratizing cornerstones of our communities—and this country’s future.” —Joseph O. Legaspi
★
“I’d like to trust that the voice of any suffering person, regardless of category, had as much currency with you as some power broker. I’d like not to doubt you knew that suffering was of a piece with the planet’s emergency, the ongoing story of oil, water, war, animals.” —Paul Lisicky
★
“Your country is complex; it is hard to imagine a foreigner being able to fix it for you. Keep this in mind when you consider invading another nation.” —Karan Mahajan
★
“What’s really important to me is the radical reconceptualization of our broken criminal-justice system that targets young black and brown people—increasingly girls and young women—for arrest, detention, and incarceration, thereby continuing the program of relegating generations of people of color to second-class citizenry. It is clear to so many of us that the increased presence of police in daily life, alongside the militarization of police forces, is the wrong path to go down, and that we have to think progressively in our imagining of the future we’d like to create.”—Dawn Lundy Martin
★
“Please put climate change at the front and center of our national conversation, and follow up by funding initiatives toward developing and using sustainable energy.” —Cate Marvin
★
“Peace is a good word for politicians to look up, understand the meaning of it, use it once in a while, learn to practice it. You are committing environmental child abuse by poisoning our food, polluting our air, and totally destroying the environment so that a few of your cronies can make a few extra billion or two while the rest of us will not survive even to serve you.” —Alejandro Murguía
★
“The blight on ‘American exceptionalism’ is the recurring cycle of black youth raised in communities where poverty, inadequate education, and insufficient recreational and job opportunities exclude too many of them from the promise of the American Dream. It is urgent that you fund programs now to address this shameful problem.” —Elizabeth Nunez
★
“Dear Madam President, help us lift up the least advantaged among us. Put your strength and determination behind education, jobs, and equality. We have benefited greatly from the moral guidance of the last administration. Please keep the spirit of ‘yes we can’ alive. God bless you.” —D. A. Powell
★
“What the world wants, demands, deserves, and needs from you is that you guide your leadership and base your decisions on just one principle: love. Because isn’t that the whole point to it all—love? Isn’t that why we all keep on going?” —Mira Ptacin
★
“Madam President, the influence of the Israel lobby is not as valuable as the lives of the many Palestinians who have been living in degradation and increasing terror under the Israeli occupation for the last half century, just as the influence of the NRA lobby is not as valuable as the lives of the many U.S. citizens who have been injured and killed due to gun violence.” —Emily Raboteau
★
“There should be a new cabinet post—Secretary of the Arts. For the inaugural six poets: European, Hispanic, Asian American, African American, Native American, Muslim.” —Ishmael Reed
★
“I want the president to know that we are tired of having our voices silenced and our needs unmet. I want the president to know that we want better gun control, higher minimum wages, recognition of women’s rights, better education, and most of all a greater sense of our shared humanity—unity, not division.” —Roxana Robinson
★
“President Hillary Clinton, I live in Portland, Oregon, where every day I watch our homeless camps grow in size. Homelessness is a national crisis that has barely been discussed this election season. You’ve pledged ‘to direct more federal resources to those who need them most.’ As you do so, please don’t forget about some of your most vulnerable constituents: homeless Americans. It’s an issue at the nexus of economic inequality, joblessness, rising housing costs, lack of affordable housing, health care accessibility, and systemic racism. Please make connecting all Americans to safe, stable homes and services a priority.”—Karen Russell
★
“Madam President, where has all the funding gone for arts in the schools? Could those kuts be the reesen we are all getin dummer?” —George Saunders
★
“The growing disparity in wealth in this country undermines any hope we have for achieving social justice. Changing this won’t be easy, and will require more courage, conviction, and political leadership than you have exhibited in the past.” —Dani Shapiro
★
“Since arts and humanities programs enrich our American lives beyond measure, connecting and inspiring people of different backgrounds and inclinations better than anything else does, it would be reasonable to support them threefold or more, without question. The fact that Bernie Sanders, a Jewish American, found it possible to be frank about the injustice and criminal oppression that Palestinian people have suffered for the past sixty-eight years suggests other politicians might be able to do this too—injustice for one side does not help the ‘other side’ and everyone knows this but does not act or speak as honestly or honorably as Sanders did.” —Naomi Shihab Nye
★
“I would like you to know that we do not have any more time—at all—to postpone addressing the issue of climate change. And while you’re working to ensure the survival of the planet, please remember that some of us are dying at an even faster rate from poverty, lack of health care, gun violence, police brutality, war, and twenty-seven kinds of intolerance—so please use your authority to help ensure that we live to see (and help implement) the climate-change solutions you set in motion.” —Evie Shockley
★
“I want the next president to shout from the housetops that violence is not a source or sign of strength but of weakness, whether inside a home or between nations. I want us to address violence at all scales, from domestic violence and gun violence to our endless, failed, one-sided, expensive foreign wars to the subtle violence against the poor and the unborn among our species, against more fragile species, and against the earth and the future that is unchecked climate change and the brutal fossil-fuel industry.” —Rebecca Solnit
★
“Did you know we need to find more jobs for the unemployed? Also, Palestine and Israel need to work it out.” —Tom Spanbauer
★
“If you can’t do everything, at least do what you say. I just wanna live in a country that knows the difference between love and hate.” —Ebony Stewart
★
“Our public-education system is in desperate need of resources, specifically in marginalized communities, as well as a more learner-centered, diverse curriculum emphasizing perspectives across race, gender, class, nationality, sexual orientation, ability, and the multiple intersections therein to challenge all of us to be better human beings on this planet. And, Madam President, if I can focus our last few minutes on my beautiful, complicated city: Your support of Rahm Emanuel terrifies me. Thank you for listening. Please, keep listening. To all of us. Not some. All.” —Megan Stielstra
★
“Free Leonard Peltier. Free Chelsea Manning.”—Justin Taylor
★
“No language is neutral. To speak is to claim a life—and often our own. If more Americans speak to one another, in writing, in media, at the supermarket, we might listen better. It is difficult, I think, to hate one another when we start to understand not only why and how we hurt, but also why and how we love.” —Ocean Vuong
★
“The greatest threats facing the United States are not terrorism and illegal immigration but rather injustice, bias, inequality, and fear. To be a great nation we must focus on criminal-justice reform; the eradication of the vestiges of slavery; education; and human and civil rights for all.” —Ayelet Waldman
★
“Please stop separating families through deportation; let it be understood that they did not want to be in this country to begin with (which reminds me, please stop bombing children, stop invading countries, stop sending the young and poor onto the battlefields). Please create a path toward citizenship for everyone, not just the ‘dreamers,’ because we all learn to dream from our parents.”—Javier Zamora
It has been just over five years since the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, on December 14, 2012, during which twenty first-graders and six educators were killed. Since then, more than 150,000 Americans have lost their lives as a result of gun violence, and the public debate about guns in America—recently magnified by a mass shooting in Las Vegas in October and at a church in rural Texas in November—rages on. But a new anthology of poetry and essays aims to offer a different perspective on an issue that is so often oversimplified by the media.
Published a week before the fifth anniversary of the Sandy Hook shooting and coedited by poets Brian Clements, Alexandra Teague, and Dean Rader, Bullets Into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence (Beacon Press) is a powerful call to end gun violence in the United States. The anthology includes poems by dozens of celebrated poets—including Billy Collins, Ocean Vuong, Natasha Trethewey, and Juan Felipe Herrera—paired with nonfiction responses by activists, political figures, survivors, and others affected by gun violence. The anthology’s “call and response” structure showcases the direct relationship between specific acts of gun violence and the poems that were generated as a result. In the book’s foreword, former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords—who survived being shot in the head at a 2011 meeting with constituents in Arizona—and her husband, retired astronaut and Navy captain Mark Kelly, write, “Survivors, advocates, and allies can change hearts and minds—and move more people to join our fight for solutions—by telling stories about the irreparable damage that gun violence does to families and communities across the country.”
When they began compiling the book, the editors knew it would have a political purpose. “We agreed that the anthology would do more than simply collect literary responses to a political issue—it would need to be a political artifact in itself,” says Clements, for whom the anthology has a personal thrust. His wife, Abbey, worked as a second-grade teacher at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 and has since become an outspoken activist for gun control. Clements and his fellow editors envisioned the anthology as both a tribute to those who die by guns every year and a way to find common ground in the discussion about gun violence.
Several poets the editors invited to contribute, including Robert Hass, Tess Taylor, and Yusef Komunyakaa, chose to write new poems for the anthology. “These poems tend not to respond to specific events but are, instead, often deeply personal meditations on the poet’s relationship to guns or their individual experiences with shootings,” says Rader. He points to two poems in particular: one by Brenda Hillman about her family’s gun, and one by Bob Hicok that revisits the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech, where he was a professor at the time and even had the shooter, who killed thirty-two and wounded seventeen, in one of his classes. “Both of these poems move beyond mere ‘anger’ and toward some larger notion of individual and communal ethic,” says Rader.
With more than fifty poems and fifty responses, the anthology brings together many perspectives on a complicated issue. “A big part of the impetus for the anthology was that conversations in the media about gun violence often become a loop of the same few sentiments, without the range of voices that poets were offering,” says Teague. “Christopher Soto’s ‘All the Dead Boys Look Like Me,’ for instance, written in the wake of the 2016 shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, draws together personal experience with the often fatal dangers that queer brown bodies face in our country, as well as with family connections, activism, and a call for reimagining this legacy of endangerment and death.”
In another of the anthology’s pairings, Samaria Rice, mother of Tamir Rice, the twelve-year-old boy who was shot by police in Cleveland in 2012, responds to Reginald Dwayne Betts’s poem “When I Think of Tamir Rice While Driving,” which opens:
in the backseat of my car are my own sons, still not yet Tamir’s age, already having heard me warn them against playing with toy pistols, though my rhetoric is always about what I don’t like, not what I fear, because sometimes I think of Tamir Rice & shed tears…
Rice responds, “When I think of Tamir as his mother, the woman who gave birth to him, I wonder why my son had to lose his life in such a horrific way in this great place we call America…Tamir was an all-American kid with a promising and bright future…. Who will govern the government when they continue to murder American citizens?”
In another pairing, Po Kim Murray of the Newtown Action Alliance responds to a poem about the Sandy Hook shootings. Antonius Wiriadjaja, who survived being shot on the sidewalk in New York City as he walked to the subway in 2013, responds to Jimmy Santiago Baca’s poem “A Morning Shooting,” about a young man who is shot in a driveway on his way to work. “The poems themselves are exceptionally powerful, but the combinations of poem and respondent results in another order of emotional impact,” says Clements.
“Throughout the collection, the poets and respondents imagine how the lives of those killed by gun violence, and their survivors, could have been different if not for racial discrimination, homophobia, and other forms of violence that have replaced listening and supporting the lives and potentials of all our citizens,” says Teague.
The Bullets Into Bells editors hope to expand the project’s reach beyond the book. In the coming months, a number of events will be held across the country, featuring readings and panel discussions with the poets and essayists from the anthology. A related website for the project (beacon.org/bullets-into-bells-p1298.aspx) includes additional poems, statements from activists, opportunities for action, data on gun violence, interviews, and more. “One of my hopes,” says Clements, “is that this project—the book, the web content, the events around the country—will be part of a perhaps slower but more direct and more personal approach, bypassing the national media, that will encourage poets, readers of poetry, and literary audiences who might not otherwise have become involved in this movement to get more involved.”
Colum McCann echoes this hope in his introduction to the book: “The conviction behind this anthology is that we should be in the habit of hoping and speaking out in favor of that hope. It is, in the end, an optimistic book. The poems assert the possibility of language rather than bullets to open up our veins.”
Maya Popa is a writer and teacher living in New York City. She is the author of the poetry chapbook The Bees Have Been Canceled (New Michigan Press, 2017). Her website is mayacpopa.com.
Abbey and Brian Clements (holding an orange sign) at the Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America march across the Brooklyn Bridge in May 2016.
When poet Glenn Shaheen first started writing, he had little sense of community as an Arab American writer. He felt constrained from writing about Arab American issues or identity, and his undergraduate writing professors scoffed at “identity writing,” telling him it would be “a cheat to write like that, because you’d immediately get published.” But when fellow poet Hayan Charara introduced Shaheen to the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI), Shaheen found a community that supported and empowered his artistic freedom. “RAWI helped me be proud of my Arab heritage. Knowing there was a thriving community of Arab writers of all backgrounds and genres made me realize I was actually a part of that community,” says Shaheen. “I feel free to write about anything now after meeting so many other Arab writers—some working on science fiction novels or ecopoetry or experimental dramatic works. It helped me see that there isn’t a specific mold of an Arab American writer that I should aspire to or avoid.”
Shaheen is not the only writer who has found community through RAWI, a nonprofit organization that for the past twenty-five years has worked to support and disseminate creative and scholarly writing by Arab Americans. RAWI—a word that means storyteller in Arabic—was first established in 1992 by journalist and anthropologist Barbara Nimri Aziz as a seven-person group of writers that met in Washington, D.C. It has since grown into a thriving community of nearly 125 writers, artists, and journalists all over the world, from the United States to the United Arab Emirates. Members include literary heavyweights like Pulitzer Prize finalist Laila Lalami, National Book Award finalist Rabih Alameddine, poet and translator Fady Joudah, and poet Naomi Shihab Nye. The organization now hosts workshops and a biennial conference that features panels, readings, and workshops for Arab American writers. The last conference, which focused on a range of topics including craft, publishing, and the effects of Islamophobia, was held in Minneapolis in June 2016 and cosponsored by Mizna, a nonprofit that promotes Arab American culture. The next conference will take place in Houston, Texas, in June 2018. In the meantime, RAWI has also launched In Solidarity, a series of daylong workshops and craft talks for people of color, members of marginalized communities, and allies in various cities throughout the United States. The series was spearheaded by fiction writer Susan Muaddi Darraj, and the first workshop, which took place in March in Washington, D.C., gave writers space to talk about identity, publishing, and being a writer in the margins. The second was held in San Francisco in April, and more are in the works around the country. “We hope these workshops foster communication and a feeling of solidarity among various communities,” says Darraj. “At least one writers circle has been formed as an outcome of these daylong workshops.”
In the coming year RAWI will be doing even more. In March the organization began advocating for the first-ever Arab American caucus, to be held at the next Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in Tampa, and is currently planning a twenty-fifth-anniversary celebration. In October the University of Arkansas Press will publish Jess Rizkallah’s poetry collection the magic my body becomes, winner of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize, a new award given for a first or second book of poetry by a poet of Arab heritage and cosponsered by RAWI. “Leading RAWI has always been rewarding and challenging, but it is especially so this year,” says executive director Randa Jarrar. “I’m dazzled by our community’s literary output—we have so many excellent books out this year and next, and on and on.”
RAWI’s growth hasn’t been without some pains. “The challenge is often fund-raising, and belonging to a nation that often doesn’t celebrate our work alongside us, but picks and tokenizes, or silences,” Jarrar says. Both before and after 9/11, Arab American writers have had to balance the desire to be read and recognized for the quality of their work with being hyper-visible spokespeople for their homelands while struggling to live and work amid ongoing hostility toward Arab people. With the president’s recent ban on travelers from several Arab-majority countries, Arab Americans face increased challenges. “More than ever,” Jarrar says, “I hope that RAWI can be a solace and provide its members and the Arab American literary community support and a sense of belonging and connection and resistance.”
For many writers, RAWI has done just that. “It has shown me that we exist,” says Palestinian American poet Tariq Luthun. “I think, like any population, we are at least vaguely aware of the fact that we aren’t the only ones of our kind. But seeing and experiencing this community firsthand is so vital to one’s resolve in continuing to do this work.” Emerging poet Kamelya Omayma Youssef agrees. For her, RAWI provided the foundation she needed as a writer. “Imagining that I can eventually read to a room full of people and be heard without the threat of reductive thinking or fetishization or demonization should not be as radical as it is for me today,” she says. “But it is totally radical. RAWI is that room.”
Marwa Helal is a poet and journalist who lives and teaches in Brooklyn, New York. She is the winner of BOMB Magazine’s 2016 Poetry Contest and the author of the poetry collection Invasive species, forthcoming from Nightboat Books in 2019. Her website is marshelal.com.
Hayan Charara addresses attendees at the 2016 RAWI conference in Minneapolis. (Credit: Makeen Osman)
On a recent trip to New Orleans, my friend and I went to a bar in the neighborhood known as Algiers. We met a local man there, who hung out with us for the rest of the evening. About three hours into our conversation, I casually mentioned that my last name means “crescent moon.” He backed away from the table with a fearful gesture and said, “Oh, so you’re definitely Muslim.” This is the M-word in action, and this is how it functions in everyday social situations. It can suddenly change the mood, discontinue or alter conversations. PEN America’s new initiative, “The M Word: Muslim Americans Take the Mic,” aims to address this social effect head-on through a series of events and stories that will give voice to some of the most powerful and innovative writers in the Muslim community. The two-year initiative, which launched last fall and is funded by a $225,000 grant from the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art’s Building Bridges Program, seeks to advance the conversation about the challenges of self-identification and self-expression that Muslim Americans face in today’s social and political climate.
An organization devoted to advancing literature and protecting free expression at home and abroad, PEN America has highlighted Muslim writers by publishing their work on its website, pen.org, and by inviting Muslim writers to speak at the annual PEN World Voices Festival in New York City, where the organization is based. The M Word series continues this work by giving a more dedicated platform to the Muslim community. “We are for the first time focusing on the richness and diversity of Muslim American writers but also their deep contributions to the American literary canon and landscape,” says Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf, the deputy director of public programs at PEN America.
For centuries, Muslim Americans have played a vital role in building America’s varied and inspiring cultural landscape. But their voices have often been marginalized, a trend that has accelerated in today’s political climate, as misinformation and the normalization of hate speech have given rise to divisive rhetoric and rampant Islamophobia. “PEN America wanted to counter this trend by giving Muslim American creators the mic, so to speak, to tell their stories, their way, and to challenge prevailing narrow representations of Muslims in popular media,” Shariyf says.
The series kicked off in New York City this past September with an event called “The M Word: Muslim-American Comedians on the Right to Joke,” which featured comedy sets and a conversation with journalist and award-winning playwright Wajahat Ali, and comedians Negin Farsad, Mo Amer, Hasan Minhaj of The Daily Show, and Phoebe Robinson of 2 Dope Queens. PEN plans to host similar events in Boston; Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles; and other cities across the country. The next event, part of the Muslim Protagonist Symposium hosted by the Muslim Students Association at Columbia University, will be held in late February in New York City and will focus on Muslim American fiction writers.
To expand the program’s reach, PEN will also share original stories by Muslim American writers online. “We are inviting audience members, online followers, panelists, and others to share their personal experiences. The stories we collect will become part of the PEN American Center Digital Archive of Free Expression and may also appear on pen.org, Facebook, or other platforms,” Shariyf says. Videos of the M Word events are also posted online and sometimes live-streamed.
To help shape the series, PEN is collaborating with prominent organizations and individuals within the Muslim writing community. PEN cohosted an event in September at the Brooklyn Book Festival with Akashic Books and the Muslim Writers Collective, a volunteer-run group that organizes monthly open mics for Muslim writers and artists (the collective has active chapters in several cities, including Seattle; Boston; Houston, Texas; and Ann Arbor, Michigan). PEN has also solicited several advisers, including Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Ayad Akhtar; Sana Amanat, creator of the comic-book series Ms. Marvel (Kamala Khan); novelist Zia Haider Rahman; religious scholar and media commentator Reza Aslan; and Ali, who moderated the September event. “Everyone talks about Muslims, but no one is really interested in talking to them or having them emerge as protagonists in their own narrative,” Ali says. “The M Word is not a politically correct, feel-good, liberal proselytizing series. It examines, dissects, uncovers and celebrates the diverse experiences that are too often silenced, stereotyped, or excised from the final draft.”
When asked what the M-word means to him, Ali explains, “Muslim is an identity, a signifier that means an individual in some way identifies with a religion that acknowledges the Allah as the Creator and the Prophet Muhammad as his messenger. It’s one of my chosen identity markers that denotes my spiritual path and religious communities. On 9/11, I was a twenty-year-old senior at UC Berkeley. Since that day, I have become an accidental representative of this word and the 1.7 billion people it allegedly represents. I became us and them. My career has been spent navigating the alleged divides, building this bridge and inviting others to cross it.”
Ali remains hopeful. “Change takes time and effort, it never comes without some friction. I hope the M Word helps cast a spotlight on these talented American Muslims who rarely get their voices heard in front of mainstream, privileged audiences. It’s education, entertainment, and an opportunity to bridge the divides.”
Marwa Helal is the winner of BOMB Magazine’s 2016 Poetry Prize. She lives in New York City and received her MFA from the New School. Follow her on Twitter, @marwahelal.
Every month in New York City, thirty to forty writers and literature enthusiasts gather at the home of a fellow writer for a potluck and reading of American, international, and Singaporean literature. Established in 2014 by Singaporean writer Jee Leong Koh, these salons, called the Second Saturday Reading Series, have featured dozens of emerging and established writers from around the world and allowed Singaporean and non-Singaporean writers alike to connect over literature. Koh now hopes to expand on that cultural exchange with his new project, Singapore Unbound, which will celebrate and raise awareness about Singaporean literary culture. “We want to expand the idea of who is Singaporean,” says Koh. “You’re not Singaporean just because you’re a citizen. You’re still Singaporean if you move away, or you could be a guest worker in the country. We want to encompass both groups.”
Launched in February, Singapore Unbound serves as the umbrella organization for the Second Saturday Reading Series and the biennial Singapore Literature Festival, which was created in 2014 by Koh and writer Paul Rozario-Falcone and was last held in New York City in Fall 2016. Under the same umbrella, indie poetry publisher Bench Press will join forces with the blog Singapore Poetry, which features cross-cultural book reviews (Americans review Singaporean books, and Singaporeans review American books). Koh hopes that by aligning these projects under one organization, he can provide Singaporean writers with a “prominent and independent platform for open and free expression of their views.”
That platform is important to protecting and advancing the literary culture of a country that has not always supported free speech. While Singapore boasts a rich stew of cultures with four official languages—Malay, Mandarin, Tamil, and English—and a burgeoning indie literature landscape that showcases a diversity of cultures and ideas, literature is still restricted by the government. Although the state grants large sums of money to publishers and writers, giving them greater freedom to take risks on young writers in particular, the money comes with stipulations: The work cannot undermine governmental authority and must not advocate for what the state deems “objectionable lifestyles”—namely, those of LGBTQIA writers. In response, Singapore-based publishers like Ethos, Epigram, Landmark, and Math Paper Press have been pushing censorship boundaries for the past few years, and Koh himself doesn’t accept government funds. Kenny Leck, owner of the popular Tiong Bahru–based bookstore BooksActually, says, “At the bookstore, and with our publishing arm, Math Paper Press, we sell the titles and publish the content that most compels us. In that way, our government, the state, has no say in what we choose to do.”
Singapore Unbound is committed not only to freedom of expression, but also to the idea that cross-cultural exchange leads to a healthier literary culture. Alfian Sa’at, who participated in the 2016 literature festival, where a portion of his five-hour epic play Hotel was performed in the United States for the first time, notes the positive impact of the kind of exchange Singapore Unbound fosters. “Having links with writers from other countries helps us learn from one another’s experiences,” he says. “For a long time I think we’ve looked toward a place like the United States for guidance on issues such as freedom of expression, how institutional solidarity in the form of something like the PEN American Center can aid writers who struggle with censorship and persecution.” Jeremy Tiang, a Singaporean writer living in New York City, agrees. At the 2014 festival Tiang worked with the political arts collective Kristiania to organize a panel of two Singaporean poets alongside writers in exile from Indonesia and Nigeria. “I think the best conversations happen when people from different contexts are able to exchange ideas in this way,” says Tiang.
With the introduction of Singapore Unbound, Koh plans to further those conversations. He hopes to start a scholarship program that will pay for Singaporean writers to spend two weeks in New York during the summer to experience the culture of the city and collaborate with local writers. This past fall Koh also created a fellowship program designed to bring more voices to the organization, help it reach a wider audience, and build its online presence. “With Singapore Unbound we want to bring outstanding literature to a wide audience,” says Koh, “and by doing so liberalize our politics and sentiments.”
Melynda Fuller is a New York City–based writer and editor. She received her MFA from the New School and is at work on a collection of essays. Her website is melyndafuller.com. Find her on Twitter, @MGrace_Fuller.
Correction A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that the 2016 Singapore Literature Festival included both a performance of Alfian Sa’at’s play Hotel in English and a panel organized by Jeremy Tiang. Alfian Sa’at’s play is actually multilingual and Jeremy Tiang organized a panel at the 2014 festival, not the 2016 festival.
Jee Leong Koh speaks at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.
On a recent trip to New Orleans, my friend and I went to a bar in the neighborhood known as Algiers. We met a local man there, who hung out with us for the rest of the evening. About three hours into our conversation, I casually mentioned that my last name means “crescent moon.” He backed away from the table with a fearful gesture and said, “Oh, so you’re definitely Muslim.” This is the M-word in action, and this is how it functions in everyday social situations. It can suddenly change the mood, discontinue or alter conversations. PEN America’s new initiative, “The M Word: Muslim Americans Take the Mic,” aims to address this social effect head-on through a series of events and stories that will give voice to some of the most powerful and innovative writers in the Muslim community. The two-year initiative, which launched last fall and is funded by a $225,000 grant from the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art’s Building Bridges Program, seeks to advance the conversation about the challenges of self-identification and self-expression that Muslim Americans face in today’s social and political climate.
An organization devoted to advancing literature and protecting free expression at home and abroad, PEN America has highlighted Muslim writers by publishing their work on its website, pen.org, and by inviting Muslim writers to speak at the annual PEN World Voices Festival in New York City, where the organization is based. The M Word series continues this work by giving a more dedicated platform to the Muslim community. “We are for the first time focusing on the richness and diversity of Muslim American writers but also their deep contributions to the American literary canon and landscape,” says Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf, the deputy director of public programs at PEN America.
For centuries, Muslim Americans have played a vital role in building America’s varied and inspiring cultural landscape. But their voices have often been marginalized, a trend that has accelerated in today’s political climate, as misinformation and the normalization of hate speech have given rise to divisive rhetoric and rampant Islamophobia. “PEN America wanted to counter this trend by giving Muslim American creators the mic, so to speak, to tell their stories, their way, and to challenge prevailing narrow representations of Muslims in popular media,” Shariyf says.
The series kicked off in New York City this past September with an event called “The M Word: Muslim-American Comedians on the Right to Joke,” which featured comedy sets and a conversation with journalist and award-winning playwright Wajahat Ali, and comedians Negin Farsad, Mo Amer, Hasan Minhaj of The Daily Show, and Phoebe Robinson of 2 Dope Queens. PEN plans to host similar events in Boston; Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles; and other cities across the country. The next event, part of the Muslim Protagonist Symposium hosted by the Muslim Students Association at Columbia University, will be held in late February in New York City and will focus on Muslim American fiction writers.
To expand the program’s reach, PEN will also share original stories by Muslim American writers online. “We are inviting audience members, online followers, panelists, and others to share their personal experiences. The stories we collect will become part of the PEN American Center Digital Archive of Free Expression and may also appear on pen.org, Facebook, or other platforms,” Shariyf says. Videos of the M Word events are also posted online and sometimes live-streamed.
To help shape the series, PEN is collaborating with prominent organizations and individuals within the Muslim writing community. PEN cohosted an event in September at the Brooklyn Book Festival with Akashic Books and the Muslim Writers Collective, a volunteer-run group that organizes monthly open mics for Muslim writers and artists (the collective has active chapters in several cities, including Seattle; Boston; Houston, Texas; and Ann Arbor, Michigan). PEN has also solicited several advisers, including Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Ayad Akhtar; Sana Amanat, creator of the comic-book series Ms. Marvel (Kamala Khan); novelist Zia Haider Rahman; religious scholar and media commentator Reza Aslan; and Ali, who moderated the September event. “Everyone talks about Muslims, but no one is really interested in talking to them or having them emerge as protagonists in their own narrative,” Ali says. “The M Word is not a politically correct, feel-good, liberal proselytizing series. It examines, dissects, uncovers and celebrates the diverse experiences that are too often silenced, stereotyped, or excised from the final draft.”
When asked what the M-word means to him, Ali explains, “Muslim is an identity, a signifier that means an individual in some way identifies with a religion that acknowledges the Allah as the Creator and the Prophet Muhammad as his messenger. It’s one of my chosen identity markers that denotes my spiritual path and religious communities. On 9/11, I was a twenty-year-old senior at UC Berkeley. Since that day, I have become an accidental representative of this word and the 1.7 billion people it allegedly represents. I became us and them. My career has been spent navigating the alleged divides, building this bridge and inviting others to cross it.”
Ali remains hopeful. “Change takes time and effort, it never comes without some friction. I hope the M Word helps cast a spotlight on these talented American Muslims who rarely get their voices heard in front of mainstream, privileged audiences. It’s education, entertainment, and an opportunity to bridge the divides.”
Marwa Helal is the winner of BOMB Magazine’s 2016 Poetry Prize. She lives in New York City and received her MFA from the New School. Follow her on Twitter, @marwahelal.
Goodreads, the social networking website and app for readers, celebrated its tenth anniversary in September. With sixty-five million users and sixty-nine million book reviews, it is among the hundred most visited websites in the United States. Owned by Amazon and headquartered in San Francisco, the company is not just a platform to catalogue, rate, and review books, it’s also a promotional force in the publishing industry—one utilized by the Big Five publishers, independent presses, and authors alike.
In 2007 journalist Elizabeth Khuri and software engineer Otis Chandler, who were married the following year, created Goodreads to answer two needs book lovers often face: how to decide what to read and how to keep track of what you’ve already read. Social networking was in its infancy—Facebook had just hit fifty million users—and the couple wanted to bring the social aspect of reading, recommending, and discussing books to the Internet. “Most readers find the amount of books being published overwhelming,” says Khuri. “And there is something deeply satisfying about being able to track the books you’ve read.”
A teeming community of book bloggers and critics quickly latched on to the platform. Chandler says that publishing “the best reviews on the Internet” helped secure its success. Khuri adds that the reviews published on Goodreads are more personal than those of traditional book-review outlets, which enhances the site’s appeal. “Goodreads users are writing for their friends and for the community, so the reviews feel more authentic.”
Goodreads offers numerous tools for cataloguing and discussing books. As with Facebook and other social-networking sites, readers can set up a profile and connect with other book enthusiasts. They can create and label “shelves” to keep track of what they’ve read, what they want to read, and their favorite books; they can rate books, write reviews, and comment on other readers’ reviews. They can also join any of the thousands of public and private discussion groups and book clubs—or create their own. Users can even ask authors questions and post their own writing. In 2011 the Goodreads team introduced a book-recommendation engine to the platform, which delivers informed suggestions to users for further reading based on the books they’ve read and rated. Chandler notes that three to five books in a given subject area enables the algorithm to make smart picks—often a mix of best-sellers and lesser-known surprises.
In 2013 Amazon purchased Goodreads for an undisclosed sum, allowing Goodreads to bolster its team (now at 130 employees) and implant Goodreads reviews and recommendations into the Kindle reading experience. Users can also share Kindle notes and highlights with friends on Goodreads, to facilitate deeper discussion. “We’re building magical experiences for the Kindle,” Chandler says, before adding, “We’re still full-guns-ahead on Goodreads the site.” Though Goodreads makes it easiest to buy books on Amazon, a drop-down menu lists other online options such as Barnes & Noble and Better World Books, as well as links to WorldCat, a centralized library catalogue.
While Goodreads started out as a useful tool for readers, it has also become an important promotional platform for authors and publishers. Considering that publicity departments have been scaled back in recent years, social networking has played a growing role in the success of many books and authors, whether traditionally or self-published. “Online discovery has become the biggest challenge for authors and publishers,” says Chandler. “How do you stand out online with all the self-publishing and digital publishing? Goodreads sits at the intersection of word of mouth and online publicity.”
Writers Paulo Coelho, Neil Gaiman, Kathryn Stockett, and Roxane Gay have long used the site. Chandler and Khuri were humbled when John Ashbery joined Goodreads a few months after the site launched. Novelist Celeste Ng joined Goodreads in its early stages to keep track of what she’d read. When she published her 2014 debut novel, Everything I Never Told You, she created an official author page, which contains a bio, a list of books she has written or contributed to, quotes from her writing, discussion topics, and her reviews of other books. Ng also answers reader questions and participates in interviews on the site. But she warns against responding to reader reviews, good or bad: “For the author to be listening in can dampen the conversation,” she says.
Everything I Never Told You resonated with readers on the site and was nominated for a Goodreads Choice Award, so Ng’s publisher, Penguin Press, embraced the site in its promotional campaign for her 2017 follow-up, Little Fires Everywhere. The publicity team raffled off galleys to Goodreads users, mailed them to influential reviewers on the site who had loved the first book, and shipped a box to the Goodreads office. When the book hit stores, Penguin paid for an e-mail with a note from the author to be sent to Ng’s fans and placed targeted ads on the Goodreads home page. Ng came in at number three on a BuzzFeed list entitled “21 Books Goodreads Users Are Damn Excited to Read This Fall,” and Goodreads featured an interview with Ng in its e-newsletter in the lead-up to her new novel’s publication. After each of these efforts, more users added the book to their “want to read” shelf—which often converts to sales.
Ng’s second novel debuted in September at number seven on the New York Times hardcover best-seller list. “It’s safe to say that this community helped make Little Fires Everywhere such a big success,” says Matt Boyd, the associate publisher and marketing director of Penguin Press. “I think the site has helped people discover the book,” Ng says. “My sense is that it’s an amplified version of friends recommending books to other friends.”
Jonathan Vatner is a fiction writer in Brooklyn, New York. His novel, The Chelmsford Arms, is forthcoming from Thomas Dunne Books in Fall 2018.
Otis Chandler and Elizabeth Khuri, founders of Goodreads.
Jack Kerouac’s On the Road has inspired countless works of literature and art, but now, thanks to two literary-minded entrepreneurs, the iconic novel has also inspired an app. “I was reading On the Road, sitting there with my laptop next to me, book at my side, looking up all the places Kerouac mentioned,” says Jef Van der Avoort, cofounder of the new literary search-and-discovery app Squirl. “I told my business partner, Serie Wolfe, and she said she had the same experience.”
The pair’s literary curiosity sparked the idea for Squirl, which allows users to find nearby literary locations wherever they are. The app pins locations on a map that correspond to scenes in books. There’s a pin for the University of Texas in Austin campus, which is featured in Elizabeth Crook’s novel Monday, Monday. There’s a pin for South Park in Billings, Montana, which appears in Carrie La Seur’s novel, The Home Place. And there’s a pin for the Brooklyn Bridge, which plays a part in Catherine Lacey’s debut novel, Nobody Is Ever Missing. Each pin features a relevant passage from the book, as well as links to the author’s profile and a summary of the book that also includes links to booksellers.
Squirl works by first inviting authors to post locations from their books. “We developed the app because we think too many great books remain undiscovered,” Van der Avoort says, noting that the app is geared mostly toward independent and emerging authors who need help getting the word out about their books. “If you’re a smaller indie author, you can tell your friends, then friends of friends—but what’s the next step? It levels the playing field. Whether you have a marketing budget or not, it’s the same for everyone.” Writers then set up an author profile, on which readers can find out more about their work. Readers can search locations for a specific book, or they can search by locale to discover what literary places might exist in that area—and in doing so also find out about new books. Users can also search by author, from self-published writers to Arthur Conan Doyle, in order to find out where the characters in that author’s books have been and the places that have inspired their works.
Van der Avoort and his team began developing the app in late 2014. They launched the brand, complete with people dressed in squirrel costumes, at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, in March 2015. The app, which is free for readers and authors, went live later that year; by the end of January it included more than five hundred authors and a thousand locations worldwide. The project has so far been independently funded, but Van der Avoort is looking for external support to develop new features. In the future, he hopes readers will be able to create their own maps of favorite literary locations and that authors will be able to create virtual journeys for their characters that readers can follow.
For now, Van der Avoort sees Squirl as a tool to enhance the reading experience and connect readers with authors they might not otherwise discover. “My personal goal would be to one day see a book that was discovered through our app featured on the New York Times best-seller list,” Van der Avoort says. “That would be success.”
Rachael Hanel is the author of We’ll Be the Last Ones to Let You Down: Memoir of a Gravedigger’s Daughter (University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
Considering the number of steps it takes for writers to turn their work into a published book, it’s no wonder that the literary world is partitioned into so many components: workshops for writers to hone their craft, literary magazines for emerging writers to share their first pieces, and both indie and mainstream presses for new and established authors to publish their books. Catapult, a new literary venture launched in September and led by a team of industry veterans—with significant financial backing—offers all of the above.
“Catapult conceptually mirrors the ecosystem in which writers and creatives exist right now,” says Andy Hunter, Catapult’s publisher and the cofounder of the popular website and digital publisher Electric Literature. The new operation, headquartered in New York City with a satellite office in Portland, Oregon, evolved out of the independent press Black Balloon Publishing, which was established in 2010 by Elizabeth Koch and Leigh Newman. Koch—Catapult CEO and daughter of billionaire conservative industrialist Charles Koch—provided the seed funding for the company, which is operating on a budget in the high six figures. “Since the inception of Black Balloon, part of the vision was always to create a mechanism for writers to find one another, support one another, and share their work,” says Koch. “Both Catapult and Black Balloon sprang from a deep-seated belief that a well-told story can be an accidental training ground for empathy, for expanding our minds and developing personally.”
Koch enlisted Hunter, who then recruited industry veteran Pat Strachan to take the role of editor in chief. Strachan has worked as an editor at the New Yorker; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; and Little, Brown, and is known for acquiring Marilynne Robinson’s debut novel, Housekeeping, as well as books by Tom Wolfe, Lydia Davis, and Seamus Heaney. Meanwhile, Newman has been named the company’s editor-at-large.
Catapult’s editorial focus will be broader than that of Black Balloon (which will continue to publish more experimental books as an imprint of Catapult), with twelve titles published in both print and e-book format each year. Strachan says Catapult is seeking “American and international fiction and narrative nonfiction that is alive, insightful, illuminating, stirring, and surprising by way of unique voices—whether emerging or established—who honor the craft of writing.” The press will open its doors to unagented submissions every April and October, and released its first titles this fall: Padgett Powell’s short story collection Cries for Help, Various, in September; and Gavin McCrea’s debut novel, Mrs. Engels, in October.
The company’s website (catapult.co), meanwhile, publishes original short fiction and nonfiction that complements the press’s editorial focus. Web editor in chief Yuka Igarashi and associate web editor Mensah Demary say they are more concerned with a compelling story than genre distinctions. “We’re thinking about stories very widely,” says Igarashi, the former managing editor of Granta. “Hopefully that includes graphic pieces and stories told in multimedia.” Catapult also publishes pieces with original art by its in-house illustrator, Tallulah Pomeroy; recent works have included Nao-cola Yamazaki’s story in translation about amoebas, “False Geneology,” and Joy Williams’s story about a daughter visiting a nursing home, “Cats and Dogs.” Submissions for the website are open year-round, and contributors are paid for their work.
The Catapult website also hosts a Community section, which allows writers to self-publish stories and comment on one another’s work. Readers can promote pieces they like, and the web editors will choose their favorite pieces, which will then be published on the curated site; those writers selected will be compensated for their work. With this type of community engagement, Hunter hopes the site will eventually attract a million unique visitors a month (by comparison, Electric Literature attracts three million unique visitors a year)—an audience that will help build and sustain a readership for Catapult’s books.
In addition to its publishing platforms, Catapult offers a robust series of writing classes in New York City. The program offers six-week workshops (limited to six students each), as well as daylong publishing and writing boot camps, taught by both established and emerging writers such as Mary Gaitskill and Julia Pierpont. While the Catapult team doesn’t have plans to host courses outside of New York City, it will offer online courses starting in 2016.
With such a comprehensive array of publishing and educational efforts, Hunter believes the new endeavor could eventually become its own publishing ecosystem. In other words, beginning writers might take a Catapult class to learn craft and find readers, then publish a piece on the community site, and then be chosen for the curated site. And finally, Hunter hopes, some Catapult writers might even publish a book through the press. “Nothing that we do hasn’t been done before,” Hunter says, “but we’re the only ones who are doing all of it together in exactly this way.” Koch agrees. “This multiarmed structure—that’s our Catapult. It’s our flywheel, generating its own growth and momentum as it blurs traditional boundaries—between student and teacher, established author and up-and-comer, publisher and audience.”
Jonathan Vatner is a fiction writer in Brooklyn, New York. He is the staff writer for Hue, the magazine of the Fashion Institute of Technology.
Correction An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that many staff members of Black Balloon Publishing have joined the Catapult staff. No former Black Balloon staff members currently work at Catapult.
When looking to buy a particular book, one has a couple of options: Either go online, punch in a few keystrokes, click a couple of links, and a book will be immediately on its way; or call several bookstores, track down a copy (or wait for it to arrive in stock), and then walk, drive, or take a train to the shop. The first option is quick and easy; the second is time-consuming and inefficient, but supports more local booksellers—an increasingly important act in the age of Amazon, the company whose business model has made it difficult for many independent bookstores to compete.
Ben Purkert, a poet who lives in New York City, grappled with this dilemma. Like many readers, he wants to support his local independents and enjoys the experience of browsing through a physical store, but in the end he wants to know whether a specific book is on the shelves before he makes the trip. Purkert grew frustrated, however, with calling individual stores to confirm books were in stock. “I thought that maybe there were other people getting frustrated in the same way I was,” he says. In response, he founded CityShelf (www.cityshelf.com), a new digital tool that allows users to search the inventories of local bookstores on their mobile devices. A user can simply enter the title of a book, and CityShelf offers a list of local bookstores that carry the title, including the book’s price and in-store availability as well as each store’s location and phone number. Launched last December as a mobile site, CityShelf initially only covered seven bookstores in New York City. This summer, however, Purkert and the CityShelf team rolled out a new app and desktop site that covers stores in New York City as well as in five new locations: Boston; Chicago; Minneapolis; Portland, Oregon; and Seattle.
Purkert describes CityShelf as a “passion project.” He and his partners—technologist Eric Weinstein, designer Liz Oh, and product manager Javier Lopez—created the site in their spare time with no funding. Once they built the platform, they approached bookstores and included those with a searchable inventory on the site. In the few months since the mobile site’s launch, Purkert reports that more than a thousand people have used CityShelf, with about 50 percent of the site’s traffic representing returning users. Ultimately, Purkert would like to see the number of users grow exponentially, and he hopes to add more cities to the site and more developers to the team.
As CityShelf continues to expand, Purkert believes the platform will complement what he sees as a resurgence in indie bookstores and will encourage more readers to choose local brick-and-mortar shops over the convenience of Amazon. “A lot [of bookstores] are not just surviving, but thriving. What that suggests to me is that people are buying local. People love talking to booksellers, they love browsing, and they love getting suggested picks,” he says. “You can buy lightbulbs and diapers online, but a paperback is a bit more sacred.”
Rachael Hanel is the author of We’ll Be the Last Ones to Let You Down: Memoir of a Gravedigger’s Daughter, published in 2013 by the University of Minnesota Press.
Filmmaker Jennifer Crandall first visited Alabama in 2013 on a short-term assignment for Alabama Media Group, a digital media company that produces television and video programming and publishes three of the most prominent newspapers in the state. Though she was living in Amsterdam at the time, Crandall was so inspired by Alabama that she moved to Birmingham, became the company’s first artist-in-residence, and began developing a documentary project that would showcase the state’s citizens. But rather than use a traditional interview format, Crandall decided to center her project around Walt Whitman’s iconic 1855 poem “Song of Myself” for its celebration of American identity. She has since spent the past two years traveling throughout Alabama, filming people reading from the poem. The resulting series, Whitman, Alabama, captures the spirit of the state and its people while illustrating the many themes of the poem—race, religion, politics, sexuality, and immigration—that the nation continues to wrestle with today.
The first installment in the series featured ninety-seven-year-old Virginia Mae Schmitt, who has since died, reciting the poem’s famous opening lines. “I celebrate myself, and sing myself,” reads Schmitt from an armchair in her living room in Birmingham. “And what I assume you shall assume.” Since that initial shoot, Crandall, with the support of Alabama Media Group and the help of fellow filmmakers Bob Miller and Pierre Kattar, has filmed around forty of the fifty-two planned films; she posts a new video to the project website (www.whitmanalabama.com) each week. The project features a diverse group of Alabamians, including Bob Tedrow, a concertina maker in Birmingham; Mariam Jalloh, a fourteen-year-old immigrant from Guinea living in Birmingham; and Demetrius, Frederick, Patricia, and Tammy—all inmates at prisons in Montgomery.
Acquaintances and friends introduced Crandall to several of the project’s readers, but she approached many people at random too. Crandall was surprised by how readily Alabamians agreed to being filmed. Each subject is asked to read from one of the poem’s fifty-two verses. “No matter what way we went about it, people just said yes,” says Crandall, who notes that the project is not about making the audience into Whitman experts. “Most people have heard of Whitman, from Alabama to anyplace else I’ve been, but they are not really conversant in his work. Fundamentally, it’s a project about getting Americans more conversant about who we are as Americans.”
Crandall strives to make the videos intimate reflections of the subjects and to film them in environments where they can be fully themselves: a living room, for instance, a front porch, or the woods. Each video juxtaposes candid moments alongside the recitation. A group of teenagers skateboard, dance, beatbox, and tease one another in a vacant lot while taking turns reading verse 21. One participant, Beth Spivey, recounts getting into her car in the middle of the night to chase a vandal down the road before reading the opening lines of verse 34.
Crandall embraces spontaneity in her process. She filmed verse 43 by driving along Route 43 and seeing whom she might encounter. While passing through the small city of Union Springs, she met Anthony Stewart, who was sitting under a tree. When she asked him to read a portion of the poem, he explained that he has a hard time reading. In the video, Crandall can be heard feeding Stewart the lines from behind a tree. The result is moving: Stewart repeats complex language with composure, lines Crandall herself stumbles over. “I’m not a good reader, but I’m a good singer,” Stewart says. The scene closes with Stewart singing as a thunderstorm breaks over Union Springs. “That is the stuff I live for,” says Crandall. “Each of these verses has its own fingerprint, which has to do with the people behind the camera, in front of the camera, and the Whitman verse chosen. This project is 51 percent serendipity, 49 percent planning. It’s a gamble, but part of what we do is in the spirit of the moment. We work with what people give us. Everyone is a coauthor in that they feel some sense of ownership.”
In the opening verse of “Song of Myself,” Whitman proclaims, “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” This sentiment lives at the heart of Crandall’s series, celebrating the disparate lives of individuals while emphasizing our unity as a nation. “Whitman wrote the poem at a pretty divided time,” Crandall says. “He did a lot of work to help us empathetically understand who we could be and didn’t restrain himself to the time and place he was from. He offered us guidelines for how to think of ourselves as Americans. We are inextricably linked to one another and no one particular thing. Today we’re struggling with that.”
The irony of using the words of Whitman, a Northerner, to showcase the South does not escape Crandall. “Bringing this poem to life by Southerners was an attempt to remind us that if you’re a Northerner, you’re also a Southerner. We are part of each other.”
Maya C. Popa is a writer and teacher based in New York City. She is the author of the poetry chapbook The Bees Have Been Canceled (New Michigan Press, 2017). Her website is www.mayacpopa.com.
Bob Tedrow, a concertina maker in Birmingham, Alabama, plays the banjo as part of his reading of verse 7 of “Song of Myself” for the Whitman, Alabama project.
In 2013 actor and director Ross Williams, founder of the nonprofit New York Shakespeare Exchange, set out to film all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets, each performed by a different actor in a New York City location. After raising nearly $50,000 through a Kickstarter campaign, filming began. The original deadline was Shakespeare’s 450th birthday (April 23, 2014), but the project’s aim—to merge the literary and visual arts, and bring the poetry of William Shakespeare to the poetry of New York City—quickly proved more ambitious than expected.
As Williams and his team—made up of producers, a copy writer, and text coaches—began to film the sonnets, it became clear that the project transcended a mere collection of recitations. Each video became an artistic object in its own right. “This project is unlike any I have seen before,” says Mark Karafin, who directed Sonnet 108, which won runner-up in the annual Shakespeare Short Film Competition in 2015. “I read Sonnet 108 and it spoke to me immediately.” Filmed at the John T. Brush Stairway in Harlem, where the Polo Grounds, the original New York Giants baseball stadium, once stood, the sonnet explores “the first conceit of love, and its agelessness.” “I felt strongly about this location,” says Karafin. “It had substance and relevance to New York. There was history here.” Billy Magnussen, an actor who earned a Tony nomination for the Broadway production Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, stars in the film, and recites the sonnet in a voice-over. “My favorite part of this project was the opportunity to collaborate with such talented and inspiring artists in every department,” says Karafin.
Each of the project’s short films, released online and through a mobile app, offers a unique stylistic take on the sonnets: The adaptation of Sonnet 73, which opens with “That time of year thou mayst in me behold,” depicts a gray, blurry image of a man sitting beneath a wintry arbor in Central Park while another man plays the saxophone. Sonnet 116—“Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments”—features a couple walking along the Brooklyn Heights Promenade in the rain. Sonnet 44—“If the dull substance of my flesh were thought”—uses special effects to portray a man walking in an abstract, geometric landscape as his skin morphs into different metals.
The Sonnet Project app, which was launched in May 2013, has been an integral part of the project’s success, offering a catalogue of the filmed sonnets and a mapping feature that shows the setting used in each production. This allows the project to highlight locations in New York City that tourists and locals alike might otherwise overlook. “That’s been a part of the project that really makes people notice us,” says Williams, who adds that the interactivity of the project “could really make an impact” in terms of its reach. Additionally, each video provides a transcript of the sonnet, including a brief analysis and explanation of the wordplay. “It’s a unique platform to learn and expose all parts of Shakespeare,” says Karafin.
Ultimately, the project aims to nurture the next generation of readers and artists, helping them gain confidence with Shakespearean language and inspiring them to take on creative projects of their own. “We are currently deep in the creation of the Sonnet Project educational tools,” says Williams, who, by the end of the year, plans to unveil a two-week curriculum for high school students that teaches Shakespearean language and encourages students to create their own Sonnet Project films on their mobile devices. “We have had a number of educators tell us that they like to use the Sonnet Project in their classroom because it’s the one time of day they can stop telling their students to put their phones away,” says Williams.
So far, the Sonnet Project has engaged more than five hundred artists and produced videos for all but approximately thirty of the sonnets. Filmmakers and directors are invited to apply to create an original video adaptation of any of the remaining sonnets; if accepted, the Sonnet Project will work with that filmmaker to assign a New York City location, actor, and text coach for the film. In his plans for 2017, Williams hopes to launch a second series of videos of the 154 sonnets, this time filmed in locations all over the United States and abroad. The team also hopes to add several new mapping features to the app so that it can support walking tours and even scavenger hunts. “Our goal is to create a global conversation about Shakespeare,” says Williams. “By existing in a cinematic space, Shakespeare can feel alive and present.”
Maya C. Popa is a writer and teacher based in New York City. Her website is www.mayacpopa.com.
A phone rings, but it’s not the one in your pocket; you realize the sound is coming from an old-school rotary pay phone in a corner of your favorite bookstore. You look around. It’s just you and this softly ringing relic of a bygone era. You pick up the phone. “Hello?” you say. “Ishmael, what’s going on, man?” a smooth-talking stranger says on the other end. “I just wanted to tell you a little bit about my experience with The Catcher in the Rye.”
Welcome to Call Me Ishmael, perhaps the most celebrated opening sentence in literary history and now an innovative and irresistible new tool for discovering books and sharing stories about them. The project began in 2014, when founders Logan Smalley and Stephanie Kent were exchanging favorite opening lines of books in a bar in New York City’s West Village. One of them wondered aloud, “What if Ishmael had a phone number? What if you actually could call him?” In an instant, the idea for Call Me Ishmael was born: a phone number, an answering machine, a website, and an invitation to “readers around the world to tell us stories about the books they love.”
The process is simple: If a reader has a story to tell about a particular book—how it was a source of inspiration, maybe, or how it was life changing—that reader can call Ishmael at (774) 325-0503 and leave the story as an anonymous voice mail. Those who just want to listen can visit the website (callmeishmael.com) and hear more than a thousand stories about books of all types: literary fiction, fantasy, mystery, poetry, nonfiction, and everything in between. Smalley and Kent select their favorite stories and share a few each week on the website and via social media. When the pair discover a particularly wonderful story, they transcribe it on a typewriter (yes, a real manual typewriter) and share it as a video.
But they’re not stopping there. Now, in the form of a rotary-style pay phone produced this winter, Call Me Ishmael will soon be found in bookstores, libraries, schools, coffee shops, and even homes around the world. A small placard on the phone provides a directory of books. Dial the number for, say, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road or Mary Oliver’s Thirst, and moments later a caller is listening to a stranger’s journey with Kerouac or, in one of Smalley and Kent’s favorite calls, a woman’s recollection of serenading trees with Oliver’s verse in a Nashville park.
To fund the project, Smalley and Kent, who both have day jobs—Smalley is the director of TED Education and Kent works in community and marketing at Astrohaus—conducted a Kickstarter campaign in early November 2015. The campaign exceeded its ten-thousand-dollar goal in the first two days, and the project’s first phones will be produced early this year, including one that will be installed in Avid Bookshop in Athens, Georgia. The phone is portable, requires minimal space, and can be plugged in or powered by a rechargeable battery. It can be purchased outright (the cost is still being determined) or rented for events such as festivals or readings. Owners can also track the number of listens for each story on an app that manages the phone.
Owners of Call Me Ishmael phones can also use the app to assign any voice mail in Ishmael’s library (or stories that the phone owner uploads) to any button on the phone. “A bookstore might want to make all buttons correlate to stories about a visiting or local author, or a librarian might want to feature stories sourced from a fifth-grade class,” says Smalley. “It’s just a simple and, hopefully, delightful way to discover and celebrate books.” The phone’s app even has a “mysterious button”—when an owner presses the button on the app, the physical phone will start ringing. When someone answers, a message will play.
The response to Call Me Ishmael so far has been positive—not least, the founders believe, because it taps into why people so deeply love books. More than two thousand readers have called in and left messages, and the recordings have been played over a million times. “Ishmael is a really unique way to talk about books and to get people talking about books,” says Smalley. “It isn’t a review of books, it’s a way for people—writers, readers, teachers, anyone—to share stories about the stories that have touched them.” Kent agrees: “Books affect us in profound ways. Ishmael provides readers a way to share that experience, and it’s fascinating the range of people who call and the books they tell us about. Sometimes people call and instantly start crying. More often than not, they share intimate stories from their own lives.”
In one message, about Shirley Conran’s book Lace, a woman says, “I was adopted at birth. And at the time when I read this book, I wanted desperately to find my birth mother. And I found her.” In another, a man talks about his experience with Dr. Seuss’s The Sneetches. “I was born about five months before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that separate by definition is not equal,” the caller says. “My Sunday school teacher told us that God wanted us to be separate.” Another: “I feel like I grew up with Harry Potter, as crazy as that sounds.”
Ishmael also gets his fair share of prank calls (one caller asked Ishmael to pick up toilet paper for him, another declared her love for him). “The calls are just absolutely hilarious,” Kent says. “We compiled them for April Fools’ Day this year. It’s quite a treasure to wake up every day and hear what people have to say.”
Call Me Ishmael has also bridged the gap between readers and authors. Last March Cheryl Strayed posted a response to a Call Me Ishmael voice mail about her book Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life From Dear Sugar, on her Facebook page, saying that the message made her day. John Green tweeted “I’m in tears” in response to a compilation video of readers who called Ishmael to share their experiences with Green’s young-adult novel The Fault in Our Stars. This is precisely why Call Me Ishmael was designed, Kent says: “to build community via narrative and to share books. Strayed and Green are just two examples of how it can do this. We’re super excited to see where all of this goes.”
Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum is a poet, an editor, and a lecturer at the University of Colorado in Boulder. He is the author of a poetry collection, Ghost Gear (University of Arkansas Press, 2014). His website is andrewmk.com.
When you walk into a bar full of people silently on their phones, no one thinks anything of it,” says Guinevere de la Mare, founder of San Francisco–based Silent Book Club. “But when you walk into a bar full of people silently reading books? Now that’s an arresting image.” It’s also an image that’s becoming more common, as a new literary trend gains traction around the country: silent reading parties.
Here’s how it works: A group of friends and strangers meet at a bar or library or private home once a month and read together. They don’t read the same book. They can come and go as they please. They’re not even expected to discuss what they’re reading. All they do is read, in a shared space, together, as a community. And while some show up, read, and leave without saying a word, many pass notes, laugh out loud, or share paragraphs they particularly love with one another.
“A lot of people end up hanging out all night,” says de la Mare, whose organization helps people start their own clubs across the country and overseas. “It’s a community-driven movement to get people out in public and switch out their phones for a book.”
The original silent reading party was held in 2009 by Christopher Frizzelle, who hosts a monthly meeting at the historic Sorrento Hotel in Seattle. “This is literature standing up for itself,” says Frizzelle, who is also the editor of the Stranger, an alternative weekly published in Seattle. “TV is so good now. Breaking Bad and The Wire are basically novels, and TV is an easier, more social act. Reading, on the other hand, no matter what it is, isn’t something you typically do with other people. Silent reading parties change all that.”
Since that original party eight years ago, writers and book lovers around the world have followed suit, launching their own silent reading parties in places like Bangalore, India; Brooklyn, New York; Portland, Oregon; Evansville, Indiana; and Spokane. This past April, writer Daniel Handler (also known as Lemony Snicket), started a silent reading party at a hotel bar in San Francisco, and donates a portion of the bar proceeds from each meeting to local libraries.
“The beauty of the parties is that they’re so easy,” Frizzelle says. “People interested in starting a reading party somewhere call me for advice. Nothing actually happens at the series, I tell them. People just get together and read. So I give them my blessing and tell them to keep it simple.”
De la Mare’s Silent Book Club goes a few steps further. In addition to hosting regular reading parties in San Francisco, the organization publishes a blog on reading and books, curates an international Silent Book Club event calendar, and offers tips on how to start a club. They even send an event kit to people looking to host their own club, which includes table signs, bookmarks, and coasters. Since establishing Silent Book Club in 2012, de la Mare has helped launch fifteen Silent Book Club chapters, with monthly events in more than twenty cities worldwide, including Washington, D.C.; Birmingham, Alabama; Des Moines; Phoenix; Oakland; Andover, England; and Melbourne, Australia.
Why are these groups where “nothing actually happens” so popular? Frizzelle thinks it’s obvious: “Reading is such an isolated activity,” he says. “You’re alone. The room is quiet. You don’t have anyone to share what you’re reading with. Which is all great, it’s part of why we read. But sometimes you want to be where things are happening too, like a bar.”
Ryan Molden, a regular attendee of Frizzelle’s silent reading party, echoes this sentiment, but with a twist: “When I first started going, I had just gone through a really hard breakup and was looking for new ways to meet people. I love to read, so I thought I would check it out. Long story short: I didn’t meet my girlfriend Jessica there, but when I asked her to join me, about a year and a half ago, we fell in love, and we just moved in together.” Molden adds, “The readings provided a great way to get to know each other. And seeing so many people engrossed in reading, in a time where reading is not exactly considered cool? That’s inspiring. We’re both so glad for the opportunity to share that time together. It’s the kind of thing the world needs more of.”
For de la Mare, silent reading parties help her carve out time to read in a busy schedule. “Being a mother,” she says, “you’re often completely alone. All day. And though I’ve identified as a reader my entire life, it was really hard to give myself permission to do something for me when I was raising my toddler. The silent book club gave me that permission. That’s a gift I wouldn’t, now that I have it, go without.”
Andrew McFadyen-Ketchumis a freelance writer, editor, and writing coach. He is the acquisitions editor of Upper Rubber Boot Books, founder and editor in chief of poemoftheweek.org, and founder of the Colorado Writers’ Workshop. His poetry collection, Ghost Gear, was published by the University of Arkansas Press in 2014. His website is andrewmk.com.
Growing up in Little Rock, Arkansas, in the nineties, Alvin Irby wasn’t much of a reader. “Reading books for pleasure wasn’t a part of my childhood,” he says. It wasn’t until high school—when Irby “started to understand the political and societal implications of reading,” and more specifically which groups of people tend to be excluded from reading—that the activity became something more than a chore. Today Irby is committed to making books and reading fun for children, in particular black boys—who report some of the lowest reading scores among children in the United States—through Barbershop Books, a literacy program that creates child-friendly reading spaces in barbershops and also trains barbers and other adults to help teach early literacy.
Irby, who now lives in New York City, began installing shelves of children’s books in Harlem barbershops in 2014. He chose barbershops because he wanted to find black male–centric spaces to promote a love of reading among young black boys. The statistics, after all, are startling: In 2010 the Council of the Great City Schools, a coalition of seventy of the nation’s largest urban public school systems, reported that while 38 percent of white fourth-grade boys are proficient in reading, the number for black boys of the same age is only 12 percent. Through Barbershop Books, Irby hopes to reach kids before the fourth grade. In the program’s early days, Irby spent his own money to buy books for all ages. “When I put the books in a barbershop, I observed for hours and hours that it was the young kids who were most likely to engage with the books,” he says. He realized that books for readers ages four to eight, a period critical for reading development, seemed to be the most useful.
Unlike many early reading programs, Barbershop Books focuses not on reading skills but on what Irby calls “reading identity.” This means building boys’ motivation to read and helping them form a self-image as readers. Developing a reading identity is key to increasing literacy, Irby says, and is a different approach than that taken by most schools, which often focus on assessment, test scores, and skills development. The fun is lacking, Irby says, so reading becomes tied up in pressure and judgment rather than pleasure.
Barbershop Books attributes the low reading proficiency among black boys in part to schools and educators that are not responsive to individual learning styles, as well as to a lack of black men involved in black boys’ early reading experiences. In 2013 the U.S. Department of Education reported that less than 2 percent of teachers were black men. “There are literally young black boys who have never seen a black man reading,” said Irby in a 2017 TED talk, “or never had a black man encourage him to read.” By working with local community partners to organize training for both barbers and parents to teach kids how to read, Barbershop Books works to address this deficit.
Irby and his team stock the barbershops with books that appeal to the kids who visit. A 2013 report from the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin in Madison showed only 10.48 percent of children’s books published that year featured characters of color, and Irby also notes that a significant number of titles about black children revolve around the same few topics, such as slavery. Although such books are important, he says, it is equally important to supplement those books with more lighthearted stories, like Ezra Jack Keats’s The Snowy Day and Maribeth Boelts’s Those Shoes—books about kids with whom children can identify. (Irby’s own children’s book, Gross Greg, which he self-published in 2016, is a humorous story about a boy who likes to eat what he calls “delicious little sugars”—his boogers.) While Barbershop Books titles aren’t limited to those about black boys, Irby asks boys what kinds of books they would like to read, allowing them to help with the decision of what to stock. The organization also gives books away: On July 18 it will host a giveaway of three thousand books at the Boys’ Club of New York in East Harlem.
Since its founding Barbershop Books has been adopted by more than a hundred barbershops in twenty-eight cities across the United States and reaches more than four thousand boys each month. In the next three years Irby hopes to raise $1 million to set up reading spaces in eight hundred more barbershops throughout the country. Eventually he’d like to expand to include Latino barbershops and digital initiatives as well. For now Barbershop Books has already made an impact. Irby reports that before he launched the program, 73 percent of barbers he spoke with never saw a boy reading in their shop. Now 64 percent say they’ve seen a boy reading a book in their shop almost every day. Irby believes that regardless of children’s reading abilities, it’s a step in the right direction. “Whether or not kids can read the books,” he says, “even if they’re just looking at the pictures, that’s a positive reading experience.”
Christine Ro writes about books regularly for Book Riot and occasionally for Literary Hub, Vice, and other publications.
Three boys reading at Denny Moe’s Superstar Barbershop in Harlem in New York City.
What began as a hashtag to celebrate black womanhood, Black Girl Magic quickly leapt off social media streams and into the lexicon of writers, politicians, celebrities, and activists. What is Black Girl Magic? No two people will define it the same, but a new poetry anthology released by Haymarket Books in April, The BreakBeat Poets Volume 2: Black Girl Magic, is allowing black women who grew up in the hip-hop generation to deepen the conversation through their poetry.
Mahogany L. Browne, who edited the anthology with fellow poets Idrissa Simmonds and Jamila Woods, says the book challenges stereotypes about black women. “We’re not allowed nuance; we’re not allowed to be angry and sad and loving—we’re supposed to be strong, stand up for everything,” says Browne. “This is about how we create ourselves, how we re-create ourselves…how we rename ourselves, how we bring our ancestors into the room, and how we invite those that don’t serve us out. Black Girl Magic as a whole is a resilience, a celebration, and a reclamation of the black woman body.”
The idea for the anthology was born a few years ago, when Browne was the featured poet at Louder Than a Bomb, an annual youth poetry festival in Chicago cofounded by poets Kevin Coval and Anna West. Browne read a poem called “Black Girl Magic,” which she wrote specifically for the event, and the audience response was immediate and visceral. “To see a poem hit the air like that,” Browne says, “after that response, I said, ‘This is bigger than me.’” (Browne later performed the poem on a 2016 episode of PBS NewsHour’s “Brief but Spectacular.”) After the festival, she mentioned to Coval that there should be a Black Girl Magic anthology, and a few months later he phoned her to move forward with the idea.
The anthology features more than a hundred poems from new and established voices, including Elizabeth Acevedo, Syreeta McFadden, Morgan Parker, Aracelis Girmay, and Angel Nafis. Poet Patricia Smith, the 2018 winner of the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, contributed a foreword to the collection. “I relentlessly love my sisters,” she writes. “We have taken back the right to name ourselves.” Each section of the anthology is named after an excerpt from the work of a notable black woman writer or activist. It begins with a section focused on the black woman’s body in all its forms, “Collector of Me,” inspired by poet Sonia Sanchez, and ends with a section centered on joy and resilience, “Jubilee,” inspired by novelist Edwidge Danticat.
The poems in the collection, influenced by the rhythms, lyricism, and expressiveness of hip-hop music and culture, speak to the many dimensions of black womanhood. In “My Beauty,” Justice Ameer writes about gender identity and self-love: “And ain’t that being a Black woman / Being forced to destroy herself / To make a man more comfortable / Me and my beauty stopped looking for him one day / And suddenly / I saw my body / My beauty saw a woman.” In “#SayHerName,” Aja Monet writes about the campaign to remember black women victims of police brutality: “I am a woman carrying other women in my mouth.”
Black Girl Magic continues the work of the first anthology in the series, The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, published by Haymarket Books in 2015 and edited by Coval, along with poets Quraysh Ali Lansana and Nate Marshall. Focusing on black women was the perfect next step in the series, Coval says. “Black women have been and remain at the center of hip-hop culture and poetic practice. This anthology is some of the receipts and a peek into the future. Here are some of the most important and freshest of voices on the planet rock.”
The anthology series will continue to be a space for marginalized voices, and work is already under way on the next volume. “Halal If You Hear Me,” edited by poets Fatimah Asghar and Safia Elhillo, will be focused on writing by Muslim women and LGBTQ Muslims and will be published in 2019.
LaToya Jordan is a writer from Brooklyn, New York. Follow her on Twitter @latoyadjordan.
For nearly ten years the brownstone at 20 East 127th Street in Harlem was silent. Once the home of celebrated Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes, who lived there for twenty years until his death in 1967, the three-story row house sat vacant, its dark stone walls overgrown with ivy, the paint of its once grand interior chipped throughout. The only evidence of the building’s literary history was a small plaque on the facade bearing Hughes’s name and designating it a landmark.
But today, thanks to the I, Too Arts Collective, the brownstone is once again bustling with creativity. On any given day one might hear the voice of a teen writer reciting Hughes’s poem “I look at the world,” or a community member reading at an open mic for the first time, or a distinguished author in conversation about the practice of writing. Established as a nonprofit organization by award-winning author Renée Watson, I, Too provides arts programming in Hughes’s house to underrepresented and marginalized voices. The collective takes its name from Hughes’s famous poem “I, Too,” which opens with the lines, “I, too, sing America. // I am the darker brother.”
“People need spaces where they can seek justice and stand up for what they believe in, spaces where they can be their full selves,” says Watson. “Often they are not able to do that in the world, so I wanted to have a space where they can come and create and engage with their community—that was really important to me.”
Watson, who lives in Harlem, walked past the vacant house for ten years, disappointed that nothing had been done with the space. She was inspired to take action in the summer of 2016, after hearing that Maya Angelou’s Harlem brownstone, located just a ten-minute walk from Hughes’s house, had been sold for $4 million. Determined that another piece of Harlem and African American culture wouldn’t be lost, Watson contacted the owner of Hughes’s brownstone and shared her vision of a space dedicated to preserving the writer’s legacy. The owner also didn’t want to see the building become gentrified, turned into condos or a coffee shop, but told Watson she’d need to come up with a year’s rent to turn her vision into a reality.
Watson, who in addition to publishing several well-received children’s books—including most recently Piecing Me Together (Bloomsbury, 2017)—has years of experience in business and nonprofit arts administration; she established the I, Too Arts Collective in July 2016 and launched #LangstonsLegacy, an online fund-raising campaign to lease the brownstone. In just a few months, with the help of the literary community and private donors, she raised $150,000 toward the lease, renovation, and programming costs. Watson signed a three-year lease in October 2016 and along with the I, Too team and a group of volunteers, cleaned, painted, and restored the building. On February 1, 2017—Hughes’s 115th birthday and the beginning of Black History Month—the Hughes House opened to the public.
I, Too now hosts weekly open hours at the Hughes House, during which the community and tourists can visit the space, walk the same parlor floor Hughes did, and snap photos of his piano and typewriter. Watson says the brownstone is less of a museum, however, and more of a space for people to create. I, Too runs a number of special programs and events at the Hughes House, including creative writing workshops for adults and young people, a recurring poetry salon with an open mic, a monthly social event for writers and artists, and discussions with writers about their process and work. I, Too also rents the space to other artists and nonprofits to hold workshops, readings, and performances. Writers who have visited the brownstone include Kwame Alexander, Tracey Baptiste, Andrea Davis Pinkney, Angela Flournoy, Nikki Grimes, Ellen Hagan, Jason Reynolds, Jacqueline Woodson, and Ibi Zoboi.
Watson and her I, Too colleagues— program director Kendolyn Walker, social media director Jennifer Baker, and graphic designer Ellice Lee, as well as working and honorary boards of directors made up of writers and artists—want to empower artists as well as honor Hughes’s legacy. “I wanted something that would add on to what he left behind,” says Watson. “I think that is a powerful thing, to not just celebrate his work in theory or by reading but also saying, ‘This is what he wrote, this is what he said—what do you want to say, and how are you continuing his legacy?’”
The program closest to Watson’s heart is the Langston Hughes Institute for Young Writers, which hosts writing workshops for young people during school breaks and throughout the summer. Funded by the Ford Foundation, the workshops allow teens to learn about Hughes’s work and share their own poetry. “I always say whenever young people are in the space, that’s when I get emotional and feel like this is why I am doing this work,” Watson says. “What moves me is when I see young people writing and finding their voices and expressing themselves.”
After a successful first year, the collective is working toward its long-term goals, including restoring the second floor of the house to create studio space and a library, as well as raising money to establish a fellowship program for writers. As part of the program, fellows would receive a residency in the Hughes House and hold workshops and readings in return.
The organization’s ultimate goal is to raise enough money to purchase the brownstone. “I want this to be a place that lives far beyond me or anybody involved with it now,” says Watson. “This is not just a trendy thing to do, but a sustainable space with roots in the ground for everyday artists to develop their craft and for established artists to share their stories and their voices.”
LaToya Jordan is a writer from Brooklyn, New York. Follow her on Twitter @latoyadjordan.
Renee Watson, founder of the I, Too Arts Collective, next to Hughes’s typewriter.
From late nineteenth-century poet Paul Laurence Dunbar to Harlem Renaissance icon Langston Hughes to contemporary poetry stars Rita Dove and Toi Derricotte, the influence of African American poets on America’s literary culture cannot be overstated. But until recently there was no center that had significant institutional support and was specifically dedicated to sharing and studying the legacy of African American poetry.* Earlier this year, poets Dawn Lundy Martin, Terrance Hayes, and Yona Harvey decided it was high time to start one. The trio launched the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP) as a creative think tank to spark conversation and collaboration among poets and other artists, and to promote and archive the work of African American poets for future generations.
“We recognized that there was this huge impact that African American and African diasporic poets were making on American arts and letters,” says Martin, who codirects the center alongside Hayes. “We wanted there to be a place where we could really think and work through what that means.” Housed at the University of Pittsburgh, where both Martin and Hayes teach in the MFA writing program, the center held its first event in March—a set of conversations and readings about race, poetry, and the humanities—and will host similar events throughout the academic year. Its first course on African American poetry and poetics, led by Lauren Russell, the assistant director of CAAPP and an English professor, will be offered to undergraduate and graduate students during the 2017–2018 academic year and will feature visiting speakers each week. Hayes and Martin also plan to launch a residency and fellowship program, through which poets, artists, and scholars can work at the center for periods between a month and a year.
Part of CAAPP’s core mission is to archive and document the work of African American poets, which will be accomplished through both a physical collection of books and an online archive of lectures, readings, and discussions. While organizations like Cave Canem create space to nurture new work by African American poets, and other university centers such as Medgar Evers College’s Center for Black Literature and Chicago State University’s Gwendolyn Brooks Center work to promote black literature, CAAPP will focus specifically on the research and scholarship of black poetics, particularly as it relates to historical, artistic, and cultural repression, as well as corresponding social justice movements. “Cave Canem is twenty years old, and there still hasn’t been a large body of work about how it came into being or archival work around it,” says Hayes. “Our organizations historically haven’t had an opportunity to take care of our own information, to build our own insights around that work…. Now we are in a position to be our own historians and our own archivists, and write our own biographies about the importance of these roots.”
The University of Pittsburgh has long been a home for the work of African American poets. The university press, with editor Ed Ochester at the helm, has published notable titles by both emerging and established African American poets, recently Derricotte, Ross Gay, Rickey Laurentiis, Nate Marshall, and Afaa Michael Weaver. Hayes and Martin hope to work with the press on a book prize, and harness other university resources. “What a university can do is provide infrastructure, in a way that’s just not set up in most sectors of our society,” says Hayes. “Infrastructure and research capabilities.” The pair have enlisted faculty from other departments, including English and Africana Studies, to advise CAAPP and possibly teach future courses. “We think of ourselves as a start-up,” says Martin. “And like innovators in tech, we want to be open and inclusive as we generate new ideas about what it means to work in the fields of African American poetry and poetics. This seems especially important in these trying and divisive times.”
A significant part of CAAPP’s work will also intersect with the university’s MFA program. Graduate writing students will be able to take courses offered by the center and have the opportunity to help curate, design, and teach these courses. This goes hand in hand with how Hayes sees the MFA as an opportunity to teach students the tools and skills needed to hold positions of power in poetry and arts organizations. “A person who is interested in getting an MFA and being a poet can learn how to live in the world, whether they are directing centers or working as librarians, archivists, or critics,” says Hayes. “Just to alert and inspire a poet to do that is a possibility. Maybe you want to run a press or be an editor of a press. I don’t see why the MFA can’t be an opportunity to begin that conversation, as opposed to assuming that all you can do is write or teach.”
*Editor’s Note: After this article went to print, it was brought to our attention that a center dedicated to studying African American poetry was already established before the launch of CAAPP. The Furious Flower Poetry Center, housed at James Madison University and founded by Joanne Gabbin, has been cultivating and promoting African American poetry since 1994. We regret the error.
Hayes and Martin hope that the center will also help make the university’s MFA program a more welcoming space for writers of color, an important effort in light of increased discussion about race and diversity in MFA programs. For Martin, this means creating and maintaining a space of cultural inclusion. “Pittsburgh is a place where there are other students of color, and the graduate faculty is extremely diverse. There’s already some understanding between folks who are there, so you can start from a place of not having to work through your values and struggle to articulate your cultural perspective.”
The CAAPP directors plan to offer courses that intersect with visual art and music, in order to explore how thinking across disciplines can parallel thinking across cultures and perspectives. “Certainly, we feel like if anyone is prepared to build those new conversations, it would be African American poets and poets of color in general,” says Hayes, adding that CAAPP aims to include non-black people of color and other marginalized communities in the conversation. “We talk about collage and hybridity—that’s what people of color are. [We’re] not thinking about segregation, not thinking about fences around what we do, but looking across those bridges, saying, ‘Well, how are these people across the street interested in what I’m doing?’ even if they’re not poets. They might be architects, they might be scientists.”
Moving forward, the center will hold a community workshop, reading, and exhibition from November 9 to November 11 on poetry and politics titled “Black Poets Speak Out,” featuring Jericho Brown, Mahogany Browne, and Amanda Johnston. The directors also hope to host a reading by emerging women and trans poets. Martin and Hayes are optimistic about the social impact of the center’s work. “As far as I’m concerned,” says Martin, “especially given the state of violence in this country—violence against queer people, violence against black people, violence against women—it makes sense to take up things like African American literature, African American culture, African American history, African American poetry and art as a part of making the world better.”
Tara Jayakar is the founder and editor of Raptor Editing. She lives in New York City.
In the summer of 2014, eighteen-year-old Kaya Thomas launched We Read Too, an app that offers a comprehensive database of multicultural books for young readers. Thomas had been frustrated with the difficulty of finding books by and about people of color in libraries and bookstores, so she designed and wrote the code for the app (she recently graduated from Dartmouth College with a degree in computer science), which now has information on hundreds of books and more than fifteen thousand users. “I knew that if my app had even helped one person feel represented and showed them that their stories are being told too,” wrote Thomas in a piece at Medium about starting the app, “I had done my job.” Word spread further about We Read Too in March after Thomas launched an Indiegogo campaign to expand the app and raised $15,000. In the next several months, Thomas plans to launch a website for We Read Too and expand its catalog to more than a thousand books. As work on the app progresses, Thomas spoke about her larger mission and hopes for We Read Too.
How has the We Read Too app evolved over the years? When I first released We Read Too, it had a directory that included 300 children’s and young adult titles. Each title had a detail page where you could view the book cover, title, author, and description. There was also a suggestion feature where users could send me titles they thought should be included. Since then the directory has expanded to more than 630 titles, and you can search by author or title. You can now share any of the books via text message, e-mail, or social media, and you can view the book on Safari to purchase it. There’s also a discovery feature now that allows you to see one random book at a time so you don’t have to search through the entire directory.
Was it a purposeful decision to include both self-published and traditionally published books in this list? I wanted to include self-published works because it can be hard for those authors to get readers to discover their work. A lot of authors who are self-published have reached out to me in hopes that We Read Too can be a place for them to get more reader discovery for their work. I know that for authors of color it can be hard to get into the publishing world, so I want to support those who haven’t gone through the traditional routes. I want all authors of color to have their work highlighted in We Read Too, regardless of how they got their work out there.
Do you have plans to include adult fiction in the app? I eventually do want to include adult fiction in the app, but it would be a larger undertaking because there are so many different genres within that category. I want to make sure I have a significant number of titles in each genre before I add them to the app.
We Read Too is free. Do you think you will ever charge for it so you can continue updates and expansion? We Read Too will always be free for individual users. I never want to charge users to access the directory of titles because that would be counterintuitive toward the mission. I want titles written by people of color to be easier to discover and all in one place, not blocked by a paywall. I want users to discover titles they can share with the young people in their lives and community. I want users to know that these titles exist and, more specifically, for users who are people of color, I want them to see that there are authors who share their background and are creating work that reflects their culture in some way.
Jennifer Baker is a publishing professional, the creator and host of the Minorities in Publishing podcast, the panel organizer for the nonprofit We Need Diverse Books, and the social medial director and a writing instructor for Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop. She is the editor of the forthcoming short story anthology Everyday People: The Color of Life (Atria Books, 2018).
Cave Canem was established by Cornelius Eady and Toi Derricotte in 1996 to nurture black poets both on the page and in the publishing marketplace. The Brooklyn, New York–based organization’s many programs include writing workshops, master classes, a reading series, publication prizes, and an annual retreat, which brings together more than fifty poets, or “fellows,” each year. In January Nicole Sealey, previously Cave Canem’s programs director, became the organization’s new executive director. A veteran arts administrator (including a previous role as the assistant director of Poets & Writers’ Readings & Workshops program), Sealey is also a poet; her first full-length collection, Ordinary Beast, will be published by Ecco in September. A couple of months into her new position, Sealey spoke about the future of Cave Canem.
Can you tell me a little bit about your relationship to Cave Canem? Almost ten years ago I participated in Cave Canem’s eight-week fall workshop in New York City, facilitated by Marilyn Nelson. I was a very young writer and it ended up being a formative experience in my life. We got serious about craft and made lifelong connections in the process. I’ve met many of my closest friends through Cave Canem, the closest of all being my husband, John Murillo. The very least I can do for an organization that has served me well for the last decade is to return the gesture.
How does being a writer influence the way you will lead the organization? Cave Canem has always had a “poets first” philosophy, which has served the organization well for the last twenty-plus years. Remember, the organization was founded by rock-star poets and directed for the past decade by Alison Meyers, also a poet. In that tradition, I plan to lead with both head and heart, which are the qualities I value most in poetry.
What’s ahead for Cave Canem and for you as the new executive director? In May we’ll be capping off our twentieth-anniversary year with Cave Canem 20/20: A Panoramic Vision of Black Poetry, a two-and-a-half day poetry forum at Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn. The forum will offer readings, skill-building panels, artist conversations, and more. I’m also looking forward to my first retreat as executive director. The retreat takes place in June at the University of Pittsburgh in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. It’s our flagship program, and where, as Harryette Mullen says, “black poets, individually and collectively, can inspire and be inspired by others, relieved of any obligation to explain or defend their blackness.”
So much has changed since Cave Canem faculty member Elizabeth Alexander recited “Praise Song for the Day,” the inaugural poem for Barack Obama in 2009. What do you see as the role of Cave Canem, and poetry more broadly, in the new political climate? “So much has changed” is a very gracious way to describe the political climate in which we now find ourselves. In “Praise Song for the Day,” the speaker asks, “What if the mightiest word is love?” I have no doubt that it is love, but the new administration would have me believe that the mightiest word is fear or, worse yet, the president’s name. It is neither. It is love. And what is love if not a society based on justice and equality? With this in mind, the role of Cave Canem in particular, and poetry in general, is and will be to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. With love. Bigly.
Are there any outreach programs on tap to connect poetry with readers? Cave Canem’s Poets Tour, a nonprofit speakers bureau, connects national audiences with Cave Canem fellows through readings and workshops. This year we hope to increase the number of participating fellows and reach out to presenting institutions, including high schools, universities, museums, libraries, and prisons. We want to bring black poets to diverse communities.
Tayari Jones is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
From late nineteenth-century poet Paul Laurence Dunbar to Harlem Renaissance icon Langston Hughes to contemporary poetry stars Rita Dove and Toi Derricotte, the influence of African American poets on America’s literary culture cannot be overstated. But until recently there was no center that had significant institutional support and was specifically dedicated to sharing and studying the legacy of African American poetry.* Earlier this year, poets Dawn Lundy Martin, Terrance Hayes, and Yona Harvey decided it was high time to start one. The trio launched the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP) as a creative think tank to spark conversation and collaboration among poets and other artists, and to promote and archive the work of African American poets for future generations.
“We recognized that there was this huge impact that African American and African diasporic poets were making on American arts and letters,” says Martin, who codirects the center alongside Hayes. “We wanted there to be a place where we could really think and work through what that means.” Housed at the University of Pittsburgh, where both Martin and Hayes teach in the MFA writing program, the center held its first event in March—a set of conversations and readings about race, poetry, and the humanities—and will host similar events throughout the academic year. Its first course on African American poetry and poetics, led by Lauren Russell, the assistant director of CAAPP and an English professor, will be offered to undergraduate and graduate students during the 2017–2018 academic year and will feature visiting speakers each week. Hayes and Martin also plan to launch a residency and fellowship program, through which poets, artists, and scholars can work at the center for periods between a month and a year.
Part of CAAPP’s core mission is to archive and document the work of African American poets, which will be accomplished through both a physical collection of books and an online archive of lectures, readings, and discussions. While organizations like Cave Canem create space to nurture new work by African American poets, and other university centers such as Medgar Evers College’s Center for Black Literature and Chicago State University’s Gwendolyn Brooks Center work to promote black literature, CAAPP will focus specifically on the research and scholarship of black poetics, particularly as it relates to historical, artistic, and cultural repression, as well as corresponding social justice movements. “Cave Canem is twenty years old, and there still hasn’t been a large body of work about how it came into being or archival work around it,” says Hayes. “Our organizations historically haven’t had an opportunity to take care of our own information, to build our own insights around that work…. Now we are in a position to be our own historians and our own archivists, and write our own biographies about the importance of these roots.”
The University of Pittsburgh has long been a home for the work of African American poets. The university press, with editor Ed Ochester at the helm, has published notable titles by both emerging and established African American poets, recently Derricotte, Ross Gay, Rickey Laurentiis, Nate Marshall, and Afaa Michael Weaver. Hayes and Martin hope to work with the press on a book prize, and harness other university resources. “What a university can do is provide infrastructure, in a way that’s just not set up in most sectors of our society,” says Hayes. “Infrastructure and research capabilities.” The pair have enlisted faculty from other departments, including English and Africana Studies, to advise CAAPP and possibly teach future courses. “We think of ourselves as a start-up,” says Martin. “And like innovators in tech, we want to be open and inclusive as we generate new ideas about what it means to work in the fields of African American poetry and poetics. This seems especially important in these trying and divisive times.”
A significant part of CAAPP’s work will also intersect with the university’s MFA program. Graduate writing students will be able to take courses offered by the center and have the opportunity to help curate, design, and teach these courses. This goes hand in hand with how Hayes sees the MFA as an opportunity to teach students the tools and skills needed to hold positions of power in poetry and arts organizations. “A person who is interested in getting an MFA and being a poet can learn how to live in the world, whether they are directing centers or working as librarians, archivists, or critics,” says Hayes. “Just to alert and inspire a poet to do that is a possibility. Maybe you want to run a press or be an editor of a press. I don’t see why the MFA can’t be an opportunity to begin that conversation, as opposed to assuming that all you can do is write or teach.”
*Editor’s Note: After this article went to print, it was brought to our attention that a center dedicated to studying African American poetry was already established before the launch of CAAPP. The Furious Flower Poetry Center, housed at James Madison University and founded by Joanne Gabbin, has been cultivating and promoting African American poetry since 1994. We regret the error.
Hayes and Martin hope that the center will also help make the university’s MFA program a more welcoming space for writers of color, an important effort in light of increased discussion about race and diversity in MFA programs. For Martin, this means creating and maintaining a space of cultural inclusion. “Pittsburgh is a place where there are other students of color, and the graduate faculty is extremely diverse. There’s already some understanding between folks who are there, so you can start from a place of not having to work through your values and struggle to articulate your cultural perspective.”
The CAAPP directors plan to offer courses that intersect with visual art and music, in order to explore how thinking across disciplines can parallel thinking across cultures and perspectives. “Certainly, we feel like if anyone is prepared to build those new conversations, it would be African American poets and poets of color in general,” says Hayes, adding that CAAPP aims to include non-black people of color and other marginalized communities in the conversation. “We talk about collage and hybridity—that’s what people of color are. [We’re] not thinking about segregation, not thinking about fences around what we do, but looking across those bridges, saying, ‘Well, how are these people across the street interested in what I’m doing?’ even if they’re not poets. They might be architects, they might be scientists.”
Moving forward, the center will hold a community workshop, reading, and exhibition from November 9 to November 11 on poetry and politics titled “Black Poets Speak Out,” featuring Jericho Brown, Mahogany Browne, and Amanda Johnston. The directors also hope to host a reading by emerging women and trans poets. Martin and Hayes are optimistic about the social impact of the center’s work. “As far as I’m concerned,” says Martin, “especially given the state of violence in this country—violence against queer people, violence against black people, violence against women—it makes sense to take up things like African American literature, African American culture, African American history, African American poetry and art as a part of making the world better.”
Tara Jayakar is the founder and editor of Raptor Editing. She lives in New York City.
The Uni Project, a New York City–based organization that has created hundreds of pop-up reading rooms throughout the city to encourage reading and inspire learning, particularly in underserved communities, is marking its fifth anniversary this year by doing the kind of work that has made its first five years so successful. “It has always been about activating public space with meaningful ways for people to gather,” says Sam Davol, who, with spouse Leslie Davol, started the project in 2011.
The idea for the Uni Project began to take shape two years earlier, in 2009, when the couple became frustrated that Boston’s Chinatown, the neighborhood where they lived with their two kids, had no library. In response, they created the Storefront Library, a temporary community library in a borrowed storefront. Emboldened by their work, the Davols, who moved from Boston to New York in 2011, began to research how to create library experiences in city parks and plazas.
Inspired by a library branch in Stockholm’s metro station and the New York Public Library’s Bryant Park Reading Room, they commissioned architects to help them design a “reading kit”—a transportable reading cart complete with stackable shelves and chairs, which would serve as the basis for pop-up libraries. “The mission was less about access to books and information than about creating a great experience for urban people, something that could let people express a value of learning and education, right at street level,” says Sam Davol.
The Uni Project debuted its first reading room in New York City’s South Street Seaport on September 11, 2011, and has since installed nearly three hundred pop-up libraries in over fifty neighborhoods. Most of the reading rooms are assembled outdoors for a few hours at a time, their shelves stocked with books donated from libraries, publishers, and individuals. The Davols estimate they’ve reached more than twelve thousand New Yorkers through the program, with reading rooms stretching across the city’s five boroughs—from Clinton Hill in Brooklyn to Ozone Park in Queens to Morrisania in the Bronx. And the project isn’t just confined to New York: The Davols have sent their reading kits to the Seattle Public Library and the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway Conservancy in Boston, as well as to international sites, such as the U.S. Consulate in Almaty, Kazakhstan, and the Médiathèque Départementale du Haut-Rhin Library in Colmar, France.
As part of the project’s mission, the Davols try to create pop-up reading rooms in neighborhoods where books and libraries are scarce. “We’ve discovered that our reading rooms significantly increase feelings of community safety in some neighborhoods, which is especially important for women and families who want to be out and about,” says Sam Davol. “Reading together creates a way for people of all walks of life to linger in a public space, activating it, enlivening it.”
Not only does the Uni Project provide books to communities that need them most, but the Davols also try to curate collections that reflect the demographics of the neighborhood. “We have lots of books in Spanish, and some in Chinese,” says Leslie Davol. “We have a few books in Hebrew, Arabic, and French…. In Ozone Park, the Queens Library came through with a loan of books in Bengali. Some of our collection has been donated by institutions like the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Chinese in America, the Louis Armstrong House Museum, and the New York Hall of Science.”
The reading rooms offer more than just books—their open-air locations on bustling city streets spark conversations and encourage a more interactive environment. They are staffed by approximately twenty active volunteers, who help people find books and lead other educational activities, such as writing flash fiction, drawing, and even learning how to use a microscope. The volunteers reflect the diversity of the city: Some have come from Ecuador, Thailand, or China, while others have been middle-schoolers who just love books and want to get to know the city.
The project shows no signs of slowing down: More than a hundred reading rooms are scheduled to pop up in New York City this year. The project continues to expand its partnerships with the city’s libraries and parks, and the Davols are looking for new ways to reach more neighborhoods and grow their book collections. “A city,” Sam Davol says, “can never have too many books.”
Morgan Jerkins is a writer and the web editorial assistant at Catapult. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, BuzzFeed, the Atlantic, and Fusion, among many others.
Early in March a box was erected outside the Association for the Advancement of Mexican Americans (AAMA) in Houston. Orange and with a slightly pitched roof, the box stands on a short post and bears illustrations by John Parra from the children’s book Little Libraries, Big Heroes (Clarion Books, 2019). It is large enough to hold at least twenty books for neighborhood residents to borrow and read.
This box is a Little Free Library, the work of the eponymous Wisconsin-based nonprofit that seeks to increase both access to and love for reading within communities. When the organization’s founder, Todd Bol, first placed a schoolhouse-shaped box in his yard in 2009 as a memorial to his mother, he wanted to foster book exchanges among his neighbors. In 2012, Bol founded the related nonprofit, and when he died in 2018 there were more than seventy-five thousand Little Free Libraries in eighty-eight countries. In Bol’s New York Times obituary, his brother Tony spoke of the program’s success: “What was powerful about it was that all you needed was the idea…. You just build it, or order it, then put it up in your yard, like a public art monument.”
The box outside the AAMA isn’t just any Little Free Library—it’s the one hundred thousandth Little Free Library in the world, and it was made possible through the Impact Library Program, an initiative launched in 2016 that has so far provided more than one thousand no-cost boxes to applicants in communities where books are scarce. Recipients commit to setting up the library and maintaining it for at least a year, taking a picture and sharing its story, and holding a book-related neighborhood activity. Applications are also frequently part of larger initiatives to build connection around books; Denver’s Montbello neighborhood, for instance, hopes to eventually erect numerous libraries along “walkable loops throughout the community for families to enjoy [for] walking and bicycle riding.”
Along with fostering community and a love of reading, the Impact Library Program seeks to improve literacy nationwide. According to the U.S. Department of Education and the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, forty-two million adults in the United States cannot read in English at a third-grade level—and a lack of access to books contributes to this crisis. This lack is often particularly pronounced in Native communities, and a special branch of the Impact Library Program, the Native Library Initiative, has so far placed sixty-nine book-sharing boxes on tribal lands. The poet Heid E. Erdrich says in a short video about the initiative, “Little Free Libraries are not just going to be in suburban yards and on street corners anymore; there are Little Free Libraries popping up on reservations and in Native communities across the United States.” An Impact Library Program application from Jamie P. in South Dakota, who received a box in 2018, described the need for a local book exchange: Their reservation the size of Connecticut had only one library, few families owned vehicles, the schools were overburdened, and not many people had internet access.
The Impact Library Program’s mission to expand access to books near children’s homes has only grown more important since the donation of AAMA’s orange box in March. In May the Associated Press noted an increase in Little Free Libraries during the COVID-19 pandemic, both in their original capacity as book-sharing locations and as “little free pantries” offering canned food donations, jigsaw puzzles, handmade masks, and more. Between March and September 2020 the Impact Library Program saw 40 percent more applications than during the same period in 2019, and according to Shelby King, the director of programs at Little Free Library, these applications frequently cite pandemic-related school and library closures as reasons a book-sharing box would make a difference.
Candice Arancibia, a third-grade teacher and literacy coach who received a box for her home near the Mexico-California border through the Impact Library Program in September, applied after noticing that during distance learning her students have limited access to books—and those they do have “often aren’t those of the BIPOC experience.” She hopes her new box will make it easy for children from local schools to come by and find books that resonate with them.
King says the importance of sharing diverse books has been a common refrain in recent applications. In response, Little Free Library has launched the Read in Color initiative, through which library stewards and others can pledge to share books that incorporate experiences and perspectives from people of many different identities. Distributing both diverse and anti-racist books is particularly important, Arancibia says, because “it’s not until we begin to share our stories that we can actually begin to be seen, and we start to understand people and build empathy.”
Emma Hine is the author of Stay Safe, which received the 2019 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry and will be published in January 2021 by Sarabande Books.
Young readers at Jenks East Elementary in Jenks, Oklahoma, have access to books through the seventy-five thousandth Little Free Library, built through the Impact Library Program. (Credit: Jenks East Elementary)
In September the Nation, a bastion of progressive journalism since 1865, welcomed Kaveh Akbar as its newest poetry editor, succeeding Stephanie Burt and Carmen Giménez Smith. To say Akbar lives poetry is an understatement: The author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James Books, 2017), a collection that explores addiction and recovery, and the forthcoming Pilgrim Bell (Graywolf Press, 2021), he serves as a poetry professor in the MFA programs at Purdue University, Randolph College, and Warren Wilson College; pens the column PoetryRx for the Paris Review Daily; and is editing The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 100 Poets on the Divine (Penguin, 2022). Akbar spoke about the intersection of his writing and editing life and about his new role at the Nation.
What calls you to the art of literary editing? I love reading poems, and I have the utmost respect for anyone who takes up the inherently doomed task of trying to set any of this—I’m gesturing right now toward this whole world and the ones beyond it—into language.
As the Nation’s new poetry editor, what role do you think poetry can play in effecting social and political change? The Nation is the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the country. It was founded by abolitionists in 1865, and the first poem I published in my tenure was called “After Abolition” by the poet Kyle Carrero Lopez. I literally gasped when I first read it. The poem imagines the world after prison and carceral abolition, and I cannot put into language the profound honor of getting to publish it, of getting to be a tiny bit of wind at that poem’s back, the work it does to imagine better realities into being. I’ve solicited and accepted work from incarcerated poets, international poets in translation, disabled poets. I reject the notion that the poetry in a serious weekly need be ornamental, subordinate to the magazine’s “true” content. Lopez’s poem dignifies and distinguishes the work around it, not the other way around. Dunya Mikhail writes that “poetry is not medicine—it’s an X ray.” I can’t improve upon that.
What are some of the unique challenges and opportunities you think a literary editor faces in this moment? One of my favorite things to do when I’m in New York City is to just hole up with a pal somewhere and watch movies, sit around, and do nothing. The opportunity cost is so high in a city where you can do pretty much anything you want at any moment that choosing to pass it all up to stay in watching Netflix with a beloved feels especially intimate. Maybe poetry is like that now, when the opportunity cost of reading a poem—when you could be watching Hulu, learning a new language on Duolingo, Zooming your mother—has become so great that the relative intimacy of the experience of reading poetry has risen in measure.
Graywolf will release your second and much-anticipated poetry collection, Pilgrim Bell, in August. What was the editing process like for that collection as opposed to Calling a Wolf a Wolf? Calling a Wolf a Wolf felt like I was strapped to the masthead of my disease, my recovery, just jutting through the stormwater and straining to get down what poetry I could on scraps of torn sail, bits of driftwood—I’m also straining this metaphor. With Pilgrim Bell I have matured as a poet, and also maybe—probably more important—I’ve been able to look a bit past my own all-encompassing psycho-spiritual pathologies. The partition between me and an early preventable death is a couple fractions of a millimeter thicker now seven years sober than it was when I wrote my first book, and while I can still clearly and constantly hear the voices calling from the other side of that membrane, the voices on this side seem louder now, more urgent. I hope that makes sense. I hope that urgency is reflected in the poems.
You play so many different roles in the literary community. How do you balance the demands that attend these various roles? Or, put differently, how do these pursuits interact with and support each other? Poetry very literally, unhyperbolically saved my life. It was a place to put myself when just about everywhere else I knew to go was actively killing me. I think it’s an honor to get to spend my life in service to the thing I love best, paying back a bit of that gratitude debt. I’m grateful to be trusted with any of it.
Devon Walker-Figueroa is the author of Philomath (Milkweed Editions, 2021), which was a National Poetry Series winner. She teaches at Saint Joseph’s College in Brooklyn, New York.
In January the oldest literary magazine in the Pacific Northwest welcomed a new editor to the helm. Former senior editor Keetje Kuipers succeeds Aaron Barrell and Erin Malone as editor in chief of Poetry Northwest, which was established in 1959 and is based in Everett, Washington. Kuipers, who previously worked at Southern Humanities Review, has published three books of poems with BOA Editions, most recently All Its Charms (2019). In her three years as senior editor at Poetry Northwest, Kuipers has already brought compelling and sometimes playful innovation to the journal, including a series of essays on failure, the Native Poets Torchlight Series, and the Line Cook feature, which pairs a recipe with a literary podcast that lasts as long as it takes to make the dish. Kuipers discussed her ideas for the journal and the creative ethos she brings to her editorial stewardship.
What plans do you have for the magazine? In January I went to Under the Volcano, a writing retreat and conference in Tepoztlán, Mexico. It’s a really special gathering of writers because it’s bilingual. One of the things that’s most important to them is that neither language is privileged, which made me think a lot about translation. I came back knowing that I wanted to begin to publish non-English work in Poetry Northwest, and without an English translation. There was a young poet at Under the Volcano who writes in Tzotzil, an Indigenous language in the Chiapas region of Mexico. We’re going to publish her work in Spanish and Tzotzil, without an English translation. I see that as the first step toward doing more publishing of that kind. Poetry Northwest is an English-language magazine, but I don’t think that every poem we publish has to privilege English or even give English a place in its publication. I’m interested in seeking out more work in translation where English is not one of the languages into which it’s being translated.
We’re also going to be partnering with Circumference, which was a magazine for a long time and then became a book publisher. We will be spotlighting work from [some of their] forthcoming books of translation. They’re translating new, fresh voices from all over the world. So we want to spotlight their work as well.
One of the things I feel is missing from poetry right now is more joy. A lot of times it’s hardest to write poems that are joyful and celebratory, and that dwell in a moment of gratitude, and specifically gratitude that isn’t bittersweet. So we’re going to introduce a poem of joy on the inside back cover of every issue. I want to give that as a little gift to our readers. We’re also going to start a humorous, tongue-in-cheek poetic advice column: how to pack for AWP, what to wear when you’re giving a reading—sort of the silly parts of being a poet. And then the last thing I’m cooking up is a prize at the magazine. I’m looking forward to having it debut next year.
How does your new role as editor in chief allow you to innovate at the magazine? As senior editor I had a ton of freedom to bring new ideas to the table, and I got lots of support for those ideas. I think the difference is that now, instead of injecting those ideas into the conversation, I get to really steer the conversation.
Every editor has a place where they want to put the pressure. I want to take the conversation I’m facilitating to a riskier place. My new editor role allows me to take more chances. I want features that feel more like questions to which we’re trying to figure out the answers together. I also want to publish more poems that I’m not sure about. I’m interested in accepting poems that I struggle with, that I don’t understand, that I might even fundamentally disagree with in terms of either their craft or simply the argument that they’re making about the state of the world. But I’m excited that, as editor, I am going to have the freedom to take those chances and to hopefully make myself uncomfortable and make readers a little uncomfortable.
Is there anything else you want readers to know about the magazine and its future? One of the first things I asked myself when I joined the team was, What does it mean to have the word Northwest in our title? What does it mean to have that regional label right there up front as the first thing that a reader, or a poet who might submit, sees? The Northwest is an area of incredible migration. The West is this incredibly dynamic, shifting place. Being a magazine rooted in the Northwest means we are married to this land, but it also means being of many lands, many languages, and having to be open to change. Our landscape is shaped by fierce forces of weather, from wildfire to torrential rains. Our culture in the Northwest is also shaped every day by dramatic shifts. I want the magazine to reflect that, to reflect change and migration.
Sarah Neilson is a freelance writer and book critic whose work appears in Literary Hub, the Believer, and Bookforum, among other outlets. Her website is sarahneilsonwriter.com.
Established in 1959 by Nelson Bentley, Richard Hugo, Carolyn Kizer, and Erol Pritchard, Poetry Northwest is a brilliant example of a literary magazine’s capacity to endure despite—or perhaps because of—its regional focus. Before the Internet enhanced connections within the national writing community, the Seattle-based magazine was one of the few nationally distributed venues for voices from the fairly isolated northwestern United States. Though the road to the magazine’s present incarnation hasn’t been altogether smooth—Poetry Northwest was on hiatus from 2002 to 2004, was revived in Portland, Oregon, and is now back in the Seattle area, housed at Everett Community College—it is still going strong. While working on his fourth issue as editor, Kevin Craft, who succeeded David Biespiel in January 2010, discussed the importance of community, as well as a measured approach to editing, to the magazine’s success.
Poetry Northwest moved from Portland back to Seattle when you became editor. What did that mean for the magazine? The magazine was part of the University of Washington from 1963 until 2002 and was losing money, as most journals do, so it went under. David Biespiel, who lived in Portland, adopted it and ran it there from 2004 to 2009. I like to think of those years as our years in the wilderness, wandering. You have to go through that period in order to find your true self, but our coming back to Seattle in late 2009 was greeted with cheers by the community.
So returning was like beginning again. Do you have advice for a lit mag start-up? My advice is to surround yourself with good people, good readers. Also, know what you’re looking for. You get a lot of good poems, but you have to have a shaping instinct. I’m not thinking of the magazine as a random collection of poems. I want them to have a loose thematic coherence, so the magazine becomes a pleasure to read, like a book.
Despite a brief hiatus, Poetry Northwest has been around for a long time. What’s the key to its longevity? Partly it’s the distinct personality of this part of the world and the poets here who have been involved in the magazine. It’s a voice for the community, a forum for dialogue between this region and other parts of the world. We’re all so socially networked now that Seattle and Minneapolis and New York City seem part of the same circuit, but when you’re out here you do feel a long way from the East Coast. Being a flagship magazine calling attention to what’s going on out here has always been an important part of the magazine’s success.
How is the magazine taking advantage of the connectedness of today? We’ve been doing more online features, but our website is not as busy or frenetic as some—digital burnout is something that I hope to avoid. I don’t want to overpower people with our online offerings. I want them to be something that people look forward to receiving.
Do you have any advice for people looking to submit to Poetry Northwest, or any journal for that matter? The classic answer is, “Make sure you read the magazine first.” The other bit I always say is, “There is no rush to publication. Choose carefully where you want your poems to appear and wait until they are ready.” In the younger generation especially there’s the feeling that you’ve got to get out there, and frequently. That’s a burnout model. Good poetry takes time to accrete in the imagination as well as on the page. So my main advice is don’t rush it. There’s no place to get to. Even if you win the Pulitzer Prize, the next day you’ve still got to wake up and try to write the next poem.
Catherine Richardson is a writer, reviewer, and the managing editor of Washington Square.
In July poet and critic Meghan O’Rourke will take over as the editor of the Yale Review, Yale University’s quarterly of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and criticism. O’Rourke, who has been an editor at the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and Slate, succeeds acting editor Harold Augenbraum, who stepped in when the publication’s editor since 1991, the late poet J. D. McClatchy, retired in June 2017. A few months before her official start date, O’Rourke discussed her plans for the review and her approach to editing. In addition to numerous pieces of criticism, O’Rourke has published three poetry collections, most recently Sun in Days (Norton, 2017), and one memoir, The Long Goodbye (Riverhead Books, 2011).
When will your first issue come out? October. It coincides with the two-hundredth anniversary of the review, which is a wonderful occasion for me to start as editor. It’s fun to begin with a beginning and celebrate a very long period of time at the same time.
Does a two-hundred-year legacy feel overwhelming? It’s so overwhelming that it’s freeing. Seventy-five years might be more overwhelming, but two hundred years is so capacious and broad, it reminds you that a magazine is a made thing that reflects the passions and currents and ideas of its time and is shaped by the people who work there. There’s a kind of permission in that two hundred years. So the expectation I bring is not so much to maintain a particular identity but to make the journal be to its time what it has been to its time at some of its highest moments. Also, although the magazine is not oriented toward Yale, it is incubated at Yale; I want the magazine to be to its world what Yale is to its world, which is a place of rigorous, creative inquiry that holds itself to the highest standards.
What do you think is a journal’s ideal relationship to its time? The answer is different for different journals. But the Yale Review is uniquely situated to be a space for the best creative and literary writing to be side by side with passionate, personal, and political criticism—the review has always had a robust back-of-the-book, where the critics’ section is housed. The relationship between the creative enterprise and the critical enterprise is exciting because they are two almost antithetical modes of inquiry. Poems and stories can offset the tendency of the polemicizing, op-ed culture we have around us—not that we’re going to be running op-eds. But there’s something wonderful about modes that coexist in the same journal as oil and water to each other; there’s something exciting about that tension between those modalities because it can add up to a larger world of exploration.
When you’re putting together an issue, will you take that literally? Will you, for example, publish a poem that addresses a topic and a review of a book about that same topic? Or how might the creative and the critical speak to one another in the review? Less literal than that. We will have theme issues where we use a word—almost the way a poet might—to riff editorially in our thinking. For example, I’m thinking about an issue focused on documents and documentation. Right now, because of the news, we’re all thinking about what it means to be undocumented in America in a specific way. It’s led me to think about literature as document: What does literature document? What goes undocumented? What does it mean to try to document not only what we know about ourselves and our time, but what we can’t know about ourselves and our time? And how does a journal situate itself in that space? It’s also this moment where both fiction and poetry have this fascination with the claims of nonfiction—I’m thinking of Knausgård, Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti, and the current of autofiction. Novelists are saying, “I’ve gotten tired of making things up.” We also have poets who are using found documents and exploring docupoetics, so it seems like a moment to think through the relationship between imaginative literature and literal documents.
The great challenge of editing a literary journal—or a political and literary journal, which I hope the Yale Review will be—is to figure out how to publish an assortment of really good pieces that add up to something more than a slightly incidental aesthetic. That point to aspects of our cultural experience that we know but maybe haven’t named or aspects of the discourse that are hypocritical or unrigorously explored.
Having many different modes of considering that same question will hopefully lead to a richer understanding, yes? Yes, and complicate an understanding we might have. As the culture editor at Slate in the early 2000s, where I essentially ran half a magazine and helped build that section and what it meant to be writing cultural criticism on the web, that was still a new question—what are the cultural phenomena we think we understand but don’t look at very closely or have only looked at a little? That’s also what interests me as a writer and led me to write about grief in The Long Goodbye. Grieving had radically changed in American culture, and while we had this idea of grieving, no one had fully unpacked it. Scholars had, but it hadn’t been fully looked at in cultural criticism. And suddenly there was a wave of us all saying, “Hey, this is really strange. Let’s look at how we grieve.” So I’m interested in the journal being a space where that looking a second time can happen.
What other topics besides documentation do you want to cover in the journal? I’m starting to figure that out. Another thing on my mind is the word antisocial—what does that even mean?We live in a moment where we are bombarded by the social. And there’s been a lot of discussion about Facebook’s role in the last election. So is antisocial an interesting word from which to begin thinking about modes of literature? And in my own work I’ve been writing about chronic illness, so I’m interested in intersections between the medical world and the world of literature, as well as medicine as a culture in itself. I expect that interest will find its way into the review somehow and not just because I’m interested in it—all these people are writing books about the experience of having a poorly understood illness, as well as the social context of medicine and what it means to be a woman and/or person of color searching for answers in a system that comes with a lot of unconscious bias. That narrative is emerging in the culture.
One of the great pleasures of editing a journal like the Yale Review, which comes out four times a year, is that there’s not a pressure to be timely like at Slate where I was publishing daily. I have this wonderful opportunity to take the long view as an editor. But it’s important, as I was saying before, that we’re not merely collecting good pieces that come together in an incidental way, but finding a way to curate them so that there’s some sense of the urgency of the moment, but not in a way that feels merely timely. Hopefully it could also feel timeless. How do we collect the artifacts of our moment and also assign and encourage and facilitate the writing of pieces that will speak to us deeply about what’s happening right now in the world we live in? Sometimes pieces of poetry or fiction do that by not seeming to speak at all to the world we live in—so we’re not going to publish poems that have an expiration date of 2019 or 2020. I hope we’ll publish lasting poems and lasting fiction that somehow reflect something about us in our moment.
Are you planning other changes to the format or coverage of the print review? I’m planning to revamp the back of the book. Right now it’s a wonderful group of reviews of poetry, music, books, and film, but I want to shake it up a little and publish an idea in review, where we’ll talk about something like the antisocial or culpability—there was a lot of discussion about culpability last fall around Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing: How do we think about culpability? Who is culpable and when? So maybe we’ll have a few different people write about this theme, and let those pieces not respond, but resonate with one another. And I want these pieces to touch down in actual lived cultural and political experiences. So there will be real texts under review, but it might be a text like the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings alongside a novel, alongside Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive, alongside Jericho Brown’s The Tradition. It is important that we put together the pieces of our experience that are often left separate.
What tone do you want the journal to strike? I think of the journal as a house I’m building into which I’m inviting a very dynamic, creative, playful, whimsical, argumentative group of people who are all going to be having a conversation. And the journal has the tone of that party. A tone of voluble and passionate conversation.
What are you planning to do on the digital side of the review? We are planning to launch a new website by early 2020, which will publish original content alongside work from the journal. More broadly we are rethinking how the Yale Review can use different platforms for the delivery of ideas, criticism, and dialogue. To that end we will be developing new columns and podcasts for the website, albeit in a highly curated way, since we’re a small staff. To me the digital review will be as important as the print journal, and it offers a fresh and exciting set of possibilities, precisely because it is a medium different from print. But it serves the same mission: A twentieth-century journal, if you think about it, was just a technology for the delivery and dissemination of passionate, excellent criticism and literature. The question is, What does the web allow us to do better and differently?
What writers or trends in writing are you excited about? Now is a true moment of fertility in American literature, partly because the nature of gatekeeping has changed. That change allows for a much greater diversity of voices that desperately needs to be there and also brings a great diversity of style and stance and position from which to make formal aesthetic exploration. Sometimes the media can talk a little too reductively about diversity; one of the things that gets overlooked is that diversity of people brings diversity of aesthetics and diversity of approaches. What more could one want? Right now is a wonderful moment to be an editor.
Do you think the editors of a journal should be backstage, or should they be out in front? How open and transparent do you want to be as an editor to your readers? Because the Yale Review and its readers form a kind of imagined community, especially as we move ever more online, I’d like our readers to know the people behind this enterprise—to get to know our staff, who, I hope, will be doing interviews and editing and writing too. I will sometimes write an editor’s letter to frame issues and share our goals and the questions raised for us, say, in assembling a special issue. In terms of transparency, which I take to refer to questions of how we select what we select, or why we publish what we publish, I’d just say that, of course, there are certain issues where transparency is especially called for. In general, finding ways of representing different points of view is really important to me—far too many literary journals and general interest magazines still have lopsided representation, to put it mildly—and that includes being clear about our mission of engaged dialogue and our hope of discovering valuable new voices.
When you’re editing a piece—this is probably very different for a piece of criticism versus a poem or story—are there a certain set of questions you ask? In criticism it’s important to have a certain muscularity and flexibility of thought. As a reader and writer of criticism, I want to know that even if one is writing in a passionate, argumentative way, everything has been considered. That I’m not writing or reading a piece that has been written only reflexively. I say that carefully because we live in a moment where we all feel a fair amount of outrage. We all see a certain amount of passionate engagement from all directions about the political moment, and the Internet is a place where we can indulge in that. I’m not saying that’s not important, but if we want to bring that level of passionate outrage to written criticism, there has to be a sense of consideration too. It’s the job of the editor to be an interlocutor for the critic and make sure the critic is saying what they mean as precisely as possible. When you edit criticism, you’re trying to make the argument as clear and sound as possible. There’s always a moment of arguing with yourself as a critic, which doesn’t necessarily need to be on the page but probably needs to happen to write the piece.
When editing fiction and poetry, it’s more about trying to help the writer make a persuasive aesthetic object from nothing. As an editor, my role is not to be an interlocutor, but a mirror. To say, “This is a moment in the poem where I feel the poet making it instead of the object that has been made. The mystery disappears and the effort shows through.” Or, “The tone slips mysteriously,” or, “This section is actually unclear.”
When I started working as an editor at the New Yorker, I would always pretend like I understood everything. It took me a long time to realize as an editor it’s okay to be—in fact, you have to be—an honest reader. You have to say, “I really don’t understand this,” or, “I’m really bored on page four, and I kind of fell asleep there for a little bit.” You have to do it with the humility of your own personhood—it could just be you—but you’re trying to reflect back to the writer as honestly as possible something about your experience. You’re also trying to think as you read it, “Is this an experience others might have while reading this text? Am I identifying something that is getting in the way of it as a persuasive aesthetic object, or is this my own predilection?” Because those are two different things. We can never fully disentangle them, but we can try.
I’m curious about your use of the word “persuasive” in “persuasive aesthetic object”—persuasive of what? Of its own madeness. I have this sort of spiritual relationship with poems and fiction—I think about Emily Dickinson saying, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” I don’t mean that a piece makes an argument that I agree with and I’ve been bullied into submission as a reader, but that it gives me that feeling. It’s that chill; it’s that sense of encountering a vision of the world that uncovers things you knew were there but never named before. I’m thinking of Taeko Kono’s Toddler Hunting and Other Stories,a fascinating book of short stories published in translation by New Directions. Many of the stories feature narrators that have deeply disturbing relationships with young children, and there’s something about the book and the way these women experience loneliness in the world that feels like it’s opening an aspect of experience that I knew was there, but I never had a name for. I don’t have the same sort of relationships that these characters do, but when I read it, I’m totally persuaded of its reality. That’s the kind of persuasion I mean. And that the poem or story has to be the way it is. Original literature is strange, and it often makes choices that another piece couldn’t make.
I love that as a description for how you feel when you read a great poem or story, but how do you feel when you read a really great piece of criticism? There are different ways I feel. There’s the kind of criticism where you think, “Ah, I agree with every single thing here—thank you. You have named something and provided a structural framework for an intuition, a feeling, or argument I’ve been making but not as well.” Then there’s the piece that slightly changes your mind as you read it. Criticism is important because it gives us language for change, and it gives us language for reevaluation of long-held positions, which is crucial in the moment we’re living in. Especially as you get older, you have some reflexive positions, and good criticism can make you rethink something you’ve long believed, maybe without a lot of critical interrogation. Good criticism can be very uncomfortable to read. But you know it’s good if there’s a soundness to its own structure, its own architecture. And then there’s a kind of criticism that proceeds more associatively and is exciting in how it finds formal freedom in a genre that can be very conservative. There are some critics who can turn a piece of criticism almost into a work of literature. I love reading all these kinds of criticism—criticism that’s formally radical as well as criticism that’s not.
What do you find satisfying or exciting about editing? As a writer and an editor, I’ve toggled between periods of more solitary writing and periods of more outward-oriented editing. There can be something very lonely and solipsistic and deranged about being a writer alone at your desk all day—the minute can become major, and the major can become minute. It’s like being a candle that burns itself up. So it’s satisfying to use my passion and knowledge and experience of having spent so much time with words on behalf of other people.
A big thread in my nonfiction work is a resistance to a culture of individuality—I believe in a culture of care and community. It’s something we struggle with as Americans: how to figure out the relationship between individual ambition and the humanist mode of actually caring about one another. So I like the humanistic aspect of editing: being there for somebody and helping them because I have a knowledge base of thinking about this stuff for so long.
What kinds of editors inspire you? Those who make a space for writers to be the best versions of themselves. I also learned a huge amount from Bill Buford, who was my boss at the New Yorker when I started. We’re very different temperamentally, but he cared so deeply about the pieces he worked on. Sometimes as an editor you’re tired, and it can be easy to read a piece and think, “This is great.” And sometimes that’s not the fidelity that the piece needs—sometimes it needs you to enter it and read it more deeply. And that can be exhausting. As a writer, my best editors have made me better but not changed me, which is a kind of magic. I aspire to that—not to impose my aesthetic, but to illuminate what’s there. Make you a better writer and thinker on the page.
Is there anything from J. D. McClatchy’s approach or practice you hope to adopt yourself? He was a wonderful champion to writers. I think Sandy published my first published piece, so I feel a wonderful sense of gratitude toward him. He believed in young writers and gave them a chance to write serious criticism and publish their poems and fiction. He believed passionately that the review needed to exist and continue existing, and he came on at a moment when there were some doubts about the review’s future. So every day I think about him in that sense—I don’t think it would be here without him. And I feel a similar passionate conviction already that the review should exist and continue existing for many years.
Do you think literary journals are in trouble? I’m thinking, for example, of Tin House announcing it will no longer publish a print quarterly. Is it getting harder for literary journals to sustain themselves? I don’t know about “harder” or “in trouble,” but any literary journal in 2019 has to think deeply about what it is and what it is in relationship to the culture. The advent of the Internet as a technological change is probably similar to the printing press. We’re looking at a really massive, really fast, wide-scale change in communication. It has to affect literary journals. It would be foolish to say it didn’t. But it affects them in all kinds of ways. Publishing online is not the same thing as publishing in print; [both modes] have brought with them different kinds of conversation and communication.
To give an example: When I starting working as an assistant at the New Yorker in 1997, if someone wanted to write a response to a piece, we chose whose words got published. We reflected back to the world what the world thought of a piece we ran. We reflected what the world thought of the New Yorker. That is not true anymore. Right now I could write a response to anything. Anyone could write anything in response to anything published. And though there’s not totally equal access because of things like search engine optimization, it is much easier for many voices to be heard. That’s a great thing, but the question then becomes: Now that so many voices can come into the conversation, how do we have that conversation in a way where we’re not all yelling at one another? We have to think about this as editors—what does it mean if we’re in a much more democratic space? What are the opportunities there? For the Yale Review, I’m thinking about how to build in a space for conversation and response. So are magazines in trouble? It’s hard in ways that it wasn’t before, and it’s important to think about what kind of editorial reckoning has to happen around this shift. It’s challenging but also exciting.
Dana Isokawa is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
In April, Emily Nemens, then the coeditor of the Southern Review in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was named the new editor of the Paris Review. Nemens started the new position at the Paris Review’s New York City office in June and succeeds Lorin Stein, who resigned in December 2017 amid allegations of sexual misconduct toward female staffers and writers. Nemens takes over a storied publication that is much more than a print quarterly—the magazine regularly runs online content, produces videos and a podcast, hosts events, and publishes books through Paris Review Editions. A few weeks before the Fall 2018 issue, her first, came out, Nemens spoke about her plans for the Paris Review and her approach to editing.
Are there any new series or forms of coverage for the print quarterly in the works? The guest poetry editor program is really exciting. The Winter Issue, which comes out in December, will be with Shane McCrae picking the poetry. I’m really excited to work with him. I think the magazine does so much really well, and I don’t want to close the door on that—I really just want to support it. So I think there will be incremental growth across all the sections of the magazine. I’d really like to reengage with the essay, which wasn’t always in the magazine, so making a point to reconnect with that form is a priority. I have a visual arts background, so I’d like to collaborate with the arts community to not just figure out striking covers, but to really engage with what’s going on in the art world. For fiction, I’m trying to broaden the kinds of stories that are featured and the emotional motivation and narrative arcs of the stories. There’s a lot going on in fiction now, and the magazine of course reflects my taste and my staff’s taste, but it’s exciting to broaden the kinds of stories told.
How do you want to broaden the review’s fiction? I think there are different kinds of motivations for stories. Reading the archive, I felt like we hit on the same notes too often in terms of what motivated characters to set out on their journeys. I want to think more about different emotional needs and motivations. There is definitely a theme of loneliness in some of the stories [in the Fall 2018 issue], which I think might be the cultural moment. I read a lot of stories about social media and isolation—to the point where I actually had two really good stories that revolved around the same thing, so one will be in [the Winter 2018 issue]—but I want to think about different inspirations and aspirations for characters in different forms. My personal taste is towards a very long and complicated short story—something in the lines of a Deborah Eisenberg or Adam Johnson story where there’s an entire world—but the Fall issue also features an eight-hundred-word story and a four-hundred-word story. So I’m really thinking about the mechanics of the form and how they can be stretched or compressed and what happens when you do that.
What notes do you think were hit too often in the fiction archive? There are so many good stories in the archive, and I don’t want to discount that. I do think that there were a lot of New York stories, and there were a lot of romantic attainment stories about finding a partner. That pursuit is a huge part of life, but it’s not the only part of life. There’s also family, there’s also career, there’s also travel, there’s also adventure, there’s also physical attainment in terms of mountain climbing, or whatever it is. There are a lot more things than winding up in the sack, to put it a little too crassly. So I was just reading with that in mind.
How many stories did you read for the Fall 2018 issue? A few hundred, I’d say. Which is pretty normal. When I was at the Southern Review, I put eyes on every story. And it was about 1 or 2 percent acceptance, so right along those lines.
The Southern Review and the Paris Review publish writers from all over the country and the world, but both seem like journals very tied to a region—the Southern Review to the South and the Paris Review to New York City. The Paris Review is a real New York institution and that’s really exciting, but I don’t think it needs to be exclusively that. I think it can maintain its ties and relationships to the engine of New York but also bring more people into the fold.
From working at both these journals, do you think the region where a journal’s office is located affects the aesthetic of the journal? I don’t think it has to. I think it’s really in the perspective of the editors. In certain times of the Southern Review’s history, it was run by Southern scholars who every five years—more often that that—would edit special issues that were just on the state of literature in the South. And that was great and important for the magazine at the time and did a lot to establish it as a powerhouse in regional literature. But when I was there, for the five years I was editing the magazine, my focus was really more on the short story and finding the best short stories and featuring them and celebrating the form. So I wasn’t distancing myself from the legacy, but I wasn’t emphasizing it. So I think the same can happen here, where I don’t want to distance myself from the city and the literature here and everything that’s happening culturally in the city—but know that we can do something else too. And we’ll still exist in this universe. We’ll still be doing programming in the city, but I think we’ll bring the magazine to other events. I’m going to be at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in Portland and doing some public programming in Philadelphia and out in California. I don’t want to turn my back in New York and all the wonderful things happening here, but I think having lived and worked in a place where there aren’t as many cultural opportunities makes me want to spread the wealth.
When you were at the Southern Review, you were coeditor with Jessica Faust, and it seemed like the two of you had a really great collaborative process from start to finish. What is it like adjusting to being more on your own? I’m at the top of the masthead, but I’m still working with a really talented group of colleagues. The buck stops with me, and the editorial selection stops with me, but my editorial assistant, for example, shared a story that ended up in the Fall issue, and my associate editor did, as well. It’s different. It’s definitely reorienting. I love the coeditor structure just in terms of my personal approach to hierarchy—so I’m bringing some of that collaborative spirit and collegiality to the magazine, which feels really good, and I think is refreshing here.
After Lorin Stein resigned in December, the journal’s board members released a statement saying that they had “revised [the Paris Review’s] code of conduct and anti-harassment policies.” How do you hope to build on that? The board did a lot of good and important work before I ever got here. I was brought up to speed on all of those new policies, and there was great workplace sensitivity training and a lot of other resources brought in this spring. So I feel like a lot of the hard work was done before I arrived. But understanding really what it means to be in a safe and collaborative and collegial work environment and emphasizing that every day—that’s where I come in.
How do you think you can achieve that? It starts and ends with respecting everyone in the office no matter what their role is or how long they’ve been here. I think it’s being sensitive and empathetic to people’s work, but also to their lives outside of work without prying. And understanding that we’re all colleagues, but we’re also people, and just having that be my baseline as a boss. I’ve been trying to systematically work my way around the office and figure out with people what they’re working on, what they want to be working on, and what their short- and long-term goals are. I think starting with that and making sure we’re having regular check-ins sets a precedent for this as a dynamic and caring place.
Emily Nemens
(Credit: Murray Greenfield )
What does a good relationship between a writer and an editor look like to you? I approach relationships with my writers with a lot of enthusiasm and curiosity. I’m a pretty—I’m not going to say tough—but I’m a pretty engaged editor, and I do a lot of edits. I think the only way for those to go over well is if you deliver them with kindness. And usually that works—it doesn’t always work—but usually that works. I also bring that sort of relationship on the page to conversations and relationships [in person]. And even if I don’t connect with a writer on a particular piece, I try to support the work and the person making the work. I spend a lot of time saying, “No, but please keep in touch,” and, “No, I’m not going to publish this, but I care about your work, and I’m excited about it, so let me keep reading it.”
What do you think is the most helpful thing you can give a writer? The platform of the magazine is huge, and I know that, and I’m so excited about that. We just lost Philip Roth, and we published him at twenty-five, which really made his career or started it. So I’ll acknowledge that. But on a personal level, I really love taking a story that is amazing and that I love and spending some time with it and making it just a smidge better. And showing the writer ways they can grow and improve. I was recently at the Sewanee conference, and a writer I’d published five or six years ago said, “You know, the way you line-edited made me think about the way I write, and I’ve written differently ever since that interaction.” And that melted this editor’s heart. But giving people a new platform or encouraging people to keep going even if they’re not quite there—that’s an easy grab for me, to just be honest and enthusiastic about people’s work. And I don’t know that the writing community always has that generosity.
How would you describe your editing style? It sounds like you’re a really close line-editor. I am. If I see a really big structural issue I’ll generally ask about it and send more general notes. I always want to test the water if I want to do an overhaul—someone might feel that their story is perfect the way it is, and that’s fine—but if they’re up for it, I’ll send notes broadly. I don’t have time to do that with every story, of course, so I have to be kind of judicious about developmental edits. Usually it’s just one story an issue, or if I see two or three things that [have] developmental issues, I might space them out across a few issues. And then when a story feels close, that’s when I get in there and really think about each line and the pacing of every scene. I learned how to edit from Jessica Faust, a poet and a poetry editor. She was my mentor when I was in graduate school, and we then became colleagues. When you’re editing poetry you’re really considering every piece of punctuation, so I brought that over to editing fiction and interviews and everything else. It’s tedious, but I love it.
It’s hard to think about the Paris Review and not think about George Plimpton. Is there anything from his vision or editing style that you hope to adopt or carry on? He looms so large. This is Sarah Dudley Plimpton’s rug [points to rug beneath her desk]. This was at the Plimpton home. I feel like I have a strong feeling of his work, but I’m still really learning the details of his legacy. One of my favorite things about this past Spring, and after my appointment, was hearing all the Plimpton stories from all the writers who had encountered him and whose careers he’d helped. That was so much fun to get these stories. I feel like I’m still gathering those and talking with other editors who worked closely with him and getting to know more of his leadership style. That’s an ongoing project. I read his book Paper Lion years ago, and as a person who likes literature but is writing about sports, he was a guiding light for me before the Paris Review was on the radar as a place I could work. So I feel really fortunate to be carrying on that tradition of writing. But that’s secondary to learning how he ran this magazine and how he built this magazine from a really ambitious place. I feel like the journal has been able to carry that ambition and thrive.
Speaking of yourself as a writer, you recently signed a deal with Farrar, Straus and Giroux for your book about spring training, The Cactus League. As an editor, writer, and visual artist, do you find that the roles complicate or complement one other? I’m an editor first. I spend most of my time doing that, so when I have the opportunity to write or draw I’m sort of a snake and I just gobble—I have a really big meal and get a lot of work done. Because I’m not one of those writers who sits down and writes every morning. I wish I was, but I edit every morning! And that feels really good. But the thing is, working with language makes your language better. Working on other people’s stories—of course it takes away in terms of number of hours from my writing practice—but I feel like every time I do sit down to write I have a bigger tool kit. So I’m really grateful for that interplay. And the visual arts practice that I love—it will always be part of my life, but it’s sort of tertiary right now. And that’s fine.
At Poets & Writers we have a database of literary journals, and right now it lists almost 1,300 journals, which to me seems like a very daunting number to both writers and editors. Does that number surprise you or seem too high? That is a really big number, but I think it’s fine. Every journal is run by people who want to make a thing and put it out in the world, and I don’t think there’s any reason to stop that or hinder that progress. Obviously that’s more than I can read in a year. But I think with elbow grease, some strategy, and the right mix of editorial leadership and resources, those journals will find the right audiences—and if they can’t find those audiences, maybe there will be 1,250 next year. I don’t mean that in a glib way; I think that every experiment is worth it. Having seen a lot of great journals close for reasons of resources or lack thereof, I’m really excited that the Internet and other means have reinvigorated the form.
Dana Isokawa is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
In August Atria Books will release Everyday People: The Color of Life, an anthology of short stories by emerging and established writers of color and indigenous people. Edited by Jennifer Baker, a writer and longtime advocate for minority representation in literature—she has worked for the nonprofit We Need Diverse Books and hosts the podcast Minorities in Publishing—the collection features work by more than a dozen writers, including Courttia Newland, Yiyun Li, Mitchell S. Jackson, and Nelly Rosario. Baker took on the project after Brook Stephenson, the writer and bookseller who conceived of the anthology, died in 2015. While Stephenson planned for the anthology to feature only Black voices, Baker expanded the project’s focus and began soliciting other people of color and indigenous writers for stories shortly after the 2016 presidential election. The result is a collection of stories that depict the modern lives of people of color as they struggle with contemporary social, political, familial, and personal issues. Just before the book’s release, Baker discussed her work on the anthology and her connection to its mission as a writer and editor of color.
Everyday People highlights the universality of human experience while also mostly adhering to contemporary social realism. When you were soliciting stories for the book, did you intend for this? It was difficult for me to ask writers of color and indigenous writers to contribute to Everyday People so soon after the presidential election. It was and is a bad time, especially for marginalized people. The contributors are writers I contacted because their work contains a multiplicity of voices and topics. The fact that, in an increasingly tumultuous moment in history, people who are directly affected can create a high level of work in a finite amount of time that continually reflects our humanity speaks to their talent and professionalism. I gave no firm parameters to the writers for their stories, which may have helped them in the end to write broadly or tap into subjects that really speak to them.
Do you think social realism will continue to dominate the future of the short story? That depends on the author. In Everyday People, Courttia Newland’s and Allison Mills’s stories have speculative and fantastical elements rooted in culture and place that are political, personal, and real. To me those stories also encapsulate our society today by focusing on elections or sudden loss and how to get through loss. They may not be what publishing defines as “contemporary” or “true life,” yet they are identifiable, especially to a person of color or indigenous person.
The 2017 VIDA Count shows that in most of the U.S. literary magazines surveyed more than two-thirds of women and nonbinary contributors were white. Within this landscape, what do you see as the future of multiethnic American short fiction? The lack of representation in the industry prevents more marginalized stories from being seen by a wider audience. It wouldn’t, I hope, curtail the fact that marginalized folks are constantly creating and finding new routes for this. That said, unless we see some paramount change from the top down and from the bottom up in all areas of the industry, we won’t see a real change.
In the wake of #MeToo controversies within the literary community, Junot Díaz’s story was dropped from the book. How did you come to this decision? Editors have a responsibility, in any and all capacity, to do what’s morally right and also what is right for the work they’re editing. As editors we have a hand in the titles we publish, and I quite literally have my name on this product. This is also an anthology; I’m not acting out of self-interest but for all those whose work is tied to this book. Hearing other women of color speak out about assault is not something I take lightly or something anyone should readily dismiss. As I told Atria when I made my decision, “This isn’t a PR move. It’s a moral one.” A friend suggested I replace this story with a list of writers of color, namely women, which I expanded as much as I could with nonbinary and transgender writers of color. It seemed the best course of action to not remedy a problem but to make use of the space in a book to further highlight writers of color and indigenous writers. It serves as a resource that reflects as many people as I could find—and while I know I missed so many wonderful artists in my scramble to create this list in two weeks, I hope it’s at least an indicator of how we can further uplift those who don’t have the platform.
What were some of the biggest joys and challenges in compiling an anthology like Everyday People? The biggest joy was finishing it. Once contributors’ stories were finalized, I mapped out where the stories would go. Seeing first-pass proofs was rewarding because then the final contributors saw the entirety of the book and how it came together. Receiving positive reviews for Everyday People has also been incredibly heartening. The challenges were constant problem solving and also feeling the weight placed on Black women both personally but also nationwide during this time. Yet another challenge was when I experienced misogyny or hesitation to recognize privilege or when I recognized I should’ve done things earlier like utilize sensitivity readers for stories because something felt off to me.
How does wearing the editorial hat impact your own creative writing? That I’m a very precise person makes me a strong editor and a slowwriter. The inner workings of the editorial mind can be [preoccupied with]: “What does it all mean?” And in the framework of a story that doesn’t mean a narrative gets tied together with a bow, but that it culminates in an experience that seems honest for the work. So, in a way, my work as an editor complements my writing because it means I come to the page with purpose and am aware of when things aren’t working. At times it can impede upon my process because I may continually wonder: “Well, is that good enough?”
Namrata Poddar is the interviews editor for Kweli, where she curates a series called “Race, Power and Storytelling.” Her fiction and nonfiction has appeared in Longreads, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, VIDA Review, the Progressive, and elsewhere. Her debut story collection, Ladies Special, Homebound, was a finalist for Feminist Press’s 2018 Louise Meriwether First Book Award and is forthcoming from Speaking Tiger Books.
Having run her eponymous literary agency since 2005, in February Gillian MacKenzie joined forces with Kirsten Wolf, a publishing lawyer and the president of Wolf Literary Services, an agency providing legal consultation to other agencies, publishers, and independent artists. The merger resulted in MacKenzie Wolf, which offers all the services of a traditional literary agency plus legal and strategic advising that can be uniquely important for authors, who often face questions ranging from copyright disputes to television and film rights. MacKenzie Wolf, which is currently open to queries, boasts clients such as novelists Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi and Patty Yumi Cottrell, as well as nonfiction writers Michael J. Casey, Virginia Morell, and Henry Fountain. Shortly after the merger was complete, MacKenzie discussed the partnership, the state of the publishing industry, and the challenges of reaching readers today.
Why did you decide to team up with Kirsten Wolf in this new venture? Kirsten and I worked in the same office while I was working in film development and production at Jane Startz Productions, before I founded Gillian MacKenzie Agency. Since she started Wolf Literary Services ten years ago, a literary agency and consultancy for other agencies, she and I have shared an office and assistant, with whom I’d sometimes coagent projects. Our merging officially into MacKenzie Wolf was a natural extension of how we’ve always worked, and it has allowed us to more officially and effectively grow the agency arm of the company.
Why pair an agent with a lawyer? It is surprising how often an attorney’s perspective is useful beyond negotiating the contract. Questions come up about writing partnerships, disputes with publishers, the legal implications of including particular content in a book, various subsidiary rights and how they can be exploited in new ways, and so on. While Kirsten isn’t representing any of our clients—in intricate legal matters, an author should have his or her own attorney—her expertise helps guide decision-making greatly.
How is an agent’s job changing? The consolidation of publishing houses has reduced submission opportunities. And on the publishing side, it is harder to get a reader’s attention. With fewer physical bookstores, how does a reader come across a book? There is so much noise out there, and what once might have compelled a person to purchase a book—a stellar review, an interesting op-ed by the author—doesn’t necessarily lead to that outcome anymore. The sort of quirky, fascinating midlist books I love seem more challenging to get published these days as well.
So how do readers discover and read books now? That is the million-dollar question, isn’t it? Of course, big traditional media coverage still helps. Stellar review attention and awards still can help. And to state the obvious, social media seems to matter much more. Today publishers hope to have “influencers”—prominent names with large and active social media followings—push the book; even better, for the authors themselves to have those sorts of followings. However, it is still not entirely clear to me what sort of mention of what kind of book and by whom and where actually pushes someone to go out and make a purchase. I think it is important we all keep thinking of creative ways to help people discover books and authors.
What are some ways you help your writers reach more readers? We explore avenues that our authors and illustrators may not have originally considered. We are starting to pitch more of our illustration clients for animated commercial work. More and more we encourage our adult-nonfiction writers with suitable material to think about adapting their work for a younger audience. Our agency is also handling more of our clients’ speaking engagements, because not all clients garner fees large enough to attract traditional speaking bureaus, and yet their talks help sell books and generate word of mouth.
Who are you trying to reach with these tactics? People find themselves so busy and so distracted these days, and even those who were once avid readers have trouble finding the time and bandwidth to read full-length books. I am convinced that if we can compel lapsed readers to take the time to be still for a spell and to read a book from cover to cover, they will be reminded of the addictive and transformative power of books. Yes, there will be other modes of “content delivery” that cater to one’s scattered attention span, but nothing will be able to replace that inimitably rich experience one gets from reading a book. In this way, good books are perhaps the best promotion for other good books.
Have you seen any bright spots? I am heartened that quality books on not-overtly-commercial topics that matter still do find their way to the shelves. For example, in April my client Alisa Roth had her book Insane: America’s Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness come out—a book about not one but two difficult themes that Basic Books smartly saw important enough to publish. And one of the biggest titles on my list, The Path by Harvard professor Michael Puett and journalist Christine Gross-Loh, is a book about ancient Chinese philosophy and how it informs our lives today—again a book on a serious topic one might not immediately expect to be best-selling and yet has been translated into more than twenty-five different languages and counting.
What kinds of work are you looking to represent? I am fairly catholic in my tastes: By nature I can find myself excited by stale toast if it’s presented in a certain way. I guess I gravitate toward things that surprise me by coming at an idea through a new perspective, a multi-disciplinary prism, a surprising voice, an unusual format, etc. I want to work on material that I think matters, that might make the world a better place, or at the very least, that will offer readers an entertaining diversion. I’m always interested in seeing book ideas about intriguing discoveries or ways of seeing the world backed by science, journalistic exploration, or personal experience, coupled with the right person behind them. I also have a soft spot for illustrated works and think there are opportunities out there for unusual and winning visual books. Recent projects range widely, from humorous illustrated middle-grade books to books about the blockchain to mountain climbing to dog intelligence to loose nukes. I also gravitate towards strong narrative nonfiction, business, sports, current affairs, and memoir.
What do you love to see in a query from a writer? I have a full slate; fairly or unfairly, many of my clients of late have come through referrals. But I do read the queries that come in to me, and occasionally one will grab me. One of my favorite slush pile discoveries, for instance, is the talented Cat Warren, whose cover letter started, “My name is Cat, and this is a book about my dog.” As I kept reading, it was immediately clear that her story and talent backed up her compelling letter. Her book, What the Dog Knows: Scent, Science, and the Amazing Ways Dogs Perceive the World, ended up being longlisted for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award and is a best-seller for Touchstone, under the guidance of editor extraordinaire Michelle Howry. Cat is now working on a middle-grade adaptation of the book, which we recently sold to Krista Vitola at Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers. My colleague Kate Johnson, who primarily represents fiction, recently discovered Patty Yumi Cottrell from the slush pile. Patty’s stunning debut novel, Sorry to Disrupt the Peace—everyone must read it!—went on to win a 2018 Whiting Award in fiction and the 2017 Barnes & Noble Discover Award in fiction.
What advice do you have for writers? My advice is to do your research on who might be a good fit for your kind of writing, and when you make contact, let that person know why you have chosen specifically to reach out. And don’t give up!
Jonathan Vatner is a fiction writer in Yonkers, New York. His debut novel, Carnegie Hill, is forthcoming from Thomas Dunne Books in 2019.
In November the Library of America (LOA), the nonprofit publisher of classic American literature, named John Kulka its new editorial director. Succeeding longtime editor in chief Geoffrey O’Brien, who retired at the end of 2017, Kulka previously worked at Yale University Press, Harvard University Press, and Basic Books. In his new role at the LOA, Kulka oversees all of the publisher’s titles, including the Library of America standard series, which comprises more than three hundred volumes of classic and historical literature and scholarship and has been called the “de facto canon of American literature” by the New York Times. A few months into his new position, Kulka discussed editing the series and what’s ahead for LOA’s editorial program.
What are your responsibilities at the LOA? The LOA has always been a special publisher with a special mission. Our broader, nonprofit mission is to reconnect readers through education programs and community outreach. I’m responsible for guiding the editorial program: the Library of America standard series, which issues essential American writing in authoritative editions, and our special non-series books, like David Foster Wallace’s tennis essays, String Theory. The LOA publishes reliable editions. They are uncluttered. The mission is to build the national library of American writings—canonical, neglected literature, historical writings. It’s one of the most important undertakings in the history of American publishing.
How do you choose what to publish? How we publish any given author is always a tricky calculus. Looking at a writer with a voluminous body of work, are we better off being selective or comprehensive? It varies from author to author. Sometimes it’s not an issue. Flannery O’Connor, for example: The stories, novels, and all the nonfiction—if we exclude the letters—fit neatly into a single volume. But I’m thinking now about publishing an edition of Constance Fenimore Woolson, wrongly neglected, whom Henry James saw as a significant nineteenth-century writer. Woolson is a revelation to me: I had always known who she was because of James, but do yourself a favor and look at her short fiction. Is the LOA better off publishing one volume, two volumes, or everything we have of hers? That’s a question I’m faced with. Though a larger selection might be of interest to scholars, I’m not entirely sure that it’s the right thing to do in presenting her work to a general audience.
How does the LOA remain relevant today? This is a weird time we’re living in. The proliferation of fake news, inequality, a presentist disregard for the past—in such times, we need the LOA more than ever. Our history and literature still have much to teach us. We ignore it only at our peril. As Faulkner put it, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” I believe that. Here’s an example: When Lin-Manuel Miranda was writing Hamilton, it was the LOA’s edition of Hamilton’s writings that Miranda used as a resource. The musical in turn brought readers back to Hamilton. We published a brief paperback, The Essential Hamilton, in 2017 that we then put gratis into the hands of educators around the country.
What has been the most unexpected thing you’ve learned about LOA since you arrived? I’ve been repeatedly impressed by the amount of research and scholarship that sometimes goes into these volumes. Literally at my feet right now are three or four oversized cardboard boxes that represent the outtakes from the American Poetry Anthology—and just the two volumes devoted to the twentieth century. There’s so much research and scholarship that goes into production. It’s kind of a humbling thing.
Adrienne Raphel is the author of What Was It For (Rescue Press, 2017) and But What Will We Do (Seattle Review, 2016). Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review Daily, Lana Turner, Prelude, and elsewhere.
Ten years ago, Sarah Browning and a group of fellow poets founded Split This Rock, a literary nonprofit that works at the intersection of poetry and political activism and hosts the biennial Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness in Washington, D.C. Browning recently announced that she will step down from her role as executive director of the organization at the end of the year, and that the search for her replacement will begin after this year’s festival, which will be held from April 19 to April 21. With her final year at the organization underway, Browning discussed her past decade at Split This Rock, the continued need to consider poetry a form of social engagement, and the upcoming festival.
What changes have you seen in the literary world since starting Split This Rock? When we started this organization, there were very few literary organizations engaging in activism. I went to the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference in 2003, three weeks before the United States invaded Iraq, and I could find only two sessions that engaged political questions at all. We were actively being told not to write political work fifteen years ago. That’s why we started D.C. Poets Against the War [a movement in 2003 to protest the war in Iraq] and then Split This Rock, which emerged from that movement. Split This Rock brought the activism piece into the picture. Now, of course, everybody is focused on making change with their poetry and doing so more explicitly. But I’m telling you, ten years ago, there was no home for it. And that’s why we built it.
The name “Split This Rock” comes from a poem, doesn’t it? It does, from a Langston Hughes poem called “Big Buddy.” It ends with, “When I split this rock, / Stand by my side.” So it’s about splitting the rock of injustice but also the solidarity that’s needed—that need for community.
How does Split This Rock make poetry and activism accessible? We try to bring poetry into as many spaces as possible and encourage everyone to write. We host community writing workshops twice a month in D.C. They’re free, drop-in; all you have to do is show up. The room is physically accessible, with transcription service for people with disabilities. You don’t have to have an MFA or any educational experience or introduction to poetry. We believe that, as Roque Dalton wrote in a poem, “poetry, like bread, is for everyone.” And our programs prove it. People are hungry for the imaginative language of poetry and for the authentic voice of one another, the heart-language, because so much of our experience is mediated now by propaganda, by commerce, by social media. We’re being sold to all the time. So we’re hungry for more authentic experience, and that’s what poetry is: It’s idiosyncratic language; it’s weirdness and wildness.
What would you say to those who might suggest that poetry and activism are incompatible? Writers have always engaged the world around them. And as a writer you have to write what’s pounding up inside you. And if what’s pounding up inside you is injustice—if there’s a mother who has to work two jobs just to get food on the table, or if you are that mother, and you’re writing late at night and hoping there’ll be enough food to get you through the end of the week to the next paycheck—then that’s what you’re writing. That’s the poem. That’s what’s going to have power: What is the fire in your belly?
Nobody should tell anybody else what to write. I’m not telling anybody what to write. These poems were always being written; they just weren’t finding a wide audience because journals weren’t publishing them. The guidelines were saying, “No causes.” The contests weren’t awarding these poets the awards. The universities weren’t giving these poets the jobs. Because of racism, and because of conservatism. And homophobia and sexism. Split This Rock was founded to help these poets, like myself, feel less lonely and be more effective as poet-citizens, so that we could join together when we wanted to do activism—but also to amplify our voices and to create our own platforms.
Split This Rock cites Federico García Lorca’s concept of duende as one of its core values, which is described on your website as “recognizing the potential imaginative power of fear and embracing poets and activists who grapple with difficult issues and take risks in their writing and public work.” Why are fear and risk both necessary to move things forward? It ain’t easy. None of it. We’re not going to make change if we stick to platitudes and simplicity, either in our poetry or in our social justice work. So we have to go to dark places, difficult places, in ourselves and in our relationships with one another and in our society. And that’s hard. I think it certainly helps us to sometimes be patient with one another. Split This Rock is one of the few places in the literary world, but really anywhere, where folks who are twenty-one and folks who are seventy-six are hanging out in the same room, having conversations. And maybe they have radically different cultural references and life experiences. So duende informs that because it’s scary to say, “You know, I don’t actually know anything about what you’ve just said.”
I’ve never studied poetry formally, so even when I’m with a bunch of academics and they use terms that I don’t know, I have to say to them, “Guess what, I don’t know what you’re saying!” [Laughs.] Which is a scary thing for me to say. I try to face my fear. But it’s at all levels, and we have to do it at all levels: personal, creative, collective, national. I’m the descendant of slave owners. I write about that in my work and I’m trying to push that, hard. I don’t know how my extended family’s going to feel about it, let alone other white people from the South. I wasn’t raised in the South, only half my family is from the South, so I’m going to be treated as an outsider, but that’s an issue where I feel like we have to face our fears as white Americans.
What guests and panels are you excited to feature in this year’s Split This Rock Poetry Festival? Sharon Olds has been added to the lineup, which is really great news. She was supposed to feature at our very first festival in 2008 but was unable to come. Likewise, Sonia Sanchez kicked off our first festival and she will be back to mark this tenth anniversary. But also we have young poets like Paul Tran and Terisa Siagatonu. We always try to honor voices of all ages and in all places in their writing lives.
This being the first festival under the new political regime, we are particularly interested in how poetry is being used in resistance and in how poets are taking care of themselves and one another. We’re all feeling a lot of despair, I think, and we heard that in the proposals we received. There are a lot of sessions about using sadness, about using rage—in our poetry, but also in our community building—and acknowledging these things as real. Crying. Holding one another in celebration and in support.
What’s next for you—writing? Yes. I don’t do well without structure, even this late in my life. I’m thinking about grad school. But at the very least, I would like to have more time for my own poetry and creative nonfiction. My second book just came out, but it was ten years between books. It would be nice not to have ten years till the next one.
Nadia Q. Ahmad is the Diana & Simon Raab Editorial Fellow at Poets & Writers Magazine.
As the editor-at-large of Merriam-Webster, Peter Sokolowski contributes to the dictionary’s print and online content, which, in addition to word definitions, includes podcasts, videos, and blogs. In August Sokolowski and his fellow editors rolled out Time Traveler, a tool that organizes words according to when they were first used in English. He recently discussed Merriam-Webster’s newest features, the changing ways in which people use the dictionary, and the Word of the Year, feminism, which the editors announced today.
How does Time Traveler work? How does it affect the way we think about language? With Time Traveler, by organizing [words] a different way—that is, rather than alphabetically, chronologically—you get a three-dimensional experience with the dictionary. I do think it’s profound to think of language chronologically. Alphabetically, the ordering is arbitrary. Chronologically, it’s not. Time Traveler shows layers of cultures as they are expressed in the language when they come into the language. English is such a peculiar language in this way. French, for example, is almost entirely derived from Latin. The French Academy founded the language with an ethos of contraction. But English is a mongrel language, with an ethos of expansion. This ethos of expansion has a political component, too. England is establishing colonies all over the world. So, due to exploration, India is a very rich source of words. We first put dates into the dictionary in 1983, with the release of the Collegiate ninth edition. Dictionary entries have always been organized in chronological order: The first sense was always the oldest sense, and the last definition was, chronologically, the most recent. The thing is, that’s a little counterintuitive. By adding dates to entries, we felt we were giving more specific info about when each word entered the language. And now, collectively, because of organizing principles of the Internet, we can connect these words by date. Time Traveler allows imagination to combine with history. It gives a poetic sense of what the dictionary really is—a new and different kind of way of organizing our language.
How might people use Time Traveler? Here’s one banal example: There’s a wonderful linguist, Ben Schmidt, who rates the language of Downton Abbey, illustrating how many of the words [used on the show are] anachronistic. Contact, for example, was not a verb in 1912. Another example is when Lord Grantham says “You’ll have to step on it” in 1912. You just have to think: This guy had probably never driven a car, so why would he use this very slangy idiom? The idea of speeding didn’t even exist yet.
What does the online version of the dictionary do that print can’t, and vice versa? When Samuel Johnson, in 1755, wrote his dictionary, a woman came up to him and said, “I’m so pleased that you have omitted the naughty words.” “Madam,” Johnson replied, “I find that you have been looking them up.” Before the dictionary went online, the people who wrote dictionaries never knew which words were looked up. We’re learning enormous amounts about what drives people to a dictionary and what people are looking for from a dictionary. The dictionary is not just used for novel and arcane words—it’s mostly used for words that are a little abstract. There are cyclical things: Love is always at the top of the list in February. There are back-to-school terms: cultures, diversity, plagiarism. And there are the evergreens: integrity, ubiquitous, affect versus effect. Whatever sends us to the dictionary is a private moment. Looking up a word in the dictionary is an intimate act, something between ourselves and our language. The dictionary is this little intermediary—it orchestrates and organizes that relationship. That’s what it’s for. When people are looking up love in February, they’re not looking for spelling—they’re looking for philosophy.
In 1996 we started offering the dictionary online for free, and in 1997 we started following word trends. What had become a static list became dynamic, and we could see what people were looking up in real time. So, for example, in 1997, Princess Di dies; paparazzi is a very natural word to look up. During 9/11, first there were concrete words—rubber, triage—then more philosophical words, such as surreal, succumb, spontaneous. Surreal is always looked up after tragedies. In 2009 I started putting these things on Twitter. We’re often criticized for being political, but we’re responding to the data. We’re good at reading data—we’re not good at reading minds.
Why keep the print edition around at all? The dictionary we search online is a different experience than the book. The print dictionary is a great piece of technology: It’s really fast, and it really works. And the print way of organizing information means that you always see certain things together. That’s no longer really the case online. The big thing online is, there’s space. Almost every decision for print dictionaries had to be made by the tyranny of space. We are no longer bound by that. What had been tyranny of lack of space is now tyranny of too much space. I always tell people, keep your old dictionaries. The old ones have different information that might be interesting. There is no spreadsheet for when definitions change. You just have to take the book down and look it up and see. For the first time last week, I looked up the word dictionary in Webster’s unabridged second edition, from 1934. I was fascinated. It’s an article on the history of the dictionary. That’s the kind of material that would be dropped in print today, but that’s some of the reason you go to a dictionary. We’re trying to answer those questions that might be asked when you’re looking up a word in the dictionary: Does a Cobb salad have chicken or turkey? The online dictionary is a contemporary magazine of language—let’s be the one-stop word website.
How do you choose the Word of the Year? The Word of the Year goes back to 2003, and it was always based on the data. However, there’s an asterisk. If we went by raw tonnage, we would have boring words, abstract words that adults feel responsible for. We’re looking for what words spiked this year, not last year. That tells us something about the language today. We also look at what words were looked up in far greater numbers this year than last year, which we call year-over-year numbers. We look at that figure, and then we see a list of words that are typically much more apposite to the year we just experienced. In other words, it tells us something about this year that we’ve lived through, as opposed to words that tell us something about the general curiosity about the English language.
What do you think 2017’s Word of the Year tells us about the world in this moment? The word of the year is feminism, which is pretty striking given the news. On the one hand, you might say that this is a fairly common word, one that is not really the subject of the news. In point of fact, this is a word that has been rising for the past several years to the point that it’s almost in our top twenty of overall lookups in the history of our website. We saw a 70 percent increase in lookups in 2017, and then we saw these spikes throughout this year. In January we saw a spike after the Women’s March on Washington and the other marches all over the country and the world, which got a huge amount of attention and were historic in various ways. The word feminism was used in particular regarding questions of whether or not the March was feminist or what kind of feminism the organizers and the attendees represented.
In February we saw another huge spike—and this one is in some ways more pointed and more dictionary-oriented—when Kellyanne Conway gave an onstage interview at the Conservative Political Action Conference and said she didn’t consider herself a feminist in the “classic sense.” She explained that she thinks being feminist, in her words, seems to be very “anti-male” and very “pro-abortion.” She was using the word in a very specific way, and that kind of specific use sends people to the dictionary for the definition, because the definition of the word itself was put into question, was itself the subject of the news story. Which is also true with the word fact, when Kellyanne Conway, also in the earlier part of the year, used that term “alternative facts.”
Later in the year we saw two entertainment reasons for the word’s popularity: The Handmaid’s Tale, the Hulu TV adaptation of the Margaret Atwood novel, which got not only a huge amount of positive reviews, but also a huge amount of think pieces using that series as a point of departure and a contemporaneous cultural critique; and the film Wonder Woman, starring Gal Gadot in the title role, who was viewed as a feminist character in a feminist film with a female director, Patty Jenkins.
And recently of course, subsequent to the accusations made against Harvey Weinstein and a long list of others, the word feminist has been in the news a lot. Just today I happened to click on the New York Times story about Lena Dunham and her warnings to the Clinton campaign about being too close to Harvey Weinstein. The word feminist was not only used several times in the article, but there’s also a quote from Dunham where she says she wears underwear that has the word feminist on it. That’s not necessarily the kind of use that will send people to the dictionary, but it shows you that this word is part of the national conversation—to the extent that there is such a thing as a national conversation. I think it’s sometimes too facile to say that there’s a national conversation; I sometimes think that’s shorthand for people who don’t want to be very specific about context. However, if there is such a thing as a national conversation—and there surely is right now regarding, for example, sexual harassment in the workplace and presidential politics—Merriam-Webster has a front-row seat because we see the words that are being looked up as the stories progress. That’s a fascinating thing that I’ve been watching for years and that we present on our home page and on Twitter, in a feature we call Trend Watch, which is simply the words that are most looked up at a given moment. And that word right now is feminism.
Have you recently changed or tweaked the definition of feminism, or has it been consistent for the past several years? The first English language dictionary to ever include this word was Noah Webster’s dictionary in 1841, which was the last time Webster revised the dictionary before he died. He added the word feminism with the definition, “the qualities of females.” Clearly what he meant was femininity or femaleness; there was no political connotation to the word. This was a word that appeared to him somewhere, but we can’t actually find what he was looking at; we don’t know where he got it. In the 1864 edition, after Webster died and the Merriams had taken over, they dropped the word entirely because it was not used very frequently. It was not included in the next edition, published in 1890. And then in 1909 it was added with two definitions—one, “feminine character or characteristics,” and two, the medical definition, “female characteristics present in males.” So this medical definition precedes the political one. Finally, in the famous unabridged second edition of Webster’s from 1934, the political sense was added: “the theory of those who advocate such legal and social changes as will establish political, economic, and social equality of the sexes.” That’s pretty much the way we define it today. The important word here is equality—equality of the sexes could almost stand as the definition. It’s interesting that we’ve dropped both the medical sense and the femininity sense, which is archaic at this point. The political sense we associate with the word basically begins around 1895, and that’s exactly when the suffragette movement was beginning. So the term feminism is more closely associated in political terms to the fight to get the vote, which makes perfect sense.
Also notable is that it’s a very modern word for English—we have a lot of words that are over a thousand years old, and this one is just over a hundred. That’s a very short time in the history of the English language. It seems to me that feminism is a word that has shifted over time. I think it was taken to be more aggressive in the past and is maybe taken much more positively today. Just like a lot of ideas, it’s a word that has shifted in meaning as the times have changed. That’s as it should be.
What were the runners-up for Word of the Year? The nine runners-up tend to represent individual spikes that were very striking. The first one is complicit. That came from Ivanka Trump who said in an interview with Gayle King, “I don’t know what it means to be complicit.” When you are a newsmaker and you say “I don’t know what x means” on live television, you better believe it sends people to the dictionary. What sends people to the dictionary even more is when people are having a lot of fun with it, and Saturday Night Live made a skit based on that interview, which kept it going. So that word really had a lot of hits, and it’s a fascinating word. The word is two parts, com and plicare or plek—the com means “together” or “with” in Latin, and the plek means “fold,” so it means “folded together.” It’s the same etymon of two other words that are much more common, complicated and complex.
The next one is the word recuse. Those lookups are all attached to Jeff Sessions. There was a recusal to look into Hillary Clinton; there was a recusal to look into the Trump campaign; there was a recusal involving the Russians. The word recused kept bobbing up and it was always connected to Jeff Sessions. Recused is a classic legal term, and he’s the attorney general, so it makes perfect sense that a legal term would be associated with him.
The next word is one that we don’t associate with a particular story; it just simply went way up in lookups, and we’re not really sure why. It’s the word empathy. Part of it was attached to the #MeToo campaign, with people talking about empathy towards women. And of course there was a lot of criticism of the Republican Party, Trump in particular, for lacking empathy. So this word is being used in both positive and negative ways. It was also in the news January when Asghar Farhadi, the Iranian film director who won two Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film, said he wouldn’t come to the Oscars because of Trump’s proposed travel ban, and that he was making a call for empathy between us and others, “an empathy which we need today more than ever.” And then in July at the Republican National Convention, Paul Ryan was highly quoted using the word when he said, “Real social progress is always a widening circle of concern and protection. It’s respect and empathy overtaking blindness and indifference.” When newsmakers utter the word, it does tend to send people to the dictionary. But we can’t say any one of those stories is the simple reason it makes our list.
Here’s the one that’s interesting from a percentage point of view: dotard. It’s a very unusual word. It was the word used by the Korean Central News Agency as a translation of Kim Jong Un’s statement where he referred to Donald Trump as a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard.” Because it’s such an unusual word—it’s essentially an obsolete word—we saw a 35,000 percent increase in lookups from 2016. We have 250,000 pages of words in the dictionary and some of those pages are looked up a thousand times an hour, others only a few times a year. Dotard was a word that was probably never looked up last year. It comes from the same word as dotage, which means a state or period of senile decay. So dotard originally meant imbecile, or stupid person, but now it just means an older person who is losing mental acuity. And this is a great thing about what the dictionary does—it gives a vocabulary lesson to the country when words like this are in the news. It’s also notable that this word is in the news probably because the Korean translators must be using very old bilingual dictionaries, because no contemporary speaker of English would use this word.
The next word is a science word from the solar eclipse, syzygy, which means the nearly straight-line configuration of three celestial bodies such as the sun, moon, and earth during a solar or lunar eclipse. The solar eclipse was an international story, and it cut straight through the United States and was a big teaching moment for a lot of people.
The next word is one that is looked up for pronunciation. We know that some words are looked up for their phonetics; typically they’re foreign words like schadenfreude or niche. This year the word was gyro. This was because of one simple event—Jimmy Fallon did a sketch on The Tonight Show with Luke Bryan, the country singer, and it showed them out on the streets of New York City getting a gyro. They ask each other, “How do you pronounce this?” and they turned it into this big musical number. It turns out there are three pronunciations for the word.
Federalism spiked because of the Congressional debate about the Affordable Care Act. Lindsey Graham said, “Here’s the choice for America: socialism or federalism when it comes to your health care.” What’s interesting to me about this is that socialism, as well as fascism and capitalism, are some of the most looked-up words in the dictionary. The problem with federalism, is that in America, we very unusually call our national government the federal government; however, the word federalism refers very explicitly to state rights. So the word itself is very confusing. You can see why it would send people to the dictionary.
The next two words are very simple, news-related words: hurricane—we had Harvey, Irma, José, and Maria—all these hurricanes that affected the Caribbean and the southeastern United States. Storm words always looked up when there’s a big storm, and we’ll usually see an echo—if hurricane is looked up, we’ll also see spikes in cyclone and tornado, because people are comparing them like recipes, the definitions all specify wind speed and geography. These are words where you can really learn something about the world, not just the language.
Finally, the last of the runner-up words goes all the way back to the Oscars in February—the word gaffe, which of course refers to the mistake of the wrong envelope that was opened for the Best Picture announcement. All the crew and cast of La La Land came up on stage, and while they were thanking their mothers, it was revealed that in fact Moonlight was the winner for Best Picture. Gaffe is an interesting word because it’s one of these journalistic words, it’s a word that’s used much more in headlines than in conversation. It’s a word that sends people to the dictionary quite regularly, since I’m sure when people see a headline that uses the word gaffe, they wonder if there’s something very specific about this kind of mistake, as opposed to just the word mistake. But of course headline writers like it because it’s short. And English has that kind of flexibility.
Adrienne Raphel is the author of What Was It For (Rescue Press, 2017) and But What Will We Do (Seattle Review, 2016). Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review Daily, Poetry, Lana Turner Journal, Prelude, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a doctoral candidate at Harvard University.
Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster editor-at-large.
In July writer, activist, and media commentator Jamia Wilson was named the new executive director and publisher of the Feminist Press (FP), a forty-seven-year-old nonprofit known for highlighting feminist perspectives and prose. Located at the City University of New York, the press has published books by writers such as Shahrnush Parsipur and Ama Ata Aidoo and public figures such as Anita Hill and Justin Vivian Bond. Wilson previously worked as the executive director of Women, Action, and the Media, and her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Elle, Bust, and many other publications. As she becomes the youngest person and first woman of color to direct the Feminist Press, Wilson discusses her aims to advance the press’s mission.
How has your experience helped you prepare for this new role, and what do you hope to bring to the Feminist Press? I grew up reading FP books that I borrowed from my mother’s shelf, like I Love Myself When I Am Laughing: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader and But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies. These books taught me about my literary and activist lineage and helped provide a road map for the present and the future. I’m honored to work with FP’s intergenerational team to both enliven and deepen our intersectional vision of publishing unapologetic, accessible texts and multiplatform content that inspire action, teach empathy, build community, and shift culture. FP will continue to deepen our engagement with communities of color, indigenous folks, the LGBTQ community, and the disability community. Representation matters, but it must be coupled with systemic change. We will elevate and amplify the voices of the most marginalized members of our community because we know that none of us are free unless we all are.
How do you plan to apply your knowledge and experience in the social justice field to the job of executive director and publisher? My engagement as a movement maker and media commentator brings FP closer to our community. It helps us connect with new readers because we’re involved in conversations out in the world and contributing to the cultural narrative via social media; TV; at conferences, panels, and marches; and in movement spaces. Until more gatekeepers do the work to disrupt habits and practices of patriarchy, economic injustice, and white supremacy in the publishing industry, we won’t transform our cultural narrative. My goal is to help contribute to the movement to put these values into active practice at all levels of our organization and work overall.
In this political and social climate, what kinds of books are pushing this conversation forward and promoting action? This has been a consistent part of FP’s mission, and that’s why we’re prepared to speak truth to power through our books and voices in the midst of attacks on free expression and the rise of authoritarianism, misogyny, and racial violence. We publish books other publishers deem “too risky,” “controversial,” or “radical.” We’ve made efforts to lift up queer voices with our Amethyst Editions imprint and women and nonbinary folks of color with our Louise Meriwether Prize. Our nonfiction books are mainly activist-based. We resist the reinforcement of respectability politics, as well as the promotion of narratives that appear to promote social progress but only in a way that’s palatable or validating to oppressive power structures—and only at the price of continuing to marginalize communities that are often silenced, invisible, or undermined. Some of our recent titles include Brontez Purnell’s Since I Laid My Burden Down, a novel about growing up gay in 1980s Alabama, and Juniper Fitzgerald and Elise Peterson’s forthcoming How Mamas Love Their Babies, a picture book that shows how diverse mothers work in different ways to take care of their children, from domestic labor to sex work.
What kinds of books have been most influential to you personally? The books I’m most enamored with have moved my heart in both personal and political ways. As my feminist foremothers taught us, “The personal is political.” I’m both an activist and a writer, and these identities have affixed themselves upon my soul. I love fiction, especially dystopian fiction, but I’m mostly a reader of nonfiction, historical fiction, legal history, and memoir. Although I tend to lean towards writing grounded in “truth,” I’m finding I’m even more drawn to this genre in the “post-truth” era.
There has been an increase in online-only feminist publications. Do you foresee potential partnerships to bring further visibility to FP’s work? We reach out to writers or artists who have gotten their start online if we’re interested in creating a book with them, like with Makeda Lewis’s Avie’s Dreams: An Afro-Feminist Coloring Book and The Crunk Feminist Collection. Many of the feminist writers and artists we work with have robust online communities and serve as natural ambassadors for their labor and wisdom. We have other upcoming collaborations with the Well-Read Black Girl Festival, Soul Camp, the Together Live tour, the SisterSong conference, Howard University, and the March for Black Women. We want to be a part of feminist conversations on- and offline and to lift up remarkable and stunning storytelling.
Jennifer Baker is a publishing professional, the creator and host of the Minorities in Publishing podcast, a contributing editor at Electric Literature, and the social media director and a writing instructor for the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop. She is the editor of the forthcoming short story anthology Everyday People: The Color of Life (Atria Books, 2018).
In 2015, Lena Dunham, along with her producing partner, Jenni Konner, created an online newsletter that would provide “a platform for young female voices to discuss feminist issues.” In its first six months Lenny Letter, also known as Lenny, attracted an impressive 400,000 subscribers. Building on that success, last year Random House, publisher of Dunham’s 2014 memoir, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned,” announced that Lenny would be the basis of a new imprint, overseen by vice president and editor in chief Andy Ward. The imprint’s first title, Sour Heart, the debut story collection by poet Jenny Zhang, is out now. In the months leading up to its publication, Dunham spoke about her vision for Lenny Books.
There can never be too many platforms for new and emerging literary voices, but still: Why Lenny Books and why now? It was essential to Jenni and me that we use the gift of our platform to give voice to a diverse group of women who need to be heard. It has never been more important that we hear from every kind of woman and understand the specificities of her experience—and that happens to be the goal of Lenny.
Will the imprint be fueled by the same ethos as the newsletter? We want the imprint’s logo to be a symbol that lets you know you’re about to read something that plays with the feminine in a fascinating new way. We want you to see the spine and think, “Oh, thank the Lord, I know what will thrill me tonight.” We want our readers to trust that our imprint is selecting books that will enrich them and make them laugh. Books allow for a deeper, more sustained exploration that the newsletter doesn’t—and that, too, is thrilling.
You and Jenni are already successfully publishing new voices in your newsletter, so what is it about print books in general, and Random House in particular, that led you to this new project? We are book nerds. We read to learn. We read to relax. We read to get inspired. It’s honestly selfish: We want a hand in helping produce the kinds of books we want to read, and we want to get first crack at reading fantastic authors and groundbreaking feminist works. So far, it’s been wildly fun. It’s interesting and inspiring that our partner in crime is Andy Ward, a man who understands our mission. So we aren’t for girls only, even if we are always thinking of our reader as a busy woman who needs to be able to trust that a Lenny book means her precious time is not being wasted.
What made Jenny Zhang’s Sour Heart a good choice for the first title from Lenny? Jenny is a writer of uncompromising honesty, complete originality, massive wit, and real skill. Her stories show us a part of the world, a part of the human experience, which most of us have never encountered. She’s enigmatic and compelling as a person—there is no one who more clearly represents our mission.
How will you and Jenni work together to make decisions about whose books to publish? It’s all instinct. Along with Andy, we try to fill our slate slowly but enthusiastically with writers we admire. Ultimately, we want the Lenny list to be an exciting kind of “collect ‘em all” where our books as a whole tell a story about what it feels like to be female now.
How closely will you work with Random House? Do you have autonomy in terms of editorial decisions? Andy was my editor on my first book, and we are currently at work on my second. He is my creative collaborator on a deep and abiding level. So we don’t just accept his thoughts, we demand them. And we wouldn’t be doing this if we didn’t have such a special relationship with Random House. My literary agent Kim Witherspoon is also a remarkable force who has helped authors like Anthony Bourdain build their own imprints, and her business instincts are impeccable. It really takes a village, and Jenni and I are happy to admit what we don’t know.
Will you be editing the books yourself? We know that editing is a specific and challenging job and one that people work their whole lives to get great at. So we read everything and give our notes but we really trust that editors should edit.
You’ve published poetry issues of Lenny. Any chance you and Random House have a poetry imprint in the works? We would love to publish poetry and not relegate it to some musty back room. We just need to find the right poet who we think will spark with readers who may be new to the pleasures of poetry. Jenni and I are both liberal arts grad poetry nerds who find the form completely enthralling. We’d love to add that element to our list.
You’ve written a book, Not That Kind of Girl, so do you have any advice for writers who are working on their own? Work. Work. Work. There’s no substitute for actually rolling up your sleeves and getting it done.
Kevin Larimer is the editor in chief of Poets & Writers, Inc.
Founded in 1986 by Charles F. Harris, Amistad Press is one of the country’s leading publishers of multicultural voices. Originally established to publish anthologies of African American writing, Amistad has since grown into a prominent literary fiction and nonfiction imprint of HarperCollins, having published novels by Edward P. Jones, Yvvette Edwards, and Jacqueline Woodson, as well as books of nonfiction by cultural icons such as Steve Harvey and Venus Williams. As Amistad celebrates its thirtieth anniversary, Tracy Sherrod, who has served as the editorial director since 2013, talks about the press’s history and the challenges it faces today.
How has Amistad changed or grown in the past thirty years? It’s grown in the number of titles, it’s grown in prominence, it’s grown in respectability, it’s grown in creativity. The foundation is the same, which is to publish multicultural voices and to let them express themselves freely. At the time when Charles F. Harris started Amistad, you didn’t feel that the publishing industry could fully see black culture. When Susan L. Taylor’s essay collection In the Spirit came—Taylor was the editor in chief of Essence—people in the publishing industry didn’t recognize how popular she was, so she was rejected all over town. But Malaika Adero, who came to Amistad as its first official editor outside of Charles Harris, acquired that book and it sold in best-seller numbers. And then they followed it up a few years later with a book by John Johnson, who founded Ebony and Jet. These people were praised in our community and celebrated—we all knew their names, we all wanted to know their stories—and Amistad published them. That’s how Amistad has impacted publishing: by helping the industry recognize how important and profitable these voices are.
What are the challenges for Amistad now? Nowadays, people in the industry recognize how important African American voices are in contributing to literature. The authors can be published by any imprint they choose, so that makes it more competitive on my part. It’s always been competitive, but not this competitive. I’m glad to see it. There should be huge demand for those voices.
Do you find authors are reluctant to join Amistad as opposed to an imprint that doesn’t have a multicultural focus? I find both. I find authors who prefer the focus, who have been published elsewhere and have maybe felt “culturally assaulted” by their editors—that’s one way a writer described what happened to her in the editorial process. And there are authors who are perfectly happy where they are and are published brilliantly where they are. Some writers are reluctant and ask me to publish their book on the broader Harper list. But we have the same marketing and publicity team, so I don’t think the logo on the book makes much of a difference.
Do you think publishers run the risk of pigeonholing or sequestering writers by creating multicultural imprints? No, I don’t think there’s a risk of doing that. It’s been proved that when Random House closed down One World/Ballantine and Harlem Moon, the company as a whole published less work by multicultural voices. So I don’t think that they’re sequestered—it’s an opportunity. Some people see it as ghettoized. But that’s not the case at all—these books are published with great care, they’re given the same marketing and publicity opportunities, we offer the same competitive advances.
Amistad publishes both literary and commercial titles—how do you balance the two? I go with my taste. I think every editor acquires to her personality, and I have a broad range of interest. I’m really trying to do books that address the community’s needs—depression and emotional issues are heavy on people’s minds these days with the economy. We published Darryl McDaniel’s book, Ten Ways Not To Commit Suicide. Since it’s by someone who’s rich and obviously successful—but who also suffers with depression from time to time—it might make the layperson feel more comfortable coming forth and talking about these issues. We also published this book The Mother by Yvvette Edwards and it’s delicious, let me tell you, but delicious in the sense that it’s rich in the pain the mother feels after her son is killed by another child. And I think that’s an issue in our community. That’s what I mean by publishing to the issues—things that are very particular to us. Not too particular to us, but something we’re dealing with in overabundance.
Can you speak more to what issues are important now? Financial issues, the economy. I’ve published several books that allow people to inspire their creativity to become entrepreneurs. Like Miko Branch’s Miss Jessie’s: Creating a Successful Business From Scratch—Naturally. And some of our memoirs have practical elements that you can take away, like The Book of Luke: My Fight for Truth, Justice, and Liberty City by Luther Campbell. In his book, he writes about how he made a financially successful life for himself, ran all the way to the Supreme Court to fight injustice against the first amendment, and won. I think that’s pretty incredible. He shares with people that you need to stand for something and you need to work hard. And a lot of the memoirs we publish have that theme running through them: entrepreneurship, hard work, and the use of your God-given talents.
What as an editor do you find most challenging? There comes moments in one’s publishing career—or in one’s publishing day, week, month—where a book will come along and you’ll feel like you need to acquire it, because it’s going to be extremely popular and sell really well. It’s only once in a while that you’re going to say, “This one is the one. This one is going to work.” And a lot of times if the people around you don’t know that person’s name in the same way that they didn’t know Susan Taylor’s name, the same way they didn’t know Zane’s name, they’ll say, “Oh no, we can’t do that book. We’re not going to invest much of an advance in that book.” Those moments are painful, because I know—sometimes you know—you’re not guessing, you’re not estimating. Once in a while you know. And I need to work better at conveying when I know, so that those books don’t end up with another publisher.
How do you know when a title is one of those books? For nonfiction, it’s straight-up practical reasons—the community has been waiting for a book from this person forever, so things are all lined up. There are so many people behind it that it doesn’t really matter what it is that they do, but chances are that they’re doing something smart and it will work. For fiction, it feels like a warmth that overwhelms you—it’s a sensation. When there are so many elements to a story that embrace where you come from that you know it’s going to work. Like Edwards’s The Mother and Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn.
Are there more specific challenges you encounter as an editor of color? The number one thing is that I think most of the publishing industry looks at African American editors as one and the same. They believe that our tastes are going to be the same, that we’re going to want the same books, that we’re building identical publishing programs—but that’s not really true. We all have very different tastes. Some are more literary than others; some are more interested in books that have historical relevance; some only want to do books that will make a difference. And it goes across the board. Everybody has different tastes. And we’re friends—even though we sometimes compete against one another, we’re friends and support one another and recognize more than anything that if one book fails, it could jeopardize all the books. We face more pressure because we can only acquire a few books. So if you pay a lot for one and it tanks hugely, there’s no telling what might happen. So we’re all very careful and very smart and think of publishing multicultural books as a whole, not about our careers. It has nothing to do with our individual careers. And I think this was shown when Chris Jackson was given the opportunity to start his own imprint, and he decided to resurrect One World [at Random House] instead, which shows that he was concerned about the multicultural publishing community.
Do you sense that the publishing industry has adopted the view that black readers have diverse interests and read across racial and cultural lines? I don’t think it’s adopted by the industry as a whole. Someone once said to me, “Are all of your books about race?” And I said, “No!” Multicultural writers write about various aspects of their lives. Even though racism has shaped all of us, unfortunately, and I’m not sure it has shaped us to be our best selves. I do believe that something special is going on right now, where all of us are questioning our biases and racism in a more serious way. I also believe there’s another segment of the population that is embracing their hostility towards other races, and they are really speaking loudly. So those of us who are trying to do better and [create] a more beloved society need to speak louder. And perhaps show some love to the other people who are really having a challenging time, and maybe then we can make America great again.
It’s a scary time, right? It is, it is. But I think it’s going to be a productive time. I remember back in 2008 and 2009, there was a drought in multicultural literature. There were great books, but there were very few in terms of the number of books that were coming out. I remember telling a friend in publishing, “Believe it or not, this is a really good time, because I know that people are in their homes writing and creating and in the next few years, it’s going to be an explosion of just amazing, amazing literature.” And I think that is happening now.
What are your plans for Amistad’s future, and how do you hope to grow the list? We plan to grow the staff, to find someone who specializes in marketing and publicity. As for the list, I’ve learned from the success of Edward P. Jones winning the Pulitzer Prize for The Known World, the reception of Another Brooklyn, the reception of The Mother, that literary fiction is the route for Amistad. As for nonfiction, [we’ll be looking to publish fewer] celebrities and more serious narrative nonfiction. That’s how we’ll grow the list. We have some really great books coming that reflect that. We’re doing Black Detroit: A People’s History of Self-Determination by Herb Boyd, and Making Rent in Bed-Stuy, which is a memoir by a young man, Brandon Harris, about gentrification. And we have a book called The Original Black Elite by Elizabeth Dowling Taylor that’s a history from the Emancipation Proclamation to the Jim Crow era of the really wealthy class of black people and their philosophies and ways of life.
Does Amistad have a target audience? I definitely want our books to reach people of color in addition to everyone else. I think it’s the same hope that we have for every book: We want our books to reach everyone. So my goal is that I’m publishing for people of color, but I hope that everyone is interested.
What would you like to see in the industry in terms of increasing diversity? I would like for the industry to see that it’s wonderful when all the cultures come together and do things together. There’s so much joy, there’s so much pleasure, there’s so much excitement to be found there. And I think that we should try to achieve that more often—because it’s a beautiful experience, and we all learn so much, and what we learn provides joy.
In what way would we be brought together? In making books! And not thinking that books are for a particular audience, or that when we go to market that only women or only whatever the “only” is buys books. Don’t think of it that way. Because we’re sharing a story that we’re all a part of. This is supposed to be some melting pot, so let’s see what’s in the pot! I’d like for us to see that bringing things together is joyful and not work. Inclusion is not work. I think living in isolation is work.
Dana Isokawa is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
In 2015, Lena Dunham, along with her producing partner, Jenni Konner, created an online newsletter that would provide “a platform for young female voices to discuss feminist issues.” In its first six months Lenny Letter, also known as Lenny, attracted an impressive 400,000 subscribers. Building on that success, last year Random House, publisher of Dunham’s 2014 memoir, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned,” announced that Lenny would be the basis of a new imprint, overseen by vice president and editor in chief Andy Ward. The imprint’s first title, Sour Heart, the debut story collection by poet Jenny Zhang, is out now. In the months leading up to its publication, Dunham spoke about her vision for Lenny Books.
There can never be too many platforms for new and emerging literary voices, but still: Why Lenny Books and why now? It was essential to Jenni and me that we use the gift of our platform to give voice to a diverse group of women who need to be heard. It has never been more important that we hear from every kind of woman and understand the specificities of her experience—and that happens to be the goal of Lenny.
Will the imprint be fueled by the same ethos as the newsletter? We want the imprint’s logo to be a symbol that lets you know you’re about to read something that plays with the feminine in a fascinating new way. We want you to see the spine and think, “Oh, thank the Lord, I know what will thrill me tonight.” We want our readers to trust that our imprint is selecting books that will enrich them and make them laugh. Books allow for a deeper, more sustained exploration that the newsletter doesn’t—and that, too, is thrilling.
You and Jenni are already successfully publishing new voices in your newsletter, so what is it about print books in general, and Random House in particular, that led you to this new project? We are book nerds. We read to learn. We read to relax. We read to get inspired. It’s honestly selfish: We want a hand in helping produce the kinds of books we want to read, and we want to get first crack at reading fantastic authors and groundbreaking feminist works. So far, it’s been wildly fun. It’s interesting and inspiring that our partner in crime is Andy Ward, a man who understands our mission. So we aren’t for girls only, even if we are always thinking of our reader as a busy woman who needs to be able to trust that a Lenny book means her precious time is not being wasted.
What made Jenny Zhang’s Sour Heart a good choice for the first title from Lenny? Jenny is a writer of uncompromising honesty, complete originality, massive wit, and real skill. Her stories show us a part of the world, a part of the human experience, which most of us have never encountered. She’s enigmatic and compelling as a person—there is no one who more clearly represents our mission.
How will you and Jenni work together to make decisions about whose books to publish? It’s all instinct. Along with Andy, we try to fill our slate slowly but enthusiastically with writers we admire. Ultimately, we want the Lenny list to be an exciting kind of “collect ‘em all” where our books as a whole tell a story about what it feels like to be female now.
How closely will you work with Random House? Do you have autonomy in terms of editorial decisions? Andy was my editor on my first book, and we are currently at work on my second. He is my creative collaborator on a deep and abiding level. So we don’t just accept his thoughts, we demand them. And we wouldn’t be doing this if we didn’t have such a special relationship with Random House. My literary agent Kim Witherspoon is also a remarkable force who has helped authors like Anthony Bourdain build their own imprints, and her business instincts are impeccable. It really takes a village, and Jenni and I are happy to admit what we don’t know.
Will you be editing the books yourself? We know that editing is a specific and challenging job and one that people work their whole lives to get great at. So we read everything and give our notes but we really trust that editors should edit.
You’ve published poetry issues of Lenny. Any chance you and Random House have a poetry imprint in the works? We would love to publish poetry and not relegate it to some musty back room. We just need to find the right poet who we think will spark with readers who may be new to the pleasures of poetry. Jenni and I are both liberal arts grad poetry nerds who find the form completely enthralling. We’d love to add that element to our list.
You’ve written a book, Not That Kind of Girl, so do you have any advice for writers who are working on their own? Work. Work. Work. There’s no substitute for actually rolling up your sleeves and getting it done.
Kevin Larimer is the editor in chief of Poets & Writers, Inc.
In July writer, activist, and media commentator Jamia Wilson was named the new executive director and publisher of the Feminist Press (FP), a forty-seven-year-old nonprofit known for highlighting feminist perspectives and prose. Located at the City University of New York, the press has published books by writers such as Shahrnush Parsipur and Ama Ata Aidoo and public figures such as Anita Hill and Justin Vivian Bond. Wilson previously worked as the executive director of Women, Action, and the Media, and her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Elle, Bust, and many other publications. As she becomes the youngest person and first woman of color to direct the Feminist Press, Wilson discusses her aims to advance the press’s mission.
How has your experience helped you prepare for this new role, and what do you hope to bring to the Feminist Press? I grew up reading FP books that I borrowed from my mother’s shelf, like I Love Myself When I Am Laughing: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader and But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies. These books taught me about my literary and activist lineage and helped provide a road map for the present and the future. I’m honored to work with FP’s intergenerational team to both enliven and deepen our intersectional vision of publishing unapologetic, accessible texts and multiplatform content that inspire action, teach empathy, build community, and shift culture. FP will continue to deepen our engagement with communities of color, indigenous folks, the LGBTQ community, and the disability community. Representation matters, but it must be coupled with systemic change. We will elevate and amplify the voices of the most marginalized members of our community because we know that none of us are free unless we all are.
How do you plan to apply your knowledge and experience in the social justice field to the job of executive director and publisher? My engagement as a movement maker and media commentator brings FP closer to our community. It helps us connect with new readers because we’re involved in conversations out in the world and contributing to the cultural narrative via social media; TV; at conferences, panels, and marches; and in movement spaces. Until more gatekeepers do the work to disrupt habits and practices of patriarchy, economic injustice, and white supremacy in the publishing industry, we won’t transform our cultural narrative. My goal is to help contribute to the movement to put these values into active practice at all levels of our organization and work overall.
In this political and social climate, what kinds of books are pushing this conversation forward and promoting action? This has been a consistent part of FP’s mission, and that’s why we’re prepared to speak truth to power through our books and voices in the midst of attacks on free expression and the rise of authoritarianism, misogyny, and racial violence. We publish books other publishers deem “too risky,” “controversial,” or “radical.” We’ve made efforts to lift up queer voices with our Amethyst Editions imprint and women and nonbinary folks of color with our Louise Meriwether Prize. Our nonfiction books are mainly activist-based. We resist the reinforcement of respectability politics, as well as the promotion of narratives that appear to promote social progress but only in a way that’s palatable or validating to oppressive power structures—and only at the price of continuing to marginalize communities that are often silenced, invisible, or undermined. Some of our recent titles include Brontez Purnell’s Since I Laid My Burden Down, a novel about growing up gay in 1980s Alabama, and Juniper Fitzgerald and Elise Peterson’s forthcoming How Mamas Love Their Babies, a picture book that shows how diverse mothers work in different ways to take care of their children, from domestic labor to sex work.
What kinds of books have been most influential to you personally? The books I’m most enamored with have moved my heart in both personal and political ways. As my feminist foremothers taught us, “The personal is political.” I’m both an activist and a writer, and these identities have affixed themselves upon my soul. I love fiction, especially dystopian fiction, but I’m mostly a reader of nonfiction, historical fiction, legal history, and memoir. Although I tend to lean towards writing grounded in “truth,” I’m finding I’m even more drawn to this genre in the “post-truth” era.
There has been an increase in online-only feminist publications. Do you foresee potential partnerships to bring further visibility to FP’s work? We reach out to writers or artists who have gotten their start online if we’re interested in creating a book with them, like with Makeda Lewis’s Avie’s Dreams: An Afro-Feminist Coloring Book and The Crunk Feminist Collection. Many of the feminist writers and artists we work with have robust online communities and serve as natural ambassadors for their labor and wisdom. We have other upcoming collaborations with the Well-Read Black Girl Festival, Soul Camp, the Together Live tour, the SisterSong conference, Howard University, and the March for Black Women. We want to be a part of feminist conversations on- and offline and to lift up remarkable and stunning storytelling.
Jennifer Baker is a publishing professional, the creator and host of the Minorities in Publishing podcast, a contributing editor at Electric Literature, and the social media director and a writing instructor for the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop. She is the editor of the forthcoming short story anthology Everyday People: The Color of Life (Atria Books, 2018).
As the editor-at-large of Merriam-Webster, Peter Sokolowski contributes to the dictionary’s print and online content, which, in addition to word definitions, includes podcasts, videos, and blogs. In August Sokolowski and his fellow editors rolled out Time Traveler, a tool that organizes words according to when they were first used in English. He recently discussed Merriam-Webster’s newest features, the changing ways in which people use the dictionary, and the Word of the Year, feminism, which the editors announced today.
How does Time Traveler work? How does it affect the way we think about language? With Time Traveler, by organizing [words] a different way—that is, rather than alphabetically, chronologically—you get a three-dimensional experience with the dictionary. I do think it’s profound to think of language chronologically. Alphabetically, the ordering is arbitrary. Chronologically, it’s not. Time Traveler shows layers of cultures as they are expressed in the language when they come into the language. English is such a peculiar language in this way. French, for example, is almost entirely derived from Latin. The French Academy founded the language with an ethos of contraction. But English is a mongrel language, with an ethos of expansion. This ethos of expansion has a political component, too. England is establishing colonies all over the world. So, due to exploration, India is a very rich source of words. We first put dates into the dictionary in 1983, with the release of the Collegiate ninth edition. Dictionary entries have always been organized in chronological order: The first sense was always the oldest sense, and the last definition was, chronologically, the most recent. The thing is, that’s a little counterintuitive. By adding dates to entries, we felt we were giving more specific info about when each word entered the language. And now, collectively, because of organizing principles of the Internet, we can connect these words by date. Time Traveler allows imagination to combine with history. It gives a poetic sense of what the dictionary really is—a new and different kind of way of organizing our language.
How might people use Time Traveler? Here’s one banal example: There’s a wonderful linguist, Ben Schmidt, who rates the language of Downton Abbey, illustrating how many of the words [used on the show are] anachronistic. Contact, for example, was not a verb in 1912. Another example is when Lord Grantham says “You’ll have to step on it” in 1912. You just have to think: This guy had probably never driven a car, so why would he use this very slangy idiom? The idea of speeding didn’t even exist yet.
What does the online version of the dictionary do that print can’t, and vice versa? When Samuel Johnson, in 1755, wrote his dictionary, a woman came up to him and said, “I’m so pleased that you have omitted the naughty words.” “Madam,” Johnson replied, “I find that you have been looking them up.” Before the dictionary went online, the people who wrote dictionaries never knew which words were looked up. We’re learning enormous amounts about what drives people to a dictionary and what people are looking for from a dictionary. The dictionary is not just used for novel and arcane words—it’s mostly used for words that are a little abstract. There are cyclical things: Love is always at the top of the list in February. There are back-to-school terms: cultures, diversity, plagiarism. And there are the evergreens: integrity, ubiquitous, affect versus effect. Whatever sends us to the dictionary is a private moment. Looking up a word in the dictionary is an intimate act, something between ourselves and our language. The dictionary is this little intermediary—it orchestrates and organizes that relationship. That’s what it’s for. When people are looking up love in February, they’re not looking for spelling—they’re looking for philosophy.
In 1996 we started offering the dictionary online for free, and in 1997 we started following word trends. What had become a static list became dynamic, and we could see what people were looking up in real time. So, for example, in 1997, Princess Di dies; paparazzi is a very natural word to look up. During 9/11, first there were concrete words—rubber, triage—then more philosophical words, such as surreal, succumb, spontaneous. Surreal is always looked up after tragedies. In 2009 I started putting these things on Twitter. We’re often criticized for being political, but we’re responding to the data. We’re good at reading data—we’re not good at reading minds.
Why keep the print edition around at all? The dictionary we search online is a different experience than the book. The print dictionary is a great piece of technology: It’s really fast, and it really works. And the print way of organizing information means that you always see certain things together. That’s no longer really the case online. The big thing online is, there’s space. Almost every decision for print dictionaries had to be made by the tyranny of space. We are no longer bound by that. What had been tyranny of lack of space is now tyranny of too much space. I always tell people, keep your old dictionaries. The old ones have different information that might be interesting. There is no spreadsheet for when definitions change. You just have to take the book down and look it up and see. For the first time last week, I looked up the word dictionary in Webster’s unabridged second edition, from 1934. I was fascinated. It’s an article on the history of the dictionary. That’s the kind of material that would be dropped in print today, but that’s some of the reason you go to a dictionary. We’re trying to answer those questions that might be asked when you’re looking up a word in the dictionary: Does a Cobb salad have chicken or turkey? The online dictionary is a contemporary magazine of language—let’s be the one-stop word website.
How do you choose the Word of the Year? The Word of the Year goes back to 2003, and it was always based on the data. However, there’s an asterisk. If we went by raw tonnage, we would have boring words, abstract words that adults feel responsible for. We’re looking for what words spiked this year, not last year. That tells us something about the language today. We also look at what words were looked up in far greater numbers this year than last year, which we call year-over-year numbers. We look at that figure, and then we see a list of words that are typically much more apposite to the year we just experienced. In other words, it tells us something about this year that we’ve lived through, as opposed to words that tell us something about the general curiosity about the English language.
What do you think 2017’s Word of the Year tells us about the world in this moment? The word of the year is feminism, which is pretty striking given the news. On the one hand, you might say that this is a fairly common word, one that is not really the subject of the news. In point of fact, this is a word that has been rising for the past several years to the point that it’s almost in our top twenty of overall lookups in the history of our website. We saw a 70 percent increase in lookups in 2017, and then we saw these spikes throughout this year. In January we saw a spike after the Women’s March on Washington and the other marches all over the country and the world, which got a huge amount of attention and were historic in various ways. The word feminism was used in particular regarding questions of whether or not the March was feminist or what kind of feminism the organizers and the attendees represented.
In February we saw another huge spike—and this one is in some ways more pointed and more dictionary-oriented—when Kellyanne Conway gave an onstage interview at the Conservative Political Action Conference and said she didn’t consider herself a feminist in the “classic sense.” She explained that she thinks being feminist, in her words, seems to be very “anti-male” and very “pro-abortion.” She was using the word in a very specific way, and that kind of specific use sends people to the dictionary for the definition, because the definition of the word itself was put into question, was itself the subject of the news story. Which is also true with the word fact, when Kellyanne Conway, also in the earlier part of the year, used that term “alternative facts.”
Later in the year we saw two entertainment reasons for the word’s popularity: The Handmaid’s Tale, the Hulu TV adaptation of the Margaret Atwood novel, which got not only a huge amount of positive reviews, but also a huge amount of think pieces using that series as a point of departure and a contemporaneous cultural critique; and the film Wonder Woman, starring Gal Gadot in the title role, who was viewed as a feminist character in a feminist film with a female director, Patty Jenkins.
And recently of course, subsequent to the accusations made against Harvey Weinstein and a long list of others, the word feminist has been in the news a lot. Just today I happened to click on the New York Times story about Lena Dunham and her warnings to the Clinton campaign about being too close to Harvey Weinstein. The word feminist was not only used several times in the article, but there’s also a quote from Dunham where she says she wears underwear that has the word feminist on it. That’s not necessarily the kind of use that will send people to the dictionary, but it shows you that this word is part of the national conversation—to the extent that there is such a thing as a national conversation. I think it’s sometimes too facile to say that there’s a national conversation; I sometimes think that’s shorthand for people who don’t want to be very specific about context. However, if there is such a thing as a national conversation—and there surely is right now regarding, for example, sexual harassment in the workplace and presidential politics—Merriam-Webster has a front-row seat because we see the words that are being looked up as the stories progress. That’s a fascinating thing that I’ve been watching for years and that we present on our home page and on Twitter, in a feature we call Trend Watch, which is simply the words that are most looked up at a given moment. And that word right now is feminism.
Have you recently changed or tweaked the definition of feminism, or has it been consistent for the past several years? The first English language dictionary to ever include this word was Noah Webster’s dictionary in 1841, which was the last time Webster revised the dictionary before he died. He added the word feminism with the definition, “the qualities of females.” Clearly what he meant was femininity or femaleness; there was no political connotation to the word. This was a word that appeared to him somewhere, but we can’t actually find what he was looking at; we don’t know where he got it. In the 1864 edition, after Webster died and the Merriams had taken over, they dropped the word entirely because it was not used very frequently. It was not included in the next edition, published in 1890. And then in 1909 it was added with two definitions—one, “feminine character or characteristics,” and two, the medical definition, “female characteristics present in males.” So this medical definition precedes the political one. Finally, in the famous unabridged second edition of Webster’s from 1934, the political sense was added: “the theory of those who advocate such legal and social changes as will establish political, economic, and social equality of the sexes.” That’s pretty much the way we define it today. The important word here is equality—equality of the sexes could almost stand as the definition. It’s interesting that we’ve dropped both the medical sense and the femininity sense, which is archaic at this point. The political sense we associate with the word basically begins around 1895, and that’s exactly when the suffragette movement was beginning. So the term feminism is more closely associated in political terms to the fight to get the vote, which makes perfect sense.
Also notable is that it’s a very modern word for English—we have a lot of words that are over a thousand years old, and this one is just over a hundred. That’s a very short time in the history of the English language. It seems to me that feminism is a word that has shifted over time. I think it was taken to be more aggressive in the past and is maybe taken much more positively today. Just like a lot of ideas, it’s a word that has shifted in meaning as the times have changed. That’s as it should be.
What were the runners-up for Word of the Year? The nine runners-up tend to represent individual spikes that were very striking. The first one is complicit. That came from Ivanka Trump who said in an interview with Gayle King, “I don’t know what it means to be complicit.” When you are a newsmaker and you say “I don’t know what x means” on live television, you better believe it sends people to the dictionary. What sends people to the dictionary even more is when people are having a lot of fun with it, and Saturday Night Live made a skit based on that interview, which kept it going. So that word really had a lot of hits, and it’s a fascinating word. The word is two parts, com and plicare or plek—the com means “together” or “with” in Latin, and the plek means “fold,” so it means “folded together.” It’s the same etymon of two other words that are much more common, complicated and complex.
The next one is the word recuse. Those lookups are all attached to Jeff Sessions. There was a recusal to look into Hillary Clinton; there was a recusal to look into the Trump campaign; there was a recusal involving the Russians. The word recused kept bobbing up and it was always connected to Jeff Sessions. Recused is a classic legal term, and he’s the attorney general, so it makes perfect sense that a legal term would be associated with him.
The next word is one that we don’t associate with a particular story; it just simply went way up in lookups, and we’re not really sure why. It’s the word empathy. Part of it was attached to the #MeToo campaign, with people talking about empathy towards women. And of course there was a lot of criticism of the Republican Party, Trump in particular, for lacking empathy. So this word is being used in both positive and negative ways. It was also in the news January when Asghar Farhadi, the Iranian film director who won two Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film, said he wouldn’t come to the Oscars because of Trump’s proposed travel ban, and that he was making a call for empathy between us and others, “an empathy which we need today more than ever.” And then in July at the Republican National Convention, Paul Ryan was highly quoted using the word when he said, “Real social progress is always a widening circle of concern and protection. It’s respect and empathy overtaking blindness and indifference.” When newsmakers utter the word, it does tend to send people to the dictionary. But we can’t say any one of those stories is the simple reason it makes our list.
Here’s the one that’s interesting from a percentage point of view: dotard. It’s a very unusual word. It was the word used by the Korean Central News Agency as a translation of Kim Jong Un’s statement where he referred to Donald Trump as a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard.” Because it’s such an unusual word—it’s essentially an obsolete word—we saw a 35,000 percent increase in lookups from 2016. We have 250,000 pages of words in the dictionary and some of those pages are looked up a thousand times an hour, others only a few times a year. Dotard was a word that was probably never looked up last year. It comes from the same word as dotage, which means a state or period of senile decay. So dotard originally meant imbecile, or stupid person, but now it just means an older person who is losing mental acuity. And this is a great thing about what the dictionary does—it gives a vocabulary lesson to the country when words like this are in the news. It’s also notable that this word is in the news probably because the Korean translators must be using very old bilingual dictionaries, because no contemporary speaker of English would use this word.
The next word is a science word from the solar eclipse, syzygy, which means the nearly straight-line configuration of three celestial bodies such as the sun, moon, and earth during a solar or lunar eclipse. The solar eclipse was an international story, and it cut straight through the United States and was a big teaching moment for a lot of people.
The next word is one that is looked up for pronunciation. We know that some words are looked up for their phonetics; typically they’re foreign words like schadenfreude or niche. This year the word was gyro. This was because of one simple event—Jimmy Fallon did a sketch on The Tonight Show with Luke Bryan, the country singer, and it showed them out on the streets of New York City getting a gyro. They ask each other, “How do you pronounce this?” and they turned it into this big musical number. It turns out there are three pronunciations for the word.
Federalism spiked because of the Congressional debate about the Affordable Care Act. Lindsey Graham said, “Here’s the choice for America: socialism or federalism when it comes to your health care.” What’s interesting to me about this is that socialism, as well as fascism and capitalism, are some of the most looked-up words in the dictionary. The problem with federalism, is that in America, we very unusually call our national government the federal government; however, the word federalism refers very explicitly to state rights. So the word itself is very confusing. You can see why it would send people to the dictionary.
The next two words are very simple, news-related words: hurricane—we had Harvey, Irma, José, and Maria—all these hurricanes that affected the Caribbean and the southeastern United States. Storm words always looked up when there’s a big storm, and we’ll usually see an echo—if hurricane is looked up, we’ll also see spikes in cyclone and tornado, because people are comparing them like recipes, the definitions all specify wind speed and geography. These are words where you can really learn something about the world, not just the language.
Finally, the last of the runner-up words goes all the way back to the Oscars in February—the word gaffe, which of course refers to the mistake of the wrong envelope that was opened for the Best Picture announcement. All the crew and cast of La La Land came up on stage, and while they were thanking their mothers, it was revealed that in fact Moonlight was the winner for Best Picture. Gaffe is an interesting word because it’s one of these journalistic words, it’s a word that’s used much more in headlines than in conversation. It’s a word that sends people to the dictionary quite regularly, since I’m sure when people see a headline that uses the word gaffe, they wonder if there’s something very specific about this kind of mistake, as opposed to just the word mistake. But of course headline writers like it because it’s short. And English has that kind of flexibility.
Adrienne Raphel is the author of What Was It For (Rescue Press, 2017) and But What Will We Do (Seattle Review, 2016). Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review Daily, Poetry, Lana Turner Journal, Prelude, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a doctoral candidate at Harvard University.
Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster editor-at-large.
In July writer, activist, and media commentator Jamia Wilson was named the new executive director and publisher of the Feminist Press (FP), a forty-seven-year-old nonprofit known for highlighting feminist perspectives and prose. Located at the City University of New York, the press has published books by writers such as Shahrnush Parsipur and Ama Ata Aidoo and public figures such as Anita Hill and Justin Vivian Bond. Wilson previously worked as the executive director of Women, Action, and the Media, and her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Elle, Bust, and many other publications. As she becomes the youngest person and first woman of color to direct the Feminist Press, Wilson discusses her aims to advance the press’s mission.
How has your experience helped you prepare for this new role, and what do you hope to bring to the Feminist Press? I grew up reading FP books that I borrowed from my mother’s shelf, like I Love Myself When I Am Laughing: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader and But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies. These books taught me about my literary and activist lineage and helped provide a road map for the present and the future. I’m honored to work with FP’s intergenerational team to both enliven and deepen our intersectional vision of publishing unapologetic, accessible texts and multiplatform content that inspire action, teach empathy, build community, and shift culture. FP will continue to deepen our engagement with communities of color, indigenous folks, the LGBTQ community, and the disability community. Representation matters, but it must be coupled with systemic change. We will elevate and amplify the voices of the most marginalized members of our community because we know that none of us are free unless we all are.
How do you plan to apply your knowledge and experience in the social justice field to the job of executive director and publisher? My engagement as a movement maker and media commentator brings FP closer to our community. It helps us connect with new readers because we’re involved in conversations out in the world and contributing to the cultural narrative via social media; TV; at conferences, panels, and marches; and in movement spaces. Until more gatekeepers do the work to disrupt habits and practices of patriarchy, economic injustice, and white supremacy in the publishing industry, we won’t transform our cultural narrative. My goal is to help contribute to the movement to put these values into active practice at all levels of our organization and work overall.
In this political and social climate, what kinds of books are pushing this conversation forward and promoting action? This has been a consistent part of FP’s mission, and that’s why we’re prepared to speak truth to power through our books and voices in the midst of attacks on free expression and the rise of authoritarianism, misogyny, and racial violence. We publish books other publishers deem “too risky,” “controversial,” or “radical.” We’ve made efforts to lift up queer voices with our Amethyst Editions imprint and women and nonbinary folks of color with our Louise Meriwether Prize. Our nonfiction books are mainly activist-based. We resist the reinforcement of respectability politics, as well as the promotion of narratives that appear to promote social progress but only in a way that’s palatable or validating to oppressive power structures—and only at the price of continuing to marginalize communities that are often silenced, invisible, or undermined. Some of our recent titles include Brontez Purnell’s Since I Laid My Burden Down, a novel about growing up gay in 1980s Alabama, and Juniper Fitzgerald and Elise Peterson’s forthcoming How Mamas Love Their Babies, a picture book that shows how diverse mothers work in different ways to take care of their children, from domestic labor to sex work.
What kinds of books have been most influential to you personally? The books I’m most enamored with have moved my heart in both personal and political ways. As my feminist foremothers taught us, “The personal is political.” I’m both an activist and a writer, and these identities have affixed themselves upon my soul. I love fiction, especially dystopian fiction, but I’m mostly a reader of nonfiction, historical fiction, legal history, and memoir. Although I tend to lean towards writing grounded in “truth,” I’m finding I’m even more drawn to this genre in the “post-truth” era.
There has been an increase in online-only feminist publications. Do you foresee potential partnerships to bring further visibility to FP’s work? We reach out to writers or artists who have gotten their start online if we’re interested in creating a book with them, like with Makeda Lewis’s Avie’s Dreams: An Afro-Feminist Coloring Book and The Crunk Feminist Collection. Many of the feminist writers and artists we work with have robust online communities and serve as natural ambassadors for their labor and wisdom. We have other upcoming collaborations with the Well-Read Black Girl Festival, Soul Camp, the Together Live tour, the SisterSong conference, Howard University, and the March for Black Women. We want to be a part of feminist conversations on- and offline and to lift up remarkable and stunning storytelling.
Jennifer Baker is a publishing professional, the creator and host of the Minorities in Publishing podcast, a contributing editor at Electric Literature, and the social media director and a writing instructor for the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop. She is the editor of the forthcoming short story anthology Everyday People: The Color of Life (Atria Books, 2018).
Ten years ago, Sarah Browning and a group of fellow poets founded Split This Rock, a literary nonprofit that works at the intersection of poetry and political activism and hosts the biennial Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness in Washington, D.C. Browning recently announced that she will step down from her role as executive director of the organization at the end of the year, and that the search for her replacement will begin after this year’s festival, which will be held from April 19 to April 21. With her final year at the organization underway, Browning discussed her past decade at Split This Rock, the continued need to consider poetry a form of social engagement, and the upcoming festival.
What changes have you seen in the literary world since starting Split This Rock? When we started this organization, there were very few literary organizations engaging in activism. I went to the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference in 2003, three weeks before the United States invaded Iraq, and I could find only two sessions that engaged political questions at all. We were actively being told not to write political work fifteen years ago. That’s why we started D.C. Poets Against the War [a movement in 2003 to protest the war in Iraq] and then Split This Rock, which emerged from that movement. Split This Rock brought the activism piece into the picture. Now, of course, everybody is focused on making change with their poetry and doing so more explicitly. But I’m telling you, ten years ago, there was no home for it. And that’s why we built it.
The name “Split This Rock” comes from a poem, doesn’t it? It does, from a Langston Hughes poem called “Big Buddy.” It ends with, “When I split this rock, / Stand by my side.” So it’s about splitting the rock of injustice but also the solidarity that’s needed—that need for community.
How does Split This Rock make poetry and activism accessible? We try to bring poetry into as many spaces as possible and encourage everyone to write. We host community writing workshops twice a month in D.C. They’re free, drop-in; all you have to do is show up. The room is physically accessible, with transcription service for people with disabilities. You don’t have to have an MFA or any educational experience or introduction to poetry. We believe that, as Roque Dalton wrote in a poem, “poetry, like bread, is for everyone.” And our programs prove it. People are hungry for the imaginative language of poetry and for the authentic voice of one another, the heart-language, because so much of our experience is mediated now by propaganda, by commerce, by social media. We’re being sold to all the time. So we’re hungry for more authentic experience, and that’s what poetry is: It’s idiosyncratic language; it’s weirdness and wildness.
What would you say to those who might suggest that poetry and activism are incompatible? Writers have always engaged the world around them. And as a writer you have to write what’s pounding up inside you. And if what’s pounding up inside you is injustice—if there’s a mother who has to work two jobs just to get food on the table, or if you are that mother, and you’re writing late at night and hoping there’ll be enough food to get you through the end of the week to the next paycheck—then that’s what you’re writing. That’s the poem. That’s what’s going to have power: What is the fire in your belly?
Nobody should tell anybody else what to write. I’m not telling anybody what to write. These poems were always being written; they just weren’t finding a wide audience because journals weren’t publishing them. The guidelines were saying, “No causes.” The contests weren’t awarding these poets the awards. The universities weren’t giving these poets the jobs. Because of racism, and because of conservatism. And homophobia and sexism. Split This Rock was founded to help these poets, like myself, feel less lonely and be more effective as poet-citizens, so that we could join together when we wanted to do activism—but also to amplify our voices and to create our own platforms.
Split This Rock cites Federico García Lorca’s concept of duende as one of its core values, which is described on your website as “recognizing the potential imaginative power of fear and embracing poets and activists who grapple with difficult issues and take risks in their writing and public work.” Why are fear and risk both necessary to move things forward? It ain’t easy. None of it. We’re not going to make change if we stick to platitudes and simplicity, either in our poetry or in our social justice work. So we have to go to dark places, difficult places, in ourselves and in our relationships with one another and in our society. And that’s hard. I think it certainly helps us to sometimes be patient with one another. Split This Rock is one of the few places in the literary world, but really anywhere, where folks who are twenty-one and folks who are seventy-six are hanging out in the same room, having conversations. And maybe they have radically different cultural references and life experiences. So duende informs that because it’s scary to say, “You know, I don’t actually know anything about what you’ve just said.”
I’ve never studied poetry formally, so even when I’m with a bunch of academics and they use terms that I don’t know, I have to say to them, “Guess what, I don’t know what you’re saying!” [Laughs.] Which is a scary thing for me to say. I try to face my fear. But it’s at all levels, and we have to do it at all levels: personal, creative, collective, national. I’m the descendant of slave owners. I write about that in my work and I’m trying to push that, hard. I don’t know how my extended family’s going to feel about it, let alone other white people from the South. I wasn’t raised in the South, only half my family is from the South, so I’m going to be treated as an outsider, but that’s an issue where I feel like we have to face our fears as white Americans.
What guests and panels are you excited to feature in this year’s Split This Rock Poetry Festival? Sharon Olds has been added to the lineup, which is really great news. She was supposed to feature at our very first festival in 2008 but was unable to come. Likewise, Sonia Sanchez kicked off our first festival and she will be back to mark this tenth anniversary. But also we have young poets like Paul Tran and Terisa Siagatonu. We always try to honor voices of all ages and in all places in their writing lives.
This being the first festival under the new political regime, we are particularly interested in how poetry is being used in resistance and in how poets are taking care of themselves and one another. We’re all feeling a lot of despair, I think, and we heard that in the proposals we received. There are a lot of sessions about using sadness, about using rage—in our poetry, but also in our community building—and acknowledging these things as real. Crying. Holding one another in celebration and in support.
What’s next for you—writing? Yes. I don’t do well without structure, even this late in my life. I’m thinking about grad school. But at the very least, I would like to have more time for my own poetry and creative nonfiction. My second book just came out, but it was ten years between books. It would be nice not to have ten years till the next one.
Nadia Q. Ahmad is the Diana & Simon Raab Editorial Fellow at Poets & Writers Magazine.
As the editor-at-large of Merriam-Webster, Peter Sokolowski contributes to the dictionary’s print and online content, which, in addition to word definitions, includes podcasts, videos, and blogs. In August Sokolowski and his fellow editors rolled out Time Traveler, a tool that organizes words according to when they were first used in English. He recently discussed Merriam-Webster’s newest features, the changing ways in which people use the dictionary, and the Word of the Year, feminism, which the editors announced today.
How does Time Traveler work? How does it affect the way we think about language? With Time Traveler, by organizing [words] a different way—that is, rather than alphabetically, chronologically—you get a three-dimensional experience with the dictionary. I do think it’s profound to think of language chronologically. Alphabetically, the ordering is arbitrary. Chronologically, it’s not. Time Traveler shows layers of cultures as they are expressed in the language when they come into the language. English is such a peculiar language in this way. French, for example, is almost entirely derived from Latin. The French Academy founded the language with an ethos of contraction. But English is a mongrel language, with an ethos of expansion. This ethos of expansion has a political component, too. England is establishing colonies all over the world. So, due to exploration, India is a very rich source of words. We first put dates into the dictionary in 1983, with the release of the Collegiate ninth edition. Dictionary entries have always been organized in chronological order: The first sense was always the oldest sense, and the last definition was, chronologically, the most recent. The thing is, that’s a little counterintuitive. By adding dates to entries, we felt we were giving more specific info about when each word entered the language. And now, collectively, because of organizing principles of the Internet, we can connect these words by date. Time Traveler allows imagination to combine with history. It gives a poetic sense of what the dictionary really is—a new and different kind of way of organizing our language.
How might people use Time Traveler? Here’s one banal example: There’s a wonderful linguist, Ben Schmidt, who rates the language of Downton Abbey, illustrating how many of the words [used on the show are] anachronistic. Contact, for example, was not a verb in 1912. Another example is when Lord Grantham says “You’ll have to step on it” in 1912. You just have to think: This guy had probably never driven a car, so why would he use this very slangy idiom? The idea of speeding didn’t even exist yet.
What does the online version of the dictionary do that print can’t, and vice versa? When Samuel Johnson, in 1755, wrote his dictionary, a woman came up to him and said, “I’m so pleased that you have omitted the naughty words.” “Madam,” Johnson replied, “I find that you have been looking them up.” Before the dictionary went online, the people who wrote dictionaries never knew which words were looked up. We’re learning enormous amounts about what drives people to a dictionary and what people are looking for from a dictionary. The dictionary is not just used for novel and arcane words—it’s mostly used for words that are a little abstract. There are cyclical things: Love is always at the top of the list in February. There are back-to-school terms: cultures, diversity, plagiarism. And there are the evergreens: integrity, ubiquitous, affect versus effect. Whatever sends us to the dictionary is a private moment. Looking up a word in the dictionary is an intimate act, something between ourselves and our language. The dictionary is this little intermediary—it orchestrates and organizes that relationship. That’s what it’s for. When people are looking up love in February, they’re not looking for spelling—they’re looking for philosophy.
In 1996 we started offering the dictionary online for free, and in 1997 we started following word trends. What had become a static list became dynamic, and we could see what people were looking up in real time. So, for example, in 1997, Princess Di dies; paparazzi is a very natural word to look up. During 9/11, first there were concrete words—rubber, triage—then more philosophical words, such as surreal, succumb, spontaneous. Surreal is always looked up after tragedies. In 2009 I started putting these things on Twitter. We’re often criticized for being political, but we’re responding to the data. We’re good at reading data—we’re not good at reading minds.
Why keep the print edition around at all? The dictionary we search online is a different experience than the book. The print dictionary is a great piece of technology: It’s really fast, and it really works. And the print way of organizing information means that you always see certain things together. That’s no longer really the case online. The big thing online is, there’s space. Almost every decision for print dictionaries had to be made by the tyranny of space. We are no longer bound by that. What had been tyranny of lack of space is now tyranny of too much space. I always tell people, keep your old dictionaries. The old ones have different information that might be interesting. There is no spreadsheet for when definitions change. You just have to take the book down and look it up and see. For the first time last week, I looked up the word dictionary in Webster’s unabridged second edition, from 1934. I was fascinated. It’s an article on the history of the dictionary. That’s the kind of material that would be dropped in print today, but that’s some of the reason you go to a dictionary. We’re trying to answer those questions that might be asked when you’re looking up a word in the dictionary: Does a Cobb salad have chicken or turkey? The online dictionary is a contemporary magazine of language—let’s be the one-stop word website.
How do you choose the Word of the Year? The Word of the Year goes back to 2003, and it was always based on the data. However, there’s an asterisk. If we went by raw tonnage, we would have boring words, abstract words that adults feel responsible for. We’re looking for what words spiked this year, not last year. That tells us something about the language today. We also look at what words were looked up in far greater numbers this year than last year, which we call year-over-year numbers. We look at that figure, and then we see a list of words that are typically much more apposite to the year we just experienced. In other words, it tells us something about this year that we’ve lived through, as opposed to words that tell us something about the general curiosity about the English language.
What do you think 2017’s Word of the Year tells us about the world in this moment? The word of the year is feminism, which is pretty striking given the news. On the one hand, you might say that this is a fairly common word, one that is not really the subject of the news. In point of fact, this is a word that has been rising for the past several years to the point that it’s almost in our top twenty of overall lookups in the history of our website. We saw a 70 percent increase in lookups in 2017, and then we saw these spikes throughout this year. In January we saw a spike after the Women’s March on Washington and the other marches all over the country and the world, which got a huge amount of attention and were historic in various ways. The word feminism was used in particular regarding questions of whether or not the March was feminist or what kind of feminism the organizers and the attendees represented.
In February we saw another huge spike—and this one is in some ways more pointed and more dictionary-oriented—when Kellyanne Conway gave an onstage interview at the Conservative Political Action Conference and said she didn’t consider herself a feminist in the “classic sense.” She explained that she thinks being feminist, in her words, seems to be very “anti-male” and very “pro-abortion.” She was using the word in a very specific way, and that kind of specific use sends people to the dictionary for the definition, because the definition of the word itself was put into question, was itself the subject of the news story. Which is also true with the word fact, when Kellyanne Conway, also in the earlier part of the year, used that term “alternative facts.”
Later in the year we saw two entertainment reasons for the word’s popularity: The Handmaid’s Tale, the Hulu TV adaptation of the Margaret Atwood novel, which got not only a huge amount of positive reviews, but also a huge amount of think pieces using that series as a point of departure and a contemporaneous cultural critique; and the film Wonder Woman, starring Gal Gadot in the title role, who was viewed as a feminist character in a feminist film with a female director, Patty Jenkins.
And recently of course, subsequent to the accusations made against Harvey Weinstein and a long list of others, the word feminist has been in the news a lot. Just today I happened to click on the New York Times story about Lena Dunham and her warnings to the Clinton campaign about being too close to Harvey Weinstein. The word feminist was not only used several times in the article, but there’s also a quote from Dunham where she says she wears underwear that has the word feminist on it. That’s not necessarily the kind of use that will send people to the dictionary, but it shows you that this word is part of the national conversation—to the extent that there is such a thing as a national conversation. I think it’s sometimes too facile to say that there’s a national conversation; I sometimes think that’s shorthand for people who don’t want to be very specific about context. However, if there is such a thing as a national conversation—and there surely is right now regarding, for example, sexual harassment in the workplace and presidential politics—Merriam-Webster has a front-row seat because we see the words that are being looked up as the stories progress. That’s a fascinating thing that I’ve been watching for years and that we present on our home page and on Twitter, in a feature we call Trend Watch, which is simply the words that are most looked up at a given moment. And that word right now is feminism.
Have you recently changed or tweaked the definition of feminism, or has it been consistent for the past several years? The first English language dictionary to ever include this word was Noah Webster’s dictionary in 1841, which was the last time Webster revised the dictionary before he died. He added the word feminism with the definition, “the qualities of females.” Clearly what he meant was femininity or femaleness; there was no political connotation to the word. This was a word that appeared to him somewhere, but we can’t actually find what he was looking at; we don’t know where he got it. In the 1864 edition, after Webster died and the Merriams had taken over, they dropped the word entirely because it was not used very frequently. It was not included in the next edition, published in 1890. And then in 1909 it was added with two definitions—one, “feminine character or characteristics,” and two, the medical definition, “female characteristics present in males.” So this medical definition precedes the political one. Finally, in the famous unabridged second edition of Webster’s from 1934, the political sense was added: “the theory of those who advocate such legal and social changes as will establish political, economic, and social equality of the sexes.” That’s pretty much the way we define it today. The important word here is equality—equality of the sexes could almost stand as the definition. It’s interesting that we’ve dropped both the medical sense and the femininity sense, which is archaic at this point. The political sense we associate with the word basically begins around 1895, and that’s exactly when the suffragette movement was beginning. So the term feminism is more closely associated in political terms to the fight to get the vote, which makes perfect sense.
Also notable is that it’s a very modern word for English—we have a lot of words that are over a thousand years old, and this one is just over a hundred. That’s a very short time in the history of the English language. It seems to me that feminism is a word that has shifted over time. I think it was taken to be more aggressive in the past and is maybe taken much more positively today. Just like a lot of ideas, it’s a word that has shifted in meaning as the times have changed. That’s as it should be.
What were the runners-up for Word of the Year? The nine runners-up tend to represent individual spikes that were very striking. The first one is complicit. That came from Ivanka Trump who said in an interview with Gayle King, “I don’t know what it means to be complicit.” When you are a newsmaker and you say “I don’t know what x means” on live television, you better believe it sends people to the dictionary. What sends people to the dictionary even more is when people are having a lot of fun with it, and Saturday Night Live made a skit based on that interview, which kept it going. So that word really had a lot of hits, and it’s a fascinating word. The word is two parts, com and plicare or plek—the com means “together” or “with” in Latin, and the plek means “fold,” so it means “folded together.” It’s the same etymon of two other words that are much more common, complicated and complex.
The next one is the word recuse. Those lookups are all attached to Jeff Sessions. There was a recusal to look into Hillary Clinton; there was a recusal to look into the Trump campaign; there was a recusal involving the Russians. The word recused kept bobbing up and it was always connected to Jeff Sessions. Recused is a classic legal term, and he’s the attorney general, so it makes perfect sense that a legal term would be associated with him.
The next word is one that we don’t associate with a particular story; it just simply went way up in lookups, and we’re not really sure why. It’s the word empathy. Part of it was attached to the #MeToo campaign, with people talking about empathy towards women. And of course there was a lot of criticism of the Republican Party, Trump in particular, for lacking empathy. So this word is being used in both positive and negative ways. It was also in the news January when Asghar Farhadi, the Iranian film director who won two Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film, said he wouldn’t come to the Oscars because of Trump’s proposed travel ban, and that he was making a call for empathy between us and others, “an empathy which we need today more than ever.” And then in July at the Republican National Convention, Paul Ryan was highly quoted using the word when he said, “Real social progress is always a widening circle of concern and protection. It’s respect and empathy overtaking blindness and indifference.” When newsmakers utter the word, it does tend to send people to the dictionary. But we can’t say any one of those stories is the simple reason it makes our list.
Here’s the one that’s interesting from a percentage point of view: dotard. It’s a very unusual word. It was the word used by the Korean Central News Agency as a translation of Kim Jong Un’s statement where he referred to Donald Trump as a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard.” Because it’s such an unusual word—it’s essentially an obsolete word—we saw a 35,000 percent increase in lookups from 2016. We have 250,000 pages of words in the dictionary and some of those pages are looked up a thousand times an hour, others only a few times a year. Dotard was a word that was probably never looked up last year. It comes from the same word as dotage, which means a state or period of senile decay. So dotard originally meant imbecile, or stupid person, but now it just means an older person who is losing mental acuity. And this is a great thing about what the dictionary does—it gives a vocabulary lesson to the country when words like this are in the news. It’s also notable that this word is in the news probably because the Korean translators must be using very old bilingual dictionaries, because no contemporary speaker of English would use this word.
The next word is a science word from the solar eclipse, syzygy, which means the nearly straight-line configuration of three celestial bodies such as the sun, moon, and earth during a solar or lunar eclipse. The solar eclipse was an international story, and it cut straight through the United States and was a big teaching moment for a lot of people.
The next word is one that is looked up for pronunciation. We know that some words are looked up for their phonetics; typically they’re foreign words like schadenfreude or niche. This year the word was gyro. This was because of one simple event—Jimmy Fallon did a sketch on The Tonight Show with Luke Bryan, the country singer, and it showed them out on the streets of New York City getting a gyro. They ask each other, “How do you pronounce this?” and they turned it into this big musical number. It turns out there are three pronunciations for the word.
Federalism spiked because of the Congressional debate about the Affordable Care Act. Lindsey Graham said, “Here’s the choice for America: socialism or federalism when it comes to your health care.” What’s interesting to me about this is that socialism, as well as fascism and capitalism, are some of the most looked-up words in the dictionary. The problem with federalism, is that in America, we very unusually call our national government the federal government; however, the word federalism refers very explicitly to state rights. So the word itself is very confusing. You can see why it would send people to the dictionary.
The next two words are very simple, news-related words: hurricane—we had Harvey, Irma, José, and Maria—all these hurricanes that affected the Caribbean and the southeastern United States. Storm words always looked up when there’s a big storm, and we’ll usually see an echo—if hurricane is looked up, we’ll also see spikes in cyclone and tornado, because people are comparing them like recipes, the definitions all specify wind speed and geography. These are words where you can really learn something about the world, not just the language.
Finally, the last of the runner-up words goes all the way back to the Oscars in February—the word gaffe, which of course refers to the mistake of the wrong envelope that was opened for the Best Picture announcement. All the crew and cast of La La Land came up on stage, and while they were thanking their mothers, it was revealed that in fact Moonlight was the winner for Best Picture. Gaffe is an interesting word because it’s one of these journalistic words, it’s a word that’s used much more in headlines than in conversation. It’s a word that sends people to the dictionary quite regularly, since I’m sure when people see a headline that uses the word gaffe, they wonder if there’s something very specific about this kind of mistake, as opposed to just the word mistake. But of course headline writers like it because it’s short. And English has that kind of flexibility.
Adrienne Raphel is the author of What Was It For (Rescue Press, 2017) and But What Will We Do (Seattle Review, 2016). Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review Daily, Poetry, Lana Turner Journal, Prelude, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a doctoral candidate at Harvard University.
Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster editor-at-large.
In November the Library of America (LOA), the nonprofit publisher of classic American literature, named John Kulka its new editorial director. Succeeding longtime editor in chief Geoffrey O’Brien, who retired at the end of 2017, Kulka previously worked at Yale University Press, Harvard University Press, and Basic Books. In his new role at the LOA, Kulka oversees all of the publisher’s titles, including the Library of America standard series, which comprises more than three hundred volumes of classic and historical literature and scholarship and has been called the “de facto canon of American literature” by the New York Times. A few months into his new position, Kulka discussed editing the series and what’s ahead for LOA’s editorial program.
What are your responsibilities at the LOA? The LOA has always been a special publisher with a special mission. Our broader, nonprofit mission is to reconnect readers through education programs and community outreach. I’m responsible for guiding the editorial program: the Library of America standard series, which issues essential American writing in authoritative editions, and our special non-series books, like David Foster Wallace’s tennis essays, String Theory. The LOA publishes reliable editions. They are uncluttered. The mission is to build the national library of American writings—canonical, neglected literature, historical writings. It’s one of the most important undertakings in the history of American publishing.
How do you choose what to publish? How we publish any given author is always a tricky calculus. Looking at a writer with a voluminous body of work, are we better off being selective or comprehensive? It varies from author to author. Sometimes it’s not an issue. Flannery O’Connor, for example: The stories, novels, and all the nonfiction—if we exclude the letters—fit neatly into a single volume. But I’m thinking now about publishing an edition of Constance Fenimore Woolson, wrongly neglected, whom Henry James saw as a significant nineteenth-century writer. Woolson is a revelation to me: I had always known who she was because of James, but do yourself a favor and look at her short fiction. Is the LOA better off publishing one volume, two volumes, or everything we have of hers? That’s a question I’m faced with. Though a larger selection might be of interest to scholars, I’m not entirely sure that it’s the right thing to do in presenting her work to a general audience.
How does the LOA remain relevant today? This is a weird time we’re living in. The proliferation of fake news, inequality, a presentist disregard for the past—in such times, we need the LOA more than ever. Our history and literature still have much to teach us. We ignore it only at our peril. As Faulkner put it, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” I believe that. Here’s an example: When Lin-Manuel Miranda was writing Hamilton, it was the LOA’s edition of Hamilton’s writings that Miranda used as a resource. The musical in turn brought readers back to Hamilton. We published a brief paperback, The Essential Hamilton, in 2017 that we then put gratis into the hands of educators around the country.
What has been the most unexpected thing you’ve learned about LOA since you arrived? I’ve been repeatedly impressed by the amount of research and scholarship that sometimes goes into these volumes. Literally at my feet right now are three or four oversized cardboard boxes that represent the outtakes from the American Poetry Anthology—and just the two volumes devoted to the twentieth century. There’s so much research and scholarship that goes into production. It’s kind of a humbling thing.
Adrienne Raphel is the author of What Was It For (Rescue Press, 2017) and But What Will We Do (Seattle Review, 2016). Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review Daily, Lana Turner, Prelude, and elsewhere.
Ten years ago, Sarah Browning and a group of fellow poets founded Split This Rock, a literary nonprofit that works at the intersection of poetry and political activism and hosts the biennial Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness in Washington, D.C. Browning recently announced that she will step down from her role as executive director of the organization at the end of the year, and that the search for her replacement will begin after this year’s festival, which will be held from April 19 to April 21. With her final year at the organization underway, Browning discussed her past decade at Split This Rock, the continued need to consider poetry a form of social engagement, and the upcoming festival.
What changes have you seen in the literary world since starting Split This Rock? When we started this organization, there were very few literary organizations engaging in activism. I went to the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference in 2003, three weeks before the United States invaded Iraq, and I could find only two sessions that engaged political questions at all. We were actively being told not to write political work fifteen years ago. That’s why we started D.C. Poets Against the War [a movement in 2003 to protest the war in Iraq] and then Split This Rock, which emerged from that movement. Split This Rock brought the activism piece into the picture. Now, of course, everybody is focused on making change with their poetry and doing so more explicitly. But I’m telling you, ten years ago, there was no home for it. And that’s why we built it.
The name “Split This Rock” comes from a poem, doesn’t it? It does, from a Langston Hughes poem called “Big Buddy.” It ends with, “When I split this rock, / Stand by my side.” So it’s about splitting the rock of injustice but also the solidarity that’s needed—that need for community.
How does Split This Rock make poetry and activism accessible? We try to bring poetry into as many spaces as possible and encourage everyone to write. We host community writing workshops twice a month in D.C. They’re free, drop-in; all you have to do is show up. The room is physically accessible, with transcription service for people with disabilities. You don’t have to have an MFA or any educational experience or introduction to poetry. We believe that, as Roque Dalton wrote in a poem, “poetry, like bread, is for everyone.” And our programs prove it. People are hungry for the imaginative language of poetry and for the authentic voice of one another, the heart-language, because so much of our experience is mediated now by propaganda, by commerce, by social media. We’re being sold to all the time. So we’re hungry for more authentic experience, and that’s what poetry is: It’s idiosyncratic language; it’s weirdness and wildness.
What would you say to those who might suggest that poetry and activism are incompatible? Writers have always engaged the world around them. And as a writer you have to write what’s pounding up inside you. And if what’s pounding up inside you is injustice—if there’s a mother who has to work two jobs just to get food on the table, or if you are that mother, and you’re writing late at night and hoping there’ll be enough food to get you through the end of the week to the next paycheck—then that’s what you’re writing. That’s the poem. That’s what’s going to have power: What is the fire in your belly?
Nobody should tell anybody else what to write. I’m not telling anybody what to write. These poems were always being written; they just weren’t finding a wide audience because journals weren’t publishing them. The guidelines were saying, “No causes.” The contests weren’t awarding these poets the awards. The universities weren’t giving these poets the jobs. Because of racism, and because of conservatism. And homophobia and sexism. Split This Rock was founded to help these poets, like myself, feel less lonely and be more effective as poet-citizens, so that we could join together when we wanted to do activism—but also to amplify our voices and to create our own platforms.
Split This Rock cites Federico García Lorca’s concept of duende as one of its core values, which is described on your website as “recognizing the potential imaginative power of fear and embracing poets and activists who grapple with difficult issues and take risks in their writing and public work.” Why are fear and risk both necessary to move things forward? It ain’t easy. None of it. We’re not going to make change if we stick to platitudes and simplicity, either in our poetry or in our social justice work. So we have to go to dark places, difficult places, in ourselves and in our relationships with one another and in our society. And that’s hard. I think it certainly helps us to sometimes be patient with one another. Split This Rock is one of the few places in the literary world, but really anywhere, where folks who are twenty-one and folks who are seventy-six are hanging out in the same room, having conversations. And maybe they have radically different cultural references and life experiences. So duende informs that because it’s scary to say, “You know, I don’t actually know anything about what you’ve just said.”
I’ve never studied poetry formally, so even when I’m with a bunch of academics and they use terms that I don’t know, I have to say to them, “Guess what, I don’t know what you’re saying!” [Laughs.] Which is a scary thing for me to say. I try to face my fear. But it’s at all levels, and we have to do it at all levels: personal, creative, collective, national. I’m the descendant of slave owners. I write about that in my work and I’m trying to push that, hard. I don’t know how my extended family’s going to feel about it, let alone other white people from the South. I wasn’t raised in the South, only half my family is from the South, so I’m going to be treated as an outsider, but that’s an issue where I feel like we have to face our fears as white Americans.
What guests and panels are you excited to feature in this year’s Split This Rock Poetry Festival? Sharon Olds has been added to the lineup, which is really great news. She was supposed to feature at our very first festival in 2008 but was unable to come. Likewise, Sonia Sanchez kicked off our first festival and she will be back to mark this tenth anniversary. But also we have young poets like Paul Tran and Terisa Siagatonu. We always try to honor voices of all ages and in all places in their writing lives.
This being the first festival under the new political regime, we are particularly interested in how poetry is being used in resistance and in how poets are taking care of themselves and one another. We’re all feeling a lot of despair, I think, and we heard that in the proposals we received. There are a lot of sessions about using sadness, about using rage—in our poetry, but also in our community building—and acknowledging these things as real. Crying. Holding one another in celebration and in support.
What’s next for you—writing? Yes. I don’t do well without structure, even this late in my life. I’m thinking about grad school. But at the very least, I would like to have more time for my own poetry and creative nonfiction. My second book just came out, but it was ten years between books. It would be nice not to have ten years till the next one.
Nadia Q. Ahmad is the Diana & Simon Raab Editorial Fellow at Poets & Writers Magazine.
Having run her eponymous literary agency since 2005, in February Gillian MacKenzie joined forces with Kirsten Wolf, a publishing lawyer and the president of Wolf Literary Services, an agency providing legal consultation to other agencies, publishers, and independent artists. The merger resulted in MacKenzie Wolf, which offers all the services of a traditional literary agency plus legal and strategic advising that can be uniquely important for authors, who often face questions ranging from copyright disputes to television and film rights. MacKenzie Wolf, which is currently open to queries, boasts clients such as novelists Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi and Patty Yumi Cottrell, as well as nonfiction writers Michael J. Casey, Virginia Morell, and Henry Fountain. Shortly after the merger was complete, MacKenzie discussed the partnership, the state of the publishing industry, and the challenges of reaching readers today.
Why did you decide to team up with Kirsten Wolf in this new venture? Kirsten and I worked in the same office while I was working in film development and production at Jane Startz Productions, before I founded Gillian MacKenzie Agency. Since she started Wolf Literary Services ten years ago, a literary agency and consultancy for other agencies, she and I have shared an office and assistant, with whom I’d sometimes coagent projects. Our merging officially into MacKenzie Wolf was a natural extension of how we’ve always worked, and it has allowed us to more officially and effectively grow the agency arm of the company.
Why pair an agent with a lawyer? It is surprising how often an attorney’s perspective is useful beyond negotiating the contract. Questions come up about writing partnerships, disputes with publishers, the legal implications of including particular content in a book, various subsidiary rights and how they can be exploited in new ways, and so on. While Kirsten isn’t representing any of our clients—in intricate legal matters, an author should have his or her own attorney—her expertise helps guide decision-making greatly.
How is an agent’s job changing? The consolidation of publishing houses has reduced submission opportunities. And on the publishing side, it is harder to get a reader’s attention. With fewer physical bookstores, how does a reader come across a book? There is so much noise out there, and what once might have compelled a person to purchase a book—a stellar review, an interesting op-ed by the author—doesn’t necessarily lead to that outcome anymore. The sort of quirky, fascinating midlist books I love seem more challenging to get published these days as well.
So how do readers discover and read books now? That is the million-dollar question, isn’t it? Of course, big traditional media coverage still helps. Stellar review attention and awards still can help. And to state the obvious, social media seems to matter much more. Today publishers hope to have “influencers”—prominent names with large and active social media followings—push the book; even better, for the authors themselves to have those sorts of followings. However, it is still not entirely clear to me what sort of mention of what kind of book and by whom and where actually pushes someone to go out and make a purchase. I think it is important we all keep thinking of creative ways to help people discover books and authors.
What are some ways you help your writers reach more readers? We explore avenues that our authors and illustrators may not have originally considered. We are starting to pitch more of our illustration clients for animated commercial work. More and more we encourage our adult-nonfiction writers with suitable material to think about adapting their work for a younger audience. Our agency is also handling more of our clients’ speaking engagements, because not all clients garner fees large enough to attract traditional speaking bureaus, and yet their talks help sell books and generate word of mouth.
Who are you trying to reach with these tactics? People find themselves so busy and so distracted these days, and even those who were once avid readers have trouble finding the time and bandwidth to read full-length books. I am convinced that if we can compel lapsed readers to take the time to be still for a spell and to read a book from cover to cover, they will be reminded of the addictive and transformative power of books. Yes, there will be other modes of “content delivery” that cater to one’s scattered attention span, but nothing will be able to replace that inimitably rich experience one gets from reading a book. In this way, good books are perhaps the best promotion for other good books.
Have you seen any bright spots? I am heartened that quality books on not-overtly-commercial topics that matter still do find their way to the shelves. For example, in April my client Alisa Roth had her book Insane: America’s Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness come out—a book about not one but two difficult themes that Basic Books smartly saw important enough to publish. And one of the biggest titles on my list, The Path by Harvard professor Michael Puett and journalist Christine Gross-Loh, is a book about ancient Chinese philosophy and how it informs our lives today—again a book on a serious topic one might not immediately expect to be best-selling and yet has been translated into more than twenty-five different languages and counting.
What kinds of work are you looking to represent? I am fairly catholic in my tastes: By nature I can find myself excited by stale toast if it’s presented in a certain way. I guess I gravitate toward things that surprise me by coming at an idea through a new perspective, a multi-disciplinary prism, a surprising voice, an unusual format, etc. I want to work on material that I think matters, that might make the world a better place, or at the very least, that will offer readers an entertaining diversion. I’m always interested in seeing book ideas about intriguing discoveries or ways of seeing the world backed by science, journalistic exploration, or personal experience, coupled with the right person behind them. I also have a soft spot for illustrated works and think there are opportunities out there for unusual and winning visual books. Recent projects range widely, from humorous illustrated middle-grade books to books about the blockchain to mountain climbing to dog intelligence to loose nukes. I also gravitate towards strong narrative nonfiction, business, sports, current affairs, and memoir.
What do you love to see in a query from a writer? I have a full slate; fairly or unfairly, many of my clients of late have come through referrals. But I do read the queries that come in to me, and occasionally one will grab me. One of my favorite slush pile discoveries, for instance, is the talented Cat Warren, whose cover letter started, “My name is Cat, and this is a book about my dog.” As I kept reading, it was immediately clear that her story and talent backed up her compelling letter. Her book, What the Dog Knows: Scent, Science, and the Amazing Ways Dogs Perceive the World, ended up being longlisted for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award and is a best-seller for Touchstone, under the guidance of editor extraordinaire Michelle Howry. Cat is now working on a middle-grade adaptation of the book, which we recently sold to Krista Vitola at Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers. My colleague Kate Johnson, who primarily represents fiction, recently discovered Patty Yumi Cottrell from the slush pile. Patty’s stunning debut novel, Sorry to Disrupt the Peace—everyone must read it!—went on to win a 2018 Whiting Award in fiction and the 2017 Barnes & Noble Discover Award in fiction.
What advice do you have for writers? My advice is to do your research on who might be a good fit for your kind of writing, and when you make contact, let that person know why you have chosen specifically to reach out. And don’t give up!
Jonathan Vatner is a fiction writer in Yonkers, New York. His debut novel, Carnegie Hill, is forthcoming from Thomas Dunne Books in 2019.
As the editor-at-large of Merriam-Webster, Peter Sokolowski contributes to the dictionary’s print and online content, which, in addition to word definitions, includes podcasts, videos, and blogs. In August Sokolowski and his fellow editors rolled out Time Traveler, a tool that organizes words according to when they were first used in English. He recently discussed Merriam-Webster’s newest features, the changing ways in which people use the dictionary, and the Word of the Year, feminism, which the editors announced today.
How does Time Traveler work? How does it affect the way we think about language? With Time Traveler, by organizing [words] a different way—that is, rather than alphabetically, chronologically—you get a three-dimensional experience with the dictionary. I do think it’s profound to think of language chronologically. Alphabetically, the ordering is arbitrary. Chronologically, it’s not. Time Traveler shows layers of cultures as they are expressed in the language when they come into the language. English is such a peculiar language in this way. French, for example, is almost entirely derived from Latin. The French Academy founded the language with an ethos of contraction. But English is a mongrel language, with an ethos of expansion. This ethos of expansion has a political component, too. England is establishing colonies all over the world. So, due to exploration, India is a very rich source of words. We first put dates into the dictionary in 1983, with the release of the Collegiate ninth edition. Dictionary entries have always been organized in chronological order: The first sense was always the oldest sense, and the last definition was, chronologically, the most recent. The thing is, that’s a little counterintuitive. By adding dates to entries, we felt we were giving more specific info about when each word entered the language. And now, collectively, because of organizing principles of the Internet, we can connect these words by date. Time Traveler allows imagination to combine with history. It gives a poetic sense of what the dictionary really is—a new and different kind of way of organizing our language.
How might people use Time Traveler? Here’s one banal example: There’s a wonderful linguist, Ben Schmidt, who rates the language of Downton Abbey, illustrating how many of the words [used on the show are] anachronistic. Contact, for example, was not a verb in 1912. Another example is when Lord Grantham says “You’ll have to step on it” in 1912. You just have to think: This guy had probably never driven a car, so why would he use this very slangy idiom? The idea of speeding didn’t even exist yet.
What does the online version of the dictionary do that print can’t, and vice versa? When Samuel Johnson, in 1755, wrote his dictionary, a woman came up to him and said, “I’m so pleased that you have omitted the naughty words.” “Madam,” Johnson replied, “I find that you have been looking them up.” Before the dictionary went online, the people who wrote dictionaries never knew which words were looked up. We’re learning enormous amounts about what drives people to a dictionary and what people are looking for from a dictionary. The dictionary is not just used for novel and arcane words—it’s mostly used for words that are a little abstract. There are cyclical things: Love is always at the top of the list in February. There are back-to-school terms: cultures, diversity, plagiarism. And there are the evergreens: integrity, ubiquitous, affect versus effect. Whatever sends us to the dictionary is a private moment. Looking up a word in the dictionary is an intimate act, something between ourselves and our language. The dictionary is this little intermediary—it orchestrates and organizes that relationship. That’s what it’s for. When people are looking up love in February, they’re not looking for spelling—they’re looking for philosophy.
In 1996 we started offering the dictionary online for free, and in 1997 we started following word trends. What had become a static list became dynamic, and we could see what people were looking up in real time. So, for example, in 1997, Princess Di dies; paparazzi is a very natural word to look up. During 9/11, first there were concrete words—rubber, triage—then more philosophical words, such as surreal, succumb, spontaneous. Surreal is always looked up after tragedies. In 2009 I started putting these things on Twitter. We’re often criticized for being political, but we’re responding to the data. We’re good at reading data—we’re not good at reading minds.
Why keep the print edition around at all? The dictionary we search online is a different experience than the book. The print dictionary is a great piece of technology: It’s really fast, and it really works. And the print way of organizing information means that you always see certain things together. That’s no longer really the case online. The big thing online is, there’s space. Almost every decision for print dictionaries had to be made by the tyranny of space. We are no longer bound by that. What had been tyranny of lack of space is now tyranny of too much space. I always tell people, keep your old dictionaries. The old ones have different information that might be interesting. There is no spreadsheet for when definitions change. You just have to take the book down and look it up and see. For the first time last week, I looked up the word dictionary in Webster’s unabridged second edition, from 1934. I was fascinated. It’s an article on the history of the dictionary. That’s the kind of material that would be dropped in print today, but that’s some of the reason you go to a dictionary. We’re trying to answer those questions that might be asked when you’re looking up a word in the dictionary: Does a Cobb salad have chicken or turkey? The online dictionary is a contemporary magazine of language—let’s be the one-stop word website.
How do you choose the Word of the Year? The Word of the Year goes back to 2003, and it was always based on the data. However, there’s an asterisk. If we went by raw tonnage, we would have boring words, abstract words that adults feel responsible for. We’re looking for what words spiked this year, not last year. That tells us something about the language today. We also look at what words were looked up in far greater numbers this year than last year, which we call year-over-year numbers. We look at that figure, and then we see a list of words that are typically much more apposite to the year we just experienced. In other words, it tells us something about this year that we’ve lived through, as opposed to words that tell us something about the general curiosity about the English language.
What do you think 2017’s Word of the Year tells us about the world in this moment? The word of the year is feminism, which is pretty striking given the news. On the one hand, you might say that this is a fairly common word, one that is not really the subject of the news. In point of fact, this is a word that has been rising for the past several years to the point that it’s almost in our top twenty of overall lookups in the history of our website. We saw a 70 percent increase in lookups in 2017, and then we saw these spikes throughout this year. In January we saw a spike after the Women’s March on Washington and the other marches all over the country and the world, which got a huge amount of attention and were historic in various ways. The word feminism was used in particular regarding questions of whether or not the March was feminist or what kind of feminism the organizers and the attendees represented.
In February we saw another huge spike—and this one is in some ways more pointed and more dictionary-oriented—when Kellyanne Conway gave an onstage interview at the Conservative Political Action Conference and said she didn’t consider herself a feminist in the “classic sense.” She explained that she thinks being feminist, in her words, seems to be very “anti-male” and very “pro-abortion.” She was using the word in a very specific way, and that kind of specific use sends people to the dictionary for the definition, because the definition of the word itself was put into question, was itself the subject of the news story. Which is also true with the word fact, when Kellyanne Conway, also in the earlier part of the year, used that term “alternative facts.”
Later in the year we saw two entertainment reasons for the word’s popularity: The Handmaid’s Tale, the Hulu TV adaptation of the Margaret Atwood novel, which got not only a huge amount of positive reviews, but also a huge amount of think pieces using that series as a point of departure and a contemporaneous cultural critique; and the film Wonder Woman, starring Gal Gadot in the title role, who was viewed as a feminist character in a feminist film with a female director, Patty Jenkins.
And recently of course, subsequent to the accusations made against Harvey Weinstein and a long list of others, the word feminist has been in the news a lot. Just today I happened to click on the New York Times story about Lena Dunham and her warnings to the Clinton campaign about being too close to Harvey Weinstein. The word feminist was not only used several times in the article, but there’s also a quote from Dunham where she says she wears underwear that has the word feminist on it. That’s not necessarily the kind of use that will send people to the dictionary, but it shows you that this word is part of the national conversation—to the extent that there is such a thing as a national conversation. I think it’s sometimes too facile to say that there’s a national conversation; I sometimes think that’s shorthand for people who don’t want to be very specific about context. However, if there is such a thing as a national conversation—and there surely is right now regarding, for example, sexual harassment in the workplace and presidential politics—Merriam-Webster has a front-row seat because we see the words that are being looked up as the stories progress. That’s a fascinating thing that I’ve been watching for years and that we present on our home page and on Twitter, in a feature we call Trend Watch, which is simply the words that are most looked up at a given moment. And that word right now is feminism.
Have you recently changed or tweaked the definition of feminism, or has it been consistent for the past several years? The first English language dictionary to ever include this word was Noah Webster’s dictionary in 1841, which was the last time Webster revised the dictionary before he died. He added the word feminism with the definition, “the qualities of females.” Clearly what he meant was femininity or femaleness; there was no political connotation to the word. This was a word that appeared to him somewhere, but we can’t actually find what he was looking at; we don’t know where he got it. In the 1864 edition, after Webster died and the Merriams had taken over, they dropped the word entirely because it was not used very frequently. It was not included in the next edition, published in 1890. And then in 1909 it was added with two definitions—one, “feminine character or characteristics,” and two, the medical definition, “female characteristics present in males.” So this medical definition precedes the political one. Finally, in the famous unabridged second edition of Webster’s from 1934, the political sense was added: “the theory of those who advocate such legal and social changes as will establish political, economic, and social equality of the sexes.” That’s pretty much the way we define it today. The important word here is equality—equality of the sexes could almost stand as the definition. It’s interesting that we’ve dropped both the medical sense and the femininity sense, which is archaic at this point. The political sense we associate with the word basically begins around 1895, and that’s exactly when the suffragette movement was beginning. So the term feminism is more closely associated in political terms to the fight to get the vote, which makes perfect sense.
Also notable is that it’s a very modern word for English—we have a lot of words that are over a thousand years old, and this one is just over a hundred. That’s a very short time in the history of the English language. It seems to me that feminism is a word that has shifted over time. I think it was taken to be more aggressive in the past and is maybe taken much more positively today. Just like a lot of ideas, it’s a word that has shifted in meaning as the times have changed. That’s as it should be.
What were the runners-up for Word of the Year? The nine runners-up tend to represent individual spikes that were very striking. The first one is complicit. That came from Ivanka Trump who said in an interview with Gayle King, “I don’t know what it means to be complicit.” When you are a newsmaker and you say “I don’t know what x means” on live television, you better believe it sends people to the dictionary. What sends people to the dictionary even more is when people are having a lot of fun with it, and Saturday Night Live made a skit based on that interview, which kept it going. So that word really had a lot of hits, and it’s a fascinating word. The word is two parts, com and plicare or plek—the com means “together” or “with” in Latin, and the plek means “fold,” so it means “folded together.” It’s the same etymon of two other words that are much more common, complicated and complex.
The next one is the word recuse. Those lookups are all attached to Jeff Sessions. There was a recusal to look into Hillary Clinton; there was a recusal to look into the Trump campaign; there was a recusal involving the Russians. The word recused kept bobbing up and it was always connected to Jeff Sessions. Recused is a classic legal term, and he’s the attorney general, so it makes perfect sense that a legal term would be associated with him.
The next word is one that we don’t associate with a particular story; it just simply went way up in lookups, and we’re not really sure why. It’s the word empathy. Part of it was attached to the #MeToo campaign, with people talking about empathy towards women. And of course there was a lot of criticism of the Republican Party, Trump in particular, for lacking empathy. So this word is being used in both positive and negative ways. It was also in the news January when Asghar Farhadi, the Iranian film director who won two Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film, said he wouldn’t come to the Oscars because of Trump’s proposed travel ban, and that he was making a call for empathy between us and others, “an empathy which we need today more than ever.” And then in July at the Republican National Convention, Paul Ryan was highly quoted using the word when he said, “Real social progress is always a widening circle of concern and protection. It’s respect and empathy overtaking blindness and indifference.” When newsmakers utter the word, it does tend to send people to the dictionary. But we can’t say any one of those stories is the simple reason it makes our list.
Here’s the one that’s interesting from a percentage point of view: dotard. It’s a very unusual word. It was the word used by the Korean Central News Agency as a translation of Kim Jong Un’s statement where he referred to Donald Trump as a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard.” Because it’s such an unusual word—it’s essentially an obsolete word—we saw a 35,000 percent increase in lookups from 2016. We have 250,000 pages of words in the dictionary and some of those pages are looked up a thousand times an hour, others only a few times a year. Dotard was a word that was probably never looked up last year. It comes from the same word as dotage, which means a state or period of senile decay. So dotard originally meant imbecile, or stupid person, but now it just means an older person who is losing mental acuity. And this is a great thing about what the dictionary does—it gives a vocabulary lesson to the country when words like this are in the news. It’s also notable that this word is in the news probably because the Korean translators must be using very old bilingual dictionaries, because no contemporary speaker of English would use this word.
The next word is a science word from the solar eclipse, syzygy, which means the nearly straight-line configuration of three celestial bodies such as the sun, moon, and earth during a solar or lunar eclipse. The solar eclipse was an international story, and it cut straight through the United States and was a big teaching moment for a lot of people.
The next word is one that is looked up for pronunciation. We know that some words are looked up for their phonetics; typically they’re foreign words like schadenfreude or niche. This year the word was gyro. This was because of one simple event—Jimmy Fallon did a sketch on The Tonight Show with Luke Bryan, the country singer, and it showed them out on the streets of New York City getting a gyro. They ask each other, “How do you pronounce this?” and they turned it into this big musical number. It turns out there are three pronunciations for the word.
Federalism spiked because of the Congressional debate about the Affordable Care Act. Lindsey Graham said, “Here’s the choice for America: socialism or federalism when it comes to your health care.” What’s interesting to me about this is that socialism, as well as fascism and capitalism, are some of the most looked-up words in the dictionary. The problem with federalism, is that in America, we very unusually call our national government the federal government; however, the word federalism refers very explicitly to state rights. So the word itself is very confusing. You can see why it would send people to the dictionary.
The next two words are very simple, news-related words: hurricane—we had Harvey, Irma, José, and Maria—all these hurricanes that affected the Caribbean and the southeastern United States. Storm words always looked up when there’s a big storm, and we’ll usually see an echo—if hurricane is looked up, we’ll also see spikes in cyclone and tornado, because people are comparing them like recipes, the definitions all specify wind speed and geography. These are words where you can really learn something about the world, not just the language.
Finally, the last of the runner-up words goes all the way back to the Oscars in February—the word gaffe, which of course refers to the mistake of the wrong envelope that was opened for the Best Picture announcement. All the crew and cast of La La Land came up on stage, and while they were thanking their mothers, it was revealed that in fact Moonlight was the winner for Best Picture. Gaffe is an interesting word because it’s one of these journalistic words, it’s a word that’s used much more in headlines than in conversation. It’s a word that sends people to the dictionary quite regularly, since I’m sure when people see a headline that uses the word gaffe, they wonder if there’s something very specific about this kind of mistake, as opposed to just the word mistake. But of course headline writers like it because it’s short. And English has that kind of flexibility.
Adrienne Raphel is the author of What Was It For (Rescue Press, 2017) and But What Will We Do (Seattle Review, 2016). Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review Daily, Poetry, Lana Turner Journal, Prelude, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a doctoral candidate at Harvard University.
Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster editor-at-large.
Update: February 20, 2019. The MacDowell Colony has announced that Philip Himberg, the former artistic director for the Sundance Institute’s Theatre Program, will succeed Cheryl A. Young as the organization’s executive director, effective June 1.
This spring, after twenty-two years as the executive director of the MacDowell Colony, one of the nation’s most prestigious residency programs for writers and artists, Cheryl A. Young will retire. Having joined the nonprofit arts colony in 1988 as its director of development, Young was named its leader in 1997 and oversaw MacDowell through a time of notable growth. During her time at the colony, the organization’s net assets increased from $5 million to $44 million, and the number of annual residencies at the colony, located in Peterborough, New Hampshire, rose by 35 percent. Last July the organization opened a new office and gallery space in New York City to showcase the work of past residents and expand its reach. With the search for her successor underway, Young spoke about her tenure at MacDowell and the future of the colony.
What are you most proud of achieving during your tenure at MacDowell? I’m really pleased with the number of people we’ve been able to help. We expanded into other disciplines more robustly, so film and theater are now a much bigger part of the program. I’m also really proud of the journalism initiative [that funds residencies for journalists], since we started working on that before this era of, let’s say, less respect for journalists. That work will make a huge difference, because their work will reach millions of people—and that can change policy. We’ve also been able to increase our financial aid and the number of residencies—we are able to take people whose work is not as present in the art world as it should be. About a third of the fellowships are for artists of color.
What is ahead for MacDowell? Most of the ideas that are floating around have to do with removing barriers so people can participate in the arts and with making sure that people understand what happens at residencies. Nationally, MacDowell would like to be more visible as a supporter of the arts and to make sure that people understand that they’re welcome. So there’s a lot of work to do with people who don’t know about residency programs because they either don’t have artists in the family or didn’t go to graduate school. When the colony was starting in 1907, schoolchildren knew who Edward MacDowell—who founded the colony with his wife, Marian MacDowell—was as a composer, because music was part of schools’ curriculums. There were children’s books about him. And then Mrs. MacDowell took over the colony and went across the country raising funds through women’s groups and music clubs, and it was a more grassroots effort. I think that grassroots aspect, which starts in the schools and goes up through the first dozen years of what kids learn about the arts, is kind of critical. So it’s a challenge now. People who are participating in the arts understand [the importance of residencies], but there are a lot of people who are not participating in the arts. There’s definitely a diversity gap in terms of who participates, which means that if your family didn’t have trips to the library or go to live performances of music or go to museums, it really is all a mystery as to why and how to become an artist. There’s a lot of work to do that way. Our mission is written very broadly, and there are some things we can do visibility-wise that have to do with just saying: Living artists need support. So we’ve always been out front with that. That’s how the colony was built. We didn’t have an endowment. Mrs. MacDowell just went out and raised funds. And did it by going basically door-to-door, saying, America needs a place for its artists.
Has the MacDowell residency model changed much since its inception? We try to support all different disciplines—that’s a core value, because artists have something to say to one another regardless of how they’re making—and we try to [maintain] the retreat aspect, which is: Remove all interruptions and let a person—without pressure from the marketplace—sit down and do something without anyone saying no. Not their agent, not their spouse or partner—just all yes. It’s all about yes. That hasn’t changed at all. The big difference that I see is that the residency field has grown enormously. When I started there were about eighteen programs and very few international ones, most of them run by American foundations. Now there are thousands all over the world. There are also more artists than ever before—in some ways it’s the best of times. But if you look at the U.S. census, there are around a million creative artists, and there are less than ten thousand residencies, so that means one out of a hundred is going to able to go to a residency. Artists are some of the most highly trained people, but the support for them is not commensurate with their skill level. You need residencies. There’s no way to support the arts economy without them. And everyone would be a lot worse off if we didn’t have residencies helping to support artists. Half the people who go to MacDowell make less than twenty thousand dollars a year; they’re right at the poverty line.
What is your idea of a healthy arts culture? In order for artists to thrive and an arts culture to thrive, you need a society that values art. That can only happen if art becomes part of people’s lives and value systems early on. And then you need leadership that reinforces it. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is incredibly important [in that respect]; when it was created the whole point was that the country deserves great art, and we should set an example by supporting it and directing people’s gaze toward art that’s new and wonderful and part of our history. And the third thing you need is the opportunity for everybody to participate and develop their talents and contribute—that comes from encouragement and scholarships, removing barriers, and making sure people value and respect artists, so that people will want to become artists.
Will people still want to become journalists if they think they’re all muckrakers? We’ve been through this before—if you study journalism history, there was a time when people were writing junk, and then we cleaned up the journalism that was out there and set standards and ethics. People really [started to] respect journalists. But because the leadership has changed, there’s a real danger that we’ll lose that. And I think that’s true of art, too. During the period when the NEA was told it was supporting blasphemous work and artists couldn’t possibly be contributing to society, we retreated from our education and arts funding. We survived it, the NEA survived it, but we’re definitely feeling the effects of it in how people view art. And now it’s starting to come back a little bit with this generation and the creative economy and all the conversations about what makes the quality of life better and how art plays into that. I think that opportunity is really important at this point because kids aren’t getting enough education about art in schools. So we’re going to have to figure out a way to retrofit that.
How do we encourage a respect for art in kids? They need to have some happy memories—even if it isn’t from their parents. If you read about Baldwin, he didn’t have that much support at home, but he went into the library every day and read every book in the library. He did have some support, but it wasn’t like he had a role model specifically telling him he was going to be a great writer. And I think that can happen with so many people. I informally ask our artists in residency, “Were your parents artists?” Or “How did you decide to do this?” Because this is not an easy life. I get all different answers. Some say, “My uncle was a writer,” or “My grandfather was an architect.” Sometimes there’s a role model there. But sometimes there isn’t—in my family there was no role model whatsoever and my parents said, Are you kidding? How are you going to support yourself unless you marry someone? Nowadays that’s an unlikely answer—you wouldn’t expect someone to answer that they’re going to support themselves by getting married—but you still wouldn’t necessarily be able to give a better answer about [how you’ll make money]. That hasn’t changed. It’s still not good. In the sixties we posted a survey in the Saturday Evening Post about what it was like to be an artist, and we recently did the same survey, and it’s not changed. The number of hours artists spend on their art and their income—it’s not really changed, except maybe that student debt has increased.
What is next for you? I am going to rest and truly retire for a few years—I have no burning desire to start a new career. What I’d like to do is volunteer my time to the same kinds of things I’ve been doing at MacDowell—work to help artists, work on equity—and do some traveling and other things one normally does when unfettered and alive. The parts I’ll miss are all the wonderful people here and the artists. I’m just hoping I can stay connected in other ways—being in the audience or writing notes to artists after I see something wonderful that they’ve done. I’ve always loved that part.
Dana Isokawa is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
In November, Mary Gannon, formerly the associate director and director of content for the Academy of American Poets, became the new executive director of the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP). She succeeds Jeffrey Lependorf as the head of the organization, which since its founding in 1967 has provided literary presses and magazines across the United States with direct technical assistance, guidance on everything from audience building to fund-raising, and a platform through which publishers can connect with readers, writers, and one another. Prior to her tenure at the Academy of American Poets, Gannon was the editorial director of Poets & Writers (she is also married to Poets & Writers’ editor in chief, Kevin Larimer). As she prepared to step into her new position, Gannon spoke about CLMP’s potential, its place in the literary landscape, and the impact of independent publishing.
What is CLMP’s most important role? Our main role is to help raise the organizational capacity of literary magazines and presses and to support them in whatever way that they need. But there is also a harder-to-define area of support that comes from creating the time and space for them to work together, have conversations, and discover the questions and problems that they, because they’re such a hardworking group, haven’t had time to think about. Intentional communication is a really valuable thing to help facilitate. We want to continue to make those spaces on a national level for members to collaborate, leverage one another’s strengths, and work toward this higher goal of making sure that literature thrives.
What are the most significant needs of small presses and literary magazines right now? Distribution is a challenge, so figuring out how CLMP can help literary publishers get their work out is important. How can we make sure that their magazines and books are being sold in bookstores and seen in major online bookselling venues, so that all the good work they’re doing is actually getting out there and connecting with people? I think the other challenge will be the fund-raising aspect of it—trying to make sure that CLMP has the resources it needs to provide the resources for the network that it serves.
Are there other challenges that you see on the horizon? I think it is undeniable, especially with younger generations, that attention is shifting, and the way people learn and read is shifting, so making sure that publishers and producers of literary art are contending with that in a way that works for everybody is a challenge. I’m not really sure what that looks like yet, but it’s very interesting to me. Having said that, it’s also a really exciting time for independent and small publishing, because in the wake of the conglomeration of big publishers, it has created space for innovative, dedicated people to put together these projects that connect writers with audiences and make sure that literature is inclusive. Not to say that the big publishers aren’t also putting beautiful books and magazines into the world, but for a healthy ecosystem you need diversity. And I think that’s where the smaller publishers come into play.
Do you have any big plans for CLMP? I have a few ideas, but one of the things I need to do first is make sure I am totally up to speed on what members’ needs are. Running a small press or literary magazine is really hard work, and people are driven to it because they’re passionate about it, and they have a serious commitment to and love of the art form. Because of them we have access to all these stories that transform our lives, help us contend with what it means to be human, and make us better citizens. That’s a beautiful thing, and they deserve to be supported in every way they can.
Cat Richardson is the editor in chief of Bodega. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Narrative, Tin House, and elsewhere.
In November, Mary Gannon, formerly the associate director and director of content for the Academy of American Poets, became the new executive director of the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP). She succeeds Jeffrey Lependorf as the head of the organization, which since its founding in 1967 has provided literary presses and magazines across the United States with direct technical assistance, guidance on everything from audience building to fund-raising, and a platform through which publishers can connect with readers, writers, and one another. Prior to her tenure at the Academy of American Poets, Gannon was the editorial director of Poets & Writers (she is also married to Poets & Writers’ editor in chief, Kevin Larimer). As she prepared to step into her new position, Gannon spoke about CLMP’s potential, its place in the literary landscape, and the impact of independent publishing.
What is CLMP’s most important role? Our main role is to help raise the organizational capacity of literary magazines and presses and to support them in whatever way that they need. But there is also a harder-to-define area of support that comes from creating the time and space for them to work together, have conversations, and discover the questions and problems that they, because they’re such a hardworking group, haven’t had time to think about. Intentional communication is a really valuable thing to help facilitate. We want to continue to make those spaces on a national level for members to collaborate, leverage one another’s strengths, and work toward this higher goal of making sure that literature thrives.
What are the most significant needs of small presses and literary magazines right now? Distribution is a challenge, so figuring out how CLMP can help literary publishers get their work out is important. How can we make sure that their magazines and books are being sold in bookstores and seen in major online bookselling venues, so that all the good work they’re doing is actually getting out there and connecting with people? I think the other challenge will be the fund-raising aspect of it—trying to make sure that CLMP has the resources it needs to provide the resources for the network that it serves.
Are there other challenges that you see on the horizon? I think it is undeniable, especially with younger generations, that attention is shifting, and the way people learn and read is shifting, so making sure that publishers and producers of literary art are contending with that in a way that works for everybody is a challenge. I’m not really sure what that looks like yet, but it’s very interesting to me. Having said that, it’s also a really exciting time for independent and small publishing, because in the wake of the conglomeration of big publishers, it has created space for innovative, dedicated people to put together these projects that connect writers with audiences and make sure that literature is inclusive. Not to say that the big publishers aren’t also putting beautiful books and magazines into the world, but for a healthy ecosystem you need diversity. And I think that’s where the smaller publishers come into play.
Do you have any big plans for CLMP? I have a few ideas, but one of the things I need to do first is make sure I am totally up to speed on what members’ needs are. Running a small press or literary magazine is really hard work, and people are driven to it because they’re passionate about it, and they have a serious commitment to and love of the art form. Because of them we have access to all these stories that transform our lives, help us contend with what it means to be human, and make us better citizens. That’s a beautiful thing, and they deserve to be supported in every way they can.
Cat Richardson is the editor in chief of Bodega. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Narrative, Tin House, and elsewhere.
In April, Emily Nemens, then the coeditor of the Southern Review in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was named the new editor of the Paris Review. Nemens started the new position at the Paris Review’s New York City office in June and succeeds Lorin Stein, who resigned in December 2017 amid allegations of sexual misconduct toward female staffers and writers. Nemens takes over a storied publication that is much more than a print quarterly—the magazine regularly runs online content, produces videos and a podcast, hosts events, and publishes books through Paris Review Editions. A few weeks before the Fall 2018 issue, her first, came out, Nemens spoke about her plans for the Paris Review and her approach to editing.
Are there any new series or forms of coverage for the print quarterly in the works? The guest poetry editor program is really exciting. The Winter Issue, which comes out in December, will be with Shane McCrae picking the poetry. I’m really excited to work with him. I think the magazine does so much really well, and I don’t want to close the door on that—I really just want to support it. So I think there will be incremental growth across all the sections of the magazine. I’d really like to reengage with the essay, which wasn’t always in the magazine, so making a point to reconnect with that form is a priority. I have a visual arts background, so I’d like to collaborate with the arts community to not just figure out striking covers, but to really engage with what’s going on in the art world. For fiction, I’m trying to broaden the kinds of stories that are featured and the emotional motivation and narrative arcs of the stories. There’s a lot going on in fiction now, and the magazine of course reflects my taste and my staff’s taste, but it’s exciting to broaden the kinds of stories told.
How do you want to broaden the review’s fiction? I think there are different kinds of motivations for stories. Reading the archive, I felt like we hit on the same notes too often in terms of what motivated characters to set out on their journeys. I want to think more about different emotional needs and motivations. There is definitely a theme of loneliness in some of the stories [in the Fall 2018 issue], which I think might be the cultural moment. I read a lot of stories about social media and isolation—to the point where I actually had two really good stories that revolved around the same thing, so one will be in [the Winter 2018 issue]—but I want to think about different inspirations and aspirations for characters in different forms. My personal taste is towards a very long and complicated short story—something in the lines of a Deborah Eisenberg or Adam Johnson story where there’s an entire world—but the Fall issue also features an eight-hundred-word story and a four-hundred-word story. So I’m really thinking about the mechanics of the form and how they can be stretched or compressed and what happens when you do that.
What notes do you think were hit too often in the fiction archive? There are so many good stories in the archive, and I don’t want to discount that. I do think that there were a lot of New York stories, and there were a lot of romantic attainment stories about finding a partner. That pursuit is a huge part of life, but it’s not the only part of life. There’s also family, there’s also career, there’s also travel, there’s also adventure, there’s also physical attainment in terms of mountain climbing, or whatever it is. There are a lot more things than winding up in the sack, to put it a little too crassly. So I was just reading with that in mind.
How many stories did you read for the Fall 2018 issue? A few hundred, I’d say. Which is pretty normal. When I was at the Southern Review, I put eyes on every story. And it was about 1 or 2 percent acceptance, so right along those lines.
The Southern Review and the Paris Review publish writers from all over the country and the world, but both seem like journals very tied to a region—the Southern Review to the South and the Paris Review to New York City. The Paris Review is a real New York institution and that’s really exciting, but I don’t think it needs to be exclusively that. I think it can maintain its ties and relationships to the engine of New York but also bring more people into the fold.
From working at both these journals, do you think the region where a journal’s office is located affects the aesthetic of the journal? I don’t think it has to. I think it’s really in the perspective of the editors. In certain times of the Southern Review’s history, it was run by Southern scholars who every five years—more often that that—would edit special issues that were just on the state of literature in the South. And that was great and important for the magazine at the time and did a lot to establish it as a powerhouse in regional literature. But when I was there, for the five years I was editing the magazine, my focus was really more on the short story and finding the best short stories and featuring them and celebrating the form. So I wasn’t distancing myself from the legacy, but I wasn’t emphasizing it. So I think the same can happen here, where I don’t want to distance myself from the city and the literature here and everything that’s happening culturally in the city—but know that we can do something else too. And we’ll still exist in this universe. We’ll still be doing programming in the city, but I think we’ll bring the magazine to other events. I’m going to be at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in Portland and doing some public programming in Philadelphia and out in California. I don’t want to turn my back in New York and all the wonderful things happening here, but I think having lived and worked in a place where there aren’t as many cultural opportunities makes me want to spread the wealth.
When you were at the Southern Review, you were coeditor with Jessica Faust, and it seemed like the two of you had a really great collaborative process from start to finish. What is it like adjusting to being more on your own? I’m at the top of the masthead, but I’m still working with a really talented group of colleagues. The buck stops with me, and the editorial selection stops with me, but my editorial assistant, for example, shared a story that ended up in the Fall issue, and my associate editor did, as well. It’s different. It’s definitely reorienting. I love the coeditor structure just in terms of my personal approach to hierarchy—so I’m bringing some of that collaborative spirit and collegiality to the magazine, which feels really good, and I think is refreshing here.
After Lorin Stein resigned in December, the journal’s board members released a statement saying that they had “revised [the Paris Review’s] code of conduct and anti-harassment policies.” How do you hope to build on that? The board did a lot of good and important work before I ever got here. I was brought up to speed on all of those new policies, and there was great workplace sensitivity training and a lot of other resources brought in this spring. So I feel like a lot of the hard work was done before I arrived. But understanding really what it means to be in a safe and collaborative and collegial work environment and emphasizing that every day—that’s where I come in.
How do you think you can achieve that? It starts and ends with respecting everyone in the office no matter what their role is or how long they’ve been here. I think it’s being sensitive and empathetic to people’s work, but also to their lives outside of work without prying. And understanding that we’re all colleagues, but we’re also people, and just having that be my baseline as a boss. I’ve been trying to systematically work my way around the office and figure out with people what they’re working on, what they want to be working on, and what their short- and long-term goals are. I think starting with that and making sure we’re having regular check-ins sets a precedent for this as a dynamic and caring place.
Emily Nemens
(Credit: Murray Greenfield )
What does a good relationship between a writer and an editor look like to you? I approach relationships with my writers with a lot of enthusiasm and curiosity. I’m a pretty—I’m not going to say tough—but I’m a pretty engaged editor, and I do a lot of edits. I think the only way for those to go over well is if you deliver them with kindness. And usually that works—it doesn’t always work—but usually that works. I also bring that sort of relationship on the page to conversations and relationships [in person]. And even if I don’t connect with a writer on a particular piece, I try to support the work and the person making the work. I spend a lot of time saying, “No, but please keep in touch,” and, “No, I’m not going to publish this, but I care about your work, and I’m excited about it, so let me keep reading it.”
What do you think is the most helpful thing you can give a writer? The platform of the magazine is huge, and I know that, and I’m so excited about that. We just lost Philip Roth, and we published him at twenty-five, which really made his career or started it. So I’ll acknowledge that. But on a personal level, I really love taking a story that is amazing and that I love and spending some time with it and making it just a smidge better. And showing the writer ways they can grow and improve. I was recently at the Sewanee conference, and a writer I’d published five or six years ago said, “You know, the way you line-edited made me think about the way I write, and I’ve written differently ever since that interaction.” And that melted this editor’s heart. But giving people a new platform or encouraging people to keep going even if they’re not quite there—that’s an easy grab for me, to just be honest and enthusiastic about people’s work. And I don’t know that the writing community always has that generosity.
How would you describe your editing style? It sounds like you’re a really close line-editor. I am. If I see a really big structural issue I’ll generally ask about it and send more general notes. I always want to test the water if I want to do an overhaul—someone might feel that their story is perfect the way it is, and that’s fine—but if they’re up for it, I’ll send notes broadly. I don’t have time to do that with every story, of course, so I have to be kind of judicious about developmental edits. Usually it’s just one story an issue, or if I see two or three things that [have] developmental issues, I might space them out across a few issues. And then when a story feels close, that’s when I get in there and really think about each line and the pacing of every scene. I learned how to edit from Jessica Faust, a poet and a poetry editor. She was my mentor when I was in graduate school, and we then became colleagues. When you’re editing poetry you’re really considering every piece of punctuation, so I brought that over to editing fiction and interviews and everything else. It’s tedious, but I love it.
It’s hard to think about the Paris Review and not think about George Plimpton. Is there anything from his vision or editing style that you hope to adopt or carry on? He looms so large. This is Sarah Dudley Plimpton’s rug [points to rug beneath her desk]. This was at the Plimpton home. I feel like I have a strong feeling of his work, but I’m still really learning the details of his legacy. One of my favorite things about this past Spring, and after my appointment, was hearing all the Plimpton stories from all the writers who had encountered him and whose careers he’d helped. That was so much fun to get these stories. I feel like I’m still gathering those and talking with other editors who worked closely with him and getting to know more of his leadership style. That’s an ongoing project. I read his book Paper Lion years ago, and as a person who likes literature but is writing about sports, he was a guiding light for me before the Paris Review was on the radar as a place I could work. So I feel really fortunate to be carrying on that tradition of writing. But that’s secondary to learning how he ran this magazine and how he built this magazine from a really ambitious place. I feel like the journal has been able to carry that ambition and thrive.
Speaking of yourself as a writer, you recently signed a deal with Farrar, Straus and Giroux for your book about spring training, The Cactus League. As an editor, writer, and visual artist, do you find that the roles complicate or complement one other? I’m an editor first. I spend most of my time doing that, so when I have the opportunity to write or draw I’m sort of a snake and I just gobble—I have a really big meal and get a lot of work done. Because I’m not one of those writers who sits down and writes every morning. I wish I was, but I edit every morning! And that feels really good. But the thing is, working with language makes your language better. Working on other people’s stories—of course it takes away in terms of number of hours from my writing practice—but I feel like every time I do sit down to write I have a bigger tool kit. So I’m really grateful for that interplay. And the visual arts practice that I love—it will always be part of my life, but it’s sort of tertiary right now. And that’s fine.
At Poets & Writers we have a database of literary journals, and right now it lists almost 1,300 journals, which to me seems like a very daunting number to both writers and editors. Does that number surprise you or seem too high? That is a really big number, but I think it’s fine. Every journal is run by people who want to make a thing and put it out in the world, and I don’t think there’s any reason to stop that or hinder that progress. Obviously that’s more than I can read in a year. But I think with elbow grease, some strategy, and the right mix of editorial leadership and resources, those journals will find the right audiences—and if they can’t find those audiences, maybe there will be 1,250 next year. I don’t mean that in a glib way; I think that every experiment is worth it. Having seen a lot of great journals close for reasons of resources or lack thereof, I’m really excited that the Internet and other means have reinvigorated the form.
Dana Isokawa is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
In July poet and critic Meghan O’Rourke will take over as the editor of the Yale Review, Yale University’s quarterly of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and criticism. O’Rourke, who has been an editor at the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and Slate, succeeds acting editor Harold Augenbraum, who stepped in when the publication’s editor since 1991, the late poet J. D. McClatchy, retired in June 2017. A few months before her official start date, O’Rourke discussed her plans for the review and her approach to editing. In addition to numerous pieces of criticism, O’Rourke has published three poetry collections, most recently Sun in Days (Norton, 2017), and one memoir, The Long Goodbye (Riverhead Books, 2011).
When will your first issue come out? October. It coincides with the two-hundredth anniversary of the review, which is a wonderful occasion for me to start as editor. It’s fun to begin with a beginning and celebrate a very long period of time at the same time.
Does a two-hundred-year legacy feel overwhelming? It’s so overwhelming that it’s freeing. Seventy-five years might be more overwhelming, but two hundred years is so capacious and broad, it reminds you that a magazine is a made thing that reflects the passions and currents and ideas of its time and is shaped by the people who work there. There’s a kind of permission in that two hundred years. So the expectation I bring is not so much to maintain a particular identity but to make the journal be to its time what it has been to its time at some of its highest moments. Also, although the magazine is not oriented toward Yale, it is incubated at Yale; I want the magazine to be to its world what Yale is to its world, which is a place of rigorous, creative inquiry that holds itself to the highest standards.
What do you think is a journal’s ideal relationship to its time? The answer is different for different journals. But the Yale Review is uniquely situated to be a space for the best creative and literary writing to be side by side with passionate, personal, and political criticism—the review has always had a robust back-of-the-book, where the critics’ section is housed. The relationship between the creative enterprise and the critical enterprise is exciting because they are two almost antithetical modes of inquiry. Poems and stories can offset the tendency of the polemicizing, op-ed culture we have around us—not that we’re going to be running op-eds. But there’s something wonderful about modes that coexist in the same journal as oil and water to each other; there’s something exciting about that tension between those modalities because it can add up to a larger world of exploration.
When you’re putting together an issue, will you take that literally? Will you, for example, publish a poem that addresses a topic and a review of a book about that same topic? Or how might the creative and the critical speak to one another in the review? Less literal than that. We will have theme issues where we use a word—almost the way a poet might—to riff editorially in our thinking. For example, I’m thinking about an issue focused on documents and documentation. Right now, because of the news, we’re all thinking about what it means to be undocumented in America in a specific way. It’s led me to think about literature as document: What does literature document? What goes undocumented? What does it mean to try to document not only what we know about ourselves and our time, but what we can’t know about ourselves and our time? And how does a journal situate itself in that space? It’s also this moment where both fiction and poetry have this fascination with the claims of nonfiction—I’m thinking of Knausgård, Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti, and the current of autofiction. Novelists are saying, “I’ve gotten tired of making things up.” We also have poets who are using found documents and exploring docupoetics, so it seems like a moment to think through the relationship between imaginative literature and literal documents.
The great challenge of editing a literary journal—or a political and literary journal, which I hope the Yale Review will be—is to figure out how to publish an assortment of really good pieces that add up to something more than a slightly incidental aesthetic. That point to aspects of our cultural experience that we know but maybe haven’t named or aspects of the discourse that are hypocritical or unrigorously explored.
Having many different modes of considering that same question will hopefully lead to a richer understanding, yes? Yes, and complicate an understanding we might have. As the culture editor at Slate in the early 2000s, where I essentially ran half a magazine and helped build that section and what it meant to be writing cultural criticism on the web, that was still a new question—what are the cultural phenomena we think we understand but don’t look at very closely or have only looked at a little? That’s also what interests me as a writer and led me to write about grief in The Long Goodbye. Grieving had radically changed in American culture, and while we had this idea of grieving, no one had fully unpacked it. Scholars had, but it hadn’t been fully looked at in cultural criticism. And suddenly there was a wave of us all saying, “Hey, this is really strange. Let’s look at how we grieve.” So I’m interested in the journal being a space where that looking a second time can happen.
What other topics besides documentation do you want to cover in the journal? I’m starting to figure that out. Another thing on my mind is the word antisocial—what does that even mean?We live in a moment where we are bombarded by the social. And there’s been a lot of discussion about Facebook’s role in the last election. So is antisocial an interesting word from which to begin thinking about modes of literature? And in my own work I’ve been writing about chronic illness, so I’m interested in intersections between the medical world and the world of literature, as well as medicine as a culture in itself. I expect that interest will find its way into the review somehow and not just because I’m interested in it—all these people are writing books about the experience of having a poorly understood illness, as well as the social context of medicine and what it means to be a woman and/or person of color searching for answers in a system that comes with a lot of unconscious bias. That narrative is emerging in the culture.
One of the great pleasures of editing a journal like the Yale Review, which comes out four times a year, is that there’s not a pressure to be timely like at Slate where I was publishing daily. I have this wonderful opportunity to take the long view as an editor. But it’s important, as I was saying before, that we’re not merely collecting good pieces that come together in an incidental way, but finding a way to curate them so that there’s some sense of the urgency of the moment, but not in a way that feels merely timely. Hopefully it could also feel timeless. How do we collect the artifacts of our moment and also assign and encourage and facilitate the writing of pieces that will speak to us deeply about what’s happening right now in the world we live in? Sometimes pieces of poetry or fiction do that by not seeming to speak at all to the world we live in—so we’re not going to publish poems that have an expiration date of 2019 or 2020. I hope we’ll publish lasting poems and lasting fiction that somehow reflect something about us in our moment.
Are you planning other changes to the format or coverage of the print review? I’m planning to revamp the back of the book. Right now it’s a wonderful group of reviews of poetry, music, books, and film, but I want to shake it up a little and publish an idea in review, where we’ll talk about something like the antisocial or culpability—there was a lot of discussion about culpability last fall around Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing: How do we think about culpability? Who is culpable and when? So maybe we’ll have a few different people write about this theme, and let those pieces not respond, but resonate with one another. And I want these pieces to touch down in actual lived cultural and political experiences. So there will be real texts under review, but it might be a text like the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings alongside a novel, alongside Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive, alongside Jericho Brown’s The Tradition. It is important that we put together the pieces of our experience that are often left separate.
What tone do you want the journal to strike? I think of the journal as a house I’m building into which I’m inviting a very dynamic, creative, playful, whimsical, argumentative group of people who are all going to be having a conversation. And the journal has the tone of that party. A tone of voluble and passionate conversation.
What are you planning to do on the digital side of the review? We are planning to launch a new website by early 2020, which will publish original content alongside work from the journal. More broadly we are rethinking how the Yale Review can use different platforms for the delivery of ideas, criticism, and dialogue. To that end we will be developing new columns and podcasts for the website, albeit in a highly curated way, since we’re a small staff. To me the digital review will be as important as the print journal, and it offers a fresh and exciting set of possibilities, precisely because it is a medium different from print. But it serves the same mission: A twentieth-century journal, if you think about it, was just a technology for the delivery and dissemination of passionate, excellent criticism and literature. The question is, What does the web allow us to do better and differently?
What writers or trends in writing are you excited about? Now is a true moment of fertility in American literature, partly because the nature of gatekeeping has changed. That change allows for a much greater diversity of voices that desperately needs to be there and also brings a great diversity of style and stance and position from which to make formal aesthetic exploration. Sometimes the media can talk a little too reductively about diversity; one of the things that gets overlooked is that diversity of people brings diversity of aesthetics and diversity of approaches. What more could one want? Right now is a wonderful moment to be an editor.
Do you think the editors of a journal should be backstage, or should they be out in front? How open and transparent do you want to be as an editor to your readers? Because the Yale Review and its readers form a kind of imagined community, especially as we move ever more online, I’d like our readers to know the people behind this enterprise—to get to know our staff, who, I hope, will be doing interviews and editing and writing too. I will sometimes write an editor’s letter to frame issues and share our goals and the questions raised for us, say, in assembling a special issue. In terms of transparency, which I take to refer to questions of how we select what we select, or why we publish what we publish, I’d just say that, of course, there are certain issues where transparency is especially called for. In general, finding ways of representing different points of view is really important to me—far too many literary journals and general interest magazines still have lopsided representation, to put it mildly—and that includes being clear about our mission of engaged dialogue and our hope of discovering valuable new voices.
When you’re editing a piece—this is probably very different for a piece of criticism versus a poem or story—are there a certain set of questions you ask? In criticism it’s important to have a certain muscularity and flexibility of thought. As a reader and writer of criticism, I want to know that even if one is writing in a passionate, argumentative way, everything has been considered. That I’m not writing or reading a piece that has been written only reflexively. I say that carefully because we live in a moment where we all feel a fair amount of outrage. We all see a certain amount of passionate engagement from all directions about the political moment, and the Internet is a place where we can indulge in that. I’m not saying that’s not important, but if we want to bring that level of passionate outrage to written criticism, there has to be a sense of consideration too. It’s the job of the editor to be an interlocutor for the critic and make sure the critic is saying what they mean as precisely as possible. When you edit criticism, you’re trying to make the argument as clear and sound as possible. There’s always a moment of arguing with yourself as a critic, which doesn’t necessarily need to be on the page but probably needs to happen to write the piece.
When editing fiction and poetry, it’s more about trying to help the writer make a persuasive aesthetic object from nothing. As an editor, my role is not to be an interlocutor, but a mirror. To say, “This is a moment in the poem where I feel the poet making it instead of the object that has been made. The mystery disappears and the effort shows through.” Or, “The tone slips mysteriously,” or, “This section is actually unclear.”
When I started working as an editor at the New Yorker, I would always pretend like I understood everything. It took me a long time to realize as an editor it’s okay to be—in fact, you have to be—an honest reader. You have to say, “I really don’t understand this,” or, “I’m really bored on page four, and I kind of fell asleep there for a little bit.” You have to do it with the humility of your own personhood—it could just be you—but you’re trying to reflect back to the writer as honestly as possible something about your experience. You’re also trying to think as you read it, “Is this an experience others might have while reading this text? Am I identifying something that is getting in the way of it as a persuasive aesthetic object, or is this my own predilection?” Because those are two different things. We can never fully disentangle them, but we can try.
I’m curious about your use of the word “persuasive” in “persuasive aesthetic object”—persuasive of what? Of its own madeness. I have this sort of spiritual relationship with poems and fiction—I think about Emily Dickinson saying, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” I don’t mean that a piece makes an argument that I agree with and I’ve been bullied into submission as a reader, but that it gives me that feeling. It’s that chill; it’s that sense of encountering a vision of the world that uncovers things you knew were there but never named before. I’m thinking of Taeko Kono’s Toddler Hunting and Other Stories,a fascinating book of short stories published in translation by New Directions. Many of the stories feature narrators that have deeply disturbing relationships with young children, and there’s something about the book and the way these women experience loneliness in the world that feels like it’s opening an aspect of experience that I knew was there, but I never had a name for. I don’t have the same sort of relationships that these characters do, but when I read it, I’m totally persuaded of its reality. That’s the kind of persuasion I mean. And that the poem or story has to be the way it is. Original literature is strange, and it often makes choices that another piece couldn’t make.
I love that as a description for how you feel when you read a great poem or story, but how do you feel when you read a really great piece of criticism? There are different ways I feel. There’s the kind of criticism where you think, “Ah, I agree with every single thing here—thank you. You have named something and provided a structural framework for an intuition, a feeling, or argument I’ve been making but not as well.” Then there’s the piece that slightly changes your mind as you read it. Criticism is important because it gives us language for change, and it gives us language for reevaluation of long-held positions, which is crucial in the moment we’re living in. Especially as you get older, you have some reflexive positions, and good criticism can make you rethink something you’ve long believed, maybe without a lot of critical interrogation. Good criticism can be very uncomfortable to read. But you know it’s good if there’s a soundness to its own structure, its own architecture. And then there’s a kind of criticism that proceeds more associatively and is exciting in how it finds formal freedom in a genre that can be very conservative. There are some critics who can turn a piece of criticism almost into a work of literature. I love reading all these kinds of criticism—criticism that’s formally radical as well as criticism that’s not.
What do you find satisfying or exciting about editing? As a writer and an editor, I’ve toggled between periods of more solitary writing and periods of more outward-oriented editing. There can be something very lonely and solipsistic and deranged about being a writer alone at your desk all day—the minute can become major, and the major can become minute. It’s like being a candle that burns itself up. So it’s satisfying to use my passion and knowledge and experience of having spent so much time with words on behalf of other people.
A big thread in my nonfiction work is a resistance to a culture of individuality—I believe in a culture of care and community. It’s something we struggle with as Americans: how to figure out the relationship between individual ambition and the humanist mode of actually caring about one another. So I like the humanistic aspect of editing: being there for somebody and helping them because I have a knowledge base of thinking about this stuff for so long.
What kinds of editors inspire you? Those who make a space for writers to be the best versions of themselves. I also learned a huge amount from Bill Buford, who was my boss at the New Yorker when I started. We’re very different temperamentally, but he cared so deeply about the pieces he worked on. Sometimes as an editor you’re tired, and it can be easy to read a piece and think, “This is great.” And sometimes that’s not the fidelity that the piece needs—sometimes it needs you to enter it and read it more deeply. And that can be exhausting. As a writer, my best editors have made me better but not changed me, which is a kind of magic. I aspire to that—not to impose my aesthetic, but to illuminate what’s there. Make you a better writer and thinker on the page.
Is there anything from J. D. McClatchy’s approach or practice you hope to adopt yourself? He was a wonderful champion to writers. I think Sandy published my first published piece, so I feel a wonderful sense of gratitude toward him. He believed in young writers and gave them a chance to write serious criticism and publish their poems and fiction. He believed passionately that the review needed to exist and continue existing, and he came on at a moment when there were some doubts about the review’s future. So every day I think about him in that sense—I don’t think it would be here without him. And I feel a similar passionate conviction already that the review should exist and continue existing for many years.
Do you think literary journals are in trouble? I’m thinking, for example, of Tin House announcing it will no longer publish a print quarterly. Is it getting harder for literary journals to sustain themselves? I don’t know about “harder” or “in trouble,” but any literary journal in 2019 has to think deeply about what it is and what it is in relationship to the culture. The advent of the Internet as a technological change is probably similar to the printing press. We’re looking at a really massive, really fast, wide-scale change in communication. It has to affect literary journals. It would be foolish to say it didn’t. But it affects them in all kinds of ways. Publishing online is not the same thing as publishing in print; [both modes] have brought with them different kinds of conversation and communication.
To give an example: When I starting working as an assistant at the New Yorker in 1997, if someone wanted to write a response to a piece, we chose whose words got published. We reflected back to the world what the world thought of a piece we ran. We reflected what the world thought of the New Yorker. That is not true anymore. Right now I could write a response to anything. Anyone could write anything in response to anything published. And though there’s not totally equal access because of things like search engine optimization, it is much easier for many voices to be heard. That’s a great thing, but the question then becomes: Now that so many voices can come into the conversation, how do we have that conversation in a way where we’re not all yelling at one another? We have to think about this as editors—what does it mean if we’re in a much more democratic space? What are the opportunities there? For the Yale Review, I’m thinking about how to build in a space for conversation and response. So are magazines in trouble? It’s hard in ways that it wasn’t before, and it’s important to think about what kind of editorial reckoning has to happen around this shift. It’s challenging but also exciting.
Dana Isokawa is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
In April, Emily Nemens, then the coeditor of the Southern Review in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was named the new editor of the Paris Review. Nemens started the new position at the Paris Review’s New York City office in June and succeeds Lorin Stein, who resigned in December 2017 amid allegations of sexual misconduct toward female staffers and writers. Nemens takes over a storied publication that is much more than a print quarterly—the magazine regularly runs online content, produces videos and a podcast, hosts events, and publishes books through Paris Review Editions. A few weeks before the Fall 2018 issue, her first, came out, Nemens spoke about her plans for the Paris Review and her approach to editing.
Are there any new series or forms of coverage for the print quarterly in the works? The guest poetry editor program is really exciting. The Winter Issue, which comes out in December, will be with Shane McCrae picking the poetry. I’m really excited to work with him. I think the magazine does so much really well, and I don’t want to close the door on that—I really just want to support it. So I think there will be incremental growth across all the sections of the magazine. I’d really like to reengage with the essay, which wasn’t always in the magazine, so making a point to reconnect with that form is a priority. I have a visual arts background, so I’d like to collaborate with the arts community to not just figure out striking covers, but to really engage with what’s going on in the art world. For fiction, I’m trying to broaden the kinds of stories that are featured and the emotional motivation and narrative arcs of the stories. There’s a lot going on in fiction now, and the magazine of course reflects my taste and my staff’s taste, but it’s exciting to broaden the kinds of stories told.
How do you want to broaden the review’s fiction? I think there are different kinds of motivations for stories. Reading the archive, I felt like we hit on the same notes too often in terms of what motivated characters to set out on their journeys. I want to think more about different emotional needs and motivations. There is definitely a theme of loneliness in some of the stories [in the Fall 2018 issue], which I think might be the cultural moment. I read a lot of stories about social media and isolation—to the point where I actually had two really good stories that revolved around the same thing, so one will be in [the Winter 2018 issue]—but I want to think about different inspirations and aspirations for characters in different forms. My personal taste is towards a very long and complicated short story—something in the lines of a Deborah Eisenberg or Adam Johnson story where there’s an entire world—but the Fall issue also features an eight-hundred-word story and a four-hundred-word story. So I’m really thinking about the mechanics of the form and how they can be stretched or compressed and what happens when you do that.
What notes do you think were hit too often in the fiction archive? There are so many good stories in the archive, and I don’t want to discount that. I do think that there were a lot of New York stories, and there were a lot of romantic attainment stories about finding a partner. That pursuit is a huge part of life, but it’s not the only part of life. There’s also family, there’s also career, there’s also travel, there’s also adventure, there’s also physical attainment in terms of mountain climbing, or whatever it is. There are a lot more things than winding up in the sack, to put it a little too crassly. So I was just reading with that in mind.
How many stories did you read for the Fall 2018 issue? A few hundred, I’d say. Which is pretty normal. When I was at the Southern Review, I put eyes on every story. And it was about 1 or 2 percent acceptance, so right along those lines.
The Southern Review and the Paris Review publish writers from all over the country and the world, but both seem like journals very tied to a region—the Southern Review to the South and the Paris Review to New York City. The Paris Review is a real New York institution and that’s really exciting, but I don’t think it needs to be exclusively that. I think it can maintain its ties and relationships to the engine of New York but also bring more people into the fold.
From working at both these journals, do you think the region where a journal’s office is located affects the aesthetic of the journal? I don’t think it has to. I think it’s really in the perspective of the editors. In certain times of the Southern Review’s history, it was run by Southern scholars who every five years—more often that that—would edit special issues that were just on the state of literature in the South. And that was great and important for the magazine at the time and did a lot to establish it as a powerhouse in regional literature. But when I was there, for the five years I was editing the magazine, my focus was really more on the short story and finding the best short stories and featuring them and celebrating the form. So I wasn’t distancing myself from the legacy, but I wasn’t emphasizing it. So I think the same can happen here, where I don’t want to distance myself from the city and the literature here and everything that’s happening culturally in the city—but know that we can do something else too. And we’ll still exist in this universe. We’ll still be doing programming in the city, but I think we’ll bring the magazine to other events. I’m going to be at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in Portland and doing some public programming in Philadelphia and out in California. I don’t want to turn my back in New York and all the wonderful things happening here, but I think having lived and worked in a place where there aren’t as many cultural opportunities makes me want to spread the wealth.
When you were at the Southern Review, you were coeditor with Jessica Faust, and it seemed like the two of you had a really great collaborative process from start to finish. What is it like adjusting to being more on your own? I’m at the top of the masthead, but I’m still working with a really talented group of colleagues. The buck stops with me, and the editorial selection stops with me, but my editorial assistant, for example, shared a story that ended up in the Fall issue, and my associate editor did, as well. It’s different. It’s definitely reorienting. I love the coeditor structure just in terms of my personal approach to hierarchy—so I’m bringing some of that collaborative spirit and collegiality to the magazine, which feels really good, and I think is refreshing here.
After Lorin Stein resigned in December, the journal’s board members released a statement saying that they had “revised [the Paris Review’s] code of conduct and anti-harassment policies.” How do you hope to build on that? The board did a lot of good and important work before I ever got here. I was brought up to speed on all of those new policies, and there was great workplace sensitivity training and a lot of other resources brought in this spring. So I feel like a lot of the hard work was done before I arrived. But understanding really what it means to be in a safe and collaborative and collegial work environment and emphasizing that every day—that’s where I come in.
How do you think you can achieve that? It starts and ends with respecting everyone in the office no matter what their role is or how long they’ve been here. I think it’s being sensitive and empathetic to people’s work, but also to their lives outside of work without prying. And understanding that we’re all colleagues, but we’re also people, and just having that be my baseline as a boss. I’ve been trying to systematically work my way around the office and figure out with people what they’re working on, what they want to be working on, and what their short- and long-term goals are. I think starting with that and making sure we’re having regular check-ins sets a precedent for this as a dynamic and caring place.
Emily Nemens
(Credit: Murray Greenfield )
What does a good relationship between a writer and an editor look like to you? I approach relationships with my writers with a lot of enthusiasm and curiosity. I’m a pretty—I’m not going to say tough—but I’m a pretty engaged editor, and I do a lot of edits. I think the only way for those to go over well is if you deliver them with kindness. And usually that works—it doesn’t always work—but usually that works. I also bring that sort of relationship on the page to conversations and relationships [in person]. And even if I don’t connect with a writer on a particular piece, I try to support the work and the person making the work. I spend a lot of time saying, “No, but please keep in touch,” and, “No, I’m not going to publish this, but I care about your work, and I’m excited about it, so let me keep reading it.”
What do you think is the most helpful thing you can give a writer? The platform of the magazine is huge, and I know that, and I’m so excited about that. We just lost Philip Roth, and we published him at twenty-five, which really made his career or started it. So I’ll acknowledge that. But on a personal level, I really love taking a story that is amazing and that I love and spending some time with it and making it just a smidge better. And showing the writer ways they can grow and improve. I was recently at the Sewanee conference, and a writer I’d published five or six years ago said, “You know, the way you line-edited made me think about the way I write, and I’ve written differently ever since that interaction.” And that melted this editor’s heart. But giving people a new platform or encouraging people to keep going even if they’re not quite there—that’s an easy grab for me, to just be honest and enthusiastic about people’s work. And I don’t know that the writing community always has that generosity.
How would you describe your editing style? It sounds like you’re a really close line-editor. I am. If I see a really big structural issue I’ll generally ask about it and send more general notes. I always want to test the water if I want to do an overhaul—someone might feel that their story is perfect the way it is, and that’s fine—but if they’re up for it, I’ll send notes broadly. I don’t have time to do that with every story, of course, so I have to be kind of judicious about developmental edits. Usually it’s just one story an issue, or if I see two or three things that [have] developmental issues, I might space them out across a few issues. And then when a story feels close, that’s when I get in there and really think about each line and the pacing of every scene. I learned how to edit from Jessica Faust, a poet and a poetry editor. She was my mentor when I was in graduate school, and we then became colleagues. When you’re editing poetry you’re really considering every piece of punctuation, so I brought that over to editing fiction and interviews and everything else. It’s tedious, but I love it.
It’s hard to think about the Paris Review and not think about George Plimpton. Is there anything from his vision or editing style that you hope to adopt or carry on? He looms so large. This is Sarah Dudley Plimpton’s rug [points to rug beneath her desk]. This was at the Plimpton home. I feel like I have a strong feeling of his work, but I’m still really learning the details of his legacy. One of my favorite things about this past Spring, and after my appointment, was hearing all the Plimpton stories from all the writers who had encountered him and whose careers he’d helped. That was so much fun to get these stories. I feel like I’m still gathering those and talking with other editors who worked closely with him and getting to know more of his leadership style. That’s an ongoing project. I read his book Paper Lion years ago, and as a person who likes literature but is writing about sports, he was a guiding light for me before the Paris Review was on the radar as a place I could work. So I feel really fortunate to be carrying on that tradition of writing. But that’s secondary to learning how he ran this magazine and how he built this magazine from a really ambitious place. I feel like the journal has been able to carry that ambition and thrive.
Speaking of yourself as a writer, you recently signed a deal with Farrar, Straus and Giroux for your book about spring training, The Cactus League. As an editor, writer, and visual artist, do you find that the roles complicate or complement one other? I’m an editor first. I spend most of my time doing that, so when I have the opportunity to write or draw I’m sort of a snake and I just gobble—I have a really big meal and get a lot of work done. Because I’m not one of those writers who sits down and writes every morning. I wish I was, but I edit every morning! And that feels really good. But the thing is, working with language makes your language better. Working on other people’s stories—of course it takes away in terms of number of hours from my writing practice—but I feel like every time I do sit down to write I have a bigger tool kit. So I’m really grateful for that interplay. And the visual arts practice that I love—it will always be part of my life, but it’s sort of tertiary right now. And that’s fine.
At Poets & Writers we have a database of literary journals, and right now it lists almost 1,300 journals, which to me seems like a very daunting number to both writers and editors. Does that number surprise you or seem too high? That is a really big number, but I think it’s fine. Every journal is run by people who want to make a thing and put it out in the world, and I don’t think there’s any reason to stop that or hinder that progress. Obviously that’s more than I can read in a year. But I think with elbow grease, some strategy, and the right mix of editorial leadership and resources, those journals will find the right audiences—and if they can’t find those audiences, maybe there will be 1,250 next year. I don’t mean that in a glib way; I think that every experiment is worth it. Having seen a lot of great journals close for reasons of resources or lack thereof, I’m really excited that the Internet and other means have reinvigorated the form.
Dana Isokawa is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
The stark contrast between Hanif Abdurraqib’s early life and his current literary celebrity is not lost on him: He spent part of his younger years in and out of Ohio’s jails and courtrooms before publishing a series of critically acclaimed books and, in 2021, winning a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. Abdurraqib is a “system-impacted” writer, a term that refers to people who have been negatively affected by the criminal justice system, although he does not typically apply that label to himself.
“Let’s be real: If I didn’t win the MacArthur or write some shit that people like, I would have a hard time getting a job because I have a record,” says Abdurraqib. “So consider what it’s like for someone who has not won something prestigious or who has not gotten a book deal.”
With that in mind Abdurraqib is helping to steer a new initiative to support other system-impacted writers: the Writing Freedom Fellowship, a collaboration led by the Chicago-based nonprofit press Haymarket Books with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Art for Justice Fund. Abdurraqib joins an all-star lineup of authors who serve on the initiative’s board: Mahogany L. Browne, Natalie Diaz, Tayari Jones, Rachel Kushner, Andrea J. Ritchie, and Christopher Soto. Other members include Lawrence Bartley, publisher of the Marshall Project Inside (a publication for incarcerated audiences produced by the Marshall Project, a nonprofit online journalism outlet focused on criminal justice), and Romarilyn Ralston, executive director of Project Rebound at California State University in Fullerton, which helps formerly incarcerated individuals gain access to higher education.
The yearlong fellowship will provide funding to twenty writers who have been incarcerated or more broadly system-impacted, says Jyothi Natarajan, Haymarket’s program manager for the fellowship. “We’re including things like the border regime, family policing, and involuntary commitment [to a mental health facility] as part of how we understand carceral systems,” says Natarajan, who uses she/they pronouns. “We’re also keeping the fellowship open to writers who are impacted via having loved ones and family members who are directly impacted.”
The fellowship’s leaders wish to support those who demonstrate a commitment to writing, though they may be at different stages in their careers, Natarajan says. There are no residency or citizenship requirements for fellows, but Haymarket is focusing on candidates who “have a relationship to the United States.” Natarajan would not disclose the dollar amount for the awards “out of concern for the privacy and safety of future awardees, particularly any who may be presently incarcerated.” However, they say the fellowship has “no strings attached,” meaning that fellows are not required to complete a project to receive funding and may use the award money however they see fit.
Abdurraqib says board members nominated candidates and are part of a committee that will select the final twenty fellows, the names of whom are slated to be announced this fall. Fellows will have “opportunities for mentorship and professional development,” all offered remotely, Natarajan says. Whether the fellowship will continue in subsequent years for a new cohort of writers is still an open question that will be answered later, she says.
In his role as a board member, Abdurraqib says he is looking forward to building his literary network. “There’s a real opportunity, I think, to expand the community of writers, which means expanding my relationship with the work [of system-impacted writers] and the scope of what the work can do,” he says. “I also think that it provides a real opportunity to get work into the world that pushes up against some of the more traditional narratives we see, particularly narratives of incarceration.”
Haymarket—which has published authors such as Angela Y. Davis and Eve L. Ewing—runs Books Not Bars, which provides books to people who are in prison. Haymarket is slated to publish two books by incarcerated authors in the months ahead: in November, Lyle C. May’s Witness: An Insider’s Narrative of the Carceral State and, in February, Justin Rovillos Monson’s poetry collection, American Inmate.
The Writing Freedom Fellowship “really follows in the larger trajectory of Haymarket’s mission as a social justice publisher and one committed to abolitionist politics,” Natarajan says.
For Abdurraqib the Writing Freedom Fellowship is personal beyond his own experience with the carceral system. “I have loved ones who have been impacted by the system, and I workshop with writers who have been impacted by systems,” he says. “It confuses me often that there are not more resources for the work happening inside and for people who get free of the systems but are not free from the aftermath of their impacts.”
Having avenues to express himself through writing and other creative activities was essential for Michael Powell while he was incarcerated at Marion Correctional Institution in Ohio. While there Powell was involved in the prison’s community center run by Healing Broken Circles, a nonprofit in Columbus, Ohio, that serves people who are currently and formerly incarcerated. The center, which closed during the pandemic, offered poetry, yoga, and dance classes alongside programs focused on workplace-readiness, parenting, and wellness.
Powell became a leader in the community center, where he mentored younger men and developed Beats by the Gallon, a program focused on songwriting and musical expression, among other activities. “It gave me an avenue to explore some things that I had never been exposed to before,” says Powell. “It just opened up for me to start thinking about myself in a different way.”
Powell was released in May 2020 and today serves as the Healing Broken Circles director of creative and youth programming and continues to write and perform music and poetry. He says the Writing Freedom Fellowship and programs like it are important because they create a positive culture in an inherently negative place. They also set people up for success after imprisonment.
So often the thinking around incarceration is based on punishment, which does little to help those who are incarcerated, Powell says. “They’re not taking into account, if you continuously punish the person that you already thought was bad, what is going to happen to that person?” he says. “They’re just gonna get worse if you keep beating them down.”
The Writing Freedom Fellowship is working to change that by giving those who are directly affected by incarceration the resources and support to share their stories.
“These narratives about what prison is and what justice is and what policing is, all of them, or many of them, at least, are not driven by folks who have been impacted by these systems in a big way,” Abdurraqib says. “I think having access to these stories told by people who are living them is important.”
Brittany Moseley is a writer and editor based in Columbus, Ohio.
In April, Deesha Philyaw gave a reading that in many ways felt like any other. The multipurpose room where the event took place was large and open, and some fifteen attendees clustered in a semicircle, wearing shirts and jeans in various neutral colors and blue. Philyaw read from her Story Prize–winning collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, as she has on numerous occasions since it was published by West Virginia University Press in 2020. Then she answered questions about craft—where to find story ideas, how to handle writer’s block, and the challenges of writing about other people, especially those who haven’t been kind to you.
But Philyaw was not in the usual bookstore or school. She was among an audience of people incarcerated at Patuxent Institution in Jessup, Maryland. Philyaw was acting as a Literary Ambassador for Freedom Reads, an organization founded and directed by poet and attorney Reginald Dwayne Betts that seeks to bring the spirit of literature into prisons. From a seed of an idea he had in summer 2020 to install libraries in prison housing units nationwide, Betts has managed to expand Freedom Reads into a multifaceted organization that also brings theater productions, book clubs, and world-class writers inside carceral walls. In 2022, Freedom Reads brought Philyaw and Deb Olin Unferth to Patuxent as well as Terrance Hayes and Jacqueline Woodson to Otisville Correctional Facility in upstate New York for discussions that were the first of their kind for many of the book lovers and writers inside.
“Books can be a light amidst all that lack of hope, lack of justice, lack of healing, lack of possibility,” Philyaw says.
Even beyond that, Freedom Reads is invested in “what books can do, in terms of helping you discover who you are, who you want to be, who you might have been,” Betts says. Now in his early forties, Betts is the author of a memoir and three poetry collections, including Felon (Norton, 2019), and a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship recipient. He experienced the transformational power of books firsthand during his own stint in prison, where at sixteen he began a term of eight years for carjacking and robbery. In the depths of solitary confinement, Betts yelled, “Somebody, send me a book!” and was rewarded with a copy of the wide-ranging poetry anthology The Black Poets, edited by Dudley Randall. After his release in 2005, he eventually graduated from Yale Law School. But instead of following his plan to become a public defender, Betts started Freedom Reads, originally dubbed the “Million Book Project,” which in 2020 received a $5.25 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The expanded project officially became an independent nonprofit this summer.
Freedom Reads’ core offering remains its “Freedom Libraries,” meticulously designed modular structures that seek to meet the tight regulations of prison architecture while promoting community. Their curves are a nod to Martin Luther King Jr.’s idea of a universe that “bends toward justice,” Betts says. The maple, oak, walnut, or cherry wood is chosen specifically for aesthetics: “There’s nothing this beautiful in prison,” adds Betts. As of this writing, some fourteen Freedom Libraries have been installed in five states, with the goal of installing 150 libraries in 2023 and 375 by 2025.
The libraries will open the way for more Literary Ambassador events at the prisons where they are installed, Betts says, as well as his own performances of his poetry and an upcoming theatrical adaptation of Richard Wright’s novel Black Boy. The varied arms of the nonprofit may sound disparate, but Betts contends they’re related: “The library is the physical embodiment of literature, but the living embodiment of literature is a writer.” And perhaps theater represents them both, animated and swirled together.
While other organizations that connect incarcerated readers with literature take a more individualized approach, sending titles by request, each Freedom Library holds five hundred carefully curated books: The Black Poets next to The Count of Monte Cristo, the Odyssey and Iliad shelved near Invisible Man, and titles by Toni Morrison and Sonia Sanchez. About a quarter of the collection’s books were published after 2015, more than half are by writers of color, and about 10 percent are Spanish-language texts.
“We’re excited about the idea of a conversation that transcends the walls,” says Tess Wheelwright, deputy director of Freedom Reads. “If I’m in a segregated housing unit in California, and you’re in a dorm in a minimum-security prison in Minnesota, there’s something powerful about the fact we’re exploring the same book collection.”
Freedom Reads takes that idea one step further with its Book Circles, providing multiple copies of a book from the library in a single prison to readers who are encouraged to discuss it in the style of a book club. “Synchronous reading builds community,” Wheelwright says. By combining multiple forms of access to books, ambassador visits, and theater, she says, Freedom Reads offers inmates with different levels of literacy or comfort with reading various paths into what she calls the “embodied world of letters.”
People often misunderstand why Betts founded Freedom Reads, assuming that the program is meant to fill some special need for books in prisons beyond their universal value. “Prison is not the reason why books matter,” he says. “Books are the reason why books matter, and it just so happens that they are absent in prison.” He thinks of books as the “bedrock of civilization.” Without help, incarcerated people can’t access that bedrock. That’s where Freedom Reads comes in.
Patrick Berry, author of Doing Time, Writing Lives: Refiguring Literacy and Higher Education in Prison (Southern Illinois University Press, 2017), agrees. He sees Freedom Reads as a key piece of the puzzle in enabling incarcerated people to find meaning and success. There are, of course, no easy solutions. But the “windows of opportunity that can come through books” are not to be underestimated. The overwhelmingly positive feedback about Freedom Reads programming from inside seems to confirm Berry’s point. Incarcerated readers often enthuse about the beauty of the Freedom Library shelves, eager to share what they’re reading and the way they’ve organized their books and kept track of checkouts.
That spirit came through during Philyaw’s visit to Patuxent: “My mindset was, ‘I’m talking to people who care about books and who love books like I do,’” she says. Yet she remained mindful of the extra difficulties incarcerated writers face—difficulties she has learned more about while keeping in touch with some of the incarcerated people she met. “I’m trying to write and stay encouraged about becoming a writer,” they tell her. “But I’m trying to stay encouraged while I’m in a place that’s designed to dehumanize me.”
Acting as a Literary Ambassador has given Philyaw a sense of agency, and she is glad to be able to support her new writer colleagues in prison. “I feel a little less powerless knowing that my book, my voice, my presence can make a difference to someone else—hopefully the way books made a difference for [Betts],” she says.
Alissa Greenberg is a volunteer editor at San Quentin News, produced by individuals incarcerated at the California state prison; a staff writer at Nova on PBS; and a freelance journalist.
Freedom Reads founder and director Reginald Dwayne Betts (left) talks with people incarcerated at the Arkansas Valley Correctional Facility in Ordway, Colorado, in June.
Reginald Dwayne Betts is the author of A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison (Avery, 2009) and three poetry collections, including Shahid Reads His Own Palm (Alice James Books, 2010), Bastards of the Reagan Era (Four Way Books, 2015), and, most recently, Felon, published in October by W. W. Norton. An exploration of love, fatherhood, and grace, the new book is also a testament to the trauma of years in prison as well as the challenges of life postincarceration—subjects Betts knows well. Arrested and charged with three felonies in an armed carjacking when he was sixteen, Betts was tried as an adult and sentenced to nine years in prison. After his release he struggled to sidestep his record but went on to graduate from Prince George’s Community College in Largo, Maryland, and earn a bachelor’s degree from the University of Maryland in College Park and an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, North Carolina. In 2016 Betts graduated from Yale Law School, and a year later he passed the Connecticut bar exam and eventually was recommended for admission to the bar. He now lives in New Haven with his wife and two children; he is studying for his PhD in law at Yale.
We asked poet, author, and activist Mahogany L. Browne to visit Betts in New Haven as the publication date for Felon approached.
I am drawn to Reginald Dwayne Betts like any homesick person looking for family. In him I see my gone kin with every expletive sentence laced lovely. The Metro-North New Haven train station is not that different from the one where I wait for my family car to retrieve me from the dusty Amtrak station in Emeryville, California. A city bus billows heat nearby, and a man smoking a cigarette looks annoyed at the lot of it all before I notice a responsible-sized SUV pull into the driveway, windows down. Bucket hat and prescription glasses can’t hide the identity of Betts, a poet I’ve studied from articles, via Cave Canem archives, and remember from a previously attended overcrowded writers conference.
Name a song that tells a man what to expect after prison;
As an AP literature student in high school, I was taught very early about poetry and who it belongs to. When I revised the work of Dante’s Inferno for an end-of-semester assignment using the lyrics of NWA, I was scolded quickly. Betts is exactly what I was told poetry is not, and is very much the heartbeat of the language. He is a contradiction of both the trajectory of poetry and prison. When speaking he commands attention with succinct hand choreography, and on the page he dares readers to find themselves in the text; the familiar language, the melody swinging both blues and hip-hop, and the traditional line breaks conversing with court documents turned erasure poems. The origami form and folklore is a contemporary investigation of an admonished narrative we rarely forgive.
Explains Occam’s razor: you’re still a suspect after prison.
Betts, a husband and father of two, talks about his time in prison like it was a lifetime ago and like it was yesterday. Time is a construct when the mind is bound to trauma. I know this song of farewell by heart. In his memoir, A Question of Freedom, Betts writes, “I was sixteen and headed to prison for nine years, which meant there would be no prom, no first night driving down Silver Hill Road, no going off to college.” But today, years and years later, Betts is sipping on water for lime and thinking about thinking. He doesn’t take the silence for granted. He also doesn’t speak like a man afraid of what the world thinks.
What brought you to write your newest collection, Felon? I’m getting letters from people in prison all the time. I’m working in a federal courthouse. I’m reading habeas corpus petitions. I’m reading about crimes that happened and the people who appeal. This shit is not just the face of incarceration as a nonviolent drug offender. This is nothing like people imagine incarceration is. And then it’s also, it’s subtle—it’s like, you getting deported because you got a drug beef. All of that bullshit is like, no—they’re deporting people right now who they’ve labeled criminals that shouldn’t get deported. I’m thinking about the language that we choose to use to justify how we treat certain people. And because I don’t want to get treated that way, I want to run from that language. But all that says is that I’m looking for some other kind of permission. I want to be a Yale Law graduate because that means you’ll give me a job—instead of being a convict, which means you won’t. I’m writing the book while I’m in law school. I’m writing the book while I’m being a father. I’m writing the book while I’m working as a public defender. So some of those poems happen because a kid that I was representing on a robbery beef, who probably did pull a pistol out and put it in somebody’s face, who probably did say it was a BB gun but ain’t nobody ever find it, and all the while I’m talking to his mom, and she says, “You know, Mr. Betts, I’ve never been around someone like you before. You know, you don’t curse.” And I’m thinking what the fuck? I curse and I got three felonies. Everybody you’ve been around is like me. It’s like a veil and then a mask and then a brown bag over my head. Because at this point, I can’t reveal all the many parts of myself.
The point is, that’s who is in the book. And maybe that doesn’t come out explicitly. But the moms is fascinating. It’s like the way in which somebody you know interacts with the system, and the system don’t give a fuck about them. Everything we know about this world is on the outskirts of incarceration.
Did your interactions with your client change once they learned you had been incarcerated? I told her because I was tired of acting like I ain’t did a bid. Her son knew anyway. Her son was my first client, and he told me when we met, “Oh, you the one that’s been locked up?” And I didn’t tell him. My supervisor didn’t tell him. I for real don’t know how he knew. I mean I had a few clients that knew and found out, and they came to me and said, “I read your story; it’s impressive.” Some ways it changes because they expected different shit from you. But the world is the world. And that’s what the book is. I’m trying to be all of this shit. Well, not me specifically. But sometimes me specifically. You know, be a good father, but sometimes I yell at my kid. Sometimes I’m supposed to come home. But instead of coming home I go have another drink at the bar. Sometimes I yell at strangers.
Betts’s eyes go dark. He wrings his fingers methodically before sharing a story he once told his wife. While he is a natural-born storyteller—this tale extends beyond the appetizers and draws the attention of nearby diners—with every detail, it is clear how serious this story is. Violence haunts his accent: pounce-ready, and each sentence unfolds like a staged film. For a minute, I can see the story right in front of me: a car wreck of hypermasculinity daring to make a moment into a lifetime of regret. Betts shakes his head at the memory. The picture blurs out of focus as we hold the lesson up to the light: Any one of us can become a victim of our adrenaline if we don’t give it a beat to go still. After the intensity subsides he bookends the story with this response from his wife: “You can’t be a thug listening to a Marlon James e-book and eating a falafel sandwich.” We both laugh. Centered by her perspective. In her quick retort, what she is saying is, “How could you have come this far and consider jeopardizing it over something so fleeting?” The restaurant’s music punctuates the sound of dropping silverware.
My lover don’t believe in my sadness. She says whisky, not time, is what left me wrecked after prison.
Your wife shows up in your poems, and she’s been there in these moments to make you see yourself. How does your partnership—not just being a partner but being a father—how has it informed your writing? How has it pushed forward or harnessed that energy? I think I’m figuring it out. I remember when I was writing a nonfiction piece and I was trying to figure out what she thought when we had first met. And I wanted her thoughts. And I don’t remember what I wrote about besides how I was real nerdy and shit, and it’s hard to imagine me going to prison. She just didn’t believe the story. Not that she thought I was lying but that it just didn’t register for her the way it might have for me. She asks all the time when am I going to write about something other than prison. And I’m like, “I don’t know, maybe never.” But I do think that being Black and being married—I met my wife just a few months after I came home, we started dating a little over a year after I came home, and we’ve been married going on eleven years. And the shit is challenging because I think so much of our relationship—the shit I’ve chosen to do has driven some of the decisions about where we live and what she can do. And I think we’ve become more aware of that lately. But I think she’s made me better though. Shit, that sounds like a cliché. But I think we complement each other.
What would your wife, Terese, say to me about your work ethic? I don’t know. I think she’d be more honest. She would recognize I’m not the greatest at time management or have a realistic idea of what I’m capable of. But I usually do most of the shit that I say I’m going to do. I think I’m a good dad. We’re good parents. Our kids love each other. They’re spoiled. They got stamps in their passport. Micah has been to more poetry readings than most. This is how I know my wife loves me. She worked at a community college in Maryland, and she got me tickets to see Lucille Clifton. Me and Micah went to the reading; he was like two. He’s been all over. He’s seen Sonia Sanchez. I took him with me to Chicago; that was pretty dope. He’s spent seven days with me in Chicago when I read with Patricia Smith. Then I took my younger son, Miles, with me to do events in Indiana.
I’m writing a piece now about meeting Lucille Clifton. I was just happy to be in the space. [But when I first started going to poetry events] Micah had to come with me because his mom was working. I remember he asked, “Is there a toy for me in the poem?” He was young enough; I guess he figured the toy might spring out like a jack-in-the-box.
What do your sons think of you as a poet? They don’t pay that shit no mind. They’re like, “Ms. Such-and-Such said I should write a book, so I’m really excited about writing a book!” Where I’m like, “You know your dad writes books! With an s!” And they’re like “Yeah, but Ms. Such-and-Such knows what she’s doing.”
Dear Warden: my time been served, let me go
If the system is the villain, then it’s really easy for us to work. But if we have a conversation about what is incarceration, then we have to have a real conversation about how do you respond to somebody who has done a harmful thing. And I feel like one of the things I wanted this book to do is put me in a situation to be a part of conversations that demanded that we ask, “What is the appropriate response to this harm that has happened?” How do we acknowledge harm? Like, I know one innocent person in prison. And it’s fucked up—because I want to be a part of the conversation, but I realize I don’t have real answers for it. But maybe the book is just putting the shit on the table. Because I ain’t got no resolution. And the book don’t got no resolution. It’s not a bootstrap narrative. It’s a book admitting to the struggle.
Do you ever reimagine justice? Restorative justice. But so much of that is invested in the one incident. And I don’t know how you gel that with the accumulation of harm. I’m trying to become more educated about restorative justice around sexual violence and domestic violence. But some of the conversations we have are just dishonest. We haven’t figured it out yet because we ain’t got enough power to be responsible for sending people to jail. We got to be serious about the work of asking real questions.
Would you say poetry thrives off of our inability to be a certain kind of honest, responsible and accountable? I would say it suffers. The best poets figure out how to push against that. How to think about that. I think the space between rhetoric and poetry—or the distance you try to span between what is rhetoric and what is poetry—is a mission that I might just not know. I think sometimes we demand a kind of certainty to poetry that is antithetical to the practice of it.
More recent poetry has been used as a political tool for some; for others the personal and the political is one and the same, and they aren’t looking for a new and improved platform to share their poems about police brutality—is it a performance or…? I think what you’re saying is absolutely true. It’s the worst of its kind because it’s almost like “this is my chance to make some kind of gesture toward justice.” Even though the political is faux political. It’s more: I want my poem to give you a political education, but I don’t want my poem to be a part of the politics of change. Look, AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] ain’t reading my shit. She’s up there talking about how people at the borders ain’t criminals. She would never say that if she read my poems. But I trust people to say, “Let’s get them to read this.” This is why I like CRC [Civil Rights Corps]. These attorneys are fighting for bail money—they don’t know shit about you. They have no clue. And I’m on their board. I started a conversation with [CRC founder and executive director] Alec Karakatsanis years ago, and when they had the opportunity to give artists money, they did it. So he was invested in the idea that art should be involved in the work that they do. Art should be a part of what they do because if artists want to be political, it has to be honest, informative, and it can’t be what an organization produces.
I try to produce work to help somebody know something of a world they don’t know. I’m acknowledging that even our slice isn’t the world.
I remember I wrote this poem about Tamir Rice. And the poem was like, if you murder my child, at some point the blood on the concrete is going to be yours. I wrote this while driving my kids to school, and in the back of my head the video of Tamir Rice being murdered by police is playing. It’s like, how does that exist in one mind? I think artists and poets who aren’t in the profession, where our craft isn’t motivated by getting the bag, when we have the time and space to write honestly about something we can’t escape, that is the best part of the work.
Titus Kaphar painted my portrait, then dipped it in black tar. He knows redaction is a dialect after prison.
I think I’m still figuring out how to talk to different people. I want to be on The Breakfast Club [a popular hip-hop radio show in NYC], and I want to be on The Daily Show. Poetry should be in the middle of the civic discussion of what’s going on in this country. And we got to figure out how to do our thing and have it stand up without the rhetorical purpose of didacticism. And sometimes it’s hard to say. I don’t want to think about my kids hurt and domestic violence and date rape—I don’t want to think about that; I want to be as far away from that conversation as possible. But if one in four women in this country has experienced sexual assault, then how can I be a writer in this country and not engage with that conversation? And if I engage with it in a suggested way, which is like “demonize, demonize, criminalize, criminalize,” then how am I going say I’m against mass incarceration? Art is supposed to be a mechanism to help us become better than when we came to the page. Both the reader and the writer.
Who do you want to be thinking about this and grappling with these questions? If poetry is really what people die for the lack of, then I want the poem to be in the center of that. It’s 2019, and everybody you know is three minutes away from a felony. The real argument is: Men in prison doing fifteen to twenty years, murderers, dudes that got bodies, are only there because they in a war they didn’t enlist in. The gambit of failed and struggling human beings that exist in prison is not that different from what exists on the outside. So when someone suggests “we need to incarcerate less people in prison because they become worse in prison,” it’s like, no, we need to incarcerate less people because all of us become less.
Them fools say you can become anything when it’s over.
Today Betts is a practicing lawyer. He is a freelance journalist. Today he needs to rush back from this interview for family obligations. Today Betts serves as a consultant to advocacy organizations against mass incarceration and invites those affected by the severity of the prison system into the room. Betts is more than an ex-felon and redeemed citizen; he is equal parts Shakespearean swagger and neighborhood bar pastor. His humility lies behind the stories of masculinity, prison violence, and survival. Today his humility is buckled safely into the rear seat of the car as he whips swiftly past a red light in order for this writer to make the Metro-North train back to Brooklyn on time.
Mahogany L. Browne is a writer, organizer, and educator. The interim executive director of Urban Word NYC and the poetry coordinator at St. Francis College, Browne has received fellowships from Agnes Gund, AIR Serenbe, Cave Canem, Poets House, the Mellon Research Forum, and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. She is the author of Woke: A Young Poet’s Call to Justice, forthcoming from Roaring Brook Press in March 2020; Woke Baby and Black Girl Magic, both published by Roaring Brook Press in 2018; Kissing Caskets (YesYes Books, 2017); and Dear Twitter: Love Letters Hashed Out Online in 140 Characters or Less (Penmanship Books, 2010). She is also the founder of Woke Baby Book Fair, a nationwide diversity literature campaign. As an Art for Justice grantee, she is completing her first book of essays about mass incarceration and its effect on women and children. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
One can make a home wherever the body finds itself at rest. I imagine this to be true always, but especially now, while taking in the large plastic novelty fish hanging high on the wall above the head of Terrance Hayes. Even while slouching in his chair, Hayes towers above the table in front of him, so that the fish, a marlin, appears as a crown under the glow of red light humming overhead, darkening half of the marlin and half of the face of the poet. We are at Great Jones Cafe in lower Manhattan, a place Hayes told me is his “go-to spot” when we spoke earlier, trying to nail down where to meet. When I arrive, I find him alone in a corner, drink already on the table. Hayes is a Southerner at heart, having spent his childhood and early adulthood in South Carolina, so it comes as no surprise to find out why he has led me here, to this place he tells me he comes to every weekend, often alone. “I didn’t know how quiet it would or wouldn’t be in here,” he tells me as I sit down, in reference to my request that we find a low-key location for our interview. “But it’s the only place in this city where I can get good grits, so it’s one of the few places in this city I love.” I imagine this to be his way of welcoming me into a small corner of his home.
We are talking about primary colors, Hayes and I. He is describing for me his most recent project. His poems were commissioned by composer Tyshawn Sorey for Cycles of My Being, a song cycle that “explores the realities of life as a black man in America” (or so it is described in the publicity material), performed by renowned tenor Lawrence Brownlee at Carnegie Hall, Opera Philadelphia, and Lyric Opera of Chicago. So Hayes sent Sorey some work to be played in front of a mass audience. He tells me he agonized over which poems to send—“you know how I am with this shit; nobody knows what poems are except for poets,” he says—and eventually bent to the will of the composer, who had asked Hayes if he had any poems about hope, or about hate. Hayes balked at the idea.
“They wanted [it] to be hopeful, but a hopeful poem isn’t my tendency,” he says. “And a hateful poem isn’t my tendency either.” He eventually wrote a poem specifically for the show but then set it aside.
This story is less about the song cycle for me and more about what is happening with the interior of Terrance Hayes. “I’m not interested in primary colors,” he tells me when I ask him why he has no interest in hope or hate. “It’s not nuanced enough. I’m interested in the spaces where colors overlap. It’s like when people call someone a racist and think that’s the end of it. That ain’t the end. Racism is a symptom of fear, or greed, or some other bullshit. So even if I wrote a poem about hate, it ain’t gonna be about hate when I’m done with it. My personality likes a challenge, so I can write a poem that many would consider hopeful.”
“But aren’t you a hopeful person?” I ask.
“Am I?” he shoots back playfully, smiling before sighing and stirring a small tornado into his drink with the tip of his straw. “I mean, the endgame is always going to be death, so how hopeful can anyone really be?”
We are talking about death, Hayes and I. Or, it seems, death is the river’s mouth our conversation is flowing into. This makes sense, in some ways. We are here to talk about his new book of poems, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, published by Penguin in June, which is overwhelming in every sense. Overwhelming in its brilliance, yes, but also overwhelming in its pacing, its style. Each poem is the exact same length—a sonnet’s requisite fourteen lines—and carries the exact same title: “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin.” The book, despite its breadth and clever turns, is a confrontation. Not an unwelcome one but a confrontation nonetheless. Hayes is too crafty to force his way, unwanted, into a room, so his poems are like the slow and steady picking of a lock, until the door handle clicks. Instead of entering, the poet stands outside, satisfied with his work.
Hayes began the process of writing the sonnets with inspiration from Wanda Coleman’s American Sonnets series. Coleman’s sonnets, much like Hayes’s own, are winding, endlessly questioning, and rich with syntax and alliteration. A stunning formalist, yet inventive and often two steps ahead of her peers, Coleman, who died in 2013 at the age of sixty-seven, spent much of her life as a poet struggling to make a living from her craft. Born and raised in L.A.’s Watts neighborhood, Coleman worked several odd jobs until her poems began to take off, and even then it was hard for her to make ends meet. Her hustle manifested itself in her poems; chasing new ways of crafting a poem became a form of survival. She was a mentor to some and an inspiration to many more, but Coleman wasn’t always granted the acclaim she deserved. Her work—unlike the work of Hayes—wasn’t fully celebrated until after her death.
Hayes is gathering his roses while he is still alive to grasp them—thorns and all. One such thorn: Hayes, who now lives in New York City after several years in Pittsburgh, where he taught at the University of Pittsburgh and was codirector of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics there, appreciated the love he was shown in the smaller city but notes that it became overwhelming. “They had my face up in the airport,” he says. “I couldn’t handle it.”
This is not to say that Hayes is entirely humble, however—nor should he be. But he is grounded, possessing a healthy blend of logic and confidence. You know the long list. The author of six poetry collections—Muscular Music (Tia Chucha Press, 1999), Hip Logic (Penguin, 2002), Wind in a Box (Penguin, 2006), Lighthead (Penguin, 2010), How to Be Drawn (Penguin, 2015), and now the new book—he has won much of what a poet can win, including the National Book Award for Lighthead; the Kate Tufts Discovery Award for Muscular Music; a Whiting Award; an NAACP Image Award; and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. He is also a chancellor at the Academy of American Poets. All that and he’s still relatively young, just forty-six years old. Young enough to have decades of future success but old enough to have watched skilled but less decorated writers die, without much control over their legacies.
As for his own legacy, Hayes tells me that he is most concerned with how he’s viewed as a teacher. He is at NYU now and finds himself at home in the classroom. He tells stories about his talented students and how there is a mutual pushing and pulling forward. None of it is about money, he tells me.
“This is why I just want to leave my kids my poems,” he says, referring to his two children. “I want to leave them art.” He pauses and references something he recently mentioned to his ex-wife, the poet Yona Harvey. “Money is nothing to be governed by, because once you get it, it’s never enough. When I die, I want my kids to have my art. Surely that will be worth something one day.”
Confidence and logic.
We are talking about Wanda Coleman again, as the darkness falling on Great Jones Street becomes richer, nighttime beginning to flood in through the windows. “I wrote an American Sonnet to Wanda Coleman,” he tells me, picking apart the catfish on his plate. “And I sent it to her. We exchanged letters, and then suddenly she was ill. She died in 2013, and I registered that, and then,” he pauses, “and then around the election I decided to do something else.”
Hayes says he had a “reaction” to the election, and I understand instantly what he means, as I felt it too. For all of the “now more than ever” tropes about writers and poets being needed at this particular moment—particularly writers and poets of color—the election did create a sense of urgency for many, not necessarily to share all of their work at once, but to establish a legacy of work, something that might be left behind, if there would be nothing else left of us. If things got “real bad,” whatever that meant. For Hayes, though, the week of the election also had another emotional touch point: Wanda Coleman’s seventieth birthday would have been on November 13, 2016.
“I had this obsession with writing these shorter poems, because I had been writing long poems,” he says, referring to the work in his last book, How to Be Drawn, which included a number of multiple-page poems such as “Who Are the Tribes” and “How to Draw a Perfect Circle.” He continues: “And I thought I could do this for her. I thought to myself, ‘Can I access the thing I most love about what she did, in these times?’” It became something he chased after relentlessly. “Also,” he smirks, after I ask him what other motivations existed for his use of the form, “I like a volta.”
It seems, at least to me, that a volta is defined best by the hand that crafts it, and so therefore a volta can be anything. Formalists will define it as the turn, or the rhetorical division, the shift, between the sonnet’s first eight lines and the final six. For Hayes the volta is in the project itself, tethered to his always shifting definition of the assassin in the work. “I’m trying to go in one way and come out another way. So, yeah, I’m trying to see how many turns I can fit into a poem, but also I like the sonnet as a way of addressing an idea: How can I write a traditional love poem to someone or something I don’t deem worthy of my love?” After a long pull of his drink, he adds, “I just don’t know what other form would be able to hold this particular moment.”
A love poem for an enemy or a foe is largely about restraint, I suppose. Which makes the project of the book and the restraints on the poems themselves even more fascinating. The central conceit is this: How can I reach out and gently touch that which might not be so gentle toward me? And how can I be sure that in honoring these foes with love, in my turning to face them, they won’t change?
Sometimes the foes are invented, and sometimes the foes are direct and predictable—country, or president, or racism. But the book is most interesting when the foe is Hayes himself. “I’m in a different phase of my life now,” he tells me after we talk briefly about what it is to want to love yourself when you are your own enemy. “Having been married and not being married [now] also bears on the sonnets,” he says, staring into his drink. Hayes is recently divorced from Harvey, though they remain on good terms, he insists, raising their children, a son and a daughter, shuttling between Pittsburgh and New York. “I haven’t talked…. People been asking this shit, but I don’t wanna talk too much about it. But what I will say to you is that sometimes the assassin is you, or sometimes the assassin is a beloved, and that role feels transferrable. It’s like the stuff in the book about Orpheus and Eurydice.” He pauses here, which is rare for Hayes when he gets into a stream of conversation. He is talking about a series of poems in the book that detail the ancient legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. The poems are decidedly distinct from the others, in both tone and what they are attempting to unravel. They are the poems in the book in which Hayes is hiding the least, taking himself to task, or taking the idea of love to task, or taking the idea of forever to task.
In one of the sonnets he writes:
I tried to tell the woman
Who sent me songs, it’s departure that makes company Hard to master. I tried to tell her I’m a muser, a miser With time. I love poems more than money & pussy. From now on I will eat brunch alone. I believe Eurydice is actually the poet, not Orpheus. Her muse Has his back to her with his ear bent to his own heart. As if what you learn making love to yourself matters More than what you learn when loving someone else.
“Most of that is me tying back to a different kind of relationship,” he says. “Who is the assassin between Eurydice and Orpheus? Who is the poet between those two? I’m thinking about…what does it mean to be married to a poet? What does it mean to be married to a motherfucker who’s gonna be playing his music no matter what? He’s a poet. It’s what he’s gonna do. But there are consequences to that. And so you might say, well, maybe she’s the poet then. I’m just…I’m wondering about the beloved as an assassin.”
This sits between us heavy on the table, the most open Hayes has been to this point in our talk. We leave it there, untouched.
I write the poems so I don’t have to talk about this shit,” Hayes tells me when I ask him which part of the response to his work he values more: his playfulness and precision with language or his sentimentality. He is not saying this to dismiss me, and we both understand this. It’s a moment in the conversation when he is talking to me as a writer, someone who he knows has likely had similar responses to questions like this. “Anything I say in a poem, I mean it,” he says. “Feeling and intuition is the only important thing to me. You can persuade someone through logic that perhaps what they’re thinking is wrong. But you can’t persuade someone that their feelings are wrong. You can’t tell a motherfucker that they ain’t hungry if they’re hungry. No words in the world can do that. So I trust feeling as a bedrock thing. Can you want to kill a motherfucker and simultaneously love them?”
To trust one’s feelings can be all-consuming, especially if those feelings are brought into a harsher light by a mess of a political moment. Hayes is invested in his obsessions, even if his obsessions are about the nation unraveling.
There are poets who are slow and deliberate speakers, working to make sure every sentence holds weight. But Hayes is a rapid-fire conversationalist, spreading his long arms wide, or gesturing with one massive hand. Like his work, he is challenging you to keep up with him and to pick out what’s worth expanding on. And if you don’t catch it, he’ll expand on it for you anyway. And in this moment the topic worth expanding on is Donald Trump.
“Everything I do has to be in service of poetry,” he says, with a little more excitement in his voice. “I can’t be waking up and thinking about Trump all day. And if I do, I have to do it in service of a poem, or else he’ll be a block.”
He is talking about boxes and how every box, like every poem, has multiple sides through which it can be entered. He decided to put Trump in a box and kept turning the box until his truth looked different from every angle. He found this to be more interesting than it would have been with, say, Barack Obama.
“Obama is super interesting to me, but I already know some of the sides to that cube. He’s a six-sided truth, but I know about half of those sides. As a brother, as a dude who loves basketball, as a dude who got old. To look at something and see yourself in it is easy. I’m not moved by that. With Trump it’s about power and the way his power has a bearing on everyone else. I can meditate on that for at least six months.”
The restraints of the sonnets have been liberating, he tells me. This is only interesting because of how the book wrestles readers inside of it and gives them little room to move within it. If anything, a reader then becomes a part of the interior of the box, which Hayes is turning around in his hand. I don’t mean this to sound negative: One of the book’s strongest points is how readers have to fight their way into and then out of it. Like all of the work Hayes has offered in his career so far, it is both inviting and asking a reader to earn enjoyment of it, in this case through a means of discomfort with the repetitive nature of the poems and their aim.
Hayes tells me he has become so obsessed with the project that he can’t unravel himself from it, which makes sense. He is conflicted, because he knows he can’t do another book like this, but he also knows that he isn’t done with the fascination. “I mean, I got seventy good ones, and I don’t want to overdo it,” he says, blending his usual cool and confidence with the anxieties he holds. “It’s like [ John] Berryman, right? He put out 77 Dream Songs, and then later he put out all of them. And like, there were some all-right ones in there, but shit. I was good with seventy-seven.”
It is political, in some ways: Hayes is surviving the world by writing against it. When I ask him if the work has made him feel any better, he matter-of-factly states, “Well, the shit is still going on, you know?”
There are other ways out, Hayes says. He draws, going to a class once a week and trying to improve his hand as a visual artist. Hayes has experience in the craft, receiving a BA from Coker College in Hartsville, South Carolina, where he studied both English and painting. His drawings and paintings provide the artwork for the covers of his books. It’s easy to get lost in the visual form, but he keeps returning to the sonnets. Twisting a forkful of mashed potatoes around, and up toward his mouth, he pauses.
“There’s no law that says an obsession can’t continue beyond the production of the obsession, you know?”
It’s getting late, and the fish over the head of Terrance Hayes has begun to droop its long face lower. This is a trick of the eye, I’m sure. Perhaps Hayes is growing taller, more excitable with conversation, and the fish is shrinking in the face of that. Van Morrison’s “Into the Mystic” is playing through the café’s speakers, and small crowds of revelers have started to filter in, the way one might expect as a night stretches its palms wider. It is perhaps late only for me. Hayes insists he doesn’t sleep much. “I go to bed around two or three in the morning and wake up around seven. I’m good with four hours a night,” he tells me, as my body involuntarily trembles at the prospect of such little time in bed. He does his best work in the hours after these, when even the revelers beside us begin to lose steam (“I like a nap, though,” he insists). This disclosure makes for an interesting moment between us: me winding down, and him warming up.
Hayes and I find ourselves in the golden hour of our conversation, too. The talk about poems and craft has perhaps drawn all it can draw from the two of us, and now we’re just talking about basketball. Hayes was an Academic All-American basketball player during his time at Coker and has remained attached to the sport. Throughout the conversation Hayes insists that he is always thinking about poems, no matter what else we’re speaking on, but he seems at ease here talking NBA. The plates are cleared off the table, and he has leaned over his drink, swinging his massive palms in one direction or another as he makes a point. An athlete and sports fan and writer, Hayes has an intimate relationship with the game. Like me, he is in it for the narratives, which I do suppose means that even in our talk about basketball, we are talking about poems.
“LeBron James shoots free throws every day,” Hayes tells me. “And you gotta think, ‘Why is this dude shooting free throws every day if he gets paid to shoot free throws?’ He’s doing that shit with no one watching, because he’s after something different.”
I nod, and Hayes continues.
“I think about that versus someone like [Philadelphia 76ers rookie] Ben Simmons, right? Ben Simmons should be a huge star right now, and he’s perplexed by that….”
I take the opportunity to interject that Simmons isn’t a huge star yet because he can’t really shoot, but Hayes is off, sprinting a mile a minute to reach the end of his thought.
“Yeah, but Kobe Bryant struggled with that same shit too, right? Kobe had to fight through the same thing of doing the things that should make you famous and expecting fame. But it ain’t about the fame, though.”
In many ways, I know what’s coming next—Hayes the speaker is rarely separate from Hayes the poet—but I let him draw back the curtain with his own language. “It’s about the glory. There’s a difference in fame and glory. Fame is when everyone else is peeping what you’re doing, but glory is when your peers recognize the work you’re putting in. Glory has to be number one. Glory has to be number one, because no one else has to be there.”
I ask the obvious question, the one about whether or not an artist or an athlete or a parent or a construction worker can have glory without fame. Because this is the thing with Hayes, who is undoubtedly famous and has basked in his share of glory. It has created a mythology around him that he seems equal parts thrilled to revel in and sometimes uncomfortable with. Minutes before the conversation took this turn, we were speaking about pressure, and in the middle of a response, Hayes shook his head and said, “God forbid I ever start writing bad poems,” and one ear might hear I know all of my poems are good, but to another, the poet is saying I don’t know what I would be without my insistence on living up to my own standards. So I wonder out loud how you survive at the intersection of fame and glory, or if you can cut one off in service of the other. Hayes takes a moment.
“Yeah, I think so. On the days I’m writing and I’m in a good groove, I hit moments where I think, ‘Where the fuck did that come from?’ It’s the closest I can get from this,” he says, gesturing toward his head, “to getting it together on that page. And that’s glory. I’m doing that for me, with no one watching, knowing that the people I’m writing for—poets—are doing the same thing. And it only happens a few times, but when it happens it feels good. I did a 360 dunk once, and I was alone in a gym. No one saw it but the other guys on my basketball team, and those are the only people I cared to see it. A 360 dunk is fucking hard. I want the people who know how difficult the work is to bear witness to the work.”
The red light above our heads has only become more aggressive in its lapping up of the darkness, and by now we are both radiating in its shine. Hayes casually regales me with a tale of watching basketball with former NBA player and coach Phil Jackson last April, a story that few poets would have in their back pocket. “We talked about Buddhism and shit. You know, it was a good afternoon,” he says in an “Isn’t New York wild?” kind of way, to which I nod, thinking about the times I’ve been to this city and felt tiny. The gist of the story is that during their first basketball-watching excursion, Jackson insisted that Hayes not mention LeBron James, whom Jackson had found himself feuding with over a Twitter debate. When the 2017 NBA Finals came around, Jackson invited Hayes to his Manhattan apartment to watch them with him, and Hayes balked. “He invited me back to watch the NBA Finals and told me I couldn’t talk about LeBron James!” Hayes says, half-yelling and half-laughing, as energetic as he has been all night. “I can’t talk about LeBron James during the NBA Finals? I like LeBron James! So I was like, ‘Nah, I’ll pass.’ I watched the Finals alone.”
It’s the kind of casual story told by Hayes during which one realizes that he moves through multiple worlds in a singular way, something that can’t be said for many of his peers, though he is still very much among them and often in service to them. He blurbs books vigorously, he reads poems endlessly, and until recently he served as the poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine. (Rita Dove took the reins in June.) He derives great pleasure from teaching—during our conversation he is most excited when talking about the ways his students show him to and through poems. But he is also someone who pens work for operas and has his face in an airport and casually watches basketball with one of the greatest basketball coaches of all time. And it all seems simple to him, something he has been working toward since he began working. Both fame and glory.
We are talking about death and isolation again, Hayes and I. It’s a fitting end to our time together. Hayes says his true inclination is to stay inside; he likes New York because he feels like he can do that here, and not many other places. He tells me he both loves and hates the way the city folds around him—loves it for its many options and hates it for its many options, all at once.
When we get to the topic of rap, Hayes is succinct, melancholic. “I think when it comes to rappers, Biggie Smalls is closest to my sensibilities,” he insists, spinning the last bit of ice around in his drink. “He scares me, and the consequences of his art, too…. The consequences of his art informed his life. I think of this like Sylvia Plath. The fact that Sylvia Plath would write ‘Ariel’ and then put her head in an oven, or the fact that Biggie Smalls would say he’s ready to die and then die. There’s something closer to the truth for me. Closer to my understanding of the consequences of what we do. The body’s relationship to the art’s consequences.”
I nod, and look at the time. When I look back up, Hayes is looking outside, while the street, drenched in sirens, howls.
Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet and critic from Columbus, Ohio.
In the twentieth episode of Ampersand, editor in chief Kevin Larimer and senior editor Melissa Faliveno preview the July/August 2018 issue, featuring a look at how authors, agents, editors, booksellers and publicists work together to reach readers; the secrets to maintaining a long-term author-agent relationship; the summer’s best debut fiction; a profile of poet Terrance Hayes; author Lauren Groff on her new story collection, Florida; self-publishing advice, writing prompts; and more.
00:01 Terrance Hayes reads an excerpt of a poem from his new collection, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin.
01:12 The cohosts discuss Lauren Groff’s complicated relationship with her state of residence, Florida, which serves as both backdrop and inspiration for her new collection of stories of the same name, out this month from Riverhead Books. Contributor Bethanne Patrick, otherwise known as @TheBookMaven, profiles Groff for the new issue of the magazine. Kevin and Melissa talk about some of the stranger aspects of Florida (hat tip to the website Florida Man) and share some of their own stories about the Sunshine State, which involve hair removal, Tinkerbell, sunburn, and unsupervised teenagers on the loose.
07:22Lauren Groff reads an excerpt from one of the stories in Florida, “Dogs Go Wolf.”
12:55Terrance Hayes reads a poem from his new collection, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, out this month from Penguin. Hayes is the cover profile of the new issue, and poet, essayist, and critic Hanif Abdurraqib, author of the essay collection They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us (Two Dollar Radio, 2017), interviewed Hayes at the Great Jones Cafe in Manhattan for the piece.
14:56Hanif Abdurraqib reads the opening section of his profile on Hayes from the new issue, “My Past and Future Assassin.”
18:52Terrance Hayes reads two more poems from his new collection, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin.
22:18 A. M. Homes, the celebrated author of more than ten books—including novels, story collections, and a memoir—reads an excerpt from the title story in her new collection, Days of Awe, out this month from Viking.
28:31 In honor of the twentieth episode of Ampersand, Kevin and Melissa compose a celebratory haiku. (With sincere apologies to the masters of the form.) If you can do better—and we’re pretty sure you can—send us your Ampersand haiku at ampersand@pw.org.
Ampersand: The Poets & Writers Podcast is a production of Poets & Writers, Inc., and is edited and mixed by Melissa Faliveno. Music for this episode is provided by Podington Bear, Blue Ducks, Audiobinger, and YACHT. Comments or suggestions? E-mail ampersand@pw.org.
The poets whose work I return to again and again answer a call that compels them, meaning their poems cannot not exist. I can’t escape them, even though what I want from poetry is lightless, weightlessness, to be untethered. The poems—for the writer and for me, the reader—create the feeling, however temporarily, that I am free.
Nicole Sealey is one such poet. Born in St. Thomas and raised in Apopka, Florida, she is the author of Ordinary Beast, published this month by Ecco, and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the 2015 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. She is also the executive director of Cave Canem, a nonprofit organization in Brooklyn, New York, that cultivates the artistic and professional growth of African American poets. In fact, in mid-June we spent a week together at Cave Canem’s retreat at the University of Pittsburgh in Greensburg. There we had our first substantial conversation, though we’ve been in each other’s orbit and mutual admirers of each other’s work for years. Despite the sweltering heat that hit us in that special landlocked way, we talked about poetry and craft, our new books—I, too, have a new collection, Good Stock Strange Blood, out in August from Coffee House Press—aesthetics and language, vulnerability and vagrancy, luxury and yearning, drag and systematic repression.
Somewhere in my thoughts I held Sealey’s poem “A Violence,” from Ordinary Beast, as we spoke. I thought of how it feels like a poem for our times; at the end, it references what the mind cannot sustain. We are left to imagine what that is, exactly, though she gives us good direction. In Between the World and Me (Spiegel & Grau, 2015), Ta-Nehisi Coates writes of the art that he was coming to love as a young man, how it “lived in this void, in the not yet knowable, in the pain, in the question.”
Our discussion spanned several days, and I felt the calling that compels us both through our focus on the craft of our poetry and how we think meaning gets made. As our conversation spread (during the week of the retreat, the Minnesota police officer on trial for the killing of Philando Castile was acquitted of all charges in the July 2016 shooting), we never overtly said the names of those people who have been unjustly killed by police, but they are ever-present nonetheless. While at the retreat, we all heard of legal absolutions that confuse the rational mind. But the conversations between most of us who attended remained focused on poetry. Why? I think—and this is what I noticed in my talk with Sealey—that the art that moves us does something else entirely than speak to the thing at hand. What we do as poets is figure out how to negotiate the limits of the so-called rational world. This is a means of survival. And it is also, finally, where weightlessness might be found.
Nicole Sealey: I don’t know if you remember, but about a decade ago I wrote a review of your debut collection for Mosaic magazine. I wrote:
Just as the great American folklorist Zora Neale Hurston encouraged readers—through her mother’s words—to “jump at the sun,” so does poet Dawn Lundy Martin urge in A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering. It is the leap, not necessarily the landing, that forces risk and invention. Martin has taken such a leap and, in the process, invented new ways in which to engage and experience language. A Gathering of Matter…does not consult with convention, but rather vehemently argues with it.
I didn’t think it possible, but Good Stock Strange Blood takes even greater leaps and risks even more. Can you trace your journey from A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering to Good Stock Strange Blood?
Dawn Lundy Martin: When I was writing A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering, I was doing two things. One, I was figuring out how to speak to childhood traumas; and second, I was thinking of black displacement—like our relationship to a postcolonial continent. So I was trying to make work about something really big and something really small, and do it via a poetics that was interested in language’s inexactitude. Language feels too bulky to speak to trauma. What happens when we open our mouths to speak it? Out comes dust. Blathering. A cry. A stammer. A circling, a return again and again to try to say what happened.
I was working from the idea that language was not enough, that it fails us—often even in regular communication, like, say, an argument with a lover—and that where poetry enters is in the re-formation and ratcheting of language, so that it does its best job at speaking. This is especially important when it comes to trauma, which has no language, and the displacement of an entire people, which is almost unimaginable. By the time I got to Good Stock Strange Blood I’d been working in the art world and influenced by the ways utterance happens in art by folks like Kara Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, and Lorna Simpson. I’d also been working a lot in the prose poem and attending to the sentence.
The sentence is such a curious method toward utterance for me. It really wants to control us with its yoke of grammar. In Discipline and Life in a Box Is a Pretty Life, the prose poem becomes a way of thinking through the concerns of freedom—both internal and external, individual and collective. In my mind, however, Good Stock is my strangest work to date. The approach to language is ranging—lots of lyric poems extracted from Good Stock on the Dimension Floor, the libretto I wrote for the politically trouble-making global artist’s collective HowDoYouSayYamInAfrican? And other approaches: essays, journaling, prose poems, poems that are poems and poems that approximate poems. Which is to say, the aesthetic approach is less contained, less namable. More vagrant.
Vagrant is the word I would use to describe Good Stock Strange Blood. But if I had to describe your work in one word, I would use “vulnerable.” Immediately, when reading Ordinary Beast, I’m struck by the opening poem’s gorgeous and stinging vulnerability. How does this kind of nakedness impact how you think about writing poetry? And when I say “vulnerable” or “naked,” I mean I feel a rawness in your work—the poems feel stripped of artifice, even as they make themselves available to us as crafted poems. This is a rare and gorgeous balance.
Sealey: Straight out of the gate there’s an assumed familiarity between the reader and myself, void of pretense. Part of the pleasure I take in being a writer and reader of poetry is this instant intimacy. By the first page, we’re practically what one would refer to as family—at this point, I’m comfortable in my nightclothes and headscarf. As you know, the relationship between reader and writer is reciprocal. We bring with us all that we are, the sum total of our experiences up to that point. There’s an exchange happening—one that encourages vulnerability, one that can transform strangers into kin. Which is why, without a second thought, I’m comfortable opening the collection with “Medical History,” its lines: “I’ve been pregnant. I’ve had sex with a man / who’s had sex with men. I can’t sleep.”
I read somewhere that in order to be likable, one mustn’t share too much too soon. I’m not convinced that this rule applies to art, particularly poetry, as some of the best work is some of the most exposed and indicting early on—take Sympathetic Little Monster by Cameron Awkward-Rich, Rummage by Ife-Chudeni A. Oputa, and Beast Meridian by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, for instance. All that to say, when poets sit down to write, we don’t think about being vulnerable. We just are.
But I so admire this idea of vagrancy. Did you consciously give yourself permission to be “more vagrant,” or was this an unconscious evolution? And I’m in love with the italicized voices that interrupt the “narrative” of Good Stock. Who are they?
Martin: Vagrancy just evolved. I’m less interested in doctrine than I used to be and more compelled by uncertainty. I know so little about how to write an essay but have been teaching myself how to write them, which is very exciting, like learning a new language. And the essays teach me about wandering. As much as I feel like the books are an evolution over time, I feel like they are also one big utterance—always circling around the same haunting themes in an attempt to get it down better. I think of that thing my mother does when she’s listening. She doodles by tracing a word or scribbles over and over, making a deep imprint.
In terms of the italicized voices, sometimes they are an interior voice I want to gift the reader. It’s the voice in my head—or a fabrication of it—or a certain register, which in a way is an invitation into my heart. In other moments, it can be like singing into one’s own ear. I happen to be, probably to my own detriment, a fairly abstract thinker—meaning the voice I whisper into my own ear is like a clock questioning time. When I write, however, “Something larger than ourselves to hold us,” I am writing about black people and thinking very concretely about how we as black people have historically always been left to build our own apparatuses for our own support, defense, relaxation, and protection.
And speaking of support, answer this: If someone you don’t know approaches you with an open hand and that open hand, you understand, is open for you to place a poem into, which poem do you place into it from Ordinary Beast and why? You know nothing about the person or what they need, just that their hand is open, and that they are desperate.
Sealey: Without a doubt I’d place “Hysterical Strength” in the hand. The first half of the poem describes true accounts of superhuman strength—a child lifts a car, a woman fights a bear, etcetera. These accounts are then juxtaposed with the strength black people have had to harness to exist in a world that, I would argue, has for centuries tried (and failed) to kill us. The poem speaks to our struggle and to our strength. I need that someone to know that they’re not imagining things, that this is not normal and that they’re stronger than some people would have them believe. Yes, I would hand over “Hysterical Strength.”
When I hear news of a hitchhiker struck by lightning yet living, or a child lifting a two-ton sedan to free his father pinned underneath, or a camper fighting off a grizzly with her bare hands until someone, a hunter perhaps, can shoot it dead, my thoughts turn to black people— the hysterical strength we must possess to survive our very existence, which I fear many believe is, and treat as, itself a freak occurrence.
There have been so many poems that have saved me in this same way. The most significant being Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die.” Whenever I get to thinking otherwise, that poem affirms that I’m not imagining things, that this is not normal, and that I’m stronger than some people would have me believe.
What about you? If someone approaches you for a poem, which from Good StockStrange Blood do you give that person?
Martin: There are these lines in the middle of the new book—a square block of italicized text:
Symptomatic of being a slave is to forget you’re a slave, to participate in industry as a critical piece in its motor. At night you fall off the wagon because it’s like falling into your self.
This is a reminder that we have to be vigilant, especially now with people running the country who are explicit in their disdain for black people, women, queer people, and the poor. The other day I was listening to this heartbreaking podcast about the resurgence of predatory home-lending practices. Instead of buyers acquiring mortgages, mortgage companies are offering “contracts” and telling buyers that this is a cheap route toward home ownership. “Buyers” never accumulate equity, so as soon as they miss a payment they’re out. Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about this in “The Case for Reparations.” This was one way black people were kept from owning homes in the 1960s and ’70s. The practice is back. And guess who’s the secretary of treasury. A guy who has made billions from people losing their homes. Playing the game often doesn’t work—you know, being a good citizen, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.
But turning back to aesthetics, I’m energized by the ranging approaches to telling stories in Ordinary Beast and the range of forms you inhabit and invent. How did you develop these multiple means toward narrative? And I’m interested in how drag and gender is configured in the work. I love the emergence of all these drag queens who speak up through the interstices of the book via epigraph.
Sealey: In the movie Love Jones, the character Darius Lovehall says, “When people who have been together a long time say that the romance is gone, what they’re really saying is they’ve exhausted the possibility.” I say this to say, these multiple means toward narrative is my attempt to keep the relationship I have with poetry interesting…yet manageable. Writing is hard, at least for me. Having an architectural plan with which to imagine and engage poems makes the process less so. I love form for precisely this reason and find the constraints ironically freeing—the restrictions actually lend themselves to specific music, associations, and imagery that probably wouldn’t happen otherwise. This is definitely true of the various forms in the collection.
For the last decade I’ve been at work on “Legendary,” a series of personae sonnets inspired by the queens featured in Paris Is Burning, a documentary film about drag pageants in 1980s Harlem. Thus far I’ve drafted about a half dozen poems—only three of which were solid enough to make it into Ordinary Beast. What most interested me is the double interiority of it all, the idea of being a subgroup of an already marginalized community. In a perfect world—one free of racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, and transphobia—these queens, who were at the top of their game and art, might have lived the fabulous lives they emulated; instead, their high-ranking status was limited to makeshift ballrooms. The series acknowledges their restricted authority and, in so doing, is as much an assertion of their power as it is commentary on the lack thereof.
I’m interested in the way you use fragment and fracture as tools to reconstruct “truth” in Good Stock Strange Blood. “—The Holding Place—” is a great example of this.
Martin: When I look back at some of my earlier work and the way I used the em dash, I understand the usage to be a literal stutter, cut speech that won’t come out. Like trying to speak with a hand around the neck. In Good Stock, the fragment is a disruptive force to the poem itself. “—The Holding Place—” in particular is meant to self-destruct in the speaker’s attempt to grapple with her own blackness. Originally this piece was in the libretto, and the speaker, NAVE, I imagined, had been born from the head of Sarah from Adrienne Kennedy’s one-act play Funnyhouse of a Negro. Being born black on earth has rendered NAVE both mutant—her body made of many arches and windows—and crazy. NAVE’s is a madness meant to speak to what racism can produce. The truth is the poem can’t hold all of this, so it falls apart in these places of radical ellipses. I’m more than willing to let the poem slip out of the reader’s grasp at times to get as close as possible to the utterance that enacts the near impossibility of our simply being.
A little game I’ve played over the course of my four books is to borrow a line or two from a previous book in each new book. In this case “matter that matters” is extracted with slight variation from A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering and in its new location doing completely different work on what “good stock” might mean to American black bodies.
Ordinary Beast is such a striking title—hard and soft at the same time. I noticed how beasts and animals find several locations in the book. In the last poem, that beautiful moment, “There’s a name for the animal / love makes of us” still resonates in my imagination. What is the beast to you?
Sealey: Those lines from “Object Permanence,” the final poem in the collection, speak to how love can transform someone into something wholly unrecognizable—if we’re lucky, into something better. Whatever “better” looks like. The speaker seems surprised by her own affection for her beloved, by her own capacity to love, which suggests a shift in the way the speaker now engages with “love.” I can’t imagine her having similar thoughts about the love that came before the one she muses over in the poem.
I just did a quick roll call in my mind of all the animals in Ordinary Beast—fish, horses, tadpoles, a bear, scarabs, goats, elephants, locusts, dogs, caterpillars, unidentified “strays” as well as a variety of birds, one of which is made of fire. Fun fact about me is that back in the day I was studying to become a veterinarian. Obviously, that didn’t pan out, but I’ve maintained my interest in animals, human beings included. I think we’d like to think that we’re more evolved than ordinary beasts, but the truth is we’ve got some growing to do. As a species that prides itself on its consciousness, there are many who are content to live in the dark. And even more who would have us join them. What is the beast to me? At the moment, it is mankind—some men more than others.
Dawn Lundy Martin teaches in the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh and is codirector of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. She is the author of several books and chapbooks, including A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering (University of Georgia Press, 2007), winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize; Discipline (Nightboat Books, 2011), which was selected for the Nightboat Books Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Candy, a limited-edition letterpress chapbook (Albion Books, 2011); The Main Cause of the Exodus (O’clock Press 2014); The Morning Hour, selected by C. D. Wright for the 2003 Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship; and Life in a Box Is a Pretty Life (Nightboat Books, 2015), which won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry. Her latest collection, Good Stock Strange Blood, was published by Coffee House Press in August. Her nonfiction writing has been published in the New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and boundary2.
Dawn Lundy Martin (left) and Nicole Sealey at Cave Canem’s 2017 retreat at the University of Pittsburgh in Greensburg. (Credit: Richard Kelly)
Ada Limón is a North Star poet for me. She’s up there with Lucille Clifton, W. S. Merwin, and Adelia Prado in a great influential constellation. I’m drawn to Limón for the same reasons I’m drawn to the others: It’s as much for her surprising and sublime departures as for the earthbound truths they lay bare. And I have feelings when I’m inside her poems. I sigh. I laugh out loud. I cry. A lot. I do, I cry a lot.
Often when people hear of a reader having an emotional response to a poem, the engine assumed to be driving that response is the narrative subject matter: the familiarity of it, perhaps, or the dramatic imagining of it. It’s the compliment narrative poets like myself have come to dread—the relatability of the poem. That happened, or that could have happened to me, thus this is a successful piece of art. And, of course, great poems like the kind Limón writes often incorporate emotional subject matter and narrative. But focusing on subject matter alone doesn’t do powerful poetry like Limón’s justice. What drives her poems—what makes her new collection, The Carrying, so moving and masterful—is her dexterity with voice and diction and her giftedness with metaphor. It is her deep wellspring of surprising and evocative images and her syntactic superpowers. Most of all, it’s her intellect and intelligence. The poems are keen reflections of a mind constantly at work, seeing and wondering and moving toward meaning but not always the meaning to which the poem and its reader thought they were headed.
The Carrying, published in August by Milkweed Editions, follows Limón’s four previous collections, including Bright Dead Things (Milkweed Editions, 2015), which was a finalist for not only the 2015 National Book Award, but also the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award. It was also named one of the top ten poetry books of the year by the New York Times. Her earlier books include Lucky Wreck (Autumn House Press, 2006), This Big Fake World: A Story in Verse (Pearl Editions, 2006), and Sharks in the Rivers (Milkweed Editions, 2010). Limón, forty-two, serves on the faculty of the low-residency MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte in North Carolina and the 24 Pearl Street online program for the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. She splits her time between Lexington, Kentucky, and Sonoma, California.
We had this conversation over the course of a week, just as the first advance copies of The Carrying were making their way into the world and just after I’d swallowed my copy whole.
Carrie Fountain: Ada, your book blew me away. Even the second time I read it—“Come on, Fountain, get it together”—I could hardly do anything but cry and sigh and gasp at the art of the poems, especially the very surprising revelations on which they open at their endings. It’s a gift. There are readers out there right now ready for, waiting for, needing these poems to change their lives.
As a maker and a reader of poetry collections—these weird books that aren’t necessarily narrative or even inherently linear, but also aren’t random in terms of tone or subject matter or voice—one of the things I admire most is how full The Carrying is and how complete and collected it feels as an artistic gesture. There is so much here of the world, of the beauty and responsibility and heartbreak of going through life in a human—a woman’s—body, and deep existential questions about life and legacy and fate. So, how did you make it? You know: How? And how did you know when you were finished, when it had gone from a group of poems to a collection?
Ada Limón: Oh, Carrie, thank you for this. It’s odd, the making of a poetry book, isn’t it? We write one poem at a time. One small poem and then, hopefully, another one comes. With The Carrying, I was experiencing long periods of painful silence, feeling completely overwhelmed by the degenerating state of the world, but then I would be reminded of how writing can bring me back to the world, into my being. In many ways the poems in The Carrying were answering the question, “Where do I put all this?” The poems came in fits and starts, and sometimes they’d flood over me, and sometimes I’d stare into the abyss for a long time wondering if I’d ever write again. When I finally had about thirty poems, I realized I was writing something real, making a complicated living thing. Then I started to push myself to plunge further, to be as veracious as possible and follow the craft, follow the song as far as it would take me. Before I even realized it, the manuscript was nearly done. To be totally honest, the book still terrifies me. But maybe that’s a good thing?
Fountain: I think I know that terror, and the accompanying feeling that maybe it’s a good thing, a good signal about the particular qualities of the art you’re about to release into the world. I’d love to hear you say more. Did you feel this with your previous books? What is it about The Carrying that terrifies you?
Limón: I think what scares me the most is that I’m writing more about the body and from a place of physical vulnerability. In my previous books I have been open to an emotional vulnerability, but in The Carrying I address more of the frailty of my own body. I also think this book is more overtly political than other books I’ve written. I feel like some part of me has lost interest in play, in poetry for the sake of play, and now I want only to get to the root of things. This book feels driven by a serious engine. I’m not saying it doesn’t have hope. I do have hope, too, but much of the poems are written from inside the well with only a glimmer of light coming from the earth’s surface.
Fountain: “I want to only get to the root of things.” How perfect a sentence to describe these poems. So many roots in this book. Aside from the poems that are about familial roots, and the poems that locate the body as a place where things may or may not take root, there are also so many actual roots. One of the poems I’ve returned to again and again, “The Burying Beetle,” ends with these lines:
I lost God awhile ago. And I don’t want to pray, but I can picture the plants deepening right now into the soil, wanting to live, so I lie down among them, in my ripped pink tank top, filthy and covered in sweat, among red burying beetles and dirt that’s been turned and turned like a problem in the mind.
Even in these haunting lines from your poem “A New National Anthem,” we find something dark and violent taking root beneath the surface:
Perhaps, the truth is, every song of this country has an unsung third stanza, something brutal snaking underneath us as we blindly sing the high notes with a beer sloshing in the stands hoping our team wins.
There’s so much going on in these poems under the surface. Many of them make their turn down there, below. Is this something you were working toward actively as an organizing metaphor, or was it more a subconscious thing—a thing beneath the surface—or was it coincidence? Tell me what it means to you to “get to the root of things” in poems.
Limón: In your poems I always see the trembling thing underneath. I suppose the main thing that I mean by “the root of things” is that I am most interested in the process of writing poems as questions, as a troubling of the water, sending down the echo sounder and seeing what comes back. But also my obsession with physical roots is true too. Trees, trees, and trees. No one has ever called me a nature poet, but nature is what I return to most frequently. The earth below our feet, the water that moves through us and connects us to the oceans and rivers. And how we are nature too, even in our own destruction. How the human animal is also an animal.
Fountain: It makes me wonder what a nature poet is, if you’re not considered one. It isn’t that there’s not enough nature in your poems. I’m laughing thinking of the nature quota set by…Gary Snyder, Mary Oliver? Counting how many birds alight on branches in early morning, how many vistas, how many species of cacti named.
But then again, your poems aren’t contained wholly in nature—not containable by any category, really. Your poems contain the natural world, but also the world-world, the world of highway overpasses and torn pink tank tops and your funny friend Manuel—who’s my friend too! And beyond the image level, your poems aren’t “about” nature. I read “The Burying Beetle” to my husband, and the two of us discussed it at length, its many turns and gestures. Neither of us ever talked about it as a nature poem.
Still, I’m interested in these labels because I think they’re sometimes more about who gets to write what, or who is expected to write what. I think that’s changing—the lines are blurring, the categories are widening, there are more voices—but not fast enough.
Your poem “The Contract Says: We’d Like the Conversation to Be Bilingual” examines this, doesn’t it, in a searing, hilarious way? The world sometimes wants to tell poets what they as poets, especially women, especially writers of color, should write about. Your poems and your presence in the world of poetry upends these expectations in such a wonderful way. You’re you. You’re Ada. You truly contain multitudes. I think this is important and inspirational for the generation of poets coming up.
When my first book came out, someone in a review called it “fake ecofeminism.” It was a man, shocker. Another guy—in the Harvard Review—said the poems were obsessed with my “body parts.” Back then I was hurt. I felt ashamed. There were only one or two body parts in that book. Most of the poems are about the conquest of the New World. Still, I heard that review and I just took it in. I didn’t know any better. Maybe I was too much: too sexual, too conversational, too woman. And at the same time, maybe I wasn’t enough—not intellectual enough, not valid enough, not a man’s woman poet.
Then, by the time I put out my second book, which is a lot about having my first child, I’d somehow unburdened myself from that worry. I think I’d begun to divest myself—rather organically—of my own internalized misogyny. I’d begun selling off the little acre of patriarchy between my ears that I’d so long cultivated without knowing. And with that, my readers changed. My ideal readers changed. I wasn’t writing to satisfy Mr. Body Parts anymore. In fact, I was looking him in the face and saying—kindly, because of course—“Maybe these poems aren’t for you. That’s not my problem.”
Some of the most powerful poems in The Carrying are about intimate things, women’s things: trying to get pregnant, coming to terms with not getting pregnant, the many ways we’re forced to change our idea of what our lives will be in the child-rearing department. Even the love poems here—and there are so many, so lovely—are about the tender, weird, specific qualities of married love.
I wonder: Do you feel there’s been a shift in the way women’s voices are read in poetry, especially women of color? And maybe all this is a roundabout way of asking, Who is your ideal reader? Do you have one? Has it changed?
Limón: I think you’re right. The uselessness of poetic and stylistic categories is becoming more evident as poetry and the world continue to evolve. The idea of divesting ourselves of our own internalized misogyny, of granting ourselves permission to write about whatever world we live in, of silencing the grouchy goateed hipster critic inside that writes cheeky snark from his parents’ basement in order to prove his own intelligence, that’s some of the heaviest work we do. Silencing that good-ol’-boy critic that lives in you and scares you into thinking, “Should I take the ‘I’ out? Should I erase my being?” I’m still working on silencing that dude. Daily.
When Bright Dead Things came out, I was nervous about the fact that it spoke about “the body” and loss, and I worried that it would be seen as sentimental. For the first time in my poems, I wasn’t thinking of writing to prove anything, to show off formal acrobatics, but rather I was writing the poems I needed for my own survival. I was disavowing myself from a “project” and just working on what mattered to me. I had no idea what would happen once those poems entered the world. It was thrilling to see people respond favorably, but it was absolutely not what I was expecting. Still, there were reviews that spoke of “identity” being the driving engine and even “shallow identity verse,” which seemed to be saying that if I wrote about being a woman, being Latinx—or, oddly, even if I didn’t—by default my poems were being driven by only a sense of alienation or, worse, manipulation. I maintain that this does not happen as much to men.
It’s funny that you brought up a reviewer writing “fake ecofeminism” about your work, as I received the descriptor “bogus feminism” in a particularly negative review, written by a man. I don’t think of it anymore, and I do like what you say about, “Hey there, this isn’t for you.” I happen to like the ocean and black-and-white movies, but it doesn’t mean we all have to. You can go on liking slushy machines and Fox News. I do think there’s been a shift in how we not only read women, but also how we talk about the work. It’s slow, however, and it’s frustrating, but it’s shifting. I think, for me, it all comes down to permission and capacity. I’m giving myself permission to write the poems I want—as different as they all are—and I am focusing on the human capacity to hold within us so many different things at once.
I don’t know if I have an ideal reader, but I know that with The Carrying, I’m writing for someone who perhaps has gone through the same things as I have, or similar things. Perhaps the older you get, you realize that so many people are suffering in so many ways and you get tired of privileging your own pain, or imagining your own isolation. I suppose, if this book is for anyone, it’s for those who have both struggled and searched for a way back into the world.
Fountain: This isn’t your first rodeo by any stretch. The Carrying is your fifth collection. You’ve been at this a while now. We’ve talked a little about how this book feels different now, as it makes its way into the world, but I wonder, too, how has your writing practice changed over the years? What have you learned about yourself as a writer, and what continues to evolve?
Limón: Like you, I’ve written for a long time now. I’ve written seriously and with purpose for twenty years. I’ve written a failed novel, a messy draft of a YA novel, and poems, poems, poems. So many words, and all the while I hope I am getting to be a better, smarter writer every day. Speaking of which, I’ve only just started I Am Not Missing—your new young adult novel—and I’m obsessed with Miranda the half-Mexican girl who is the story’s protagonist. She’s wonderful.
One of the things I’ve learned this far into a life in language is to be grateful about all of this. I get to read and spend time with words as a vocation. Yes, it’s work, and there is so much failure and so much getting it wrong. But still, we are so lucky. I wish people talked about that more. Just to be able to do this work, to meet people along the way, to celebrate other writers, to live in a life of words? I can’t tell you how grateful I am for that gift. As corny as that sounds, I don’t know where I’d be without poetry.
Fountain: I’d love to hear more about your fiction writing. So many times, while reading your poems, I’ve thought, “I’d love to read Ada’s fiction.” I have this feeling only for my favorite poets, the ones who really take me to a place and time. This isn’t about the narrative quality, but rather it’s about a surprising, specific image and inviting voice. Do you have a yen for writing fiction?
Limón: I love that you ask that. I do love to write fiction, but I’m not sure if it’s my strong suit. I think I need to keep practicing and keep learning. Right now, I think I write very “poetic” fiction. You know, there’s a lot of a woman standing in a field thinking about other times she stood in a field. All my plot shifts are emotional and psychological. What I love most is describing—both the landscape and the humans and their interactions. I love dialogue, too. But I think I’m a little too satisfied when nothing happens. That’s what I admire so much about your work. You’re this exquisite poet with an excellent ear, and an internal engine of unraveling drives your poems, but you are also able to write a real story. I Am Not Missing just moves so well and real things happen, big things. I’m envious of your storytelling ability. Maybe I’ll get there someday. Maybe my characters will stop daydreaming and go on a real adventure one of these days.
Fountain: I know The Carrying is hot off the presses, but I can’t help but want to know what you’re working on now. Where are you headed?
Limón: I think I will work on napping next. And gardening and breathing and wandering. It’s been a wild three or four years making this book, and I might rest my poem brain a bit. That said, I just wrote a poem today. So maybe poems will just come eventually? I am also working on some personal essays. These days I’m just trying not to rage too much at the world while still staying active and aware and working toward truth. On a good day, I just work on being a real person who wants to make real living things and give them to the world.
Carrie Fountain’s poems have appeared in Tin House, Poetry, and the New Yorker, among many other publications. She is the author of the collections Burn Lake (Penguin, 2010) and Instant Winner (Penguin, 2014). Her first novel, I’m Not Missing, was published by Flatiron Books in July. Fountain received her MFA as a fellow at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas and is now writer-in-residence at St. Edward’s University in Austin. She lives in Austin with her husband, playwright and novelist Kirk Lynn, and their two children.
Reginald Dwayne Betts is the author of A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison (Avery, 2009) and three poetry collections, including Shahid Reads His Own Palm (Alice James Books, 2010), Bastards of the Reagan Era (Four Way Books, 2015), and, most recently, Felon, published in October by W. W. Norton. An exploration of love, fatherhood, and grace, the new book is also a testament to the trauma of years in prison as well as the challenges of life postincarceration—subjects Betts knows well. Arrested and charged with three felonies in an armed carjacking when he was sixteen, Betts was tried as an adult and sentenced to nine years in prison. After his release he struggled to sidestep his record but went on to graduate from Prince George’s Community College in Largo, Maryland, and earn a bachelor’s degree from the University of Maryland in College Park and an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, North Carolina. In 2016 Betts graduated from Yale Law School, and a year later he passed the Connecticut bar exam and eventually was recommended for admission to the bar. He now lives in New Haven with his wife and two children; he is studying for his PhD in law at Yale.
We asked poet, author, and activist Mahogany L. Browne to visit Betts in New Haven as the publication date for Felon approached.
I am drawn to Reginald Dwayne Betts like any homesick person looking for family. In him I see my gone kin with every expletive sentence laced lovely. The Metro-North New Haven train station is not that different from the one where I wait for my family car to retrieve me from the dusty Amtrak station in Emeryville, California. A city bus billows heat nearby, and a man smoking a cigarette looks annoyed at the lot of it all before I notice a responsible-sized SUV pull into the driveway, windows down. Bucket hat and prescription glasses can’t hide the identity of Betts, a poet I’ve studied from articles, via Cave Canem archives, and remember from a previously attended overcrowded writers conference.
Name a song that tells a man what to expect after prison;
As an AP literature student in high school, I was taught very early about poetry and who it belongs to. When I revised the work of Dante’s Inferno for an end-of-semester assignment using the lyrics of NWA, I was scolded quickly. Betts is exactly what I was told poetry is not, and is very much the heartbeat of the language. He is a contradiction of both the trajectory of poetry and prison. When speaking he commands attention with succinct hand choreography, and on the page he dares readers to find themselves in the text; the familiar language, the melody swinging both blues and hip-hop, and the traditional line breaks conversing with court documents turned erasure poems. The origami form and folklore is a contemporary investigation of an admonished narrative we rarely forgive.
Explains Occam’s razor: you’re still a suspect after prison.
Betts, a husband and father of two, talks about his time in prison like it was a lifetime ago and like it was yesterday. Time is a construct when the mind is bound to trauma. I know this song of farewell by heart. In his memoir, A Question of Freedom, Betts writes, “I was sixteen and headed to prison for nine years, which meant there would be no prom, no first night driving down Silver Hill Road, no going off to college.” But today, years and years later, Betts is sipping on water for lime and thinking about thinking. He doesn’t take the silence for granted. He also doesn’t speak like a man afraid of what the world thinks.
What brought you to write your newest collection, Felon? I’m getting letters from people in prison all the time. I’m working in a federal courthouse. I’m reading habeas corpus petitions. I’m reading about crimes that happened and the people who appeal. This shit is not just the face of incarceration as a nonviolent drug offender. This is nothing like people imagine incarceration is. And then it’s also, it’s subtle—it’s like, you getting deported because you got a drug beef. All of that bullshit is like, no—they’re deporting people right now who they’ve labeled criminals that shouldn’t get deported. I’m thinking about the language that we choose to use to justify how we treat certain people. And because I don’t want to get treated that way, I want to run from that language. But all that says is that I’m looking for some other kind of permission. I want to be a Yale Law graduate because that means you’ll give me a job—instead of being a convict, which means you won’t. I’m writing the book while I’m in law school. I’m writing the book while I’m being a father. I’m writing the book while I’m working as a public defender. So some of those poems happen because a kid that I was representing on a robbery beef, who probably did pull a pistol out and put it in somebody’s face, who probably did say it was a BB gun but ain’t nobody ever find it, and all the while I’m talking to his mom, and she says, “You know, Mr. Betts, I’ve never been around someone like you before. You know, you don’t curse.” And I’m thinking what the fuck? I curse and I got three felonies. Everybody you’ve been around is like me. It’s like a veil and then a mask and then a brown bag over my head. Because at this point, I can’t reveal all the many parts of myself.
The point is, that’s who is in the book. And maybe that doesn’t come out explicitly. But the moms is fascinating. It’s like the way in which somebody you know interacts with the system, and the system don’t give a fuck about them. Everything we know about this world is on the outskirts of incarceration.
Did your interactions with your client change once they learned you had been incarcerated? I told her because I was tired of acting like I ain’t did a bid. Her son knew anyway. Her son was my first client, and he told me when we met, “Oh, you the one that’s been locked up?” And I didn’t tell him. My supervisor didn’t tell him. I for real don’t know how he knew. I mean I had a few clients that knew and found out, and they came to me and said, “I read your story; it’s impressive.” Some ways it changes because they expected different shit from you. But the world is the world. And that’s what the book is. I’m trying to be all of this shit. Well, not me specifically. But sometimes me specifically. You know, be a good father, but sometimes I yell at my kid. Sometimes I’m supposed to come home. But instead of coming home I go have another drink at the bar. Sometimes I yell at strangers.
Betts’s eyes go dark. He wrings his fingers methodically before sharing a story he once told his wife. While he is a natural-born storyteller—this tale extends beyond the appetizers and draws the attention of nearby diners—with every detail, it is clear how serious this story is. Violence haunts his accent: pounce-ready, and each sentence unfolds like a staged film. For a minute, I can see the story right in front of me: a car wreck of hypermasculinity daring to make a moment into a lifetime of regret. Betts shakes his head at the memory. The picture blurs out of focus as we hold the lesson up to the light: Any one of us can become a victim of our adrenaline if we don’t give it a beat to go still. After the intensity subsides he bookends the story with this response from his wife: “You can’t be a thug listening to a Marlon James e-book and eating a falafel sandwich.” We both laugh. Centered by her perspective. In her quick retort, what she is saying is, “How could you have come this far and consider jeopardizing it over something so fleeting?” The restaurant’s music punctuates the sound of dropping silverware.
My lover don’t believe in my sadness. She says whisky, not time, is what left me wrecked after prison.
Your wife shows up in your poems, and she’s been there in these moments to make you see yourself. How does your partnership—not just being a partner but being a father—how has it informed your writing? How has it pushed forward or harnessed that energy? I think I’m figuring it out. I remember when I was writing a nonfiction piece and I was trying to figure out what she thought when we had first met. And I wanted her thoughts. And I don’t remember what I wrote about besides how I was real nerdy and shit, and it’s hard to imagine me going to prison. She just didn’t believe the story. Not that she thought I was lying but that it just didn’t register for her the way it might have for me. She asks all the time when am I going to write about something other than prison. And I’m like, “I don’t know, maybe never.” But I do think that being Black and being married—I met my wife just a few months after I came home, we started dating a little over a year after I came home, and we’ve been married going on eleven years. And the shit is challenging because I think so much of our relationship—the shit I’ve chosen to do has driven some of the decisions about where we live and what she can do. And I think we’ve become more aware of that lately. But I think she’s made me better though. Shit, that sounds like a cliché. But I think we complement each other.
What would your wife, Terese, say to me about your work ethic? I don’t know. I think she’d be more honest. She would recognize I’m not the greatest at time management or have a realistic idea of what I’m capable of. But I usually do most of the shit that I say I’m going to do. I think I’m a good dad. We’re good parents. Our kids love each other. They’re spoiled. They got stamps in their passport. Micah has been to more poetry readings than most. This is how I know my wife loves me. She worked at a community college in Maryland, and she got me tickets to see Lucille Clifton. Me and Micah went to the reading; he was like two. He’s been all over. He’s seen Sonia Sanchez. I took him with me to Chicago; that was pretty dope. He’s spent seven days with me in Chicago when I read with Patricia Smith. Then I took my younger son, Miles, with me to do events in Indiana.
I’m writing a piece now about meeting Lucille Clifton. I was just happy to be in the space. [But when I first started going to poetry events] Micah had to come with me because his mom was working. I remember he asked, “Is there a toy for me in the poem?” He was young enough; I guess he figured the toy might spring out like a jack-in-the-box.
What do your sons think of you as a poet? They don’t pay that shit no mind. They’re like, “Ms. Such-and-Such said I should write a book, so I’m really excited about writing a book!” Where I’m like, “You know your dad writes books! With an s!” And they’re like “Yeah, but Ms. Such-and-Such knows what she’s doing.”
Dear Warden: my time been served, let me go
If the system is the villain, then it’s really easy for us to work. But if we have a conversation about what is incarceration, then we have to have a real conversation about how do you respond to somebody who has done a harmful thing. And I feel like one of the things I wanted this book to do is put me in a situation to be a part of conversations that demanded that we ask, “What is the appropriate response to this harm that has happened?” How do we acknowledge harm? Like, I know one innocent person in prison. And it’s fucked up—because I want to be a part of the conversation, but I realize I don’t have real answers for it. But maybe the book is just putting the shit on the table. Because I ain’t got no resolution. And the book don’t got no resolution. It’s not a bootstrap narrative. It’s a book admitting to the struggle.
Do you ever reimagine justice? Restorative justice. But so much of that is invested in the one incident. And I don’t know how you gel that with the accumulation of harm. I’m trying to become more educated about restorative justice around sexual violence and domestic violence. But some of the conversations we have are just dishonest. We haven’t figured it out yet because we ain’t got enough power to be responsible for sending people to jail. We got to be serious about the work of asking real questions.
Would you say poetry thrives off of our inability to be a certain kind of honest, responsible and accountable? I would say it suffers. The best poets figure out how to push against that. How to think about that. I think the space between rhetoric and poetry—or the distance you try to span between what is rhetoric and what is poetry—is a mission that I might just not know. I think sometimes we demand a kind of certainty to poetry that is antithetical to the practice of it.
More recent poetry has been used as a political tool for some; for others the personal and the political is one and the same, and they aren’t looking for a new and improved platform to share their poems about police brutality—is it a performance or…? I think what you’re saying is absolutely true. It’s the worst of its kind because it’s almost like “this is my chance to make some kind of gesture toward justice.” Even though the political is faux political. It’s more: I want my poem to give you a political education, but I don’t want my poem to be a part of the politics of change. Look, AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] ain’t reading my shit. She’s up there talking about how people at the borders ain’t criminals. She would never say that if she read my poems. But I trust people to say, “Let’s get them to read this.” This is why I like CRC [Civil Rights Corps]. These attorneys are fighting for bail money—they don’t know shit about you. They have no clue. And I’m on their board. I started a conversation with [CRC founder and executive director] Alec Karakatsanis years ago, and when they had the opportunity to give artists money, they did it. So he was invested in the idea that art should be involved in the work that they do. Art should be a part of what they do because if artists want to be political, it has to be honest, informative, and it can’t be what an organization produces.
I try to produce work to help somebody know something of a world they don’t know. I’m acknowledging that even our slice isn’t the world.
I remember I wrote this poem about Tamir Rice. And the poem was like, if you murder my child, at some point the blood on the concrete is going to be yours. I wrote this while driving my kids to school, and in the back of my head the video of Tamir Rice being murdered by police is playing. It’s like, how does that exist in one mind? I think artists and poets who aren’t in the profession, where our craft isn’t motivated by getting the bag, when we have the time and space to write honestly about something we can’t escape, that is the best part of the work.
Titus Kaphar painted my portrait, then dipped it in black tar. He knows redaction is a dialect after prison.
I think I’m still figuring out how to talk to different people. I want to be on The Breakfast Club [a popular hip-hop radio show in NYC], and I want to be on The Daily Show. Poetry should be in the middle of the civic discussion of what’s going on in this country. And we got to figure out how to do our thing and have it stand up without the rhetorical purpose of didacticism. And sometimes it’s hard to say. I don’t want to think about my kids hurt and domestic violence and date rape—I don’t want to think about that; I want to be as far away from that conversation as possible. But if one in four women in this country has experienced sexual assault, then how can I be a writer in this country and not engage with that conversation? And if I engage with it in a suggested way, which is like “demonize, demonize, criminalize, criminalize,” then how am I going say I’m against mass incarceration? Art is supposed to be a mechanism to help us become better than when we came to the page. Both the reader and the writer.
Who do you want to be thinking about this and grappling with these questions? If poetry is really what people die for the lack of, then I want the poem to be in the center of that. It’s 2019, and everybody you know is three minutes away from a felony. The real argument is: Men in prison doing fifteen to twenty years, murderers, dudes that got bodies, are only there because they in a war they didn’t enlist in. The gambit of failed and struggling human beings that exist in prison is not that different from what exists on the outside. So when someone suggests “we need to incarcerate less people in prison because they become worse in prison,” it’s like, no, we need to incarcerate less people because all of us become less.
Them fools say you can become anything when it’s over.
Today Betts is a practicing lawyer. He is a freelance journalist. Today he needs to rush back from this interview for family obligations. Today Betts serves as a consultant to advocacy organizations against mass incarceration and invites those affected by the severity of the prison system into the room. Betts is more than an ex-felon and redeemed citizen; he is equal parts Shakespearean swagger and neighborhood bar pastor. His humility lies behind the stories of masculinity, prison violence, and survival. Today his humility is buckled safely into the rear seat of the car as he whips swiftly past a red light in order for this writer to make the Metro-North train back to Brooklyn on time.
Mahogany L. Browne is a writer, organizer, and educator. The interim executive director of Urban Word NYC and the poetry coordinator at St. Francis College, Browne has received fellowships from Agnes Gund, AIR Serenbe, Cave Canem, Poets House, the Mellon Research Forum, and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. She is the author of Woke: A Young Poet’s Call to Justice, forthcoming from Roaring Brook Press in March 2020; Woke Baby and Black Girl Magic, both published by Roaring Brook Press in 2018; Kissing Caskets (YesYes Books, 2017); and Dear Twitter: Love Letters Hashed Out Online in 140 Characters or Less (Penmanship Books, 2010). She is also the founder of Woke Baby Book Fair, a nationwide diversity literature campaign. As an Art for Justice grantee, she is completing her first book of essays about mass incarceration and its effect on women and children. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
In November the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Flamboyan Foundation’s Arts Fund announced the inaugural recipients of the Letras Boricuas Fellowships, a new award for Puerto Rican writers living either on the island or within the U.S. diaspora. Seven fellowships were awarded for poetry, eight for fiction, four for creative nonfiction, and one for children’s literature; each fellow received an unrestricted grant of $25,000. In a press release Mellon president Elizabeth Alexander characterized the group as showcasing the “depth and breadth of Puerto Rico’s stories and histories across literary genres and a range of styles.” In addition to receiving funding, the fellows will be invited to a gathering in San Juan in 2023 to meet one another and connect with a second cohort for which applications will open later this year. Writers must have published a book or three pieces in literary journals in the past five years, with the exception of spoken word poets, who may submit three links to videos of performances at public events.
The inaugural fellows are diverse in their backgrounds, aesthetics, and sociopolitical commitments. Fellow Xavier Valcárcel, a creative nonfiction writer and poet who was born in San Juan and grew up in Loíza, emphasizes that Puerto Rican literature has long flourished because of the labor of noninstitutional writer communities. He says Puerto Rican literature “survives, is known, and shines thanks to the tireless effort of self-management by writers who are also editors, school and university professors, librarians, booksellers, and book distributors—and not thanks to the State or institutions,” and he believes that the fellowship is a sign of support and recognition for this work that has already been done. Valcárcel describes his creative growth as linked to the “violence and beauty of an archipelago that does not rest or end” and says his writing reflects many confluent identities: “the ‘queer,’ the Puerto Rican experience, the trapped against the sea, the broken, the dreams of the possible and the impossible, from a voice that is not just one but multiple voices at the same time.”
Carmen R. Marín, a fellow in poetry, left Puerto Rico after university to move to New York and said that meeting Puerto Rican writers of the diaspora gave her a sense of the immense diversity of Puerto Rican identity. “I could not stop being amazed then by the different ways in which we all felt about, defined, and interacted with the sense and the idea of being Puerto Rican. I still am.” After returning to the island in 2001 with her then eight-year-old son, Marín joined a workshop at the Librería Mágica in the Río Piedras neighborhood of San Juan called “Taller para sobrevivientes” (Workshop for Survivors) and later took poetry workshops in the living room of Mairym Cruz-Bernal, where she found a community of writers who allowed her to “feel alive again.” In her work she seeks to explore “the ways in which regular people (mostly women) deal with the everyday challenges of living on this island,” without ever reducing Puerto Rico to a tale of resilience—a word she says is used to “disregard, with a condescending smile, the deep social, economic, political, and psychological problems that we have to endure.” The resilience of a people should not be romanticized, says Marín, but it is something “to be noted.”
Looking ahead, both Marín and Valcárcel mention that the funds from the fellowship will enable them to devote more time to their writing and, critically, Valcárcel notes, “rest for a moment.” He continues: “Being an independent artist in a colony in crisis is very taxing. And even more when one does not want to stop creating or fighting for what is fair.” Both writers also look forward to the gathering in 2023. As Marín puts it: “The fellowship has stressed, for me, one of the most beautiful senses of the word fellowship: the companionship, the sense of feeling in company of equals and friends.”
As the fellows connect with the new and familiar faces in their cohort, the Letras Boricuas program simultaneously offers the long-overdue opportunity for a wider American public to come to know and read an already flourishing and diverse literary community of Puerto Rican writers. These writers have grown through their own networks, mythologies, and self-determined narratives while carrying the island’s history of colonization, military occupation, and U.S.-induced economic crisis.
Megan Fernandes is a writer living in New York City. Her most recent book of poetry, Good Boys, was published by Tin House in 2020. She teaches at Lafayette College.
Xavier Valcárcel and Carmen R. Marín are members of the inaugural class of Letras Boricuas Fellows. (Credit: Courtesy of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Flamboyan Arts Fund)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Xavier Navarro Aquino, whose debut novel, Velorio, is out today from HarperVia. The arresting first line of Velorio immediately conveys the heartbreak of Hurricane María for Puerto Rico. A young girl named Camila reflects, “It wasn’t until after I dug out her body that I learned to love my sister, Marisol.” Velorio follows Camila and several other characters as they converge on a cult-like alternative society known as Memoria, established by a man name Urayoán in the aftermath of the hurricane. Polyphonic and lyrical, the novel renders and resists the legacy of empire in Puerto Rico and the authoritarian shadow that accompanies disaster. “Velorio recognizes that neither utopia nor dystopia are finite states, that they exist alongside and even inside one another, like the hurricane and the eye, the empire and the island,” writes Justin Torres. “Xavier Navarro Aquino takes us on a riveting, harrowing journey.” Xavier Navarro Aquino was born and raised in Puerto Rico. His fiction has appeared in Tin House, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and Guernica. He has received fellowships and awards from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, MacDowell, and the American Council of Learned Societies. He teaches in the MFA program at the University of Notre Dame.
1. How long did it take you to write Velorio? I wrote the full draft in five weeks. Then worked through edits for a couple of months before the book went on submission.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? Getting started. I resisted writing this book because the aftermath of María was so visceral. After the storm we went through a painful grieving process. The hurricane served to highlight how truly sinister neocolonialism is. The economic despair on the island had been looming since the mid-2000s, but María brought it into the national conversation. Of course now the fear is the short attention span of the media. While many stateside have moved on, María’s aftermath is still evident back home.
Once I came around to writing, the challenge became balancing the polyphonic nature of the novel. The character Urayoán was equal parts liberating and exasperating to write. He is a Caliban figure, filled with paradox and complication. I suspect he will be misread a lot. My hope is readers will slow down and interrogate him at the sentence level. His voice is poetry, even if it’s often predisposed to rants and stream of consciousness. But I’d argue all the characters carry poetry in their unique voices, each one contributing to a chorus of proclamations, agency, and possibilities.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? I try to write when I’m not consumed with teaching. So it varies. I used to write very late into the night but that changed now that I adopted two dogs and started teaching at Notre Dame. I’m up early walking pups and lesson planning. By 9 PM I’m exhausted. When I write it’s often all-consuming. Summer break and writing residencies have become a tonic.
4. What are you reading right now? I just finished Myriam J. A. Chancy’s deft What Storm, What Thunder. Next I’m planning on returning to Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides, Li’s Where Reasons End, and Nunez’s The Friend as guiding frameworks for my next novel, Two Young Kings. As you’d expect, it’s a novel about two brothers, about trauma, mental health, and suicide.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? To narrow it down to one would be impossible. The two that I’ll mention won’t surprise certain readers. But they should be read more widely in the United States: Dionne Brand and M. NourbeSe Philip are some of the best artists and thinkers working today.
6. What is one thing that surprised you during the writing of Velorio? I was surprised with how insistent these characters were. As cheesy as it sounds. Marisol and Camila haunted me leading up to my MacDowell residency. In that isolation everything fell out of me in five intense sleepless weeks. When I finished the draft, I cried.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? It’s not one thing, rather many. Overall my agent, Jin Auh, kept a steady hand of reassurance and faith in the novel. She never wavered in belief even when I did. My editor, Tara Parsons, has an infectious optimism. I’m lucky to have two brilliant advocates for my work.
8. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry? Big Five publishers in the United States need to do a better job championing Puerto Rican voices coming out of Puerto Rico, and put money and resources behind narratives that don’t treat Puerto Rican identity, experiences, and events like a periphery experience to the United States. There are 3.4 million American citizens back home living with the complicated history of neocolonization, while also holding onto our own culture and language. It’s time we start working harder on creating access. Translate our work and publicize it widely. Some of what is labeled as “Puerto Rican” in trade publishing favors tired tropes of “Puerto Ricanness”—the same old familiar characters, plots, and themes that are palatable to a white audience. Anything that complicates a white gaze is parsed as strange and foreign. This is comical, considering how much Puerto Rico has contributed to other types of popular culture such as music. I’d love to see publishing stop using our historical events and tragedies as props for appeal. It’s damaging and limiting. There is no absence of Puerto Rican literature, just gross under-translation of work written in Spanish from the island. To that end, works in translation need to become part of the mainstream zeitgeist. Perhaps if that occurs, the United States may see itself as a much smaller part of a larger world filled with unique and imaginative ways of approaching storytelling.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? It starts with my spouse. I’ve apologized countless times that she must endure those terrible first drafts. Then two close friends from grad school. I trust all their judgment.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? It’s not really explicit advice, but it’s certainly stayed with me. “If we don’t tell our stories, someone else will tell them for us.”
Nearly two hundred writers have been featured in our Ten Questions series since it first debuted in 2018. Each was asked to respond to roughly the same set of questions, but the resulting archive is anything but repetitive. Just as the books featured are various, so too are the voices of the authors. (An endlessly fascinating exercise: Consider how an author’s interviewing voice coincides with or deviates from the voice in their prose or poetry.) To showcase this range and to celebrate making it through another year, our editors have selected ten of their favorite responses to the final question of the interview: What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
“‘Don’t do it.’ Because that just made me want to do it even more.” —Neel Patel, author of Tell Me How to Be
“Isak Dinesen said, ‘Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.’ The trick is to cultivate that Zen, to not get too high or too low. You’re neither the genius nor the failure you think you are.” —Jack Wang, author of We Two Alone
“There’s no perfect writing advice. It all depends on your particular artistic moment. But if you are in this for the long haul, it’s valuable to know that all you understand about yourself as an artist—your working habits, your interests, your needs—will shift as you grow and life changes. It’s helpful to expect that and roll with it rather than mourn a past perfect writing life or long for a future one that is never coming.” —Kaitlyn Greenidge, author of Libertie
“Hearing various versions of ‘don’t wait for the muse, don’t wait for inspiration, just do the writing’ has effectively incinerated most of the woo woo from my thoughts of how and why to write. I am grateful for that.” —Jaime Cortez, author of Gordo
“Patricia Weaver Francisco, after watching me struggle with this book for many years, said, ‘You need to just choose an island and swim to it.’” —Jana Larson, author of Reel Bay
“A long-ago student named Zac said about an essay we were workshopping: ‘I’m looking at a circle where I’d like to see a sphere.’” —Jo Ann Beard, author of Festival Days
“I learned from my colleague Charlotte Whittle to always pay attention to how sentences end. You never want them to fizzle, unless the fizzle is the point.” —Julia Sanches, translator of Migratory Birds
“Spend as much time alone as possible.” —Alex Dimitrov, author of Love and Other Poems
“One must hear the story.” —Jhumpa Lahiri, translator of Trust
“In a poem about feeling some overwhelm around her jobs to care for family, friends, and community, Pat Parker wrote, “The next person who asks / ‘Have you written anything new?’ / just might get hit.” Parker is saying a lot here. One important thing that I think she’s saying is: Don’t stress if you’re not writing all the time, because you’re probably busy helping keep the people you love alive, and for that you’re a fucking hero.” —Angela Hume, author of Interventions for Women
Clockwise from upper left: Alex Dimitrov, Jana Larson, Jack Wang, Julia Sanches, Jaime Cortez, Neel Patel, Jo Ann Beard, Angela Hume, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Kaitlyn Greenidge. (Credit: Dimitrov: Sylvie Rosokoff; Larson: Shelly Mosman; Wang: Mike Grippi; Sanches: Dagan Farancz; Cortez: Mark Smotroff; Patel: Bradford Rogne; Beard: Franco Vogt; Lahiri: Marco Delogu; Greenidge: Syreeta McFadden)
Over the course of two and a half years, nearly one hundred and fifty writers have answered Ten Questions from Poets & Writers Magazine, generating an index of almost 1,500 responses for readers to peruse. The interview has evolved since the first installment in June 2018—questions have cycled in and out—but the last question has remained: What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? As we approach the end of 2020, our editors have selected ten of their favorite answers to this question, responses that we hope might renew your creative spirit after this unusual and difficult year.
“Everything you’re most afraid of is what you need to write.” —Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of The Freezer Door
“It sounds a little nutty coming from someone who’s been teaching writing for more than a decade, but I’m mistrustful of writing advice in general—which relates to my irritation that writers are now expected to be sages. But I have noticed that the writers who are willing to revise their work substantially are eventually able to get their work to do what they want it to, and to find someone willing to publish it.” —Kate Zambreno, author of Drifts
“My friend, the incredible and generous poet, Willie Perdomo, once told me to work on my writing in pieces, breaking it down, and do a bit each day. I needed his wisdom. Because I can get overwhelmed. Left to my anxiety, I’ll ambush myself before I even begin because I think I have to know the entire life of a story and that it must be a single breath. But that’s not how we breathe.” —Rachel Eliza Griffiths, author of Seeing the Body
“It might not be the best I’ve ever heard, and it certainly isn’t the most appropriate for this moment in time, but the advice I most often need to hear is: You’ve got to get out. Take a walk. At the very least, these days, leave the screen and stand by a window. So much work can happen while you’re not working. I think this is instinctive for some people, but I always have to remind myself; otherwise I end up stuck and hunched and ripping everything in half.” —Natascha Bruce, translator of Lake Like a Mirror
“Alexander Chee once said something like, When you put something that actually happened to you in a story, you have to privilege the needs of the story and not merely what happened. I don’t remember the exact quote, but I think about that all the time.” —Brandon Taylor, author of Real Life
“Indigenous Canadian writer and Elder Lee Maracle once told me, ‘Don’t throw anything away. There’s a reason you wrote it in the first place, even if it doesn’t belong in the piece you’re drafting.’ I keep a folder on my laptop with snippets that have to be cut. After editing one of my novels, I ended up using the pieces in the folder to finish a volume of short stories.” —Cherie Dimaline, author of Empire of Wild
“My best piece of writing advice came from the poet-scholar Chiyuma Elliott at a Cave Canem workshop back in 2009. I was a baby poet who loved grand finales for my poems, and in her feedback, she said very gently, ‘At the end of a poem, leave the door open.’ I’ve spent every day of my writing life since learning all the ways you can leave a door open: unlocked, cracked, off the hinges. There are so many ways.” —Destiny O. Birdsong, author of Negotiations
“I’ve been terrible at everything I’ve ever wanted to be good at—dating, tying my shoelaces, athletics, writing, driving, math, drawing, fashion, parenting—the first time I tried it. But years ago, my father, who’s a musician and public school teacher, told me about how much better his music had gotten when he’d just made it a point to commit to doing it—with focus and intention—on a daily basis. Even when it’s terrible. Especially when it’s terrible. Intentional, focused practice: That’s it. Maybe some people are phenomenal enough to not need it, but for me there’s no shortcut. Not for anything.” —Kawai Strong Washburn, author of Sharks in the Time of Saviors
“‘Ah, go on. You’re living your life’—said to me by Grace Paley when I was not writing every day.” —Heid E. Erdrich, author of Little Big Bully
“My friend Richard Sala had two catchphrases/mantras: ‘I can’t win’ and ‘It never ends.’ Taken together, they seem like the perfect summation of creative struggle.” —Adrian Tomine, author of The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist
Clockwise from upper left: Destiny O. Birdsong, Cherie Dimaline, Kawai Strong Washburn, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Natascha Bruce, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Adrian Tomine, Brandon Taylor, Kate Zambreno, and Heid E. Erdrich. (Credit: Birdsong: Hunter Armistead; Dimaline: Wenzdae Brewster; Washburn: Crystal Liepa; Sycamore: Jesse Mann; Taylor: Bill Adams; Zambreno: Heather Sten)
As we near the end of a year like no other, we turn to the work of our fellow writers to mourn all that we’ve lost and to celebrate the dreams of a better future. The following is a collection of ten author readings, culled from the most recent installment of Page One: Where New and Noteworthy Books Begin, that reflect the beauty, hope, resilience, and strength of writers to confront the failures of the past and to rejoice in the promise of what lies ahead.
Cheryl Boyce-Taylor reads “Hand of the Midwife” and “Stone” from her poetry collection Mama Phife Represents, published in January 2021 by Haymarket Books.
Peter Gizzi reads “That I Saw the Light on Nonotuck Avenue” and “The Present Is Constant Elegy” from his poetry collection Now It’s Dark, published in December 2020 by Wesleyan University Press.
Anne Marie Macari reads “Boats Can Take You,” “Bow Down,” and “We Will All Go Home With You” from her poetry collection Heaven Beneath, published in December 2020 by Persea Books.
Rodney Gómez reads “Warbler,” “Theories of Violence,” and “The Annunciation” from his poetry collection Arsenal With Praise Song, published in January 2021 by Orison Books.
Jackie Wang performs “Damnation” from her poetry collection, The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us From the Void, published in January 2021 by Nightboat Books.
In search of an alternative to rewatching the same Netflix series? From London to New York City, these extended readings and conversations with Zadie Smith, Édouard Louis, Ocean Vuong, Min Jin Lee, and Joy Harjo possess a nearly cinematic quality. Videos might never replicate the magic of those bygone crowded halls—where the writer’s voice somehow managed to dispel the discomfort of the folding chair, or of standing shoulder to shoulder with strangers at the door—but they can provide some semblance of community while we continue to shelter indoors.
Zadie Smith on Swing Time (Penguin Press, 2016)
“I wanted to write about dance, really, and dance’s relation to Black life,” Smith says. “That was the first thought.” She appears in conversation with Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah at the 92nd Street Y in New York City.
Édouard Louis on The End of Eddy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017)
“When I started to write The End of Eddy, I felt that I wanted to say something true, something real,” Louis says. He appears in conversation with Tash Aw at the London Review Bookshop.
Ocean Vuong on On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin Press, 2019)
“Having written poems for over ten years, I got really good at getting out of the poem. I got really successful at ducking out the side door when things got too hot,” Vuong says. “The novel was the perfect antidote because it forces you to tend to bodies, day after day.” He appears in conversation with Darin Strauss at the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House in New York City.
Min Jin Lee on Pachinko (Grand Central Publishing, 2017)
“I don’t believe in writer’s block,” Lee says. “But I do believe that your time is limited which means that we have to make choices about who we see, what we do, and how we spend our time.” She appears in conversation with Ken Chen at the Tenement Museum in New York City.
Joy Harjo
“Poetry doesn’t just emerge, it emerges from the soul of a community, from a community’s history,” Harjo says. She delivers her inaugural reading as the twenty-third U.S. Poet Laureate at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
As the long days stretch into the month of August, settle in, pour a cold beverage, and let the cool sounds of these five readings from recently published books of fiction provide some relief from the summer heat.
F*ckface: And Other Stories (Henry Holt, July 2020) by Leah Hampton:
Ocean Vuong made his literary debut in April 2016 with Night Sky With Exit Wounds, a poetry collection that chronicles a family’s journey as refugees from Vietnam to America, where the poems’ young speaker grows up attuned to the turmoil of his family’s traumas while becoming aware of his sexual identity. Vuong’s meteoric rise in popularity was immediate, and so was the positive critical response to his lyrical voice.
In the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani raved about “his ability to capture specific moments in time with both photographic clarity and a sense of the evanescence of all earthly things.” The book’s warm reception was accompanied by a number of prizes and honors from the Whiting Foundation (Whiting Award), the Lannan Foundation (Lannan Literary Fellowship), the T. S. Eliot Foundation (T. S. Eliot Prize), Publishing Triangle (Thom Gunn Award), Forward Arts Foundation (Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection), and others. The New York Times went on to name it one of the top ten books of 2016. All for a first book of poems by a relative newcomer to the literary scene.
Rather than follow it up with another book of poems, however, Vuong shifted gears and turned his attention to a different genre entirely—fiction, in the form of a novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, out in June from Penguin Press. The book centers around the strained relationship between a mother, who struggles with PTSD induced by memories of the Vietnam War and her abusive marriage, and her son, who is contending with his sexuality as he comes of age on the drug-ravaged streets of Hartford, Connecticut. I recently sat down with Vuong to discuss his path from poet to novelist, a story that begins with—as Vuong puts it—“a little gay kid from Hartford, who read in the library with his head down so that people didn’t know he was reading.”
Born in Saigon in 1988 to a family of rice farmers, Ocean Vuong was only two when his extended family left Vietnam and traveled to Connecticut after making a brief stop in the Philippines. The seven-member household included his grandmother, “who would start to sing any time there was conflict,” Vuong says. “Since she was the elder, it cast a kind of spell over us so that we could survive our problems.” The cultural adjustment for this mostly illiterate refugee family was not easy, to say the least. Vuong’s father returned to Vietnam not long after their arrival, and his mother found a job as a manicurist, a profession she still practices. “Everything was erupting all the time,” Vuong recalls, “but it was our shared journey that kept us together.”
Though the Vuongs were the only Vietnamese family in a mostly Black and Puerto Rican neighborhood, they were embraced with generosity and kindness, which made them more comfortable with the reality that they now lived in a different country. “I didn’t know that most of America was white until I was eight or nine,” he says. The concept of white supremacy was encountered much later, when he eventually left the working-class side of Hartford to seek job opportunities as an adolescent in the more affluent and commercial areas of the city.
In the meantime, he was having to contend with two life-changing realizations: that he was gay and that he had, despite a love of reading, dyslexia. The learning disorder is a family affliction; Vuong’s mother and brother also have it. Much later he would find out that so did Octavia Butler and F. Scott Fitzgerald, which helped him reconcile with the possibility of becoming a writer. “I would insist it’s not a setback or an illness,” he says. “It’s just a different angle of looking at language that actually reveals a lot and was very advantageous for me as an artist.”
Vuong says he also sees his queerness as a source of strength in the way he thinks about the world. “For queer kids, when the world around you is dangerous, you go into your own refuge,” Vuong says. For him it was books. Coming out to his mother, however, was a different kind of challenge—one that he didn’t think would end well for him. In fact he was prepared for the worst and planned his exile from his family.
“I waited until I was seventeen,” he recalls. “I had enough for a bus ticket and $2,000 in my pocket saved up from my job at Panera Bread. I had my bag with me when I sat down with my mother. I was ready for rejection.” But that rejection never came. At this point the family had already suffered serious losses to drug overdoses, victims of the opioid epidemic that was affecting this working-class community, a harsh reality he weaves into his new novel. “Where would you go?” his mother asked. “What would we do without you?”
Relieved, Vuong set down his bag and began to imagine a future in Hartford the way his family had so many years ago. His mother suggested he try college first because her son “had a belly full of English.” And if not, she suggested, “You can always come work at the nail salon.” Vuong jokingly adds, “I thought, ‘Well, it’s not a bad job. Where else can you work and watch Oprah all day?’”
His time at Manchester Community College was brief but instrumental in changing his perceptions about who had the right to dream big. “I was fortunate to walk into my first class, a composition course, and be met by single mothers, people with two jobs, people in their forties—all walks of life—and it felt like for the first time I saw a teacher have faith in this community of outsiders, investing in our imaginations, and challenging us,” he says. “Folks that were not supposed to be having these discussions were allowed to.” By now he had started to keep a journal, feeling the magnetic pull to poetry—Rimbaud, Lorca, Vallejo, Neruda—copying poems from library books to his notebook because he couldn’t afford to buy books of his own.
Encouraged by his community-college education, Vuong decided to pursue a degree—one that could eventually lead to a job that would help his family—so in 2008 he enrolled in business school at Pace University in Manhattan. After two weeks, keenly aware that he didn’t fit in among the men in business suits and internships, he dropped out. “I still had my library card,” he says, “so I rekindled my love of reading. But I also began attending open mics to read from my scribbles in my notebook. I wasn’t ready to call it poetry.”
It was at one of these events that he heard about MFA programs, in which he could not only nurture his passion but perhaps also fund it. He was also eager to get back to college so he could stop deceiving his mother about his activities in New York City. Unbeknownst to her, he had been couch surfing since leaving Pace. But first he needed to complete his undergraduate degree. “I applied to the most affordable place I could find: City University of New York,” he says. He ended up attending Brooklyn College.
Although he credits Brooklyn College with giving him access to the literature he needed to finally feel well-read, it was the cafés, bookstores, and other venues that held poetry readings that gave Vuong the community he was looking for, forging friendships that fortified his resolve to keep going. “I met Saeed Jones,” he recalls, “who was fabulous and glorious, with a big, hearty laugh. And when he told me he was attending an MFA program at Rutgers in Newark, I knew that it was possible.” Soon after, he connected with poet Eduardo C. Corral, who at the time was living in his family’s double-wide in Casa Grande, Arizona, working at Home Depot, and running a popular blog called Lorcaloca. Corral’s blog gave Vuong a glimpse into the ways the writing profession welcomed or rejected writers of color. When Corral announced he was moving to New York City in late 2011, Vuong knew this too was a sign: “We had similar stories—both of us gay boys from working-class immigrant parents. He became a kind of mentor because his journey was like a map for me.”
Corral recalls their first meeting: “Ocean’s attentiveness is what first caught my attention. He was kind and curious, always asking questions, eager to listen, to learn. This attentiveness also extended to language.” Since then they have stayed in touch, though Corral contends that theirs is a bond not forged by literary success but by the amazing truth that they are sons of non-English speakers, who have been able to shape careers and help their families financially through a profession that, in effect, excludes their loved ones. “We now get to write about our immigrant families and claim a place for them in poetry,” he adds.
Ocean Vuong
(Credit: Jon Crispin )
In 2014, prompted by his intimate but influential writing community, Vuong applied to MFA programs, but only in the New York City area because he wanted to remain close to friends. He chose NYU because it offered him funding without teaching obligations. But on that fateful first day of class, he received a call from Michael Wiegers at Copper Canyon Press, letting him know the press had accepted his book for publication. “What people don’t understand,” Vuong says, “is that I had been working on Night Sky With Exit Wounds for eight years. And one of the reasons I sent my manuscript to that press was that they promised a personal rejection, and since I wasn’t enrolled in school yet, I was craving feedback.”
For Wiegers there was no doubt the manuscript needed to be in the world. “I was struck by his ability to risk toeing the edge of sentimentality, without crossing over it,” he says. “His poems were open and vulnerable and bold enough to take on the big topics of love and grief and war and familial legacy. These were gentle poems that were graceful and confident—and did not need to perform themselves toward the deep desire they contained.”
The prospect of publication would give Vuong something tangible to show his mother. “Since my mother could not read, I insisted that the book have my picture so that she could see it was really me and show all of her customers at the nail salon,” Vuong says. A few days later, Don Share from the Poetry Foundation called to offer him the $25,800 Ruth Lilly Prize. The timing was perfect for Vuong, who could now proceed with confidence, fine-tuning his book for the next two years without dealing with financial stress or the anxieties of an uncertain future. Two years later, Night Sky With Exit Wounds was published to considerable fanfare.
Besides giving his mother a book and, after years of financial hardship, a down payment for a house, Vuong also had the opportunity to show her a bit of the literary world he had just entered: “She has come to a few of my readings, and she sits in the room so that she can look at the audience responding to my work. She calls me a scholar, not a poet, because in Vietnam, scholars are revered.” What did he get for himself after that flurry of fellowships? “My only splurge was a coat,” he says.
Vuong, who now lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, credits his Buddhist upbringing with his ability to navigate all the attention in stride. He meditates five times a week and keeps reminding himself of the person he was when he first fell in love with writing. “I bring him to the present,” Vuong explains, “not the person who won the awards—he has nothing to teach me. So when people ask what is the secret of my success, I say Submittable.”
He has maintained this sobering stance as he steps into the role of teacher and mentor at his new job as assistant professor of English at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. “I tell my students that I didn’t have a social life. I had a library card,” he says. “I sit down with them and ask them to privilege intention over motivation.” But he admits it’s a challenge to keep students focused on the art of writing during the era of social media, which he believes fuels competitiveness.
“My interactions with Saeed and Eduardo and Rickey Laurentiis were important, but afterward I went home to the page, not to Facebook or Twitter,” he says. Nevertheless, he is determined to give his students the kind of positive experience he had with his own teachers like Ben Lerner, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Sharon Olds.
What also keeps him centered is the reality of his family’s urgencies. “They still need my support,” he says, particularly now as the current administration implements a policy to revoke residency from Vietnamese refugees deemed “violent-crime aliens.” Vuong says, “Those are my people! We come from a troubled history, and with such trauma come problems. It’s unfair to penalize a community for an affliction exacerbated by this country’s participation in the Vietnam conflict.” While he waits to find out how these policies will directly affect his family, Vuong turns to his first love, poetry, for solace. In May 2018 he partnered with the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center to launch the Center for Refugee Poetics at the Asian Arts Initiative, an organization and venue in Philadelphia, with a day of activities exploring poetry and the refugee experience. Its next symposium has yet to be scheduled, but the center hopes to expand the reach of the conversation, which began with the Southeast Asian refugee diaspora.
With the publication of an acclaimed debut comes the inevitable expectation of the second book. Shortly after the release of Night Sky With Exit Wounds, as the accolades came pouring in, Vuong was courted by a number of literary agents, who suggested he write prose. But Vuong hesitated moving on from his previous project when deep inside he knew, he says, that the first book, “an eighty-five-page paperback, did not answer all of my questions. How does it contain everything I have been asking all of my life, like what does it mean to be a queer American body, or poor, or a refugee?” So he decided to investigate those concerns further in a different genre, to find out if he could learn anything new.
While on a residency in Italy, courtesy of the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Vuong found himself browsing the castle’s extensive library, where he connected to other poets who also wrote prose, such as Anne Carson and Maggie Nelson. “I realized then that I wasn’t out in the sea by myself,” Vuong says. “Poets have been there and thrived with the sentence and the paragraph.”
Vuong chose to explore fiction writing because he wanted “the book to be grounded in truth but realized by the imagination. That’s why the opening chapter reads like an essay.” He also credits his education as a poet with the skills necessary to move into prose. In both he could “orchestrate an entire world,” he says. Nonfiction, he notes, would have presented issues he wanted to avoid: “As a person of color, when it comes to memoir, we are seen as anthropological conduits, a vehicle of exotic information. I wanted to insist on agency as an artist, with the freedom to embellish, and then claim it as my own rendition.”
An early role model was Maxine Hong Kingston, who had set out to write the great American novel but whose book The Woman Warrior (Knopf, 1976) was presented as nonfiction. He decided not to erase that effort and succumb to the pressure to write a memoir. “I wanted to insist that these lives—yellow, brown, poor—inspired me to create art as I wanted to create it, not as others wanted me to create,” he says.
Page after page, he allowed memory to shape the fabric of the fictional narrative. He understands the impulse of readers to want to make direct connections between the writer and the writing, and he expects many will also want to draw lines between the poetry book and the novel, but that’s beyond his control. He’s more invested in his right to invent. “Writers of color are not supposed to have the musculature of an imagination,” he says. “When we use it, we’re being bold, and that’s what I want to do—be bold, make things up. I’m not here to give people the juicy bits of my community. I’m not a journalist; I’m an artist.”
That said, he set out to write a book with a clear mission: “I wanted a voice in the conversation about what it means to be a body inhabiting this incredibly complicated, violent, and precarious country.” His inspiration was the community he hailed from: “When I moved to New York City and I’d tell people I came from Connecticut, there was this perception that I had come from a place of wealth. But I was a refugee. So I wanted to expand on working-class identity in a place where people lived rich and diverse lives. There are immigrant populations from all over the world in Connecticut. I want to shift the telescope and show that this world has always existed.”
Two years and four drafts later, a manuscript of the complete novel made its way to Frances Coady from the Aragi Agency. “I explained to Frances that I was a poet, that a poet doesn’t submit anything until it’s finished,” he says. For Coady, it was worth the wait: “When I read an early draft of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, I experienced one of those glorious privileged moments in publishing when you know that what you are holding in your hand will affect readers in the most profound ways you can imagine.” The novel was sold to Ann Godoff at Penguin Press in April 2018.
Though the book was acquired for a notable sum, Vuong doesn’t want to dwell on that. He’s got more immediate concerns, like his family’s well-being—“the distress signals arrive and I have to answer,” he says—as well as his own. Diagnosed with agoraphobia, an anxiety disorder in which one experiences fear of places and situations that might cause panic, helplessness, or embarrassment, which at times keeps him from performing the most basic functions, like going to the grocery store, he has had to rely on his partner, Peter Bienkowski, for support. A former copyright lawyer, Bienkowski quit the profession to help Vuong through the demands of travel and presentations. He drives Vuong to and from the university so that he can teach his courses and meet committee obligations, because, as Vuong admits, “I failed my driver’s test five times.” On difficult days, Vuong stays home, at the cost of canceling appearances or meetings. “People have been surprisingly understanding,” he adds.
As for his own expectations with the release of his novel, Vuong doesn’t care to fantasize about its future or the rewards that might come with further success: “I don’t see myself as a success story even though I’ve experienced success. Everything I learned along the way was a strength. If I didn’t have my communities, that many consider broken or forgotten, I wouldn’t be where I am. I don’t want to be a sob story or anybody’s project. I want to show that you can have pride no matter where you come from and joy without forsaking the pain it took to get here.”
Rigoberto González is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Ocean Vuong and his partner, Peter Bienkowski, along with their dog, Tofu. (Credit: Jon Crispin )
Marlon James and I have met before, many times, but never in Los Angeles. A Facebook update this morning informs me that James’s favorite city in America is L.A. I’m waiting for him in the lobby of the Line hotel, Koreatown’s very hip, very industrial, very dope—to quote its enthusiasts—singular travel destination, but I’m worried about the noise. Elevator jazz is playing overhead, and the aqua-blue couches and glass dining tables are packed with folks just like us talking about business deals, and art, and literature, and vastness, and coffee roasters, and Hollywood. When he arrives we sit at the far back of the lobby, away from the bustling entrance. I ask, “Why is Los Angeles your favorite city?” and he says “ha” in the new way we’ve all come to share the sentiment: being reminded that hundreds, sometimes thousands of “friends” and “followers” are reading the minutiae of our daily lives, even if they don’t click Like or leave a comment. The practice is popularly known as lurking. I call it research. “I still think art can happen here,” he says. “New York has museums, but museums aren’t culture. Museums are a graveyard for culture. If I am this year’s Patti Smith, I cannot go to New York, but I can still go to Los Angeles. There’s a sense of possibility here. Kendrick, and Anderson. Paak, the Black Hippy movement, Kamasi Washington, all of that is Los Angeles.” He turns the question on me, and I don’t even need to think about the answer. I love the desert, the mythos of the Western frontier, the apocalypse. “I’m going to die in the desert,” I say, and we both briefly acknowledge the setting sun, pink with hints of orange, bouncing off the backs of buses moving slowly down Wilshire Boulevard, before getting down to business.
I ask him a question about the world since Donald Trump when he lets out another hearty laugh. Hearty laughter and Facebook will become a theme of our two and a half hours together. “That’s usually a question I get from the foreign press,” he says. James doesn’t take a breath between sentences. “The most powerful aspect of fascism is that nobody knows they are sitting in fascism when they’re in it. Trump is disruptive, but he’s not transformative. We’re going to see more literature coming out of this administration than coming out of 9/11. 9/11 was instantaneous. We’re not even sure how to process this yet.” I’m reminded of the tense, private conversations I’ve had with friends since the 2016 election: reviewing our savings, taking on extra work, scaling back, canceling vacations. We’re sure that the worst of the recession is on its way, and none of us are prepared to survive it. Forget talking about the bizarre, carnival-like press conferences; no comment on the sitting president’s outrageous ideas regarding climate change; I don’t bring up the migrant children in detention centers. I’m still anchored to the end of James’s last sentence. He’s right, I can’t even process the daily news. In the name of self-care, unplugging, unwinding, getting over and getting through, I close my app like everyone else.
I’ve sat down with James many times before, so I know his cadence. We’re talking about novelists now, and apathy, and James is about to bring his point full circle. “Every book is political. Not political is politics,” he says. “I’m not on a mission, but I think a writer has to talk about what’s in front of them, even when writing about shape-shifting creatures.”
Marlon James is the author of four highly acclaimed novels. His first, John Crow’s Devil, which was rejected seventy-eight times before it was published by Akashic Books in 2005, went on to be named a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. His follow-up, The Book of Night Women (Riverhead Books, 2009), won the 2010 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Minnesota Book Award and was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction and an NAACP Image Award. His magnum opus (to date), A Brief History of Seven Killings, won the 2015 Man Booker Prize, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature for fiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction, and the Minnesota Book Award.
His new novel, Black Leopard, Red Wolf, published by Riverhead Books in February, is the first book of an epic fantasy trilogy about Tracker, a hunter known widely for “his nose,” who is tasked with hunting down a mysterious boy who hasn’t been seen in three years. Tracker, who some have called a wolf, finds himself working with a ragtag band of hunters, some human and others supernatural, including a shape-shifting mercenary named Leopard, all searching for the boy. As Tracker and his group move closer to discovering the boy’s location and true identity, they come under attack by enemies near and far. Weighing in at 640 pages, Black Leopard, Red Wolf is in many ways the novel that James was destined to write. While much of the media hype has been focused on the fact that James wrote an epic fantasy, I am intrigued for all of its other riches: This is James’s first book that is not set in his native Jamaica, his first book about empire. I would argue that James has never been more free. Though he read African mythologies and epics for three years before writing one word, Black Leopard, Red Wolf is a testament to his own make-believe. “I really wanted to geek out and write the story I wish I read as a kid,” he says. “I am writing the stories that I want to read about Jamaica. I wrote the stories that I wanted to read about Jamaica.”
Mic drop.
The Man Booker Prize win catapulted James to international stardom. With the win, he joined the “one-name club,” composed of those writers and artists whose legend has no ceiling and no floor: Jesmyn, Edwidge, Colson, Zadie, Toni, Hilton, Jamaica, Gwendolyn, and now Marlon. With that kind of glory comes fame: Melina Matsoukas, the visionary, two-time Grammy Award–winning director of music videos, films, and television shows (most notably Issa Rae’s Insecure on HBO), is leading the adaptation of A Brief History of Seven Killings for Amazon Studios.
After such a meteoric rise to the heights of literary fame, I am curious about whether his approach to writing this new book was different from the others. “All my books start with trial and error,” he says. “There were four or five versions that I tried. This is the one that worked. I was talking to Melina [Matsoukas]—do you know her?” he stops to ask me. It was my turn for hearty laughter. Of course I know Beyoncé and Solange’s personal director. We have brunch all the time. He returns the laughter. “Well, we were talking about Showtime’s The Affair and the changing perspective. That’s when it occurred to me that Tracker could tell this story, but if you want to believe him, that’s your business.” How perfect, I thought. The Black woman director adapting your most critically acclaimed novel is also talking shop with you about your draft-in-progress. This is some kind of psychedelic, neon-haired P-Funk dream that could only happen in a Black Los Angeles where Black people not only know the future, they are writing and directing it.
Still, James is modest in discussing his success. “I write the kind of books where if people don’t say, ‘Read it,’ people don’t read it. God bless those people who can write best-sellers. I don’t write great white saviors; my books are pretty nihilistic; things don’t end well, and I think something like a Booker Prize got more and more people to read my work. It’s hard for literary authors, for authors writing people of color.” James is standing for his ovation, but he’s also aware that every pair of hands in the auditorium counts.
“Yeah, but what about the bad parts?” I ask. There’s rarely a story this enchanted without a poison apple.
James is only the second Caribbean winner to win the Booker, following Trinidad-born V. S. Naipaul, who won the award in 1971. “It also changed the kinds of scrutiny I get,” James says, “which brings us back to Facebook. Any little thing I say on Facebook ends up in the Guardian and international media, but it hasn’t made me less outspoken.”
James is referring to two particular instances here but offers no further elaboration, and I don’t prompt him to say more. In November 2015 James responded to novelist Claire Vaye Watkins’s five-thousand-word Tin House essay “On Pandering” that would rock the Internet for weeks. In it Watkins discusses motherhood, misogyny, publishing, and pandering, which she refers to as performing for the imaginary white, male audience. “I have been writing to impress old white men,” she wrote. For as much as “On Pandering” does do, there is so much that it doesn’t do: It doesn’t consider the lives and journeys of writers of color, it doesn’t consider that her readers are people of color, and it doesn’t hold white, female publishing gatekeepers accountable for continuing to popularize and publish a very particular type of literature again and again. James wrote on Facebook: “While she [Watkins] recognizes how much she was pandering to the white man, we writers of colour spend way too much time pandering to the white woman. I’ve mentioned this before, how there is such a thing as ‘the critically acclaimed story.’ You see it occasionally in certain highbrow magazines and journals. Astringent, observed, clipped, wallowing in its own middle-style prose and private ennui, porn for certain publications.” The Guardian would go on to say that James “slammed” and “blasted” the publishing world in his retort, but James did what Black people do every day: He pointed at what was standing right in front of him and called it out for exactly what it is.
Fast-forward two years and James would find his Facebook posts in the news again. On June 16, 2017, a jury acquitted officer Jeronimo Yanez in the shooting death of thirty-two-year-old Philando Castile during a traffic stop in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, just north of Saint Paul, where James has lived for more than a decade. Castile, an employee of Saint Paul Public Schools, was shot seven times. Diamond Reynolds, Castile’s girlfriend, live-streamed the immediate aftermath of the shooting on Facebook, and one can see Officer Yanez still pointing his gun at Castile’s dead body. Reynolds’s four-year-old daughter is in the backseat.
The Washington Post picked up the story following James’s Facebook essay-post “Smaller, and Smaller, and Smaller,” written the day after Yanez’s acquittal. Though James is one of the most famous people in Saint Paul and one of the most recognizable, he carries the burden of not appearing “too big” or “too close” (a phrase coined by comedian Dick Gregory in 1971) to white people but especially to police officers. He points out that while some Minnesotans want to “rebrand this state as North,” in reality, North is merely a romanticized concept in race relations. This is where I press James for more. We talk about living in this country, in the world as Black people, as writers, as people who travel frequently and observe everything. I bring up Garnette Cadogan’s groundbreaking essay “Walking While Black” and James nods in recognition. “Garnette’s piece made me think about how I don’t know how to stand still. Talking about Philando Castile, I don’t know if I should stand up and get shot, read my phone and get shot, blink and get shot. I don’t know what actual physical activity I can do, including standing still, that I can do and not get shot.”
“And Tracker?” I ask, thinking of James’s protagonist roving through forests, mountains, and enemy territory with bands of people after him.
It’s obvious that James has thought a lot about his newest protagonist and state-sanctioned surveillance and violence. “It’s important for Tracker and Leopard that shape-shifting is a pleasure, and it’s a nature, a survival, but not in the same way. They’re not being monitored and watched. They don’t have a city system and a state working against them.”
At this point we take a few moments for ourselves to clear the air of the weight of Black death. Thankfully James has one of those urgent texts that happen when you land in L.A., and I need more water.
When we return to the table, James is laughing. “It’s amazing that people think I am outspoken on Facebook, because I still feel like I have to hold back. I feel if I really, really said what I want to say, I could still be deported,” he says. We are laughing again partly because that is both a half and whole truth, and as Black people we are on the inside of it: It is true that James will always say what needs to be said, and that’s the source of his authority and mastery, and it is also true that James lives with the everyday threat of harassment, deportation, and violence, if someone in power decided to make it so.
“Are you ready to talk about this novel finally?” I ask. Beaming, he claps his hands and pumps his shoulders a few times like a beautiful, broad-shouldered athlete being interviewed after a victory. “Ready!” he says with a smile.
James explains that break dancing, Labelle, Star Wars, and Jamaican fashion magazines of the eighties and nineties were his first experiences of futurism. I want to know what appeals to him about genre, specifically. Any close reader of James’s work will tell you that A Brief History of Seven Killings, which delves into three electrifying decades of Jamaican history around the attempted assassination of Bob Marley, is pretty genre-defying itself. It is clear that James has a fondness for crime and mystery, an admiration threaded through all four of his novels. “Most of the books I read when I was younger were fantasy, comics, crime, and children’s books, and children’s books themselves are usually all of those things. Part of it is growing up in the Caribbean.” Here, James paraphrases Gabriel García Márquez: “Living in the Caribbean is wilder than the wildest fiction.” James credits his grandparents and his favorite aunt for his love of imaginative fiction. “Stories you’re told as a kid are always fantastical. I’m growing up in Jamaica, and I’m in a Jamaican pharmacy, not even a bookstore, you’re not going to find Moby-Dick. You’re going to find a novelization of Star Trek. Even my sci-fi fantasy cinema language is not the movies; it’s the books I read. It’s very dime-store, very pop comics; quite frankly it’s whatever got dumped in the third world, and I gobbled up all of it. I mean, I read Superman III as a book.” He returns to his love of Los Angeles briefly and says, “L.A. is the place where genre fiction exploded with the two genres I like the most: sci-fi/fantasy and crime. The crime novels of L.A. have a wider campus than anywhere else.”
James wants readers to be “exhausted” by the time they finish Black Leopard, Red Wolf from putting the full story together for themselves. “I realized reading all of the African epics, the awesome complexity of these narratives and how much intelligence that they’re expecting from the reader. People are more complicated than simple story; the gods are more complicated than that. They expect you to have the intelligence to navigate the treacherous waters.” And James flings us directly into turbulent, unreliable waters in Black Leopard, Red Wolf. He forces us to second-guess Tracker, Leopard, the entire cast of characters, and ourselves. While most epic fantasies look to the hero-crusade model, James knew from the outset that his trilogy would do none of that. “Respectability politics is Black people playing Anglo. It’s tying to a value system that I have no interest in writing about. I wasn’t interested in writing a sci-fi movie in brown face. Firstly, if you’re interested in African storytelling, realize that the trickster is telling the story, so the whole sense of authenticity and authority that we attach to storytelling—throw that out of the window. I knew I was going to write a hedonistic, queer, selfish character. I’m not interested in inner nobility. That’s a European, Christian narrative from the Crusades.”
And the novel is gay. “Gay gay,” James adds. We’re both reminiscing about our time as baby queers who weren’t yet out. I tell him about my times riding the train from Poughkeepsie to basement parties in Brooklyn where money was collected at the door by a dyke elder, bottles of Heineken were for sale in the kitchen, and we were left alone to grind against each other for hours in the dark. Ladies only. James chimes in, recalling his own closetedness and coming out. “I was in the Bronx with the Jamaicans,” he says, “and I’d take the 5 train to Barnes and Noble, to Union Square. Just to walk around. Just to be out. Our built-in desire to shape-shift is always there.” James scoffs at the notion that an African epic can’t also be queer. “The novel is super fluid and super sexual because Africa is fluid and sexual. Pansexuality, queerness, nonbinary is not new to Africa. White people like to think it is.” Being queer doesn’t mean that someone isn’t problematic, and Black Leopard, Red Wolf’s Tracker isn’t without his problems. He’s a misogynist, but unlike other authors, James takes his character to task. “It was very important to me that Tracker is called out on his sexism. I’m not having that.”
Before our time together comes to an end, I tell James that he can’t get away without talking about process and craft. James is a tenured creative writing and literature professor at Macalester College in Saint Paul. When I ask him how he managed to write another 600-plus-page book, he scoots closer to me and shows me his iPhone screen. He opens his gallery to dozens and dozens of panoramic photos of his office wallpapered in bright index cards and sticky notes, mostly pink, yellow, and green. He shows me maps of various African dynasties and the map of his own new novel that he designed himself. I can see that besides being meticulous and organized, he’s simply happy that someone asked him about craft—for once. Before closing his phone he gives me a final observation on craft: “People disregard plot because they’re not really that interested in their characters.”
We get up to hug and ask the lobby attendant to take our photo together, though we’ll see each other soon: The very next night, on the rooftop of the same hotel, Riverhead Books and Entertainment Weekly will throw a party for him. The Los Angeles Times will be there, Roxane Gay, Carolyn Kellogg, the who’s who of literary L.A.
James will be standing in the center of the room, dashing in a traditional Arabic black thobe with a high slit on one side, his thick hair pulled back, a composed celebrity. There will be two signature cocktails, a large spread, and heaps and heaps of praise for what is sure to be this year’s blockbuster book. Every guest will be greeted at the door by James’s team with the question, “Are you a black leopard or a red wolf?” When I arrive and it is my turn to answer, I scan the room for James and lock eyes, blow him a kiss, before turning to his team and saying, “I am both.”
Kima Jones is a poet and prose writer living in Los Angeles, where she owns and operates Jack Jones Literary Arts, a book publicity company.
Twenty-two writers, including Alexander Chee and Rebecca Makkai, offer their personal take on the best retreats for productivity, motivation, networking, and more.
Our annual Writers Retreats Issue features twenty-two of the most inspiring retreats in the country; a profile of Marlon James on the release of his new epic fantasy novel, Black Leopard, Red Wolf; an interview with Valeria Luiselli about her new novel, Lost Children Archive; a conversation with poet Ilya Kaminsky about his new collection, Deaf Republic; the second installment of How to Get Paid; Reviewers & Critics; the art of translation; writing prompts; and more.
In the twenty-fourth episode of Ampersand, editor in chief Kevin Larimer and senior editor Melissa Faliveno discuss new books by the three authors featured in the new issue: Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James; Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli, and Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky.
02:40Marlon James, the author of three previous books of fiction, including the Man Booker Prize winning novel A Brief History of Seven Killings, is back this month with Black Leopard, Red Wolf, the first installment of his Dark Star Trilogy, an epic fantasy that’s being called “The African Games of Thrones.” And this book is truly epic: It follows two shape-shifting mercenaries, Leopard and Tracker, on an odyssey through a Dark Ages version of the African continent, across ancient cities and dense forests, in search of a missing boy. Along the way they encounter all sorts of mythical creatures, including vampires, witches, wizards, trickster monkeys, and one very wise buffalo. Adventure and swashbuckling ensue, but so do deeper explorations: of truth, power, queerness, and the desire to understand one another.
04:25 Marlon James reads an excerpt from Black Leopard, Red Wolf.
The opening spread of this issue’s conversation between Ilya Kaminsky by Garth Greenwell. Photo by Bob Mahoney.
12:03Ilya Kaminsky’s new book, Deaf Republic, is a kind of parable-in-poems set in an unnamed occupied territory during a time of political unrest. The poetic narrative starts with a gunshot: While breaking up a protest, a soldier shoots and kills a young deaf boy—and this horrific act renders the entire town deaf. The citizens coordinate their silent insurgency with sign language as the book follows the private lives of townspeople encircled by public violence. It’s a love story, a collection of poems about terror and carnage and witness and political dissent—and the power of puppeteering. Ilya was born in Odessa, in what was then the Soviet Union, in 1977. Substantially deaf from the age of four, he spoke no English when he immigrated to the United States with his family at sixteen. And yet he studied at the University of Rochester and Georgetown University and has a JD from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. His honors include a Whiting Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Metcalf Award, a Lannan Fellowship, Poetry magazine’s Levinson Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is the editor in chief of the literary journal Poetry International and, after several years teaching in the graduate creative writing program at San Diego State University, Ilya now holds the Bourne Poetry Chair at Georgia Tech.
15:12 Ilya Kaminsky reads three poems from Deaf Republic.
The opening spread of this issue’s interview with Valeria Luiselli by Lauren LeBlanc. Photo by Tony Gale.
19:44Valeria Luiselli’s new novel, Lost Children Archive, follows a family of four—whose names and ethnicities we never learn—as they road-trip across the country, from New York to Arizona. The couple are audio archivists, and their destination on this journey is Apacheria, the place the Apaches once called home. “Why Apaches?” asks the ten-year-old son. “Because they were the last of something,” answers the father. The family, which is facing a crisis of its own, is trying to hold onto its own foundations while attempting to understand those of the country across which they travel. It’s a book that is at once a great American road trip novel and an investigation of the complexities of family, immigration, justice, and equality in the United States. Born in Mexico City in 1983, Luiselli has lived in South Korea, India, Spain, and elsewhere; she now lives in New York, where she teaches a creative writing workshop with her niece, at an immigration detention center, to mostly Guatemalan children for whom Spanish is their second language. In the fall she will begin teaching at Bard College, where he was recently appointed writer in residence. She is the author of four previous books, including Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions, The Story of My Teeth, Faces in the Crowd, and Sidewalks.
21:58 Valeria Luiselli reads an excerpt from Lost Children Archive.
27:48 The cohosts talk about one of their favorite subjects—made-up words!—after receiving an e-mail from Jim Armstrong, an avid listener of Ampersand who shared a project in which he came up with a new word for each letter of the alphabet, including wrught, vocabullary, and emaul. On his website, armstrongwords.com, he offers the definition and etymology of each word, then provides some useful examples. Thanks for reaching out, Jim!
This episode is brought to you in part by the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. From July 16–28, the University of the South will host the 30th annual Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Thanks to the generosity of the Walter E. Dakin Memorial Fund, supported by the estate of Tennessee Williams, the Conference will gather distinguished faculty to provide instruction and criticism through workshops and craft lectures in poetry, fiction, and playwriting. Fellowships and scholarships are available, and the application deadline is March 20. Apply online and find out more at sewaneewriters.org.
Valeria Luiselli audio excerpted courtesy Penguin Random House Audio from Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli, read by the author, Kivlighan de Montebello, William DeMeritt and Maia Enrigue Luiselli.
Ampersand: The Poets & Writers Podcast is a production of Poets & Writers, Inc., and is edited and mixed by Melissa Faliveno. Music for this episode is provided by YACHT, BitBasic, Adam & Alma, and Clinic. Comments or suggestions? E-mail ampersand@pw.org.
The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is located at the intersection of 135th Street and Malcolm X Boulevard in Harlem. It is eight blocks from Langston Hughes’s famous brownstone, seven blocks from where James Baldwin once attended high school, and a three-minute walk from Zora Neale Hurston’s former artist-collective residence. It sits directly across from the Harlem Hospital Center and is surrounded by an array of delis, bodegas, and brownstones—quintessential emblems of Harlem that drape the neighborhood’s landscape.
After stepping off the subway, I walk fifteen feet to the right and purchase a chicken-and-rice meal from the shawarma cart that is parked near the sidewalk in front of the center each day. I sit on one of the benches in front of the building as cars glide down Malcolm X Boulevard, their music thumping with enough bass to shake the street.
Mid-chew I look up and see Barry Jenkins, director of the Academy Award–winning film Moonlight, surveying a table of used books. The moment is almost too prototypically Harlem to be true. Here is one of the preeminent black artists of our time—and one of the most critically acclaimed directors in Hollywood—quietly perusing used books on Malcolm X Boulevard as passersby bustle along without saying a word to him, as if he were simply a fixture of the Harlem ecosystem. The Schomburg Center is, in many ways, the central home to the culture that Jenkins embodies, and its new director, the poet Kevin Young, sits at the nexus of participant and purveyor.
When I step inside the Schomburg, I am escorted to meet Young in a small conference room with a dozen chairs, two square tables pushed against each other, and three rectangular windows that overlook a small courtyard. Young walks into the room with a stack of papers and several books with innumerable dog-eared pages. He moves with a sense of self-assuredness that one would expect from someone with his résumé, but counterbalances it with a disarming sense of humor.
Today he is wearing a light-blue oxford shirt with its sleeves rolled up to just below his elbows. The screen of his watch flickers as he moves his hand during the conversation. The ID at the end of his black lanyard is tucked into his left shirt pocket as if he didn’t want you to know that he is the director of the leading research center for black culture in the country. His thick, black beard is flecked with subtle streaks of gray, and he often runs his fingers through it while his other hand rests on the opposite arm. His hair is closely cropped on the sides, but the top of his head abounds with tightly coiled black curls that sprout up along his scalp. His glasses are round and thick and black and slide from the bridge of his nose when he laughs, which he does often, in a way that invites you into the conversation. I’m here to talk to him not only about his position at the Schomburg Center but also about his new role as poetry editor of the New Yorker as well as his new book of nonfiction, Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News, published this month by Graywolf Press.
I first met Young two summers ago at the Cave Canem retreat—an annual weeklong workshop for black poets that serves as a refuge from the predominantly white literary spaces we spend most of our time in. Many of the fellows came from MFA programs and workshops where, as Junot Díaz put it in his 2014 treatise in the New Yorker, “the default subject position of reading and writing—of Literature with a capital L—was white, straight, and male.”
I was not in an MFA program myself but had taken a poetry workshop as a small weekly reprieve from the datasets and statistical analyses of my own graduate studies in the sociology of education, only to have a similarly disillusioning experience as the only black person in a room full of mostly white writers. I talked to Young, for example, about how I had written a series of poems in the voice of my barber and didn’t bring any of those poems into the class because I didn’t want to endure the stress of navigating a scenario where my workshop mates had to decide how to engage a poem laden with the N-word. He laughed in the way some people do to signal that they understand—that they really understand—and nodded. “Cave Canem exists because of that need,” he said.
At that first meeting, the gap between us couldn’t have felt wider. I was a twenty-something-year-old poet and graduate student who had not yet finished a draft of my first manuscript. I was simply thrilled to have even been accepted to the retreat. Young was a Guggenheim fellow and the author of ten poetry collections, including Jelly Roll: A Blues (Knopf, 2003), a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and a book of nonfiction, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (Graywolf Press, 2012), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a winner of the PEN/Open Book Award. He was a professor of creative writing and curator of one of the most impressive literary archives in the country at Emory University. All that by the age of forty-six. And yet he was so different from what we imagine our preeminent literary figures to be. There was no bravado or pretense. There was no condescension or sense of snobbery. My first memory of Young is seeing him playing pool with poet Major Jackson in the lobby of the dormitories where we were all staying. He snacked on a bag of chips between shots, and when I walked in he looked up and asked, “You know how to play?”
That week, as Young led our workshop, it was clear that the collective project we were all embarking on was about far more than what we were putting onto the page. It served as reaffirmation that our work, our experiences, and the cultural idiosyncrasies of our voices were not something that should be compromised in order to be part of the literary community, but something that meaningfully contributed to its terrain. For many, it is often the only reminder they receive. “I think [Cave Canem] often serves as a healing place for folks,” Young says. “It helps focus the tradition that has always been there.”
More than simply being a space of healing, Cave Canem, Young points out, has fundamentally transformed the landscape of black literature since it was founded two decades ago. He is adamant about this point.
In the past decade alone, for example, there have been four black winners of the Pulitzer Prize in poetry—Tyehimba Jess (2017), Gregory Pardlo (2015), Tracy K. Smith (2012), and Natasha Trethewey (2007)—as compared with three winners in the previous eighty-five years of the prize combined. Smith and Trethewey would go on to serve as poets laureate of the United States. Both of their first books were published after winning the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Young was the judge who selected Smith’s debut, The Body’s Question (Graywolf Press, 2003).
“It’s just like this unprecedented thing,” he says, leaning back in his chair, soaking in the realization as if having it for the first time. “Obviously not all of that is because of Cave, but Cave is part of what I would call the Renaissance of Black Letters, and it’s one that I think the Schomburg can be, and should be, at the center of.”
For young writers, part of Young’s approachability stems from his recognition that not so long ago he was also a young writer attempting to find a literary community. The community he found would be both personally and artistically transformative.
In 1987, Sharan Strange and Thomas Sayers Ellis, who would soon become friends and peers of Young’s, hopped in a car and drove from Boston to Harlem to attend James Baldwin’s funeral. The prophetic luminary had died in France, but his body had been brought back to the neighborhood of his birth. His community wanted to give him a homegoing celebration imbued with Harlem’s unique character and give so many of those who loved him most an opportunity to say goodbye for themselves. At the funeral the young writers encountered figures like Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and Amiri Baraka, all of whom spoke at Baldwin’s service and all of whom represented the pinnacle of African American letters. Baldwin’s death was made especially difficult for the young writers who trekked from Boston not only because they were mourning the death of a distinguished black literary figure, but also because they never had the opportunity to meet him while he was alive. As Young puts it, they “swore to themselves that they would not let another black writer die without having met that person and connected.” As a way to remedy that problem, Strange and Ellis, joined by their friend Janice Lowe, started a reading series in which they paired young emerging black writers alongside their more established counterparts. The group became known as the Dark Room Collective and held the reading series in an old Victorian at 31 Inman Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where several of the young artists lived.
Writers like Derek Walcott, Alice Walker, and Yusef Komunyakaa made their way through the Cambridge residence—metal chairs unfolded across wooden floors and couches slid against the walls to make room for the guests who had come to see these literary forebears alongside their progeny.
Young, then an undergraduate at Harvard studying under the likes of Seamus Heaney and Lucie Brock-Broido, remembers attending some events there, before he became an official member of the collective himself, and being stunned at the sight of two hundred fifty black people packed into a single room—sitting on floors, peeking around corners, holding their breath—listening to poetry. “I think it spurred a community,” he says, pausing, reflecting on the word. “It spurred the writing community in Boston, which was really interesting then but probably was whiter than it knew, to really think about itself in new ways. It was important in that way.”
He must see it in my face as he describes how the series unfolded because he smiles knowingly as I share how shocked I am that a group of relatively unknown aspiring writers could get some of the most important artists of the day to show up and read at their house—for free. Young says that they simply wrote to them and said, “Hey, we have this thing and it’s special and we get this many people and we can get you great dinner.” “And folks came out,” he adds. “It was both a different time and also it’s an eternal thing that if you provide the space and build it,” they will come.
After Young joined the group, the collective began traveling to venues beyond the Inman Street house to read their work. They read in other places throughout Boston and then across the country. “We’d read in a bar in Miami or we’d all get in a car, and me and Major [Jackson] had the cars and we’d drive,” he says with a laugh. “We’d drive to D.C. and sleep on people’s floors. Even then I knew it was a particular moment in time.”
There were many poets who weren’t formally in the collective but whose presence and friendships shaped the distinctive literary sensibilities of the group. Among them was Elizabeth Alexander, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a current professor at Columbia University, and someone to whom Young felt particularly close. Alexander recounts with nostalgic tenderness the moment she met Young and another young undergraduate writer at Harvard, both of whom were in the nascent stages of their literary careers.
“I read on Harvard’s campus through the Grolier Bookstore when my first book of poems came out in 1990. There were these two adorable, alive young men listening very, very carefully and they came up to introduce themselves afterward—Kevin Young and Colson Whitehead,” she wrote to me in an e-mail. “Kevin sent me copies of the literary journal he edited and told me about younger writers who were his friends and comrades. We talked about writers and poems we admired and loved. Later on, we sent each other manuscripts—we’ve been good book editors to each other. Now we text to make each other laugh.”
There is a photograph of the Dark Room Collective taken in 1996 that serves as an illuminating artifact of the time. Seven of the members—Natasha Trethewey, Kevin Young, Major Jackson, Nehassaiu deGannes, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Sharan Strange, and Adisa Vera Beatty—are sitting on a New England beach, some looking off in different directions, some looking directly at the camera. The photo is in black and white, and the young writers each appear to be wearing a mix of black, white, and beige clothing so their bodies blend into the sand. Young sits between Jackson and Trethewey—looking directly at the camera—his full beard then a tightly groomed goatee, the tight coils of hair on his head and a flock of thin dreadlocks falling down just past his shoulders.
The very existence of the photo and others like it—color coordinated, posed, pensive—captures the group’s youthful ambition. Even before they achieved such high standing in American letters, they understood themselves as something worthy of being documented, archived.
The collective would dissolve in the late nineties as its members transitioned to graduate school, new jobs, and opportunities to pursue their work full-time.
Young’s life prior to his literary ascent was one of constant movement, expanding his conception of home beyond the limits of geographical location. His mother and father—both of whom grew up in segregated, rural Louisiana and were the first in their families to attend and graduate from college—were studying to become a chemist and an eye surgeon, respectively. As a result, they moved the family around every few years as the two of them pursued their careers. Before Young turned ten years old, he had lived in six different cities. But he always thought of Louisiana, where much of his family remained and where he frequently visited, as home.
He attended high school in Topeka, Kansas, a place from which few might expect great writers to emerge, though Young points out that among both his heroes (Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes) and his contemporaries (Ed Skoog, Gary Jackson, Ben Lerner), Topeka has produced some of the top literary talent in American poetics.
Young attended Harvard as an undergraduate, where he joined the Dark Room Collective, and in the years that followed, his career, like many of his collective-mates, took off. He was awarded a Stegner fellowship from Stanford before going on to receive his MFA from Brown. He had brief tenures at the University of Georgia and Indiana University before moving to Emory University, where he remained for eleven years and served as curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library, a 75,000-volume collection of both contemporary and centuries-old work. He also served as curator of the library’s Literary Collections, which contains the archival work of canonical writers such as Seamus Heaney, Lucille Clifton, Alice Walker, Jack Kerouac, and Flannery O’Connor, among others.
During this period, Young’s writing was prolific, and his work helped to shape the twenty-first-century landscape of American poetry. He won or was a finalist for some of the genre’s most prestigious awards and served as steward not only to the work of the past—through his work in the archives—but also to the work of the present, editing several anthologies, including The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food and Drink (Bloomsbury, 2012), The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing (Bloomsbury, 2010), and Jazz Poems (Everyman’s Library, 2006). Part of what served as a catalyst for Young’s prolific output was the unexpected death of his father in 2004. “I think I realized life is short,” he says. And part of Young’s mourning took place in his work. His books Dear Darkness (Knopf, 2008) and Book of Hours (Knopf, 2014) eulogize his father in a series of poems that move between gentle nostalgia and violent grief.
Last fall Young left the temperate seasons of Atlanta for the dynamism of Harlem to become the new director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Upon his arrival, he wasted little time ensuring that he would continue to build on the work of his predecessor, Khalil Gibran Muhammad (who left his post after five years to become a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School). Within the first few months of Young’s tenure, the Schomburg Center was named a National Historic Landmark by the Obama administration, and the center finalized plans to acquire James Baldwin’s papers, something that was of particular import to Young both because Baldwin is a son of Harlem and because the nature of our social and political moment renewed public interest in his work.
“It was very important to me that the papers not just be announced, but be open,” he says. “And so, the day after we announced them, they were open to research service. And the researchers have come in droves to see them.”
The connection to Baldwin is also personal for Young, who says he could not have written his debut nonfiction project, The Grey Album, without the virtuosic guidance of Baldwin’s prose. The Grey Album was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the PEN/Open Book Award, but, more important, it expanded Young’s reputation from that of an acclaimed poet to a distinguished and erudite cultural critic. “Even [for] this new book, in which I think a lot about America and American history and race…his spirit provided an essential guide,” he says about Baldwin.
Young’s new book, Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News, and his new job fit together in ways that have aligned with unsettling relevance. The book traces the history of the hoax and deceit in the American cultural and political life—moving from P. T. Barnum (who founded the Barnum & Bailey Circus) in the late nineteenth century to Greg Mortenson’s infamously fabricated memoir Three Cups of Tea (Penguin, 2007) to Melania Trump’s plagiarism of Michelle Obama’s Democratic National Convention speech. Young began research for the book long before the assent of Trump into mainstream national politics and certainly long before anyone could anticipate the extent that “fake news” would become common parlance in contemporary political discourse.
But as Young outlines in Bunk, there is a long and often insidious precedent for a society in which facts become secondary. And both through his book and in his role as director of the Schomburg, he hopes to more forcefully push back against the insurgent phenomenon. “Libraries are more important than ever now, because we provide free and accurate information for people across learning levels,” he says. “That’s what we do.”
The greatest hoax of them all, Young believes, is race. No other type of insidiously conjured fraudulence has endured as long and has had effects as deleterious. “I trace the hoax [of race], as an idea and a concept, and one that emerges in the eighteenth century—it isn’t a word until then,” he says. “I came to understand that that’s not an accident. In many ways, some of the aspects of the hoax and its systematic and stereotypical qualities allowed race to become more fixed around the nineteenth century. We tend to think there’s progress and things get better, but there’s a real hardening along originally unclear racial lines—or blurry ones, or ones not fully understood as biological and unredeemable in the case of black people, brown people, Native American people—all of these qualities became more and more fixed for very different reasons but similar ends, which is to justify slavery or displacement or aspects of supremacy.”
Ideas like those in Bunk serve as the bedrock of discourse at the Schomburg, where many black writers, artists, and public intellectuals come to share their work. Part of Young’s commitment as director is to flatten the hierarchies of intellectual engagement. It’s not that he wants to reduce such writers’ standing as thought-leaders in the community—indeed, many of them are his friends and colleagues—but he wants to continue opening up the space for more people to enter it. In reflecting on an event that took place right after he became director, Young says, “The discourse at that event, which was one of my first events as director, was so impressive. Just community folk asking really smart, interesting questions. The way I think of it is it’s not just scholars. Every student is a scholar; every scholar is a student. We have a lot of folks who are doing deep reading who are really engaged.”
Inevitably, the nature of Young’s new job means that he doesn’t have the same chunks of time to write that he once did as a young professor, but he says it’s well worth it. “I get to go to a place, every day, where Langston Hughes is buried and his spirit is felt. That’s amazing.” And it isn’t as if Young feels like he has less writing time; it’s just that now he has to be more purposeful in creating it. “I feel like people have this notion of writing that it’s inspiration-based and romantic. Both little-R and big-R romantic. I don’t think that’s how it works. I think we can put it many ways—perspiration not inspiration—but I think it’s really just being there in your space. It’s physical in order to prompt a mental space, but it isn’t inspiration, exactly. It’s being there and writing.”
I share with him my own struggles of clearly demarcating how much of my time I spend reading and how much of my time I spend writing. That when I do more of one, I never feel like I am doing enough of the other. I tell him how, for different writing projects, like the piece I am writing on him, I attempt to set specific word goals each day but become overwhelmed when I don’t meet them. He balks. “No, God no. You have to just think of it [all] as work. I think that’s the thing that changed for me a long time ago,” he says in the way people do when they’re reintroduced to a habit they attempted to leave behind. “It’s working. That’s why they call it your work.”
Going forward, Young will have to be even more purposeful about making time for his personal reading and writing—this month he begins his tenure as the poetry editor of the New Yorker, the first black person to hold the position. David Remnick, editor in chief of the magazine, gushed over Young’s work as both writer and editor when I called him. The two had met briefly at a dinner party at Elizabeth Alexander’s home years ago, and Remnick continued following, and then publishing, Young’s poetry and essays. “I love his work and have read him for a long time,” he says.
While online poetry journals and literary magazines have provided more and more opportunities for poets to be published, the New Yorker, with its circulation of 1.2 million, remains the largest commercial platform for poets to have their work engage the larger world. “The opportunity to get read at that scale is not a common thing for poets,” says Remnick, who wanted someone in that position who not only understands the role that the New Yorker has played in putting poems in front of those who may not regularly read them, but who would also use the platform to publish a range of different voices. “I think Kevin will,” he adds.
When I ask Young about it, he becomes more coy than he’s been in the previous moments of our conversation. His responses become briefer, as if the opportunity were a fragile vase that the wrong words might break into pieces. “I remember reading the New Yorker book of poems when I was a kid. I’m looking forward to participating in that tradition too,” he says shyly. I try to hype him up. “This is a big deal!” I tell him, attempting to pull something from him that it becomes increasingly clear he is not willing to give. I try again: “When these things happen to you, are you able to step back and say, ‘Man, I am the director of the preeminent center on black culture in the country. I’m going to be poetry editor of one of the most historically renowned literary magazines—”
He leans back in the wooden chair and laughs. “Every night, I say those exact words.”
He then becomes more reflective. “I think you’re busy doing the work of it, but that’s why you have friends, so you can sit back and celebrate or reflect. Also, it’s an actual day-in and day-out thing. You’re trying to get that work done.”
Throughout his career his friends have indeed lifted him up in celebration, and still, they recognize that despite the success he remains the person so many of them knew as an eager undergraduate trying to emerge in the landscape of black literature. “Kevin feels like his same self to me over all these years,” Elizabeth Alexander says. “He has always been prolific, hilarious, omnivorous, meticulous, dauntless, and sure-footed, a lover of black culture in its everythingness.”
Clint Smith is a writer, a doctoral candidate at Harvard University, and the author of Counting Descent (Write Bloody Publishing, 2016), which won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. He is a 2014 National Poetry Slam champion and a 2017 recipient of the Jerome J. Shestack Prize from the American Poetry Review. His writing has been published in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Guardian, and the New Republic, among other publications. He was born and raised in New Orleans.
Arundhati Roy must be tired of hearing the same question: What took you so long? But then, it has been two decades since her debut novel, The God of Small Things, was translated into forty-two languages, sold eight million copies, and won the prestigious Man Booker Prize, and she was catapulted to international fame and remarkable financial success. Now, with the June release of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (Knopf), she is not apologizing for the wait. Busy traveling, writing, and establishing herself as an outspoken activist, Roy explains that about ten years ago, the “mad souls,” the constellation of characters in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, grew insistent. “Anjum, Tilo, Saddam, Musa, and the gang moved in with me and colonized my imagination,” she says. “And for me, while fiction is necessary, I prefer it to be timeless rather than timely. So when I write fiction, I am prepared to wait for it to come to me. I am never in a hurry.”
Yet for someone who prefers not to hurry when it comes to fiction, she is certainly capable of moving with a sense of urgency, if her prolific, and often polemic, nonfiction is any measure. Roy cites a “watershed moment” when, in 1998, the newly formed Hindu Nationalist government in India conducted a series of nuclear tests, “which were greeted by the media and establishment with a nationalist fervor and talk about the return of ‘Hindu pride’ that changed the nature of what could and could not be said politically.” Roy had her say in an essay titled “The End of Imagination,” a critique of these policies. “While India was being hailed as a great new economic power,” she says in retrospect, “within India millions of poor people were being further impoverished by the new economic policies; tens of thousands of small farmers, deep in debt, were committing suicide. Young Muslim men accused of being ‘terrorists’ on very flimsy and often fabricated grounds were being thrown in prison. Kashmir was on fire.” Her essays and speeches turned into a steady stream of books, including Power Politics (South End Press, 2001), The Algebra of Infinite Justice (Viking, 2001), War Talk (South End Press, 2003), Public Power in the Age of Empire (Seven Stories Press, 2004), Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers (Haymarket Books, 2009), Broken Republic (Penguin, 2011), and Capitalism: A Ghost Story (Haymarket Books, 2014). Fiction had to wait because, she says, she had no choice: “I could not watch all this happen as I continued my glittering career as a prize-winning novelist. I began to travel and write about these things because it was urgent and necessary to do so.” Her efforts did not go unnoticed. Roy was awarded the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award in 2002, the Sydney Peace Prize in 2004, and the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2006. (She rejected the most recent award, from the Indian Academy of Letters, because she opposes the government’s policies.) And she’s been giving back, contributing prize money and royalties to fund various causes and small organizations, mainly in India.
Even though the characters from The Ministry of Utmost Happiness took up residence in her imagination, she wasn’t ready to share them until about seven years ago, after a visit with her friend John Berger at his home in France. A mentor and also a Booker Prize winner, in 1972, for his novel G—in other words, someone whom she listened to before his death early this year—Berger told her to go to her computer and read to him whatever fiction she was writing, which she did. Impressed, he said she should go right home and finish the book, which she intended to do. But a few weeks later, in Delhi, she found an anonymous note pushed under her apartment door asking her to visit the Maoists in the jungles of central India—an offer she couldn’t refuse. This was followed by a period of still more waiting, though eventually, she asserts, those characters themselves brought the novel to closure: “They compelled me! Stubborn people. I had no choice.”
“She lives in the graveyard like a tree,” reads the first sentence of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness—an opening that is enigmatic, tantalizing, and predictive. The “she” is the aging Anjum, a central character whose mother, thrilled to have given birth to a boy, discovers “nestling underneath his boy-parts, a small, unformed, but undoubtedly girl-part.” So Anjum, originally known as Aftab, begins her journey, as readers begin theirs, into the world of the Hijra. A somewhat ambiguous term, Hijra refers to a person whose gender is neither male nor female, including those born intersex, though it most frequently refers to individuals who were born male but identify as women. (In 2014, the Supreme Court of India recognized Hijra as “a third gender,” thus conveying legal status.) Roy is careful to point out, however, that she has not “used” Anjum, whom she refers to as “a Beloved,” to typify a category of people: “She is herself and distinct. Yes, she has a schism running through her, like many others in the book. Many of them have borders of caste and out-casteness, of religious conversion, of nation and geography.”
The novel crosses other borders of both perspective and place. Set primarily in present-day New Delhi, with a political backdrop of Kashmir’s struggle for independence, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness spans more than thirty years, often through Anjum’s eyes as she establishes herself in that space where her relatives are buried. “Over time, Anjum began to enclose the graves of her relatives and build rooms around them,” Roy writes. “Each room had a grave (or two) and a bed. Or two. She built a separate bathhouse…[she] called her Guest house Jannat. Paradise.” Beginning by taking in down-and-out travelers, Jannat Guest House becomes a community center of sorts, where nearly all the characters in this intricately plotted novel find themselves—some, as Roy playfully writes, “for The Rest of Their Lives,” some to bond as family, some only for a moment of comforting connection.
It is in Jannat Guest House, a place of physical as well as spiritual union, that Anjum and others recognize as well as honor a continuum of life and death—a place where “the battered angels in the graveyard that kept watch over their battered charges held open the doors between worlds (illegally, just a crack), so that the souls of the present and the departed could mingle, like guests at the same party.” This became a guiding image for Roy, who worked with designer David Eldridge and photojournalist Mayank Austen Soofi to create the cover art for the novel: a vertical picture of a decaying white marble grave with a withered rose placed right below the title. The haunting image melds beauty and decay and suggests the compatibility of change and permanence.
In The Ministry of Utmost Happiness Roy shifts places, time periods, and viewpoints with the grace of a master choreographer as characters take circuitous paths that are at times parallel, then intersecting or conflicting, ultimately seeming a matter of both coincidence and fate. She works at that unstructured structure. “To me, the way a story is told is almost more important than the story itself. I think I might be incapable of telling a story in chronological order,” she says. “For me, a story is like the map of a great city or, at the very least, a large building. You can’t explore it by driving down the main street or entering from the front door and exiting through the back. You have to live in it, wander through the by-lanes, take blind alleys and have a smoke with the people who live there, look into the rooms from the outside in. That’s the fun of it!”
Arundhati Roy in New York City.
(Credit: Tony Gale)
The novel is teeming with indelible characters: politicians—some murderously demented—accountants, teachers, militants, and mothers in a multigenerational story. There’s the irrepressible Ustad Kulsoom Bi, guru and head of the Hijra household that Anjem joins initially; the incorrigible Saddam Hussain, a name he chose for himself; the two Miss Jebeens, one killed by a bullet that passed through her skull into her mother’s heart, the other abandoned on a Delhi street and claimed by Anjum; the shape-shifting Amrik Singh, “a cheery cold-blooded killer.” A central quartet of characters—Musa, Naga, Garson Hobart (a code name for Biplab Dasgupta), and Tilo, the one the other three love—meet as students, go their separate ways, then weave in and out of one another’s lives in a plot that moves between the poverty-stricken neighborhoods of Old Delhi, the glittering new wealth of malls and hotels, and the mountains and valleys of Kashmir.
Although it’s tempting to see some of these characters as representations of different viewpoints in Indian politics, Roy objects: “Even Dasgupta is partly the voice of the establishment and partly a lost, lovelorn wreck. Hazrat Sarmad, Hazrat of the Indeterminate, is the deity of this book.” Thus, Roy’s characters are, first and foremost, complicated human beings who remind us that “we do a great injustice to people when we ‘unsee’ their identities and the discrimination they suffer because of that identity,” she says. “Equally, we do great injustice when we see nothing of a person except to brand them with one single identity. Sometimes people do this even to themselves.”
The dazzling array of characters, while hardly autobiographical, does suggest Roy’s own wide spectrum of experiences, lived passionately and thoughtfully. She was born Suzanna Arundhati Roy in 1961 in northeast India to Mary, a Syrian Christian, and Rajib, a Bengali Hindu from Calcutta. Her parents divorced when she was two and her brother, Lalith, three and a half. In interviews, Roy emphasizes that she did not come from a privileged background. Quite the contrary: When her mother left her alcoholic husband, she struggled to make a living, finally starting an independent school in Kerala. Roy went to boarding school and began secretarial college. At sixteen, she quit and moved to Delhi to study at the School of Planning and Architecture. For a while, she lived what has often been described as a bohemian lifestyle with architect Gerard da Cunha. After they broke up, Roy returned to Delhi to work at the National Institute of Urban Affairs, where she met and married Pradeep Kishen, a former history professor and Oxford graduate who had become an independent filmmaker. Roy wrote screenplays and acted in several films they collaborated on, but she became disillusioned with what she saw as the elitism of the film world. After they divorced, she made her living in various jobs, including leading aerobics and yoga classes, until she turned her attention to writing.
It’s no surprise then that Roy dismisses those questions about what took her so long by pointing out that we are the sum of our experiences. A couple of decades between novels was hardly time wasted. “I absolutely could not have written this book without having lived the last twenty years in the way that I have. All that I saw and understood and experienced has been infused in me and then sweated out as fiction.”
With only two novels to her name, what accounts for Roy’s enormous international popularity as both novelist and dissident? Some argue that she reinforces the views of the Western liberal media and literary elite and affirms a tourist’s romanticized view of India’s ancient but flawed and crumbling beauty. That’s way too simplistic a perspective for many, however, including scholars such as Pranav Jani, an English professor at Ohio State University and the author of Decentering Rushdie: Cosmopolitanism and the Indian Novel in English (Ohio State University Press, 2010). He acknowledges that the West often views Indian authors through “a veneer of exoticism” because they are “deliciously Other.” Roy to some extent fulfills that expectation with her descriptions of the lush environment and her “unequivocal condemnation of caste and gender oppression,” Jani says, but she offers more. “While her sustained focus has always been on India, she has consistently contextualized Indian issues within global ones: The same systems of capitalism and militarism that produce inequality in India are the ones that create inequality here.”
Controversial as well as charismatic, Roy recently took on the icon of icons not only to India but the Western world: Mahatma Gandhi. What began initially as a brief introduction for a new edition of The Annihilation of Caste by B. R. Ambedkar turned into a book-length essay titled The Doctor and the Saint, in which Roy analyzes the political debate between Ambedkar and Gandhi, arguing that the latter’s more moderate call for the dissolution of only the “untouchable” caste sidelined the former’s fight for justice. She characterizes Ambedkar, himself born an “untouchable,” as the true champion of the poor—with predictably heated results. Writing the introduction to the 2017 edition, published by Haymarket Books, Roy defended herself: “Given the exalted, almost divine status that Gandhi occupies in the imagination of the modern world, in particular the Western world, I felt that unless his hugely influential and, to my mind, inexcusable position on caste and race was looked at carefully, Ambedkar’s rage would not be fully understood.”
In The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Roy strides onto similarly dangerous ground with the Maoists, or Naxalites, a revolutionary guerrilla force in central India. Believing that “there is an unreported war taking place against these populations,” she interrupted her writing to follow instructions that began with the note under her door and spent time living with Maoist insurgents and tribal villagers. Her initial article, published as a cover story for the Indian newsweekly Outlook, became the book Walking With the Comrades (Penguin, 2012). She argues that the official military campaign against the Maoists is actually a war against the poor, specifically the indigenous tribes who live on land with great mineral reserves. “Here in the forests of Dantewada,” she writes, “a battle rages for the soul of India.” Not surprisingly, response ranged from adulation to outrage.
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness takes some of the same risks. Toward the end of the novel, Roy presents a ten-page letter from Miss Jebeen the Second’s mother, Revathy, a member of the Maoist Communist Party of India. The letter explains the plight of those like her who have few choices, experience rape and torture, “live and die by [the] gun,” yet who recognize that the party “does many wrong things,” that “women join because they are revolutionaries but also because they cannot bear their sufferings at home.” Likely some will interpret this letter as an eloquent exposé of an unreported war; others are likely to interpret it as a lengthy intrusion of political polemic.
Roy, however, does not see a conflict or controversy in this example or in other overtly political dimensions of the novel. “I am very much against the idea of a novel as a disguised vehicle to write about ‘issues.’ To me a novel is a prayer, a world, a way of seeing. But in the telling of a story, these issues are the very air we breathe. To avoid them would make me a dishonest storyteller. It has always amazed me how people manage to tell stories about India without mentioning caste. It’s like writing about South Africa in the 1960s without mentioning apartheid. Apartheid was not an ‘issue.’ It was the DNA of that society at the time. So too with the practice of caste and what is happening in Kashmir. So too with the brutal violence, both state and societal, against the poor, and so too with the people who resist it.”
In the twenty years since the publication of The God of Small Things, speculation has run high about what Roy’s next novel might be. Satire was one guess. It’s true that irony, even cynicism, makes its way into the novel: There are soldiers who “fired their light machine guns,” the concept of “post-massacre protocol,” and sadistic officers who take a “torture break.” There is sly sarcasm in Roy’s description of India as the new superpower: “Namaste, they said in exotic accents, and smiled like the turbaned doormen with maharaja mustaches who greeted foreign guests in five-star hotels.” And there’s the Shiraz Cinema, converted to an “enclave of barracks and officers’ quarters.” She writes, “What had once been the cinema snack bar now functioned as a reception-cum-registration counter for torturers and torturees.”
But despite such dark humor and sardonic observations, Roy’s generously expansive novel lacks the brittle spirit of satire. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is filled with utopian communities—unconventional, misguided, and temporary as they may be—the Khwagagah or Dream Palace of the Hijra, the Jannat Guest House, even the fighters in Kashmir calling for Azadi, or freedom. It’s a novel filled with the search to belong, to find “my people,” to seize love in some form, whether as romance, motherhood, or camaraderie. Roy even tucks in Anna Akhmatova’s brave optimism: “I am not yet cured of happiness.” In fact, when asked to respond to Appalachian novelist Ann Pancake’s charge that “the greatest challenge for many twenty-first century artists is to create literature that imagines a way forward,” Roy sounds downright idealistic: “The ‘way forward’ will only come about when we change our way of seeing, when we redefine what we mean by words like ‘progress,’ ‘civilization,’ and ‘happiness.’ To do that we have to take a good look at ourselves. I think good novels help us to do that. And perhaps some are, in themselves, another way of seeing the world. In a non-didactic way, I hope The Ministry is that and does that.”
She’s right. Ultimately, it’s not politics that stay with us; it’s a beautifully written, powerful story. One of the most touching scenes in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is Musa recalling his young daughter, Miss Jebeen, demanding he tell her a story at night.
And then she would begin the story herself, shouting it out into the somber curfewed night, her raucous delight dancing out of the windows and rousing the neighborhood. Yeth manz ne kahn balai aasi! Noa aes sa kunni junglas manz roazaan! There wasn’t a witch, and she didn’t live in the jungle. Tell me a story, and can we cut the crap about the witch and the jungle? Can you tell me a real story?
Perhaps that’s what Arundhati Roy has done with this ambitious novel that spans a continent and several decades of war and peace and people who live in palaces and on the streets as well as undercover and underground—a novel that’s worth the wait. Once again, she has told a real story.
Renée H. Shea has profiled numerous authors for Poets & Writers Magazine, including Tracy K. Smith, Julie Otsuka, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Edwidge Danticat, and Maxine Hong Kingston. She is currently working on a series of textbooks for Bedford, Freeman & Worth, including Advanced Language and Literature (2017) and Foundations of Language and Literature, forthcoming in 2018.
In the late spring of 2000, on my first feature assignment as a twenty-seven-year-old editorial assistant for this magazine, I took the five-and-a-half-hour train ride from New York City to Syracuse, New York, to interview the author of one of that summer’s most highly anticipated books, the story collection Pastoralia (Riverhead Books). George Saunders had not yet received the kind of popular acclaim and critical recognition that followed him in the years to come, in the form of a MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called Genius Grant; the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story; an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the Story Prize; and so many other honors. He had not yet appeared on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert or This Week With George Stephanopoulos, or been named by Time magazine as one of the hundred most influential people in the world. He had not yet delivered the convocation address at Syracuse University that was posted on the website of the New York Times and then, within days, shared more than a million times on social media.
Back in 2000, when the author had published just one collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (Random House, 1996), and his second was just starting to gain momentum, the name George Saunders was already on every critic’s tongue, but the literary world had yet to discover the true depth of the author’s talent. Seventeen years later, we still haven’t touched bedrock, though his subsequent books—two more story collections, In Persuasion Nation (Riverhead Books, 2006) and Tenth of December (Random House, 2013); a novella, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil (Riverhead Books, 2005); a children’s book, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip (Villard, 2000); and a collection of essays, TheBraindead Megaphone (Riverhead Books, 2007)—have added to the already overwhelming evidence that we are in the presence of a writer whose boundless imagination, laugh-out-loud humor, moral acuity, and, though he would protest the characterization, generosity of spirit truly set him apart.
Saunders’s soaring talents are once again on display in his long-awaited debut novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, published in February by Random House. Presenting a kaleidoscopic panorama of voices (the audiobook employs a cast of 166 narrators), Lincoln in the Bardo is set in a graveyard, over the course of a single night in 1862, where President Abraham Lincoln grieves the death of his eleven-year-old son, Willie, while the boy’s ghost confronts a congregation of other spirits in a strange purgatory—called the bardo, in Tibetan tradition. It is a wonderfully bizarre and hilariously terrifying examination of the ability to live and love with the knowledge that everything we hold dear will come to an end.
Seventeen years ago, Saunders offered to spend more of his time with me than any professional obligation or friendly courtesy required of him. It was my first, and fortunately not my last, opportunity to get to know this bighearted, wholly original writer. In December we met again, at a hotel on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where we spoke for several hours about emotional realism, humor as a form of honesty, the flexibility of form, and, because this is George Saunders, poop jokes.
In 2000, I asked you if you’d ever tried to write a novel, and you replied, “Most of those stories in Pastoralia started out as novels. I’ve tried and I just recently got to the point where I’m not going to try anymore. If it happens, it’ll happen organically.” Here you are with your debut novel—so, did it happen organically? The idea for Lincoln in the Bardo had been around for a long time, and I found myself saying, “Well, I’ll do it, but I’m not sure it’s going to be a novel. I’m hoping it isn’t. I’m going to push against it whenever it starts to bloat.” And that principle seemed to be a good compositional principle, you know? If something tries to push its way into the book, you give it a stern look and say, “Are you just here because you think this is a novel? Because that’s next door.” So that meant, too, that all the moves I developed [writing stories] over the years were of course the ones that I used. How could it be otherwise, you know? But about halfway through, I said, “Oh, this is a novel only because it’s on a bigger stretcher-frame.” But each of the individual sections was being executed by the same principles as a story would be. So that was a relief.
You just treated it like pieces of a story. Yes. And I don’t know if other writers do this, but there’s that moment where you go, “Oh my God, I’m writing a novel. Anything goes!” And a couple of times I got in trouble because that mind-set took over. And then I would get that back in the box and say, “No, it’s by the same principles as all these stories: efficiency, one section producing and then leading to another. That’s it.” And then I would get back on track. So it was like the more I said, “The principles don’t change, but maybe the scale changes,” then I could do it. It was really a comfort to know that, in art, form is a way of accommodating one’s natural inclinations. If your natural inclination is to make small, concise structures, then form shows up and says, “Would you like me to help you link your small, concise structures?” And then form seems organic; it doesn’t seem whimsical. It doesn’t seem arbitrary. It seems organic, because it’s what allows you to accommodate your strengths.
Actually, at one point, a long time ago, I tried to do sort of a third-person version of this. And it was just dull, you know? “Lincoln walked into the graveyard. It was a dark and stormy night.” And sometimes you get into a zone like that, and you recoil. Like, no, no, no, I’m not using that voice. I can’t do it.
How far did you go using that voice? A page. Maybe two pages. It just felt creepy. And it was funny, because I loved that idea, but the prose was doing nothing to get me into a happy zone vis-à-vis that idea. It was just, like, typing about Lincoln. So that was no good. But I did try, over the years, to write a play. Kind of the same thing: It made me more convinced that there was definitely a story there, but that wasn’t it. The play wasn’t it, for sure.
That wasn’t the form that was going to allow you to tell the story. No. And strangely enough, the book is kind of playlike. But it was just, you know, sometimes you think—for me, for example, when I think, “I’m going to write a poem today,” it’s a guarantee that bullshit will come out of my head, because I’ve said I’m going to be a poet, and I just don’t have that gift. So my “poems,” in quotes, sound like poems in quotes. They’re just not good. The play was like that. It had a certain kind of faux-dramatic quality that just wasn’t interesting.
And how far did you get into the play? I finished it. I did twenty or thirty drafts. I kept thinking, “I’m going to figure out something here that makes this work.” At one point I put a big sign across it: Don’t Touch It! Just stay away.
That makes me think of something Colson Whitehead said when we talked for a recent episode of our podcast, Ampersand, about The Underground Railroad and how the idea for that was something he’d had fifteen years ago. And he just put it aside. He said he wanted to wait because he didn’t feel like he could do the idea justice. He wanted to become a better writer before he tackled that subject matter. That’s exactly the feeling I had about this…. I feel like my whole trajectory has been as a person of quite limited talent who’s a little strange and learns to harness that strangeness to accent the talent. So then you’re walking on a pretty thin ledge for the first two or three books. I think the thing has been trying to make my work—I’ve said as “happy” as I am, but I’m not sure I’m really that happy—I’m trying to make my work more like me. And so, over the past twenty years, the process has been trying to expand my toolbox to allow access to these different emotional valences that I didn’t really have access to early on. Or, I had access to them but only through a really dark route. I don’t think those early stories are particularly not hopeful. I think they’re kind of hopeful, but you’ve got to go a long way to get there, you know?
I suppose it’s like one’s personality: When you’re young, you’re a little insecure, you’re a little stealthy, and you try to find your way in the world, so you start embracing certain approaches and eschewing other ones. Then maybe at some midlife point, you go, “Wait now, I wonder if there’s more to me than this,” and you start to try to become more expansive, or maybe just get a little more comfortable in your skin, and you go, “Okay, I’m going to reconsider.” So for me it was an artistic enactment of that, which happened when I started writing essays. Especially the travel essays. Andy Ward, whom I worked with at GQ, had a really nice way of encouraging me when I would get into a place where I wasn’t relying on humor quite so much. And that in turn led to the Tenth of December and a couple of stories where suddenly I was drawing more directly on my real life…and finding that you could actually do that and still have a good prose style. Those kinds of things were the ladder that led me to be able to try this book.
What was the initial germ of the idea for this novel? We were in D.C. and driving by Oakhill Cemetery, and my wife’s cousin just casually pointed up and said, “That crypt up there…” I don’t know if we could actually see the crypt, or if we could just see the graveyard, but he said, “Lincoln’s son was buried up there.” And at that point, I didn’t even know Lincoln had a son. I’m not exactly a history major. And then she said, “Yeah, you know, he died while Lincoln was in office, a very low moment in the presidency, and Lincoln was so bereft that he apparently snuck out of the White House, crossed the city at night, and then newspapers at the time”—I’ve verified this since—“said that he had touched or held the body several times.” So that’s just one of those weird historical things. One, that a president at that point in history could leave the White House. This was during the Bill Clinton years, so you thought, “Bill Clinton’s not coming out at night.” And then also, as a father, just this sense of loss, and also the idea that, at that time, to touch and hold a body wouldn’t have been considered quite as morbid as we consider it. And this doesn’t happen to me, I’m not a real visual person, but there was just a pop of that image of Lincoln with the body across his lap—the Pietà, a monument or memorial or whatever. And then your mind goes, “Oh, that’d be a good story,” and I just had a feeling like, “Yeah, not for you.” Because maybe at that point…what year did we see each other?
That was 2000. So it would be around that time. A little earlier than that, because Clinton was president. At that point I had just gotten up on my feet a little bit with a certain voice and a certain approach to material that for me was very new. So when I just did the mental transposition of that material with what I thought was my voice at that point, it’s almost like sparks: “Nah, that isn’t right.” So I put it aside. I’m not sure I was so confident I ever would write about it. But I remember kind of thinking, “Yeah, there are people who could do that, but in this life, maybe it’s just not me.” And there are lots of stories in the world; I just happened to hear that one. No problem. But it definitely persisted. And the way I knew it was, I have a range of, like anybody, happiness and not-happiness, and whenever I’d be happy, that idea would almost come stand behind me and go, “Would you please?”
But every time I thought of it, I got that uncomfortable feeling like it was more than I could do. I’m not sure I was quite as confident as Colson that I would get there, but I just wasn’t able to get over it. So that’s interesting: an idea that just refuses to be boxed. That’s kind of weird. And I hadn’t actually ever had that feeling before. I normally don’t even think in ideas. So I felt a trap was being set, because when I was a younger writer, I would have those kinds of ideas: A novel in which…
The grand elevator pitch. Right. And then nothing would happen. So I was really resisting it. But when I have an idea like that, it’s trying to summon me into some new artistic ground. I was permitting parts of myself into the book that I had been keeping out all these years—genuine parts, and parts that I wanted to have in there. And somehow the idea went, “Come here, come here, come here. Trust me, trust me.” And I’m like, “I don’t know, I think it’s a trap.” And the idea said, “It is! It’s a good trap!”
And suddenly, you find yourself in really interesting, dramatic situations where the only way out is to summon up those previously suppressed or denied parts of your psyche that can finish it. And for me, those tended to be the more hopeful parts, actually. Or, hopeful and narratively straight, being comfortable with drama, no need to turn around and make jokes, just stay in that zone a little longer than I would normally be comfortable with. And then turn around and make the joke. It was a great experience.
I listened to an interview you gave around the time Tenth of December came out. And you were talking about how you were a little nervous about the reception of it, because you felt like it had more realism in it than your earlier work. Do you see this as a kind of trajectory, that you’re kind of pushing toward more realism? It’s funny, in talking about writing, I think people tend to make binaries. I don’t know why, but a student will come in and say, “I don’t know if I want to be funny or serious.” Or sometimes they’ll link it to people: “I either want to be Kerouac or Flannery O’Connor.” I don’t know why these writing problems present as binaries, but they seem to be neurological. So then of course one of the things you can do is, you can destabilize the binary. If you like O’Connor and Kerouac, put them on one side of the binary, and who’s on the other side? In this new novel, it’s a kind of realism, but when I think about writing a truly realistic book, I don’t have any interest in it. So I would say it’s emotional realism. And the goal has always been—that’s actually what it is, that’s the first time I’ve realized that: It’s just to have the fiction somehow simpatico with my actual emotional life, or let’s say with our actual emotional lives. I think that was always the goal. In CivilWarLand, that’s what I was trying to do. I was in a pretty rough patch. But I think the idea would be to say, “Okay, I’m going to try to remember every emotional state I’ve ever been in, and then assume that there are a bunch I haven’t been in, and that out in the world, all the ones I’ve ever experienced are still going on. It’s not like being a depressed eighteen-year-old went away because I turned nineteen.” So then you try to experiment, to imagine all those coexisting [states]; develop a style that would allow you to talk about that. I don’t really care much about realism, except in that sense. What does the human mind actually produce for us? What experiences and prejudices and impulses and desires? How do those desires actually play out in the real world? To get to the point where you could actually accommodate that would be the goal. And that makes sense for my work, because this novel isn’t—there are only three living people in the book, so I don’t know if we could really call it realism, but I think it certainly felt like I had more room to be emotionally realistic. In other words, to be able to write about grief not glancingly but rather directly. There’s some of that in the early books, but it’s always just a quick hit and move on, almost like a marker of grief. To be able to turn directly to it for three hundred pages feels to me like a step in the direction of emotional capaciousness, let’s say. So the goal would be, when I’m three hundred years old and I’m finishing my last book, that to anybody who walked in I’d be able to say, “Oh yeah, I get that. I love you, I understand you. Let’s have a book about you.” Whereas even now, there are some areas of human experience where I’m just like, “Yeah, I don’t know enough.” Or maybe I don’t have enough generosity of spirit.
In the interview you did with Random House—the one that appears in the back of the ARC—you talking about this book being a sort of chorus of voices. And you say, “These are people who did not in life manage to bring forth what was within them.” Where did that come from? It’s a psalm, I think. It’s the Gnostic Gospels, yeah. In some ways it’s just traditional ghost theory, which is, “Why are you here?” “I want my liver back!”
Unfinished business. That kind of thing. And that kind of melded with the Tibetan bardo idea, which is to me the more interesting and scarier idea: whatever way that your mind works in real time, right this minute, right this second. The body’s going to drop away, and that’s going to continue, but exaggerated. So with Heaven and Hell, it becomes a little complicated. It’s not: “Turn left, you’re in Heaven; turn right, you’re in Hell.” It’s: “Where are you right now?”
There’s that binary you were talking about again. Exactly. There’s something that’s Heaven-esque maybe. So if a person had gotten into a relationship with their thoughts in this life in a way that made them mostly pretty loving and happy, then I guess the idea would be that when you kicked off, that would continue. Or if you were an intensely self-flagellating, suspicious, greedy person whose every thought was sort of infused with that, then when you die, that could continue. That’s the theory. But the fun thing about this book was, your temptation was to say, “Well, let’s figure out what the afterlife is, and I’ll put it in a novel.” Well, I’m pretty sure that whatever it is, it’s not what you think it is. So part of it was fun. To make the afterlife surprising was a pretty natural thing for a comic writer to do. You know how to make things weird and surprising, so to take the afterlife and just make it a little bit strange. I didn’t want it to look like the Christian Heaven, I didn’t want it to look like the Buddhist Heaven. I wanted it to look like nothing you’d seen before, to simulate the idea that if you went there, you’d be like, “Oh my God, what is this?”
You’re referencing Heaven a lot. They’re not in Heaven.
I read this novel as much darker. It inhabits a much darker space. Yes, that’s true.
Back when we first talked sixteen years ago, you said that you could only write comic fiction. You said, “Humor, I don’t know, but comic.” So, is this a comic novel? Yes. I think so. But…I got to certain places where, in early rounds, the material was so straight. Sort of slavishly straight. It just had a History Channel vibe in the early drafts. And that panicked me a little bit, because that’s where it looked like it wasn’t emotionally honest. It was something else. So I kind of panicked and dropped in a couple funny things. And they just didn’t belong in that book. They were kind of funny, but they also were…it’s like somebody in the middle of a marriage proposal who senses he’s going to get a “no,” so he does a fart joke. You know? You think, “Well, that’s a desperate move.” So then I had a few days of just saying, “Okay, wait a minute now.” Again, in the binaries: I was saying funny versus not-funny. Then I thought to myself, “Is there a way to turn that? And whatever it is that I have always thought of in my work as funny, or people have thought of as funny, can we rename that a little bit?” Just to give myself a little bit of room. And I thought, “Well, all right: How does a joke work in fiction?” I think the way it works is, you and I are walking through the story together, reader and writer, writer and reader, and there’s something I’ve said behind us, and I suddenly remember it. As we’re going into the apartment building, I eat a banana, I drop the peel. And then we’re coming out of the building, and I remember that, you know? And you have just said something really arrogant to me, and then you step on the peel and you fall. That’s comedy. But really, at its essence, it’s the writer remembering what he said. In other words, it’s a form of narrative alertness. So then I thought, “Okay, since this draft is a little straight, is there a way that I’m not being narratively alert enough?” And I could show you, there’s one particular moment where I had the three ghosts arriving, and I’d forgotten that they all had these crazy features, these physical manifestations. Just by the act of putting those descriptions in, the text came alive, and the text coming alive made me hear them better. And I gave them a couple funny lines. So the whole thing came alive, but with, I would say, narrative alertness. So then suddenly it gives you a little more freedom to do things that don’t break the tone of the scene. From then on, I’m like, “Oh yeah, you don’t have to be funny.” People like it when narrative alertness becomes funny, but there’s a lot of forms of narrative alertness. Cormac McCarthy is the most narratively alert person you could ever ask for. Not particularly funny, but when he’s moving through a landscape, he doesn’t forget anything that he’s made. It all comes home in that beautiful language.
The Orchard Keeper. Unbelievable. And he sometimes can be very funny actually. But you can see that he’s not addicted to or looking for that. He’s just 100 percent alive in his fictive reality. Actually, Toni Morrison—I taught Sula this year: same. She can be very funny. But the main thing I feel with her is that the fictional world is just crackling with life, and the author is just generously looking around, blessing it all, and asking, “What do I need?” And that question means: What will make the most beautiful sentence I can put in front of you to make you feel as alive in the fictive reality as I am? So whether it’s humor or not is maybe a low-level understanding of that kind of interaction between reader and writer.
Well, I’ll tell you, when I started reading this I wasn’t sure what to do. Because I know you, and I’ve read all your books, and then here’s this novel. And it’s had such big fanfare. “George Saunders has a new novel, and I have all the feels,” that sort of thing. And I was reading along, and pretty early on you write, “When we are newly arrived in this hospital yard, young sir, and feel like weeping, what happens is, we tense up ever so slightly, and there is a mild toxic feeling in the joints, and little things inside us burst.” And so I stopped for a second, because so much of it, too, is that when a reader enters your work, so much depends on where the reader is as well. You don’t have complete control over the reader. Not at all, no.
So at that phrase—“little things inside us burst”—I guess I was feeling emotional, and I knew I was about to read a novel about a father losing his son. And I have young kids. You know, it’s all those little things that are happening in the reader. So I read that sentence, and it’s like, “Oh, the dead are weeping.” And there are very real emotions in here that I’m thinking through as I’m reading. But then the very next sentence is, “Sometimes, we might poop a bit if we are fresh.” And right there we realize we’re in George Saunders’s world. It’s so funny you should pick that out, because in the manuscript, that’s said on page two. In the galley, it’s deeper, but in what I worked on for many years, it was two. And I remember thinking, “I just hope my readers will make it to the poop joke.” And that’s my weakness, but I was just thinking, “That’s where I’m signaling that I’m all here.” I didn’t turn into a super-straight realist guy, which is a fear of mine, because humor came into my writing as a form of emotional honesty. We’re talking about when I was really young. I kept it out when I was trying to be Hemingway, which is a form of emotional dishonesty. My wife and I got married, we had our kids, we were having a great time, but we were pretty poor, all working really hard. The humor came back in at that point as “Holy shit, what’s going on here? This is really hard.” So that was honest. My fear is always that as you get old and august, the world actually stops being so difficult, and it’s not that funny anymore. Please note that I’m saying this in a British accent. [Laughter.] So in that case, again, that would be a form of emotional dishonesty. Just because it’s not happening to you doesn’t mean it’s not happening. In that first long section I hope my readers don’t think I’m that guy now, that I’m just indulging in a straight historical narrative with capital-R Romantic tendencies. For me, that joke was a place to sort of breathe a little. You with me? I didn’t leave anything behind. I’m still doing it.
You did it. But it sounds like you could have used a few more beats of the emotional stuff before the poop stuff.
You get a great mix of both in this novel. In all of your work. You know what it reminds me of? If you were a Led Zeppelin fan, and then, what’s the album, the one with “Over the Hills and Far Away” on it?
Houses of the Holy. There are parts of that album where you think, “Oh my God, where’s Jimmy Page? Where’s the guitar?” And they know that, and they’re kind of setting you up a little bit with those swelling strings, and then all of a sudden it starts. So to me, it was a little bit like, let’s make sure we don’t leave anything behind.
Let’s go back to something you said earlier about the essays that you were writing. You had mentioned that those gave you an opportunity to do a little bit of work on writing about your own emotional responses to things, which is in your fiction, but it’s not you, George Saunders, saying, “I feel this way.” There’s a part in the “Buddha Boy” essay, which a lot of people talk about because it’s a terrific essay…. Oh, thanks.
Do you mind if I read it? Yeah, no, I love it.
“You know that feeling at the end of the day when the anxiety of that-which-I-must-do falls away, and for maybe the first time that day, you see with some clarity people you love and the ways you have during that day slightly ignored them, turned away from them to get back to what you were doing, blurted some mildly hurtful thing, projected instead of the deep love you really feel, a surge of defensiveness or self-protection or suspicion. That moment when you think, Oh God, what have I done with this day? And what am I doing with my life? And how must I change to avoid catastrophic end-of-life regrets? I feel like that now, tired of the me I’ve always been, tired of making the same mistakes, repetitively stumbling after the same small ego-strokes, being caught in the same loops of anxiety and defensiveness.” I love that you had the presence and the courage to write that. I really connect with that notion. I think anybody who is sentimental, as you said that you are… I am.
Perhaps nostalgic… Yes.
And is very busy and maybe has kids, as we do, you can’t help but feel that way. Some of us feel that way a lot more often than others. Those would be the good people.
But to push that idea a little further, I have those feelings, exactly what you’re talking about there. And it’s this tremendous feeling of guilt, because I have those moments, and then I even think of myself having those moments, like, “Oh, okay, at least I’m aware enough to be feeling this.” Yeah, I think that’s true, actually.
But then an hour later, I’m checking my phone and looking at tweets. Yet it’s a wonder I ever leave the house and let my kids and my wife out of my sight. You know what I mean? I do. I do. I think that you’re right, first of all, that the awareness that one is less loving or less present than one would wish is actually pretty good awareness, you know? Because there were times in my life when I didn’t even have that awareness. I just was…right. I think that’s where, for me, a person’s desire to get better on that score is what leads them to something. For some people, it’s a spiritual push, meditation or prayer. But I think just to be aware of that is huge. But as you say, it doesn’t change.
It doesn’t solve anything. I know I can’t run a marathon, and I still can’t.
I could go out and train. I could do that. But I’m aware I don’t want to. And I think that’s part of art. Part of fiction writing is a small training in assessing how good your awareness is. You come back to the page you’ve written, and you’re reacting to it by reading it. And the critical thing is: How fine-tuned and honest are your reactions to your own work? So a part gets slow; do you notice it? Do you honor the fact that you noticed it? Are you willing to try to fix it? And then the second level is: You’re aware of your reaction to the work, then outside of that you’re also aware that that reaction is also temporary and may change. So how then do you revise? You go ahead and make the change. But then the next day you come back and do it again. And at some point, you reach a steady state where your reaction to the piece is pretty consistent. Then you’re good. But for me, that mimics the process of being in the world. How are you feeling right now? How reliable is your feeling about how you’re feeling right now?
I want to say one thing parenthetically about the GQ pieces, because you are right that I was able to turn to my own emotional state to write about them. The other thing that I learned is just the simple mechanics of…describing the setting, which I don’t usually do in my fiction. I feel like I can’t get anything going with that. Well, when you have to do it, you find that you can get something going. So there was a part of me that got more comfortable with the power of just describing physical stuff. That was something I had been suppressing. So the idea that I would spend a couple lines describing someone’s looks or something, I usually wouldn’t do it, except if I could get a little joke in there. But now I have more confidence that if I am given the task of describing your face or this street outside, I’ll be able to come up with some language that is interesting in its own right. That is something I learned from magazine writing. You’re driving through South Texas for three hours, and it’s gorgeous. You think, “Do I have something I can say about this?” Once I gave myself permission to do that, I found that, sure, your years of writing have made your language skills good enough to describe a mountain.
I want to refer to something in an essay you wrote, “My Writing Education: A Time Line,” about your experience earning a master’s degree in creative writing at Syracuse University in the 1980s. You wrote about a meeting you had with one of your teachers, Doug Unger, and basically that he didn’t pull any punches in telling you that your thesis was essentially not…it was “crap,” I think, is the word he used. He didn’t say it was crap; he just didn’t say it wasn’t.
Right. [Laughter.] And your response was that it was difficult to hear, of course, but that he had the respect to do such a thing for you, to not just feed you a line about how brilliant you are. That’s one of the things an MFA program can offer: respect. Because for a creative writer, where else can you go in today’s society where everyone around you respects what you’re doing—maybe they don’t necessarily like your work, but the act of writing is respected. That sort of validation for writers is something we try to provide at Poets & Writers, too: What you’re doing is important. I’m wondering if you could talk a bit about your experience teaching at Syracuse. When we talked in 2000, you had been teaching there for maybe three or four years. Did you have a sense then that you were going to be there for twenty years or more? I hoped so. Yeah, those early years were really rich, and they still are. There’s something to be gained by staying in the same place for a long time. But I like this idea of respect. That’s correct. And I think, also, what Doug gave me in that moment and what I got from my whole time there was just that standards don’t move, you know? This thing that we are doing is actually really hard, and there are no guarantees that anybody will be able to accomplish anything. So when you get to an MFA program and you realize that there actually are standards that aren’t being imposed by your teachers; they’re being imposed by the world, by culture, and the rabbit hole you have to go down is very, very deep. There are levels of exertion and understanding that you haven’t even touched yet. And the whole purpose for that journey is so you can be most uniquely yourself. That’s what it should do. It should be neither a teardown nor a feel-good factory. But just to say, this thing that you’re doing is really, really difficult, really, really essential. You don’t even know yet. “Know you do not yet” [in Yoda voice]. You’ve got to say, “Actually, this is even harder than you think, and also, we don’t know how it’s going to be hard for you in particular.” To set that up I think is really useful. In some ways, it’s maybe like going to medical school—except for the money—but in the sense that someone teaching young doctors doesn’t say, “It’s all right. You don’t have to worry about tonsillectomies, because you probably will get only about six in your career, so don’t bother.” You know? That’s not a thing. The way you’d know a culture was going down the shitter would be if someone was doing that. I think it’s the same with the arts. But it’s complicated, because part of that process is to nurture, but part of the process is to not over-nurture, which I think can be a problem in MFA programs. You come to love these people so much, and the delivery of bad news is not fun. But respect is the key thing, because if you really loved a young writer and you saw that she was doing something contrary to achieving her full potential, it would definitely be an act of love to put up a sign to stop her from doing that, in whatever way worked. Basically, my prayer is: “Let me positively inflect this person once or twice while she’s here.” More, if possible, but once or twice would be great. If I could just have one interaction so that five years down the line, she goes, “Ah! I now know what he was talking about.” Or the best is when students have walled off certain material that they don’t want to do, they don’t want to do it, but it’s essential to them, and you somehow help them take the wall down. That’s really wonderful. Or when they have been hurt or maybe diminished by some life situation, and you can make them see that that actually is their material, and it’s all right.
Have you noticed any changes in how writers are approaching the MFA? There are two observations. One is that the relation of the young writer to the MFA program has changed certainly since I was a student. At that time, the idea was kind of like, “Oh, that’s freaky. Let’s be outlaws and do this thing that isn’t actually going to make us richer or whatever.” And there weren’t very many programs. I’d never heard of one until the week before I applied. I didn’t know they existed. And then there’s the false and damaging assumption that if one wants to be a writer, you must go to an MFA program. And the related one, which is, if you go to an MFA program, you’ll definitely be a published writer. That whole suite of assumptions makes a lot of pressure for students. It’s what we call “professionalization,” and I think that’s not so good, and I predict there’ll be some kind of backlash against it. I predict there will be—there probably already is—a group of people who say, “I’m not going to an MFA program; I’m going to do it on my own.” And then we’ll have a series of successes from those writers, and the pendulum will swing. There’s nothing wrong with it, but the most damaging thing is when a student doesn’t get in and thinks, “Therefore I’m not a writer.” That is not true. And it’s a function, at least in our program, of the numbers. We get 650 applications for six spots. We have six spots because those are all that we can afford to fully fund, which we feel is kind of ethically or artistically important. So if you’re number seven, you’re great. It doesn’t matter that you didn’t get in.
Another thing you mentioned in that essay is that when you first got to Syracuse and were studying with Tobias Wolff, who is just an amazing writer, a master— He’s a genius.
But you had the realization that he’s also a real person. He creates this amazing art for four hours in the morning, and then he goes grocery shopping or picks up the laundry or whatever. And that leads into something I want to talk about, which is how to respond to success. Because here you are, and if people see you picking up your laundry, it’s like, “Wow, George Saunders has this normal life.” Not as often as you’d think. Mostly they’re just like, “Hmm, who’s that bald dude?”
You’ve been the cover story in the New York Times Magazine and appeared on talk shows; you sang a song with Stephen Colbert. You’ve achieved a very high level of success in this field. And literary journalists and bloggers and everyone on social media will pump that up, rightly so, but we don’t often talk about how, as a writer, you are supposed to respond to that sort of thing. That’s a great question. I think one thing you can do is watch it. I’ve said before, if you eat a bunch of beans, you’re going to fart. That’s it. It wouldn’t be a disgrace, but you might notice it. So I think anybody, at any level, who has gotten any attention knows this syndrome, which is the birthday syndrome. You get something published, you tell your friends, they get excited, and you get elated, which, as a word, has positive connotations. But I actually see it as kind of a negative. You get elated: You can’t think about anything else and you want more. It’s like a sugar buzz. And then the next day, it’s not your birthday anymore, and you’re like, “What the fuck is wrong with all these idiots?” You know? That’s just the human mind responding to stimuli. So I think part of it is to ask yourself, “Where am I on that scale right now? How full of shit am I based on this attention that I’m getting?” And by the way, that would also go the other way; if you were being criticized, you would have anti-elation.
Deflation. It’s the same thing, though, because you’re still thinking about only you and your hurt feelings. I think part of my deal is to sort of take everything in my life and subjugate it into the goal of using my talent wisely. So if success starts to occur, go on full alert to the ways in which your natural biologic reactions to success might screw up your work. One way is, you get into the rarefied-air syndrome, where you’re only in cool places being praised. That’s death. You can’t do that. The other thing would be believing that it’s objectively true that you did well. That’s anathema to an artist. Even after a work is done, you have to be going, “I should have done better; I know I could have.” That’s how you get to the next thing. I think most of it is just not believing in it too much, and maybe if you still have a little skill left you say, “Let me also not enjoy it too little, because it doesn’t happen all the time; it doesn’t happen to everybody.”
If we think about talent, talent is like a flower. I wasn’t doing publishable work until about thirty-three. Well, the odds are, it’s going to wilt. It may very well wilt before I die. So you have to treat it as something that you were gifted with briefly, and it may or may not be around. But I also think of it as kind of a fun adventure; especially in this time, I feel like it’s not a bad thing for a writer to work herself into a more public role, to kind of push herself into the public mind a little more so as to push back against some of the stuff that’s going on. But it’s like everything else. Anything that happens to you is going to have some effect on your artistic abilities, so I think part of it is to manage. Even when we met the last time, I had just come out of that period when I’d written a book at work, and the way I understood that was, okay, this is part of it. This is part of the artistic journey. I don’t have enough money, and my hours are getting burned up doing this work. All right, I accept. And then it becomes ennobled. And I found myself empowered by that. If I thought, “Ah, I’m getting cheated by the world,” then that’s disempowering. But to say, “This is part of my writer’s journey,” then suddenly you can take more of it.
We have a little more time, and there are two topics that I want to touch on: One is the election and the other is death. Wait, there was an election? Oh, you saved the good one for last.
It was very interesting to go back and reread, “Who Are All These Trump Supporters?” which was published in the New Yorker last July. I’ll confess that when I first read it—and this is maybe part of the problem—but my reaction was one of curiosity, almost like being at the zoo or something. Who are these creatures? What’s happening? It was almost a morbid curiosity. Now, rereading it, I think, “Why didn’t we see this coming?” I personally thought good would prevail. And it didn’t. It did numerically.
It did numerically, but the system did not. Well, that piece was really hard for me to finish, and I think it was exactly for the reason you’re naming. I went there thinking it was kind of a fringe—at the time, I think 40 percent of people who were going to vote said they would vote for Trump. But I thought it was kind of a fringe thing that would burn out. In other words, I found myself in the position of somebody who takes on the story, “Some People Like Football Better Than Baseball: Who Are They?” Well, they’re everybody. Or it’s a mix of all kinds of people. So I went in with this idea that I was going to try to pinpoint or diagnose this slender, fading movement, but in fact it’s half the people who voted. I’m still puzzling over it, actually. The one thing I’m sure of is this: The people who supported trump were either willing to ignore or could not see the humiliation and fear that he was causing in good people: Muslims, Mexicans, Mexican Americans, gay people, black people, any people of color. You’d have to be sort of willfully blind to not see the anxiety his rhetoric was causing in those people. So the thing that I think a lot of progressives are struggling with is, how could you discount that? Now, that’s an interesting question. Because the first-level answer is, they’re racist. I think it’s responsible to take that and try to break it apart a little bit, and one Gallup poll recently suggested an interesting answer, which was that most of the Trump supporters had a relatively low level of interaction with the other. They didn’t live near the border; they didn’t live near undocumented communities; they didn’t have a lot of friends of color. So it’s sort of a projection. When they have a fear about an undocumented person, it’s almost all projection.
And how were they getting their perspective on these matters? Fox News? Well, this is the interesting thing, because that’s what my assumption was, so I would do these little fishing questions like, “So, where do you get your news?” And they’d say, “I get my news from all over.” And it’s funny, at the time, last spring, I took that to mean they also watched CNN or something. But now, in retrospect, I think they meant Fox and Breitbart and alt-right sites. They were seeing Fox as a little bit left of center. In the reporting, I would get these weird refusals of data sets to intersect. We’d be talking about something, and their facts were coming from somewhere I didn’t know about. And at the time, I don’t think that network of right-wing sites was as widely known. That explains a lot of the data in that piece. So I’m still puzzling over it.
But I think for writers, it’s a time…I feel kind of excited about writing. I don’t think I’ve ever felt in my life that it was a more essential task. When there’s leadership in place that is purposefully encouraging anti-factuality, that got elected on repeatedly being as nonspecific as possible, constantly invoking linguistic tropes, meaningless linguistic tropes, using these rhetorical stances to alienate and terrify groups of people, that’s when language shows up and goes, “I did matter all along! You writers knew about it.” So, right is still right, virtue is still virtue, and I feel a little bit energized about it. Now, the one thing I noticed during this thing that scares me is that this left-right divide is getting fatal. I went with these Trump supporters, and I got along with everybody and had a really nice time. They were very friendly; we chatted; I insulted them and they insulted me. But one thing that was funny—if I was feeling insecure, I’d drop the fact that I’m a New Yorker writer, in general. And I don’t think there was a single Trump supporter—there might have been one guy in Wisconsin—who knew what that was.
I expected, “Oh, that liberal rag.” Not even that. “Is that some liberal thing?” sometimes. But they didn’t know what it was. So that means then I went home and worked five months on a ten-thousand-word piece trying to be very measured but not a pushover and all this stuff. Who read it? We read it. Now, I’m a fan of preaching to the choir; the choir needs to huddle around the most profound version of our ethos. But it was weird to think, “If I wanted to bust out and really speak directly to Trump supporters, how would I do it?”
That’s the question. It’s a big question.
You mentioned that you feel hopeful and energized now. That’s a very good message, this idea that language does matter now. Maybe now more than ever. But the hard thing is trying to reconcile the fact that no one really gave a shit about the language Trump was using during the campaign. I would break that down, because many of us, including you, care deeply about it.
Of course. It didn’t have an effect, though. When I was hearing him say some of these things—“Grab them by the whatever”—I was like, “Oh, well, it’s over now,” because there’s no way someone’s going to vote for that. It’s disqualifying, right, right.
But they did. Yeah. And that’s a deep well. One thing I’m trying to tell myself in order to stay hopeful is that heartbreak is the difference between what you thought the world was and what the world actually turned out to be. So you thought this person loved you; they didn’t. Aww. Well, actually, that’s on you, in a sense. So those of us who are feeling crestfallen or heartbroken at this time, I’m trying to say to myself, “That’s your problem! You were out there in the rallies, why didn’t you know?” So then isn’t it literary to say, “I’m going to adjust my view because it was too small. I misunderstood America. I misunderstood the country.” That’s okay. You’re allowed to misunderstand. Also, America is allowed to be as fucked up as it wants to be. My perceptions just can’t be out of sync with that. That’s one thing.
Now, we talk about specificity. With this thing, a fifth of the country voted for Trump. That’s a pretty small number. To elect someone else would take a sliver of about 15 percent. Say 15 percent of the population would have to flip over into an anti-Trump stance. That’s really easy.
Or just vote at all. Right. But part of me is wanting to say because of our election procedure, this looks like the country has totally changed, but the truth is—and this is something I left out of the piece because it didn’t come into focus—so many of those people I talked to were as much anti-Hillary as for Trump. To me, that’s mystifying, but that was their position. So I would imagine if you just plunk in Joe Biden next time, it all shifts. So I’m not hopeless. It’s still depressing, mostly because it makes me sad to think of all the people I met on this trip down in Phoenix, and so many wonderful Mexican Americans and also Mexican immigrants who were so humiliated by this. You know, they work so hard, and now the country is sort of turning them into enemies. And that’s heartbreaking. That’s disgusting, actually, and it makes me sad. But the other thing it does is it backlights our whole history a little differently. You talk to any African American and you say, “America’s racist!” they’ll go, “That’s not news.” So I think part of the sadness but also maybe the invigorating thing for me as an older person is to go, you know what? I maybe never saw this country correctly. And as you get older, a little bit of an Aaron Copland vibe gets in your head, like, “Oh, this lovely country that’s been so good to me.” It’s a time for me to maybe reconsider, for everyone to reconsider, and say, “Yeah, this is not new, this kind of oppressive rhetoric and this kind of knee-jerk, reactionary demagogue thing. We’ve been fighting it a long time.” I think heartbreak comes from the fact that many of us felt that that was in its death throes and that this next administration would be the end of it, or at least a good movement towards the end of it, and now we have to wait.
It’s also perhaps naive for some of us to have thought that we understood this country. It’s a huge country. There are so many people, so many different kinds of people, and to think that we know who we are as one united… Right. And so much of that comes from our mind, what we want to see. But to turn it back to writers: What an incredible moment to say, “Okay, we don’t know.” And let’s just generalize: “We don’t know the Midwest.” Well, that’s a good project, because it’s full of human beings and therefore full of literature. I remember coming the other direction; I was in Amarillo before I came to the Syracuse program, and I’d been working in a slaughterhouse, and we’d been having a lot of drama in our circle of friends and family—real deaths and drugs and all kinds of dark stuff. And I came out here very hopeful that that would give me a badge of authenticity, kind of like when Kerouac met Neal Cassidy. I came out, and I found that a lot of the people I met in the artistic community hadn’t had much experience there, and so therefore it didn’t hold much interest. It was sometimes just a one-line joke, you know? “Oh, Amarillo, I drove through there. Bunch of currency exchanges.” And I remember, it was maybe one of the most heartbreaking moments of my life to see that I wasn’t going to get in there with that. There was no understanding that there was an entire human community there that I loved, and they were suffering. So now, it’s a tremendous literary mission to say, “Can we reimagine our country?” It’s going to take some legwork, and it’s going to take some curiosity, which is in short supply these days, in both directions.
Well, shifting gears here— Let’s move on to death!
Let’s move on to death. It seems like the perfect place to end our conversation. You’ve mentioned that you find death such an interesting and terrifying thing to write about. It’s in all of your work, but this book in particular, because all but three peopleare dead. And a horse. Thank you for noting the horse. [Laughter.] I think it’s because I have a reasonable level of belief that it’ll actually happen to me. I remember, as a kid, being in my grandparents’ house in Texas, and it was a smallish house, and I could hear their sleep-noises, and it hit me really hard—and they were in their sixties, so they were old to me at that time—and I couldn’t sleep, and I thought, “They’re going to die, my God.” And that just-woke-up sort of confusion: “What if they die right now? They could. Well, they could. They’re going to, and they could.” I don’t think I’m fascinated with it, but I kind of feel like, you know, if you’re on the tracks and you distantly hear a train, come on! I’m not fascinated with the train, but—
It’s a fact, coming. Yes.
I guess another way to phrase the question here is that, similar to how taking the election as this sort of negative and looking at it as a positive, which you so beautiful did, it’s a similar thing with death. I think that the kind of general feeling about death is that it’s a negative. And yet it’s going to happen to every one of us. And you seem to have taken the positive view, which is that it makes life, life. Yes. Let me put it another way: As with the election, it’s not that you think the thing itself is positive, but being willing to accept the reality of the thing is positive. Then you accommodate it. It’s kind of like—actually, it’s sort of anti-denial. Denial is something I’m very prone to, and it’s always gotten me in trouble. Okay, look, death seems to be, as far as I can tell, it’s going to come for me. So is there any way I can accommodate that knowledge? No matter what, whether it enriches your life or fucks it up, it’s still healthy to acknowledge. So if you go to a party, and you know everyone is leaving at midnight, it should affect the way you pace yourself, or the way you are there.
I think what happened with me is, again, because of that thin ledge of talent I have, I’m not a writer who could write a story about something that has no urgency for me. There are really talented writers who say, “Oh, I’m going to imagine that I live in that apartment.” I can’t even do it, something so casual. I flounder in that mode. So I have to make sure that my stories get on something that really matters to me. Death would be one. I always quote Flannery O’Connor: “A writer can choose what he writes, but he can’t choose what he makes live.” So coming at that idea from the other direction, if your prose is flat, that means you’re not writing about—well, it means your prose is flat. And it means you better stop that. So for me, what that means is, when I get off into something where the prose starts jangling, then full-speed ahead, don’t worry about what it’s about. But that tends to be about mortality. And it might just be a lack of subtlety. I’m not too good at making a story in which nothing big happens. I mean, the masters do. Chekhov, he always can do that. I think I’m maybe just not that subtle. So for me, peril, death, has to be there for me to get the necessary energy.
This whole novel is predicated on death. Did anything about writing it surprise you? Oh, yeah. So much. But mostly it’s—this is Poets & Writers, so we can talk about it—but mostly it was the internal dynamics. If you’re writing a story as over-the-top as this one, it’s all in the doing. It’s all in the line-to-line and section-to-section transfers. And my thought was, if ever once I got too cheesy or on the nose, all the air goes out of the balloon. So much of the editing work was: If I juxtapose this speech with this speech, what does it feel like? If I cut this speech and move this one up? I just finished section nine; which way am I going? And the constant enemy was kind of—I was going to say “banality,” but it’s not really that. I think a lot of the energy is, as a reader, going, “What the fuck’s going on here? Who are these people?” And then, just about the time they figure out who they are, then I have to keep moving it. The idea was to keep the reader always a little bit behind me but interested. So sometimes if you make a too-obvious structural move, the reader passes you. “Oh, it’s a ghost story.” That’s really hard to talk about, but it’s all the micromanaging of text and transitions and the way the speech is made, which I really like, because if my attention’s on that stuff, the big questions come in anyway, and they come in naturally. So the surprises—there were thousands of things that surprised me.
I have to ask you about one of the voices in the book: the hunter. Yeah.
Where did that come from? I don’t know.
You pause on that character it seemed to me in a slightly different way. It was more detailed in terms of what he had to do in the afterlife. All the thousands of animals he killed during his lifetime were gathered around him, and he had to hold them all, one by one, “for a period ranging from several hours to several months, depending on…the state of fear the beast happened to have been in at the time of its passing.” I mean, I could make something up, but the truth is, this is what I love about writing. Basically, they’re going from Point A to Point B; they need to pass some people. What I love is to suspend the part of your mind that says, “Well, who should they pass?” and just go, “No, who do they pass.” And that guy just showed up. I don’t know why. I honestly…the only true answer is: I don’t know. He just showed up. And in that space…it’s funny: You’re walking through the woods, and you go, “Okay, I need somebody to show up on the left,” your mind turns there, and it supplies. That’s the difference between someone writing well and someone not. And I don’t think you can say much more than that. But you do train yourself, I think. I’ve noticed the training is mostly been to repress the side of me that wants to figure it out. Who should I have show up? No. Maybe just a vague turning in that direction that’s informed by everything that’s behind you, and then a trust that whatever the little intuitive leap is, is actually coming from the subconscious in a deeper way. But it’s literally like training yourself in putting up a little roadblock to your conscious mind and saying, just stay back a little bit. You don’t have to go away, but just stay back. And then veering over here and seeing what you’ve got. I mean, how do you talk about that?
You don’t want to look behind the curtain. No, you don’t. But it’s also years of being in that exact space and being somewhat confident. And I would even say, in that moment when you turn away from the conscious, there are several different strands of other things. There are several candidates going, “I’m over here! I’m over here!” And there’s a micro-moment where you can go, “No, no, no, no, yeah.” So it’s really freaky.
Well, this book is full of those moments. As you say, it’s a comic novel, but when I was reading it, moments like that are haunting. Oh, thanks.
Your work is full of those moments where it’s comic, laugh-out-loud moments, and then this little twist. Part of that, again, is that alert[ness]. I’m trying to imagine where you are. Now, again, you can’t exactly, but it’s surprising how you sort of can. So if, on a micro-level, you feel like you just landed a very nice, profound, serious moment, and I’m watching Kevin—what if I do the poop joke? So it’s interesting, you know? You’re enjoying the pleasure of that deep, literary, serious moment. Now, you know, if we just left it alone, does that trail off? And if we follow it with another one, do you now feel like it’s becoming predictable? It’s a challenge of teaching in an MFA program, or teaching writing in general: Those little skills are so small and subrational, in a certain way. You can’t teach those moments, and yet everything abides in them. So that’s why I do a lot of close line-editing with my students, because in that way you can sort of communicate, if you have a sentence that’s this way, and you can edit it and make it this way, and that way’s better, you’ve kind of engaged that moment a little bit. That’s very interesting. And the danger is, in school, we’re always analyzing the effect after the fact, in analytical language. Which may or may not have anything to do with how Tolstoy did it in the first place. That’s the thing. I try to remind myself of that, that we’re talking about literature often from the wrong end of the telescope. That’s the conundrum of a writing education.
I was saying earlier how you can never know the mess of neuroses and emotions and everything that a reader is bringing to it, but on the other hand, just in my case, I’m not feeling anything new. I’m not going through anything so special that hasn’t been gone through by other people, you know? Think of it this way: If we’re walking down the street, you’re having your thoughts, I’m having mine, somebody gets hit by a car; suddenly, we’re both in exactly the same space. So I think in art and writing, you can do the same thing, sometimes just with a simple sentence, you know? “They crossed the river.” You might be having a bad day, but suddenly, you’re crossing a river.
Kevin Larimer is the editor in chief of Poets & Writers, Inc.
Don’t tell George Saunders you can’t get there from here. En route to an enviable writing career, he traveled from a working-class childhood in south Chicago to the oil fields of Indonesia, a slaughterhouse in Amarillo, Texas, and the stuffy office of an environmental company in Rochester, New York. Along the way he collected an MA in creative writing from Syracuse University, where he studied with Tobias Wolff, and a degree in geophysical engineering from the Colorado School of Mines.
Saunders readily admits he didn’t chart his course, and he approaches the writing of fiction the same way—with no particular destination in mind. As a result his stories end up in some unexpected places: a prehistoric theme park; a future world where citizens belong to two classes: “Normal” or “Flawed;” and a self-help seminar where participants learn to identify who has been “crapping in your oatmeal.” Ask him why his stories, at once hilarious and macabre, are littered with severed hands, dead aunts, see-through cows, and Civil War ghosts and he’ll share your curiosity. “Where does this shit come from? I don’t have an answer.”
Today Saunders teaches creative writing in the graduate program at Syracuse University. He lives with his wife of 13 years and his two daughters, ages 9 and 12. His first collection of short stories, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, was published in 1996 by Riverhead Books. In May, Riverhead published his second collection, Pastoralia. Villard will publish his modern fairy tale “for adults and future adults,” The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, illustrated by Lane Smith, in August.
Recently I visited Saunders in Syracuse. During lunch at Erawan Restaurant and over coffee in his sunny Victorian home, he revealed two qualities that make him so popular among his students—a friendliness and a generosity one wouldn’t necessarily expect to find in someone at this stage of a successful writing career. He also displayed a quality one would expect to find in the author of such stories as “The 400-Pound CEO” and “Downtrodden Mary’s Failed Campaign of Terror”—the uncanny ability to find humor in unlikely places.
One of the things that’s immediately intriguing about you as a writer is your sort of non-traditional background— That’s a nice way to put it …
Well, it doesn’t seem like you’ve been stagnating in some university setting. No, that started up here. It was kind of an inadvertent path. When I look back I’m always a little bit embarrassed because it’s not like I had any sense. I had such a malformed sense of the world at each point that I ended up making some stupid decisions without really realizing what the options were. I grew up in Chicago in a pretty working-class neighborhood so writing wasn’t something…well, I didn’t really know who did it. It never occurred to me that I might do it. But I never even read a whole lot. I remember reading Johnny Tremain—that was a big watershed. I got a degree in geophysical engineering from the Colorado School of Mines. This was at the height of the oil boom, so I went over to Sumatra and worked for a couple years in the oil fields. After that was a period of just bombing around with no real sense of what was going on. I worked in a slaughterhouse for a while in Amarillo, Texas. I was probably twenty-four or twenty-five. In that town if you wanted to get some money quick that’s where you went, and they would hire anybody and you could stay for as short as you wanted.
What did you do at the slaughterhouse? I was a knuckle-puller. It’s a leg thing. It would come in on a hook. It would look like a big chicken leg. There was this complicated series of cuts. You had a hook in one hand and a knife in the other. The cuts were very surgical, some of them. When that was done you just sort of heaved it across onto this conveyor belt. It was like this big Rube Goldberg thing and it would go somewhere else. At one point I got demoted because I was too slow and I went to this place where all the stuff that was left over at the end came by on this big belt and you had to separate it. There was one box that was for bone and one was for fat and one for miscellaneous. The story was that the bone went to make pizza toppings, and fat was for marshmallows. It wasn’t too good.
So you were de-knuckling the leg. Of what animals? Cows? Oh, cows, yeah. It was hard to tell. It could’ve been brontosaurus for all I know.
You’re a vegetarian now. Yeah, but that’s pretty recent. One wasn’t a result of the other.
How did these kinds of experiences inform your work? I always wanted to write but had never read anything contemporary. When I was in Asia there were all these great things to write about during the oil boom, but I didn’t have the vocabulary. I found myself drifting and not knowing how to put the stuff that was happening into the work because I had never seen it done before. But then I read that story “Hot Ice” by Stuart Dybek and that was basically my neighborhood where I grew up. To see that in prose… I couldn’t pretend that only Hemingway mattered after that. Dybek was a big breakthrough because I could for the first time see what you had to do to reality to make it literature, because I knew the neighborhood and I knew the people and I could see what he’d done to it.
You played guitar in a bar band in Texas. A really bad bar band. We were called—it’s really embarrassing—we were called Rick Active and the Good Times Band. It was along Route 66 in Amarillo, where they had these drunk palaces where you’d go to drink and they’d pay us each $50 a night and we’d play the same set six times over and over again, never practice, no original songs. This was 1986. I should’ve known better then. In a way it’s like half of your mind is saying, “It’s okay, I’m just slumming, I’ll write about this some day,” and the other half is just that there weren’t a whole lot of other options.
Were there any other early influences? Monty Python was a huge influence—the way that they would get at something archetypal through a side door was always really interesting. We just turned our kids on to that recently. The argument sketch. Do you remember that one? “I’m here for an argument.” “No you’re not.”
I remember watching Monty Python with my father. He was really busy and we didn’t do a lot together, but every Sunday night we’d watch that. In our neighborhood, a very working-class neighborhood, jokes were really a currency. If you could tell a joke or even if you could imitate somebody it was a really big deal. Junot Díaz, who teaches here at Syracuse, has this great theory that writers come out of any kind of situation where language equals power. So in his case, in the Dominican Republic, English was clearly a meal ticket. And I think that’s true. So that combined with just sitting there with my father roaring at Monty Python…somehow humor became validated. But for years, like a lot of working-class people, writing was that thing which I could not do. It had to be just beyond my grasp or it didn’t count, right? So it was only when that sort of dropped that I could really have fun with it. But that was relatively recently.
Humor is obviously a very big part of your writing. Humor combined with sentiment. I’m thinking of the ending of the short story “Isabelle” in CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. It’s heartbreaking. I’m increasingly happy to be a funny writer. What I find really funny is the straight faces that people keep in spite of the fact that life is so full of suffering. I think of the poses people strike, and the hatred that they develop in spite of the fact that in fifty years we are all going to be dust. We have to occupy those places so that’s really funny to me. Whenever I try to write hard and earnestly it always comes out like that. I have to sort of trust it. I can’t write anything that isn’t comic—I don’t know about funny—but comic. Earnestness is my enemy.
You’ve written short stories and a novella. Have you ever tried to write a novel? Most of those stories started out as novels. I’ve tried and I just recently got to the point where I’m not going to try anymore. If it happens it’ll happen organically. I’m not going to sweat it because in the past when I tried to write a novel I thought, “I’ll have to do something fundamentally different, I’ll have to stretch things out.” But if I have any gift it’s for compression. At forty-one I’m like, “Well it’s nice that I can do something. I don’t have to do everything.” We’ll see what happens.
When I was working as an engineer at the environmental company there was just no way that a novel was going to happen. When I was in that job I was desperately trying to figure out another way because not only was it not a lot of money, but not a lot of time with the kids. There’s that great quote by Terry Eagleton: “Capitalism plunders the sensuality of the body.” That was such a beautiful lesson because you come home half despising yourself because you’ve done such stupid things with your day. You’ve groveled and you’ve not even groveled efficiently. Then you come home and you’re exhausted and you’re not capable of generosity and I find it really sad.
A lot of your stories, like “Pastoralia” and “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” take place in this beaurocratic, artificial universe. Disneyland gone wrong. I think it’s mostly that job I worked at the environmental company. It was a provincial office of a medium-sized company that was based in Texas so it had all the rigidity with none of the brilliance. There were probably thirty people there and they were all pretty anxious and by the time I got there they were shrinking the place down. It wasn’t huge enough that it was faceless. We all knew each other. There was quite a bit of inside space where there was no natural light. My own ego, my youthful arrogance, and my own high expectations of myself were put suddenly in conflict with this because, you know, by then I had two kids. I was maybe thirty-three or thirty-four and nothing was going as planned. I hadn’t won the Nobel Prize yet and Hollywood wasn’t calling because I hadn’t published anything, so there was something about that that made it seem absurd. It was a pretty petty place and there were a lot of rules. I mean at one point I was sending stories out and I got a nice rejection from the New Yorker and I was so excited because an actual person had responded and in a fit of madness I mentioned this to my supervisor at the end of the day. And he got this stricken look on his face and he said, “Well actually, George, it’s come to our attention that you are using corporate resources to produce your ‘writing’ so we’d like you to discontinue that.” And this was a guy who knew me and he knew my kids. So that wasn’t too good.
How are you able to negotiate some of the awful things that happen in your stories—death, dismemberment—with humor? That’s a South Side of Chicago thing because our whole world—communicating anything emotional—was to be sarcastic. If you wanted to say you loved somebody you’d punch him in the crotch. My impulses are always very sentimental, I mean mawkishly, sit-comishly so. So in some ways I think it’s a cloaking mechanism. If you have in one scene a kid getting his hand cut off, I think in some funny way you’re more willing to accept a sentimental scene. I don’t know if you’re more willing to accept it, but maybe the juxtaposition of those two things is more interesting. As a writer I’m really aware of my defects and how much I have to find other things to substitute, so humor helps. It’s got its own inherent energy so if you can sustain funniness you almost always have to sustain something else. Pure funny you see sometimes in humor columnists who are just funny, but in fiction to keep funny going you almost always dredge something else up. I think.
For some reason I think of Charlie Chaplin. Yeah, The Great Dictator. I think partly it’s ritualized humility. If you think of the great evils: When China invades Tibet they’re not funny, they’re not self-doubting. There’s no trace of humor in what they’re doing. And Hitler: not a guy who’s at all prone to see funniness in himself. One of the great things about fiction is that if I write an asshole into a story it has to be me. I can’t generate him. And it’s always funny in the reviews they say my stories are full of losers. I know where I got all those things. I didn’t just make them up. I think it’s ritualized humility.
In your stories, one thing that continually strikes me is guilt. I’m thinking of “Winky” in Pastoralia, and just about every story in CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. Well, I think it’s the Catholic background. The binary that got set up was that you were either doing good or you were doing evil, and you were never doing good. If you actually appeared to be doing good there was probably something wrong with your intentions. I think if you have any moral tension, guilt is part of it. If a person can feel guilt they are at least cognizant of a moral interplay. It’s a powerful emotion—one, because it implies you’ve done wrong, and two, that you know you’ve done wrong.
When I was a kid in Chicago, the big thing was to go to a Bears game because it was expensive and people didn’t really do it. But this family that lived two doors down from us—they were maybe ten years off the boat from Poland and they didn’t have much money and they lived in a house that was completely bare, no furniture. It always smelled like noodles and they were always kind of barking at each other. One day the kid came over and said “I got Bears tickets.” It was like someone in the poorest neighborhood saying they had a house in the Hamptons. So I said, “Great, we’re going to go.” It was his father, his uncle, Greg, and me. It was a big journey with trains and buses, and we stopped at other Polish relatives and there was a lot of cheek-pinching. But I was going to endure it all to see Gale Sayers and Dick Butkus. So we finally got to Wrigley Field and just before we go in the father says, “All right, boys, we’ve got a little problem which is that we only got two tickets, but don’t worry about it we got it figured out. The Andy Frain guys they never look up when they take your ticket.” So they picked each one of us up—we were maybe ten or eleven—picked us up and put us on their shoulders. And in those days they were still wearing those big overcoats, and they had us put our feet down their overcoat and they buttoned it up. And so the plan was that they were going to walk in and they would take our tickets and not look up. Now I was the all-time Goody Two-shoes, straight A, never had an evil thought. And I was just appalled to be cheating, and cheating publicly. Then the father says, “Now if they do look up, all you got to do is look retarded.” And he was serious. The idea was that if they thought you were retarded they would let you in for free. So he says, “Now let’s see how you’re gonna do it.” So we had to practice. And we started in. What I was really deeply ashamed of afterward is how willing I was. I was not going to get caught. If they busted us, I was going to go into the retarded thing, I was going to do what he said.
Something of that is in my writing too. When I’m getting ready to send something out, I get really intensely self-critical. To my credit I get really fanatical about revising, but sometimes that can bleed over to just lock-up.
I think sometimes you can find yourself frightened of what you’re going to find if you look at it too closely too soon. I finish something and I think it’s good and I don’t want to go back to it too early. How many times do you wake up the next morning and say, “That’s trash,” you know? I think you’re right. Part of being a writer is to know when to trust yourself. I know I’m going to have a cycle. I’m going to love it more than it should be loved at first, hate it more than it should be hated later. You let your ecstatic side have it for a while, then you let your neurotic, self-doubting side. For me it was a breakthrough to realize that that wasn’t abnormal, that you weren’t right or wrong in either of those two, that you were right in both and wrong in both, and you just had to let it have a long shelf life and then it would start to make sense. Part of it, too, is knowing when to quit.
When I start to write a story I always have a simple design that would make it sort of classic and beautiful, but I can’t do it. I have some kind of weird thing that twists it, but the twist isn’t meaningless. Somehow the distortion that always happens if I work hard is useful. It’s like having this dog and going out in the field and saying, “Bring me back a pheasant.” That dog is your talent, and it runs out and and it comes back with the lower half of a Barbie doll. But if every time it brings back the lower half of a Barbie doll, you put those things together and you think, “That’s kinda good.” I don’t fight it anymore.
You write on a computer. You also said you revise a lot. How do you trust your ecstatic instinct electronically? The kind of writing I do I wouldn’t be able to do without a computer. Until I get to the end part of a story I work on the screen almost exclusively. Any time something strikes me I just put it in or cut it or whatever. If there is anything significant that happens I’ll save it. But the main thing I do is to try to keep it really free. Nothing is ever lost. I can always go back to it. It’s like those fast motion pictures of trees growing. I don’t know if it’s true with trees or not but let’s pretend it is. You sort of see this thing accreting and parts disappear and come back in but in the long run it’s working in a general direction. I couldn’t do that on hard copy.
For me, writing has become—it sounds a little pretentious but sort of true—a spiritual practice. If you’re open to whatever the story presents with no attachments to what you did yesterday or any attachments to what you want the thing to be or how you want to be perceived, but just open to the needs of the story, that’s kind of ecstatic. It’s really beautiful to say, “What I did yesterday or for the last twenty years might be shit but that’s okay.” It’s interesting to see how the artistic form teaches you. It instructs you on your own shortcomings as a person. I love that writing can really help me turn back the spiraling neurosis. It can help me be a little bit less stupid, less judgmental and unkind.
You said it is important to be there when you’re writing, not thinking about yesterday or tomorrow. Is that harder for you now that you have a couple books? It was really hard after the first book because I just thought I had squeaked through a door. “The Falls” was the first story of the new book that I wrote and it was a real lucky sort of breakthrough because it was so different from the other book. And I remember writing it and thinking, ‘No I shouldn’t send it out because it’s not like the other ones.’ But when the New Yorker took it I thought maybe whatever it is I have to offer is not totally manifest in that book, it’s something different, and that was a nice feeling to think it’s not really about style but something else you have to offer.
And maybe you don’t even know what it is yet, and maybe you never will. Maybe you’ll be eighty and you just keep cranking stuff out and you’re good enough and then you die. When you’re young you think, “I want my work to last,” and then you see that nothing lasts. Shakespeare doesn’t last, nothing does. The moment of doing it is really all there is. Everything else is all delusion. It’s hard to remember, especially now when books are coming out.
Tell me a little about The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip. I have two daughters, and I would tell them these made-up stories about this little girl and they were funny and in some ways they were funnier than anything else. They were freer and not so programmatic. And I wrote it. It’s basically a short story really. And I liked it. There was something Monty Pythonesque about it. I didn’t have to worry about any realism and I had a really good time working on it and I sent it to Daniel Menaker at Random House and he bought it. As kind of an extra bonus he sent it to Lane Smith and Lane had read CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and said, “Yeah, I’ll do it.” So that instantly became more of an important book than it was. That was really a thrill. I’d go down to his studio in New York and there would be a whole wall of sketches. Not only were they true to my work, they were twice as good as I could’ve ever dreamed of. One, he understood that the book is an exaggeration, but two, he understood the flavor of the exaggeration. It was really a thrill for someone who is not a bit visual. It was a good lesson for me because he is the least neurotic person I’ve ever met. He goes into the studio every day habitually and gets it done. I’m sort of a Catholic, “I think it’s good but it probably isn’t.” The Eeyore School of Literature.
Are you currently working on more stories? I’ve got one that Lane Smith and I might do if I can get it to be good enough. It used to be a novella. It seems to be pretty funny. It started to be a kid’s story and then it extended to be about genocide. So unless there’s a big need for a child’s guide to genocide it won’t be that. I’m sure this summer I’ll be working. I don’t really make too many plans. I just sort of see what develops.
Kevin Larimer is the assistant editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Fiction writer George Saunders in Syracuse, New York, in the spring of 2000. (Credit: Jayne Wexler)
Old age sits in a chair,” Donald Hall writes in his new book, Essays After Eighty, “writing a little and diminishing.” And so it’s not a surprise on a late August afternoon to find the former U.S. poet laureate and author of more than fifty books, including twenty-two poetry collections, perched by a window of his New Hampshire home like a rare bird, resplendent with beard feathers, pecking at a manuscript. It’s a hot, still day, and the poet who once barnstormed the country stumping for poetry, speaking out against the Vietnam War, is a few weeks shy of eighty-six—his once-notable height a rumor. Hall responds to a knock slowly, rising deliberately and moving to the door with a walker, like a man who has learned the hard way just how unreliable feet can be as they approach ninety.
Photo by David Mendelsohn
He waves me through an immaculate New England kitchen into the living room, where it is easily ten degrees cooler. “It’s the wonder of a porch,” Hall says, and begins telling a story about his great-grandparents, who bought the house in 1865, and his grandparents, who ran its farm when he was a child. Those days have long passed, though, along with so much else. The chair Hall once burrowed into later burned when he dropped a cigarette. He sits down in its replacement. There’s no car outside either; driving is something he’s had to give up too. These forfeitures, and the fact that we are in a town without a store, lends the room a hermetic, plush silence. Andy Warhol prints surround us. There is a portrait with President Obama, who awarded Hall the 2010 National Medal of Arts. I wonder if I should have taken Hall’s response to my interview request at face value—that he was “old as hell,” that he would get tired.
But over the next few hours something remarkable happens. Hall turns time around. His face brightens, his voice deepens—he expands. Arms waving, eyes flashing with a performer’s glee, he unleashes energetic and startlingly pitch-perfect impressions—of his longtime friend Robert Bly, of the sonorous-voiced Geoffrey Hill. Tale by tale the room peoples with ghosts. Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, and Adrienne Rich parade through his stories and recede. A different era of poetry, when anthologies could lead to fistfights, is briefly resurrected, a time when one could live by one’s wits rather than on an adjunct’s crumbs.
In many ways we have Robert Graves to thank for these hours of narrative fireworks. Half a century ago, Graves visited the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where Hall was then teaching, and encouraged the young poet to make a go of freelance writing. All it took, Graves instructed, was a twenty-minute nap and a bit of mercenary energy. All that was required, Graves said, was for the poet to use everything he had. Almost immediately after Graves departed Michigan, Hall began his first prose book—String Too Short to Be Saved: Recollections of Summers on a New England Farm (David R. Godine, 1961), about the very house and farm where we now sit—setting up his eventual move to New Hampshire in 1975, with his second wife, the poet Jane Kenyon. This farm was to be their retirement.
Next year will mark the fortieth anniversary of that flight, and twenty years have passed since Kenyon died of leukemia at the terribly young age of forty-seven. A three-time survivor of cancer, Hall did not expect to be here either, certainly not alone. “I was given a 30 percent chance of living five years in 1992,” the poet says. “I think, like a lot of people, I always thought I would die young,” he adds. “Instead, Jane died.” Hall’s father, who worked in the family dairy business, died at fifty-two. His mother, however, lived to be ninety and met all of her great-grandchildren, something Hall hopes to do as well. (He has two children from his first marriage and five grandchildren.)
In the interim, he has followed Graves’s advice and used everything. So now he brings forth his view on the territory before him in Essays After Eighty, forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in December, in which he ruminates playfully and hilariously on the subtractions of old age: driving, drinking, sex, smoking, and physical vanity. It is a shockingly funny book, sometimes an irreverent one. He thumbs his nose at death, the very thing that in many ways made him a poet. “When I was nine or ten, a whole bunch of aunts and uncles died right in a row,” Hall remembers. “I sat in bed, at ten years old, saying to myself, ‘Death has become a reality.’ That was my language at ten.” He laughs.
His first love as a writer was Poe. As Hall wrote in Unpacking the Boxes: A Memoir of a Life in Poetry (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008), he composed his first poem, “The End of It All,” in the writer’s shadow. “Have you ever thought / Of the nearness of death to you?” the poem goes. He wonders at this precocious portentousness now, and then grows serious again. “I used to dread it. I don’t think about it much now, at eighty-five.”
Then, as now, he looked forward. He was in a hurry to grow up and leave Hamden, Connecticut, befriending students at nearby Yale in his teens, leaving home for his final two years of high school at Phillips Exeter. Hall’s mother and father met at Bates College, but the elder Hall always felt he had missed out on a life of the mind. He was determined the same would not happen to his only child. Donald was going to go to Harvard, and he did, arriving in the late 1940s amid a swell of enrollments from the GI Bill, and joining one of the greatest concentrations of poetic talent ever to be seen in one place. John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, John Hollander, and Robert Bly were all students there at the time. Richard Wilbur was a fellow.
“It was that American century,” Hall says now, “which lasted from 1944 to 1963. There was a great sense of looseness and power, that anything could happen.” Entering Harvard Yard, Hall recalls, one would be hawked a copy of the Daily Worker, the 1920s Communist newspaper, by a Brahmin student; same-sex couples held hands. “Frank O’Hara threw the best parties,” Hall remembers. “I knew him then as a fiction writer, but he was already writing all those poems on the side.” What Hall didn’t learn on campus he gleaned by lurking around the famous Grolier Poetry Book Shop. “I met Bob Creeley, who was a chicken farmer in New Hampshire. I met him in Grolier’s—that’s where you met everybody. We talked, I thought he was terrific, he was smart, and so I looked up his poems and they were terrible. Later I loved his poems; it took a while.”
Hall’s most important friendship, however, was with Bly, who had entered college after service in the army, but had seen no action. He’d had rheumatic fever. “He was like a dean and never smiled and didn’t open his mouth much. He wore a three-piece suit,” Hall remembers. “He’d come from western Minnesota to Harvard. For a while he was looking like a Harvard man, but a year later it was lumberjack shirts. We started talking about Robert Lowell—this was two years after Lord Weary’s Castle—and Richard Wilbur’s The Beautiful Changes. We were courting each other and so on; I thought he was a bright guy and he obviously [thought I was], too.”
Their friendship has lasted sixty-five years. Every poem Hall has published has been shown to Bly, and, Hall says, probably vice versa. They began writing to each other as soon as Hall left for England after graduation, and now their correspondence stretches to more than twenty thousand letters, most of which are archived at the University of New Hampshire. “I just got a letter from him the other day,” Hall says, “but it was handwritten, not typed, just six lines.” Bly is now eighty-seven years old but remains, Hall says, his optimistic self. “He always says he looks forward to seeing me soon again.”
Every single member of the generation with whom Hall entered Harvard, except for Ashbery, has now died, along with so many of his friends and contemporaries—Louis Simpson, James Wright, Maxine Kumin, Allen Ginsberg—and Hall takes seriously the task of remembering them and their time. The manuscript he was working on when I interrupted him will be a kind of update to his classic 1978 book, Remembering Poets: Reminiscences and Opinions (Harper & Row), which spun a series of keen-eyed portraits of the great poets Hall had met, from Robert Frost, whom Hall first encountered at age sixteen as a young enrollee at Bread Loaf, to T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, whom Hall interviewed for the Paris Review when he was serving as its first poetry editor, from 1953 to 1961.
Many of the new portraits will involve people Hall befriended when he moved to England to study literature at Oxford University in the early 1950s: Thom Gunn and Geoffrey Hill, both of whom he published at the very beginning of their careers, along with Ted Hughes and others. Sixty years after his first arrival in England, Hall remembers the time well and fondly, in spite of its deprivations. “Rationing ended during my first year at Oxford. Clothing was utility. You could not get Stilton cheese. It was all for export. You got Danish Blue, which was horrible. I had my ration card to hand in at the college. But I loved it.”
Hall met Hill for the first time in 1952, when the English poet was just twenty. “The poetry society had its final cocktail party, which meant South African sherry,” Hall remembers. “I invited him to it because I had read his poem in [the Oxford University student magazine] the Isis. I remember meeting Geoffrey and talking to him in the corner, and he talked to me in this most astonishing way, as if he were tipping his cap. I thought he was making fun of me; I thought he was making fun of me for being working class. No way. His father was a constable in a village in Worcestershire. That was the end of my first year. In the second year I saw Geoffrey almost every day. We went to pubs, talked poetry.”
Hall returned to the United States in 1954 with a manuscript in his back pocket that eventually became Exiles and Marriages (Viking), his debut volume, a finalist for the 1956 National Book Award alongside books by William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, and his old teacher from Harvard, John Ciardi. W. H. Auden would win that year for The Shield of Achilles (Random House). Hall had received his acceptance letter from Viking on the day that he learned his father would die of cancer. He read reviews of the book to his father on his deathbed. “My cup…runneth over,” Hall remembers him saying.
Like so many poets of his time, from W. S. Merwin to Rich to Galway Kinnell, Hall began his career as a formalist, only to immediately feel the inadequacy of the forms in conveying, as he has written, the “crucial area of feeling.” He sorted out this anxiety by editing, with Louis Simpson and Robert Pack, an anthology called New Poets of England and America (Meridian Books, 1957), which formed a kind of footbridge between Britain and the United States. With an introduction by Robert Frost, it was as notable for whom it included at the beginnings of their careers—Gunn, Hill, Rich, and Merwin—as for whom it left out: Creeley, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Charles Olson, Gary Snyder, and others. It was not meant as an exclusionary gesture, Hall says now. “When Simpson and Pack and I made that anthology, we weren’t trying to champion one kind of poetry over another. We were just publishing what we thought were the best poems.” Poet Ron Padgett echoes the sense that perhaps the ensuing brouhaha over the anthology—and Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry: 1945–1960 (Grove Press, 1960)—was overrated. “Anthologies don’t create divisions or reinforce them,” he wrote in an e-mail, “except in the minds of people who want to think about such things instead of about specific poems.”
From the anthologies and into the university, Hall’s movement in the first four decades of his career charts the creation of the poetry establishment as we know it today. In the early 1960s he accepted a post at the University of Michigan, teaching poetry when creative writing programs were an unusual thing. The novelist and biographer Edmund White, who was a student of his in 1962, remembers Hall as “sort of round-faced, slightly chubby, like a very healthy chubby man. And he would sit on the edge of the desk, and in those days you could smoke in the classroom. He would sit and smoke a cigar. He introduced us to high-class gossip. He had just interviewed T. S. Eliot for the Paris Review, and Ezra Pound. So he was full of anecdotes about that. I suppose the kind of intensity and awe that he brought to his discussions of those people made us all feel that being a poet would be exciting.”
White was writing poetry at the time, and Hall eventually came to discourage him by pointing out that “Everything I was doing could have been done better in the nineteenth century,” White recalls. White saw Hall ten years ago at Princeton and reminded him of this fact, to which Hall said, “I think that turned out all right.” However, Hall did encourage Lawrence Joseph. “He was an absolutely fantastic teacher,” Joseph wrote in an e-mail. “I know of no one who knows about and loves poetry more than he does, and his generosity knew no bounds. It’s been a great, lifelong gift having had one of our finest poets and prose writers as a teacher.”
Today Hall remains glad that he taught, but relieved that he left when he did, after thirteen years. “I was beginning to play the tape. You know what I mean. When I began, kids would ask a question and I’d never thought of the subject, so when I answered I learned something. But at the end they weren’t asking anything I didn’t know about. It was very good to get out of teaching at that point.”
While he was at Michigan, Hall’s first marriage imploded, and he went through a difficult period of heavy drinking and self-pity. He eventually met Jane Kenyon, one of his students, and married her in 1972. They decided to spend a sabbatical year at Hall’s grandparents’ New Hampshire farm, where Hall had cleared brush and milked cows as a child, in 1975. Once there, Jane didn’t want to leave. “She said in October of that year she would chain herself in the root cellar before going back,” Hall remembers. “In December I resigned from the English department.”
Turning his back on tenure and health care at the age of forty-seven worried Hall so much he took out a subscription to Money magazine. Very quickly, however, the freedom from teaching relieved his anxiety. “The burst of energy, to be in this house, and to be writing all day!” Hall exclaims now. “I was working ten hours a day! I always managed to work on Christmas Day, just so I could say so. Jane, unless she was in the depths of depression, would be up in her study working.” It was in this house that he wrote most of his breakthrough book, Kicking the Leaves (Harper & Row, 1978), which finally smashed the shackles of the old formalism and breathed a Whitmanesque breadth into his lines. Here, too, he wrote his Caldecott Medal–winning children’s book, Ox-Cart Man (Viking, 1979), which began as a story told to him by a friendly uncle, who talked about a man who used to load up a cart with goods to take to the market in Portland, Maine, and then sold everything but the cart before returning home.
Hall has always been an active correspondent, but in New Hampshire his correspondence expanded exponentially. If you wrote to him, he responded. Novelist and poet Alice Mattison, who was Jane Kenyon’s best friend, remembers striking up a correspondence with her friend’s husband in 1986, the year Hall’s The Happy Man was published by Random House. “It did not get a lot of attention,” Mattison says now. “His editor left; it was orphaned. Not a lot of people knew about it. I loved the book, so I wrote him a letter, and he answered the letter in detail, and we were just launched.” In over twenty-five years, their correspondence hasn’t stopped. “There have been times when letters overlapped and we began two correspondences,” she says.
Mattison, like many of Kenyon’s friends, was devastated when Kenyon got sick and died. “There was nothing like going out for coffee and cake with Jane,” Mattison says. “I used to hike with her sometimes; she would carry along a backpack with everything you could think of, and we’d stop every ten minutes to have snacks and water, talk. She came at life with incredible intensity, and was kind.” Hall’s grieving for her was intense—and public. And it was followed, as he has written, by a period of manic promiscuity. Mattison has not considered any of it out of bounds. “I was grieving too; I was also quite beside myself. I thought he made sense. I didn’t think he was crazy. The losses—one’s own personal losses—are the only losses in the world when they happen to you. Nothing would have seemed excessive.”
Throughout our afternoon together Hall mentions Kenyon frequently, always in the present tense. Her grave is not far away, and if the pain of her loss is not so near as to draw tears, Hall seems to remember it in small ways and big—reflexively, fondly, without shame. She reappears throughout Essays After Eighty, and the memory of surviving her loss remains acute. “I wrote poems on her death or out of her death for about two hours a day,” he remembers. “I couldn’t keep on after that. And then I had another twenty-two hours of misery. But when I wrote about her, I was almost happy, and writing about her death and all that misery was something that kept me going.”
Now, another half dozen volumes of poetry later, there will be no more poems. “Poetry is sex,” Hall says, alighting with mischief and melancholy, when I ask if he really has given up writing new poems. “No testosterone,” he adds. Prose remains, however, even if it requires more work than ever. “I used to write a book review in three drafts,” he says, hardly bragging. Talking about one of the pieces in his new book, he idly mentions it went through eighty drafts. How is that possible? “I will write down a word, and I know I’m not going to use it eventually, it’s a blank word I will fill in later, and probably in eighty drafts I’ve had ten or eleven words in one place, and each time it’s replaced by something more particular, or that fits the tone better, or with a better sense of opposites, you know, putting together words that don’t belong together.”
This work, and personal correspondence, keeps him busy. As he writes in Essays After Eighty, each day begins in the same way: “In the morning, I turn on the coffee, glue in my teeth, take four pills, swallow Metamucil and wipe it off my beard, fasten a brace over my buckling knee…then read the newspaper and drink black coffee.” Kendel Currier, his aptly named assistant and cousin, comes by to drop off manuscripts for further revision, and he dictates several letters to her. “His messages are lengthy, friendly, chatty, modest, full of reminiscences, and sometimes funny,” Padgett says. “He’s what—eighty-five?—and I can barely keep up with him.” Mattison wonders if Hall is helped here by his disclosures. “He is totally honest, he has no sense of privacy, doesn’t have a lot of secrets, and so he just says whatever needs to be said.”
Mattison is on the receiving end of one of Hall’s latest obsessions: his poems. He may have stopped writing them, but he has begun revising poems—again—to create a new (and much smaller) selected volume, to be released in 2015. She is one of his self-designated “hard-assed friends” to whom he has sent revised versions of his poems. “I can’t help myself,” Hall pleads when I ask why he does it, this continuous revising. “You do fifty drafts, publish it in a magazine, see it in the magazine, then start rewriting it. You put it in a book, and then the book would come,” he continues, then switches into the first person, as if to own up to the mania. “I’d put it here,” he says, pointing to a shelf crowded with photos of Geoffrey Hill and other friends. “I’d hate to open it up, because I know the first thing I’d look at, I would want to change something.” And so he does.
John Freeman’s most recent book is Tales of Two Cities: The Best and Worst of Times in Today’s New York (OR Books, 2014), an anthology of poetry and prose about New York in the age of income gaps. He is writing a book about American poetry for Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Tracy K. Smith was twenty-two when her mother died in 1994. Nearly a decade later, she published The Body’s Question, her first book of poetry, in which she reflected on that loss. In “Joy,” which carried the epigraph “In Memoriam KMS 1936–1994,” Smith writes to her mother, longing to “pick up the phone / And catch your voice on the other end / Telling me how to bake a salmon / Or get the stains out of my white clothes.” Another decade later, she returns to that wrenching loss in the memoir Ordinary Light, published this month by Knopf. Smith’s first book of prose, it is a book of excavation and navigation: The poet revisits her mother’s passing in light of her father’s death in 2008, the year her daughter, Naomi, was born, and in light of the birth in 2013 of her twin sons, Atticus and Sterling.
Smith, who characterizes herself as having been “still an adolescent” when she lost her mother, believes “it took losing my father to help me come to better grips with that first loss and think about what I needed to believe my mother’s life and her death had imparted.” And now, with three children of her own, Smith wishes her mother were nearby to consult about practical parenting concerns, but of course that wish goes deeper: “I want to think actively about the continuum to which I belong—the one that includes my mother and her mother and sisters and their ancestors—and also my children. In my mother’s absence, I want to cement that connection, and words are the best glue I know.”
But why prose? She’s already written poems about her mother, and her Pulitzer Prize–winning Life on Mars is, in many respects, an elegy for her father. A memoir in verse offered an intriguing form, one that is familiar territory—Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah (1986) and, more recently, Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming, which won the 2014 National Book Award, are exemplary—but Smith credits the influence and encouragement of the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger, her mentor in the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, for emboldening her to venture into prose. Smith had never heard of the mentorship program, which pairs older masters with younger artists under forty, until 2008, when she was nominated and flown to Munich along with two other finalists. Each had an interview with Enzensberger and then all four went to dinner, an experience that Smith insists turned into more camaraderie than competition.
She and Enzensberger have become great friends after what sounds like a jet-setting year of being flown to many of the places where he had speaking engagements: “We rendezvoused in Tenerife and Paris, and gave a reading together at the public library in London. We spent much of a summer in Munich, where he lives, working on the book and getting to know each other.” In addition to face-to-face meetings, the two e-mailed back and forth, with Smith sending him parts of her work for comment. The idea she began with was, by her own description, “a big, ambitious mess” about a whole range of experiences, but Enzensberger urged her to focus discrete memories toward “a narrative with characters that moved beyond the private realm to take in and consider the relevant public history.”
From the beginning, Smith says, she knew she wanted to write “genuine prose,” possibly because some of what she wanted to explore had already been unearthed in her poetry. “But I also wanted to embrace a fuller sense of myself as a writer,” she says. And she wanted to work within “sentences, clauses, paragraphs, the whole to-do,” since, as she writes in Ordinary Light, “Being able to tell a good story was currency in my family.” Prose gave her a certain amount of freedom to explain and elaborate. She realized how much she relies on metaphor in her poetry to evoke “a strange, powerful sameness between two otherwise disparate things.” In prose, she initially felt reluctant to elaborate on an image or interrogate statements she made, but soon discovered her expansive abilities. “I learned that prose can bear the weight of much more explication,” she says. “I can think and rethink, even second-guess or analyze something on the page in prose without going overboard. The sentence, in prose, can be as tireless as an ox.”
Enzensberger recognized, perhaps before Smith herself, that her story was about her family, with her mother as the central character. Smith opens Ordinary Light with her mother’s deathbed scene, the family’s vigil during the final hours of her mother’s life, remembered twenty years later:
Then we heard a sound that seemed to carve a tunnel between our world and some other. It was an otherworldly breath, a vivid presence that blew past us without stopping, leaving us, the living, clamped in place by the silence that followed. I would come back to the sound and the presence of that breath again and again, thinking how miraculous it was that she had ridden off on that last exhalation, her life instantly whisked away, carried over into a place none of us will ever understand until perhaps we are there ourselves.
From that solemn moment, Smith circles back to her childhood as the adored and indulged baby in a family of five children and, further back, to her parents’ coming of age in Alabama at the dawn of the civil rights movement. Dedicated to her daughter, Naomi, Ordinary Light began as a way for Smith to bring her parents back to life, “to reconstruct them,” as characters for Naomi. “At least that was my intention,” Smith says, “though in the execution it has become a book about me—about excavating my own experiences, anxieties, and evolving beliefs.”
When asked about the title, she hesitates, musing that “maybe it’s the feeling of wholeness and safety and ongoing-ness that we slip into sometimes in our lives.” But after Smith settled on Ordinary Light as her title, she added an opening quote from James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” one of her favorite short stories. As Baldwin’s narrator recalls the perfect family Sunday afternoons of his childhood when all’s right with the world, he cautions: “But something deep and watchful in the child knows that this is bound to end, is already ending. In a moment someone will get up and turn on the light.” In her new memoir, it is this moment that Smith explores for herself and her own children—the moment when we hear the tiger at the door.
***
In many ways, Smith seems to have lived a charmed life. Her father retired from the Air Force at forty-five because he did not want to uproot the family once again by accepting an overseas post. Trained as an electronics engineer, he found a job in Silicon Valley, eventually working on the Hubble Space Telescope. Her mother, while active in her church and community, did not work outside the home except for a short stint as an adult-education teacher. Tracy, eight years younger than her closest sibling, recalls a childhood when “all of my siblings doted on me, then left for college. So I had this abundance of attention for a time, and then a period of abundant solitude.” A participant in gifted programs throughout her public school education, she graduated from Harvard College in 1994 with a BA in English and American Literature and Afro-American Studies. After an extended return home following her mother’s death, Smith attended Columbia University, earning an MFA in 1997; she went on to a two-year stint as a Stegner fellow at Stanford University. She taught at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, New York, and at the University of Pittsburgh before joining the faculty at Princeton University in 2005, where she is currently a professor of creative writing.
Smith has published three collections of poetry—The Body’s Question (2003), Duende (2007), and Life on Mars (2011), all with Graywolf Press—each receiving critical acclaim and significant literary prizes. In the introduction to her first book, which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, poet Kevin Young, the contest judge, heralded an exceptional new voice: “Smith is a maker, a wordsmith of the first order.” In 2012, Life on Mars won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Two years later Smith received an Academy of American Poets Fellowship. Among her other awards and fellowships are the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, an Artist’s Residence at the Fundación Valparaíso in Spain, and an Essence Literary Award.
Smith had a series of mentors even before her time with Hans Magnus Enzensberger, as she developed her identity as a poet. A reader from the outset (one of the chapters in Ordinary Light is titled “My Book House”), she experienced a sort of epiphanic moment in college when she read Seamus Heaney’s poem “Digging.” She describes how everything in that poem—the male speaker, the Irish setting—should have been completely foreign to her, yet, she says, “I felt so much a part of the landscape and the family he was describing that I realized this was what I wanted to do with language.” Ultimately, she got to know Heaney as one of her teachers. At Columbia, Mark Doty became, and remains, an important influence and mentor to her, someone who she says is “so generous and present” to his students.
Yet the seemingly idyllic life of Smith’s nuclear family—“us as an invincible unit,” is how she describes them in Ordinary Light—can prepare, though never entirely protect, its members from the loss of certainty and security and, especially, the realities of racial politics. Smith is known for sharpening a political edge in her poetry, whether she’s writing about science fiction, pop culture, or current events, and this memoir is no exception. “In writing this book, I was forced to speak about and into many of the silences that ran through my life: silence about race, silence about the painful features of African American history, silence about my own choice to turn away from or reenvision the religious faith I was raised in,” she says.
One of the side effects of the memoir, Smith discovered, is that her adult perspective remained active even when she was writing about childhood: “So Tracy the citizen was allowed to engage with these private stories, just as Tracy the mother was allowed in at times,” she says. What she calls “shifting subjectivities” becomes especially clear when she writes about returning as a child to Alabama, where her parents grew up, to visit her large extended family (her mother was one of thirteen siblings):
I was ten years old, living with a vague knowledge that pain was part of my birthright, part of what was meant by a word like Home. It was not the kind of beautified self-inflicted angst that can transform a girl into a swan or a doll or an ice princess in the ballet…. No, what I felt, what I feared and discerned, even from my rather far remove, was the very particular pain that was tied up in blood, in race, in laws and war. The pain we hate most because we know it has been borne by the people we love. The slurs and slights I knew were part and parcel of my parents’ and grandparents’ and all my aunts’ and uncles’ lives in the South. The laws that had sought to make people like them—like us, like me—subordinate.
“Growing up black in America is inherently political,” Smith says, and her own experience proved that collision with that reality is not limited to the South. In Ordinary Light, she remembers the sting she felt when one of her high school teachers in Northern California offered faint praise as encouragement by pointing out, “You’re an African American woman. You should take advantage of the opportunities that will bring you.” Even as she received one acceptance after another to impressive schools, including Harvard, Smith writes that this man’s “voice whispered in the back of my mind whenever the word diversity was printed among the catalogue copy.”
Through writing Ordinary Light Smith has also come to some peaceful terms with the fierce religious faith that guided her mother’s life. Even as a child, she struggled to understand her mother’s devotion, especially regarding the concept of salvation, “when the world of my family was the only heaven I needed to believe in.” As an adolescent and young college student, Smith felt the growing distance from her mother in her sense of religion as something imposed, even oppressive. Writing Ordinary Light has helped her appreciate the key role of the African American church of her parents’ era in fostering a sense of family, community, and discipline “in a world full of disparities.” Even her father, with his systematic, orderly mind, Smith says, prayed with and read the Bible to his children. He was a man grounded in both the worlds of science and faith. In Ordinary Light, we meet the meticulously ordered world that her parents, especially her mother, created for their children, inspired, in many ways, by their religious beliefs: “a life that would tell us, and the world, if it cared to notice, that we bothered with ourselves, that we understood dignity, that we were worthy of everything that mattered.”
Smith believes that the process of writing the memoir helped her codify some of her own beliefs and anxieties about religion and to speak “honestly” about how she sees God—something she needed to do for herself but that has also helped her decide what elements of her religious inheritance she wants to offer her children. “I hope they will bring their own ideas and feelings to the conversation,” she says. “I don’t want to subject them to the hard-and-fast, top-down approach to belief that repelled me.” Would her mother, who grew more religious after her cancer diagnosis, approve? Smith’s not sure, though her siblings have responded positively to the book, and she believes that “much of what the writing has urged me to discover along the way would make perfect, familiar sense to my mother.”
***
Coming at a difficult time in her life, when her first marriage had ended, the offer of a position at Princeton was, Smith says, “a benediction that my life would go on, that everything would be okay.” So far, it’s been more than okay. She relishes teaching: “Let’s just be honest and say that we academics have the best, most humane work schedule in the world, and I get to spend my workdays talking to smart young people who are devoted to the very same thing I love.” Admitting that Princeton’s faculty roster of luminaries is “pretty daunting,” she characterizes her colleagues as “happy and fulfilled and therefore very generous” and feels part of the family: “I feel that I’ve grown up at Princeton. I came here with one book. I was a child. That’s a paradigm I’m comfortable with, being the youngest of five kids, and so the eminence of my colleagues felt right, familiar. I’ve always been in the position of admiring the people around me and striving to play catch-up.” Her colleagues apparently agree. Poet and New Yorker poetry editor Paul Muldoon, who invited Smith to do her first public reading of Ordinary Light last December at the Irish Arts Center in New York City, describes her as “a truly exceptional poet, with an eye for the arresting image that puts most of us to shame,” noting also her commitment to teaching: “My office is right beside hers, so I have a sense of her being a teacher who is at once diligent and delighting in her work.”
Last summer Smith became a full-fledged member of that community in a more rooted way when she and her family moved from Brooklyn, New York, where she had lived for fifteen years, to Princeton. She doesn’t really miss the city, and she’s a bit surprised. Apart from the practical reality that she and her husband, Raphael Allison, a literary scholar and poet, were driving to New Jersey to teach every day while their children were in Brooklyn, she says she was emotionally ready to leave: “I have so much more mental space and more patience, now that we’re living in a house and surrounded by so many trees. I used to pity New Yorkers who moved to the suburbs: I had the smug idea that they were ‘giving up,’ but now I think how much of an inherent struggle it assumes, and I chuckle.” Tina Chang, one of Smith’s best friends and poet laureate of Brooklyn, understands, though she says she went through her own “mourning” process when her friend moved. “As always, we write letters and allow our writing to lead us through our friendship,” Chang says. “What has always been interesting to me is that Tracy can occupy any physical space, and her mental space follows. Whether her body occupies India, Mexico, Brooklyn, or Princeton, her poetry fills up that geography, illuminates it, and makes it more alive.”
So, with most of the boxes unpacked, full-time teaching under way, and three young children in tow, Smith is already contemplating another prose work, and she’s on to more poetry projects. New poems are included in a folio that accompanies a Smithsonian exhibition of Civil War photos called Lines in Long Array: A Civil War Commemoration, Poems and Photographs, Past and Present and in an anthology about Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello that is forthcoming from the University of Virginia Press. She is also working on a translation of poetry by contemporary Chinese author Yi Lei and has signed on as librettist for an opera about the legendary 1960s battle between the disparate visions for New York City of urban planner Robert Moses and journalist and activist Jane Jacobs. Although most would be content to accomplish in a lifetime what Smith has already achieved, she considers herself at the end of the first part of her career, and she’s thinking ahead. She’s always been drawn to questions of what we leave behind, what it means to survive, to endure. In her poem “Letter to a Photojournalist Going-In,” from Duende, the speaker wonders if all we do is “kid ourselves into thinking we might last.” But Smith seems more like the tiny creature in “Flores Woman,” who defies the inevitability of her own extinction: “Like a dark star. I want to last.”
Renée H.Shea is the coauthor of a series of textbooks for Advanced Placement English, most recently Conversations in American Literature: Language, Rhetoric, Culture (Bedford St. Martin’s, 2014). She has profiled many authors for Poets & Writers Magazine, including Julie Otsuka, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Edwidge Danticat, and Maxine Hong Kingston.
Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden has named Tracy K. Smith the next poet laureate of the United States. Smith, who will take on the role in the fall, will succeed Juan Felipe Herrera, who has served as poet laureate since 2015. “It gives me great pleasure to appoint Tracy K. Smith, a poet of searching,” said Hayden in a press release. “Her work travels the world and takes on its voices; brings history and memory to life; calls on the power of literature as well as science, religion, and pop culture. With directness and deftness, she contends with the heavens or plumbs our inner depths—all to better understand what makes us human.”
Smith, forty-five, is a professor at Princeton University, where she directs the creative writing program. She has written three poetry collections, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Life on Mars (Graywolf, 2011), and a memoir, Ordinary Light (Knopf, 2015). “As someone who has been sustained by poems and poets, I understand the powerful and necessary role poetry can play in sustaining a rich inner life and fostering a mindful, empathic and resourceful culture,” said Smith in the announcement. “I am eager to share the good news of poetry with readers and future-readers across this marvelously diverse country.”
Smith is the first poet Hayden has appointed to the position, which was established in 1936 as the “Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress” and later renamed the “Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry” in 1985. Each poet laureate serves for at least one year and is responsible for raising national awareness and appreciation of poetry. Charles Wright, Natasha Trethewey, Philip Levine, W. S. Merwin, Kay Ryan, and Charles Simic have all served as the poet laureate in recent years.
Each poet approaches the role, which comes with a $35,000 stipend and minimal specific duties, with a different focus. Robert Pinsky, who served as poet laureate from 1997 to 2000, launched the Favorite Poem Project, through which more than eighteen thousand Americans shared their favorite poems. Several laureates have focused more on bringing poetry into the classroom: Billy Collins curated 180 poems for high school teachers to share with their students every day in the school year as part of the Poetry 180 project, while Kay Ryan strengthened poetry’s presence in community colleges through a national contest and videoconference. Other laureates have opted to raise awareness poetry by collaborating with the media, such as Natasha Trethewey with her Where Poetry Lives video series with PBS NewsHour, and Ted Kooser with his weekly newspaper column, American Life in Poetry.
Smith will have plenty of inspiration to draw on when she starts her term in the fall. She is the first poet laureate appointed under the Trump administration, a time that has highlighted the political divisions in the country. If there’s anyone who can remind the American public of the power of poetry to give people a more nuanced way of thinking and understanding one another, though, it’s Smith. “It makes sense to me that the world of commerce and the world of politics would be invested in convincing us that we can each be one thing only: loyal to one brand, one party, one candidate,” she said in an interview with Yale Literary Magazine in 2015. “Too often we forget that we can say no to such false thinking, that nobody is single-sided, two-dimensional…. Poems activate and affirm our sense of being individuals, of having feelings, of having been affected powerfully by the events and people that touch us.”
Nominated by President Obama this past February, Carla Hayden took office in September as the nation’s fourteenth Librarian of Congress. She is the first woman, and the first African American, to hold the position, which involves overseeing the library (a collection composed of more than 162 million books and other items) and its three thousand employees, as well as the nation’s law library, the office of the poet laureate, and the U.S. Copyright Office. Just a little over a month into her term, Dr. Hayden spoke about her plans for making the library more accessible, and a typical day in the life of the Librarian of Congress.
How are you hoping to make the library more accessible to the public? We’re working on a digital strategy to make the collections available to everyone online. The collections range from comic books to the papers and memorabilia of Rosa Parks to the manuscript collections of twenty-three presidents. We just launched our new home page. It’s more active—you can really get a sense of what the collections are. We’ve also been tweeting every day, one or two things I find in the collections. The response has already been pretty wonderful because I’m tying it to what’s going on in the world. During the World Series we tweeted the baseball-card collections we have. On Halloween we posted the collection of Harry Houdini’s memorabilia—his personal scrapbooks and his funeral program—because he died on Halloween, in 1926. So we’re using social media and technology to touch as many people as possible in interesting ways.
How else do you envision people engaging with the library? We’re really excited about the possibility of traveling exhibits that can go to local communities, including an eighteen-wheeler that can pull up in a rural area or on a reservation. We want people to be able to get on that truck and have an experience they might not have had if they can’t visit Washington, D.C. We’re hiring a new exhibit designer who has museum experience, and we’re hitting the road and drawing people in. And raising general awareness of the fact that it’s the nation’s library, it’s America’s library.
What do you see as the role of the poet laureate? Our current laureate, Juan Felipe Herrera, shows how to bring poetry into people’s lives in an active and everyday way. He’s demystifying it, and working with teachers, librarians, and people who work with young people to get them excited about poetry and to recognize it around them and in themselves. He wants poetry to be more spontaneous. As he has said, it shouldn’t be something you labor over—you should feel it and write it. He has this activity where he has the kids line up, like a soul-train line—the kids go down the line and write down words they’re hearing. They come out with a poem at the end.
What happens during a day in the life of the Librarian of Congress? One month in, it is a period of discovery and getting to know not only the collections and the resources, but also the people who care for those collections. That’s been one of the greatest joys and discoveries—the curators are so knowledgeable at the library. So I go from budget meetings to visiting a collection to having the head of the British Library visit to participating in the National Book Festival and things like the poetry slam at the Split This Rock Poetry Festival.
What are you reading now? Mysteries. I also just picked up The Gershwins and Me by Michael Feinstein; I got a chance to meet him, and got him to sign it, which was really cool. I have so many books stacked in my home—I have baskets of books waiting, just waiting. I try to think of them as pieces of candy, that they’re treats. If you walked into my apartment, you’d probably think, “This person likes to read,” and be able to find a few things to pick up.
Dana Isokawa is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Annie Dillard wasn’t sure she was going to like me, she says, not long after I arrive at her cabin near Cripple Creek, Virginia, in the dark vastness of a November evening. Night had dropped abruptly as a curtain, just as she had warned it would, and were it not for the nearly topographic directions she’d e-mailed beforehand, and a few tips by telephone from her husband, Bob—that is, Robert D. Richardson, biographer of Thoreau and Emerson and William James—I probably would have been skulking about in the dark, kicking into one of the old iron forges Confederates used to make cannonballs a hundred fifty years ago. “I wasn’t sure if you were one of those guys who doesn’t like taking directions from a woman,” she says.
Instead, thanks to Dillard’s directions and a good bit of luck, my friend Garnette Cadogan—who came along as my copilot—and I are sitting at her dining table, cupped in the mountain cove’s silence that fills the room like a held breath, we men sipping whiskey and trying to play it cool as one of the most sensitive, listening intelligences ever to breathe American air perches before us like a falcon, unsure whether we’re for the eating or for the protecting. Dillard inquires if we mind smoke, lights an American Spirit and inhales deeply. As Bob lays out a simple supper of sweet potatoes and salmon, she steps into the silence, quizzing us on some of the books we’ve read recently.
Not surprisingly—for a writer who casually dropped into one of her books, as an aside, “I have been reading comparative cosmology”—the path into this conversation gets steep very quickly. Her references fan out, leaping from one outcropping of literary news to the next until my bad planning or Garnette’s driving or what is being read in New York seem a long way down. What do we think of Karl Ove Knausgaard? Is it possible he might not be as interesting as he thinks he is? Have we heard of Belomor by Nicolas Rothwell, the Australian writer? Now that is a masterpiece. Pico Iyer’s book on Graham Greene? He’s very good at Ping-Pong, Dillard adds, improbably. What about women, Garnette asks, after Dillard lists a string of books by men. Are there any women writers she likes? “I don’t read as many women as I’m told I should be reading,” Dillard replies. “I don’t like doing what I am expected to do.”
We start talking about humor, and as if tuned by sonar to Dillard’s needs, Bob returns holding a book on stand-up comedy by Phil Berger.
You can almost hear the pops and fizzes of combustion as the flue clears and Dillard’s mind gulps down the oxygen it has been feeding on for years—books. It’s something to behold. Here is the sensibility that emerged from a white-glove Pittsburgh background because she read a novel about Rimbaud and wanted her mind to be on fire too. Here is the writer who pulled it off, chiseling out Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Harper’s Magazine Press, 1974), the Walden of our time, in nine months because she read a book on nature and felt she could do better. And thus Dillard wrote that great, elegant prayer to the seasons, largely at night, in the Hollins College library in Roanoke, Virginia, powered by chocolate milk, Vantage cigarettes, and Hasidic theology. Here is the woman who, upon winning a Pulitzer Prize for that book at age twenty-nine, turned her back on fame and stepped even deeper into the void—this time all the way out to Lummi Island, Washington, in Puget Sound, to write a sixty-six-page narrative on pain and eternity and God, Holy the Firm (Harper & Row, 1977).
In person, the effect of all this is like meeting a mountaineer whose work lay behind her but whose stories of having done it still get passed around as legend. If Holy the Firm pointed to the peak Dillard was trying to climb, and her next book, Living by Fiction (Harper & Row, 1982), was a nod to the people who had gone before her and failed, then the ones that followed, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (Harper & Row, 1982) and The Writing Life (HarperCollins, 1989), told the story of actually doing it. The false starts, the caffeine yo-yos, the encounters in the Amazon or the Arctic—or at church—that kept pushing the horizon further out; the tapping at supporting rock walls and the bolts she’d drilled into them to see if they’d hold; the occasional plummets. All the hard work of staying awake, and the descent. One of the reasons Dillard is so beloved is that she tried just as hard to make the case that we could all do it, live this way, that all you need to do is work with a demented singularity of purpose.
But most of all, through everything, she has never stopped reading. “I have written down every book I’ve read since 1964,” Dillard explains as I turn the Berger book over now, wondering in what obscure corner of her mind she will sock this information away. These diaries now get packed off to Yale’s Beinecke Library as fast as she fills them, just the name of the book and occasionally a checkmark, if it was really loved. I remark there’s something almost monkish about this notational labor, surely she must be the best-read person for hundreds, if not thousands of miles—an assertion she refutes before I can finish the comment by telling me about Bob’s physician, who had read one of her books in German and English, just for the comparison.
As for her, what is she after, inhaling those hundred or more books a year since age five? That library in the sky of her mind she has built. What is she seeking? “It’s what I’m for,” Dillard says simply, putting out her cigarette. “Somebody has to read all these books.”
For the past ten years, that—and painting, and walking—is what Annie Dillard has been up to. “I had a good forty years of writing,” she explains to me later, but she stopped writing after her novel The Maytrees was published by Harper in 2007. “There’s no shame to stopping. My last two books were as high as I could go,” she adds, referring to the novel and For the Time Being (Knopf, 1999), her book about belief in landscape and time. The smoke has barely cleared from these books, though, and it is only now, as her oeuvre has settled into the culture—or perhaps, most important, the loam of its writers—that its radical illumination has begun to reveal its long neon half-life.
It is through the doorways Dillard torched open that writers as diverse as Jonathan Lethem and Maggie Nelson have stepped, the latter of whom was one of Dillard’s students at Wesleyan and is now a friend. “Her books are wild,” Nelson writes to me. “They do what they please; they do what they need to do; they keep their eye trained on the things that matter most.” Geoff Dyer was also enabled by Dillard’s permission and contributes an introduction to The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New, which is being published this month by Ecco with selections from all of Dillard’s work, including the lamenting and powerful uncollected essay she published after the attacks of September 11, 2001.
I tell Dillard the story of a writer I know, Phil Klay—a future marine, no less—who didn’t learn of the attacks until days later because he was walking the Appalachian Trail. “I was on the beach in Cape Cod,” she replies, nodding. “I came out of this shack I was writing in and figured now might be a good time to disappear.” She then taped a twenty-dollar bill to the gate at the top of the dunes, on the hope a passing stranger with honor and time to spare would pick up some provisions, some batteries. Someone did. Meanwhile, rather than wait, Dillard went back to doing what she has dedicated an enormous portion of her life to doing: contemplating the infinite.
Even in the dark near Cripple Creek, bedtime approaching, it’s clear the apparatus for this life remains in place. Dillard lives in a cabin separate from her husband’s, and has a third where she paints. All of this will be shown to us in the morning. “Bob,” Dillard says, just before turning in, eyes over my shoulder, “those are headlights.” For a brief second Richardson’s face flashes with alarm, and then indeed two beams begin to snake up Dillard’s long gravel driveway. As Bob walks out onto the porch to greet the surprise guest, Dillard explains to us that this is most likely Gary LaVallee, a friend from the area who helped Dillard clear the land on which she built the two additional buildings.
Gary’s methods are as extreme as Dillard’s observational register is austere. He doesn’t work with a crew, just his car, which he repeatedly drove into tree trunks on the nearby hillside to fell the evergreens, then hacked up what was left with an ax. His arms are as muscled as those of a professional rugby player. His eyes twinkle benevolently. Somewhere in the hills nearby he is building an enormous, five-thousand-square-foot cabin, alone, by hand, with eighty-foot logs he raises by himself with a pulley system. Gary talks genially and then excitedly when he finds out Garnette is working on a book about Bob Marley: “I heard him open for Springsteen.” He offers to pick up milk or anything else for Bob and Annie, and when told they’re okay, gently leaves.
Until recently, Bob and Annie inform us as Gary departs, he was driving around the hills of Cripple Creek in an antique dump truck with no brakes and a pile of boulders in the back. Now Gary gets around mostly by pickup or car, and occasionally he parks in their drive to use their Wi-Fi and get on Facebook.
“I’m not sure I believe in God,” Dillard says, packing up her books and supplies for a night of reading, “but I believe God watches out for Gary LaVallee.”
Annie Dillard in Key West.
(Credit: Brian Smith)
In the morning the cabin is clobbered by light. Deer stand in groups chewing on dewy grass so far away, yet still visible, the eye needs a moment to adjust its lens before one can count the animals. Hunters cannot shoot on this land and the animals seem to know it. Dillard owns most of what the eye can see, but is loose with her ownership. Appalachian land is cheap. Some of it she has bequeathed already to her friend, the activist physician Paul Farmer. It’s quite a spread; her great-grandfather founded the company that became American Standard. Bob boils rich Cuban coffee strong enough to compete with the view. As he begins frying up eggs, he raises Annie on a walkie-talkie to let her know breakfast will be ready soon. By the time she arrives at the table, Bob has pointed out cardinals and owls in the brush.
As we eat, details of Dillard’s biography—the known things—slip out in asides and in peripheral conversation, echoing some of what Bob told us the night before over a nightcap. How they met because she wrote him a fan letter for Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (University of California Press, 1986); how he was already teaching her book to students when she wrote; how they met for lunch—both of them married; and how they didn’t look back when it was clear they were falling in love. He is Dillard’s third husband. “She is the smartest person I’ve ever met,” Bob tells us when she is not present, “and I’ve known some smart ones.”
“I got my name from my first husband,” she explains to me later in an e-mail. “I had no intention of getting married, let alone young. Richard Dillard, my poetry-writing professor, talked me into it. It was fine. That was a ten-year marriage, after which I headed west and met Gary Clevidence. We were together twelve years. With Bob it’s been twenty-eight years and counting.”
The novelist Lee Smith met Dillard as a freshman at Hollins, and has known her ever since. “The class was filled with talent,” she wrote to me, “but Annie’s was always extraordinary.
The group of us became a gang, a cohort, a karass—and we had fun, too. Inspired by Richard Dillard and his friend George Garrett, often on campus, an antic spirit prevailed. We wrote and put on plays, took over the newspaper, published our own literary magazine, Beanstalks, when the upperclassmen running the real literary magazine turned us down. We satirized everything and everybody. We loved to party, and we especially loved to dance.
This was true of Hollins girls in general. When several mostly-English majors formed a (really good, by the way) rock band named the Virginia Wolves, several of us became go-go dancers and performed with them at Hollins, UVA, and other literary festivals. We all had go-go names (I was Candy Love), white boots, glittery outfits, and cowboy hats—I don’t think Annie was an actual traveling go-go girl (no outfit) but she always loved to dance, and still does, to this day, as does my entire class, which always shows up for reunions (even the 45th, our last) with music like “Barbara Ann,” “Stop in the Name of Love,” “You Can’t Hurry Love,” “Help Me Rhonda,” “My Girl,” etc. (I know, I know…you’d have to see this to believe it. Husbands flee.)
Watching Annie and Bob over breakfast, editing each other’s stories and officiating over the presentation of flatware, coffee, second and third helpings, it’s clear that whatever came before, this is the show. It is the big love, and they move with the grace and irascibility and tender watchfulness of a couple well into what Richard Ford called in his third Bascombe novel “the permanent period.” Virginia is one of three places they call home, boxes shipped ahead every six weeks like provisions sent further up a slope, the two of them following by plane with backpacks, like students. Spring and summer they spend on Cape Cod; in fall they are here in Virginia, and in winter they wind up in Key West, where over the decades they’ve come to know some remarkable writers—Joy Williams, Ann Beattie (who nursed Dillard during a recent hip surgery, coming by with movie rentals and hot meals), and the biographer and essayist Phyllis Rose. “These are some powerful, remarkable women,” Bob says, his eyebrows adding commentary.
“She was also one of the most generous teachers I’ve ever seen,” Rose writes when I ask her later about her friend. Dillard went to Wesleyan in 1979 at Rose’s request, after deciding her years in the Pacific Northwest were over and she was looking for someplace new—a general theme in Dillard’s life. “She was generous with her time, her hospitality, her advice, and even sometimes her money. She usually had classes meet at her house, and outside of class time students were welcome too, for Ping-Pong or potluck.” A Ping-Pong table sits on the cabin’s porch behind us.
Maggie Nelson says the games were part of the whole instruction method. “Annie made a writing workshop an ‘experience,’ involving an Act One, sitting in a classroom; then an intermission of sorts, which consisted of taking a brief walk through the Connecticut woods to her house; then an Act Two, with refreshments and reading aloud in her living room. On the way to her house there was a hole in a chain-link fence, which she taught us to crawl through, likely in celebration of both trespassing and accessing liminal spaces. She encouraged us to get out into the world, which explains at least one afternoon I spent playing video games with the owner of a local baseball-card store, in order to write a profile of him.”
I realize, when Dillard beckons us from breakfast for our tour of her own liminal spaces, that her demeanor is not that of a famous person reduced to interior scale—or even of a genius judging the brain capacity of two citified visitors—but that of a teacher who never truly left the classroom. She taught for four years at Western Washington University in Bellingham, followed by twenty-two years at Wesleyan, after all. “Studying with her was a top-to-bottom education on being a working artist,” novelist Alexander Chee tells me.
“I knew I liked you guys when I realized you read fiction; you’re fiction people,” Dillard says as we get ready to check out her cabin and her study. It’s a short walk over to the buildings, maybe a hundred paces, but in that space the energy changes. It feels wilder, more animal; a skull and pieces of wood sit on a table. The cabin itself is plastered with photographs of her friends and family; her daughter, a poet and Iowa MFA graduate who lives in Arkansas and whose privacy Annie asks me to respect; Gary LaVallee; Bob. There’s a photograph on her refrigerator door of a place in Turkey. Serious travel—for health reasons—is something Annie and Bob have had to give up recently, but, she says, “If I went again I’d go into the Hula Valley, the wilderness. Just to see it.”
A small shelf of books sits next to her laptop—an old hardback copy of Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams, among some beat-up paperbacks. Some volumes of her own books. Her books are no longer coming out at the alarming rate at which they appeared in the 1980s and early 1990s, but this is where she still does the work she doesn’t consider work, firing off letters of encouragement and interest to writers all over the world.
Pico Iyer struck up a fast and ongoing long-distance friendship with Dillard, stoked by her correspondence. “Her e-mails to me, long and incandescent, veered between fervent literary recommendations (of Hardy, Joyce Cary, Robert Stone) and exuberant reminiscences of her cavorting on the beach and love of the [Pittsburgh] Pirates and delight in miniature golf.” If he was expecting a symposium in person, he was mistaken. “When we met, all she wanted to do was play Ping-Pong, in her backyard, each returned slam threatening to send a stack of books on esoteric theology or meteorology skidding off the dining table a few feet away. At some point, I realized that I was meeting the closest I could get to my longtime hero, D. H. Lawrence: someone furiously alive, attentive to everything and impossible to anticipate.”
As it did for Lawrence, painting has become Dillard’s primary mode of expression in later years. (She turned seventy this past year.) “I switched to painting,” she tells me. “Not really my art, but it lets me make something new. I paint people, mostly faces, in oils, on black-gessoed paper.” She invites Garnette and me to investigate the studio, which is as compact and crammed with information as a human skull.
The austerity of the studios she describes in Teaching a Stone to Talk, The Writing Life, and Holy the Firm come zooming back like déjà-vu. Tacked-up pieces of paper describe radial-axis instructions for depth and perspective. Another piece of paper lists the radio stations on satellite radio. An orphaned pack of American Spirits gleams. The view out the window unfurls the cove and the mountain across.
Bob radios back that it’s getting on toward noon, so we leave the studio and cabin and pile into his Toyota and head off in search of Gary LaVallee’s Valhalla, as locals have dubbed his massive log cabin in progress. We bounce treacherously up a muddy boulder-strewn drive out onto a high bluff only to discover this isn’t Gary’s yard at all. Whoever lives here has managed to transport, intact, an unmuddied, vintage 1940s low-rider with exposed piston, up the mountain, where it sits near a farmhouse, as improbable and somewhat sinister as a puma in a library. We circle around and down and off the hill and backtrack into town, Annie and Bob pointing things out along the way: the Confederate-era forge, the remnant of the railroad the army built into the mountains to haul the iron out, the hotel that was opened but never really took off.
Our destination is the Cripple Creek Mall, an ironically named general store where you can buy anything from MoonPies and soda made with real Carolina sugar to extension cords, hats, toilet drain snaking equipment, packaged ham, dried kale, bullets, and several strains of honey. Dillard talks to Eddie Younce, the proprietor, asking after his and his family’s health while he comments on how good she looks, after which Eddie delivers a detailed forty-five-minute dissertation to Garnette on the best places to gather and make honey in Appalachia. “I could sit and listen to my father and his friends talk about honey for two, three hours,” he tells us.
At some point during Eddie’s monologue, Annie and Bob back silently out of the store. We find them later down the lane, standing, holding hands, as if this is all there is to do in the world. It’s past noon and the sky is showing it and already I know we’re going to have to hurry to get out of Cripple Creek before dark. We hustle back to the house and through a lunch of chicken and potatoes before they send us packing. The light chases out of the hollows and falls again quickly as the little roads turn to interstate and Garnette and I race so I can make a train back to New York City. The next day, after I’ve woken in New York and the deep, soft pocket of earth we visited feels a million miles away, Dillard writes to me, the first of many e-mails about the late E. L. Doctorow, Key West, the Pacific Northwest, landscape and family, and generosity, as if she hadn’t been demonstrating it all along.
“Working in a soup kitchen is great for a writer or any artist,” she writes in one. “There are many unproductive days when you might hate yourself otherwise. You are eating the food, using the water, breathing the air—and NOT HELPING. But if you feed the hungry, you can’t deny you’re doing something worth doing.” She may have stopped writing, but Annie Dillard continues to feed the minds of generations of writers. As she might say, that’s what she’s for.
John Freeman is the founder of Freeman’s, a biannual anthology of new writing.
At the 2009 Key West Literary Seminar, Rachel Kushner was onstage discussing her first novel, Telex From Cuba (Scribner, 2008), which was inspired by stories from her mother, who had grown up on the Caribbean island ninety miles to the south in the 1950s. In the audience that day was best-selling author Judy Blume, a longtime resident of Key West, Florida, and a member of the Literary Seminar board of directors. When she heard Kushner utter the phrase “the fifties,” an epiphany hit Blume with the force of a thunderclap. She had a story to tell, she realized—a big, important story rooted in the fifties but about which, curiously, she had spoken to no one for more than half a century.
Photographs by Kevin Nance
Over the course of fifty-eight days in late 1951 and early ’52, when the then Judy Sussman was in the eighth grade in her hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey, three airplanes crashed there, all in or near residential neighborhoods and all with significant loss of life. When the first plane plummeted from the sky, it was believed to be a freak accident in an era when commercial air travel was relatively new and glamorous. When another disaster followed, the adults in Elizabeth began to wonder whether something was awry at nearby Newark Airport, while the kids—including Judy and many of her classmates at Alexander Hamilton Junior High—spoke of sabotage, aliens from outer space, perhaps even zombies. And when the third plane went down, it seemed to many that the town was under siege, or the victim of some modern version of a biblical plague. The airport was shut down for nine months pending a safety review, which ultimately failed to explain the crashes.
And for decades afterward, the future writer, who had watched her town endure unthinkable horror—her own father, a dentist, was called in to help identify burned bodies from dental records—kept those dangerous memories in some vault in her mind, locked away.
“I must have really buried this someplace so deep inside of me that for more than forty years it never occurred to me, ever, that I had this story to tell,” Blume says in a tone of wonder at the elegant Key West home she shares with her husband, nonfiction writer George Cooper. “How is that possible? It was really deep, I guess. My husband says I never told him this story. My daughter, who became a commercial airline pilot, said, ‘Mother, I cannot believe you never told me this story.’”
Better late than never. In her latest novel, In the Unlikely Event, published by Knopf in June, Blume unpacks the events of those two months when the sky kept raining down catastrophe on Elizabeth. The product of months of research and years of writing and editing, In the Unlikely Event hews closely to the actual details of the crashes and then, with the imaginative sympathy that has been a hallmark of Blume’s novels for young people and adults over the decades, describes the toxic fallout that afflicted the lives of the townspeople. The result is a portrait of a community in crisis, in which grief, fear, and outrage are balanced, to some extent, by the characters’ capacity for heroism and a faith that, even in the shadow of tragic events, life goes on.
“Because that’s what you do when something terrible happens,” the author explains. “You keep going, doing what you do.”
Along the way, Blume weaves a tasseled shawl of historical detail of New Jersey in the early fifties—the era of Frank Sinatra, Martin and Lewis, Nat King Cole, cocktails at the Riviera, Jewish gangsters, Liz Taylor haircuts, Joe McCarthy’s Red Scare, and sci-fi movies dressing up A-bomb paranoia in Halloween costumes—in which the comfortingly mundane reality of the characters provides a vivid contrast to the disruption of the airplane crashes. The novel’s heroine, Miri Ammerman, and her uncle, the young reporter Henry Ammerman, who breathlessly covers the crashes in the purple prose of small-town newspapers of the day (the word inferno comes up with alarming frequency), struggle to maintain their sense of normal life in the midst of extremely abnormal circumstances.
“I have a fabulous memory for my early life, but I remember very few things about the crashes—which is why I had to do so much research,” Blume reflects, still puzzled, one typically perfect afternoon in Key West. “I do have a very vivid memory of where I was the afternoon of the first plane crash. I was in a car with my parents on a Sunday afternoon, and it came over the radio: ‘We interrupt this program to tell you…’ The crash was a block from our junior high school—one block!” She thinks back, shakes her head. “I knew that the crashes happened, but I don’t remember my feelings about them. Was I scared? Was I not? I don’t know.” Another thoughtful pause. “But all the mundane stuff, how people lived back then, was right at the tips of my fingers. I am, after all, a kid of the fifties.”
It was in that seemingly carefree yet oddly stifling decade that Judy Sussman began to develop as a storyteller—not a writer yet, as she kept her tales in her head—which served as a way to explore questions that often couldn’t be asked out loud, even of her parents, as beloved as they were. “Full of secrets,” Blume, still peeved, says of that decade. “Nobody told you anything.”
The 1970s were hardly better. When the author’s narratives began to be recorded and published in her late twenties and early thirties, she was immediately celebrated—and in some circles deplored and censored—for her frank fictions that touched on, among other things, the physical and sexual development of girls and young women. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (Bradbury Press, 1970), still perhaps Blume’s best-known novel for teenagers, was primarily about its sixth-grade heroine’s struggles in a mixed-faith family, but caught the disapproving eye of cultural conservatives who objected to its candor about brassieres, menstruation, sanitary napkins, and the like. In Deenie (Bradbury, 1973), Blume broached the topic of masturbation, and in Forever… (Bradbury, 1975), she graduated to teen sex. Her books’ directness on these and other “adult” themes made them simultaneously among the most banned and most popular books of their era. (To date, according to her publisher, Blume’s books in all genres have sold more than eighty-five million copies, making her one of the world’s most commercially successful writers.)
“I was very interested in writing about real life, about growing up,” Blume says. “Nobody talked about those things back then, so the books were a way to satisfy my curiosity.”
Kristen-Paige Madonia, author of the young-adult novel Fingerprints of You (Simon & Schuster, 2012), grew up feeling similarly about Blume’s novels for teens. “My sister and I took turns reading Margaret, which was incredibly important to us,” says Madonia, who got to know Blume personally years later. “Judy took subjects that were masked and muddy and made them okay and understandable. She was very clear about things that were happening to us as young girls—boobs and periods, all that—and you felt you were in dialogue with her. She was with us, speaking to us, which was far more comfortable than having that conversation with your mother or a teacher. Her voice is so accessible, so warm and down-to-earth, and I think that’s why she’s connected to so many readers over the years.”
In later years Blume turned to adult fiction, producing a pair of best-sellers, Wifey (1978) and Smart Women (1983), both published by Putnam. Although writing had always been a joy—“I felt as if I were reborn every morning,” she says—Blume suffered an existential funk in the early 1980s after reading Dad (Knopf, 1981) by William Wharton, whose prose struck her as so superior to her own that she felt paralyzed. “I was so caught up in the book that it totally took away all my confidence,” she says. “I just felt, ‘Why am I doing this? I can’t write this well. I will never write as well as this.’ And I couldn’t write at all for three months.”
Eventually, Blume got her groove back, in part by making peace with what she sees as her own limitations as a prose stylist. “It was never about putting the words on paper,” she says now, over a dinner of grilled snapper and Key lime pie at an open-air beachfront restaurant. “I’m not that kind of writer, as many people would tell you. It’s about getting the story out, the story and the characters. It’s not about the language. I do what I have to do to tell the story.”
With that pragmatic approach, Blume has written several new books in recent years, including a third blockbuster for adult readers, Summer Sisters (Delacorte, 1998). But her editor at Knopf, Carole Baron, says that Blume’s way of describing her writing process doesn’t do it justice. “She’s a great writer, whether she believes it or not,” says Baron, who also edited Summer Sisters. “Her dialogue in particular is perfection. And I do believe that’s one of the reasons—whether in adult books or books for the young—that Blume has always connected with her readers. She knows how to speak to them through the words of her characters. Her writing is deceptively simple, but it delivers a blow. To say that it’s not about the language, she’s selling herself hugely short.”
As for the popular (and vaguely dismissive) characterization of Blume by some as a “YA writer” who occasionally writes books for adults, the author shrugs. “Children’s books, YA books, adult books—it’s all the same process,” she says. “Lots of times, I don’t know which it is. I’m just telling a story.” With a knife, she slices through a thick layer of meringue on the pie, as if hacking away at the fluff of the argument. “I hate categories,” she says with a rare frown. “You have to be published by a certain department, and there are children’s book buyers, YA book buyers, adult book buyers. But that’s about the marketplace, not the book.”
Last year, as the deadline for the delivery of the manuscript of In the Unlikely Event began to loom, two issues—both related to language and storytelling, as it happened—presented themselves as potential roadblocks in the publication schedule.
One was that after having written the first of the novel’s four parts, Blume took two years off from the project to work on the film adaptation of her novel Tiger Eyes (Bradbury, 1981), directed by her son, Lawrence Blume. (As a published author, she chose to retain the surname of her first husband, John M. Blume, an attorney. They divorced in 1976, after which she married a physicist, Thomas Kitchens. They divorced after two years, and she married Cooper in 1987. “I’ve been with George for thirty-five happy years,” she says with a smile, “to make up for everything else.”) When Blume returned to work on In the Unlikely Event, she came to see Part One as too slowly paced and too crowded with characters. “I kept telling Carole, ‘I want to speed it up!’ You know you’re in danger of damaging your book when you want to take out big chunks of it and throw them away. And Carole would say, ‘Put that back!’”
As Baron recalls, “My feeling was that when we experienced the horror of the first airplane crash, we should know who the people were.” She got her way.
The second issue was that the newspaper articles about the airplane crashes, attributed in the book to Henry Ammerman, were largely based on actual accounts that originally appeared in two local newspapers, the Elizabeth Daily Journal and the Newark Evening News, both now defunct. It didn’t feel right to publish the real-life newspaper stories verbatim under Henry Ammerman’s fictional byline, but with her deadline approaching, Blume despaired of finding enough time to rewrite the stories.
At that point, Cooper entered the fray. “I’ll be your Henry Ammerman,” he said. Under Blume’s supervision in the role of a tough “city editor,” as he put it, Cooper got to work, recrafting the newspaper articles, retaining and sometimes putting his own spin on their hyperventilating prose style. “I took all the stories and added some flourishes of my own,” he says now. “I tried to tailor them to the fictional narrative, building on the story that was building in the fiction.”
“I would have said the exact opposite,” Blume says. “The news stories gave me the structure for my narrative.”
During the writing of Summer Sisters, Blume, who then lived in New York City, frequently talked about her love of summer, so Cooper said to her, “You could have more summer in your life if we went someplace in winter.” “Great,” she said, “let’s try to rent a place somewhere for a month.” They rented a place in Key West, fell in love with the island, and returned again and again, eventually making it their home in 1997.
“You live a regular life here,” the author says during a contented walk on the beach at sunset, “and you forget how lucky you are until someone reminds you.”
The self-styled Conch Republic has been good to Blume, and not only because of its nearly endless summer. For decades the island has nurtured a community of poets and writers, including Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, John Hersey, James Merrill, and Shel Silverstein, a context in which Blume fits like bougainvillea on a breezy Old Town veranda. And from her twin perches as a best-selling author and a board member of the Literary Seminar, she has been well positioned to mentor many young writers whose work she admires, providing advice and much-needed advocacy at some of the most crucial stages of their careers.
“I wanted to be a writer because of Judy Blume and her books,” says Carolyn Mackler, who first met the author while interviewing her in Key West for an article in Ms.Magazine. “She was my hero, and she was very welcoming and generous and kind to me on that visit. I was twenty-four, and during the interview, I mentioned that I wanted to write novels like hers. She said, ‘When you get a draft that you feel comfortable with, call me and we’ll talk.’ She really ended up guiding me through writing and publishing my first novel, Love and Other Four-Letter Words [Delacorte, 2000]. She read an advance copy and gave it a wonderful book-jacket quote. She’s been a mentor to me for seventeen years.”
Something similar happened to Madonia, whose short story, “Cheap Red Meat,” won the first Key West Literary Seminar Fiction Contest, in 2008—largely because, unbeknownst to the young writer, Blume had come across the story in the contest slush pile and fallen in love with it.
“I got down there and was waiting in line to have my book signed by Judy Blume,” Madonia recalls. “She saw my name tag and said, ‘It’s you!’ She loved what she saw in that short story, and really fostered my career from that moment. Half an hour later we were exchanging numbers and making plans to have breakfast. You know, you meet her and forget that you’re talking to someone unbelievably famous. And whenever I’ve hesitated in my career or had doubts, she’s always been the one I reach out to. She always says, ‘Go write another book. That’s who you are.’”
After decades of feeling reborn every morning at her writing desk, Blume herself has reached a point in her life when she’s not sure whether she’ll write another book. And if she does do so, she insists that it won’t be another lengthy, scrupulously researched tome like In the Unlikely Event, which arrives in bookstores at a muscular 416 pages.
“I’m seventy-seven years old and I don’t want to write another long novel,” she says. “I don’t want to spend three to five years doing that. I’m not saying that I’m never going to do anything, because I have a lot of creative energy.”
Baron isn’t buying it, at least not entirely. “I think the thing about this new book that’s different from her other novels is that there’s a basis of fact in dealing with these airplane crashes,” she says. “Judy is so thorough about her research, so adamant about getting every single fact right, that it added a layer to her editorial process that I don’t think she’s ever experienced before. So, sure, I believe she’s not going to undertake another book that has such a basis in nonfiction. But Judy is a storyteller, and storytellers are always telling stories. She said the same thing to me about this maybe being her last novel, and I said to her, ‘When you’re ready, I have an idea.’”
Who knows? Thanks in part to the comfortable climate and her long walks around Key West every morning with Cooper, the author appears significantly younger and more energetic than her actual age might suggest. But as always, Judy Blume is a pragmatist who understands her limitations. After many happy years in their gorgeously landscaped, high-modernist home in Old Town, Blume and Cooper are making plans to sell the house and downsize to a much smaller condo on the nearby beach. The heavy spadework of In the Unlikely Event—the digging up of what had been buried for so long—has been done. An assignment has been completed, a burden lifted.
Standing on a Key West pier taking in yet another gorgeous sunset, Blume heaves an unmistakable sigh of relief. “If this is my last book, then I’m really happy about it,” she says. “I feel I was meant to tell this story, and now I’ve told it.”
Kevin Nance is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine. Follow him on Twitter, @KevinNance1.
Tracy K. Smith was twenty-two when her mother died in 1994. Nearly a decade later, she published The Body’s Question, her first book of poetry, in which she reflected on that loss. In “Joy,” which carried the epigraph “In Memoriam KMS 1936–1994,” Smith writes to her mother, longing to “pick up the phone / And catch your voice on the other end / Telling me how to bake a salmon / Or get the stains out of my white clothes.” Another decade later, she returns to that wrenching loss in the memoir Ordinary Light, published this month by Knopf. Smith’s first book of prose, it is a book of excavation and navigation: The poet revisits her mother’s passing in light of her father’s death in 2008, the year her daughter, Naomi, was born, and in light of the birth in 2013 of her twin sons, Atticus and Sterling.
Smith, who characterizes herself as having been “still an adolescent” when she lost her mother, believes “it took losing my father to help me come to better grips with that first loss and think about what I needed to believe my mother’s life and her death had imparted.” And now, with three children of her own, Smith wishes her mother were nearby to consult about practical parenting concerns, but of course that wish goes deeper: “I want to think actively about the continuum to which I belong—the one that includes my mother and her mother and sisters and their ancestors—and also my children. In my mother’s absence, I want to cement that connection, and words are the best glue I know.”
But why prose? She’s already written poems about her mother, and her Pulitzer Prize–winning Life on Mars is, in many respects, an elegy for her father. A memoir in verse offered an intriguing form, one that is familiar territory—Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah (1986) and, more recently, Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming, which won the 2014 National Book Award, are exemplary—but Smith credits the influence and encouragement of the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger, her mentor in the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, for emboldening her to venture into prose. Smith had never heard of the mentorship program, which pairs older masters with younger artists under forty, until 2008, when she was nominated and flown to Munich along with two other finalists. Each had an interview with Enzensberger and then all four went to dinner, an experience that Smith insists turned into more camaraderie than competition.
She and Enzensberger have become great friends after what sounds like a jet-setting year of being flown to many of the places where he had speaking engagements: “We rendezvoused in Tenerife and Paris, and gave a reading together at the public library in London. We spent much of a summer in Munich, where he lives, working on the book and getting to know each other.” In addition to face-to-face meetings, the two e-mailed back and forth, with Smith sending him parts of her work for comment. The idea she began with was, by her own description, “a big, ambitious mess” about a whole range of experiences, but Enzensberger urged her to focus discrete memories toward “a narrative with characters that moved beyond the private realm to take in and consider the relevant public history.”
From the beginning, Smith says, she knew she wanted to write “genuine prose,” possibly because some of what she wanted to explore had already been unearthed in her poetry. “But I also wanted to embrace a fuller sense of myself as a writer,” she says. And she wanted to work within “sentences, clauses, paragraphs, the whole to-do,” since, as she writes in Ordinary Light, “Being able to tell a good story was currency in my family.” Prose gave her a certain amount of freedom to explain and elaborate. She realized how much she relies on metaphor in her poetry to evoke “a strange, powerful sameness between two otherwise disparate things.” In prose, she initially felt reluctant to elaborate on an image or interrogate statements she made, but soon discovered her expansive abilities. “I learned that prose can bear the weight of much more explication,” she says. “I can think and rethink, even second-guess or analyze something on the page in prose without going overboard. The sentence, in prose, can be as tireless as an ox.”
Enzensberger recognized, perhaps before Smith herself, that her story was about her family, with her mother as the central character. Smith opens Ordinary Light with her mother’s deathbed scene, the family’s vigil during the final hours of her mother’s life, remembered twenty years later:
Then we heard a sound that seemed to carve a tunnel between our world and some other. It was an otherworldly breath, a vivid presence that blew past us without stopping, leaving us, the living, clamped in place by the silence that followed. I would come back to the sound and the presence of that breath again and again, thinking how miraculous it was that she had ridden off on that last exhalation, her life instantly whisked away, carried over into a place none of us will ever understand until perhaps we are there ourselves.
From that solemn moment, Smith circles back to her childhood as the adored and indulged baby in a family of five children and, further back, to her parents’ coming of age in Alabama at the dawn of the civil rights movement. Dedicated to her daughter, Naomi, Ordinary Light began as a way for Smith to bring her parents back to life, “to reconstruct them,” as characters for Naomi. “At least that was my intention,” Smith says, “though in the execution it has become a book about me—about excavating my own experiences, anxieties, and evolving beliefs.”
When asked about the title, she hesitates, musing that “maybe it’s the feeling of wholeness and safety and ongoing-ness that we slip into sometimes in our lives.” But after Smith settled on Ordinary Light as her title, she added an opening quote from James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” one of her favorite short stories. As Baldwin’s narrator recalls the perfect family Sunday afternoons of his childhood when all’s right with the world, he cautions: “But something deep and watchful in the child knows that this is bound to end, is already ending. In a moment someone will get up and turn on the light.” In her new memoir, it is this moment that Smith explores for herself and her own children—the moment when we hear the tiger at the door.
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In many ways, Smith seems to have lived a charmed life. Her father retired from the Air Force at forty-five because he did not want to uproot the family once again by accepting an overseas post. Trained as an electronics engineer, he found a job in Silicon Valley, eventually working on the Hubble Space Telescope. Her mother, while active in her church and community, did not work outside the home except for a short stint as an adult-education teacher. Tracy, eight years younger than her closest sibling, recalls a childhood when “all of my siblings doted on me, then left for college. So I had this abundance of attention for a time, and then a period of abundant solitude.” A participant in gifted programs throughout her public school education, she graduated from Harvard College in 1994 with a BA in English and American Literature and Afro-American Studies. After an extended return home following her mother’s death, Smith attended Columbia University, earning an MFA in 1997; she went on to a two-year stint as a Stegner fellow at Stanford University. She taught at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, New York, and at the University of Pittsburgh before joining the faculty at Princeton University in 2005, where she is currently a professor of creative writing.
Smith has published three collections of poetry—The Body’s Question (2003), Duende (2007), and Life on Mars (2011), all with Graywolf Press—each receiving critical acclaim and significant literary prizes. In the introduction to her first book, which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, poet Kevin Young, the contest judge, heralded an exceptional new voice: “Smith is a maker, a wordsmith of the first order.” In 2012, Life on Mars won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Two years later Smith received an Academy of American Poets Fellowship. Among her other awards and fellowships are the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, an Artist’s Residence at the Fundación Valparaíso in Spain, and an Essence Literary Award.
Smith had a series of mentors even before her time with Hans Magnus Enzensberger, as she developed her identity as a poet. A reader from the outset (one of the chapters in Ordinary Light is titled “My Book House”), she experienced a sort of epiphanic moment in college when she read Seamus Heaney’s poem “Digging.” She describes how everything in that poem—the male speaker, the Irish setting—should have been completely foreign to her, yet, she says, “I felt so much a part of the landscape and the family he was describing that I realized this was what I wanted to do with language.” Ultimately, she got to know Heaney as one of her teachers. At Columbia, Mark Doty became, and remains, an important influence and mentor to her, someone who she says is “so generous and present” to his students.
Yet the seemingly idyllic life of Smith’s nuclear family—“us as an invincible unit,” is how she describes them in Ordinary Light—can prepare, though never entirely protect, its members from the loss of certainty and security and, especially, the realities of racial politics. Smith is known for sharpening a political edge in her poetry, whether she’s writing about science fiction, pop culture, or current events, and this memoir is no exception. “In writing this book, I was forced to speak about and into many of the silences that ran through my life: silence about race, silence about the painful features of African American history, silence about my own choice to turn away from or reenvision the religious faith I was raised in,” she says.
One of the side effects of the memoir, Smith discovered, is that her adult perspective remained active even when she was writing about childhood: “So Tracy the citizen was allowed to engage with these private stories, just as Tracy the mother was allowed in at times,” she says. What she calls “shifting subjectivities” becomes especially clear when she writes about returning as a child to Alabama, where her parents grew up, to visit her large extended family (her mother was one of thirteen siblings):
I was ten years old, living with a vague knowledge that pain was part of my birthright, part of what was meant by a word like Home. It was not the kind of beautified self-inflicted angst that can transform a girl into a swan or a doll or an ice princess in the ballet…. No, what I felt, what I feared and discerned, even from my rather far remove, was the very particular pain that was tied up in blood, in race, in laws and war. The pain we hate most because we know it has been borne by the people we love. The slurs and slights I knew were part and parcel of my parents’ and grandparents’ and all my aunts’ and uncles’ lives in the South. The laws that had sought to make people like them—like us, like me—subordinate.
“Growing up black in America is inherently political,” Smith says, and her own experience proved that collision with that reality is not limited to the South. In Ordinary Light, she remembers the sting she felt when one of her high school teachers in Northern California offered faint praise as encouragement by pointing out, “You’re an African American woman. You should take advantage of the opportunities that will bring you.” Even as she received one acceptance after another to impressive schools, including Harvard, Smith writes that this man’s “voice whispered in the back of my mind whenever the word diversity was printed among the catalogue copy.”
Through writing Ordinary Light Smith has also come to some peaceful terms with the fierce religious faith that guided her mother’s life. Even as a child, she struggled to understand her mother’s devotion, especially regarding the concept of salvation, “when the world of my family was the only heaven I needed to believe in.” As an adolescent and young college student, Smith felt the growing distance from her mother in her sense of religion as something imposed, even oppressive. Writing Ordinary Light has helped her appreciate the key role of the African American church of her parents’ era in fostering a sense of family, community, and discipline “in a world full of disparities.” Even her father, with his systematic, orderly mind, Smith says, prayed with and read the Bible to his children. He was a man grounded in both the worlds of science and faith. In Ordinary Light, we meet the meticulously ordered world that her parents, especially her mother, created for their children, inspired, in many ways, by their religious beliefs: “a life that would tell us, and the world, if it cared to notice, that we bothered with ourselves, that we understood dignity, that we were worthy of everything that mattered.”
Smith believes that the process of writing the memoir helped her codify some of her own beliefs and anxieties about religion and to speak “honestly” about how she sees God—something she needed to do for herself but that has also helped her decide what elements of her religious inheritance she wants to offer her children. “I hope they will bring their own ideas and feelings to the conversation,” she says. “I don’t want to subject them to the hard-and-fast, top-down approach to belief that repelled me.” Would her mother, who grew more religious after her cancer diagnosis, approve? Smith’s not sure, though her siblings have responded positively to the book, and she believes that “much of what the writing has urged me to discover along the way would make perfect, familiar sense to my mother.”
***
Coming at a difficult time in her life, when her first marriage had ended, the offer of a position at Princeton was, Smith says, “a benediction that my life would go on, that everything would be okay.” So far, it’s been more than okay. She relishes teaching: “Let’s just be honest and say that we academics have the best, most humane work schedule in the world, and I get to spend my workdays talking to smart young people who are devoted to the very same thing I love.” Admitting that Princeton’s faculty roster of luminaries is “pretty daunting,” she characterizes her colleagues as “happy and fulfilled and therefore very generous” and feels part of the family: “I feel that I’ve grown up at Princeton. I came here with one book. I was a child. That’s a paradigm I’m comfortable with, being the youngest of five kids, and so the eminence of my colleagues felt right, familiar. I’ve always been in the position of admiring the people around me and striving to play catch-up.” Her colleagues apparently agree. Poet and New Yorker poetry editor Paul Muldoon, who invited Smith to do her first public reading of Ordinary Light last December at the Irish Arts Center in New York City, describes her as “a truly exceptional poet, with an eye for the arresting image that puts most of us to shame,” noting also her commitment to teaching: “My office is right beside hers, so I have a sense of her being a teacher who is at once diligent and delighting in her work.”
Last summer Smith became a full-fledged member of that community in a more rooted way when she and her family moved from Brooklyn, New York, where she had lived for fifteen years, to Princeton. She doesn’t really miss the city, and she’s a bit surprised. Apart from the practical reality that she and her husband, Raphael Allison, a literary scholar and poet, were driving to New Jersey to teach every day while their children were in Brooklyn, she says she was emotionally ready to leave: “I have so much more mental space and more patience, now that we’re living in a house and surrounded by so many trees. I used to pity New Yorkers who moved to the suburbs: I had the smug idea that they were ‘giving up,’ but now I think how much of an inherent struggle it assumes, and I chuckle.” Tina Chang, one of Smith’s best friends and poet laureate of Brooklyn, understands, though she says she went through her own “mourning” process when her friend moved. “As always, we write letters and allow our writing to lead us through our friendship,” Chang says. “What has always been interesting to me is that Tracy can occupy any physical space, and her mental space follows. Whether her body occupies India, Mexico, Brooklyn, or Princeton, her poetry fills up that geography, illuminates it, and makes it more alive.”
So, with most of the boxes unpacked, full-time teaching under way, and three young children in tow, Smith is already contemplating another prose work, and she’s on to more poetry projects. New poems are included in a folio that accompanies a Smithsonian exhibition of Civil War photos called Lines in Long Array: A Civil War Commemoration, Poems and Photographs, Past and Present and in an anthology about Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello that is forthcoming from the University of Virginia Press. She is also working on a translation of poetry by contemporary Chinese author Yi Lei and has signed on as librettist for an opera about the legendary 1960s battle between the disparate visions for New York City of urban planner Robert Moses and journalist and activist Jane Jacobs. Although most would be content to accomplish in a lifetime what Smith has already achieved, she considers herself at the end of the first part of her career, and she’s thinking ahead. She’s always been drawn to questions of what we leave behind, what it means to survive, to endure. In her poem “Letter to a Photojournalist Going-In,” from Duende, the speaker wonders if all we do is “kid ourselves into thinking we might last.” But Smith seems more like the tiny creature in “Flores Woman,” who defies the inevitability of her own extinction: “Like a dark star. I want to last.”
Renée H.Shea is the coauthor of a series of textbooks for Advanced Placement English, most recently Conversations in American Literature: Language, Rhetoric, Culture (Bedford St. Martin’s, 2014). She has profiled many authors for Poets & Writers Magazine, including Julie Otsuka, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Edwidge Danticat, and Maxine Hong Kingston.
In his essay “Meditations of a Sitter,” Louise Glück’s onetime teacher Stanley Kunitz penned a line of such searing veracity it seems a condemnation of entire quadrants of the human tribe: “The empty ones are those who do not suffer their selfhood.” To suffer a selfhood means to embody the soul of self, to know yourself en route to becoming yourself. Glück studied with Kunitz at Columbia University in the mid-sixties, and for nearly five decades she has been the American poet most willing to communicate the flammable vicissitudes of selfhood, to detect the temblors beneath the self’s consistent adaptations to the facts of living. The facts of any life are impotent and ineffectual until literature intercedes, until it takes hold of those facts and twists them into the light, casting a refraction that allows us to glimpse them anew.
Glück’s refractions reveal the counterpoint between fable and fact, between mythos and mundanity, between the paralysis of silence and the necessity of assertion. Her new book of poems, Faithful and Virtuous Night, published in September by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, betrays an intimate surrealism, a congress of parable and dream—it’s more a stranger to normality than anything she’s ever written and ceaselessly thrilling in its tonal effects. Thoreau believed that “truth strikes us from behind, and in the dark,” but in Glück truth seems to strike always from below, from beneath the half-lit undulations of desire and dread.
Glück shares a birthday with Immanuel Kant and is the author of thirteen books of poems and a fierce collection of essays. She is the Rosenkranz Writer-in-Residence at Yale University, and for eight years served as judge for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, a service of which she remains immensely proud. As a poet she’s so decorated that if she were a general you’d have to squint into the glare of her: the Bollingen Prize for Vita Nova (Ecco, 1999), the Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris (Ecco, 1992), the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Triumph of Achilles (Ecco, 1985), the Wallace Stevens Award, the Lannan Literary Award—on and on. We spoke for several hours one July afternoon at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her immaculate apartment is adorned with artwork by the poet Mark Strand, and out back breathes her beloved garden, transplanted here from Vermont thirteen years ago.
What’s remarkable about the architecture of Faithful and Virtuous Night is that one can land anywhere inside this book and find a poem that is both self-fulfilled, unconcerned with what precedes or follows, and also a component in the larger whole that informs the unfurling narrative. You’ve erected similar scaffolding in the past—in all of your books since the 2007 collection, Ararat, the poems coalesce and function as a single movement—but in its intricacy and dynamism the architecture of this new book seems to me entirely different. It seems to me different too. There were years when I thought I’d never resolve the issue of this structure, never be able to give a shape to these poems, which usually means there’s a piece missing, as was true here. I had first thought that the long monologue—which is now divided, interspersed with these surreal, fragmented narratives and prose poems—I had thought that the long poem would be a whole that moved roughly chronologically from section to section, but it seemed lifeless when I put it together that way. I tried rearranging the sequence but that wasn’t the answer. At some point, fiddling with order, I put the title poem next to “An Adventure.” That juxtaposition suggested the shape this book wanted. But that shape didn’t really find itself until the end—when I wrote prose poems, which I’d never done before—they were written in a tide of exhilaration at the thought that maybe I could finally finish this book.
Those prose poems are ligatures that allow the whole to cohere with such startling poise. They recall the way Hemingway’s vignettes function in his story collections, the narrative tendons connecting muscle to bone. I cannot conceive of this book without them. I can’t either. It was my friend Kathryn Davis who prompted me toward them. She’d read every poem as it was written, and during one of my many stages of hopelessness she said, “I think you should be reading Kafka’s short fiction.” I’d read Kafka’s short fiction before but thought I’d try again, and although I didn’t love it this time around, that was useful to me, because I didn’t feel daunted by him. I read the short-shorts—“The Wish to Be a Red Indian” and others—in bed, where all my mental activity now occurs. My bed usually looks like Proust’s bed; my whole life is lived there. I got my notebook—which I keep around usually for other purposes, because if I let myself think that I might write something I become so paralyzed with longing and despair I can hardly bear it—and I wrote a little prose poem. It was, I thought, terrible, not even worth typing. But I was having dinner with Frank Bidart that night—I’m willing to be humiliated in the presence of my friends—and so before I threw away the prose poem, I thought I’d see what Frank thought. And Frank, as you know, can be a tough critic. He told me I mustn’t throw it out, and after that I wrote a little squadron of them. The book was then very easy to put together. I’d been trying for two years, but I didn’t have that last mode. It didn’t need another large thing, another tone, but it needed another mode, another facet to the prism, another method by which to examine these same materials.
What a bolt of insight for Kathryn Davis to recommend that you go back to Kafka. The frequent playfulness and stabs of comedy in your work are too little noticed, and the same is true for Kafka: Many readers don’t notice how funny he can be. I’m delighted by your dedication to great prose writers. The poetic persona in “A Summer Garden” is reading Mann’s Death in Venice. Do you see a novelist’s sense of narrative as different from your own? Yes, I think prose writers work with narrative very differently. When I’m trying to put a poem or a book together, I feel like a tracker in the forest following a scent, tracking only step to step. It’s not as though I have plot elements grafted onto the walls elaborating themselves. Of course, I have no idea what I’m tracking, only the conviction that I’ll know it when I see it.
The novelist enjoys a clear advantage over the poet who employs narrative: The novelist has characters who need something, and they have either to achieve their needs or not achieve them. The plot is the pursuit of those needs. The poet doesn’t necessarily have that. I like your image of stalking through the wood, unsure where it ends. The novelist had better see to the end of that wood. Not that there can’t be surprises in what is found there, but better at least to glimpse it in advance. I depend on that ignorance, on not seeing to the end of the book, because if I have an idea, initially it’s likely to be the wrong idea. I mean my ideas come later, after the fact. Ideas are not a part of how I conceive of a book.
Reading you, and especially these new poems, I’m often in mind of a quip by the English critic Desmond MacCarthy: “It is the business of literature to turn facts into ideas.” It’s pretty, but I don’t know if that’s what I think. I don’t like that trinity of words: business, facts, ideas. I don’t think literature exactly has a business, and the minute someone says to me what the business is, I immediately want to prove that that’s too limited a notion. For instance, I want to substitute tone for fact. If you can get right the tone, it will be dense with ideas; you don’t initially know fully what they are, but you want by the end to know fully what they are or you won’t have made an exciting work. For me it’s tone—the way the mind moves as it performs its acts of meditation. That’s what you’re following. It guides you but it also mystifies you because you can’t turn it into conscious principles or say precisely what its attributes are. The minute you turn tone into conscious principle it goes dead. It has to remain mysterious to you. You have to be surprised by what it is capable of unveiling. As you work on a book of poems you begin to understand what is at issue, but I don’t have any attitude toward the facts. And if MacCarthy’s terms are correct, I would prefer the notion that a poet turns ideas and abstractions into facts, rather than the other way around.
All through your work, certainly from Ararat on, much of that rhythm happens by the repetition of simple terms. In this new book the same terms appear again and again: silence, winter, mother, father, night. The overlap of personae works the same way, when the poet’s perspective repeatedly intrudes upon and augments the perspective of the larger narrative. Yes, there’s that overlap, as you say, because over and over there are the same materials, though to my ear they’re passing through a very different lens. More interesting to me than the repeating words (which seem fairly ordinary) are the repeated images. When I put the book together, I was astounded by the internal tapestries. I hadn’t consciously built in those recurrences or echoing gestures and vignettes, but there they were—there was the train, and the train again, and the train was a character. Averno I thought of the same way, actually. It’s not a shaped narrative arc the way some of the others are, but it’s a meditation on a set of conditions and dilemmas, so all the poems revolve around certain repeating images, such as the burned field, which is right out of Henning Mankell. Averno was my homage to Mankell. I tried to use something from one of his books in every one of the poems. Nobody noticed it, which is good, but it was there for me.
In her book Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books, your friend Wendy Lesser speaks about your abiding love of murder mysteries and of Mankell in particular. Mankell makes me happy. Murder mysteries are a way of releasing the unconscious mind to speculative, shapeless, dreamy seeking by absorbing the conscious mind in a compelling quest. One of the advantages of aging is that you know you’ve read a book, or believe you’ve read a book, but you don’t really remember it. You remember only that you love it. And somewhere near the middle you realize that you actually do remember all of the details of the plot. It’s immensely pleasing to read something you have confidence in, something that won’t disappoint you. The only disappointment might be that you’re missing the thrill of uncovering the killer, but it’s a small disappointment if you love the world that’s being constructed.
In that regard Wilkie Collins is unmatched—one can read his best novels every few years with identical pleasure. He’s better than Dickens in the construction of a thrilling, alternate world that dictates its own stipulations. Do you remember The Woman in White? And The Moonstone, yes. I read those books first in my adolescence and a few times since then. I bought The Moonstone again when I felt I had exhausted all available murder fiction, and I had trouble getting into it. Maybe I’ll try again. I certainly need something to give competition to the iPad. I seem to be in an iPad period. I don’t read on it. I just watch things that move.
Your legion of devotees might be startled to hear about your iPad. I was startled myself. I never had the Internet until last year. This is all brand-new for me. The iPad was given to me at a reading. I told the person: “Don’t give this to me. I will never turn it on.” But the person shoved it at me, so then I had it, and I felt sort of responsible to it. So I sat with it for about six months. And then one day I began poking at it. I knew people poked at it. But nothing happened, and I thought: “Well, I just don’t have the gift.” Then I realized I needed some sort of hookup. That took another six months. By this time my niece was in a television show, Orange Is the New Black, which was available only through streaming. It turned out, on this little device, you just press something and there they all were. And it became my bed buddy. It’s really the freakiest thing because I became an addict very fast. At the moment it has usurped the place of reading in my life. Part of me thinks this is dangerous; my own vocation will dissolve. Another part of me thinks this is exploratory, that if my vocation is so fragile or precarious it isn’t a vocation. After all, there were two years when I read nothing but garden catalogues, and that turned out okay—it became a book.
You mean The Wild Iris. I’m certain you’re the only American poet who’s won the Pulitzer after two years of reading nothing but garden catalogues. Well, there’s something my brain needs in such indulging, so I indulge it. This iPad addiction seems to me endlessly curious. Something may come of it. I’m an opportunist—I always hope I’ll get material out of any activity. I never know where writing is going to come from; it isn’t as though I have something in mind and this iPad is the source. This is just dream time, the way detective fiction is. It stills a certain kind of anxiety and at the same time engages the mind. As the mind is engaged and anxiety suppressed, some imaginative work in some recessed portion of the being is getting done. Not to say that every moment is contributing to a book or a poem, but you can’t know in advance what will. Don’t prejudge your stimuli. Just trust where your attention goes.
You once said to me on the phone, “Follow your enthusiasms.” I believe that. I used to be approached in classes by women who felt they shouldn’t have children because children were too distracting, or would eat up the vital energies from which art comes. But you have to live your life if you’re going to do original work. Your work will come out of an authentic life, and if you suppress all of your most passionate impulses in the service of an art that has not yet declared itself, you’re making a terrible mistake. When I was young I led the life I thought writers were supposed to lead, in which you repudiate the world, ostentatiously consecrating all of your energies to the task of making art. I just sat in Provincetown at a desk and it was ghastly—the more I sat there not writing the more I thought that I just hadn’t given up the world enough. After two years of that, I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t going to be a writer. So I took a teaching job in Vermont, though I had spent my life till that point thinking that real poets don’t teach. But I took this job, and the minute I started teaching—the minute I had obligations in the world—I started to write again.
The catalyst for Faithful and Virtuous Night was your agon with not writing, with wordlessness. Yes, I was moaning to my sister about losing words, about the deterioration of my vocabulary. I said to her, “How am I ever going to write when I’m losing words?” and she said, “You’ll write about losing words.” And I thought, “Wow, good, I’ll write about having no speech, about deterioration.” Then it was the most exciting thing, a wealth of material—everything I had been bemoaning was actually unexplored territory. That was the catalyst, as you say, for the whole endeavor—a liberating, a permission. The idea of writing about not writing seemed promising because I knew a lot about those not-writing states, but they were not something I’d ever written about. One of the experiences of putting together my large book of extant poems was an astonishment because my sense of my life, now fairly long, is that almost all the time I’m not writing. I was flabbergasted putting together that large book, nearly seven hundred pages. And I thought: “How can that have happened? When did I write all that?” My feeling concerning my life is that always I was not working. Well, apparently I was.
The gestures of silence lurk everywhere in Faithful and Virtuous Night, as they do in your work as a whole, but is your conception of your own silence a kind of illusion? A seven-hundred-page collection of poems is not silence. No, it’s real, not an illusion at all. I go through two, three years writing nothing. Zero. Not a sentence. Not bad poems I discard, not notes toward poems. Nothing. And you don’t know in those periods that the silence will end, that you will ever recover speech. It’s pretty much hell, and the fact that it’s always ended before doesn’t mean that any current silence isn’t the terminal silence beyond which you will not move, though you will live many years in your incapacity. Each time it feels that way. When I’m not writing, all the old work becomes a reprimand: Look what you could do once, you pathetic slug.
I recall those lines from “Approach of the Horizon”: “It is the gift of expression / that has so often failed me. / Failed me, tormented me, virtually all my life.” Do you know Iris Murdoch?
She’s superb. I love the humor in Under the Net. I’d been rereading all of Murdoch before I began this new book. I often reread a writer—read one book and then want to enter that world more fully. In any case, I can hear Murdoch in those lines you just recited. I love The Black Prince, A Severed Head, The Green Knight, even strange things such as A Word Child. There’s something in her archness, not a tone I’d normally think to emulate, but there’s something delicious in it. Her people might be murdering and raping but really they’re thinking about what goodness is in the world, bizarre juxtapositions of that kind. Something of her got transferred to this new book. It’s a matter of tone. The interest of the poems is in the tone in which large pronouncements are made, not necessarily the pronouncements themselves. The pronouncements are constantly being scrutinized by the tone, which is taking objection to some of the things being said. It’s not a book in which large bannerlike truths are being unfolded.
There’s a disciplined seething detectable just beneath the surface of these new poems, a fervency of feeling we know is there just as we know distant planets are there—not because we can see them but because they cause a bending, a wobble in the light of their stars. In these new poems, the tone, the pitch is bent to reveal the seething beneath it. The book has such a patient turbulence. That’s nice, a patient turbulence. It’s there as a background but the whole book seems to me to be about moving beyond that turbulence, or that seething, as you say, and into this uncommon zone where you’re on a horse flying through the air. How did that happen? What’s distinctive in this book is that sense of dreaminess. But there are two parallel issues regarding silence: one is the silence that is the faltering of a gift or a need for expression, and there’s also silence that is the result of deterioration, a faltering in the being that is a product of age. Although I’ve been writing about death my whole life, deterioration or the weakening of the powers is brand-new to me. The subject is gloomy, I suppose, but new material is exhilarating. The quality I feel most intensely in this book is a quality of euphoria, a floating, a whimsy. It’s an undertaking of a large adventure, which is the adventure of decline. It seems an oxymoron, I know, and will come to seem a gloomy fate, but now—as long as it produces something of which you’re proud, you’re grateful for it, delighted by it.
You said once that the life of a poet oscillates between ecstasy and agony, and what mitigates those extremes is the necessary daily business of living. Yes. Friends, conversation, gardens. Daily life. It’s what we have. I believe in the world. I trust it to provide me.
William Giraldi is the author of the novels Hold the Dark, published in September 2014 by Norton, and Busy Monsters (Norton, 2011). He is the fiction editor for the journal AGNI at Boston University.
Tracy K. Smith was twenty-two when her mother died in 1994. Nearly a decade later, she published The Body’s Question, her first book of poetry, in which she reflected on that loss. In “Joy,” which carried the epigraph “In Memoriam KMS 1936–1994,” Smith writes to her mother, longing to “pick up the phone / And catch your voice on the other end / Telling me how to bake a salmon / Or get the stains out of my white clothes.” Another decade later, she returns to that wrenching loss in the memoir Ordinary Light, published this month by Knopf. Smith’s first book of prose, it is a book of excavation and navigation: The poet revisits her mother’s passing in light of her father’s death in 2008, the year her daughter, Naomi, was born, and in light of the birth in 2013 of her twin sons, Atticus and Sterling.
Smith, who characterizes herself as having been “still an adolescent” when she lost her mother, believes “it took losing my father to help me come to better grips with that first loss and think about what I needed to believe my mother’s life and her death had imparted.” And now, with three children of her own, Smith wishes her mother were nearby to consult about practical parenting concerns, but of course that wish goes deeper: “I want to think actively about the continuum to which I belong—the one that includes my mother and her mother and sisters and their ancestors—and also my children. In my mother’s absence, I want to cement that connection, and words are the best glue I know.”
But why prose? She’s already written poems about her mother, and her Pulitzer Prize–winning Life on Mars is, in many respects, an elegy for her father. A memoir in verse offered an intriguing form, one that is familiar territory—Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah (1986) and, more recently, Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming, which won the 2014 National Book Award, are exemplary—but Smith credits the influence and encouragement of the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger, her mentor in the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, for emboldening her to venture into prose. Smith had never heard of the mentorship program, which pairs older masters with younger artists under forty, until 2008, when she was nominated and flown to Munich along with two other finalists. Each had an interview with Enzensberger and then all four went to dinner, an experience that Smith insists turned into more camaraderie than competition.
She and Enzensberger have become great friends after what sounds like a jet-setting year of being flown to many of the places where he had speaking engagements: “We rendezvoused in Tenerife and Paris, and gave a reading together at the public library in London. We spent much of a summer in Munich, where he lives, working on the book and getting to know each other.” In addition to face-to-face meetings, the two e-mailed back and forth, with Smith sending him parts of her work for comment. The idea she began with was, by her own description, “a big, ambitious mess” about a whole range of experiences, but Enzensberger urged her to focus discrete memories toward “a narrative with characters that moved beyond the private realm to take in and consider the relevant public history.”
From the beginning, Smith says, she knew she wanted to write “genuine prose,” possibly because some of what she wanted to explore had already been unearthed in her poetry. “But I also wanted to embrace a fuller sense of myself as a writer,” she says. And she wanted to work within “sentences, clauses, paragraphs, the whole to-do,” since, as she writes in Ordinary Light, “Being able to tell a good story was currency in my family.” Prose gave her a certain amount of freedom to explain and elaborate. She realized how much she relies on metaphor in her poetry to evoke “a strange, powerful sameness between two otherwise disparate things.” In prose, she initially felt reluctant to elaborate on an image or interrogate statements she made, but soon discovered her expansive abilities. “I learned that prose can bear the weight of much more explication,” she says. “I can think and rethink, even second-guess or analyze something on the page in prose without going overboard. The sentence, in prose, can be as tireless as an ox.”
Enzensberger recognized, perhaps before Smith herself, that her story was about her family, with her mother as the central character. Smith opens Ordinary Light with her mother’s deathbed scene, the family’s vigil during the final hours of her mother’s life, remembered twenty years later:
Then we heard a sound that seemed to carve a tunnel between our world and some other. It was an otherworldly breath, a vivid presence that blew past us without stopping, leaving us, the living, clamped in place by the silence that followed. I would come back to the sound and the presence of that breath again and again, thinking how miraculous it was that she had ridden off on that last exhalation, her life instantly whisked away, carried over into a place none of us will ever understand until perhaps we are there ourselves.
From that solemn moment, Smith circles back to her childhood as the adored and indulged baby in a family of five children and, further back, to her parents’ coming of age in Alabama at the dawn of the civil rights movement. Dedicated to her daughter, Naomi, Ordinary Light began as a way for Smith to bring her parents back to life, “to reconstruct them,” as characters for Naomi. “At least that was my intention,” Smith says, “though in the execution it has become a book about me—about excavating my own experiences, anxieties, and evolving beliefs.”
When asked about the title, she hesitates, musing that “maybe it’s the feeling of wholeness and safety and ongoing-ness that we slip into sometimes in our lives.” But after Smith settled on Ordinary Light as her title, she added an opening quote from James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” one of her favorite short stories. As Baldwin’s narrator recalls the perfect family Sunday afternoons of his childhood when all’s right with the world, he cautions: “But something deep and watchful in the child knows that this is bound to end, is already ending. In a moment someone will get up and turn on the light.” In her new memoir, it is this moment that Smith explores for herself and her own children—the moment when we hear the tiger at the door.
***
In many ways, Smith seems to have lived a charmed life. Her father retired from the Air Force at forty-five because he did not want to uproot the family once again by accepting an overseas post. Trained as an electronics engineer, he found a job in Silicon Valley, eventually working on the Hubble Space Telescope. Her mother, while active in her church and community, did not work outside the home except for a short stint as an adult-education teacher. Tracy, eight years younger than her closest sibling, recalls a childhood when “all of my siblings doted on me, then left for college. So I had this abundance of attention for a time, and then a period of abundant solitude.” A participant in gifted programs throughout her public school education, she graduated from Harvard College in 1994 with a BA in English and American Literature and Afro-American Studies. After an extended return home following her mother’s death, Smith attended Columbia University, earning an MFA in 1997; she went on to a two-year stint as a Stegner fellow at Stanford University. She taught at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, New York, and at the University of Pittsburgh before joining the faculty at Princeton University in 2005, where she is currently a professor of creative writing.
Smith has published three collections of poetry—The Body’s Question (2003), Duende (2007), and Life on Mars (2011), all with Graywolf Press—each receiving critical acclaim and significant literary prizes. In the introduction to her first book, which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, poet Kevin Young, the contest judge, heralded an exceptional new voice: “Smith is a maker, a wordsmith of the first order.” In 2012, Life on Mars won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Two years later Smith received an Academy of American Poets Fellowship. Among her other awards and fellowships are the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, an Artist’s Residence at the Fundación Valparaíso in Spain, and an Essence Literary Award.
Smith had a series of mentors even before her time with Hans Magnus Enzensberger, as she developed her identity as a poet. A reader from the outset (one of the chapters in Ordinary Light is titled “My Book House”), she experienced a sort of epiphanic moment in college when she read Seamus Heaney’s poem “Digging.” She describes how everything in that poem—the male speaker, the Irish setting—should have been completely foreign to her, yet, she says, “I felt so much a part of the landscape and the family he was describing that I realized this was what I wanted to do with language.” Ultimately, she got to know Heaney as one of her teachers. At Columbia, Mark Doty became, and remains, an important influence and mentor to her, someone who she says is “so generous and present” to his students.
Yet the seemingly idyllic life of Smith’s nuclear family—“us as an invincible unit,” is how she describes them in Ordinary Light—can prepare, though never entirely protect, its members from the loss of certainty and security and, especially, the realities of racial politics. Smith is known for sharpening a political edge in her poetry, whether she’s writing about science fiction, pop culture, or current events, and this memoir is no exception. “In writing this book, I was forced to speak about and into many of the silences that ran through my life: silence about race, silence about the painful features of African American history, silence about my own choice to turn away from or reenvision the religious faith I was raised in,” she says.
One of the side effects of the memoir, Smith discovered, is that her adult perspective remained active even when she was writing about childhood: “So Tracy the citizen was allowed to engage with these private stories, just as Tracy the mother was allowed in at times,” she says. What she calls “shifting subjectivities” becomes especially clear when she writes about returning as a child to Alabama, where her parents grew up, to visit her large extended family (her mother was one of thirteen siblings):
I was ten years old, living with a vague knowledge that pain was part of my birthright, part of what was meant by a word like Home. It was not the kind of beautified self-inflicted angst that can transform a girl into a swan or a doll or an ice princess in the ballet…. No, what I felt, what I feared and discerned, even from my rather far remove, was the very particular pain that was tied up in blood, in race, in laws and war. The pain we hate most because we know it has been borne by the people we love. The slurs and slights I knew were part and parcel of my parents’ and grandparents’ and all my aunts’ and uncles’ lives in the South. The laws that had sought to make people like them—like us, like me—subordinate.
“Growing up black in America is inherently political,” Smith says, and her own experience proved that collision with that reality is not limited to the South. In Ordinary Light, she remembers the sting she felt when one of her high school teachers in Northern California offered faint praise as encouragement by pointing out, “You’re an African American woman. You should take advantage of the opportunities that will bring you.” Even as she received one acceptance after another to impressive schools, including Harvard, Smith writes that this man’s “voice whispered in the back of my mind whenever the word diversity was printed among the catalogue copy.”
Through writing Ordinary Light Smith has also come to some peaceful terms with the fierce religious faith that guided her mother’s life. Even as a child, she struggled to understand her mother’s devotion, especially regarding the concept of salvation, “when the world of my family was the only heaven I needed to believe in.” As an adolescent and young college student, Smith felt the growing distance from her mother in her sense of religion as something imposed, even oppressive. Writing Ordinary Light has helped her appreciate the key role of the African American church of her parents’ era in fostering a sense of family, community, and discipline “in a world full of disparities.” Even her father, with his systematic, orderly mind, Smith says, prayed with and read the Bible to his children. He was a man grounded in both the worlds of science and faith. In Ordinary Light, we meet the meticulously ordered world that her parents, especially her mother, created for their children, inspired, in many ways, by their religious beliefs: “a life that would tell us, and the world, if it cared to notice, that we bothered with ourselves, that we understood dignity, that we were worthy of everything that mattered.”
Smith believes that the process of writing the memoir helped her codify some of her own beliefs and anxieties about religion and to speak “honestly” about how she sees God—something she needed to do for herself but that has also helped her decide what elements of her religious inheritance she wants to offer her children. “I hope they will bring their own ideas and feelings to the conversation,” she says. “I don’t want to subject them to the hard-and-fast, top-down approach to belief that repelled me.” Would her mother, who grew more religious after her cancer diagnosis, approve? Smith’s not sure, though her siblings have responded positively to the book, and she believes that “much of what the writing has urged me to discover along the way would make perfect, familiar sense to my mother.”
***
Coming at a difficult time in her life, when her first marriage had ended, the offer of a position at Princeton was, Smith says, “a benediction that my life would go on, that everything would be okay.” So far, it’s been more than okay. She relishes teaching: “Let’s just be honest and say that we academics have the best, most humane work schedule in the world, and I get to spend my workdays talking to smart young people who are devoted to the very same thing I love.” Admitting that Princeton’s faculty roster of luminaries is “pretty daunting,” she characterizes her colleagues as “happy and fulfilled and therefore very generous” and feels part of the family: “I feel that I’ve grown up at Princeton. I came here with one book. I was a child. That’s a paradigm I’m comfortable with, being the youngest of five kids, and so the eminence of my colleagues felt right, familiar. I’ve always been in the position of admiring the people around me and striving to play catch-up.” Her colleagues apparently agree. Poet and New Yorker poetry editor Paul Muldoon, who invited Smith to do her first public reading of Ordinary Light last December at the Irish Arts Center in New York City, describes her as “a truly exceptional poet, with an eye for the arresting image that puts most of us to shame,” noting also her commitment to teaching: “My office is right beside hers, so I have a sense of her being a teacher who is at once diligent and delighting in her work.”
Last summer Smith became a full-fledged member of that community in a more rooted way when she and her family moved from Brooklyn, New York, where she had lived for fifteen years, to Princeton. She doesn’t really miss the city, and she’s a bit surprised. Apart from the practical reality that she and her husband, Raphael Allison, a literary scholar and poet, were driving to New Jersey to teach every day while their children were in Brooklyn, she says she was emotionally ready to leave: “I have so much more mental space and more patience, now that we’re living in a house and surrounded by so many trees. I used to pity New Yorkers who moved to the suburbs: I had the smug idea that they were ‘giving up,’ but now I think how much of an inherent struggle it assumes, and I chuckle.” Tina Chang, one of Smith’s best friends and poet laureate of Brooklyn, understands, though she says she went through her own “mourning” process when her friend moved. “As always, we write letters and allow our writing to lead us through our friendship,” Chang says. “What has always been interesting to me is that Tracy can occupy any physical space, and her mental space follows. Whether her body occupies India, Mexico, Brooklyn, or Princeton, her poetry fills up that geography, illuminates it, and makes it more alive.”
So, with most of the boxes unpacked, full-time teaching under way, and three young children in tow, Smith is already contemplating another prose work, and she’s on to more poetry projects. New poems are included in a folio that accompanies a Smithsonian exhibition of Civil War photos called Lines in Long Array: A Civil War Commemoration, Poems and Photographs, Past and Present and in an anthology about Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello that is forthcoming from the University of Virginia Press. She is also working on a translation of poetry by contemporary Chinese author Yi Lei and has signed on as librettist for an opera about the legendary 1960s battle between the disparate visions for New York City of urban planner Robert Moses and journalist and activist Jane Jacobs. Although most would be content to accomplish in a lifetime what Smith has already achieved, she considers herself at the end of the first part of her career, and she’s thinking ahead. She’s always been drawn to questions of what we leave behind, what it means to survive, to endure. In her poem “Letter to a Photojournalist Going-In,” from Duende, the speaker wonders if all we do is “kid ourselves into thinking we might last.” But Smith seems more like the tiny creature in “Flores Woman,” who defies the inevitability of her own extinction: “Like a dark star. I want to last.”
Renée H.Shea is the coauthor of a series of textbooks for Advanced Placement English, most recently Conversations in American Literature: Language, Rhetoric, Culture (Bedford St. Martin’s, 2014). She has profiled many authors for Poets & Writers Magazine, including Julie Otsuka, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Edwidge Danticat, and Maxine Hong Kingston.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie received the call on her thirty-first birthday, last September. She was taking a bath at her sister’s house in Lagos, preparing to go to dinner, when her brother told her she had an important call from Chicago. Wrapped in a towel, she grabbed the phone through a barely open door and heard from the MacArthur Foundation that she’d received one of its five-hundred-thousand-dollar fellowships, known as genius grants. With that call, Adichie joined a diverse group of scientists, artists, humanists, teachers, and entrepreneurs, as well as writers—company that still amazes her: “Half the time I think I shouldn’t be there. When I was in Lagos, anytime something happened, like the TV wouldn’t work, my friends would ask, ‘Well, what does the genius think?’”
Photos by Doug Barber.
Although she was shocked at receiving a MacArthur, Adichie should have been used to hearing such news. Her debut novel, Purple Hibiscus (Algonquin Books, 2003), a coming-of-age story about a Nigerian girl who must endure the cruelty of her evangelist father, was long-listed for the Booker Prize, short-listed for the Orange Prize, and won both the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Three years later, her follow-up novel, Half of a Yellow Sun (Knopf, 2006), a story set in Nigeria during the Biafran War in the late 1960s, won the Orange Broadband Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. More than that, its publication marked her arrival as one of Nigeria’s most important voices.
Recently she returned to the United States, where she lives part time, to promote her June release, The Thing Around Your Neck (Knopf), a collection of short stories, some originally published in magazines such as the New Yorker, Granta, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and Zoetrope. She had been on tour in England, Scandinavia, New Zealand, Australia, and Canada for the book’s overseas publication earlier this year. Accustomed to being in transit, she divides her time between Nigeria and Maryland, where she lives with her partner, a family physician, who practices there. “I’m so emotionally invested in Nigeria as a country and society, which I feel has so much potential it hasn’t lived up to, that sometimes it gets exhausting. There’s so much to do, and I want to be involved. But then I find I need to leave to have some space. I quite like America, my home of convenience, where I don’t have to deal with things like electricity shortages.”
Adichie grew up piecing together “tiny stories,” as she describes them, about the Biafran War, which raged from 1967 to 1970 and ended almost a decade before she was born. The conflict resulted from ethnic tensions among the Christian Igbo population in eastern Nigeria, which seceded to form the Republic of Biafra, and the largely Muslim Fulani-Hausa in the north. At least a million people, mostly Igbo, died from massacres and starvation during this brutally violent period, though some estimates put that figure as high as three million. Both of Adichie’s Igbo grandfathers died as refugees who had to flee their hometowns. Her grandmothers survived and, as she says, “somehow kept children and relatives together. My parents, part of the postindependent [Nigeria gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1960], hopeful middle class when the war started, lost most of their property”—in addition to family and friends.
Her parents rebuilt their lives and raised a family of six children. Her father was professor of statistics at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where he was appointed vice-chancellor in 1982, and her mother became the first woman registrar. The fifth of the six children, Adichie grew up speaking both Igbo and English. She recalls the thrill of reading Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, the groundbreaking novel about the clash between Igbo tradition and British colonialism, when she was ten years old. “I realized that people who looked like me could live in books.” But her parents encouraged her to pursue a practical career, so writing had to wait.
She began studying to be a doctor in Nigeria but, urged by her sister Ijeoma, came to the United States on a scholarship to Drexel University, in Philadelphia. She transferred to Eastern Connecticut State University, in Willimantic, where she lived with her sister and her sister’s husband, and took care of their son while they started a medical practice. During that time, she wrote Purple Hibiscus, reworking it during her tenure as an MFA student at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore.
Set around the mid-1990s, when Nigeria was under the control of a junta led by General Sani Abacha, Purple Hibiscus is narrated by fifteen-year-old Kambili Achike, whose father, Eugene, is both a courageous champion of human rights and a religious zealot who terrorizes his wife and children. Kambili, though desperate for her father’s approval, cannot measure up to his impossibly high standards: “I needed him to hug me close and say that to whom much is given, much is also expected. I needed him to smile at me, in that way that lit up his face, that warmed something inside me. But I had come second. I was stained by failure.” After a military coup, Eugene sends his children to stay with their Aunty Ifeoma, an outspoken university teacher, who introduces Kambili to “a different kind of freedom,” including traditional religious beliefs and more humane and expansive relationships. Even in this debut novel, Adichie depicts characters whose personal lives are played out on the larger canvas of a society beset by corruption and violence.
Moving back in time, Half of a Yellow Sun takes its title from the flag of the doomed Republic of Biafra and tells the story of the civil war from three interconnected perspectives. The main characters move back and forth between the earlier more peaceful part of the decade and the bloodshed that ended the 1960s. Adichie, who spent four years researching and writing the novel, tells the political saga through the lives of well-to-do twin sisters Kainene and Olanna, the urbane, intellectual Odenigbo, and the white British journalist Richard as their comfortable lives unravel into a struggle for survival. At the center of the novel is Ugwu, a thirteen-year-old who comes from a poor rural village to work as Odenigbo’s houseboy and is eventually conscripted into the Biafran army. Reviewers praised the novel for its epic scope. Rob Nixon, writing in the New York Times, lauded Adichie for positioning “her characters at crossroads where public and private allegiances threaten to collide.”
Adichie says she always knew she would write a novel about Biafra. At sixteen, she wrote what she describes as “an awfully melodramatic play” called “For Love of Biafra,” and earlier in her career, she wrote short stories that dealt with the war. In “Ghosts,” one of the stories in The Thing Around Your Neck, she revisits this time period with a meeting between a seventy-one-year-old mathematics professor retired from the University of Nigeria and a colleague, who was assumed to have died as a result of the 1967 violence but had, in fact, been living in exile. Adichie says this story is “in some ways a love letter to my father,” and the tenderness of that tribute comes through in the professor’s reflections on his past:
We hardly talked about the war. When we did, it was with an implacable vagueness, as if what mattered were not that we had crouched in muddy bunkers during air raids after which we buried corpses with bits of pink on their charred skin, not that we had eaten cassava peels and watched our children’s bellies swell from malnutrition, but that we had survived. It was a tacit agreement among all of us, the survivors of Biafra.
That period has remained a powerful political issue in Nigerian society, but Adichie felt that the conversation about it retained “an implacable vagueness” and was largely uninformed, particularly for her generation. Half of a Yellow Sun, which was well received in Nigeria, changed that to some extent. “I often get feedback from friends, from friends of friends, about how the novel has become a starting point for talking about the war. My Nigerian publisher told me about a family in Lagos—the man is a newspaper publisher. Their daughter read the book and asked her mother about the war. To the husband’s surprise, she began to tell their daughter stories of what her family went through—yet he had never heard these in all the years of their marriage.”
In a 2007 article, Vanity Fair featured Adichie—along with Doreen Baingana, Uzodinma Iweala, and Helon Habila—as part of the new generation of young writers leading an African literary renaissance. The piece described Adichie at a literary festival in Nairobi, looking “radiant, fresh off her rock-star-style tour of Nigeria and splashy New Yorker debut…part[ing] the crowds, Cleopatra-style” and hailed her as the heir to her countryman Achebe, whose Things Fall Apart celebrated in 2008 fifty years of continued popularity and influence.
Adichie says Achebe is her hero and guiding literary spirit. While there is remarkable variety in the work being written by the Nigerian authors in her generation, Adichie believes they all share a certain freedom that was forged by Achebe’s writing. “When Achebe published Things Fall Apart in 1958, it was a novelty,” she says. “There may have been five other African writers writing in English. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for people like him, feeling they had this burden of responsibility, of being a pioneer, thinking, ‘the dignity of my people rests on my shoulders.’ I don’t have that burden. I’m not representing anyone—and I owe this freedom to that generation.”
Most of the twelve stories in The Thing Around Your Neck focus on contemporary situations, whether the setting is Nigeria or the United States. They explore the subjects of immigration and exile, shifting values, and cross-cultural communication among families and communities. In “A Private Experience,” two Nigerian women—one a privileged Igbo student who is visiting her aunt while on holiday from her medical studies, the other a poor Hausa trader from the marketplace—find themselves hiding together during a violent riot provoked by a man who drives over a copy of the Koran that had dropped on the street. Based on an actual incident in northern Nigeria, the story explores the brief intersection of these women’s lives during a dramatic moment that links them regardless of their tribal, religious, economic, and educational differences. “Sometimes we like to say we’re really not different,” says Adichie. “I think we are, yet what interests me is that we still can make connections.”
“Cell One,” one of two stories previously published in the New Yorker, depicts a well-off family whose son, Nnamabia, is a member of a gang whose members “had mastered the swagger of American rap videos [and] were undergoing secret and strange initiations that sometimes left one or two of them dead.” Nnamabia, the spoiled brother of the female narrator, is arrested after a gang shooting. Although it is unclear whether he is guilty, in prison he experiences the corruption of the prison guards and finally confronts his own selfish and irresponsible behavior when he speaks up for another inmate who is being brutalized by them. At the story’s end, he seems deeply changed, but can he sustain this transformation? “I believe in redemption,” Adichie says quietly, then adds, “I’m very suspicious of excessive happiness. The way the world works is a struggle, but I believe in hope—in slender hope.”
In many of these stories, hope seems in scarce supply when it comes to marriage. The wife in “Imitation” tries to take in, via long distance, the news that her husband’s mistress has moved into their home in Lagos while she waits for him in their affluent home on Cherrywood Lane in suburban Pennsylvania. In “The Arrangers of Marriage,” a new wife resists changing her name from Chinaza to the Americanized Agatha, only one demand made by her husband in an effort to speed up her assimilation—and acceptability. Patriarchal attitudes seem to dominate, regardless of the Nigerian or American setting, as an expression of the imbalance of power, particularly when sex is part of the bargain.
“I’ve always had a problem with marriage as an institution,” says Adichie. “The way it’s set up, women automatically make more compromises than men.” Despite the inspiring model of her parents’ forty-five-year marriage, she gets angry at the way our society makes a fetish of marriage. “Undue privilege is awarded to married people in so many ways. I’m all for partnerships as long as they’re mutually beneficial, satisfying, respectful. I’m part of a couple and I’m quite happy, but I also think I could be quite happy if I were not part of a couple. In Nigeria, sometimes women act as if their lives are complete because they’re married—and it’s just not true. Maybe it’s the feminist in me, but I see the lies that people tell themselves about marriage and think how unwilling we are to admit that it’s not always a perfect thing.”
Although the subject is different, a similar fierceness fuels the story “Jumping Monkey Hill,” whose title refers to the name of a resort, where an aging British intellectual and his wife lead an African writers workshop. As two narratives unfold—the third-person narrative that describes the workshop and the story that the Nigerian participant Ujunwa Ogundu is writing—so does a brutal indictment of postcolonial paternalism. In the final scene, the pompous academic dismisses Ogundu’s story, saying, “This is agenda writing, it isn’t a story of real people.”
“That is the one story propelled by rage,” Adichie says. “I’m not interested in writing about myself, but that one is personally based on what really did happen to me. I felt diminished.” In fact, she had to change her thinly disguised portrayal of the workshop leader before Granta would publish it because of fear of a lawsuit. She still makes no apology for the unflattering depiction: “For me it’s about who is policing the production of literature, who is saying what is acceptable, especially for Africans. If someone tries to tell you what your own story should be, that’s ridiculous.”
Adichie takes her commitment to authentic storytelling well beyond her own writing. Along with her efforts to promote literacy in Nigeria, for the past two years she has led workshops in Lagos for aspiring writers. In 2007, when Fidelity Bank invited her to give a reading, she agreed but said she wanted to do more for the community. She proposed a series of workshops “to help writers polish their craft, to give them a chance to be with other writers, to demystify the publishing process—and hopefully to get them comfortable with the idea of being read by others.” The first workshop was advertised with no requirement other than a brief writing sample—and over two hundred applied. Adichie chose twenty-five participants and had enough success that the bank agreed to expand the project. In 2008, applicants exceeded seven hundred, mostly from Nigeria but a few from Cameroon and Zimbabwe. Dave Eggers from the United States, Binyavanga Wainaina from Kenya, and Marie-Elena John from Antigua joined her as guest faculty serving a group ranging in age from eighteen to fifty. “Friendships formed. People exchanged books and stories. One person from the first summer ended up at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, another just published his first novel in Nigeria,” Adichie says. “Some participants formed Web groups where they continue to read and support one another. So I like to think that their writing lives are better, in general, because of the workshop.”
Nigerian Breweries has signed on as sponsor for the next three years, and this September Eggers will return along with other international writers. The workshops received wide media notice, and the accompanying literary events during the evenings drew substantial crowds. Adichie says the attention has been both “moving and humbling” but also useful. “Being known has given me a platform to talk about the things I care about, which is an incredible luxury.” For Adichie, success has meant more than making a name for herself as an author. It has given her the ability to see her slender hope realized in the lives of her fellow Nigerians—and to see the rest of us inspired by her work.
Renée H. Shea, professor of English and modern languages at Bowie State University in Maryland, has written profiles of Andrea Levy, Rita Dove, and Sandra Cisneros, among others, for Poets & Writers Magazine. She is coauthor of the book The Language of Composition: Reading, Writing, Rhetoric (Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2007).
Jacqueline Woodson is the author of more than two dozen acclaimed books for young adults, middle graders, and children—a body of work that places African American characters at the center of richly drawn narratives that have helped young readers engage with real-life situations such as interracial relationships, child abuse, poverty, and homosexuality.
Her own childhood story—she was a precocious daughter of parents in a troubled marriage, who found solace in the imaginative world of books, and eventually in writing—forms the basis of her New York Times best-selling memoir Brown Girl Dreaming (Nancy Paulsen Books, 2014), which won a National Book Award, the Coretta Scott King Award, the Newbery Honor Award, an NAACP Image Award, and the Sibert Honor Award. Brown Girl Dreaming also traces Woodson’s journey from Ohio to South Carolina to Brooklyn, an eye-opening childhood in which she learns, among other things, about the regional differences of the black experience during the 1970s.
With the release of Another Brooklyn (Amistad), her first adult novel in twenty years, Woodson revisits that important period of dramatic social changes. August, a young black girl who moves with her father and brother from Tennessee to the culturally rich Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick, comes of age during a time when her empowerment as a black woman offers new freedoms as well as familiar demons: classism, racism, and sexism. Another Brooklyn follows August as she learns the hard lessons of adolescence, uplifted by the strength of her girlhood friendships and guided by her family’s religious conversion. All the while, the terrible truth of her mother’s fate back in Tennessee weighs heavily on her emotional well-being.
I sat down with Jacqueline Woodson at her home in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn for a conversation about her new book, New York City’s literary legacy, gentrification, Islamophobia, and happiness.
The dedication of Another Brooklyn reads “For Bushwick (1970–1990) In Memory,” which covers the span of August’s coming-of-age in the novel. The reader also gets to observe Brooklyn come of age, as it negotiates the changes and challenges of those eras, through the perspective of a young black woman—a point of view that’s relatively absent from the portrayals of Brooklyn in literature. What drew you to tell this story at this stage of your career? Why this book now? The Bushwick that’s on the page is a true place, as it exists in the book. I wanted to put that on the page in its true existence because when a neighborhood becomes gentrified, its new inhabitants think they’ve discovered someplace new, but that place had a story before them. Bushwick is its own character, and this book is one of its biographies. I wanted to pay homage to the Bushwick I grew up in, so my dedication also suggests this book is an elegy to a place and time that is no longer with us. Overlaid on that biography is the narrative of the four girls, which is fiction. After having written Brown Girl Dreaming, which is a memoir, I really wanted to move away, just for a moment, from children’s literature and explore something I felt was invisible, which is the story of the black girl in Brooklyn.
In the novel, we meet August as an adult looking back at the place where she grew up. But what does Jacqueline Woodson have to say about the Bushwick of today? August in the book is looking back with a kind of melancholy or longing for this intensity of that period she lived through. Jacqueline Woodson looking at the place now—I look at it in wonder because I still go to my old neighborhood a lot and I’m just surprised by the fact that I grew up with white flight. Most of New York City was on the edge of white flight at the time, but now I’m watching the reverse of white flight, with white folks coming back into the neighborhoods their ancestors fled from. It makes me marvel at how cyclical everything is.
I’m trying to place Another Brooklyn as part of the borough’s writer-of-color lineage. I see Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones, published in 1959, and there are a few contemporary works, such as Daniel José Older’s Shadowshaper, but one has to really dig hard to find those narratives that are not centered on white characters. What areas need that literary attention in order to expand what is celebrated as Brooklyn’s—and New York’s—cultural heritage? There is so much territory left to explore in New York City in general. I feel like Brownsville is not on the page, East New York is not on the page; there are stories from the Bronx and Harlem, but since Down These Mean Streets by Piri Thomas not enough books about the black NYC experience are getting talked about. DJ does a great job in Shadowshaper, writing the black Latino perspective on the page, but we need more. Even in the Bushwick I grew up in there was a larger Dominican, Puerto Rican, and Ecuadorean population—I would love to see those stories, that Brooklyn.
And I’m even remotely interested in the vision of the kids of the hipsters who are growing up in those neighborhoods now. I know their stories are not going to be my story because of our differences in class and race, but I feel they too are part of all of these deep pockets that are not represented. I’m waiting for more stories from Queens—from Jackson Heights and the Hindu population. There’s so much that still needs to be told in order to shape this city in a way that’s nuanced. We still have a pretty flat narrative.
There are a few parallels between Jackie’s story in Brown Girl Dreaming and August’s in Another Brooklyn: Both young black women have roots in the South and eventually journey north with one parent. One gives shape to her memories through her affinity for language, the other comes to terms with her losses through her knowledge as an anthropologist of the rituals of death and dying. Agency is an important fire in your work. So is memory. How do you see these as critical components of a young black woman’s experience? Starting with memory, when you look at who we are as a people and how we got here and what we were allowed to hold on to: We were allowed to hold on to our spirit—a certain amount—and we held on to our memory. No one could take that away unless they beat us unconscious. I believe in genetic memory, that our ancestors are pretty much with us. And I believe in asking questions about the past to make historical connections because that’s what gives us strength. And in terms of agency, I grew up in the 1970s, which was so much about black power—taking your power, owning your power, making yourself visible in the world even if the world wasn’t reflecting you back. So as a writer I feel that every time I sit down to tell a story it is to create that mirror for myself and for other readers who have historically not seen themselves in the pages of literature, and to talk about how badass we are, because there’s so much strength in being a person of color and having survived.
Another Brooklyn is being marketed as an adult novel. But with contemporary YA novels being edgier, taking risks that keep their stories ahead of their time, could you imagine your younger fans reaching for the latest Jacqueline Woodson title? Is the YA designation fast becoming a fuzzy category? Oh, I think I see my audience reaching for this book the way I once reached for Judy Blume’s Forever—“Wait, she has an adult book? There might be some sex in it!” So I definitely see that happening. Also, having been publishing for twenty years, my population has grown up now, they’re adults. So I definitely see them reading it. But I do think that distinction between YA and adult is fast becoming a fuzzy line in terms of subject matter. There are still differences in the approaches to writing the two narratives, but today’s YA author is claiming more permission to take risks in order to keep up with a changing world, which is why our books continue to be banned.
Is Another Brooklyn an adult novel because of the treatment of sexuality? Not only August’s own sexual desires but also all of the lessons August learns about women and their bodies: from Muslim women, from prostitutes, from her own friends who are experimenting and pushing boundaries. Why is this still important work to do on the page? For too long we were given the wrong messages about our bodies, especially as women of color, and I wanted to show that a girl’s sense of her body is really shaped by the outside gaze, by the mirrors in her community. But I also wanted to show her agency and the way women can come together more powerfully. At one point in the book I have August with her girlfriends, and she’s thinking about how boys don’t understand why girls cover themselves even when they’re alone. It’s important work to do on the page because we are sexual beings and we have a right to be so and to walk through the world with these bodies. Living in the age of Beyoncé is really exciting for me—she’s not only celebrating the black body, but also the big body. I grew up with Twiggy as an idea of what is a beautiful body, but thankfully I also had Angela Davis and Diahann Carroll. I was informed differently, but when I’m coming to the page—because the narrative is so much bigger than real life—I have a responsibility to write what I believe in, in terms of representing more fully who we are as women.
There are so many rich layers to the life of August—her girlfriends, her brother, her love interest, the father’s love interests. She’s at the center of a complex support network, but one character who really stands out is Sister Loretta, who guides the family through their conversion to Islam. August says, “My Muslim beliefs lived just left of my heart,” meaning she understood everything that religion was providing for her and her brother, including structure and a mother figure. Was this a decision that came about given this country’s escalating Islamophobia? What do you hope readers take away from this encounter with a black Muslim family? It’s really a scary time to be living in. And Islamophobia happens when people are thinking, “Muslims are those people over there and have nothing to do with us.” Putting their humanity on the page was really important to me. We exist in all kinds of religions and this is the religion of this family, and the book deals with how this girl is taking in this religion because she’s negotiating it against this space and time of friendships and sexuality and puberty and adolescence. And faith. That’s all part of August’s journey.
I was talking to a friend about the shooting in Orlando, and during these times of crisis it’s so hard to remember the kind of work we do as artists. It’s nonstop. Much of it is economic, but so much of it is also emotional and at the core of who we are. Like Audre Lorde said, “We must wake up knowing we have work to do and go to bed knowing we’ve done it.” And writers, especially, every time we sit down to work we are working to impact a great good. And even though I am not always conscious about what is happening, when I sit down to create the narrative I know that all the information coming in from the world is informing that narrative.
The four young women at the center of Another Brooklyn—August, Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi—create such a special bond that it’s difficult to see those friendships begin to crumble. You once said that one question you wanted to explore through writing was “what is the happily ever after?” After completing this novel, dozens of books into your career, and as times change, what have you come to understand about happiness? That it ebbs and flows like every other emotion we have. I think that if I were happy all the time I’d be the most boring person in the world. The nuance comes from working towards happiness and not always getting there, or some days getting there surprisingly so. That I can wake up in the morning and get to write is amazing to me, so the mere fact that I’m here and that I’m able to tell my story is the happily ever after for me.
Rigoberto González is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Joy Harjo is a poet unafraid of self-discovery. She explored painting, dancing and medicine before focusing on a writing career. Born in Tulsa in 1951 to the Muscogee tribe (of the Creek Nation), Harjo is both Muscogee and white, and her acceptance of both heritages plays a crucial role in her work: Her poetry preserves her Native American background, while integrating aspects of the mainstream American culture in which she was also raised, to create a unique, poignant voice.
Harjo attended high school at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and went on the study at the University of New Mexico, where in 1976 she was in the first graduating class of its creative writing program. She received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1978. She has taught creative writing at the University of Arizona and is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of New Mexico.
Harjo has published four books of poetry and several short stories, and has written several screenplays. She is a winner of several awards, including an Academy of American Poets Award in 1978, two National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Fellowships (in 1978 and 1992), the Josephine Miles Award for Poetry from PEN Oakland in 1991, and the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award in 1991. Harjo has also served on a policy panel for the NEA.
Now living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Harjo has a 23-year-old son, Phil Dayn, and a 19-year-old daughter, Rainy Dawn, who is the subject of the poem “Rainy Dawn” that appears in Harjo’s most recent collection of poetry, In Mad Love and War (Wesleyan University Press, 1990).
From a hotel room in Lincoln, Nebraska, Harjo reminisces about her childhood creative stirrings. “I went outside very early in the mornings to draw in the dirt while everyone was still sleeping. I’d sit there and imagine what I could paint. And what always came to me out of the imaginative sphere were images—not particularly words, but images. Maybe that’s how I think, because sometimes I feel that I write as a painter. It’s almost as if I paint the poems.”
Harjo came from a family of painters. Her grandmother Naomi, a full-blooded Creek Indian, and her Aunt Lois, who was the family member closest to Harjo, were painters. Both women received their BFAs in fine art in the early 1900s and painted in the classical European style, but their subjects were often Native American. In her living room, Harjo has a painting by her grandmother of Osceola, the Seminole warrior who would never surrender to the U.S. government. Harjo uses a different medium, but the same collaboration of classical and Native American influences is the marrow of her poetry.
Reading was a large part of her childhood. She loved poems and memorized them, first because she was forced to in school, and then because she enjoyed doing it. For her birthdays, she requested poetry books, but she was on her own in the quest for quality poetry because she did not have any outstanding educational figures to guide her.
In high school, Harjo trained as a dancer under Rosalie Jones, a dancer of the Blackfeet tribe, and toured as a dancer and an actress with one of the first all-Indian dance troupes in this country. The show was called “Deep Roots, Tall Cedar” and gained recognition from many professional dance companies because it combined elements of classical European drama with traditional tribal drama.
After the tour ended in 1968, Harjo, who was 17 years old, returned to Oklahoma, where her son, Phil, was born. She next moved to New Mexico, leaving Phil’s father behind and enrolled at the University of New Mexico as a premed student. Within one semester she returned to art. The university setting introduced Harjo to a world of poets from backgrounds similar to her own and among the group of Native American writers at UNM she found a poetry that spoke of familiar places in a language she understood, something she had never encountered before. “Most of the poetry available to my generation was set in New England or in the Northeast and was written by men, or women emulating the male experience. I always had to change myself to conform to the poem. But I loved the melodic tones, the rhythm, and the music—those are the things that pulled me into a poem, as much or more than the idea.
One of the first poetry readings Harjo attended was given by Galway Kinnell, who became a source of great inspiration to her. She views him as a musician as well as a poet in the way he writes and reads his poetry. Harjo recounts with verve another significant event that was the turning point in her “unconscious decision” to take up the art of writing poetry: “I was watching a documentary one Sunday afternoon about a tribe in New Guinea. There was a storyteller, but he was also a poet—you could tell by the way he spoke his words. The story was about a hunt for a wild pig, and as he spoke he became—through his inflections and physical movements—the poem, the animal itself, while remaining human. It touched me as nothing else had.”
When asked about other important influences on her poetry, she says, “There are people who were very important to me. They were poets who I felt were human beings with integrity—integrity to the word and integrity to their country (the land), and to their human beingness. I think of people like Pablo Neruda. One of my favorite poets from Uganda, Africa, who influenced me very much is Okot p’Bitek. I love his piece ‘The Song of Lawino.’ I also like the work of other African writers—West African writers especially. In this country, I became excited by the African American writers: Ishmael Reed’s fiction, the work of Audre Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, Leslie Silko, and Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, a novel that was pretty much a poem. All were important to my writing.” Harjo had also read the Bible twice by the time she was 12 years old.
Harjo became disenchanted with the academic view of poetry, because it distorted poetry’s sheer beauty. “I think that what’s happened within the past centry, and it probably came with T. S. Eliot—although you can’t blame everything on T. S. Eliot—is that poetry became the property of the academic. It was taken away from the people in a sense, and I don’t believe that’s where poetry belongs—it belongs to the people. Yes, you can take apart literature, separate it, and see how it works, but as with taking apart the human body, you can’t see the spirit, which is at the root of it. It is the same with a poem—you can’t touch the spirit.”
Harjo sought a more creative approach to teaching and adopted a method that was directly influenced by one of her students. “I was teaching a class that involved African music and its connection to the spoken word. There was a young Ghanian man who told an incredible story about how he studied to be a master drummer. At seven years old, he was the apprentice to the master drummer, who would send him out into the bush every morning. He had to listen to all of the sounds going on around him, including the sound of the sun coming up, the insects buzzing, the people going for water, and the sound of the hunters as they went out into the bush. He would take it all in, and his ongoing lesson was to repeat those sounds on the drum and perfect them. Of course, it was the same lesson that went on for years, but it was the first teaching method I felt made sense. The workshop method is useful for technique and craft, but the approach seems more like business rather than the sacred art that poetry is.”
As a poet, Harjo viewed a changing society as an opportunity to explore the new attitudes toward her culture and humanity through writing. “I have felt the explosion of the civil rights movement in this country and have been challenged by the shock waves of human rights struggles all over the world. I’ve been especially involved in the struggles of my Indian peoples to maintain a place and culture in this precarious age. My poetry has everything to do with this. I came into writing at a poignant historical moment. I was lucky to be a part of a major multicultural movement with other writers.”
The beginning of her writing career also coincided with the rise of the women’s movement. Harjo noticed a great many poems being written straight from “the kitchen table,” and her poetry fit into this niche as well. “This poetry spoke very openly and honestly of women’s experiences. I considered it to be an incredible revolution in which we gave ourselves back to ourselves. Women had been stripped away by the language, by expectations of the language, and by expectations of the poets and the fathers of the poets. And we are not out of it yet.
“I am seen as a feminist poet. The way I interpret feminism in my own work is the power of a woman to be a warrior—to recognize the warrior characteristics within herself, which include self-love, vulnerability, honesty, integrity, a sense of morals, and so on.” But in a broader sense, Harjo’s poetry reflects the truths of being human, our relationship to one another, and our relationship to the physical world we inhabit.
Harjo views herself as a woman who has had to learn—or who is learning—to honor the female within herself. “I think it’s easier to honor the male in our culture because it’s much more accepted. There are almost no truly powerful and sustained images of female power. None. Look at Marilyn Monroe? The Virgin Mary? And what images exist for Indian women? The big question is, How do we describe ourselves as women in this culture? It’s unclear.
“I’ve had to nurture and accept all the elements of myself—both the creator and the destroyer; accept both my white and my native relatives, and accept the female and the male. It’s an ongoing internal war. I almost destroyed myself by the time I was twenty, because I felt like I had to be one or the other. Finally, at one point I made a stand, and here I am.” If there is any one poem that exemplifies her reconciliation of self, Harjo says it is “I Give You Back” in She Had Some Horses (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1983), her second collection of poems.
Harjo’s subject matter is drawn mainly from the Native American tradition of exalting the land and the spirit, the realities of American culture, and the concept of feminine individuality. Her characters may be actual people like Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, and Russell Moore, or they may be imaginary entities. “I imagine like a fiction writer sometimes. Most readers assume that the events in a poem actually happened to the poet. Not everything I write is autobiographical. In my work, I add to or change the truth. It is still the truth, just presented in a different form.”
There is an inherent spiritual quality to Harjo’s poetry, but she doesn’t feel that she is any more spiritual than the next person. “Part of the way I am comes from being around Native American people, but I wouldn’t really use the world ‘spiritual.’ It is natural for human beings to be in awe of the sacred and to realize that the sacred is everywhere. But humans seem to have lost their way, although every once in a while someone may find it, and I think that’s the artist. The artists and the poets are the ones who search for the sacred place.”
Her first collection of poetry, a chapbook, What Moon Drove Me to This? (I. Reed Books, 1979) is now out of print. “It should stay out of print,” says Harjo. “It was a very young book. There are probably only two good poems in it—poems that showed promise. It was a painful book, written during a difficult period in my life. You could see the beginnings of something, but it wasn’t quite cooked.”
Harjo’s second book, She Had Some Horses, sold over 11,000 copies and is now in its eighth printing by the same publisher. Horses are a recurring image in many of her poems, but when asked about their meaning, she laughs and replies, “I don’t really want to say, and I get asked that question often. I just leave the horses to themselves.”
Secrets From the Center of the World (University of Arizona Press, 1989) was a new kind of book for Harjo, combining photography with poetic language. The photographer/astronomer Stephen Strom was looking for a Native American writer to collaborate with him on his book of photographs of a Navajo reservation. “My friend Rain Perish, a Navajo artist and writer, couldn’t do it and referred him to me. We met, and I loved his photographs. Whichever way you turned the pictures, the perspectives made sense, and I think his being an astronomer and spending so much time looking at the universe affected his vision. He sees the world with immense detail. I wrote some text to go along with the photos, made the rounds to all of those places, and then rewrote the text.” Harjo and Strom worked on the arrangement of the photographs together.
Harjo had already visited most of the places featured in the photographs. “I spent a lot of time going out as a student activist to work with the Navajo people. Many of my friends were Navajo, so I learned the language. I learned the language to the point where I could speak it pretty well, joke in it, and I actually started to dream in it. For me, Secrets From the Center of the World is, in a way a tribute to that time of my life, to those people, to the land, and to the language, which I think influenced my writing very much.”
In Mad Love and War, Harjo’s most recent book of poems, departs from her original chant-oriented writing style. “In Mad Love, the story started to take precedent. Even though the lyric is important for me, the narrative had more of an edge. Maybe I’m getting farther away from the poetics. My next book will be very different. Harjo’s next collection—The Field of Miracles—is a prose narrative, which she hopes to finish within the next year. A recent short story appears in a Norton anthology called Best of the West, a collection of works by writers west of the Missouri, and another story appears in an anthology of short stories by Native American writers called Talking Leaves (Harper, 1991).
Harjo’s work has grown in density and in scope, and her increasing love of music has become a major element in her poetry. She plays tenor and soprano saxophone and is now learning to play the flute. She is excited by the literary possibilities that arise out of writing and playing music. “I started playing the saxophone about halfway into writing Mad Love and could already see the effect of jazz. Even though I’m just learning the elements of jazz, I listen to it a lot.” She doesn’t think that her poetry is “jazz poetry,” although it is very much influenced by the music. “I’m close to my tribal music and ceremony, and there is a relationship to jazz. There is a history of connections among the Muscogee, African American, and Seminole people. What I hear in jazz is my people, and I feel related to the music.”
Harjo’s relationship to jazz runs parallel with her relationship to American poetry. “I am an American, but it took me a while to reconcile my feelings toward American poetry. James Wright praised the American condition, as did Richard Hugo, who truly came out of the American experience. Adrienne Rich, too, is very important—more important to America than America wants to know or realize. I think academics felt betrayed by her when she refused to wear the clothes of her fathers. She refused the forms of her fathers, and left the house of her fathers. When she left the house of the fathers and embraced the mothers, academia felt betrayed. But I look to her honesty as much as her incredible gift of language and intellect.”
Harjo has recently formed a band called Poetic Justice, with a drummer and a bass player, and would like to record a mixture of poetry and music. She has already completed one projected called “Furious Light” (distributed by Watershed Foundation in Washington, D.C.), taped a reading of poetry from She Had Some Horses and In Mad Love recorded over music. The music was taped separately in this instance, but Harjo is eager to produce a tape that integrates poetry and music even more dramatically.
In addition to working on her new book and pursuing her musical career, Harjo is teaching and writing several screenplays for a television series called “Tales From the Center of the Earth.” The acknowledgement and integration of all creative energy—art, history, emotion, music—are highly important to Harjo’s work and daily life. The personal growth Harjo sees through the evolution of her writing is key. “If my style didn’t change and evolve, I would quit writing. Poetry is reciprocal. As poetry feeds you, you have to nurture the art and give it time and attention. It does give back to you, I suppose like anything else.”
Stephanie Izarek Smith is a writer an editor based in New York City. She is currently writing a collection of short prose and poetry.
The opening spread of “An Interview With Joy Harjo” as it appeared in the July/August 1993 issue.
For more than fifty years the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has been a vital part of this country’s creative ecosystem, providing funding and support to writers, translators, and organizations, as well as partnering with arts groups and non-arts sectors to create programs, such as Poetry Out Loud and the Big Read, that celebrate America’s rich cultural heritage and promote access to the arts in every community. For readers of this magazine, of course, the most visible—and sought-after—support offered by the NEA comes in the form of creative writing fellowships: $25,000 grants given in alternating years to poets and prose writers, enabling them “to set aside time for writing, research, travel, and general career advancement.” In short, they allow writers to be writers—even if that means simply giving them the ability to pay the rent or the student loan or the babysitter or the credit card bill—in a world that rarely acknowledges their work in financial terms.
But this isn’t all about the money. This is about being part of a tradition, built over the past half century, that honors artistic excellence in its many forms. This is about writers who are also nurses and farmers and teachers and librarians receiving support and validation from experts in the field—a measure of reassurance that the work they do before or after the day job or the night shift is valuable. And, yes, this is about patriotism: the federal government sending a message that the work of poets and writers is integral to an open society in which free expression is not only protected, but also encouraged.
This and much more is at stake as we move through the congressional budget process following President Trump’s ill-advised proposal to eliminate federal support for the NEA. And while these kinds of decisions often come down to numbers on a spreadsheet, it is important to highlight the real people—with lives and loved ones and dreams and challenges—at the other end of those fellowship checks. I spoke with nine fellowship winners, from 1977 grant recipient Joy Harjo to 2017 fellows Kathryn Nuernberger and Monica Sok, about what receiving the NEA’s creative writing fellowship meant to them, both in terms of practical financial assistance and as a vote of confidence from the federal government at that particular time in their personal and professional lives.
“To be an artist in my family was somewhat expected. My grandmother and great aunt were painters. With Indian oil money, they obtained arts training—but more than that, they were afforded the time to create. Two of my most valued possessions are paintings by them. My grandmother Naomi Harjo even played saxophone. But to be a poet, especially as a single mother, with no additional income, made for a different story. My family was proud of me, but their constant concern was: How are you going to make a living? We already had one poet in our family tree, Alexander Posey, a Muscogee Creek poet who founded the first native daily newspaper, but he made a living as a journalist, not as a poet. I knew that I would write no matter what, and I wrote my way through jobs, classes, and childrearing. The Pueblo novelist and poet Leslie Silko was the first writer I knew to be awarded an NEA fellowship, and she urged me to apply. I was about to graduate with my MFA and didn’t have anything lined up except a return home to New Mexico and an application for teaching creative writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts, then a Bureau of Indian Affairs school. I remember that late spring afternoon of 1977 opening the letter from the NEA announcing my fellowship. It was the gift I needed. It was enough money to assist me with writing what would be my breakout/breakthrough book of poetry, She Had Some Horses. I used the money for rent, utilities, supplies, and childcare. The fellowship bought me time. And it bought more than that; it brought affirmation. It put my family and community on notice that what I was doing as a poet—a strange occupation for a young native mother who needed to make a living—was considered worthy of support. My next fellowship came in 1992. It gave me the time I needed to get over that hump period that happens in the lives of all of us who create art. She Had Some Horses had set a mark. The second fellowship helped me leap the fence and make a collection that envisioned a book of poetry as an oral event.” —Joy Harjo, NEA fellow, 1977, 1992; author of ten poetry collections and a memoir, Crazy Brave (Norton, 2012)
“In the early 1980s I was studying Japanese at Columbia University and working in one of the college’s secretarial pools. When I wasn’t retyping a professor’s paper, I took advantage of the best typewriter in the world, the IBM Selectric, and put it to use for my own purposes. I was the busiest-looking secretary on campus, writing poems that would become my first two books, Air Pocket then Earshot. I was also a thirty-one-year-old new mother without an MFA—which is to say, without mentors or connections—and I felt alone, isolated. All my poet friends had books, but the support for presses was rapidly drying up. For me, mailing out a manuscript with the enclosed SASE was expensive. And waiting for snail mail was crushing. This was the backdrop to a parcel I received in our small mailbox: a thin envelope from the National Endowment for the Arts. I read it in the crack-infested vestibule of my apartment building in New York City and wept. It was 1986, the year I knew I’d be okay—more than okay. The NEA fellowship in poetry gave me validation that cannot be measured. Validation, for me, was a license to trespass: to continue writing fragments about the female body from an Asian American woman’s point of view. It may be difficult now to believe how radical this was: to hold a legal pad and pen in a coffee shop and write with confidence. The fellowship marked a turning point in my life, as it does for so many writers who receive the same gift of validation from the NEA.” —Kimiko Hahn, NEA fellow, 1986, 1992; author of nine poetry collections, including Brain Fever (Norton, 2014)
“My first job out of graduate school was as a poet in the schools in Kentucky, a two-year residency funded by the Kentucky Arts Council and the NEA in 1975. I traveled around the state giving writing workshops and exposing people of all ages and backgrounds to poetry—students in elementary schools and colleges, farmers in communities in Appalachia, and reform-school teens in Louisville. After the Kentucky residency, I went on to teach across America in poetry programs funded by the NEA. I taught migrant workers in California’s San Joaquin Valley; bilingual elementary school students in Baltimore; senior citizens in nursing homes, church basements, and Sunshine Centers, as they were called, centers where a free meal was provided, in Fayetteville, North Carolina. This last residency culminated in a book of their writings, Old Age Ain’t for Sissies, as well as a series of public readings in the community funded by the NEA. African American eighty-year-olds recited their poems before enthusiastic audiences, feeling for the first time in their lives that they had a voice and were being heard. The program helped create a strong, compassionate, connected community. The NEA is a cultural resource we can’t afford to lose. No other programs are so widespread, addressing so many different age populations and areas of the country. We must not think of the NEA and its programs as something ‘just for artists.’ It is a vital educational resource, which doesn’t quit after our school years are over. We are educating our citizenry in the rich literary resources of this great country and helping them evolve and develop their own expressive tools. An informed citizenry means a stronger, more united, compassionate, and educated America. The individual grant I received from the NEA in 1987 allowed me to take time from full-time teaching and work on the stories that would eventually become my first published novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, based on my family’s immigrant experience after escaping the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic in 1960. The novel now forms part of the curriculum in many schools and universities—the NEA at work again, enabling the creation of a diverse culture that enriches us all. Finally, in 2015, it was the NEA that nominated me for a National Medal in the Arts. For a little immigrant girl to end up receiving an award from the president of the United States was the American Dream come true. But none of us get where we want to go by ourselves. Along the way we encounter helpers, fairy godmothers. The NEA has served that role for me and so many others. I don’t have a magic wand to wave, but I do have a pen to write down this plea: Keep this incredible national treasure endowed and vital for the next generations of students, artists, writers, and readers, so that they can continue creating the country we all dream this can be.” —Julia Alvarez, NEA fellow, 1987; author of twenty-two books, including the children’s book Where Do They Go? (Triangle Square, 2016)
“I was lucky enough to receive NEA fellowships in 1998 and 2016. Both enabled me to write for a year. Both provided a considerable morale boost. Both made possible the books I was working on. That much is likely true for most recipients, of course. In my case, though, as an immigrant to this country, both also felt like an embrace from my adopted home. The emotional significance of the $25,000 grants, in other words, far exceeded their already handsome monetary value. The NEA also cemented my bond to the U.S. in another way. In between my two awards I had the privilege of serving on the panel that selects NEA fellows, which is how I found myself in a federal building on Pennsylvania Avenue at 9 AM on September 11, 2001. We saw smoke rising from the Pentagon through the windows of our conference room. Shortly thereafter, we were evacuated. That afternoon, back at the hotel, we decided, in spite of shock and sorrow, to continue our work. A small gesture, of course, but it felt like something worthwhile, a modest assertion of life and hope, of creativity, in the face of destruction, and one only made possible by dedicated NEA staffers. That night I walked down to the White House, which was floodlit like a beacon, and stood with the hushed crowd gathered before it. There’s been much talk of patriotism in the years between then and now, much talk about what the country stands for. The NEA, representing as it does a nation’s faith in the arts, seemed to me that day and ever since, an institution any country could and should be proud of. The federal building where the NEA was based on 9/11, incidentally, was the Old Post Office Pavilion, now the Trump International Hotel. The cost for a night in its largest suite on September 11, 2017: $25,000.” —Peter Ho Davies, NEA fellow, 1998, 2016; author of four books, including the novel The Fortunes (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016)
“My wife and I were married in 2000, but we couldn’t figure out how to live in the same town. She was working for Hewlett-Packard in Boise, Idaho, and I was hopscotching around the Midwest chasing teaching gigs and fellowships. We were paying two rents, spending all our money on airfare and telephone bills, and multiple times a year I cajoled my Subaru across Wyoming and Nebraska with our goldfish in a gallon water jug beside me. Every night I asked myself, ‘How important is it to me to be a writer? Important enough to spend anniversaries and Valentine’s Day and random Tuesdays apart? Just because I want to chase a silly dream?’ Then I won an NEA fellowship. I promptly sold the kitchen table, gave away most everything else, drove two thousand miles west, and moved in with my wife. For the first time since we were married, we got to wake up together every morning on a consistent basis. And after she went to work, I got to turn on my computer and face down the dragon of my next book. Years later, serving as a judge on a panel to award those same fellowships, I discovered that all over the country, writers and their loved ones were weighing similar choices: Make a car payment, or write an essay? Take a second job so a partner can finish her novel? The National Endowment for the Arts allows artists and their families to prioritize creativity, even if only for a few months, and sometimes those months are all an artist needs to give back to the country a piece of work that will outlast us all.” —Anthony Doerr, NEA fellow, 2002; author of five books, including the novel All the Light We Cannot See (Scribner, 2014)
“If I could have any superpower, it would be to stop or stretch time. And whenever someone asks me what I want for my birthday or Christmas, I say, ‘Time.’ There is never enough of it. Here is the math of 2011: Two young kids, one still in diapers; two teaching gigs—at a traditional and a low-res MFA program—which translates to maybe a thousand manuscript pages in need of editing; one leaky roof; one totaled car; one novel under way; twelve speaking gigs; ten book reviews; six short stories; $40,000 in student loans; a five-hour flight to one set of grandparents; a five-hour drive to the other. There’s nothing startling or appalling about these numbers; I was responsible for many of them, and I was building the life I wanted. But working sixty hours a week and chasing bills and scrambling from one speaking engagement to the next and trying to be there for my family sometimes added up to a schedule that made me feel stretched so thin you could see through me. I remember saying to my wife, ‘I’m not sure I can keep up this pace,’ and she said, ‘I don’t want you to.’ The NEA fellowship allowed me to slow down and carve out time so that I could properly research and pour all of my creative energy into a book that I couldn’t have written in such a harried, exhausted state. Time. That’s what these grants give their recipients. The gift of time, which is in such short supply for all of us. And, of course, money: to hire a babysitter. To fly out a grandparent for help. To teach fewer classes or take on fewer freelance assignments—or escape whatever other obligations are keeping us away from the page, the canvas, the studio, the darkroom. And here is the lovely, complicated calculus of the NEA: Those dollars become hours, and those hours become novels, memoirs, sonnets, sonatas, landscapes, photo essays, documentaries that have an incalculable effect on enriching and expanding the lives of their audience.” —Benjamin Percy, NEA fellow, 2012; author of seven books, including the novel The Dark Net (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017)
“Being awarded the NEA Fellowship changed the direction of my life. At the time it was awarded, I was teaching at Interlochen Center for the Arts, a secondary school in northern Michigan. I enjoyed the job but wasn’t writing enough. While a brilliant few are able to meet the time demands of high school teaching loads and still write, I didn’t have that stamina. Additionally, northern Michigan, though beautiful, was culturally isolating. Short on money and time, I worried I might get stuck in a career that would have meant limits on my writing. Winning this fellowship allowed me to accept my current residency at Washington University in St. Louis. It also gave credibility to my work. For poets, that’s a big deal. While, as artists, we all want to make work that is satisfying on its own merit, most poets do not survive on their work alone. As important as the work is to our audiences, I believe part of the reason harsh critics of the genre can get away with claiming poetry has no social poignancy is because we stand to make so little money in our field. Book contracts offer smaller advances than in other genres, so publishing does not always equal income. People who love poetry often depend on this community of reading and performance, and those events are generally free to the public. With our short form, we have a vibrant and accessible presence online. But it means the power of this art is not in its capital. We do what we love, and fellowships, such as the NEA’s, are monetarily crucial. The National Endowment for the Arts fellowship has, quite simply, allowed me to continue my work.” —francine j. harris, NEA fellow, 2015; author of two poetry collections, including Play Dead (Alice James Books, 2016)
“The recipient of an NEA grant sits precariously at the nexus of contradictory forces: art, government, and money. Great art ought to have nothing to do with money or power, and so paradoxically it comes to have a great deal to do with both. The philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer suggested the distinction between entertainment and art is that entertainment has purpose (to inspire people to pay for it), while art has ‘purposiveness.’ Purposiveness is the feeling that a work of art is accomplishing something beyond its own ends. By providing financial support and putting a spotlight on my recently released collection, The End of Pink, the NEA grant encourages me to focus more on purposive writing and less on a purposeful hustle to find readers, royalties, and otherwise ‘succeed’ in the literary marketplace. I’m able to use this year of grant funding to finalize a third book of poems, Rue, which considers eighteenth- and nineteenth-century botanical expeditions and folklore surrounding plants historically used for birth control through a lens of intersectional feminism. The grant has also allowed me to plan poetry readings in Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Colorado, often in rural areas that are disconnected from more urban literary hubs. How bold and brilliant a democracy is to invite paradox and dissent into its agencies, its budget, its apparatuses of power and control. Governmental support for the arts, which by their nature challenge the government that funds them, is a mechanism that inculcates within itself a relentless seeking after deeper understandings of what a democratic government should do and be for its people. Though not everyone who deserves these grants receives one, the presence of the NEA reminds all of us that our creative work is essential to the advancement of a great nation with even greater as-yet-unfulfilled ideals.” —Kathryn Nuernberger, NEA fellow, 2017; author of two poetry collections, including The End of Pink (BOA Editions, 2016)
“My manuscript needs work. It’s full of myth-making and family narratives in the context of the Khmer Rouge regime. Lately, I’ve been allowing myself to dwell in my dream space longer, to take more risks in my poetry. With the support of an NEA fellowship, I feel more confident about the imaginary world I’ve been trying to create over the last three years. Every week I continue my process of world-building. I spread out all my drafts and swim in the poems I’ve started. At this time in my personal life, I want to create new structures within my craft, to be wildly imaginative, to survive better in my search for love and healing. Without the financial burdens of rent and utilities, monthly student loans, credit card bills, and medical expenses, I can rest and practice more self-care while dealing with the difficult subject of genocide and intergenerational trauma. The award will also help me travel to Cambodia over the course of writing my first book. When I learned that the NEA might be defunded and then eliminated, I thought about the Khmer Rouge and its horrific transition into power, one where hundreds of thousands of artists and intellectuals were targeted in the early days of the regime. I’ve always been aware of myself as a poet in this country. The urgency to write remains the same for me, but I renew my desire to hone the subversiveness that my craft relies on so heavily. In 1990, the NEA also supported my grandmother Em Bun, a weaver, through a National Heritage Fellowship. My grandmother was a refugee. Over the course of three generations, the NEA has helped two women artists in my family. I strongly believe that it must continue to do the necessary work of preserving the arts.” —Monica Sok, NEA fellow, 2017; author of the poetry chapbook Year Zero (Poetry Society of America, 2015)
Kevin Larimer is the editor in chief of Poets & Writers, Inc.
Photo credits: Joy Harjo: Karen Kuehn; Kimiko Hahn: Beowulf Sheehan; Julia Alvarez: Bill Eichner; Peter Ho Davies: Dane Hillard; Anthony Doerr: Todd Meier; Benjamin Percy: Arnab Chakladar; francine j. harris: Cybele Knowles; Monica Sok: Sy J. Abudu
Update: May 23, 2017. The Trump administration today released its first full budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2018 (running from October 1, 2017, through September 30, 2018). The $4.1 trillion budget is notable for its cuts to domestic programs focused on social welfare programs, science and research, and the arts, including the elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, as well as the defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Each of the proposed cuts must pass through Congress before becoming law.
Update: May 1, 2017. The House Appropriations Committee released the FY 2017 Omnibus Appropriations bill, the legislation that will provide discretionary funding for the federal government for the current fiscal year, which ends on September 30, 2017. The bill includes $150 million each for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), $2 million above the fiscal year 2016 level. Congress is expected to vote early this week on the full spending package.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, a word commonly used to describe the Republican Party’s nominee, Donald J. Trump, was nonideological. Running from outside—and to some extent against—the Republican establishment, Trump appeared ready to offer a policy agenda that would depart from his party’s traditional platforms in ways large and small.
Following his Electoral College victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton, however, President-elect Trump launched a transition during which he announced one rock-ribbed conservative appointment after another, including that of Stephen Bannon, the former executive chairman of far-right media company Breitbart News, who is committed to what he has called “the deconstruction of the administrative state,” as his chief strategist. And in the first six weeks of his administration, President Trump took a series of hard-line Republican positions: cracking down on immigrants, rolling back a slew of Obama-era regulations protecting the environment, nominating a Supreme Court justice said to be “an heir to Antonin Scalia,” reversing federal guidelines on restroom rights for transgender students, and, more recently, announcing a massive military buildup. This last increase is to be funded by deep budget cuts in other programs—including the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), an independent agency of the federal government that offers support and funding for individuals and organizations through partnerships with state arts agencies, local leaders, other federal agencies, and the philanthropic sector.
On March 16, Trump became the first American president to propose not just cutting funds for the NEA but abolishing it outright. The White House unveiled a proposed budget that includes eliminating the NEA and its sister agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), as well as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, or CPB, which helps fund PBS, National Public Radio, and local public radio stations across the country.
“We are disappointed,” NEA chairman Jane Chu said in a statement, “because we see our funding actively making a difference with individuals of all ages in thousands of communities, large, small, urban and rural, and in every congressional district in the nation.”
Why kill the NEA? If the $3.9 trillion federal budget is envisioned as a pie, the Endowment’s most recent slice under President Barack Obama ($147.9 million, or .004 percent of the total) would hardly register as a crumb, much less a sliver. And yet the NEA quickly surfaces in nearly any discussion of budget cuts in the Trump era—not because gutting or killing it would contribute meaningfully to any fiscal imperative, but because many Republicans object to it on the ideological grounds that taxpayer funds shouldn’t be spent on the arts, which they consider inessential (or even “waste,” as Brian Darling, a former staffer of the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank and longtime NEA opponent, put it in a recent article in the Hill, a newspaper covering politics).
“I am deeply troubled by the Trump administration’s proposed FY 2018 budget calling for the elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts,” Robert L. Lynch, president and CEO of the lobbying group Americans for the Arts, said in a statement. “Our nation’s parents, teachers, community leaders, arts advocates, government officials, and even economists will not accept this proposal.”
Although Trump has now gone further than any of his predecessors in the Oval Office, the NEA has been the target of Republican budget hawks since early in Ronald Reagan’s presidency, when David Stockman, director of the Office of Management and Budget and an architect of what became known as “supply-side” economics, planned to abolish the NEA and NEH over three years. Those plans—later confirmed in a book by Livingston Biddle, NEA chairman from 1977 to 1981—were shelved when a special task force (which included Reagan’s former Hollywood colleague Charlton Heston) concluded that the two agencies performed a valuable service to the nation. Still, and simply put, conservatives have been critical of the NEA for more than three decades because they consider it a frill.
That philosophy was carried to its logical conclusion at the state level in 2011 in Kansas, where Republican governor Sam Brownback gutted the Kansas Arts Commission by line-item-vetoing the $689,000 in state funding that would have qualified it for matching grants from the NEA and a second group. “In difficult fiscal times such as these, the state must prioritize how to spend its limited resources and focus its attention on providing core services,” Brownback said in a statement at the time. In an interview for Poets & Writers Magazine, Kansas Arts Commission chairman Henry Schwaller called it “a devastating loss.” “This has happened because of the governor’s ideological belief that public funds should not be used to fund the arts,” he said. “But it’s also related to his clear misunderstanding of the role of the arts in society and in Kansas in particular. Children and seniors, especially in rural communities, will lose access to the arts because of this.”
Cultural conservatives also still harbor an animus against the NEA that has its roots in the controversies that erupted in 1989 over photographer and NEA grantee Andres Serrano—whose “Piss Christ,” part of the artist’s Immersions series, showed a plastic crucifix submerged in what was said to be his own urine—and Robert Mapplethorpe, whose photographs depicting the gay S&M subculture were shown in an NEA-supported exhibition in Cincinnati. The Serrano and Mapplethorpe firestorms, stoked by subsequent flare-ups involving the so-called “NEA Four” (performance artists Karen Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller, whose grant proposals were approved by the NEA’s peer review panels but vetoed by then chairman John Frohnmayer in 1990), turned the NEA into a national lightning rod. Led by Republican senators Alfonse D’Amato of New York and Jesse Helms of North Carolina, conservatives in and out of government repeatedly called for the arts agency to be dismantled as an affront to traditional American values. “Do not dishonor our Lord,” Helms railed on the Senate floor in reference to Serrano. “I resent it, and I think the vast majority of the American people do. And I also resent the National Endowment for the Arts spending the taxpayers’ money to honor this guy.”
In recent years, controversies involving NEA-supported art have become exceedingly rare, in part because most grants to individual artists were discontinued, by congressional mandate, in 1995. The exceptions were literature fellowships and two lifetime honor programs, the NEA Jazz Masters and the NEA National Heritage Fellowships. At the same time the NEA’s advocates have successfully made the case for the arts as an economic engine, contributing $704.2 billion to the U.S. economy in 2013 alone, according to a study conducted by the NEA and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. (That includes for-profit arts activity such as filmmaking.) The NEA has also staked a claim as the nation’s most effective instigator of contributions to the arts by others. For every dollar it awards in grants, the NEA says, up to nine dollars is generated in matching support from private and public sources, leading to an additional $500 million in arts funding in 2016. Still, that onetime shibboleth of the religious right—that the NEA supports degenerate art—still bubbles up now and again on alt-right Internet forums.
Weeks before President Trump unveiled his budget plan, two powerful conservative groups—the Heritage Foundation and the Republican Study Committee, a caucus of 173 conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives—called upon him to abolish the NEA and the NEH. And the NEA remains a perennial target of right-wing media outlets such as Breitbart News, once edited by Bannon and known to be on Trump’s daily reading list. Breitbart has been publishing articles critical of the NEA at least since 2009, when it claimed the agency was encouraging artists to support President Obama’s agenda on education, health care, the environment, and other topics. “The National Endowment of the Arts is under attack—again,” poet Dana Gioia, who led the NEA from 2003 to 2009, wrote recently in an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times. “The foes are the same tired cast of characters who have assaulted the agency for the last thirty years. Their arguments are the same threadbare notions that have been repeatedly rejected. They are mounting a partisan battle that will do the nation no good. But for the sake of the arts, it needs to be fought again and won.”
Gioia continued: “Both the Heritage Foundation and the Republican Study Committee have long been obsessed with ending federal support for the arts. During my six years as the chairman of the NEA under president George W. Bush, these groups launched one unsuccessful volley after another. Their stated rationale was that the federal government had no business funding the arts. Beneath that small-government ideal, however, was another openly acknowledged motive not related to the public good but to political advantage. By eliminating the NEA, they could deliver a symbolic victory against leftist urban constituencies.”
For all these reasons, the NEA finds itself once again in potentially mortal danger. With Republicans now firmly in control of the executive branch and both houses of Congress, the agency’s prospects for continued survival may be dimmer than at any point in its history.
***
The NEA was established by Congress in 1965, during the Johnson administration, to “support the survival of the best of all forms that reflect the American heritage in its full range of cultural and ethnic diversity and to provide national leadership on behalf of the arts.” Over the years, the Endowment has dispensed more than $5 billion to artists and arts organizations in the fields of dance, design, folk and traditional arts, literature, media arts, music, opera, multidisciplinary works, performance art, theater, and the visual arts. (Poets & Writers, Inc., the nonprofit organization that publishes this magazine, receives an annual grant that supports the magazine and the website pw.org. Poets & Writers is also a cofounder of the Literary Network, or LitNet, a coalition of sixty-eight nonprofit literary organizations that was established in 1992 as an extension of the now-defunct Coalition of Writers Organizations and in response to the freedom of expression controversies surrounding the NEA.)
In the 2016 fiscal year, more than 80 percent of the NEA’s $147.9 million appropriation was distributed as grants and awards to organizations and individuals across the country. About 40 percent of that money was awarded directly to the states through their arts agencies. The other 60 percent was distributed to artists and arts organizations applying through the NEA funding categories.
In a clear response to past criticism of its grant-making process as “elitist,” the NEA now earmarks a portion of its grants for underserved communities. Forty percent of NEA-supported activities happen in neighborhoods with high poverty rates, and 36 percent of NEA grants go to organizations that reach people with disabilities, people in institutions (including prisons), and veterans. One-third of NEA grants serve audiences with low incomes.
And while some have charged that the NEA favors large cultural institutions that would more appropriately be funded by their presumably wealthy patrons, the majority of NEA grants—65 percent—go to small and medium-sized organizations in every congressional district in the nation.
All grant applications to the NEA are reviewed on the basis of “artistic excellence and artistic merit,” according to “Art Works for America,” the NEA’s 2014–2018 strategic plan. Applications are first evaluated by independent panels consisting of experts in the various disciplines and “at least one knowledgeable layperson.” The panels’ recommendations are forwarded to the NEA’s advisory body, the National Council on the Arts, whose members are artists, scholars, and arts patrons appointed by the president. The council’s recommendations are sent to the NEA chairman (currently Jane Chu, a holdover from the Obama administration), who makes the final decision.
But will there be any grant decisions to be made in the new fiscal year? Will there be a National Endowment for the Arts at all? As of this writing, it’s unclear how Trump’s budget will fare in Congress, where the NEA still enjoys the support of most Democrats and some Republicans, including moderates and even some conservatives. In his statement, Lynch quotes North Carolina Republican representative Mark Walker, chairman of the Republican Study Committee, as saying he opposes Trump’s plans for the arts: “I appreciate the education that is found in the arts, so at this point I have no path to making any kind of hard cuts right now.” In her statement, Chu implied that anything could still happen. “We understand that the president’s budget request is a first step in a very long budget process,” she said. “As part of that process we are working with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to prepare information they have requested.”
A message posted to the grant application page of the NEA’s website on the same day the president’s proposal was unveiled reads, “We continue to make FY 2017 grant awards and will continue to honor all obligated grant funds made to date. In addition, we will continue to accept grant applications for FY 2018 at our usual deadlines…. The agency continues to operate as usual and will do so until a new budget is enacted by Congress.”
In the coming months the House and Senate budget committees will each write and vote on budget resolutions, at which point the subcommittee’s “markup” appropriation bills determine the level of spending for all discretionary programs. Then the full House and Senate debate and vote on those bills; only after each bill passes Congress can the president sign them and the budget becomes law.
Whatever happens during this process, it won’t occur under the radar. It will be done in the full glare of the public eye, and under the careful scrutiny of those who benefit from NEA’s support, including members of the literary community who stand ready to protect the future of arts funding.
Kevin Nance is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
As the long days stretch into the month of August, settle in, pour a cold beverage, and let the cool sounds of these five readings from recently published books of fiction provide some relief from the summer heat.
F*ckface: And Other Stories (Henry Holt, July 2020) by Leah Hampton:
Howard Yoon of the Ross Yoon Agency 4.13.2022 The agent answers questions about mentioning positive feedback in a query letter, how much plot to include in a query, and agents for teen writers.
Monica Odom of Odom Media Management 12.15.2021 The agent answers questions about attracting agents using self-published books and whether to use a summary or a writing sample to pitch a memoir.
Larissa Melo Pienkowski of Jill Grinberg Literary Management 10.13.21 The agent who represents writers TJ Alexander and K. Tempest Bradford, among others, answers questions about being ghosted by agents and how to query for nonfiction books.
Jade Wong-Baxter of Frances Goldin Literary Agency 8.18.21 The agent representing Chris Belcher, Kate Broad, Delia Cai, Duy Doan, and others offers advice about working with a coauthor, changing a memoir to fiction, why agents don’t consider previously published work, and how to become an agent.
Amy Elizabeth Bishop of Dystel, Goderich & Bourret 6.16.21 The literary agent answers questions about how to seek representation as a self-published author, break into the agenting business, and more.
Iwalani Kim of Sanford J. Greenberger Associates 4.14.21 The literary agent answers questions about submitting story collections, getting an agent’s attention, and querying two agents at the same agency.
The Literary Agents database contains details about more than 170 agents who are looking for new clients. Search the listings to find contact information, submission guidelines, client lists, tips from the agents, and more.
Priya Doraswamy of Lotus Lane Literary 10.10.18 An agent answers questions on obtaining the copyright of a self-published novel and seeking a U.S. publisher from abroad.
Annie Hwang of Folio Literary Management 12.13.17 A literary agent answers readers’ questions—from how seriously agents consider a writer’s previous sales to how to responsibly seek new representation.
Kirby Kim of Janklow & Nesbit Associates 4.12.17 A seasoned literary agent offers valuable counsel on when to query, how to keep revising, and whether horror fiction is a genre worth pursuing.
Anna Ghosh of Ghosh Literary 12.14.16 Anna Ghosh answers readers’ questions—from why poetry agents are seemingly nonexistent to whether or not it is possible to be “too young to write.”
Betsy Amster of Betsy Amster Literary Enterprises 10.14.15 The agent of authors such as María Amparo Escandón and Joy Nicholson offers advice on query letters, editing, and what not to do when submitting a manuscript.
A dependable source of professional and creative advice, Agents & Editors Recommend features anecdotes, insights, tips, recommended reading and viewing for writers, and more from leading agents and editors.
Danielle Svetcov of Levine Greenberg Rostan 4.15.15 Should you pay to have a manuscript edited beforehand? Are there benefits to querying via snail mail versus e-mail? Danielle Svetcov of Levine Greenberg Rostan answers readers’ questions about what (and what not) to do when trying to find an agent.
Meredith Kaffel Simonoff of DeFiore and Company 8.20.14 An agent representing authors such as CJ Hauser and Cecily Wong answers questions about writing in multiple genres, agents’ fees, and publishing work in online journals.
Amy Rennert of the Amy Rennert Agency 3.01.14 The agent of authors such as Diana Nyad and Herman Wouk answers questions about self-publishing, age restrictions, and working with an agent remotely.
Chris Parris-Lamb of the Gernert Company 10.06.13 Chris Parris-Lamb of the Gernert Company offers advice on submitting query letters and manuscripts, and when to embrace or eschew self-promotion.
Lucy Carson of the Friedrich Agency 9.01.13 Lucy Carson of the Friedrich Agency discusses e-book publishing, when to send a sample to an agent, and more.
Matt McGowan of Frances Goldin Literary Agency 5.01.13 Literary agent Matt McGowan, who represents Eula Biss, John D’Agata, Brian Evenson, and many others, answers writers’ most commonly asked questions.
Rebecca Gradinger of Fletcher & Company 10.17.12 Literary agent Rebecca Gradinger explains why writers need agents and offers tips about best practices for finding one.
Douglas Stewart of Sterling Lord Literistic 4.12.12 The agent of Jami Attenberg, David Mitchell, Carolyn Parkhurst, Matthew Quick, and others offers guidance about publishing credits, MFA programs, and unagented submissions.
Jenni Ferrari-Adler of Brick House Literary Agents 3.01.11 Does your book need to be finished before you seek representation? Do agents really read synopses? Agent Jenni Ferrari-Adler, whose clients include Lauren Shockey and Emma Straub, answers these questions and more.
Terra Chalberg of the Susan Golomb Literary Agency 10.15.10 When is the best time in your career to look for representation, and when should you call off an author-agent relationship? Terra Chalberg, whose clients include Lori Ostlund and Glenn Taylor, tackles these questions and more.
Jennifer Carlson of Dunow, Carlson & Lerner 8.11.10 The agent of authors such as Kevin Brockmeier and Marisa de los Santos offers her thoughts on self-publishing and what she looks for in the first five pages of a writing sample.
PJ Mark of Janklow & Nesbit Associates 5.01.10 The agent of authors such as Samantha Hunt, Dinaw Mengestu, and Josh Weil offers advice on shaping a query letter and when to follow up after pitching your book.
Katherine Fausset of Curtis Brown, Ltd. 3.01.10 Agent Katherine Fausset answers questions from readers about the agent’s role in submitting work to literary magazines and how writers can choose agents based on their client lists.
Launched in 2008, this series of in-depth interviews with book editors, publishers, and agents offers a unique look at the past, present, and future of the book industry and what writers can do to thrive in today’s publishing world.
Ibrahim Ahmad by Vivian Lee 8.14.24 The former editorial director of Akashic Books, now an executive editor at Viking, talks about his experience moving from an indie press to one of the Big Five publishers.
Tanya McKinnon by Vivian Lee 2.14.24 The principal agent of McKinnon Literary talks about how publishing can be a form of activism, the different ways agents and authors can use comp titles, and how the future of the book business still holds many wonderful possibilities.
Jamia Wilson by Vivian Lee 8.16.23 Random House executive editor and vice president Jamia Wilson talks about her passion for publishing as a craft, how being a writer informs her work as an editor, and the importance of keeping an expansive interest in books.
Rakia Clark by Vivian Lee 2.15.23 Mariner Books executive editor Rakia Clark talks about unlocking the full potential of an author, how writers can shine in the query letter, and effecting meaningful change in the publishing industry.
Annie Hwang by Vivian Lee 8.17.22 Annie Hwang of Ayesha Pande Literary talks about community building, professional burnout, the questions writers should ask when querying agents, and the demanding work of advocating for diversity in publishing.
Sarah McGrath by M. Allen Cunningham 2.10.21 The editor in chief of Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, talks about her start in publishing, acquiring books, editing as a creative process, and more.
Ben George by M. Allen Cunningham 8.14.19 Ben George, a senior editor at Little, Brown who works with some of the biggest names in literary fiction and nonfiction, talks about the author-editor relationship, the plight of the midlist writer, and the art of revision.
Rob Spillman by Michael Szczerban 10.12.16 Editor Rob Spillman talks Tin House—the magazine, the books, the summer workshop—and the pleasures, perils, and surprises of independent publishing.
The Book Group by Michael Szczerban 6.14.16 Four veteran agents—Julie Barer, Faye Bender, Brettne Bloom, and Elisabeth Weed—talk about the business of books, the secret to a good pitch, and what authors should do in the lead-up to publication.
Michael Wiegers by Michael Szczerban 10.14.15 Michael Wiegers, the editor in chief of Copper Canyon Press, talks about how he decides which books to publish (from the two thousand manuscripts the press receives each year) and what it’s like to edit the likes of Pablo Neruda, W. S. Merwin, and C. D. Wright.
Dawn Davis by Michael Szczerban 8.19.15 Dawn Davis—vice president and publisher of 37 INK, an imprint of Simon & Schuster’s Atria Publishing Group—talks about editing Edward P. Jones, the lack of diversity in publishing, and what some of the most successful authors have in common.
Claudia Ballard, Seth Fishman, Melissa Flashman, and Alia Hanna Habib by Michael Szczerban 6.17.15 Four young literary agents meet for an evening of food, drink, and conversation about how they find new authors, what they need to see in a query letter, and the common mistakes writers should avoid.
Jennifer Joel by Michael Szczerban 2.10.15 Jennifer Joel, whose clients include Chris Cleave, Joe McGinniss Jr., Evan Osnos, and Shonda Rhimes, talks about the difference between selling fiction and nonfiction, what inspires her to go the extra mile for her authors, and what writers should really want out of publishing.
Jeff Shotts by Michael Szczerban 10.15.14 Graywolf Press executive editor Jeff Shotts discusses the power of patience in publishing, editing as an act of empathy, and why it’s an exciting time to be a poet.
PJ Mark by Michael Szczerban 6.18.14 PJ Mark, whose clients include Samantha Hunt, Wayne Koestenbaum, Dinaw Mengestu, Maggie Nelson, Ed Park, and Josh Weil, talks about what writers can do to improve their chances of success, why fiction is harder to sell than nonfiction, and the importance of trusting your heart.
Susan Golomb by Michael Szczerban 5.1.14 Susan Golomb, whose clients include Jonathan Franzen, Rachel Kushner, and William T. Vollmann, talks about the ebb and flow of submission season, the art of the preemptive offer, and the gems she finds in her slush pile.
Amy Einhorn by Michael Szczerban 2.12.14 The publisher of her eponymous imprint at Penguin Random House, Amy Einhorn discusses her early days as an assistant at FSG, the importance of titles, and how she pushes her authors to make their books the best they can be.
David Gernert by Michael Szczerban 1.1.14 Literary agent David Gernert discusses the bookstore as a key to our culture, what it’s like to work with John Grisham, and how big changes in the industry are affecting authors’ incomes.
Jordan Pavlin by Michael Szczerban 9.1.13 A vice president and executive editor at Knopf, Jordan Pavlin discusses her terror of launch meetings, the particular genius of Sonny Mehta, and her job as a writer’s ideal reader.
Eric Simonoff by Michael Szczerban 7.1.13 A heavy-hitting agent who for twenty-two years has represented some of the biggest literary writers in the country, Eric Simonoff discusses recent changes in the publishing industry, the pitfalls of self-publishing, and what he’s learned about staying creative.
Jonathan Karp by Jofie Ferrari-Adler 11.1.09 As the editor in chief of Twelve, Jonathan Karp is always looking for good writing. Considering that half of all the books he’s published there have become best-sellers, that should make a lot of writers very, very excited.
Georges Borchardt by Jofie Ferrari-Adler 9.1.09 Georges Borchardt has been an agent for more than fifty years. He’s seen authors, editors, and other agents come and go, but two things have never changed: his belief that good writing is a gift and his ability to get it published.
Jonathan Galassi by Jofie Ferrari-Adler 7.1.09 Some publishers may have lost sight of what’s important, but the head of FSG shows his allegiance as he discusses the fallacy of the blockbuster mentality, what writers should look for in agents, and his close bond with authors.
Maria Massie, Jim Rutman, Anna Stein, and Peter Steinberg by Jofie Ferrari-Adler 5.1.09 Four agents discuss how the economy is affecting their jobs, where they’re finding new writers, and what totally freaks them out about MFA students.
Lee Boudreaux, Eric Chinski, Alexis Gargagliano, and Richard Nash by Jofie Ferrari-Adler 3.1.09 Four young editors, from big houses and small, take some time off to discuss what makes a good manuscript, what they’ve come to expect from their authors, and how much of their work needs to be done at night and on weekends.
Julie Barer, Jeff Kleinman, Daniel Lazar, and Renee Zuckerbrot by Jofie Ferrari-Adler 1.1.09 Four young literary agents meet for an evening of food, wine, and conversation about the writing they’re looking for, how they’re finding it, what they love, what they hate, and ten things writers should never ever do.
Chuck Adams by Jofie Ferrari-Adler 11.1.08 A veteran editor who has worked at publishing houses both large and small, Chuck Adams of Algonquin Books talks about what beginning writers tend to forget, the secret to selling two million copies, and the problem with MFA writing.
Molly Friedrich by Jofie Ferrari-Adler 9.1.08 Known as a heavy-hitting agent willing to go to bat for her clients, Molly Friedrich discusses how an author should choose an agent, what she looks for in a manuscript, and what separates great agents from merely good ones.
Janet Silver by Jofie Ferrari-Adler 7.1.08 Having settled into her new role at Nan Talese’s imprint following her ouster from Houghton Mifflin, editor Janet Silver discusses what she looks for in a new writer and what every author should know about agents.
Nat Sobel by Jofie Ferrari-Adler 5.1.08 Agent Nat Sobel, one of the most forward-thinking and outspoken agents in the business, voices his opinions on what authors should do for themselves, the dangers of MFA programs, and what he finds in literary magazines.
Pat Strachan by Jofie Ferrari-Adler 3.1.08 With nearly four decades of editing experience, publishing veteran Pat Strachan reveals the qualities she looks for in fiction, her approach to editing, and how writers can help themselves navigate the industry.
Lynn Nesbit by Jofie Ferrari-Adler 1.1.08 With more than forty years of experience in the business, agent Lynn Nesbit discusses how she signed some of her biggest clients, how a writer can get an agent’s attention, and what’s wrong with the publishing industry.
To say there are a lot of literary agents out there is an understatement—almost like saying there are a lot of writers looking for an agent (but not quite). The Association of Authors’ Representatives (AAR), a nonprofit membership organization founded in 1991, currently lists more than four hundred agents as members, all of whom meet certain experience requirements and abide by an established code of ethics. Another, more general, online database claims to offer details for nearly a thousand agents of varying levels of expertise and areas of emphasis. The carefully curated and focused database of literary agents at pw.org lists more than a hundred, including contact information, submission guidelines, and client lists.
No, the challenge for writers is not a dearth of agents, but rather picking the right one out of the crowd. (Of course, the same could be said about the challenge for agents.) To help narrow the field, I contacted some hungry agents who I know are eager to receive an e-mail from an as-yet-unknown writer and asked each of them for some basic information about what kind of work they want to read and how to reach them, as well as some not-so-basic information that will help you get to know them a little better. Remember, publishing is a business of relationships. You don’t want to simply fire off an e-mail to any agent you happen to come across. Read carefully. In the following profiles, a dozen agents are dropping some subtle (and not so subtle) hints for you. Have you written a piece of narrative nonfiction that gets to the heart of what it means to live in a specific geographical region? Duvall Osteen might be a great fit. Do you have a novel set in North Carolina? Adam Eaglin could be your man. Are you from Detroit and love music? You may need to look no further than Carrie Howland. Are you a writer of smart horror fiction and just can’t get enough of the work of Joe Hill and Nathan Ballingrud? You should take the time to get to know Renée Zuckerbrot.
These twelve agents all have distinct personalities, aesthetics, work habits, backgrounds, proclivities, and peeves—and so do you. So take your time, do the research, read books by their clients, and listen to what these professionals are saying. One of them might be speaking directly to you.
Who she represents: Bridget Quinn (Broad Strokes), Bonnie Tsui (Why We Swim), Nicole Perlroth (This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends), Stephanie Wilbur Ash (The Annie Year), Meg Elison (The Book of the Unnamed Midwife), James Nestor (Deep), Shalane Flanagan and Elyse Kopecky (Run Fast Eat Slow), Eben Weiss (The Ultimate Bicycle Owner’s Manual)
What she wants to read: Biographies and histories in which I can smell the breath and walk in the footsteps of the characters profiled; memoirs and reported narratives braced by vivid scenes and a sense of urgency; humor that can revive a marriage when read before bed; fiction that reads easy but isn’t.
When you should contact her: If your manuscript is the only piece of writing you’ve got to share (you’re not a working journalist, say, or a published author), then your manuscript (if it’s fiction) should be complete before you query. If you are a professional writer with clips galore to share, I still recommend you query when you’ve got a finished manuscript (if fiction), because it leaves no mystery (but it’s up to you). If you’re submitting nonfiction—all writers—then you should have a full proposal to share when you query. Coda: An agent should not be the first person (besides you) to read your manuscript or proposal.
Who she represents: Dan Chaon (Ill Will), Shannon Leone Fowler (Traveling With Ghosts), Kelly Link (Get in Trouble), Deborah Lutz (The Bronte Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects), Andrew Malan Milward (I Was a Revolutionary), Keith Lee Morris (Travelers Rest), Shawn Vestal (Godforsaken Idaho), M. O. Walsh (My Sunshine Away), Daniel Wallace (Extraordinary Adventures)
What she wants to read: I tend to be seduced by voice, so voice-driven fiction and nonfiction are high on my wish list. I love getting lost in a world that is strikingly different from mine. I have a deep appreciation for storytelling that allows me to see the world anew, or introduces me to a culture or worldview outside my own. I read to be entertained and educated. Writers who approach current events and historical topics with original, provocative ideas will always find readers. I’m also looking for smart horror writers along the lines of Joe Hill and my client Nathan Ballingrud (North American Lake Monsters). There will always be room on my list for popular science—Eric Sanderson’s Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City is a good example—and pop-culture books like my client Theron Humphrey’s Maddie on Things.
When you should contact her: Please query me when you have a complete manuscript or proposal with a sample chapter. I am also willing to look at a complete short story collection and partial novel, or a complete novel and a partial story collection. For memoirs, I will consider a proposal with a sample chapter or the complete manuscript.
Why you should want her as your agent: I am a careful reader who reads on both a micro and macro level. My first job was in editorial—I’m a former Doubleday editor—so it’s all about the writing. I work with my clients on getting their work in the best shape possible before submitting it. That said, my job is not to edit a manuscript so that it conforms to my idea of perfection; rather, it is to edit a work so that editors reading it will be able to envision the book as the writer intends. I need to leave enough room for editors to work with my clients to shape their manuscripts to their shared vision and the publisher’s vision. I’m proud of the fact that the manuscripts I sell never require major editorial overhauls. Also, I value fostering long-term relationships with my writers. Last but not least, I’m enthusiastic about collaborating with my writers and their publishers during the publication of their work. I love helping to generate buzz for my clients by talking up their work to anyone who will listen.
How she wants to be contacted: Please include a description of your work, your writing credentials, a brief bio in the body of an e-mail, along with the first three chapters/stories from your manuscript as a Word document. For nonfiction, you can also send a proposal and sample chapter.
Who she represents: Bethany Ball (What to Do About the Solomons), Elizabeth Poliner (As Close to Us as Breathing), Marjorie Liu (Monstress), Lauren Holmes (Barbara the Slut and Other People), Brooke Barker (Sad Animal Facts), Brad Watson (Miss Jane), Bryce Andrews (Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West), Wil S. Hylton (Vanished: The Sixty-Year Search for the Missing Men of World War II), Pablo Medina (The Island Kingdom)
What she wants to read: Fiction and narrative nonfiction with a big voice and/or a strong sense of place.
When you should contact her: For fiction I request completed novels or story collections. For narrative nonfiction I’m happy to read a proposal, which should include an overview and at least two finished chapters.
Where she can be reached: e-mail queries@aragi.net; attn: Duvall Osteen
Why you should want her as your agent: We’re a small, selective agency. We keep it that way for a reason. Our authors are never going to be handed off; they can always reach us, no matter how big or small the question, no matter what stage of their career. Every single author at Aragi is of equal importance.
How she wants to be contacted: Please send your query via e-mail, which should include a synopsis of the book and your bio.
Who he represents: Garth Stein (The Art of Racing in the Rain), Elizabeth Letts (The Eighty-Dollar Champion), Eowyn Ivey (The Snow Child), Jacquelyn Mitchard (Two If by Sea), Charles J. Shields (Mockingbird), Karen Dionne (The Marsh King’s Daughter), Benjamin Ludwig (Ginny Moon), Val Emmich (The Reminders), Kathy McKeon (Jackie’s Girl)
What he wants to read: I focus on book-club/literary fiction and narrative nonfiction—especially those projects that I feel can make a difference either to me personally or to the world. I love unique voices, magnificently strong characters, unusual premises, and books that offer some new perspective on something I thought I already knew something about or never even dreamed existed. I’m always interested in learning and love when someone can teach me something organically so it doesn’t feel like I’m even learning. I’m particularly looking for voice-driven fiction as well as very well-written thrillers and psychological suspense novels; or novels with a great, quirky, fun voice. I love narrative nonfiction and memoir and have sold projects in a wide variety of subjects, including art, history, animals, military, and many other genres.
When you should contact him: Fiction writers, when you’ve finished your entire novel, had it read by several readers, edited and reedited it, and feel like it’s now absolutely as strong as you can possibly make it, write me a letter and tell me about it. Nonfiction writers, when you’ve written a book proposal, paying particular attention to the sample chapter(s)/excerpts and marketing materials, write me a letter.
Where he can be reached: E-mail jeff@foliolit.com, but please consult the Folio website (foliolit.com) before you fire off an e-mail. No phone calls or hard copies, please.
Why you should want him as your agent: I’m very hands-on and love the editing-collaborating process—brainstorming plots, rejiggering motivations, tweaking backstory. It’s really satisfying and invigorating to be part of the creative process. I also love being part of the publication process, too—coming up with marketing ideas, discussing PR strategies, revising flap copy, reading/editing short promotional materials, and so forth. I do best working with authors who see their agent as a partner in the book publishing process: I’m not a guy who rubber-stamps a manuscript and just forwards it to the editor; and I don’t just disappear once the book has been sold. As one author told me recently, “I was just saying that what you do for me is not normal. I don’t know of a single other agent who works so hard to make sure his clients look good—and I know a lot of agents!”
How he wants to be contacted: For fiction, a query letter plus the first page of your manuscript; for nonfiction, a query letter plus a proposal overview and/or first page of a sample excerpt.
Who she represents: David Wroblewski (The Story of Edgar Sawtelle), Susie Steiner (Missing, Presumed), T. Geronimo Johnson (Welcome to Braggsville), Aline Ohanesian (Orhan’s Inheritance), Susan Straight (Between Heaven and Here), Michael Lemonick (The Perpetual Now)
What she wants to read: I believe a good book should wake you up by taking you out of your life and immersing you in someone else’s. So I want to read books with deeply imagined worlds, by writers who are not afraid to take risks with their work.
When you should contact her: Fiction writers, I want you to contact me when you have a full draft of your novel. I sell a lot of nonfiction on proposal, so I’m happy to look at those projects a bit earlier. If I’m considering nonfiction on proposal, I’d like to see one or two sample chapters. In general, I think the best moment for writers to contact an agent is when they have done everything they possibly can on their own.
Where she can be reached: Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency; 27 West 20th Street, Suite 1107; New York, NY 10011; e-mail eleanor@dclagency.com
Why you should want her as your agent: I consider my clients my friends. They all have my cell-phone number and are free to use it. My list is intentionally small, so I can give every project the attention it deserves. I also like to think long-term, about how to build a career as well as sell individual books.
How she wants to be contacted: Please send me a one- to two-page query letter with a summary of your work and an author bio. If you have a proposal, please attach it to your query. If you are working on a novel, please attach the first ten to twenty pages to give me a sense of your writing.
Who she represents: Katie Heaney (Never Have I Ever), Arianna Rebolini (Public Relations), Swan Huntley (We Could Be Beautiful), Anna Pitoniak (The Futures), Anne Helen Petersen (Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud), Christina Kelly (Good Karma), Victoria James (Drink Pink), Kelsey Miller (Big Girl), Jen Chaney (As If!), Emilie Wapnick (How to Be Everything), Dvora Meyers (The End of the Perfect 10), Eliot Nelson (The Beltway Bible), Megan Mulry (A Royal Pain)
What she wants to read: Literary and commercial fiction, especially upmarket and women’s fiction, as well as select memoir, narrative nonfiction, cultural studies, and pop culture. I’m especially looking for funny female writers, great love stories, campus novels, beach reads, family epics, and nonfiction projects that speak to the current cultural climate.
When you should contact her: Fiction writers, please wait until you have a complete, polished manuscript. Nonfiction writers, you should have a fully fleshed out idea and ideally a full book proposal.
Why you should want her as your agent: I like to think that I offer my authors the best of both worlds—the resources of a large, world-class agency but with a great deal of personal attention. I am a fast and voracious reader and feel that it is my duty to read widely in the genres I’m representing, to fully understand the market. I pride myself on my close working and personal relationships with editors at every publishing house, as well as my connections with the greater literary community in New York City.
How she wants to be contacted: Please send me a query and approximately ten to fifteen pages of your manuscript or proposal.
Who she represents: Kaitlyn Greenidge (We Love You, Charlie Freeman), Carmiel Banasky (The Suicide of Claire Bishop), Melissa Gorzelanczyk (Arrows), Sarah Prager (Queer, There, and Everywhere), Jason Tougaw (The One You Get)
What she wants to read: I’m actively seeking adult-fiction writers, both literary and upmarket. My background is in poetry and literary fiction, so beautiful language is one of the first things I look for in any project. Equally important are a strong voice and great story, which I’m looking for across genres. I would love to see a literary thriller, whether adult or young adult, come across my desk. For children’s books, I love voice-driven, contemporary fiction that isn’t afraid to tackle tough issues. I adore a middle-grade adventure story but am also taken by one that might deal with the loss of a sibling, for example, or a serious issue at school or with a friend. For nonfiction, I’m a music fanatic, and as such I’m always looking for great books on movements, culture, musicians themselves, or simply how we as a society respond to, and are affected by, the music around us. I’m a Detroit-area native, so I’d also love submissions for books that deal with the city itself, or cities like it, the politics surrounding them, and stories of people who live there. In addition to poetry, I have a strong background in public policy, so I’m incredibly interested in books that deal with politics, education, or other societal issues. Finally, I love all things pop culture, so I will never say no to a proposal about anything from “why we’re a Bachelor-obsessed nation” to “why we can’t ever seem to get enough of Gilmore Girls.”
When you should contact her: For fiction, a project should truly be finished before I see it. I recommend you have a not only complete but also well-edited manuscript before sending to me, or any agent. For nonfiction, a proposal is perfect.
Why you should want her as your agent: After nearly twelve years as an agent, representing award-winning authors, I’ve developed a hands-on approach to launching the careers of debut novelists. I’m a very editorial agent and love collaborating with my clients. Whether that’s idea development, manuscript feedback, assisting with publicity, social media, or marketing, I really do consider myself a full-service partner for my authors. I absolutely love what I do; I live and breathe for my clients and work tirelessly to promote their work and careers. Beyond that, while I’ve been a New Yorker for over a decade, I’m a Midwestern girl at heart, so you’ll find not only an advocate, but a friend in me as your agent. This can be a tough business, and I like to remind my clients why we all chose this profession in the first place: because we’re passionate about the written word.
How she wants to be contacted: Please send your query letter and first twenty pages (for fiction) or proposal (for nonfiction) as a Word document to carrie@empireliterary.com.
Who he represents: Isaac Oliver (Intimacy Idiot), Charlyne Yi (Oh the Moon: Stories From the Tortured Mind of Charlyne Yi), Rachel Lindsay, Manoush Zomorodi (Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self), A. Brad Schwartz (Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News), Rebekah Frumkin (The Comedown), Ruth Joffre (Night Beast and Other Stories)
What he wants to read: My taste tends to lean toward the literary, but as long as the plot surprises and entertains, I’ll be won over. I love to find new, unpredictable stories—I think every agent will tell you that—but I particularly enjoy the feeling, the unease, the excitement that creeps in when I honestly don’t know what’ll happen next. When I finish a book (or proposal), the lasting feeling of wonderment is what I’m after.
When you should contact him: You should write to me (and, yes, please do!) when you feel comfortable sharing your work. I tell writers that the right time to share your work with an agent is when you feel confident that it’ll speak for itself—without you having to be in the room. If you’re going to want to be over my shoulder saying, “Well, this part will be fixed…” or “I intend to make this part a little clearer…,” you aren’t ready to share the work, which is completely fine. Many writers make the mistake of looking for an agent too soon. An agent’s primary job is to sell your work, so if you don’t have anything yet to sell…wait until you do. You get one first impression. Make it count.
Where he can be reached: My inbox is always open to new and prospective clients: rh@skagency.com.
Why you should want him as your agent: I’m fun, I mean business, I care deeply about seeing each and every client succeed in her or his own way. When I work with any writer, regardless of genre or style, it’s a very personalized relationship.
How he wants to be contacted: A partial manuscript, a proposal, or full manuscript. The work doesn’t have to be 100 percent polished, but remember that I’m going to be considering its salability, not potential salability. Just make sure you’re ready (and feel confident) to send. If you’re excited to share your work with me, I’ll be excited to read it.
Who she represents: Meghan Flaherty (Tango Lessons), Brandon Hobson (Where the Dead Sit Talking)
What she wants to read: In almost any genre, I’m attracted to great prose and a strong sense of emotional intelligence on the page. For upmarket and literary fiction, I tend to be particularly drawn to relationship-driven novels, stories about obsession, and work that grapples with intimacy and its discontents. With nonfiction, I’m very interested in deeply reported narratives and stories that take the reader into the heart of a subculture as well as idea books with a surprising or unusual central argument.
When you should contact her: I’d like to see your work when you feel you’ve taken it as far as you can by yourself. With a novel, this will almost always mean an edited full manuscript; in nonfiction, I’d generally want to read at least the fundamental elements of a proposal (outline, sample pages, etc.).
Where she can be reached: It’s best to get in touch by e-mail at ce@goldinlit.com
Why you should want her as your agent: I do a lot of editorial work with my clients, generally from the ground level of a project. That can mean brainstorming about the concept behind nonfiction or coming up with plot solutions in fiction, but my goal is always to help authors reach the best possible version of their book before submission. I’m also a clear communicator who’s constantly thinking about what my clients want and need, and I will do everything possible to make those goals happen. I worked in marketing and digital publishing before coming to agenting, which gives me extra insight into how to position my clients in an evolving landscape.
How she wants to be contacted: Please send a query. If the work is fiction or completed nonfiction, include the first ten pages in the body of the e-mail.
Who he represents: Lawrence Osborne (Hunters in the Dark), Jennine Capó Crucet (Make Your Home Among Strangers), Ron Rash (The Risen), Lisa Servon (The Unbanking of America: How the Middle Class Survives), David Treuer (Prudence), Devin Leonard (Neither Snow nor Rain: A History of the United States Postal Service), Leah Vincent (Cut Me Loose: Sin and Salvation After My Ultra-Orthodox Girlhood), Diksha Basu (The Windfall)
What he wants to read: Debut literary and upmarket fiction; narrative nonfiction and memoir; journalists and academics writing new takes on culture, politics, and current events. Regardless of genre, I’m always interested in diverse voices and underrepresented perspectives, and as a native North Carolinian I am partial to great fiction set in the South.
When you should contact him: For fiction, it’s usually best to be in touch when you have a finished manuscript to share. For nonfiction, a draft of a proposal.
Why you should want him as your agent: I try to keep a small, selective list and only take on projects I really believe in, which enables me to be a hands-on and passionate advocate for each of my writers. This includes in-depth editorial work, working strategically to find the best publishing deals, and shepherding an author through all aspects of the publication process, including publicity and marketing. My goal is always to help each of my author’s books make as big an impact as possible and to build careers over time.
How he wants to be contacted: A query by e-mail with a full manuscript (for fiction) or a proposal (nonfiction).
Who she represents: Caite Dolan-Leach (Dead Letters), Mark O’Connell (To Be a Machine), Matt Gallagher (Youngblood), Joy Williams (Ninety-Nine Stories of God)
What she wants to read: I’m looking for books—whether fiction or nonfiction—that feel engaged with the larger world. That can mean having a big new idea, taking me to a place or a part of history that I haven’t seen, or simply having a kind of inquisitive spirit. I’m looking for writing that comes from a place of urgency.
When you should contact her: Ideally I’d like to hear from writers who have a finished manuscript or proposal ready for review. At the very least it should feel like you’ve really pushed the project as far as you can without outside eyes and feedback.
Why you should want her as your agent: The projects I look for are the kind of things I know I’m going to want to be in the trenches fighting for in the years to come (publishing is a slow business), and I think that shows in how I work with my clients—whether it’s reading multiple drafts, batting ideas around, or shepherding them through the publishing process. I like to be pretty hands-on, especially in the early, developmental stages: It’s exciting to watch something become the book we know it should be.
How she wants to be contacted: A query letter plus the first ten pages pasted into the body of an e-mail.
Who she represents: Joshua Ferris (To Rise Again at a Decent Hour), Bret Anthony Johnston (Remember Me Like This), Lily King (Euphoria), Celeste Ng (Everything I Never Told You), Cristina Henriquez (The Book of Unknown Americans), Helen Simonson (Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand), Mia Alvar (In the Country), Madeline Miller (The Song of Achilles), Alice Sebold (Lucky), Kathleen Kent (The Heretic’s Daughter), Nicole Dennis-Benn (Here Comes the Sun), Megan Mayhew Bergman (Almost Famous Women), Paula McLain (The Paris Wife), Kevin Wilson (The Family Fang), Charles Yu (How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe)
What she wants to read: My list is predominantly fiction, and I am particularly interested in representing diverse voices and perspectives from around the world. I’m always looking to learn something new from the fiction I read and to be taken somewhere I’ve never been before. I’m drawn to original voices, or retellings of stories we’ve heard before in new and innovative ways. I need to feel emotionally connected to the characters, and as obvious as it sounds, I need a real plot. More than anything, though, I just want to fall in love. I want to miss my subway stop because I can’t stop reading. I want to completely disappear into the world of the novel. I want to turn the last page and immediately feel the need to tell everyone I know about it.
When you should contact her: In general I think it’s best, when writing fiction, if you have a complete and polished manuscript. That means you’ve taken the time to self-edit and even stepped away from the project for some time so you know that you’ve really put everything into it that you can. If it’s nonfiction, then a proposal with forty to fifty pages of material is usually enough.
Why you should want her as your agent: At the Book Group we believe in a very hands-on approach at every stage of the publication process. I love to edit, and I bring a strong editorial eye and passionate commitment to each project, making sure I’ve done all I can do to help authors realize their vision and address any issues before we submit to publishers. I’m extremely selective in taking on new projects, which ensures that I’m able to give my clients the time and attention they need. I’m also committed to helping my clients establish and navigate their careers across many years and many books, so I like to be involved in everything from helping write jacket copy to developing a social media presence, pitching magazine ideas, and submitting short stories to brainstorming for the book’s marketing campaign and beyond. We are right there with you every step of the way, and in addition to the U.S. market, we’re thinking about international sales, film, television and audio, and also what your next project should be. This long-term, big-picture perspective and involvement is one of the most interesting parts of my job.
How she wants to be contacted: Please submit a query letter along with ten sample pages with “Julie Barer” in the subject line to submissions@thebookgroup.com. Please do not include any attachments.
Kevin Larimer is the editor in chief of Poets & Writers, Inc.
We did the work for you and found the most active and insightful agents to add to your Twitter feed. The seventy-eight listed below share with their followers upcoming pub dates, news, reading recommendations, and more. For more agents, visit our Literary Agents Database.
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Obed Silva, whose debut memoir, The Death of My Father the Pope, was published on December 7 by MCD. Silva’s memoir begins in the immediate aftermath of his father’s death. In the early hours of the morning in California, he receives a call from his distraught brother in Mexico, who informs him their father has succumbed to his lifelong alcoholism. Scarred by the violence of his father’s addiction, Silva briefly wavers about even attending the funeral, but quickly commits to looking closely at his father, at times even addressing him directly in the text: “When I see you again, will you receive me with open arms after I have written all of these terrible words about you, after I have told the truth?” Written with both great anger and tenderness, The Death of My Father the Pope is a uniquely rigorous study of grief and inheritance. “Obed Silva’s memoir is a magnificent and poignant achievement,” writes Greg Boyle. “Like the great literary giants he weaves throughout this narrative, we are brought to a rich and luminous excavation of the father wound, of the contours of death and the sure triumph of love.” Obed Silva was born in Chihuahua, Mexico, and immigrated to the United States as a toddler. A former gang member—he is paralyzed from the waist down, the result of a gunshot wound—he earned a master’s degree in medieval literature and is now an English professor at East Los Angeles College.
1. How long did it take you to write The Death of My Father the Pope? I started to write the book on July 14, 2009, the day after receiving the news that my father had passed away. I was on a plane to Chihuahua, Mexico, when I opened my journal and started to put pen to paper. Approximately ten years later, sometime in December 2019, after many, many exhausting revisions, the book was completed and sent off to Daniel Vazquez, who at the time worked with the editor of my great friend Héctor Tobar. A couple of weeks later, before the year was up—I don’t recall if it was before or after Christmas, but it was a nice present either way—I received an e-mail from Daniel telling me that they wanted to publish not only The Death of My Father the Pope but also the sequel, In the Hands of My Mother, which I am currently working on. Of course I said yes, signed the contract, and here we are now.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? The most challenging part about writing the book was having to relive all of the painful memories that I describe in it. I cried often over my handwritten words on the pages of my journals. The second most challenging thing was finding time, hence the ten years it took to complete.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? When writing The Death of My Father the Pope I would often write late at night, when it was the most quiet for me. I now try to write during the day in my office at East Los Angeles College, hours before my first class begins. I’m trying to make it routine, and so far it has been working out. Because of COVID, the campus is pretty empty and the buildings are quiet, so I arrive early, close my door, and start typing. Other times I just try to squeeze it in when I can. Sometimes I’ll be at a bar or restaurant or coffee shop, and I’ll just take out my journal and begin writing.
4. What are you reading right now? I am reading a number of books right now. I tend to do that. I’ll have one book at home, one in my office on campus, one in my car, and others in other places that I read depending on where I am at the moment. Here they are: A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving, The Last Great Road Bum by Héctor Tobar, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, and I most recently started The Saints of Santa Ana by Jonathan E. Calvillo, which I picked up at a small bookstore called LibroMobile in Santa Ana, California. Lastly, on Audible I’m currently listening to Wild Life by Richard Ford. Oh and I can’t forget the book I keep on my nightstand next to my bed: The Adolescent by Dostoevsky. I’m always reading something by Dostoevsky—I want to read all of his works before my days are up.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? I may be biased in my answer for this question because he’s a close friend of mine, but I believe that Héctor Tobar deserves wider recognition. I mean here’s a writer that writes as a journalist, novelist, sociologist, biographer, you name it. And as a Latino, he writes about people and communities that are often overlooked and marginalized. He sheds light on the immigrant experience and on the communities that they create once settled in this country. In his novel The Barbarian Nurseries, for example, the hero of the story is the Latina nanny. To me, that is important. Stories of Latina/os are not being told like those of other groups, and if they are, often they are stereotypical and written by non-Latino/a folk.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? The greatest impediment to my writing life now is grading student essays. Any English professor out there will tell you that grading essays is time-consuming. I love my students, but I could live without having to grade their essays. Now if any of them read this, they’re going to say, “Just give me an A.” Can’t do that.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? I can’t think of something that my editor told me during the publishing process that has especially stuck with me. But I can tell you that my editor and the entire FSG team have been completely accessible to me from the start. They have made the entire process stress-free and even enjoyable. I thought that I was going to have to do all kinds of restructuring and rewriting, but that was not the case. I didn’t have to change much from the manuscript. And what I did change or remove, they kindly asked me if I was willing to change or remove it. Suffice it to say, it’s been smooth sailing from the start.
8. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry? There is some Spanish sprinkled in my book, and my publisher didn’t have someone in-house who could edit Spanish. And I don’t really know how to write in Spanish. I can spell and create sentences, but I don’t know where the accents go, so I really needed someone to make sure all the accents were in the correct places. Eventually, one of my colleagues edited the Spanish for me, and she was paid by my publisher for her work. But that’s what I would change: the behind-the-scenes demographics. I’d make the publishing industry more accessible to Latino/a writers and editors.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? My most trusted reader is my friend Héctor Tobar. He mentored me throughout the writing of The Death of My Father the Pope. He was also the first person to read the book when it was a manuscript still in its early stages. His honest criticism was crucial to the completion of it.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? The best piece of writing advice I’ve ever heard is to be patient and disciplined, to take as much time as a story needs to be completed. If you feel that the story is good and that it needs to be read, then keep at it until you’re happy with it. Although I don’t know that a writer is ever happy with the end result.
Obed Silva, author of The Death of My Father the Pope. (Credit: Dario Debora)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Neel Patel, whose first novel, Tell Me How to Be, is out today from Flatiron Books. From its very first sentences, Tell Me How to Be signals the strained dynamic between its main characters: “My mother always told me to be a good boy. I suspect she knew that I wasn’t.” Akash, who at twenty-eight is still closeted to his family, travels from L.A. to Illinois for the puja one year after his father’s death and to help his mother, Renu, pack up the house in preparation for her move to London. Alternating between Akash and Renu’s perspectives, Patel renders how both mother and son are weighed down by secrets and memories. Captivating and heartrending, Tell Me How to Be is a moving portrait of the difficulty of learning how to live with the past and truly face the present. “A soulful and seductive love song of a book, Tell Me How to Be is a keen and sharply hilarious celebration of the universal messiness of desire and the necessity of coming clean first with ourselves,” writes Nancy Jooyoun Kim. Neel Patel is a first-generation Indian American who grew up in Champaign, Illinois. His debut story collection, If You See Me, Don’t Say Hi (Flatiron Books, 2018), was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and was longlisted for the Story Prize and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. He lives in Los Angeles.
1. How long did it take you to write Tell Me How to Be? In reality it took me a little less than a year to write it, but in many ways, this was the book I was meant to write my whole life.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? The most challenging thing was encompassing two characters’ past and present experiences, spanning continents and generations, while making the book feel light and propulsive. The real work was in layering the story, figuring out what went where.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? I usually write from my apartment in downtown L.A. I need quiet, but just the right amount of noise: too much and I can’t concentrate, too little and I’ll end up scrolling through Instagram. I typically write in the mornings and afternoons, when my mind is still clear, and I try to write every day—though I often take breaks to binge-watch TV and nurse hangovers.
4. What are you reading right now? I’m reading A Slow Fire Burning by Paula Hawkins. I want to write a suspense thriller, so I’m reading all the thrillers I can find!
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? All of them? I think authors don’t often get the recognition they deserve. It takes a lot of work to write a book. I will say one book I think deserved way more attention than it got was Speak No Evil by Uzodinma Iweala—that was such an important and beautiful book.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? My social life. I like to go out. I like to party. It’s hard to reconcile the part of me that wants to drop it low at the club with the part that needs to be sitting at a desk with my “thoughts.”
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? “You’re past your deadline.” Ha. There were so many little tidbits of advice or notes, it’s hard to choose just one.
8. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry? I’d like to see more people having fun. Some writers take themselves too seriously.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? My editor. She understands where I’m trying to go with something, even at its earliest stage, and is able to nudge me in the right direction.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? “Don’t do it.” Because that just made me want to do it even more.
Neel Patel, author of Tell Me How to Be. (Credit: Bradford Rogne)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features James Hannaham, whose latest book, Pilot Impostor, is out today from Soft Skull Press. Throughout Pilot Impostor, Hannaham wrestles with the potential futility of his own project—of making art in a time of (and about) disaster. He asks: “Doesn’t it lately seem a foregone conclusion that the psychotic combination of our science, our religion, and our stupidity would lead us to self-destruction? How much of a chance does this piece of writing have to last?” Yet he persists, despite despair, and strives to make sense of the most extreme catastrophes of the modern era, from isolated plane crashes to systemic racism. Inventive in form and told with devastating wit, Pilot Impostor reveals the volatility and perilous edges of human consciousness. “Pilot Impostor takes us on an exhilarating, incandescent ride,” writes Monique Truong. “Words crash, meanings disintegrate and reincarnate, histories disappear and appear on the radar, and against all odds the pilot knows exactly where we’re headed.” James Hannaham is a writer and visual artist. He is the author of the novels God Says No (McSweeney’s, 2009), which was a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and Delicious Foods (Little, Brown, 2016), which won the PEN/Faulkner Award and a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. His writing has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Out, and 4Columns, among other publications.
1. How long did it take you to write Pilot Impostor? The idea that it would be a book came to me on Sunday, December 18, 2016, while traveling from Nelson Mandela International Airport in Praia, Santiago, Cape Verde, to Lisbon, Portugal, on TAP Portugal Flight 1534, departing Praia (RAI) 13:40, arriving in Lisbon Humberto Delgado (LIS) at 18:45. I finished the writing part sometime in the spring of this year, maybe April, and getting photo permissions took until July? So almost exactly five years. But I was writing a novel at the same time, so maybe it would’ve taken me less time to write both if I had worked on one or the other.
2. What is the earliest memory that you associate with the book? I suppose it was the sudden, strong feeling that I could turn various obsessions into a book that I got after reading the first section of “The Keeper of Sheep,” the first poem in Fernando Pessoa & Co., an anthology of Fernando Pessoa’s work. Supposedly penned by the heteronym Alberto Caeiro, it begins, “I’ve never kept sheep / But it’s as if I did.” Caeiro is supposed to be a mystically nonmystic poet who espouses the idea that perception is everything, that things are exactly what they look like. This sounded sort of like totalitarianism to me, though I might not have said so in that moment.
3. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? Getting—and paying for!—photo permissions after having grabbed so many random images off the web turned out to be pretty difficult. Which is proof to me that I wasn’t really thinking that I would get it published, I was just doing it to do it. I have a few other unfinished projects like this on my laptop going years back.
4. Where, when, and how often do you write? It depends. I have an art/writing studio separate from my apartment, where I might do any number of things in a given day, round-robin style, usually in the mid-to-late afternoon. How often I write depends on what parameters. I like to include the thinking part of writing in the process, not just the sitting-in-front-of-the-laptop-and-bashing-the-keys part; thinking is really about 90 percent of the work. So I’m going to say I am always writing something, because I never know what material or experience will turn out to be significant to a project, and I’m “Always thinking / Always busy cooking up an angle / Working on the tiny blueprint of the angle / Sketching out the burning autumn leaves,” as They Might Be Giants once put it.
5. What are you reading right now? My students and I just sort of finished The Bear Comes Home, which was polarizing, and so good fodder for discussion, and this week we’re reading Maus, which, it is a little embarrassing to say, I have known of for decades without having read it in its entirety.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? It would be easier to say which ones deserve less wide recognition. Over the summer I wrote a piece about William Gardner Smith and his book The Stone Face; I feel as if that guy didn’t get his due. I feel as if Earl Lovelace has been overshadowed by V. S. Naipaul—he is not alone, I know—which irritates me because Lovelace is far more compassionate and funky and his sentences are just better. Writing in translation generally does not get enough attention in the United States.
7. What is one thing that surprised you during the writing of Pilot Impostor? I started out thinking the book was about failures of leadership and incompetence masquerading as experience and then at a certain point it became a metaphor for living inside one’s own mind—that is to say, being the pilot of a doomed vehicle, not really knowing what was real and what was unreal, having questions about one’s own identity and those of others.
8. How did you know when the book was finished? When we got done with the photo permissions.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? Clarinda Mac Low is always the first person to whom I show my work, because she has read really extensively, she reads really quickly, and she can gently describe to me what’s working and what’s not. She shares with me the inability to separate artistic community from family. She’s not at all associated with the publishing world—she’s much more of a dance/performance/art person, and that community was and remains foundational for me and my values.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? Jennifer Egan once said to me, “You have to give yourself permission to write badly.” But then she also said, “The only leverage we have is the quality of our work.” These I think are the bookends of the process. I think of the first while drafting and the second while editing.
James Hannaham, author of Pilot Impostor. (Credit: Isaac Fitzgerald)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Truong Tran, whose seventh book of poetry, book of the other: small in comparison, was published on November 9, 2021. Throughout book of the other, Tran scrutinizes how whiteness has pervaded his life and uses poetry to attempt to wrest back control. At times this feels like an impossible task: “can you call yourself a writer.when everything youve written. feels as though. you have been written.” To combat the racism and gaslighting he experiences, Tran repeats the “facts. because the truth is subject to interpretations. when the white reader of this book. tells you that this couldnt possibly have happened.” With a unique and precise attention to syntax, punctuation, and tense, Truong demands to be seen and begins to plant the seeds of a new narrative for all those who have been othered. “This is witness of whiteness at the scenes of what it refuses to name crimes,” writes Douglas Kearney. “This book is necessary—terribly so. Yesterday, today, and for the foreseeable future.” Truong Tran was born in Saigon, Vietnam. He is the author of six previous books of poetry, including Four Letter Words (Apogee Press, 2008) and 100 Words (Omnidawn, 2021), which he coauthored with Damon Potter. Truong lives in San Francisco and teaches at Mills College in Oakland.
1. How long did it take you to write book of the other: small in comparison? It’s taken me fifteen years or so to live this book. I guess you can say that it’s taken me just as long to write it. Some microaggression about race happened to you and it gets lodged in your body. You carry it with you through life and one day it gets dislodged when you least expect it to and you play that moment in your head again and again. When something like what happened in the book happens to you, it never stops happening. You live with it, it becomes a part of you. You are looking for a way to put it down. Writing this book became a necessity. What is it about? I am still trying to put it down even now so I won’t relitigate the subject. I won’t recount what happened. It began on December 9, 2005. I know this for a fact because I went from the university straight to the movie theater where I saw Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain. I remember being moved to tears. My friend who watched the movie with me said that she refused to cry for a movie about two white men.
2. What is the earliest memory that you associate with the book? I had published a version of this book in 2008. It was titled Four Letter Words. It was written in coded language, written from a place of fear. I remember being invited into a classroom to lecture about Four Letter Words. The class was taught by someone I wrote about in the book. It occurred to me while I was lecturing, this individual did not see herself in the book. I knew then that I would have to rewrite the book in no uncertain terms. What I did not know at the time was that the narrative of Four Letter Words would not only be rewritten but also relived. book of the other is a book about race. That memory, the classroom, my lecture about Four Letter Words, they were all about race. It will always be about race.
3. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? I wrote this book with the constraint of honesty. This is easier said than done. Honesty meant that I had to come out of hiding. I had to break my silence. I write poetry. I am addicted to metaphors. Honesty meant that I had to write the book without metaphors or at least attempt to do this. I did not entirely accomplish this because the metaphor appears out of habit or necessity. The metaphor is a shelter and as such, it is a luxury. This book cannot afford such luxuries. There is no hiding from the truth, the facts. Inside the book and in the world. There is no hiding for both the writer and the reader.
4. Where, when, and how often do you write? I have been writing in bed right before I go to sleep and right after I wake up. There is something about writing in this way that feels like the act of putting down the things I carry. I wrote this book as a way of putting down the weight of someone else’s shame. I do most of this writing in bed before sleeping as a reminder that I have a voice, and again in bed before I start the day. I wake up in silence. Writing helps me find my voice. I am always looking for my voice.
5. What are you reading right now? I’m reading Wanda Coleman’s Wicked Enchantment. I am rereading it for the millionth time. I like to keep her words close by. I miss her.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Bhanu Kapil is my ride-or-die poet of a lifetime! Her words have a way of giving my writing purpose. The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers changed my perceptions of poetry forever. And her latest book, How to Wash a Heart, is still teaching me how to breathe.
7. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? Silence. It has always been silence. Even during the times when I thought that silence was my right and my power. I thought that silence was a withholding that asserted my authority as a writer. Silence as an absence of my language, that in my absence, there would be a need, desire, or demand that my voice is present, my contribution would be seen as a necessity. This is the quandary, no this is the fantasy, no this is the burden of being the immigrant, of being the other. This is the overwhelming hope of belonging. Silence is not just an impediment. It is a lifelong path of obstacles. From a very young age, I knew that I wanted to do the work of writing. I wanted to say something. I just did not know that I had to overcome the work of silencing that was happening to me. Writing these days is about saying what needs to be said.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you before you started book of the other, what would you say? I would offer my earlier self two questions and a demand. Where are you? What are you afraid of? Break something. Use your words and break something now!
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? My editor for this book, Sunyoung Lee. She kept on asking the difficult questions. She insisted on clarity when the book needed clarity. She was my editor but also someone who walked right next to me as we walked this book back home. Kaya Press is the only U.S. publisher doing the work of publishing Asian diasporic literature. This book could not have been edited by anyone else. This book could not have been published by any other publisher.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? The late Wanda Coleman, who was also a dear friend, once whispered to me, I’m paraphrasing here, “If you allow them to not see themselves, they’ll take it.”
Truong Tran, author of book of the other: small in comparison.
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Claire Oshetsky, whose debut novel, Chouette, is out today from Ecco. Tiny, a professional cellist and the narrator of Chouette, has a sense of foreboding about her pregnancy: “This baby is an owl-baby,” she tells her husband. “If I have this baby, it’s going to kill me.” But while Tiny’s fears endure even after she gives birth to her daughter, who does indeed turn out to be an owl, she also loves her fiercely. She resists her panicked husband’s search for treatments and strives to understand her daughter’s own needs and desires. With Chouette, Oshetsky movingly renders the variousness and sweep of motherhood. “Viscous, tender, baffling, and glorious, Chouette is an unforgettable fairy tale that glitters darkly with Oshetsky’s raw and soaring brilliance,” writes Rachel Yoder. “Part love letter, part lament, Chouette astonishes as each perfected sentence burrows deep into the maternal shadows of love, possession, selfhood, and sanity. A bone-deep, breathtaking wonder.” Claire Oshetsky is a novelist whose writing has appeared in the New York Times, Salon, and Wired. She lives with her family in California. Chouette draws on her own experiences of motherhood.
1. How long did it take you to write Chouette? If I hadn’t kept all the drafts then I might have answered “about three months,” and in a way it’s true. One day I wrote what became the first sentence in Chouette: “I dream I’m making tender love with an owl.” The sentence turned out to be the key that unlocked the entire story, where the rest of the novel almost wrote itself. A more true answer, though, would be that the novel took me nine years to write. There were a lot of false starts.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? Without question my greatest struggle was in finding the right voice to tell this story. I’d never written fiction in the first person before, and I really fought against it. The voice of my narrator was a voice I didn’t recognize, and I didn’t know what to make of it, and at first I didn’t trust it. Once I yielded to the way the story apparently wanted to be told, though, it felt as if my protagonist was in the room with me, telling me her story, and that I was just there to take it down. Other writers have also described this feeling, as if they are transcribing stories being told to them by their characters. I’ve always thought the notion was a little fanciful until it happened to me.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? Whenever I can write, I write. When I’m deep into a project I need to pull myself away from it and remind myself to sleep and eat. My preferred place to write is in my library, surrounded by my books. I frequently consult the words of other authors as I write. If I’m writing a fight scene, I’ll read eleven fight scenes. I like to study how other authors end chapters, and how they split paragraphs. I try to learn from their beginnings and their endings. Often when I write it feels as if I’m tapping into stored-up memories of favorite words and rhythms in my head—from poems, mostly, that I’ve read in the past and nearly memorized, but not quite. There are bits of T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and many other inspirations in Chouette. I like the idea of a reader out there who might be reminded of an echo of a poem or passage they love when they read a certain sentence in my novel.
4. What are you reading right now? Palmares by Gayl Jones.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Gayl Jones.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? Self-doubt.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? “They want to make an offer.”
8. What is one thing that surprised you during the writing of Chouette? I’ve already mentioned the surprise of Chouette’s first sentence, and the surprise of the novel’s voice. I don’t know if I can ever explain, though, just how flabbergasted I was at the way this sentence and this voice compelled me to write a story that’s steeped in the fantastic, the surreal, and the uncanny. This novel began as a memoir, actually. The plan was to write about my real experiences as the mother of two unique children. I ended up writing a novel about a woman who gives birth to a child, conceived with the help of a giant owl. I was surprised. On the other hand, what I’ve ended up writing seems very close to the truth of my experience as a mother, which was entirely surreal.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? It’s been my everlasting delight to work with my agent Alexa Stark and with my editors at Ecco and Virago, Sara Birmingham and Rose Tomaszewska, to make the novel better than I could on my own. I imagine they will continue to be my first and most trusted readers for upcoming projects. They were extraordinary partners in the creative process, suggesting not just line edits or other smallish changes for clarity, but also encouraging me to try new scenes and to explore new fictional directions. I wrote five different endings! As I recall it, ending number four won out, but I loved the chance to play with many other possibilities and other fates for my characters. I loved the playfulness of the process—the sense that we were trying things out together, just to see what happens, and that we could always back the changes out again if they didn’t work.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? The late Jan Morris said: “I believe in the religion of kindness.” Is it writing advice? Not exactly. But I feel kindness in everything Jan Morris wrote, and I try to follow her example and to write from a place of kindness. Kindness to my characters, and kindness to my readers. As I write I always try to keep the idea in mind that we humans must take tender care of one another.
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Domenico Starnone and Jhumpa Lahiri, the author and the translator of Trust, which is out today from Europa Editions. When Pietro’s lover, Teresa, suggests that they each divulge a terrible secret, he expects that the act will bind them together for good. Instead, a few days later, they decide to bring their tumultuous three-year relationship to an end. Despite their separation, however, Pietro remains preoccupied by Teresa and the fact of her knowledge of his darkest story. He goes about his life—falls in love with a new woman, builds a successful career, constructs a polished public persona—but thoughts of Teresa reassert themselves at various turns. In subtle and dexterous prose, Starnone renders both the pleasures and anxieties that accompany desire and being known. Domenico Starnone is an Italian writer, screenwriter, and journalist. He was born in Naples and lives in Rome. He is the author of over twenty works of fiction, including Via Gemito, or First Execution (Europa Editions, 2009), winner of Italy’s most prestigious literary prize, the Strega. Jhumpa Lahiri is a writer and translator who works in both English and Italian. Her most recent novel, Whereabouts, was published by Knopf in April. She has translated two previous books by Starnone, both published by Europa Editions: Ties (2017) and Trick (2018).
1. How long did it take you to complete work on Trust? Domenico Starnone: The multiple drafts kept me busy for over a year. The project itself and the preparatory notes have accompanied me for much longer.
Jhumpa Lahiri: Six months to complete the first draft, and another three months or so to revise it.
2. What was the most challenging thing about the project? Domenico Starnone: Describing how much escapes us, how at times the person whom we most love is also the person who scares us the most, and how, in the story of our lives, we attribute great importance to certain irrelevant events simply to avoid seeing what isn’t irrelevant.
Jhumpa Lahiri: Finding solutions to translate different words for love out of Italian.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? Where, when, and how often do you translate? Domenico Starnone: I write all the time and wherever I can. But when it comes time to put the story down on paper, I work sitting in an armchair by the window, with the computer on my knees, until I have a full first draft. I write every day from eight in the morning until lunchtime, then from three in the afternoon until dinnertime.
Jhumpa Lahiri: I write and translate when I have time and wherever I happen to be. Usually at home or in a library. The amount of time and energy I have to devote to these activities changes from day to day given that I also teach at a university.
4. What are you reading right now? Domenico Starnone: I’ve just finished a novel by Antonio Pascale, La foglia di fico, out in November in Italy. Each chapter mixes, in the most surprising ways, trees and human affairs. Pascale works at the Ministry of Agriculture, he is well versed in the sciences, but above all he’s a fine storyteller.
Jhumpa Lahiri: Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Domenico Starnone: I’d have to give you so many names. It’s a good moment for Italian literature. Generally I’m intrigued by writers who build worlds that are distant from mine and from whom I am thereby able to learn. I’ll name two: Melania Mazzucco and Michele Mari.
Jhumpa Lahiri: Alba de Céspedes.
6. What is one thing you might change about the literary community or publishing industry? Domenico Starnone: I would like it if books were considered more than products from which to gain, in different ways, shapes, and forms, a little profit. Books are living organisms. They want their voices to be heard, they want to discuss and be discussed. They need good readers from the very first line.
Jhumpa Lahiri: Encourage more writers to write short stories as opposed to novels.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? Domenico Starnone: “It’s a mysterious story.” I’m still thinking of the adjective mysterious, and I hope my editor meant elusive.
Jhumpa Lahiri: I began translating the book without telling my agent or editor I was doing it. In fact I waited until I was almost finished before telling Domenico that I had translated the book. I wanted to surprise him.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your creative life? Domenico Starnone: The books that I loved and that I love deeply. I consider them so powerful that it discourages me.
Jhumpa Lahiri: The rest of my life.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? Domenico Starnone: My wife and my daughter. They are implacable and therefore essential.
Jhumpa Lahiri: Now that I write in Italian, Domenico is one of my most trusted readers, for the obvious reasons.
10. What’s the best piece of creative advice you’ve ever heard? Domenico Starnone: When I was about sixteen a teacher told me not to use the adjective strange. “Don’t say something is strange, show that it is.” Since then, every now and again, I forbid myself from using some adjective or another.
Jhumpa Lahiri: One must hear the story.
Editor’s Note: Domenico Starnone’s answers appear in translation from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri.
Domenico Starnone and Jhumpa Lahiri, the author and the translator of Trust. (Credit: Starnone: Alamy; Lahiri: Marco Delogu)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Pajtim Statovci and David Hackston, the author and the translator of the novel Bolla, which is out today from Pantheon. Bolla follows Arsim and Miloš, two young men who first meet in Kosovo in 1995—as the threat of war looms—and begin an affair. Arsim, who is married and a soon-to-be father, is Albanian, while Miloš is Serbian. “We should be enemies,” Arsim reflects. “But now, as we touch, there is nothing between us that is strange or foreign to the other.” When the violence in the region escalates, Arsim’s family decides to leave the country and Miloš enlists in the army, and yet despite their abrupt separation, they remain forever touched by each other. The story extends into the 2000s, weaving back and forth in time, and is punctuated by the legend of a demonic serpent. This is a sweeping novel about difference, desire, and the consequences of war. Pajtim Statovci was born in Kosovo in 1990 and moved with his family to Finland when he was two years old. He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Helsinki. He is also the author of My Cat Yugoslavia (Pantheon, 2017) and Crossing (Pantheon, 2019), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Bolla was awarded Finland’s highest literary honor, the Finlandia Prize. David Hackston is a British translator of Finnish and Swedish literature and drama. He graduated from University College London in 1999 with a degree in Scandinavian studies.
1. How long did it take you to complete work on Bolla? Pajtim Statovci: I wrote the first sentences of Bolla about ten years ago. However, I often find it difficult to designate the starting point of a novel. Many aspects, themes, and even plotlines have been on my mind for much longer than the actual years of writing and working on the novel.
David Hackston: After translating a preliminary sample from different sections of the book, preparing the initial draft of Bolla took around three months. Of course, the relative speed of a translation project depends very much on the style of the original, but a good rule of thumb is to allow around one month for every hundred pages of text. Though Pajtim’s rich deployment of Finnish is always a challenge, over time I’ve become more familiar with his voice, and with each subsequent translation—this is the third of his novels I have translated—getting the initial draft done feels easier. Though it’s never “easy” in the truest sense of the word.
2. What is the earliest memory that you associate with the book? Pajtim Statovci: On the last page of the novel there’s this picture of bolla, a demonic serpent. I think I was maybe six or seven years old when I drew this picture—that has been edited and photoshopped by a graphic designer to fit the page—based on the stories I was told about this creature. How it spends its life in a dark cave, hiding from humans, only to be released once a year for a single day. And when it’s released for that brief moment of freedom, it becomes a kulshedra, a dragon that causes havoc by destroying everything and everyone it sees. I think that this drawing was, in a way, one of the starting points of this book.
David Hackston: My very earliest memory of Bolla is when Pajtim sent me a draft of the novel, some six months before it was first published in Finnish. This was a great privilege, as authors don’t ordinarily involve their translators in the process of writing the original novel. It was fascinating to compare this early draft with the finished product. Of course, through translations into different languages, the text takes on new life again and again. In this sense, the publication of the original—in this case, the Finnish text—isn’t really the end of the process so much as a pitstop on a much longer journey.
3. What was the most challenging thing about the project? Pajtim Statovci: I really wanted to challenge myself with this novel by writing a story with a narrator that is not a typical hero. Bolla’sprotagonist is a human wreck, a man that is so lost and broken and wounded that he ends up hurting the people closest to him. In fact, creating this character has been one of the hardest things in my writing career. After failing to find a believable narrator’s voice for him multiple times, I had to disregard some “unwritten rules” of fiction writing, such as the necessity of having the reader in your corner all the time. Doing that also freed me, because now I could write without fear of judgment, and I started getting somewhere. A catharsis isn’t necessarily always peaceful.
David Hackston: As I mentioned earlier, Pajtim’s use of language is particularly rich, and rethinking this richness in another language is always a challenge, though one that I relish. One particular challenge here is in conveying aspects of the history explored in the novel to readers who may not necessarily be familiar with the details of the Kosovo-Serbia conflict. The translator has to provide little signposts here and there to keep the reader up to speed, but in such a way that the prose doesn’t read like a textbook.
4. Where, when, and how often do you write? Where, when, and how often do you translate? Pajtim Statovci: I only write when I feel like I have something to say. I don’t have a work schedule, and I don’t write every day. I need to be inspired and motivated to be able to start, and if I force myself to write, what I have managed to write is usually something that just doesn’t last. Currently I work from home. Before COVID-19 I worked in libraries and cafés. My day usually consists of answering e-mails, reading, occasional interviews—and on a good day, writing, too.
David Hackston: Some translators really need absolute silence in order to concentrate, but I actually prefer a little background hubbub. I translated most of Bolla at a café across the street from my house. Because I often travel—at least in pre-pandemic times—I sometimes need to translate whenever I get the chance: in cafés, local libraries, in transit at an airport. In this respect, the pandemic proved challenging as it forced me to find a way of concentrating at home where, paradoxically, there are so many other things that easily distract me.
5. What are you reading right now? Pajtim Statovci: I’m reading Emma Cline’s Daddy. It was just published in Finnish, translated by Kaijamari Sivill. I enjoy Cline’s writing immensely. These stories are so rich in detail, drawing you in instantly. What is left unsaid, to bubble under the surface, is what I really do appreciate in Cline’s work. It defies explanation and doesn’t avoid a single thing.
David Hackston: One of the drawbacks of being a translator is that I rarely get the opportunity to read anything that isn’t directly related to my work: I’m either reading the original of an upcoming translation project, checking the proofs of a translation about to go to print, editing things I translated last week, or more often than not all of the above at once. It’s also hard to read Finnish literature without my translator’s spectacles on. I’m currently reading Lovetown by Polish author Michał Witkowski, in a glorious and uproarious Finnish translation by the excellent Tapani Kärkkäinen, and Pete Buttigieg’s Trust.
6. What is one thing you might change about the literary community or publishing industry? Pajtim Statovci: I wouldn’t know.
David Hackston: In the twenty or so years I have been working as a translator, the number of titles published in English translation has grown steadily, something demonstrated by the recent inclusion of a category for translated literature at the National Book Awards. This is a great development. Given the rise in popularity and visibility of translated fiction in the English-speaking world, sometimes it’s disappointing when reviewers, magazines, and journals forget to mention the input of the translator in the process, giving rise to the recent #namethetranslator hashtag on Twitter. While we don’t necessarily need or want to bask in the limelight, we have creative agency too, and it’s only right that it should get the credit it deserves.
7. What, if anything, will you miss most about working on the book? Pajtim Statovci: I don’t know if I miss anything about it, really. Writing this book was, as I said, very consuming and also emotionally draining. It’s been over two years since I finished Bolla, and I have moved on to other interests and other themes. The excitement of having something new to work on is what I like to focus on, and not miss what’s forever gone. When you’ve given your work for publication, it’ll never be yours again, it’ll never give you the comfort of being solely yours, a place of freedom. You just need to build this space again from scratch.
David Hackston: The worlds, characters, and lives portrayed in Pajtim’s books are very unique, and there’s always an element of sadness at saying goodbye to them once the translation goes to print. But as I said earlier, just as the publication of the original isn’t the end of the process, neither is the publication of the translation. The book will go on to live a life of its own, and it’s gratifying to read reviews and hear other people’s thoughts about something that until that point had existed only on my computer. This is why we translate: to make fascinating works of literature accessible to other readers, who can then make up their own minds and have thoughts of their own about them.
8. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Pajtim Statovci: I find it a bit hard to say what counts as “wide recognition.” But I’d like to see more discussion about the works of György Dragomàn and Hiromi Kawakami, both of whom are respected and recognized authors.
David Hackston: Among authors writing in English, it’s hard to say because everything we read has already been published and, therefore, “recognized.” The one English-language author I keep coming back to is Alan Hollinghurst, for the stories but also for the beauty of the writing. As for Finnish authors, who to my knowledge haven’t been published in English translation but certainly should be, there are many, but I would particularly mention Riitta Jalonen, whose recent novel Clarity is a touching, semi-fictionalized account of the life and career of New Zealand author Janet Frame, and Sirpa Kähkönen, whose novels, notably her Kuopio series, explore aspects of Finnish history and life in rural communities.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? Pajtim Statovci: I have many trusted readers, friends and colleagues, all of whom focus on different things while reading, which is helpful. Then, I listen carefully to everything my editors here in Finland, as well as abroad, especially in the United States and the U.K., have to say, as English is a language I understand and know, to some extent. I equally respect the opinions of my translators, especially David, who has done a fantastic job in bringing all of my books to life in the English language. He has this miraculous ability to capture the essence, the soul and spirit, my writing. I am very lucky to have him by my side.
David Hackston: At least for me, this is generally the copy editor. They are able to read the very first draft of a translation, often still full of question marks and chunks of the original text, and to look beyond the roughness and see the novel itself as it emerges through the translation process.
10. What’s the best piece of creative advice you’ve ever heard? Pajtim Statovci: “Creativity is tolerating continuous incompleteness.”
David Hackston: Often it’s the comments said in passing that can end up being the most important. I remember studying Finnish in London sometime around 1998, and my late Finnish teacher, Hannele Branch, saying after a short translation exercise, “Have you ever thought about becoming a translator?” At the time, I hadn’t ever thought about it, but now, twenty-plus years later, this feels like a significant moment.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Sirpa Kähkönen’s Kuopio books were a trilogy. They are a series.
Pajtim Statovci and David Hackston, the author and the translator of Bolla. (Credit: Statovci: Anna Kurki; Hackston: Ville Kuukka)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Clare Sestanovich, whose debut story collection, Objects of Desire, is out today from Knopf. The eleven stories that make up Objects of Desires are filled with subtle yet significant gestures. A boyfriend “close to getting angry” goes to lie down and faces the wall; a mother falls asleep in her daughter’s bed after she leaves for college; a husband pauses to mark his place in the book he is reading when his wife asks for a divorce. Throughout the collection, Sestanovich remains this attuned to the often precarious dynamics between her characters. She reveals how friends, family, and lovers perform or fail to perform for one another—how there will always be mystery, miscommunication, and strangeness even in the most intimate of relationships. “Astonishing—one of the best story collections I’ve read in a long time,” writes Brandon Taylor. “The stories in Objects of Desire are subtle and sophisticated, written with sensitive lucidity and warmth; their emotional effects are brought about naturally, almost indirectly, and one leaves each of the stories feeling a little homesick.” Clare Sestanovich is an editor at the New Yorker. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Harper’s, and Electric Literature. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
1. How long did it take you to write Objects of Desire? The oldest story in this collection is five years old, and when I wrote it, I had no idea that I was writing a book. It took another year or so for me to realize, and even then, I didn’t quite believe it. I never referred to “my book.” Other people sometimes called it that, which was surprising and flattering and a little preposterous. It was just a lot of words on my computer! But up until the very last minute, that’s all a book ever is. The newest story was written a year ago, at the height of the pandemic, when I thought the collection was already finished. Which is all to say: The book often knows more, and knows better, than you do.
2. What is the earliest memory that you associate with the book? In the early months of writing the book, I turned down a job, because it was a job that I suspected would give me meaning and purpose, and I was afraid that if I took it I would use it as an excuse to abandon writing—a vaster but far less stable source of meaning and purpose. I don’t think this was an especially brave decision—had I not found another way to make money, it could simply have been arrogant and unwise—but it was a difficult one, and I lost a lot of sleep over it. The agonizing helped, though. I put my eggs in this basket, this book, and after that, I had to do whatever I could to find out what would hatch.
3. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? That hardest part was that every day I had to decide—again—to keep writing it.
4. Where, when, and how often do you write? I write early every morning. This isn’t really a preference, or a principle, it just happens to be the only schedule that I can follow while also doing my day job. I regret that early risers seem virtuous and night owls seem cool. I would much rather be cool!
5. What are you reading right now? I just finished A Shock by Keith Ridgway and started Erasure by Percival Everett.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Mary Robison is funny and unafraid and knows how to break your heart in two sentences. Why aren’t we all talking about her?
7. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry? I wish there were more paths to being in it. Communities so often just mean institutions. And getting inside one institution usually requires passing through another, which in turn requires pushing open the door at yet another. I hope we can remap the labyrinth, because too many people get lost in it.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Objects of Desire, what would you say? I wouldn’t tell her that it was going to work out. The negative capability that is required to write without certainty but with conviction is surely the most important skill you can acquire. I haven’t yet, but every day that I lose and find my faith—in myself, in my prose—feels like one step closer to relinquishing the need to believe in anything other than the process.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? For a long time my writing felt a little bit like a secret. I wasn’t hiding it on purpose, but other people only ever glimpsed it in bits and pieces, and most of them never saw it all. My agent, Bill, was the first person who ever saw the whole thing, and it’s true what they say about being seen: It makes all the difference. I imprinted on Bill the way ducklings do. You know you trust a reader when they tell you to cut your first sentence or your last sentence—those sacred darlings!—and your only reaction is, of course.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? My greatest menace as a writer is self-doubt, which is why I return so often to the advice that Martha Graham gave to Agnes de Mille: “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open…. No artist is pleased…. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”
Clare Sestanovich, author of Objects of Desire. (Credit: Edward Friedman)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Mariana Oliver and Julia Sanches, the author and the translator of the essay collection Migratory Birds, which is out today from Transit Books. In Migratory Birds, Oliver writes about historical episodes—and the experiences of various figures—as if they are personal memories. In the opening of “Normandy,” for instance, she transports readers to 1944 as “amphibious vessels slid out of the water like sea monsters and shook themselves dry” during the liberation of France. Meanwhile, in the title essay, she steps into the point of view of naturalist and ultralight aviation pioneer Bill Lishman, who helped guide endangered migratory birds: “It was like his body had multiplied. As he flew among the birds, Bill became one too.” Weaving vignettes from her own life alongside those from history, Oliver offers revelatory and poetic insights about migration, memory, and home. Mariana Oliver was born in Mexico City in 1986. She received a master’s degree in comparative literature from the National Autonomous University of México and is currently a PhD candidate in modern literature at the Iberoamerican University in Mexico City. Julia Sanches is a translator of Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan. She has translated works by Susana Moreira Marques, Claudia Hernández, Daniel Galera, and Eva Baltasar, among others.
1. How long did it take you to complete work on Migratory Birds? Mariana Oliver: I wrote Aves migratorias in the span of two years, from 2013 to 2015, thanks to a grant I received from the Fundación para las Letras Mexicanas.
Julia Sanches: I translated the titular essay several years ago, and “Özdamar’s Tongue” a couple of years after that, during the pandemic. But the whole book took me less than a month to translate. By then I’d become familiar with Mariana’s voice and style, which can only have helped the fast turnaround.
2. What was the most challenging thing about the project? Mariana Oliver: When I started writing the essays in Aves my writing experience was exclusively academic, so I felt insecure about my work.
Since I didn’t have a concrete project to work toward, much less any idea of how to plan a book, I began to write about issues that were on my mind at the time: home, migration, belonging, how memory is shaped, adopted languages. I had come back from a short stint in Germany a couple of months before.
From a distance, I started seeing a unifying thread; the questions posed in the book were all connected and addressed the same line of inquiry.
Julia Sanches: I struggle with brevity in my own writing, and Mariana’s style is so spare and directed that I found myself constantly striving to whittle sentences down to the bare minimum without compromising the voice, tone, and sense. I also spent a lot of time refining the opening paragraph of each essay, where Mariana sets the scene. For example in “Normandy,” where she describes the landings in a way that is almost aquatic, and “The Other Lost Boys and Girls,” in which she paints the ocean in a frightening, powerful light.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? Where, when, and how often do you translate? Mariana Oliver: I’m about to begin the last year of my PhD program, so I dedicate almost every day to writing my thesis. At the same time I’m compiling research for a new book. I make a point to add notes to my working draft at least once a week.
At home I have a small office space to myself, facing a window, but if I didn’t have to be at home, I’m sure I’d be writing in other places: at the university library or a café. While writing Aves, I rode the Mexico City metro almost every day, so I also ended up working on a lot of the essays there.
That said, I’ve realized that when I’m working on a piece of writing, I think about it around the clock, so I end up solving a lot of the questions raised in the process of writing while I’m doing something else: walking, washing the dishes, or cooking.
Julia Sanches: In the Before Times, I did most of my translating at a coworking space in downtown Providence in a bid to achieve work-life balance. Now I translate all over my house: I tend to start in my office, where I have an ergonomic, two-screen set-up, and migrate to the sofa after lunch. Sometimes I work on my feet at the kitchen island. Now that it’s summer and my new apartment has a porch, I often end up translating there, where I take the occasional break to feed a menagerie of our neighborhood’s characterful stray cats. Like Mariana, though, when I’m working on a project I don’t ever really stop thinking about that project. I carry around a small notebook where I write down words that I hear in movies and television or from people around me, as well as those I read in books, so that I make sure not to forget them.
4. What are you reading right now? Mariana Oliver: I’m reading a book with a beautiful title: Esta herida llena de peces by Lorena Salazar, published by Angosta Editores. I’m also reading a book of essays by George Steiner called Extraterritorial: Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution.
Julia Sanches: My attention span has suffered enormously during the pandemic, so I’ve been reading several different books very slowly: Live; Live; Live by Jonathan Buckley, a soothing and beautifully written book about the relationship between a young man and his neighbor, a clairvoyant called Lucas; Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor, translated by Sophie Hughes, which I’m reading as research for a book I am currently translating that features a good deal of colorful cursing from its potty-mouthed ten-year old protagonist, her best friend, and her best friend’s grandmother, Chela. I’m also reading Divya Victor’s Curb, because I’ve vowed to read more poetry, and Sinéad Gleeson’s Constellations.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Mariana Oliver: There are two Mexican essayists who deserve to be read more widely. One is Marina Azahua, whose writing is sensitive and brilliant. She’s published two books: Treinta ensayos mínimos ante el vacío and Retrato involuntario. El acto fotográfico como forma de violencia. The other essayist is Marisol García Walls, who has an eye for detail and contrast. Later this year her book Atlas de rasgos familiares will be published by the Colombian press Tragaluz.
Julia Sanches: My boring answer is that there are too many to name, if you consider the miniscule number of writers from other countries, especially those writing in non-European languages, that ever find their way into English.
6. What is one thing you might change about the literary community or publishing industry? Mariana Oliver: In Mexico, without a question, I would change the gender disparity. Men continue to be published more than women. They have more public appearances and are invited to take part in more panels and juries.
Julia Sanches: Hire more immigrants.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? Mariana Oliver: When I started writing these essays, a friend of mine told me to use fewer parenthetical clauses because it interrupted the flow of the text. Now, whenever I write, I pay careful attention to this and read aloud to make sure the flow isn’t being interrupted in any way. Ever since then I’ve listened to my writing.
For the English edition, Julia and our editor, Adam Levy, suggested a series of subtle but important changes to a couple of the essays; for example, eliminating statements that from a distance felt out of context. Throughout this process, I had to take a step back from the book and ask myself what aspects of the text no longer spoke to my current thinking and how the context in which I’d written had changed. The experience is similar to when you look at an old photograph of yourself: You recognize certain traits and, at the same time, others seem foreign to you.
Julia Sanches: I remember that Adam complimented a comma placement in the penultimate essay, and it made me smile.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your creative life? Mariana Oliver: I need to finish my PhD and research, which doesn’t leave much mental space to do other things. Even though at the moment it feels like an impediment, I know that won’t be the case in the long run, because all of the ideas and questions being raised now will eventually find their way into my writing.
Julia Sanches: Making enough money to survive as a literary translator in the United States is…no small challenge. Trying to find ways to fix everything that is broken in the publishing industry also takes up more of my time and energy than I would like it to. All of which gets in the way of my creative life.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? Mariana Oliver: My friends, my sister. Not only because I often hear their voices when I’m writing, but because they’ve always been the first to read and workshop my work.
Julia Sanches: My fellow translators, who are always fielding questions from me, and all the wonderful editors I’ve had the opportunity to work with.
10. What’s the best piece of creative advice you’ve ever heard? Mariana Oliver: Once the poet Dolores Castro told me that words were like doves: You have to feed them every day or they won’t keep coming. Leila Guerriero said something similar in an essay called “Writing”: “You have to knead the bread. You have to knead the bread with energy, indifference, rage, ambition, while you’re thinking of something else. You have to knead the bread when it’s cold and when it’s the middle of summer, when the sun is out, when it’s humid, when the rain is freezing. You have to knead the bread when you can’t be bothered to knead the bread.”
Julia Sanches: I learned from my colleague Charlotte Whittle to always pay attention to how sentences end. You never want them to fizzle, unless the fizzle is the point.
Editor’s Note: Mariana Oliver’s answers appear in translation from the Spanish by Julia Sanches.
Mariana Oliver and Julia Sanches, the author and the translator of Migratory Birds. (Credit: Sanches: Dagan Farancz)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Krys Malcolm Belc, whose debut, The Natural Mother of the Child: A Memoir of Nonbinary Parenthood, is out today from Counterpoint. In The Natural Mother of the Child, Belc weaves back and forth in time to tell the story of his life as a nonbinary, transmasculine person and parent. He focuses particularly on his experience carrying and birthing his son Samson: “Queer people had children,” he writes, “but I almost never saw pregnant people like me.” Raising Samson and his other two children alongside his partner, Anna, Belc finds clarity about his gender and past. He also speaks candidly to the inevitable moments of shame, jealousy, and anger that populate a life, including those particular to life as a parent. Accompanied by ultrasound images, family photos, and other documents, The Natural Mother of the Child is an intimate and inventive text about transness, family, and caregiving. Krys Malcolm Belc is also the author of the flash nonfiction chapbook In Transit (The Cupboard Pamphlet, 2018). His work can be found in Black Warrior Review, Granta, and the Rumpus, among other publications. He holds a BA from Swarthmore College, an MEd in special education from Arcadia University, and an MFA from Northern Michigan University. Belc lives in Philadelphia.
1. How long did it take you to write The Natural Mother of the Child? About two and a half years of really focused work to have a solid draft. I wrote the majority of it in an MFA program that I started just a few months after my third kid was born. I went to school for fiction and this book happened instead. The book sold soon after I started working as an educator in a pediatric oncology clinic, and so I was editing it while learning so much about cancer and its impact on patients’ school functioning. Instead of feeling like my book was frivolous or navel-gazing, I found great solace and gratitude in getting this story right and in getting to think deeply about myself again at the end of a long day.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? It’s very hard to maintain the clarity of sentences, moments, and scenes in writing that is ultimately about ambivalence and in-betweenness.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? I don’t write more than once a week. Daily writing is just not a thing that leads to good art for me. Given how people talk about productivity and writing, it is hard to accept my own pace, but I’m getting there. I can’t do anything in twenty minutes or even an hour. The idea of a daily word count horrifies me. But every day I do try to write a little prompt in a document or notes app, so that I have a variety of possible starting points when I have time to sit down. Even just a phrase. Yesterday’s was “Strawberries, again.”
4. What are you reading right now? I am reading White Girls by Hilton Als and I am listening to Tana French’s The Likeness. On deck is Chase Burke’s chapbook Men You Don’t Know You Know.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Lori Ostlund’s debut short story collection, The Bigness of the World,absolutely changed my life. Not my writing, my life. When I encountered it I had recently moved to the Upper Midwest to give my writing life more dedication and intention, and her characters move in reverse, out of the Midwest. That book helped me to adjust to living in a place that I was unprepared, on the deepest level, to love, and in the end I did love it and still do. If you know, you know; a lot of queer writers in my life know and admire her work. Its emotional precision is unparalleled. Everyone should read it and her pitch-perfect novel, After the Parade.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? I wish we could do away with the idea that telling the story of a life in temporal order within the confines of a narrative arc is the “natural” way for memoir to be. It impedes my confidence and imagination, worrying what a market might make of what I create. I don’t want it to, but it does. These confines are a barrier to many marginalized stories even making it into the world. Life is messy and some of us want to corral it into a recognizable form, but others want to embrace the questions and fracturing and employ forms that are in the service of that messiness. If we’re going to ask me why my work is in the form it’s in, why don’t we ask every single memoirist that? All memoirists are making art out of time, and there isn’t one way.
7. What trait do you most value in your editor (or agent)? My agent, Ashley Lopez, has an absolutely incredible editorial eye. Her comments on my manuscript, when I finally had one, led to some of the best writing of my life, sections that are now some of my favorites in the book. She and my editor, Jenny Alton, did not try to morph my work into something it isn’t. It has an unusual form and many images, and they did what they needed to do to help me sharpen my vision and my sentences without telling me to have a different imagination than the one I have.
8. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? I show my partner, Anna, everything I write that I think even has a spark of hope in it. My book has many sections of direct address to her because the most complex thoughts and feelings in my life sometimes only come into sharp focus when I imagine myself explaining them to her.
9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry? Before I went to graduate school for writing, I read books because they were best-sellers, “classics,” in the Best Americanseries, and so on. Turns out, this isn’t because I have a small appetite for experimentation or a limited imagination. But how was I supposed to find books to read? I was an elementary school teacher living in a neighborhood with no independent bookstore—though we now have two, Harriett’s Bookshop and The Head & The Hand. I didn’t know writers would come hang out on Twitter. I had never seen a chapbook. There has to be a way to make sure that work that isn’t a blockbuster finds its way to people who don’t have the time to be full-time book sleuths. All kinds of readers deserve to find small press books. The deck is stacked against readers and writers who aren’t in academia finding brilliant books that bend and break boundaries.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? Monica McFawn told me to think about my writing when I was doing other things and to “count” that as writing time. There’s a lot happening in my life now more than ever. Monica’s advice years ago was a gift that has allowed me to feel like I am truly a writer even though I must engage in paid work and care work during many of the hours and days I’d like to have time to make art.
Krys Malcolm Belc, author of The Natural Mother of the Child: A Memoir of Nonbinary Parenthood. (Credit: Mark Likosky)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Akwaeke Emezi, whose latest book, Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir, is out today from Riverhead Books. In Dear Senthuran, Emezi tells their origin story through a series of letters. They reflect on enduring challenges—their struggle with depression, for instance—but also describe coming into their own power. In an early letter, they write, “We can, I promise you, bear much more than we predict.” And in the many letters that follow they chart those moments of perseverance: They undergo surgeries that bring a “shift from wrongness to alignment,” they fend off predatory men who seek to leech off their literary talent and celebrity, and they survive heartbreak. This is a searing and intimate memoir about choosing to live despite the many sacrifices and pains of living. Akwaeke Emezi is also the author of The Death of Vivek Oji, which was a New York Times best-seller and longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, and Freshwater, which was shortlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, a Lambda Literary Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and the PEN/Hemingway Award. Their novel for young adults, Pet, was a finalist for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature.
1. How long did it take you to write Dear Senthuran? I started writing Dear Senthuran sometime in 2019, but I was in the middle of rolling out Pet, so it wasn’t until that fall that I really sat down to finish it. That time was very much a blur—a lot of the traumatic things I wrote about in the memoir had just happened, so the exact timeline escapes me, but we submitted the manuscript to my editor in January 2020.
2. What is the earliest memory that you associate with the book? There’s a moment I write about in the memoir, about e-mailing Senthuran Varatharajah, who helped translate Freshwater into German, and how I liked the sound of his name with a dear before it. Composing those e-mails would be the earliest memory tied to the book.
3. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? Holding my center. It was hard enough to do while writing, worrying that it wouldn’t be received well, but it was also incredibly difficult to go through the editing process because it felt like my fear that centering a work in Black spirit would come with violent repercussions was proven right. Having to insist on that center and refuse, over and over again, to compromise the work in service of a white gaze was one of the most brutal experiences of my career.
4. Where, when, and how often do you write? I no longer have any kind of regularity or structure around my writing, unfortunately. I get it in where I can fit it in. I do have to write in my office because my health issues mandate that I now work in an ergonomic setup—farewell to my laptop—but occasionally I write on my phone in bed at night and hope it doesn’t decimate my body too much.
5. What are you reading right now? I’m about to catch up on two of Zen Cho’s books, Black Water Sister and The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water, which I’m really excited about because she’s one of my favorite writers. I will read anything she publishes.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Definitely Chinelo Okparanta. We have so many writers working in queer Nigerian literature now, including myself, but she was the vanguard, and the work she did to open the road for us should be recognized. Her craft is brilliant, and she has an incisive intelligence that I’m excited for even more people to engage with once her next novel, Harry Sylvester Bird, comes out in 2022. It’s a satire of white liberalism, so I think it’s going to ruffle a few feathers, which should be delightful to witness. Chinelo is also an amazing member of the literary community—she’s taught at multiple workshops, advocated tirelessly for young queer Nigerian writers whose lives were quite literally at risk back home, and donated so much of her time to judging awards. I think how you move with your platform as an author is as important as the work you make.
7. What is one thing that surprised you during the writing of Dear Senthuran? I learned to respect myself as a thinker. I used to believe that because I wasn’t in academia, I wasn’t qualified to engage with theory, but now I understand how much I am a spirit, not a scholar, and how working in Black spirit theory is my pocket.
8. What, if anything, will you miss most about working on the book? I don’t think I’ll miss anything. After I completed the book last January, I wrote three more books in 2020 and I’m working on another book now, so I’m always in a writing process that has its own particular joy.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? It’s never one particular person. With my manuscripts, I have a community of trusted readers, and they each bring something specific to the table, informed by what their centers are. They are people I think with and write with, so for me, making work is really a community effort.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? Octavia Butler said it wonderfully: “First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice.”
Akwaeke Emezi, author of Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir. (Credit: Kathleen Bomani)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Jack Wang, whose debut story collection, We Two Alone, will be published next week by HarperVia. Through the seven stories that make up We Two Alone, Wang offers a window into the complexity and diversity of experiences in the Chinese diaspora over the past century. In the title story, a struggling actor and founder of an Asian American Shakespeare company in New York City wrestles with dissatisfaction and heartache. In “The Valkyries,” set in early-twentieth-century Vancouver, a young Chinese boy is turned away from a men’s hockey team and so disguises himself in order to play alongside women. With other stories set in Nazi-occupied Vienna and Apartheid-era South Africa, We Two Alone is an ambitious collection that is richly imagined at every turn. “These stories are so elegantly shaped, so satisfying as individual stories, that their collective power sneaks up on you,” writes Emily Fridlund. We Two Alone was first published last year by House of Anansi Press in Canada. Wang’s writing can also be found in the Humber Literary Review, Joyland, the Malahat Review, the New Quarterly, and Prism International. He holds an MFA from the University of Arizona and a PhD from Florida State University. He lives in Ithaca, New York, where he teaches at Ithaca College.
1. How long did it take you to write We Two Alone? About eight years, going back and forth between projects. My Canadian editor asked me to add a story to the collection after the book sold, so that extended the process.
2. What is the earliest memory that you associate with the book? I started working on these stories after putting a novel in the proverbial drawer. I remember the freedom of getting to invent something new after grinding away at the same story for so many years. I also remember the pleasure of working on something short and crossing the finish line quickly, even if the collection itself took a while to complete.
3. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? As I mentioned, when I started these stories, I’d just retired a novel. This novel was read by a few publishers, but in the end there were no takers. So, after writing for many years and coming close to debuting, I suddenly found myself back at square one. That was probably the hardest thing, being almost forty, with young kids, and staring up again from the bottom of the mountain. But I found a way.
4. Where, when, and how often do you write? A few years ago my wife and I renovated the second floor of our house in Ithaca, New York, and we turned the master closet into an office so that I wouldn’t have to write in the bedroom. It’s a windowless room that would probably crush the spirit of most writers, but it’s mine, and I love it. When I’m in the middle of a project, as I am now—I’m working on a new novel—I write every morning.
5. What are you reading right now? Land of Big Numbers by Te-Ping Chen, which just came out in February. It’s a terrific collection of short stories about contemporary China and recent Chinese immigrants to the United States.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Gil Adamson. Gil is fairly well-known in Canada—her literary Western, Ridgerunner, won the 2020 Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize—but she should have a wider following in the United States. She’s a good old-fashioned storyteller who writes lush, gorgeous prose.
7. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry? The only rejection I received that bothered me was from the editor who said they’d just published a Chinese American writer. I read about something similar in the New York Times article, “Just How White Is the Publishing Industry?” Apparently someone at a major house was reluctant to make an offer to a Black author because they’d already published a Black author. It’s high time editors stopped thinking of BIPOC writers in terms of quotas.
8. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of We Two Alone? I did a lot of research for these stories. We Two Alone is set on five continents and spans nearly a century. I’m familiar with places like Vancouver, Shanghai, London, and New York City, where some of these stories are set, but many of the times, places, and events I was writing about—women’s hockey in Western Canada in the 1920s, the Second Sino-Japanese War, Kristallnacht, Apartheid—were less known to me. So I read a lot of books, everything from obscure diplomatic and scientific memoirs to dissertations in the British Library.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? My wife, Angelina Mirabella, is a novelist. She’s always my first and best reader, even—or maybe especially—when the things she tells me aren’t easy to hear.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? Isak Dinesen said, “Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.” The trick is to cultivate that Zen, to not get too high or too low. You’re neither the genius nor the failure you think you are.
Corrections: A previous version of this article misstated the title of the book and misattributed the blurb that appears in the introduction.
Jack Wang, author of We Two Alone. (Credit: Mike Grippi)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Monica West, whose debut novel, Revival Season, is out today from Simon & Schuster. Miriam Horton is the daughter of a Black Baptist preacher known for leading packed revivals—gatherings to inspire religious conversion—across the American South every summer. She is devoted to her father, in awe, especially, of his apparent miraculous power to heal the sick and injured at the end of each service. But after witnessing her father lose control and act out in violence, on more than one occasion, she begins to question him and all his teachings. Meanwhile, she discovers her own healing power and increasingly chafes at her exclusion from the ministry as a young woman. Revival Season is a sweeping novel about the pains of disillusionment and finding the courage to speak one’s truth. “Compact, suspenseful, and written with incredible elegance, Revival Season is a highly rewarding, utterly original read—one of my favorite debuts of the year,” writes Jami Attenberg. Monica West is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Rona Jaffe Graduate Fellow. She received her BA from Duke University and her MA from New York University. She has also earned a fellowship from Kimbilio and a residency from Hedgebrook. Born and raised in Cleveland, she lives in Oakland.
1. How long did it take you to write Revival Season? Nine years total. It took three years to research it and complete a first draft. During the next six years—including two in Iowa—I rewrote, revised, and edited it more times than I can count.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? The most challenging aspect of writing this book was the process of holding multiple different novel threads in my brain simultaneously. There were so many characters, dates, timelines, plotlines, geographies, character arcs, flashbacks, and backstories that I had to be aware of in order to refer to them in a consistent way throughout. And then I made that task even harder for myself because I didn’t physically outline it until really late in the process.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? I write every day from my living room. I know that a lot of people can’t work at home, but I get distracted by other people when I’m in coffee shops or other public spaces. My writing hours are different depending upon other daily responsibilities—teaching, meetings, and so on—but I like to start in the morning around 10 AM. I set out to write one thousand words each day on my nonteaching days and five hundred words on my teaching days. I don’t have a set number of hours that I work each day, but I don’t let myself stop until I complete my goal. Sometimes that goal takes three hours to complete, but other times it takes ten.
4. What are you reading right now? Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Several readers have compared Revival Season to it, and though I’ve read many of her other books and short stories, I’ve never read this one. So now seems like a great time to read it.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? I loved Lesley Nneka Arimah’s What Happens When a Man Falls From the Sky. I read the story “Who Will Greet You at Home” when it was first published in the New Yorker, and when the entire collection came out I devoured it. I adore her strong characters and the lushness of her worlds.
6. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? Getting my MFA was one of the best decisions of my life, primarily because it gave me the time and space to write the novel. I had never made writing a priority before because work got in the way, so an MFA was ideal for that reason. It also gave me an amazing community of other writers who not only workshopped my fiction but also became great friends. Even though an MFA was exactly right for me, the programs are not for everyone. Pursuing an MFA is a highly personal decision, and each writer should figure out what makes sense for them and what they need. After evaluating all of that information, they should decide if an MFA is worth the time and potential expense.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? My editor told me from the beginning that “everything is a conversation.” It put me at ease to know that if we had a disagreement about something editorial, we could talk about it. I used to think that the editorial process was that the editor told you what to fix and you had to fix it; Carina disabused me of that notion in our first conversation. Though I agreed with her about almost all of the edits, we had conversations about other ones that were truly dialogues.
8. What, if anything, will you miss most about working on the book? I will miss these characters living in my head, miss the way that I kept thinking about how they interacted with each other or what they would say to each other. They have been with me for years, so even though I’m glad that I’ve finished writing the novel and have written the entire story that I intended to in the book, I will miss them dwelling with me every day.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? Margot Livesey is a sharp, precise reader who gets right at the heart of what’s working and what needs work in my fiction. She is also generous with her time and her feedback. She gave me some great advice about the book early on, and I trust her judgment about my writing.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? “Write what you can.” Paul Harding gave me this advice after I had received a ton of feedback on the first draft of Revival Season during my first semester at Iowa. I didn’t know how I would start revising based on everything I’d just heard in workshop. Paul’s advice gave me the permission to start with what I knew I could do. Maybe I couldn’t figure out the ending yet, but I knew that I could write a specific scene, even if it was out of order. That advice got me through every revision.
Monica West, author of Revival Season. (Credit: Chickpea Photography)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Brian Broome, whose debut memoir, Punch Me Up to the Gods, is out today from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Broome begins his story at a bus stop in Pennsylvania, where he watches a young Black boy fall on the pavement, only to have his tears admonished by his father. “I realize that this, what I am witnessing, is the playing out of one of the very conditions that have dogged my entire existence: this ‘being a man’ to the exclusion of all other things,” he writes. Traveling back and forth in time, Broome retraces his own journey as a Black gay man, detailing the violence and alienation he weathered as a child in small-town Ohio, the racism and homophobia that followed him into adulthood, and the unexpected moments of hope and tenderness throughout his life. He pays tribute to those who helped him survive, while also striking out entirely on his own, seeking an understanding of Blackness and masculinity free of limits. “Punch Me Up to the Gods obliterates what we thought were the limitations of not just the American memoir, but the possibilities of the American paragraph,” writes Kiese Laymon. Brian Broome is also a poet and screenwriter. He is pursuing an MFA at the University of Pittsburgh, where he is a K. Leroy Irvis Fellow. He has been a finalist in the Moth storytelling competition and won a Martin Luther King Jr. Day Writing Award from Carnegie Mellon University.
1. How long did it take you to write Punch Me Up to the Gods? I actually started writing it eight years ago in rehab. Although, at the time, I didn’t know I was writing a book. I was just sitting in rehab writing about why I thought I ended up in rehab. But I think the official writing of a book happened when I met my agent, Danielle Chiotti, at a public reading where I performed. She asked me what I was writing and I told her that I had a few autobiographical pieces. I sent them to her. Danielle saw a cohesive book in my work that I couldn’t see at first. We worked together on connecting it all into a whole manuscript, starting in February 2018, and Danielle sent it out on submission in October 2019.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? I had to think a great deal about the people I might damage by telling these stories. Those who are still alive, I mean. I often wondered if there would be backlash or anger. But I decided to be a servant to the story. Also, in writing about painful times from the past, I tried to put myself in the emotional state that I was in at that time. That was difficult. There were times when I was writing it that I actually felt like getting high because the feelings of worthlessness became so real.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? I write in my house. I’m not the kind of writer who can write in public places. I wish I were. I have an office downstairs that I’ve set up just the way I like it. The garden just behind me. I’ve painted it orange and green and I go down there during the day to do non-writing-related work. I only write at night. I turn all the lights off and sit in the dark. I find it works best because I can shut everything out. It gets really dark in my office at night. I don’t write often enough. I make up my mind to do it, give myself pep talks, and then I talk myself out of it. Eventually, the words start to feel like they’re punching my skull from the inside and I just sit down and begin.
4. What are you reading right now? My students’ essays. Honestly, school is taking a lot of my time right now and it’s particularly challenging when it’s online. I’m enjoying reading my students’ work, but I’d love to have nothing on my plate for a few days and just sit out back in the garden and read a book. That’s a luxury. Right now there’s a big pile. On top is Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex, Ijeoma Oluo’s Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America, and I want to reread Flowers in the Attic by V. C. Andrews. Sometimes I’m sure I’m going to end up like Henry Bemis in that episode of The Twilight Zone. The one where all he wants to do is read and the whole world has to come to an end before he finally gets enough time. Then he breaks his only pair of reading glasses.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Reginald McKnight. His books The Kind of Light That Shines on Texas and White Boys really made me want to write more. He’s mastered the short story, in my opinion. I don’t really know how widely recognized his work is. But I know I don’t really hear his name mentioned a lot.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? Me. I know it’s a cliché, but it’s really difficult to get going. There are some writers who love it and can’t wait to sit down and start pecking away. I often wonder what their secret is. As I mentioned earlier, I will avoid writing as long as I can until an idea starts ricocheting off the walls inside my head and I have to get it out. Once I sit down it’s never as terrible an experience as I thought it was going to be. But the next day I’m back at square one.
7. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? I actually learned a lot and the experience itself is one I’ll never forget. The community it provides is valuable. I spent a long time writing in a vacuum and I’ve learned that this is not how you get to your best work. It also taught me a lot about the business of writing, which is important. I learned a great deal on a craft level as well. And I have very much enjoyed teaching writing. I truly believe that’s what I’m meant to do. It brings me more joy than any job I’ve ever done. Far too many people my age seem to believe they don’t have anything to learn from the young. Nothing could be further from the truth. I learn a great deal from my students.
8. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? Both my agent, Danielle, and my editor, Rakia Clark, were incredibly supportive throughout this process. I did a lot of handwringing about what other writers or people who read my work were going to think of me and my writing. I remember sitting at the Bureau Coffee shop and Danielle telling me to stop worrying about what other people think and just to write. After she said that, she shrugged her shoulders and went back to drinking her coffee. That shoulder shrug said a lot. It said that there will always be people who hate your work, and you have to decide how much energy you’re going to give them. That was a valuable shoulder shrug because I had been laboring under the delusion that revision was tantamount to failure. Both my agent and my editor taught me that a draft is a draft and not to be afraid to make mistakes or hit the wrong note.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? Right now it’s just Rakia and Danielle. It’s best to keep that pool of people small, I think. Too many cooks and whatnot.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? Make it a routine. Do it every day at the same time and don’t ever deviate. Be consistent. This is the best writing advice I’ve ever heard and, someday, I may even follow it.
Brian Broome, author of Punch Me Up to the Gods. (Credit: Andy Johanson)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features E. C. Osondu, whose second story collection, Alien Stories, is out today from BOA Editions. In Alien Stories, Osondu transports readers into landscapes that feel at once futuristic and all too familiar. “Memory Store” imagines a world in which people can exchange their memories for money. In “Feast,” a community gathers to celebrate the hanging of an alien. Osondu takes these dark premises and inflects them with wit and irony. In doing so, he elucidates both the pain and power of immigrants and people of color, of any person or extraterrestrial who has been othered. E. C. Osondu is also the author of the story collection Voice of America (Harper, 2010) and the novel This House Is Not for Sale (Harper, 2015). His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including the Atlantic, Guernica, Kenyon Review, Lapham’s Quarterly, McSweeney’s, and Zyzzyva. He is the recipient of the Caine Prize for African Writing and the Allen and Nirelle Glaso Prize for Fiction, among other awards. A graduate of the MFA program at Syracuse University, he lives in Rhode Island and teaches at Providence College.
1. How long did it take you to write Alien Stories? About a year and a half. Some of the stories were from way back, but the bulk of the stories were written within the space of a year and a half.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? It was all fun and games until I realized that I was actually writing a book. Before that I was just writing short stories as they came to me. When I realized that this could well be shaping up into a book, I figured that it needed an organizing principle or some kind of scaffolding but should not run the risk of being formulaic. I had also given myself the task of never writing any story that reads even remotely like a story from my previous collection. One of the greatest things about the legendary Afrobeat musical maestro Fela Kuti was his insistence on never performing any of his songs again once they have been released as an album. So as you can see I was meandering and juggling around a bunch of tall orders.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? To be completely honest, I am always not not writing. For me writing is much more than the proverbial putting pen to paper. I am always in a writing mode, so to speak. Writing mode might include reading a book, a magazine, author interviews, profiles, short stories in online magazines, and so on.
In my past life or once upon a time long ago, I was an advertising copywriter and one of the things that was often repeated in the agency was the need for creatives to always be in a creative mode. It was said that when one is in a creative mode, two flies perched on a windowsill could inspire a great copy idea for a TV commercial.
When I am reading widely and in creative mode, I find that the writing itself comes in short feverish bursts of blooming, satisfying creativity.
4. What are you reading right now? Map: Collected and Last Poems by Wisława Szymborska—I find poetry to be a great palate cleanser.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Most, if not all, African writers deserve more space. Right now the literary table reserves one seat for African writing. It is an approach that I call “the one bright morning star” approach. This simply means that only one African writer can be acclaimed and read and celebrated and venerated and even canonized, at a time. There seems to be more space for others than African writers. Look at the generation of writers in Britain referred to as the Angry Young Men, or the generation of British writers that produced Amis, McEwan, Rushdie, Ishiguro, Timothy Mo, and even nominally Hitchens. Or the Language Poets. Or the New York School made up of Ashbery, Guest, O’Hara, Brainard. You see the plurality? As I had cause to say in a different context—we are legion. You know, there is an African proverb that sums up all I have been trying to articulate ever more succinctly: The sky is wide and spacious enough for every bird to fly without crashing into each other or knocking the other down.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? James Baldwin once said, in his inimitable way, “I want to be an honest man and a good writer.” I find that both impulses come from two totally different places. The task is to find the secret to being both.
7. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry? Many more writers deserve to be published. Publishing appears to grow more risk-averse by the year.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Alien Stories, what would you say? Writing a book is like having a wild and vivid and amazing dream, but while in the dream a part of you is second-guessing and asking yourself, When I wake up and tell people of this dream are they even going to believe that I had a dream this magical? So I would say to myself, Someone is going to believe in my dream no matter how outlandish. Just keep plucking that chicken, as someone once said.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? I often share story ideas with friends and family even before I write them. I would usually start with “What if?” and then watch their faces.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? I will mention two. The first is to lean on your strengths as a writer instead of focusing on your weaknesses. I believe I first heard this from George Saunders at Syracuse. I am not certain, but it does certainly sound Saundersesque. I have run with it since then.
The other is from something the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer once said to someone I know but in a totally different context. He said when you are walking towards the Great Sphinx of Giza from behind, it looks like a random collection of stones, but if you approach it from the right direction, you realize it is a great work of art. If your writing is looking like a random collection of stones, at any moment, it may be because you are approaching that particular piece from the wrong angle.
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Donika Kelly, whose second poetry collection, The Renunciations, is out today from Graywolf Press. Throughout The Renunciations, Kelly often invokes the monumental—deities, the oceans, continental drift theory—but she always returns to the individual. In one poem, she writes, “I am neither land nor timber, nor are you / ocean or celestial body. Rather, / we are the small animals we’ve always been.” Yet it is through bold metaphor—her understanding of memories and the body as landscapes—that Kelly finds insight. She retraces experiences of abuse as a child and divorce as an adult, but also travels beyond these wounds and builds into a new world, rich in possibility, with each poem. “I can’t imagine a time before having The Renunciations as a part of my emotional ecosystem and poetic landscape,” writes francine j. harris. Donika Kelly is also the author of Bestiary (Graywolf Press, 2016), which won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Foglifter, and the Paris Review. The recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, the Fine Arts Work Center, and the Lannan Foundation, she lives in Iowa City and teaches at the University of Iowa.
1. How long did it take you to write The Renunciations? I wrote the poems in The Renunciations over the course of about five years or so. The oldest poems are from 2013 and the most recent were written in 2018. I started to gather these poems into what would become the book in 2017, when I realized that the poems were in conversation with each other and were a part of a larger project.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? The biggest challenge to writing the book was living through the events I write about and finding some peace on the other side. Each poem in this collection was a step toward that peace: the other side of divorce, the other side of having survived childhood sexual abuse. Once the poems were written, then came the fun part of figuring out how they fit together.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? I write when I feel that I have something to say, which in real life means I write about two to three times a year in one- to two-week stretches. I set a pretty low bar for myself by committing to write twenty minutes a day, and I usually begin with a series of questions meant to lead me closer to myself. I write best at night, between 10 PM and 1 AM, which isn’t feasible for me during the semester.
4. What are you reading right now? I’ve had a really tremendous year of reading. Poetry collections I have enjoyed recently are Taylor Johnson’s Inheritance and Dujie Tahat’s Salat. Both collections are a query into what we carry in our bodies, as prayers, as love, and what we mean to hold onto.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? I’m going to answer this a little askance and make a small claim for reading entire poetry collections, as the poet orders the book. The book that convinced me of this practice, that brought me not only into the world of a poem but the whole of book, was Natasha Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia. The way the two primary sections resonate against and with each other to build the portrait of the speaker is expert and stunning.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? Life stress and anxiety get in the way of my writing. I need a quiet mind to write, and the travails of being alive can get quite loud.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? My editor, Jeff Shotts, is a patient man. We had many conversations about how to create more white space between sections. Initially I resisted even the thought of sections, but over the course of a year I came around to the kindness and generosity of giving the reader space to process all the book holds.
8. How did you know when the book was finished? Late in the process, one of the “Now” sections was giving me background trouble—nothing was wrong with it, but it also wasn’t correct. My dear friend Ama Codjoe suggested reordering the poems in the section. Again I was resistant, but I came around more quickly, and then the manuscript felt complete.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? I have a trusted network of readers, Ama Codjoe, Ladan Osman, and my beloved, Melissa Febos, because I need the volume of more than one trusted reader to hear suggestions over my own investment in being right. They are such incisive, compassionate, close readers, and I trust their sense of my work.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? In Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook, she writes about the importance of imitation, which I understand to be a skill-building exercise, a way to apprehend a technique. It’s been a vital practice for me because I haven’t always had, intuitively, the techniques I’ve needed to write a given poem.
Donika Kelly, author of The Renunciations. (Credit: Ladan Osman)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Kelli Russell Agodon, whose latest poetry collection, Dialogues with Rising Tides, is out today from Copper Canyon Press. From the first line of Dialogues with Rising Tides, Agodon is transparent about hardship, yet optimistic: “If we never have enough love,” she writes, “we have more than most.” Instead of seeking to outpace anxiety and fear, she lingers with her most difficult emotions in order to better understand them. She wrestles with both personal and global traumas, setting poems about her family history of suicide alongside those addressing climate disaster. She does not promise recovery, but she does offer pockets of hope—moments of wit and humor that inflect the darkness. “This is the book I need right here, right now, as the fires burn and the tides rise,” writes Diane Seuss. Kelli Russell Agodon is a poet, writer, and editor from the Pacific Northwest. She is the author of three previous poetry collections, including Hourglass Museum (White Pine Press, 2014). She is the cofounder of Two Sylvias Press and the codirector of Poets on the Coast, a writing retreat for women. She also teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.
1. How long did it take you to write Dialogues with Rising Tides? I wrote “Braided Between the Broken” and “Love Waltz with Fireworks” in December 2013 and January 2014 respectively. At the time I didn’t realize I was beginning a new manuscript, but those two poems make up the right and left ventricles of the collection—one acknowledges a flawed self while the other tries to fall in love with a flawed world. I hadn’t realized I had started a new book until 2015 when I created the I-think-I-may-have-a-new-book-in-the-works folder called, uninterestingly enough, “Manuscript 4.” Dialogues with Rising Tides was accepted by Copper Canyon Press in March 2019 and I turned in my final version on Valentine’s Day 2020, so final answer: five to six years.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? Amusingly enough, I’d say trying to answer this question. Finding the best order for the poems is always a bit of a task, deciding whether to take a poem out or put one in can be a challenge, but mostly I so enjoy the process of creating a book that there isn’t one particular aspect that comes to mind. I guess if writing a book was a map, I’d say choosing which road to follow is probably the hardest part, as there are so many journeys I’d like to take.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? I tend to be a seasonal writer—I write much more from September through May and easily kick into that school-year schedule. However, during the pandemic, fellow poets Martha Silano, Ronda Broatch, and I started what we now call “The Thursday Night Poetry Club,” where we show up with quirky writing exercises and write on Zoom from 5 to 7 PM.
I refer to them as “quirky writing exercises” because we add some curious elements, such as blocks of random words, unexpected questions—Does rain ever tumble into a lightbulb? Who plugs in the weather?—and maybe a few instructions: Describe a ghost’s fedora. We do three prompts for about eighteen to twenty minutes each and share our work.
I also did some collaborative writing with Melissa Studdard, Jeannine Hall Gailey, Dean Rader, and still have many online writing dates with my friend Susan Rich. They have all helped me get through the pandemic and continue writing poems.
As to where I write—I pulled the lawnmower out of our shed during the pandemic, added a desk and a chair, and turned it into my writing space. There were just too many people home during the pandemic and I was struggling to write with all that energy around me and so many dirty dishes in the house. Oddly, the dirty dishes were still there when I returned from my writing, but at least I wrote.
4. What are you reading right now? Besides e-mail? I love nonfiction and am reading Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain by Shankar Vedantam and Bill Mesler, which is a fascinating look at how the mind uses self-deception as a way to create happiness. Also: Night Angler, a stunning collection of poems on family and fatherhood by Geffrey Davis. When I read Davis’s poems I feel as if I am being held in a deep prayer—the writing is beautiful and meditative. It’s a book I keep returning to. I also recently realized some of my favorite poetry books are available as audiobooks, so I’m listening to Jericho Brown’s The Tradition, Paige Lewis’s Space Struck, as well as Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights and Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Sandra Yannone, January Gill O’Neil, and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha are three of my favorite poets and people whom I’d love to see get more attention for their work. But also, nonbinary, trans, and queer writers, as well as most women authors over the age of sixty and writers who have books from smaller indie publishers. I think there is always room in the literary community for more recognition. Poets tend be like meteor showers: They are acknowledged when they are seen, but many times, the world is looking in another direction and misses the show completely.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? Besides sunny days, I would say my ability to put nonessential work before my writing. Also, snacking.
7. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? As the newest faculty member of the Rainier Writing Workshop—Pacific Lutheran University’s low-residency MFA program—and a graduate of the program myself, I’d love to give a big “yes” here.
For me, returning to school to get my MFA was life-changing, as it created the space and time I needed to write and taught me how to be an advocate for my writing life; it made me take my work more seriously. I still have that community and I look back on my days at PLU as some of the happiest times in my life. Our writing lives are such a personal choice—each person needs to determine what their writing life needs. Returning to graduate school made me a stronger poet and led to my book, Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room, which was my creative thesis at PLU. An MFA definitely gives writers the structure and accountability they may be lacking in their own lives.
8. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of Dialogues with Rising Tides? Vintage photographs of lightships and lightvessels whose names became my section titles—Breaksea, Cross Rip, Overfalls, Black Deep, Shambles, Scarweather, and Relief—but also old maps, a misremembered quote from Zelda Fitzgerald, a line from an Anne Sexton poem, and a quote from Postcards From the Edge by Carrie Fisher. But I’d say the central form of work was the natural world—the sea and the landscape of the Pacific Northwest. Nature will always be the top source in my bibliography.
9. What, if anything, will you miss most about working on the book? Anything and everything. When I’m working on a book, I’m in my happy place. But I also adore the “almost done” place. Right before I’m ready to turn in the final version, decisions feel big—what to leave in and take out, final word/image choices, and so on. There is this moment when my intuition comes into play. I’m very much a trust-my-gut person, and when I’m in this space, I have an inner knowing about what works. It’s like looking at the insides of a pocket watch and seeing all the parts moving, and while I may not understand how everything came together, I can see it’s ticking and complete. I miss that breathless moment of knowing it’s done and the confidence of that space, which I lose the moment the manuscript is out of my hands.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? The best advice I hold onto that works for both one’s writing life and daily life comes from drag queen Alyssa Edwards: Don’t get bitter, just get better. In regards to submitting one’s work, poet Elizabeth Austen said these wise words: Don’t say no for them. It’s their job to say no, not yours. Meaning: Don’t self-select yourself out of opportunities.
Kelli Russell Agodon, author of Dialogues with Rising Tides. (Credit: Ronda Piszk Broatch)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Carey Salerno, whose second poetry collection, Tributary, is out today from Persea Books. Tributary is full of questions and rich contradictions. In an early poem, Salerno writes: “River, what are you? / River I drink from. River in which I drown.” Using the river as a guiding metaphor, she searches for a better understanding of family secrets, religion, whiteness, and other concerns. She palms her subjects like river stones, turning them over and over until they are both more familiar and unfamiliar. “In poem after poem, Salerno layers thought after thought onto the river until it overflows,” writes Victoria Chang. “Dexterous, relentless, and edifying, these are exploding and gorgeous poems of unapologetic rebellion.” Carey Salerno is also the author of Shelter (Alice James Books, 2009). The executive director and executive editor of Alice James Books, she coedited the anthology Lit From Inside: 40 Years of Poetry From Alice James Books. She is a graduate of the MFA program at New England College and teaches at the University of Maine in Farmington.
1. How long did it take you to write Tributary? The first poems for Tributary came about, in earnest, around the fall of 2016. They crept onto the page while I was feeling blocked trying to wrap up a wholly different manuscript. There were just a few poems, but I remember feeling ready to follow where they were leading me. Their conversations were burrowing in my body, or perhaps stirring from their deep burrows! I guess that makes the collection almost five years in the making. It seems like it went by a lot more quickly than it did.
2. What is the earliest memory that you associate with the book? Deep summer in rural Michigan, playing in the sun-scorched grass with my older sister. We were swinging from the swings my father hung for us, having drilled them into the nearly horizontal bough of, what seemed at the time, a pretty mighty oak tree. He’d later hung a deer, slashed open from neck to tail from another branch before us, but we still swung, making a game out of trying to clap our feet together on the other side of its body without touching it. It’s gruesome and red death-y thinking about it now, but at the time we didn’t see it that way at all. We just made a game of it.
3. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? This is such a great question, and I don’t know that I have just one answer. Writing into these subjects was so opaque at first. I didn’t know where I would end up. I didn’t know what I was going to say—that was a challenge. I often worried what would come out would be scary, accusing, not close enough to the truth or too close. In terms of probing whiteness, patriarchy, religion, and other systems of violent power, I’m writing about systems that, to many degrees, protect me in ways that I can’t always readily distinguish, so how do I know if I’m using that same system to protect myself as I move through my poems? How do I know if I’m resisting self-incrimination, self-examination, self-acknowledgment, awareness, culpability? These systems taught me to avoid these things, to approach power with silence, gratitude, and acceptance, because they often don’t need to be spoken to or dealt with—just paid tribute to. Everything is set up to prevent the “dealing with” entirely, so how, as a product/beneficiary of these systems, do you interrogate them without using what you’re conditioned by them to use?
4. Where, when, and how often do you write? It’s so sporadic. I want to be real with anyone reading this: No one writes like you do! Everyone does it differently. Everyone has their own process, unique unto them. I say this because I spent a lot of time comparing myself to others—and being compared to others, contemplating these comparisons, judging myself against them. Why wasn’t I as prolific as __________? Why didn’t I have a daily “practice.” When I write, I write intensely for weeks at a time for a few years at a time and then there’s drought—serious drought. That used to make me very uncomfortable, but now I just try to see it for what it is, knowing that the writing always comes back because it’s part of who I am, not because “it seems to be about time for another book.”
5. What are you reading right now? The answer to this is always “lots of poetry manuscripts,” but outside of my editorial life, my jam is historical nonfiction. I’ve been savoring The Splendid and the Vile for too many months now just because I’m completely enamored by the way in which Erik Larson can spellbindingly storytell history. I’m reluctant to finish it. Also, Unworthy Republic by Claudio Saunt, and for poetry: Doppelgangbanger by Cortney Lamar Charleston, Embouchure by Emilia Phillips, and Prometeo by C. Dale Young. I spend a lot of time dreaming about when I’ll reread Hari Kunzru’s White Tears as well, which is probably one of the best books I’ve ever had the pleasure to read.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? Ha, well, myself… in relation to work and motherhood. Because I’m so deeply invested in these areas of my life that call for concentrated and persistent effort, personal responsibility, and commitment, they just take precedence over what I see as “something for me,” which of course isn’t really true at all, except for the fact that the only one who I am certain is counting on/thriving off of the writing is me. Whereas with my work at Alice James and being a parent, I see, more ostensibly, the results of my efforts and dedication and how they benefit people. I feel really deeply the call to be in service of others, I guess is what I’m saying, and I’m also saying that it’s hard for me to switch that call off and attend to my writing or even other pursuits and passions.
7. What is one thing that surprised you during the writing of Tributary? The music. The formal variation. All of it really. This book was such an act of discovery in its writing in terms of really utilizing form to embody/evoke emotion. I never set out to do that, but the mechanism found me along the way, and it definitely took me by surprise to be writing what felt like little songs, incantations, longer poems, interludes. I’m really grateful, even if at the time I was terrified by it, that I listened to the poems, followed where they wanted to go, and relaxed into them without my editorial self swooping in to try to “arrange” the chaos I initially perceived.
8. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of the book? Music, absolutely. Music from my teen years and especially the compilations of albums like Radiohead’s Kid A, Outkast’s ATLiens, Wu-Tang Clan’s Wu-Tang Forever, DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing, and then later, Kendrick Lamar’s Damn. These albums are, of course, composed of individual songs, but the order, placement, conversations between, and formal variation of each tells a great story over the album’s course through the lyrical experimentation, interjections, backmasking, register changes, and so on. I’ve always been deeply engaged by this type of creative expression, musically challenged as I am. And, too, the work calls to Jean Valentine, Marie Howe, Claudia Rankine, and Monica A. Hand.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? This is an easy and hard question to answer, because handing my work over to anyone, I realize, fills me with an enormous sense of guilt, as if I’m burdening that person. We are all so overworked! I’ve had so many people be incredibly generous to me over the years, offering to read things when I have them, and I so rarely take them up on it for fear of adding to their plates. That said, a dear friend and mentor of mine for nearly all my writing life, Anne Marie Macari, is my person. She’s a generous reader, and I know she’s a sounding board for more writers than just me, which makes the attention and care she gives my work all that more extraordinary. Our friendship is a rare gift. She’s also a writer I find myself turning to over and again. Have you ever read her book Gloryland? It’s just a complete masterpiece, as is her new book Heaven Beneath.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? “Just write” is a simple piece of advice I carry with me always. Just write it. Write it down. Write without judgment or worry about the “final” outcome or where the poem/words will take you. Don’t think too far ahead of the poem you’re in. This advice was especially useful after I became a mother. I feel indebted to Nicole Cooley, who told me she would just write a few words or a line or two on any surface she could when she was a new mom, and that the poems found their way to doing the work they needed to do eventually. That opened doors for me to see the act of writing as a malleable thing. It was really empowering.
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Justin Jannise, whose debut poetry collection, How to Be Better by Being Worse, is out today from BOA Editions. The poems of How to Be Better by Being Worse are fearless and alive, queer and unapologetically indulgent. In the title poem, Jannise writes: “Be clothed / in scandal. Smear / and smudge and slander yourself // courageous.” Throughout the collection, he heeds his own advice to be daring. He frequently experiments with form—the poem “Flamingosexual” appears as the silhouette of the iconic bird—and tackles issues of family, love, and the self with great emotional honesty. “Justin expertly commands the techniques of his craft to summon up an authentic and undeniable voice that lifts off the page,” writes Richard Blanco, who chose the collection as the winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize. Justin Jannise received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is currently a PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston. His poems have appeared in numerous publications, including Columbia Journal, Copper Nickel, Hobart, Split Lip, and the Yale Review. He has taught classes for Inprint, Grackle & Grackle, Writespace, and Writers in the Schools.
1. How long did it take you to write How to Be Better by Being Worse? Seven or eight years. The earliest draft of the oldest poem dates back to 2012, and I was allowed to make some last-minute changes in 2020. There are human beings nearly capable of making a book who were not born when I started writing it.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? Everything about writing is a challenge for me, but something that took a really long time to figure out was how best to sequence the poems. I’m aware that many readers will not approach the book from beginning to end, but those who do—I’m almost certain—will enjoy the whole theme park much more than any one thrill ride.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? Before the pandemic I wrote mostly on the go—initially in my head, later on a note-taking app on my phone. Walking is great for poetry. So is driving. Basically, any activity besides sitting and putting down the thoughts that come to mind in the order that they arrive. Shopping. Eavesdropping while eating alone. Juggling or rummaging. Anything that occupies the hands and feet but not the writing brain. I like to know that a line has been turned over a few hundred times before I stop to write it down. I love that scary feeling, once the poem has grown about eight lines solely in my head, that I’m about to receive an important phone call, or witness a crime—something that’ll make me lose the whole thing. Poof! Another masterpiece lost! I love the utter absorption of pulling the vehicle over, or dropping the flaming chainsaws, and as rapidly or discreetly as possible trying to get the important parts down—all over the page sometimes, like a police sketch.
4. What are you reading right now? Anne Carson’s The Autobiography of Red, in the bathtub. Last fall I read from more than ninety titles for my comprehensive exams, starting with a good chunk of the Bible. I also chose to immerse myself in psychoanalytic theory, which was like learning a foreign language. On my nightstand I have new poetry collections by Erin Belieu, Diane Seuss, Mark Wunderlich, Christopher Kempf, and Natalie Shapero. What I like about poetry is that you can shuttle back and forth between books and it always feels like you’re getting somewhere, but when you stop to look at how much you have left, finishing feels impossible! There are just too many ways to get lost in the woods—in a good way.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? I usually find it difficult to tell how widely recognized a writer is. I’ve bounced around enough to know that one person’s junk folder is another’s Treasure Island. If you haven’t read anything by Danez Smith or Ilya Kaminsky, I’m a little afraid of you. Many writers I know have had their first books come out during the pandemic, which feels unfair, but is Benjamin Garcia’s brilliant Thrown in the Throat more or less recognizable for that reason? Are people reading more because they’re going out less? Are they reading more poetry because it resonates more strongly during global catastrophes? Can we all agree that Willa Cather should’ve won a Pulitzer for The Professor’s House and not One of Ours? Is light verse “in”? Is “serious literature” out? How’s the novella doing? And what about all the fantastic work that appears in multi-author volumes—lit mags, anthologies, translations, and so on? What about hybrid genres? Online journals? Zines?! I just learned I’ve been mispronouncing Wisława Szymborska’s name even though she’s one of my all-time favorites. In a poem, Szymborska wrote that maybe two people in a thousand like poetry. That’s less than 0.2 percent! Can we recognize that?
6. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? I wouldn’t say it’s worth taking on a lot of debt, but sure, why not? If your particular brand of genius is so fragile that it can’t withstand a bad teacher’s scrutiny—can’t overcome a hungover classmate’s offhand critique—you think the world of publishing is going to welcome you with open arms? Ha! I know some great writers who opted out of the MFA but still have solid careers and a list of publication credits a mile long. They all live in New York City. They were all born rich.
7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started How to Be Better by Being Worse, what would you say? Go to your Google Drive. Create a new folder. Call it “Cover Art Ideas.” Fill it with artwork you’ve seen in galleries, on street corners, at fancy hotel bars—wherever. Keep track of who made it, and when and where you saw it. Include the artist’s or gallery’s contact info if you have it. Only include images you like, but there’s no need to be stingy. A day will come when you will quickly need a TON of good, affordable options and, well, let’s just say that circumstances may prevent you from doing a worldwide tour of all your favorite galleries. There may even be a chance that the only thing you’ll be able to browse is the internet because everything else will be shut down. Have fun!
8. How did you know when the book was finished? Call me psychic. I just knew.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? I trust my friend Christine Kwon, a great writer in her own right, to tell me exactly what she thinks without hesitation or apology.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? I don’t know if it’s writing advice per se, but in The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides writes: “All wisdom ends in paradox.” Robert Frost, definitely issuing advice in “The Figure a Poem Makes,” said that a poem “begins in delight and ends in wisdom.” Put those two together and you get that poems end in paradoxes, which might be helpful if you are trying to determine whether or not a poem is finished. I wouldn’t be too literal about it and end every poem with a self-contradictory phrase or something like that, but I do think there’s something sort of final and fulfilling about discovering, say, that a poem’s floor is also its ceiling—as I think I did when I finally arrived at the title of “Poem with Trap Door.”
Justin Jannise, author of How to Be Better by Being Worse.
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Quiara Alegría Hudes, whose memoir, My Broken Language, is out today from One World. Born to a Jewish father and Puerto Rican mother, Quiara Alegría Hudes grew up between two languages and cultures. When her parents separated, she recalls: “It was baffling, watching parts of myself get further and further from each other.” But above all she loves her family deeply and is in awe of the women, especially her mother. Ever tender and watchful, she ultimately finds her voice as a playwright, rooting her work in the lives and language of her family. This is a virtuosic and intimate memoir about building a rooted creative life. “Wise, graceful, and devastatingly beautiful, Hudes’s memoir gives voice to the complicated cultural collisions and gentle rebellions that seed a life,” writes Lynn Nottage. Quiara Alegría Hudes is the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright of Water by the Spoonful. She wrote the book for the Broadway musical In the Heights and wrote the screenplay for the forthcoming film adaptation. She lives in New York City.
1. How long did it take you to write My Broken Language? I wrote the first paragraph on my phone in October 2016. It was about a dance party at my Abuela’s house in Philly on her birthday, July 4, soon after Juan Luis Guerra’s Bachata Rosa album hit. Watching an old home video jogged my memory and reminded me how hard we used to dance.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? Keeping it wild and mischievous and badass and ecstatic and irreverent while at the same time going deep and being real about the sorrow, loss, and struggles of the 1990s. As an adolescent, I numbed myself to much of the loss around me. But adult writers cannot afford the luxury of emotional numbness nor protective armor.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? In a studio uptown in Washington Heights, New York City. On a small, thick, silken slab of curly maple that my dad turned into a writing desk. I write every day for as many hours as possible. At around 3 or 4 PM, I usually need a glass of wine—a creative method endorsed by Questlove in his memoirs on creativity—so that’s when I head to the bar and keep writing there.
4. What are you reading right now? Celia Cruz’s autobiography. Her life and talent are miraculous. And she’s got stories for days. I recently finished Mia McKenzie’s great new novel, Skye Falling, which comes out in August, and I encourage everyone to check it out.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Leslie Marmon Silko. Her book Ceremony was an essential read for me. It felt like a cleansing. The kind that starts with a burning.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? COVID lockdown. I used to write in bars—can’t anymore. I used to write while walking—can’t do that either. Or in museums—nope. Being sedentary is the pits.
7. What trait do you most value in your editor (or agent)? Wisdom, trust, and clarity. My editor, Chris Jackson, had no interest in telling me who I was or what kind of writer I should be. He was adept, though, at making me look further and further inward. It was a gentle, nurturing sort of ruthlessness. He is extraordinary.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started My Broken Language, what would you say? Hydrate more often. Have fresh ginger on hand at all times.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? My mother and my husband. They both know me well enough to point out when I’ve betrayed or misrepresented myself.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? José Rivera, the great playwright and screenwriter, said: “Character is the embodiment of obsession. A character must be stupendously hungry. There is no rest for those characters until they’ve satisfied their needs.” His entire 36 Assumptions About Playwriting has been a rich source for me.
Quiara Alegría Hudes, author of My Broken Language. (Credit: Jon Chu)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Kaitlyn Greenidge, whose second novel, Libertie, is out today from Algonquin Books. A sweeping historical novel, Libertie begins in the Reconstruction era in Brooklyn, New York. The eponymous protagonist is eleven years old, and in the opening scene she watches her mother, a local doctor, revive a man who has just been smuggled north to escape slavery. If at first Libertie is fascinated by her mother’s work, she increasingly chafes against the expectation that she, too, will become a doctor. Greenidge maps Libertie’s life as it unfolds, from New York to Ohio to Haiti, and her pursuit of a life in music. Through Libertie’s eyes, Greenidge records the subtle and overt violence of racism, colorism, and misogyny, while meditating on what freedom might look like. “This is one of the most thoughtful and amazingly beautiful books I’ve read all year,” writes Jacqueline Woodson. “Kaitlyn Greenidge is a master storyteller.” Kaitlyn Greenidge is the author of a previous novel, We Love You, Charlie Freeman, which was a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. She is a contributing writer for the New York Times, and her work has also appeared in Vogue, Glamour, and the Wall Street Journal, among other publications. The recipient of fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, she lives in Brooklyn, New York.
1. How long did it take you to write Libertie? It took about three years in total. I came up with the idea for the book in the spring of 2016. I spent about a year just thinking about how it might work, reading and researching pretty slowly. I was overwhelmed with the technical challenge of setting part of the work in Haiti, a country I did not yet know well; in Kreyol, a language I did not speak; and during the 1870s, a time period in Haiti that is hard to find much information about in English. We have a lot of English books about the Haitian revolution at the start of the nineteenth century and U.S. intervention in Haiti in the twentieth century, but the time period I was looking at seemed more difficult to find. Luckily, I started e-mailing academics and writers and poets during that year and I found my way.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? Probably figuring out how all the different elements would work cohesively. I knew what I wanted in the book, but convincing the reader that those things were in there for a reason was the challenge.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? I don’t follow a set schedule. I write and rewrite constantly in my head, often e-mailing myself lines or images or ideas. In 2018 I was very lucky to receive a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute, which meant for the first time in a very long time I could write fiction every day. That was great—I came to my office by about 10 AM, wrote till about 2 PM, and then did nonfiction work in the afternoons. But then I got pregnant and had to rethink my fellowship time, so that schedule only lasted for about four months.
4. What are you reading right now? Sarah Schulman’s Let the Record Show, which is an absolute game changer. Both in revealing more information about the history of ACT UP and in demonstrating how to use oral histories and write about social movements and organizing. I love it a lot. I just finished Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters, which is just so satisfying and perfect. So many times in the last few years I’ve been told a novel is the novel of millennials, and I’ve been like, “Which millennials are you talking about? Not anyone I know.” Detransition, Baby feels like the last decade of my life. It’s so familiar.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Simone Schwarz-Bart. The Bridge of Beyond is, on the sentence level, an absolute masterpiece of a novel. I don’t know how she did it. I read it twice while writing Libertie.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? Time. There’s never enough of it.
7. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? It’s a highly personal decision. It all depends on the program you get into and whether the particular mix of instructors and students fits your particular needs at a particular point in your artistic life. I don’t think it’s helpful to be prescriptive about it.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Libertie, what would you say? Keep going and do the hard stuff first.
9. What, if anything, will you miss most about working on the book? The research and the characters. I loved them all and I also loved figuring out how to fit all these weird, wonderful pieces of history into the book.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? There’s no perfect writing advice. It all depends on your particular artistic moment. But if you are in this for the long haul, it’s valuable to know that all you understand about yourself as an artist—your working habits, your interests, your needs—will shift as you grow and life changes. It’s helpful to expect that and roll with it rather than mourn a past perfect writing life or long for a future one that is never coming.
Kaitlyn Greenidge, author of Libertie. (Credit: Syreeta McFadden)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Gina Nutt, whose debut essay collection, Night Rooms, is out today from Two Dollar Radio. In Night Rooms, Nutt weaves images from horror films and other media with her own personal memories. She writes about potent illusions—how difficult it is to enter the ocean without thinking of Jaws—and others that are more fragile: As a child beauty pageant contestant, she recalls chipping one of her gold trophies, revealing its brown plastic interior. Accumulating vignettes, she circles in on the most intimate and challenging subjects, reckoning with grief and survival. “Gina Nutt writes prose so astonishing I want to read it in an MRI machine just to confirm that every part of my brain indeed lit up,” writes Jeannie Vanasco. “Night Rooms is a brilliant, beautiful, boundlessly inventive book.” Gina Nutt is also the author of the poetry collection Wilderness Champion (Gold Wake Press, 2014). Her writing has appeared in Cosmonauts Avenue, Joyland, Ninth Letter, Poetry Northwest, and Salt Hill, among other publications. She received her MFA from Syracuse University.
1. How long did it take you to write Night Rooms? Four years. An essay that included the book’s earliest seeds was published in 2017. I kept writing from there, expanding and cutting away, then repeating the process.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? Staying true to the lyrical momentum and reining in the disorienting tendencies; finding a balance between the dreamy and concrete.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? I write in my office at the back of my house every morning.
4. What are you reading right now? I’m simmering in a few short story collections: Julián Herbert’s Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino, which is translated by Christina MacSweeney, Souvankham Thammavongsa’s How to Pronounce Knife, and Rebecca Fishow’s The Trouble With Language.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Jose Perez Beduya, whose debut poetry collection, Throng, is a gorgeous study in image, precision, and atmosphere.
6. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? An MFA—mentors, writing peers, workshops, time to write and read—can be transformative. It was for me. And funding can support an experience plenty of us can’t otherwise afford. I think, too, that online workshops, mentorships, writing groups, and other nonacademic opportunities can channel the most helpful aspects of MFA programs, and are sometimes more accessible or practical. My recommendation is to center the writing at the heart of any creative endeavor, sincerely weigh personal logistics, and decide from there.
7. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of Night Rooms? I spent some time in a friend’s jewelry studio during a stretch of revisions. Learning with her and working in a tactile creative form refreshed my approach to making changes in my writing. I also took breaks from this book and worked on other writing. Time away from the book was helpful. So was writing poetry and fiction, finding new approaches or ideas that I could carry back to the essays.
8. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? My husband, David Nutt, who is also a writer. He’s amazing at suggesting when something I considered minor may be the pulse of a piece, or worth another look.
9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry? Encourage the long game by supporting sustainable creative lives for authors and continuing to reimagine the ways we write, publish, and ascribe value to writing.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? Arthur Flowers, in the first fiction workshop I found myself in as an undergraduate: “You’ve got to learn how to sing your own song and respect others for singing theirs.”
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Jo Ann Beard, whose latest book, Festival Days, is out today from Little, Brown. In the nine essays that make up Festival Days, Jo Ann Beard renders her own life and the lives of others with characteristic precision. In “Werner,” she inhabits the story of a man who narrowly escaped an apartment fire, shifting from the smoke-filled room to his childhood memories as if they were her own. In the title essay, she weaves scenes from India, Arizona, and elsewhere to tell the story of losing a close friend to cancer. With each piece, she presses the essay form into new, more intimate territory. “Festival Days is an artistic triumph—vividly peopled, elegantly written, and full of surprises,” writes Adrienne Brodeur. “Each essay and story is an electrically charged tale of loss and partial redemption.” Jo Ann Beard is also the author of The Boys of My Youth and In Zanesville. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Tin House, and Best American Essays, among other publications. The recipient of awards from the Whiting Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, she teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.
1. How long did it take you to write Festival Days? Festival Days was written over the past twenty or so years—essays and stories that appeared in magazines and literary journals, and a new, novella-length piece that gives the book its title.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? My challenge is that everything has to go silent for me to hear my own thoughts and find inspiration, and the current world isn’t designed for that. It wants us to always be listening to, or scrolling through, someone else’s thoughts. For me, the drone of that, visually and aurally, must be manually turned off. In the silence that ensues, windows have to be stared out of, floors have to be paced, and then eventually, like a banner, the imagination unfurls itself.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? By necessity I am a teacher first and a writer second, and since teaching is its own consuming creative activity, the writing only occurs during breaks. But those are plentiful enough that I can’t complain. Although, of course, I do.
4. What are you reading right now? I’m reading books about consciousness, some good and some not so, some understandable and some beyond my ken. Which is good—once you leave the realm of your own understanding, you bump into some amazing things. Like cephalopods and fungi and Mexican medicine men.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Some authors, no matter how much recognition they get, deserve even more. So, Lynda Barry.
6. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? I believe in graduate school, and not just as a teacher, but as a former student. Not because it confers knowledge, though it does, but because it’s difficult as an artist to claim your intention and your will to create. Whereas the rest of the world remains skeptical, graduate school takes it seriously and tries to help. Just try not to go into debt to do it—the rewards for a writer are immense, but they are rarely monetary.
7. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry? I have close friends in the publishing industry, and they are as deeply committed to books as any writer I have met along the way. They have a lot of power over writers, of course, but very little power over readers, so it’s a marriage of convenience. As with all marriages, there are things we would change about our partners. That’s my way of not answering the question.
8. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of Festival Days? Teaching and the reading of other people’s writing, which is what makes mine possible.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? I write with, and for, Mary Allen, an essayist in Iowa. Every piece in Festival Days emerged from our long-distance writing friendship that has stretched from the early nineties to now. We listen and tell each other what we like, and the key to how we help one another is that we like everything. It’s like getting a massage—when you leave, everything hurts again, but while you’re there, you’ve never felt so good.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? A long-ago student named Zac said about an essay we were workshopping: “I’m looking at a circle where I’d like to see a sphere.”
Jo Ann Beard, author of Festival Days. (Credit: Franco Vogt)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley, whose third poetry collection, Dēmos, is out today from Milkweed Editions. In Dēmos, Kingsley reveals and speaks out against the violence that pervades American history and society. In an early poem, he addresses and challenges colonizers directly: “colonize / the crevice between my brown lungs, cremate me / in ashy anonymity before / I surface, I breathe, I war.” Writing about historical events—such as the infamous Phips Proclamation, which promised a bounty for the capture or scalps of Penobscot men, women, and children—Kingsley also attends to his own memories and experiences as a person belonging to Onondaga, Japanese, Cuban, and Appalachian communities. “Dēmos is a powerhouse collection of poems by a powerhouse poet,” writes Victoria Chang. Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley belongs to the Onondaga Nation of Indigenous Americans in New York. The recipient of fellowships from Kundiman and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, he is the author of Colonize Me (Saturnalia Books, 2019) and Not Your Mama’s Melting Pot (Backwaters Press, 2018). His work has also appeared in the Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry, Oxford American, and Tin House, among other publications.
1. How long did it take you to write Dēmos? It’s terrible that I know the exact answer. I started writing Dēmos in the fall of 2016. The writing took me almost exactly as long as forty-five’s presidency.
2. What is the earliest memory that you associate with the book? In ninth-grade biology we had to go through all that genotype/zygote stuff—I say “stuff” because I got through high school by the absolute skin of my shovel-shaped, Native incisors and am still making up for that mislaid literacy. The teacher gave prompts like “Fill out these squares with your family history: eye color, recessive, dominant, knuckle hair, yea, nay, etcetera,” and we kids start filling them out for ethnicity, which is hilariously apropos in its nearly two-decades-ago ignorance—for we so wise in the here and now—as if these cultural markers were some recessive trait you’d maybe or maybe not be born with. I remember writing all four of my “races” outside those Punnet boxes—Onondaga, Cuban, Japanese, Appalachian—and fitting them together as if I’d be able to figure out why I was me, and my homie looks over at me and says, “You’re one messed-up Punnet Square.”
That really stuck with me. A messed-up Punnet Square. I saw myself like that for a long time. That was my earliest memory associated with the book, and now fast forward a decade and a half, and maybe I see myself like that right now. If my monitor goes black and becomes that smudged electric mirror, I’m one messed-up Punnet Square. That’s me. Because I have this intimate, or at least long-standing, relationship with a sterile, probabilistic—easily misread as problematic—diagram. I am a kind of cross-breeding experiment in and of myself. My goal in the specific memory of these poems was to remove the individual “me” and focus on the higher resolution “we,” à la “we the people,” and what a crisscrossed American experiment might yield. I wanted to experiment, to turn that relationship on its ear.
You put that all-too-famous—or way, way not famous enough—Phips Bounty Proclamation on one side of the Punnet. You put my people, our people, on the other. What do you get? The results aren’t as anodyne as eye color. They aren’t as neat as knuckle hair. Not as tidy as, Can she roll her tongue, her “R’s?” When They are dominant, what do We inherit? Is revolution a recessive necessity?
3. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? When I first presented my work to potential editors, early gatekeepers, they were always like, I don’t hear a unified voice. That happened all the time. To be fair, the corpus of my work is weird. Like, when you aggregate it, I mean, when you collect it all together and present it to a publisher, it’s weird. You get one poem or hybrid narrative essay about Japanese American internment. Then the very next is like in Spanish or broken English or Appalachian Amerikan—shout-out Pennsyltucky, we out here dropping linking verbs! Then the very next poem is talking about how in the Onondaga Nation, within my people, there is a famous legend of the Tadodaho: keeper of the people’s history, of the council fire. The tribe’s Tadodaho is charged with preserving the culture, tradition, and keeping the people’s spirit alive—a very pre-Derridean survivance. In the very next poem, I’m the binary-bucking cub of two mixed-race parents.
I pull as much blood from that “I am multitude” cliché as I can, as I want. What are you? is what editors/publishers were saying in rejection after rejection. There isn’t a unified voice, I heard repeatedly from big-name editors. What are you? is what people have been asking me my whole life. I’ve been teaching college students for a hot minute now, and especially at the beginning—like ten years ago—students would always ask, “Where are you from,” which is to say what are you, what race are you. I used to get asked that outright a lot. We know the whole rigamarole by now—especially if you look remotely ethnically ambiguous. I get out ahead of that somewhat these days, but it initially led to some of the wildest classroom conversations.
4. Where, when, and how often do you write? I wake up—I try and chug a lot of water—and most days I try and write. My focus is, I hope, first and foremost on effort and not output. I have a lot more control over the discipline than I do the result. I tend to like the adage You don’t have to write, but you can’t do anything else. I write on one of those flash-furniture Costco folding tables. I have a mechanical keyboard. It’s dope.
5. What are you reading right now? I’m reading Kentaro Miura’s Berserk series, Garry Ezzo and Robert Bucknam’s On Becoming Baby Wise: Giving Your Infant the Gift of Nighttime Sleep, Alan Moore’s Absolute Swamp Thing, and Pushcart Prize XLV: Best of the Small Presses 2021. They’re all drastically different enough that the plot lines haven’t been getting confused.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? Being assaulted by the police. This is a tongue-in-cheek answer, but maybe a hopefully positive spin on turning absolutely negative real-life circumstances into positive generation or a call to action. A year into writing the book, in August of 2017, I was full-on maced—that big, pumpkin-orange, police-grade conical tornado of crowd-controlling pain—in the face by a cop. I was walking on the sidewalk, more or less minding my own business, where there were a dozen cops arresting and getting real aggressive and violent with this not-even-five-foot young woman of color.
The initial action took place on a narrow sidewalk, and there was no room for anyone to get past. So, they mace me very unexpectedly and I stumbled into oncoming traffic. It’s a busy Saturday night on the most popping street in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania—which isn’t saying a ton, but it isn’t saying nothing. Fight or flight kicked in hard. And yeah I’m not a fighter, lmao. Could you guess I fall into the sensitive poet stereotype? I almost get hit by these cars but I can’t see a damn thing. Your eyes capital S slam shut, trust me. I’m huddled in the corner of this pizza shop, totally alone, and by this point people are screaming—I find out later that the wind had picked up the clouded bloat of pepper spray blast and carried it up to a second-story, outdoor night club wherein the patrons began screaming and vomiting. Long story short, every storefront locked their doors, and I ended up being saved by the kindness of strangers and the cups of murky water they splashed in my eyes. Whew. I have bad eyes already, so I was worried permanent damage was on the table. Military folks and police get to wash their eyes out immediately after their pepper spray/tear gas tests with milk/water, whatever. I had nothing, you know? I did have to get a stronger prescription after that. It sucks to think about. There was a news article written up about it a couple days later. Like I do most things, I decided to turn it into art. I just cribbed straight from the racist comment section and the poem literally wrote itself. I like to think that, in this, and in the precursor poem that more detailed the assault in a more conventional narrative, I’m reclaiming a little of the white-whale space taken up by 2011’s fad(ish) Franco/LaBeouf-ian “uncreative writing.”
7. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry? I cannot wait until we can all be together again. I miss the intimacy of hearing undiluted voices. Hugs. Raw laughter.
8. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? Senior year of my undergrad I was desperate for a mentor, comradery, and guidance. I synced up with this about-to retire professor who had gone to Iowa in the seventies. After a semester of trying to impress him and taking two of his classes, he told me, “An MFA program might take pity on you, but I hope they don’t.” Bleh. Maybe his heart was in the right place and he just thought I wasn’t ready. Maybe I’ll look back in two decades and be like, Yeah that guy was right. Right now I think, What an asshole. I kept writing. My first semester of grad school in English/Comp Lit I found space in my schedule for a creative writing class, I submitted a creative nonfiction piece about Down syndrome, disabled bodies, and violence. My professor wrote “No.” “No.” “No.” “Offensive.” “Wrong.” all over the essay. They asked me to drop the course. I later found out they actually knew nothing about Down syndrome, and their only experiences had been with TV, with the ultra “high functioning.” My family was on the wrong end of their spectrum, unbelievable, a reality to be erased. They tore me to shreds in workshop. But I believed in the veracity of that essay, and it ended up getting me into an MFA. Unfortunately, anecdotes like that abound. All this to say: I am the most trusted reader of my work. I’ve had enough bad workshops to know that if I don’t have faith in the work, no one will.
9. How did you know when the book was finished? The only honest answer is that I know a book/essay/story/poem is finished when people in charge, i.e. publishers, will get mad if I change something, lol. Up until then everything is fair game.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? Write. I know it sounds banal, but I think everything boils its way down to just write.
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Viet Thanh Nguyen, whose second novel, The Committed,is out today from Grove Press. In The Committed, Nguyen returns to the story of the unnamed narrator of his debut novel, The Sympathizer. After enduring a year in a communist reeducation camp and two years in an Indonesian refugee camp, the narrator has managed to reach Paris and gain shelter with his French Vietnamese “aunt.” He, along with his close friend Bon, turn to drug dealing to make their way in the new city. But the work becomes increasingly dangerous, and the narrator is wary of participating in such a decidedly capitalist business. Told with characteristic wit and intelligence, The Sympathizer is a nuanced examination of ideology and identity. “A rich and exhilarating story of friendship, loyalty, and greed,” writes Laila Lalami. “Viet Thanh Nguyen gives us an unsparing look at the poisonous effects of ideology—whether colonialism, communism, or capitalism—even as he explores the deep-seated need we all have to believe in something.” Viet Thanh Nguyen’s first novel, The Sympathizer, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, among several other awards. He is also the author of the short story collection The Refugees and the nonfiction book Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, which was a National Book Award finalist. He lives in Los Angeles.
1. How long did it take you to write The Committed? A bit over four years, from 2016 to early 2020. The novel would have been published in late 2020 but for the pandemic pushing everything back.
2. What is the earliest memory that you associate with the book? How fun it was to start writing it in 2016. The Sympathizer had been a success, but it hadn’t yet won a Pulitzer Prize, so I was still left alone to enjoy the writing.
3. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? Coping with all the attention and expectations the Pulitzer brought. It was very distracting and prolonged the writing of the book by at least a year, maybe two.
4. Where, when, and how often do you write? When I’m not teaching, I write four hours or one thousand words a day, whichever comes first. When I am teaching, I write a few days a week, nothing during grading, and mostly during holidays and summers. Most of my life, I wrote in a corner of a bedroom, facing a wall. Now I’m lucky to have my own office with a view of my garden.
5. What are you reading right now? Many incredible books for the Aspen Words Literary Prize and the Pulitzer Prize. The Aspen Words longlist is public and I highly recommend it. The Pulitzer Prize is confidential so you’ll have to wait until the nominations and winners are announced in April.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Edward P. Jones. He won a Pulitzer Prize for The Known World, but he’s a modest man who doesn’t indulge in publicity, so he’s not as well-known as he deserves to be. His Lost in the City is one of the great short story collections. I love that book.
7. What trait do you most value in your editor (or agent)? Their ability to understand what I want to do and their willingness to suggest what I need to cut.
8. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry? Eliminate blurbs. They are a tax on the writers and editors who have to ask for them, and the writers who have to write them. I’ve been on both sides. Just publish books without blurbs and let readers decide.
9. What, if anything, will you miss most about working on the book? It was set in Paris and gave me a reason to spend more time there, including two full summers. I haven’t been back since the pandemic and look forward to returning in summer 2022, if not sooner.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? I found Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running to be the most inspirational book about writing, even though it’s explicitly about running. But that’s what writing is. You get up and you go and run every day, or as many days of the week as you can, for as long as you can, and you do it over and over and over and over until you can’t do it anymore, and it is an experience that is both repetitive and inspiring, painful and exhilarating. That’s writing.
Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Committed. (Credit: BeBe Jacobs)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Elizabeth Miki Brina, whose debut memoir, Speak, Okinawa, is out today from Knopf. As a child, Elizabeth Miki Brina held her mother at a distance. She was embarrassed by her mother’s accent, how conspicuous it felt in their predominantly white suburb in upstate New York. She did not yet understand the complexities of her parent’s relationship—her mother was born on U.S.-occupied Okinawa and met Brina’s father, a white American soldier, while working as a nightclub hostess. But as an adult, Brina begins to look at her parents with new eyes. She reexamines her memories, her family history, and the history of Okinawa itself. “I had not learned this history, my mother’s history, my history, until I was thirty-four years old,” she writes. “Which is to say that I grew up not knowing my mother or myself.” Speak, Okinawa is a virtuosic and unflinching search for clarity. “In exploring how one comes to be, Brina’s prose illuminates and dazzles—and we see, in the end, what was intangible made clear in her writing,” writes Bryan Washington. “Speak, Okinawa is indelible, and Brina’s words are unforgettable.” Elizabeth Miki Brina is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe–Bread Loaf Scholarship and a New York State Summer Writers Institute Scholarship. She lives and teaches in New Orleans.
1. How long did it take you to write Speak, Okinawa? I started writing the essay that would eventually become the book in the summer of 2015. So, five years.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? The most challenging thing about writing the book was deciding what personal details to share or not share, deciding what was mine or not mine to share, and knowing that these decisions would affect and alter the narrative, as well as the reader’s perception of and attitude toward the people being portrayed. This was a great deal of responsibility that I didn’t want to abuse. Kept me awake some nights.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? I write on my porch and backyard mostly, sometimes in my office when the weather gets too ugly. I typically write at night, though sometimes I sneak moments during the day. I have a solid writing session about twice a week.
4. What are you reading right now? I’m reading A Manual for Cleaning Women, a short story collection by Lucia Berlin. It’s fantastic.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? I’m not the most up to date or in tune when it comes to discovering new or underappreciated authors. Julie Otsuka wrote one of my favorite books, The Buddha in the Attic, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award, but I still think it should get more attention. Maybe it is. Maybe it will.
6. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? Yes. Absolutely. I learned so much from the workshop process: submitting drafts, reading drafts, receiving feedback, and trying to articulate what invites and moves or what falls flat on the page and why. Not to mention the camaraderie and lifelong connections. The MFA experience was invaluable to me.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? Both my agent and my editor have been incredibly encouraging and supportive. All of their continual reassurance and validation and faith in the importance of this story sticks with me.
8. What is one thing that surprised you during the writing of Speak, Okinawa? I was surprised by how much I remembered, and how much my perspective of memories shifted as I was writing, rewriting, and revising. There were so many revelations I could only have reached through the process of putting memories on paper, seeing them reflected back at me, trying to view them objectively and find the precise words to describe them.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? Besides my editor at Knopf who is so brilliant and generous and thoughtful with how she reads, I have a couple close friends from my MFA program that I trust the most for different reasons. One of them praises and uplifts, but in a very pointed and concerted way, while asking more open-ended questions that make me feel safe and allow me to explore. Another friend scrutinizes and resists, a bit harshly for my thin skin, but that’s precisely what I need to toughen up and retort with something better.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? There is a quote by Adrienne Rich that I always keep in mind: “You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.” It helps me to write about the deeply personal, the private, to trust the reader with my secrets, to take risks and pursue high stakes.
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features María José Ferrada and Elizabeth Bryer, the author and the translator of How to Order the Universe, which is out today from Tin House. At seven years old, the narrator of How to Order the Universe, M,begins to assist her father in his work as a traveling salesman. Shadowing her father, her sense of the world becomes defined by his philosophies and his inventory of hardware tools. “While my classmates wrote poems about trees and the summer sun,” she recalls. “I wrote odes to door viewers, pliers, and saws.” But cracks begin to appear in what M initially presents as an idyllic arrangement. Through the eyes of her young narrator, Ferrada subtly reveals the true precarity of M’s family life and Pinochet-era Chile. “How to Order the Universe is a dreamscape of a book,” writes Tara Conklin. María José Ferrada is also the author of numerous children’s books, including the forthcoming Niños:Poems for the Lost Children of Chile (Eerdmans, 2021); she lives in Santiago, Chile. Elizabeth Bryer is an author and translator whose previous translations include The Palimpsests by Aleksandra Lun (Godine, 2019) and Blood of the Dawn by Claudia Salazar Jiménez (Deep Vellum, 2016).
1. How long did it take you to complete work on How to Order the Universe? María José Ferrada: It’s a short novel, but it took me three years. I think partly this had to do with the fact that it draws on my own life. Writing it meant finding myself in the company of people who were dear to me, people who became characters. I knew that finishing the novel would mean saying goodbye to the traveling salesmen once more, and I think that some part of me wanted to take all the time in the world to do so.
Elizabeth Bryer: Around six months, spread across a couple of years.
2. What was the most challenging thing about the project? María José Ferrada: The most challenging thing was finding the narrator. I only identified who that would be once I’d written half of the first version, so I had to retrace my steps and start over from the first word. It has taken me a long time to learn that changes in plans—identifying the narrator, eliminating characters, eliminating entire chapters—are not necessarily setbacks, but part of the writing process.
Elizabeth Bryer: Getting the precocious voice of the narrator right. That and the humor! Humor can be such an intricate puzzle to translate, especially those instances where a play on words is involved. Sometimes what does not read as a play on words in one language can look like one when viewed from the perspective of another. The constellation of meanings encompassed by a single word in one language rarely matches exactly that of the word’s closest counterpart in the other language, which is part of what makes translation so creatively and intellectually stimulating.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? María José Ferrada: I write in the living room—the only part of my apartment where a desk will fit—or at a café when possible. Unfortunately, with the pandemic, the café no longer counts as one of my “offices.” I try to be methodical, leaving periods for writing—a month, for example—and then a couple of weeks for revising and thinking about where to take it from there. Sometimes this second period—seeing where the text is going, if it’s going somewhere—can draw out. Mornings are much more productive for me than afternoons, so I try to keep them for writing.
Elizabeth Bryer: Workflow for translation can be intermittent, so it depends on when you ask me. If I have signed a contract to translate a work, I try to keep the early morning for my own creative writing, and then translation work is the next thing I do, starting around 9:30 AM. Ideally I do this five days a week, though this is not always possible around other commitments. As for where: inside a second-story flat in Birrarranga/Melbourne, on unceded sovereign Wurundjeri land, wearing expensive noise-canceling earphones to dim the drone of the frame-making factory next door.
4. What are you reading right now? María José Ferrada: Cosmos by Alexander von Humbolt, a treatise in which the German naturalist and explorer attempts a “physical description of the universe” that incorporates all the things that he observed on his travels around the world. It is so interesting to see how he links biological and physical phenomena, until he arrives at the hunch of “nature as a whole,” interdependent, which three centuries later we are yet to fully comprehend. There are some poetic moments. He wonders, for example, at the number of phenomena that must have disappeared long before our eyes perceived them, or about changes that have already occurred and are yet to make their effects known. In those moments the perspective of this man of science reverts to that of a child asking why things are the way they are. That perspective interests me because I think it is the driving force behind many things.
Elizabeth Bryer: Currently I have two books on the go, a classic novel and a recent-ish essay collection: The Summer Book by Tove Jansson, translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal, which has been a balm during confinement; and Tressie McMillan Cottom’s Thick: And Other Essays, which is so intelligent and generous and sublimely written.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? María José Ferrada: I think that Murasaki Shikibu, author of The Tale of Genji, isn’t remembered as she should be. We don’t hear about her when we start learning the history of literature at school. We hear about Cervantes, but not about her, the person who, ten centuries ago, wrote what is now considered by many to be the first novel. She observed behavior in a way that was so profound and so free at the same time, that she not only wrote a classic, but also took the first steps into a genre that a thousand years later we are still reading.
Elizabeth Bryer: Adania Shibli. It’s a few months now since I read her novel Minor Detail, translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette, yet I still think about it at least once a day. And Alexis Wright. Carpentaria and The Swan Book are mesmeric novels of the highest order.
6. What is one thing you might change about the literary community or publishing industry? María José Ferrada: I think that in the publishing industry everything is too rushed. I always wonder how many good books never got a chance to be read—and perhaps never will be read—because they were discarded when the next month’s titles arrived. Literature, in contrast, operates at a slower speed, not only in terms of production, but in terms of reception. How did a novel do? That is something we only know a good deal of time later. There are novels that go unnoticed when they are published, only to be discovered later by a reader, and then they are reborn and attract a lot of attention. There are also best-sellers that we know nobody will remember in ten years’ time. Publishing and literature are two different things, and they operate on different timescales; I think it’s important not to lose sight of that and to recognize the times when you are working for one and the times when you are working for the other. I am not saying that you don’t need to sell your novel, because you do, especially if you want to make a living from your work, but you need to be aware, for better and worse, that the result, especially in terms of reception, doesn’t solely depend on the work you did. There are many factors involved; the pace of the market and the times we are living in are just two of them.
Elizabeth Bryer: Far more literature is translated out of English than into it, which of course means the flow of economic and cultural capital operates mostly in the inverse direction. I really like the idea—which I am pretty sure came from Michael Henry Heim, though I haven’t been able to relocate the source—for a system whereby a small percentage of earnings destined for each English-language author is automatically diverted to a pool of funds, and then these funds are dedicated to bringing into English more works by authors who write in other languages. I would also add a corrective bias towards underrepresented languages, regions, and intersections.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? María José Ferrada: This has to do with my previous response. Once I’d delivered the manuscript, I asked my editor Juan Manuel Silva what would happen if it didn’t do well. He responded that if that happened, he would be buying the beers. Which meant, he continued, that if it did well, I would be buying them. What he was saying, I think, is that after doing the work—in this case, after writing the story I wanted to write—I had to do what any worker would: crack open the beer that meant I’d made it to the end of my shift. I also think he was trying to warn me about what is and is not important in this trade. Literature and best-sellers are two different things. Sometimes as writers we confuse the two.
Elizabeth Bryer: It’s something the author, María José Ferrada, told me, and I know I can share it because she spoke about it in an interview: How to Order the Universe is very autobiographical, a gift for her father and his friends. I think this came as such a shock not only because of how endeared I had become to the characters, but also because of how crafted and almost fable-like the novel’s setting of 1980s Chile is, not to mention its picaresque tone. Translating means to inhabit the world of another author’s novel in such an intimate way, which always feels like an enormous privilege, but Ferrada’s revelation about the novel’s origins enhanced the privilege that I felt immensely.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your creative life? María José Ferrada: E-mails, phone calls, the washing machine I must turn on, the food I must buy at the supermarket, and that long to-do list, which is never-ending and which you can’t ignore if you are alive in this world. But I also believe that literature is nourished by these acts, so I welcome all those small, and sometimes tedious, impediments.
Elizabeth Bryer: Financial uncertainty, and/or having too much on my plate, with the latter often a direct consequence of the former.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? María José Ferrada: A poet friend who has a remarkable ear and, most importantly, an enviable sincerity.
Elizabeth Bryer: For translation work, the editor of whichever book I am translating. In the case of How to Order the Universe, this was Masie Cochran. Often, rereading a translation that I am working on or have recently worked on means triggering a palimpsest in my head that includes all the turns of phrase I chose in earlier iterations. For this reason, it is incredibly valuable to have an editor’s perspective.
10. What’s the best piece of creative advice you’ve ever heard? María José Ferrada: A piece of advice that Akira Kurosawa gave young people who wanted to make films. He told them that they could understand the details of how to structure a film by writing a screenplay. That to do so, they didn’t need a big budget, only paper and a pencil. He acknowledged that writing is certainly hard work, but that the only way to do it was to put one word down and then another. He insisted that you needed to be patient and, if you found the patience, after a few hours, even if it had been a challenging few hours, you would have a whole page. I think he was saying that it is a process that you can’t rush.
Elizabeth Bryer: To give whatever you are working on more time, care, thought, and creativity than you think you are able.
Editor’s Note: María José Ferrada’s answers appear in translation from the Spanish by Elizabeth Bryer.
María José Ferrada and Elizabeth Bryer, the author and the translator of How to Order the Universe. (Credit: Ferrada: Ignacio de la Cuadra; Bryer: Percy Cáceres)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Alex Dimitrov, whose third poetry collection, Love and Other Poems, is out today from Copper Canyon Press. True to its title, Love and Other Poems swells with tenderness and feeling. “I love writing letters and this is my letter. To the world that never wrote to me,” Dimitrov writes. Despite the misery of the world—“How people are being detained / and shot with our money”—he remains devoted to approaching both cruelty and beauty with open eyes. Turning over familiar subjects—New York City, the moon, sex—and holding them up to the light, he models how to reclaim a sense of wonder and purpose in daily life. Alex Dimitrov is the author of Together and by Ourselves (Copper Canyon Press, 2017) and Begging for It (Four Way Books, 2013). The recipient of a Pushcart Prize and the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize, his writing has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Paris Review, among other publications. He and Dorothea Lasky write together as the Astro Poets and published Astro Poets: Your Guides to the Zodiac with Flatiron Books in 2019.
1. How long did it take you to write Love and Other Poems? I started writing the book in August of 2017. I finished it in March of 2020. It was delayed by almost a year because I kept changing things. I’m a perfectionist.
2. What is the earliest memory that you associate with the book? I remember meeting a friend for a drink at Old Town Bar on a summer Friday, and walking from there to Lovers of Today in the East Village to meet another friend. It was that hazy, late light of summer. The streets were very hot. And I was happy because I was about to quit my office job and take a big risk. I’d just started writing the title poem, “Love,” which I really believed in.
3. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? Not having healthcare or benefits while also having more jobs than I’ve ever had in my life. I think I taught, as an adjunct, at something like six or seven different colleges and universities in the time period in which I wrote the book. Most semesters I taught five classes. The poems came easy compared to that.
4. Where, when, and how often do you write? I write in my apartment at a white desk that faces a window. I write every day. The time I write changes depending on my schedule. Ideally I read in the morning and write in the late afternoon. Usually I like to go for a late run after I write and then meet a friend for a drink. Having an entire day free almost never happens. Regardless, it’s important to treat writing like a job and be serious about having a routine. Like any job, there are many bad days. But writing is the most important thing in my life. There’s no quitting.
5. What are you reading right now? Melissa Broder’s novel Milk Fed. I think Melissa Broder is a genius.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? Money.
7. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of Love and Other Poems? I want poems to sound as pleasurable as songs and to speak to everyone. I also want them to have an edge and feel cool. I was listening to a lot of sixties and seventies girl groups. Also rock. The Strokes. The Stones. Love, time, and New York City are the big subjects of my work.
8. How did you know when the book was finished? I didn’t. I don’t know when anything is finished and I’m not sure I want to. I hate saying goodbye and I hate finishing things.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? I send my poems to almost no one. I will occasionally send them to my best friend, who is an art historian, though not for general feedback. Sometimes I have a very specific question about a line or punctuation or a larger idea. I trust her to tell me the truth, as a reader who is interested in both the intellect and pleasure, which is important to me. I care a lot about the reader. I do not take them or their time for granted. I know there are a million other things they could be doing—having sex, eating, smoking. When I have their attention, it’s on me to make it worth it.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? Spend as much time alone as possible.
Alex Dimitrov, author of Love and Other Poems. (Credit: Sylvie Rosokoff)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Randa Jarrar, whose memoir, Love Is an Ex-Country, is out today from Catapult. Love Is an Ex-Country opens in the summer of 2016, in the shadow of the upcoming presidential election, as Jarrar sets out on a cross-country road trip from California to Connecticut. Along the way there are many moments of joy and pleasure: She gathers with fellow Arab American and Muslim writers at a conference in Minneapolis, for instance, and reflects, “I wish we could spend our whole lives in celebration, communion, checking on each other, loving each other, being free.” Yet the journey also presents new challenges, and throughout the book, Jarrar revisits painful memories of domestic abuse, racism, and death threats. But no matter her subject, Jarrar steers through the varied landscape of America and memory with steady hands, speaking boldly and truthfully at every turn. “There wasn’t a page in this memoir that didn’t make me want to jump up and cheer, murmur in awe, scream with laughter, or weep,” writes Melissa Febos. Randa Jarrar is also the author of the novel A Map of Home (Penguin Books, 2009) and the short story collection Him, Me, Muhammad Ali (Sarabande Books, 2016). Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Salon, Bitch, and Buzzfeed, among other publications. She lives in Los Angeles.
1. How long did it take you to write Love Is an Ex-Country? Some of the chapters were written seven years before the book sold. But from the moment I understood this would be a book to the moment I sent it out: three years.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? I love being in a car and hearing directions to “go straight.” I always yell, “Gayly forward!” I wanted to write a road trip memoir but to subvert the form, so that readers would share my sense of disorientation as a refugee, as well as my sense of alienation. But I also wanted the book to be read. Ha! So the toughest part was finding a balance between reflecting my experiences of trauma and exile, while guiding the reader gayly forward through the narrative.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? Any time, any place, and as often as I feel like it! I self-assign deadlines for my creative projects. I raised a child alone, so I always had to write wherever I could: McDonald’s play areas, the park, at cafés with cheap tacos, and so on. Nowadays I tend to write where I’m most comfortable. I write quick drafts and spend most of my time revising.
4. What are you reading right now? Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses, which is long overdue and needs to be required reading for both students and professors.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Sherley Anne Williams, specifically her book The Peacock Poems, a beautiful book about Black desire, motherhood, and California’s Central Valley.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? Racism and imperialism—the biggest impediments to the vast majority of people’s lives, really.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? It’s not really one thing editor Megha Majumdar told me, it was what and how she told me in her first round of editorial notes. When I received her comments I was at AWP in Portland—a Very White conference in a Very White city. I’d never had a book editor of color. I was so moved by how deeply engaged she was with my work, her sharp and great suggestions, the way she saw my story, that I wept.
8. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? Only if they’re paid to, or it’s an affordable state school. Academia is often harmful for the most marginalized of us.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? Women and nonbinary queers of color, because we are who I write for. My first reader tends to be a close friend, and for Love Is an Ex-Country, it was writer Christine Hyung-Oak Lee, with whom I share a lot of intersections. She was equal parts encouraging and constructive in her criticism.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? When you’re working on a project, create a regular writing schedule and commit to completing a scene each time you write. For some, word counts and page numbers work best. But once a teacher told me to shift to scenes, books happened.
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Edward Carey, whose latest novel, The Swallowed Man, is out today from Riverhead Books. In The Swallowed Man, Carey reimagines the classic tale of Pinocchio from the father’s point of view. The novel begins inside the belly of a monster-fish, where the carpenter Giuseppe “Geppetto” Lorenzini became trapped after venturing into the sea in search of his runaway wooden son. Writing in an old journal—scavenged from the stomach of the beast—Giuseppe addresses the reader directly, relaying not only the joy of creating Pinocchio but also the misfortune that followed: “Have you ever had those moments when, without quite knowing how, your art comes through with more grace, more life in it, than you had supposed possible?” Accompanied by the author’s own illustrations, The Swallowed Man is a surreal and intimate portrait of a father in crisis. “The Swallowed Man is profound and delightful,” writes Max Porter. “It is a strange and tender parable of two maddening obsessions; parenting and art-making.” Edward Carey is a novelist, illustrator, and playwright. His previous novels include Little, Observatory Mansions, and Alva and Irva: The Twins Who Saved a City. He is also the author of the acclaimed Iremonger Trilogy for young adult readers. Born in England, he lives in Austin, Texas.
1. How long did it take you to write The Swallowed Man? A couple of years. The book is the journal and art of the two years Geppetto spent inside the belly of a gigantic sea beast. Originally the book was a sort of catalogue to an exhibition at the Parco di Pinocchio in the town of Collodi, Italy. Since then, the book has changed rather a lot. There’s new art—I always illustrate the books I write—and a new character called Ill-face, a very unpleasant, burnt puppet who haunts Geppetto.
2. What is the earliest memory that you associate with the book? I read the story of Pinocchio as a child but I think it must have been in a very adulterated version, probably by Disney. I don’t think I read the book properly until I was commissioned to adapt Robert Coover’s wonderful novel PinocchioIn Venice for the National Theatre of Craiova in Romania. Since then I’ve been obsessed by Carlo Collodi’s original story, which is dark and strange and full of life. I think of Pinocchio as something like the patron saint of objects. And when I was in my early twenties I saw the beautiful wooden Jesus in the Basicila di Santo Spirito in Florence, carved from wood by Michelangelo at age eighteen, and the sculpture seemed to me a relative of the famous Tuscan puppet.
3. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? I wanted to explore Geppetto as a character. He’s abandoned by Collodi for two years inside the belly of an enormous shark, but Collodi gives us no information on what that imprisonment was like, except that there’s a wrecked ship inside the belly with him. Collodi’s book keeps asking the question from the puppet’s viewpoint, “What is a human?” I thought that Geppetto must have asked himself the same question during his confinement.
4. Where, when, and how often do you write? I used to work in my office on campus at the University of Texas at Austin, but that hasn’t been possible for some time. Now it’s on the dining room table, or in the bedroom or in a studio a walk away, which is also where I teach from. Since the pandemic I’ve put one novel on hold and written a draft of another. My main way of getting through this strange time is doing a drawing a day and posting it on Twitter and Instagram. Every day without fail. Small marks with a pencil. Sometimes I draw something someone suggests, sometimes the drawings are in relation to current events, sometimes they’re because I’m missing England and I draw something from home. If I’m not able to write I can at least draw a little, every day.
5. What are you reading right now? One Thousand and One Nights. I’m teaching a class on fairy tales and right now I’m getting lost in that extraordinary ocean of stories. The best way I can think of traveling during a pandemic.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? I wish more people knew of the fairy tales of Giambattista Basile. He wrote his extraordinary collection The Tale of Tales in the 1600s, but he wrote in the Neapolitan dialect and, unless you were from Naples, you wouldn’t be able to understand them. He died of plague in 1632, and his sister published his masterwork after his death. For centuries no one read his work, or only saw it in poor translations. Not until 1925 did Benedetto Croce translate Basile into Italian, and we did not get a brilliant English translation until Nancy L. Canepa published one in 2007. Oh, it’s so good. He wrote, for example, many amazing sentences about dawn. Here’s one: Until Dawn brought the news that the Sun had been found alive, and the sky shed its mourning clothes.
7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started The Swallowed Man, what would you say? I would say, “Stop! Don’t do it. Put the computer down. Go outside, get on a plane, go and see friends, go to the theater, go to the cinema, go to restaurants. Stop sitting in a corner, you’re going to be stuck inside a bungalow in Texas for at least a year which is a little too similar at times to being inside the belly of a giant sea beast, go, get out, SEE PEOPLE while you still can!”
8. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry? Diversity.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? My wife, the writer Elizabeth McCracken. She’s wise and kind and very sharp. I trust her absolutely. She’ll tell me the truth, but she’ll tell it to me in such a way that I’ll feel excited about going back to work.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? I really love this from Italo Calvino: “Instead of making myself write the book I ought to write, the novel that was expected of me, I conjured up the book I myself would have liked to read, the sort by an unknown writer, from another age and another country, discovered in an attic.”
Edward Carey, author of The Swallowed Man. (Credit: Riverhead Books)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Jana Larson, whose first book, Reel Bay, is out today from Coffee House Press. Nearly two decades ago, writer and filmmaker Jana Larson was riveted by a short news item in a Minneapolis newspaper, which reported the apparent suicide of a young woman, Takako Konishi, who was visiting from Japan. The police, who had by chance interviewed Konishi a few days earlier—though greatly inhibited by a language barrier—speculated she had come to the Midwest in search of the money hidden in a snowdrift in the movie Fargo. Captivated by the strangeness of the report, and an image that flashed in her mind of the young woman wandering in a great expanse of white, Larson began to research the case further. Written as a hybrid screenplay-essay, Reel Bay documents the author’s obsession with Konishi’s story and her various attempts to transform the story into art. What begins as an exploration into another woman’s struggle becomes a broader reckoning with the author’s own creative and emotional lives. “Reel Bay is an obsessive, fascinating, haunting debut,” writes Dana Spiotta. Jana Larson holds an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Hamline University and an MFA in filmmaking from the University of California in San Diego. As a filmmaker, she has received honors from the Princess Grace Foundation and the Minnesota State Arts Board. She lives in Minneapolis.
1. How long did it take you to write Reel Bay? Too long. My friends and family had, for the most part, stopped asking me how I was doing because it had become painful for them to hear about the book. My mother would occasionally scream, “When are you going to be finished with this thing so you can move on with your life?” I worked on the project off and on for about seventeen years, first as a documentary film, then as a screenplay, and finally as a book. If I were to add up all of the time I was actively working on the project, it was probably ten years. I now console myself by thinking that might be fairly typical for a first book.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? Grappling with my own mind. Admitting to myself that I was as much a part of the story as Takako; that my own delusions rivaled hers. Then finding a structure to tell that story—about a long quest that occurred in the minds of two different women, that took them across continents at different times. Only one of them survived.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? When I’m actively working on something, I try to write every morning for an hour or two. If I don’t do that, the continuity and momentum of my thought process breaks apart and it takes me a long time to get back to it. I need to be alone at a table near a window because I need natural light. Sitting in a chair under a tree is also good. I am very particular about the pen and notebook I use. Later I go back and highlight or underline whatever interests me in the notebook and then work to cobble those lines and paragraphs together into a longer piece.
4. What are you reading right now? I’m about halfway through Antkind by Charlie Kaufman. I’m also reading A Collapse of Horses by Brian Evenson and In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. Next up are Ornamental by Juan Cárdenas, The Waves by Virginia Woolf, and Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Léger.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Probably all of them. It seems like reading isn’t a very popular pastime right now. But I feel comfortable in the more obscure corners of the artistic world. I grew up going to punk rock shows in tiny clubs and dilapidated warehouses. Mostly the bands couldn’t play their instruments very well, but there was something amazing about the energy that came from being part of something that felt totally uncommercial and sometimes a little dangerous. That probably gets lost when people in board rooms get involved and start fretting over how much money they’re investing and what kind of return they need to get. Maybe it’s great to have that kind of validation; I wouldn’t know about that. But to answer the question more directly: Julio Cortázar. I love his stories so much I want to climb inside of them. I love Lydia Davis’s stories too, but I’m already living inside of a Lydia Davis story.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? Self-doubt.
7. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? During my first year of graduate school, one of the professors said to me, “Run while you still can! People arrive here with talent and leave with none.” I thought he was kidding, but he absolutely wasn’t. The wrong MFA program can be very damaging and confusing. Still, I think that if a person has a project they’re working on and they want structure—deadlines and critiques and a practice community—to help them finish it, then perhaps graduate school is a good fit. To those people, my advice is: Get absolutely clear about what supports your creative process and what undermines it; steer toward the former and treat the latter like kryptonite.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Reel Bay, what would you say? I don’t think you can give someone insight; they have to struggle to find it on their own. But I remember one of my professors in graduate school telling me that Jonas Mekas, patron saint of lyric and experimental cinema, encouraged artists to buy real estate in New York. He understood that the existence of an art scene depends on artists having affordable spaces to live and work. So I would say, “Buy property in San Diego while it’s still possible.”
9. What, if anything, will you miss most about working on the book? Sometimes I can’t imagine myself without this book, and without Takako. Of course, she’s mostly a figment of my imagination; she’s continued on for so long as my companion because of all that I’ve projected onto her. And I don’t have that anymore. I have to let it go. It’s like any intimate relationship, really.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? Patricia Weaver Francisco, after watching me struggle with this book for many years, said, “You need to just choose an island and swim to it.”
Jana Larson, author of Reel Bay. (Credit: Shelly Mosman)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Torrey Peters, whose debut novel, Detransition, Baby, is out today from One World. Reese is proud to have served as a mother figure for several other young trans women in New York City, but above all else she longs to have a child of her own. To become a mother, she believes, is to be “granted the womanhood that she suspected the goddesses of her childhood took as their natural due.” She had once imagined she would build a family with her partner, Amy, until Amy chose to detransition, and go by Ames, leading their relationship to fall apart. But now three years after the breakup, Ames reappears with the news that his new lover, Katrine, is pregnant, and he proposes that the three of them raise the child together. And while all three characters carry fears and uncertainties, they set out to envision a family on their own terms. An honest and loving portrait of trans feminine culture, Detransition, Baby offers new visions for motherhood and kinship. “Torrey Peters evokes these characters with such fullness and compassion that they felt like dear friends to me,” writes Helen Phillips. “This is an important book, and I couldn’t put it down.” Torrey Peters is the author of the novellas Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones and The Masker. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an MA in comparative literature from Dartmouth. Born in Chicago, she lives in Brooklyn, New York.
1. How long did it take you to write Detransition, Baby? I started in the summer of 2016 and had a complete draft of it by 2019, but then I spent another year revising and writing a different ending.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? It was a time in my life when I was figuring out, basically, how to live as a trans woman after the drama of transition had passed. Which is a lot of what the book is about as well, but it meant that my setbacks in life were also setbacks in the writing process. Bad boyfriends, intermittent finances, odd living situations: They happen in the book, but first they happened in life, and I had to recover from them to have the time and space to write. Finally I read a bunch of horribly square business books on time management for like, thwarted corporate middle managers, which embarrassingly taught me more about how to separate my writing from other parts of life than any advice meant for writers.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? When I have a project I’m into, I can write for about four hours a day, and can do it steadily in the mornings. I have been restoring a tiny, old off-the-grid log cabin in Vermont, and as soon as I get some solar power going up there, I’m pretty excited to start working with no internet access and just a wood stove to distract me.
4. What are you reading right now? I have always wanted to be in a literary moment or scene, a place and time where other authors care a lot and share their work. I’ve always had fantasies of the Harlem Renaissance or Paris in the twenties…only with trans and queer authors. Maybe it’s finally happening! I’ve got just-finished unpublished manuscripts by Zoe Whittall and Casey Plett that I’ve just started in on. Big Canadian representation in this answer!
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? T Fleischmann. Their last book, Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through, I believe, will eventually be looked back on as an important work in nonbinary thought. Often really great books arrive ahead of their time and, therefore, wide recognition comes with a delay. It takes a while for the rest of us to realize we’ve been given brilliance, but after some years, we figure it out. I believe that will be the case with T.
6. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? This is a hard question, because neither my editor, Caitlin McKenna, nor my agent, Kent Wolf, speak in quotable aphorisms. Instead, to their credit, they are about long, slow hard work. I think that a lot of writers believe they need tank-like champions in agents and editors to take on the murky forces of the publishing world. But Kent and Caitlin are exceptional in that they have set me up to solve a lot of the publishing world problems myself. I feel confident in talking about why my book matters to both publishers and readers, and I feel that way because Caitlin and Kent have positioned me to speak for my book, instead of setting themselves up as arbiters and gatekeepers. They are an agent and editor confident enough to relinquish power back to the authors with whom they work. I mean that as the highest compliment.
7. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of the book? Fighting and loving other trans women. Especially other trans women artists. The book contains a lot of collective knowledge about how to make our work resonate, how to be honest, what we owe each other, and the ethics of exposing each other’s flaws for outside audiences. That didn’t just happen in the book. It happened in living rooms, in parties, at bars, working together, hurting each other, and afterwards trying to make it right—or occasionally, holding grudges.
8. What is one thing that surprised you during the writing of Detransition, Baby? How much the writing of it changed me. It was a bit of an exorcism. It holds parts of me that are now gone from my current self. I read some of the chapters and I’m like, “I wrote that? I’m really no longer the person who would write that.” But I remember being that person, and I remember the process of the book taking that piece of me—not always bad things, sometimes even humor. I’ll read something and think, “Wow, imagine still being bitchy enough to be funny like that.”
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? My girlfriend, Chrystin. Her intelligence is totally different than mine. She’s a law professor and I feel like her mind is a deep digester, a ruminant. So she’ll read something and come back three days or a week later with it completely processed, and will be like, yeah, I wrung everything nutritious out of it, chewed the cud many times, and passed it through all four of my stomachs, but in the end, I’m missing these specific essential vitamins.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? I don’t think there’s any one piece of advice that’s always correct. What works for one project doesn’t always matter in the next—perhaps presumptuous for a debut novelist to say that, but in my experience, it’s true! So instead of responding with a quote, I’m going to respond with a book. Even though I write fiction, I find myself turning to Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir when I’m stuck. I’ll reread it, and usually in one of the chapters I stumble across a key to unlocking experiences that I can turn into fiction. Each time the necessary key has been different, but she’s stashed many keys in that book.
Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby. (Credit: Natasha Gornik)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Robert Jones Jr., whose debut novel, The Prophets, is out today from G. P. Putnam’s Sons. At the heart of The Prophets are Isaiah and Samuel, two young enslaved men who share a secret love. Some of the other slaves on the Mississippi plantation have intuited the nature of the pair’s relationship, but most leave the matter alone—that is, until one man begins to preach the master’s gospel and persuade the others that Isaiah and Samuel pose a danger to the group. Narrated by an ensemble of characters, including Isaiah, Samuel, ancestors from the distant past, and many others, The Prophets is a sweeping tale of both pain and joy. “The Prophets shakes right down to the bone what the American novel is, should do, and can be,” writes Marlon James. Robert Jones Jr. was born and raised in New York City and earned his MFA at Brooklyn College. Featured in “Black Male Writers for Our Time” by T: The New York Times Style Magazine, his writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Essence, OkayAfrica, and the New York Times. He is also the founder of the social media community Son of Baldwin.
1. How long did it take you to write The Prophets? I began writing the very first sketches of The Prophets in my first year of graduate school in 2006, and I made the very last changes to the final manuscript in 2020. So technically it took me fourteen years to write the book that will hopefully make it into many readers’ hands, ears, minds, and hearts.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? The most challenging thing about writing The Prophets was trying to conjure up what it would have been like to be both Black and what we now call queer during antebellum slavery. I could find nothing in the established canon about this outside of examples of sexual assault, and I was looking for representations of love. And because I couldn’t find it in the texts, I had to imagine it through what I guess was ultimately communing with my ancestors.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? Because I created and run the social justice and social media platform Son of Baldwin, much of my writing—mostly nonfiction—appears there. I’m writing there constantly, commenting on the social and political turmoil we experience as people from marginalized communities, writing in my home office, sitting at my desk, typing on my laptop. In terms of fiction, I like to write in public spaces like mass transit or sitting on the stoop in front of my house. But sometimes I’m up at the witching hour jotting things down on whatever’s available—laptop, smartphone, or scraps of paper.
4. What are you reading right now? I just finished Maisy Card’s remarkable These Ghosts Are Family. I’m halfway through Deesha Philyaw’s stunning The Secret Lives of Church Ladies. Up next are Kiese Laymon’s reissue of How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, Bryan Washington’s Memorial, and an advance copy of Jessamine Chan’s The School for Good Mothers. There’s another stack of books I have to get to as well. I love being surrounded by books.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Gayl Jones. I was stunned to discover that she’s considered an “overlooked writer.” She’s clearly brilliant and it’s evident to anyone who reads her work that she’s probably the greatest living writer in the United States. It’s absolutely puzzling to me that more people don’t know who she is, that more people haven’t read her work, that her name isn’t mentioned with Hemingway, Baldwin, Faulkner, and Morrison, and that she hasn’t won every literary prize in existence.
6. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? Yes—for this one crucial reason: to understand how to give constructive criticism and how to receive constructive criticism. I attended the fiction program at Brooklyn College and one of the most valuable things I learned was not to be precious with my writing and to recognize that 99 percent of writing is revision. Sometimes we as writers don’t realize that a first draft is not a completed draft and that we have to rewrite even the parts that we personally believe are sublime. The more we work on it, the greater the result. Writing is revision. Period. That’s not glamorous, but it is rewarding.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? It isn’t anything that they told me specifically, but what I learned was that it is critically important to have both an agent and an editor who believe in your talent, share your goals, understand your vision, and are completely interested in ensuring that your integrity and the integrity of your work is protected at all times. I’m so lucky that I have no half-steppers on my team.
8. What, if anything, will you miss most about working on the book? I’ll miss particular characters, some of whom I wanted to spend more time with—like King Akusa, for example. I would love to delve into her history and think about how she became ruler of her people and how expansive her love is.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? My husband, Adrian. He is a Virgo and a lawyer, which means that his mind is a razor, his eye is keen, and his tongue is sharp. That also means I’m going to get the unvarnished truth about my work and really get the chance to polish it before it’s seen by other people.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? The best writing advice I ever heard came from the late, great Toni Morrison: “If there’s a book you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” If she hadn’t said that, I might not have had the courage to write The Prophets.
Robert Jones Jr., author of The Prophets. (Credit: Alberto Vargas)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Yxta Maya Murray, whose latest novel, Art Is Everything, will be published in January by TriQuarterly Books. In Art Is Everything, Chicana performance artist Amanda Ruiz navigates critical points in both her art practice and personal life. She has a residency lined up at the Guggenheim, among other honors, but frets over becoming compromised by institutions. She’s madly in love with an actuary named Xōchitl Hérnandez, but Xōchitl has recently announced she wants a child—and Amanda worries a baby would disrupt her most ambitious projects. Then a death and an incident of violence shake her further. Shifting in form from critical essay to Wikipedia post to Snapchat message, Art Is Everything is a whip-smart and intimate portrait of ambition and survival, love and loss in the contemporary age. “In Amanda Ruiz, Yxta Maya Murray has created a character that is fresh and sassy and unlike any I’ve encountered in recent fiction,” writes Alex Espinoza. Yxta Maya Murray is a writer and law professor living in Los Angeles. She is the author of several previous novels, including The Queen Jade and The King’s Gold. Her writing has also appeared in the Georgia Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Ploughshares, and the Southern Review, among other publications.
1. How long did it take you to write Art Is Everything? Two and a half years. I’d stopped writing fiction for about eight years, but I had a big surgery in 2015, and in the aftermath I began furiously banging out passages on art, ambition, longing, and survival that wound up becoming the novel.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? It wasn’t challenging. I leapt into it and wrote it like a banshee. Not all projects come to me as ferociously though.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? I write in my bed because I blew my neck out editing my fourth novel at my work desk and had to run around with a padded neck brace for two months. Now I flounder amongst the pillows and bash away at it, so to speak. I write in the morning after running, if I can. I try to do it every workday. I used to write through the weekends but then found that wasn’t good for my relationship. “I can’t! I’m writing!” Ugh.
4. What are you reading right now? I just finished Yukio Mishima’s The Temple of the Golden Pavilion,which is about a guy who wants to burn down the most beautiful thing in the world. The last line is so, so boss: “I wanted to live.” I’m also careening through Iris Murdoch’s An Accidental Man—I can’t get enough of her Oxford drama and all of the philosophical sex. Camilo José Cela’s great experimental novel about the Spanish Civil War, San Camilo, 1936, recently almost broke my mind, but I coped by reading only ten pages every morning and then journaling about it. It’s got to be a precursor to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, one of my favorite novels even though I still don’t know if it’s a feminist revolution or snuff porn. The misogyny in San Camilo, 1936 is bionic. Another good ending though.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Carribean Fragoza’s writing is passionate and precise. Her gorgeously goth book of short fiction, Eat the Mouth That Feeds You, is coming out from City Lights Publishers in March. Maceo Montoya’s Preparatory Notes for Future Masterpieces is an electric bildungsroman that University of Nevada Press will publish in April. Anaïs Duplan’s Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture just came out from Black Ocean Press. Duplan writes about aesthetic strategies that can help create liberation and chronicles his own gender transition journey. “I have discovered that when I experience what is universal in me, I may leave my individual oppressions behind,” Duplan writes. Essential and irresistible.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? Death.
7. What is one thing that surprised you during the writing of Art Is Everything? I dash about the world thinking that I’m relatable, low-key, and have a totally accessible emotional style, but in the writing of the novel I learned that I just might be the human equivalent of habanero chilies or Vegemite.
8. What, if anything, will you miss most about working on the book? My protagonist, Amanda Ruiz. She wears slashed Reagan/Bush campaign jerseys as couture and can make awesome art out of Styrofoam and tears.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? This is a hard question for me. Virginia Barber used to be my agent, and she was a god. Rest in peace.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? I started writing in 1995 during a federal clerkship for a district court judge in the Central District of Los Angeles. It was a lot of intimidating work, and I would try to write at night and on the weekends. I would cry at my computer like I was Kafka collapsing under his desk at the Workers’ Accident Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia. But then I read a Michiko Kakutani New York Times review of some writing advice book I don’t remember the name of, and she relayed that the book said that you should just write a page a day. A page on my computer was twenty-six lines. I wrote a page a day come hell or high marital dudgeon and pushed out three books that way.
Yxta Maya Murray, author of Art Is Everything. (Credit: Andrew Brown)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, whose latest nonfiction book, The Freezer Door, was published in November by Semiotext(e). From Seattle’s Volunteer Park to local gay bars, Sycamore roams in search of intimacy. Yet the American city in the contemporary age seems to deny connection at every turn, as gentrification, consumerism, and fear encroach further and further upon daily life. Even in queer spaces and communities that once felt familiar, she finds herself increasingly alienated. Shifting between various scenes and timelines, Sycamore mourns sites of brokenness, but also discovers glimmers of humor, pleasure, and new language along the way. She keeps moving, despite everything, finding new ways to be alive. “I really love Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s The Freezer Door,” writes Maggie Nelson. “In a happy paradox common to great literature, it’s a book about not belonging that made me feel deeply less alone.” Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the author of several previous books, including the novel Sketchtasy (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018) and the memoir The End of San Francisco (City Lights Publishers, 2013), which won a Lambda Literary Award. Her writing has also appeared in BOMB, Bookforum, Fence, n+1, and Ploughshares, among other publications. She lives in Seattle.
1. How long did it take you to write The Freezer Door? This is such a tricky question because, in a way, I think every book I write is informed by my whole life. But I started writing the text that became The Freezer Door around 2012, when I moved to Seattle. I think I wrote most of it between 2014 and 2017 and finished the final draft around 2018? But then of course I was still editing for another year, until it was sent off to the printer. So six or seven years. In the literal sense. There are other senses of course, but I don’t want to get too confused.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? I think the hardest part was living it. So much of the book is about searching for intimacy in the places and spaces that work so hard against connection, even if that’s what they’re supposed to be for—the book is about staying present in this search anyway. And this can be so painful.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? I write every day in my apartment at the computer screen, and I write in my head when I’m walking around, and I write on Twitter, where I can look at text out of context. But I don’t have the routine that so many writers talk about, where they get up in the morning and have a certain number of hours or whatever. I deal with devastating chronic pain drama, and have for years, so sitting and staring at the computer for a long time is not an option. Sometimes I wish it were, but also knowing that I have to move around does help me to think in different ways.
4. What are you reading right now? Right now I’m reading Bloomland by John Englehardt, which uses a second-person narrator to engage the minutia of intimate and interpersonal trauma—I’m thinking about this quote at the moment: “The accident by which people die is the same accident by which they live.” And also this existential question: “Are you in a good cage, or a bad one?”
And I just finished Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own by Eddie Glaude, who writes, “If the condition of the love of country is a lie, the love itself, no matter how genuine, is a lie.” We all need to pay attention to this, in this country of violence.
I also just finished Sarah Dowling’s Entering Sappho, which is such a beguiling collection of poems because it lures you in with a research-based process that almost invokes a kind of American regionalism paradoxically infused by town names drawn from ancient Greece, and then pulls you into “pseudo-translations” of Sappho’s poems with such an incredible rhythm and inside the rhythm are the questions of whether desire can ever truly exist outside violence and whether colonialism is always in the anthem.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Dionne Brand is a genius.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? Dealing with devastating chronic health problems. For example, I was just on a roll with answering these questions, and then my head went blank. This often happens after fifteen minutes at the computer, even if I have an entire essay in my head beforehand. So I constantly have to go back and forth. There are so many days when I can only write a few sentences, but a few sentences every day builds into a surprising amount, actually.
7. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation ofthe book? I think the work of staying in my body. The work of not giving up on the dream of the city as the place where you will find everything and everyone you never imagined, even when that dream has been squashed by gentrification, consumerism, technology, surveillance, and the stranglehold of the suburban imagination over urban life.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started The Freezer Door, what would you say? When I start working on a new book, I like to write without an intention of what I want it to become. So that the writing itself creates the form. I don’t think I would go back.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? I don’t have a single most trusted reader. I have a number of writer friends who always give me invaluable feedback on my manuscripts, but everyone has something different to offer and I always want multiple viewpoints—the more the better. And I can’t ever trust anyone completely, right? Not with my own work, I mean. Doesn’t it have to be that way?
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? Everything you’re most afraid of is what you need to write.
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of The Freezer Door. (Credit: Jesse Mann)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Morgan Christie, whose debut story collection, These Bodies, is out today from Tolsun Books. In the eleven stories that make up These Bodies, Christie examines close relationships tested by various challenges, from addiction and mental illness, to subtle disagreements and misunderstandings. Punctuated by dreamscapes, mysterious animals, and glimmers of the supernatural, each narrative is often enriched by unexpected symbolisms: In one piece, a young woman stumbles upon a shop that exclusively accepts payment in strands of hair; in another, witnessing an altercation between a coyote and a cat helps a character resolve a workplace conflict. Focusing specifically on the lives and stories of people of color, These Bodies is a rigorous, inventive study of family, community, and other bonds. Morgan Christie is a poet, playwright, and fiction writer from Toronto. The author of several poetry chapbooks, her writing has also appeared in Aethlon, Moko, Little Patuxent Review, and Room, among other publications. She received her Master of Studies in Creative Writing from the University of Oxford.
1. How long did it take you to write These Bodies? Four years. The vision for the collection was not preset in my mind—it just so happened that there was enough of a trend in my writing, themes, and perceptions to compile a cohesive collection. As far as the time it took to craft individual stories in the collection, that really varied. Some fell out of me in a day, or night. I’ve had multiple stories come to me in dreams, which I write immediately after I wake. Others took weeks, even months, with the editing process.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? Probably the emotional purge that came along with the project. So many of the pieces are open flesh wounds, observing unrequited sentiment or examining norms faced by communities and people of color, members of the LGBTQIA+ community, women, people living with mental illness, individuals of lower socioeconomic statuses, and people living with addiction. We sit with these realities every day, but to pen them through prose just tugs and pulls everything up in you a lot of the time. There’s just anger and sadness in the reality of these stories, experiences, and voices. Having to carve around those emotions to craft clear and digestible fiction can be a bit trying, but always worth it.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? That varies. Typically all I need is a quiet space. My thoughts are disturbingly sensitive to noise. I’ve never been able to wrap my head around the idea of listening to music while I write. I did try it once, and effectively typed out a line of lyrics that I had wailed not so long before with the song playing. A bit of house clatter and chatter isn’t too bad, but I like to be somewhere I can close the door. It doesn’t always happen that way, but I prefer it. Which leads me to when I write: almost always after dark. I accepted years ago that the only scary things that go bump in the night were thoughts in my head, so I began peeling them out and looking at them when my surroundings were at rest. Love it. The world is quieter at night—I find that allows me to hear the voices and stories much more clearly. As far as how often, it just depends on responsibilities and workload. I typically aim for at least a couple of solid writing sessions a week. Sometimes it’s more, sometimes less.
4. What are you reading right now? I’m finishing up Natalie Diaz’s most recent poetry collection, Postcolonial Love Poem, as well as the first book in the Star Trek: Picard series, The Last Best Hope by Una McCormack. I’m about to crack the spine of De’Shawn Charles Winslow’s In West Mills,and my shopping cart contains Let Me Tell You What I Saw by Adnan Al-Sayegh.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? I can’t name a single author. There are too many. All writers not under the guise of what is formulated as literary really; so, underrepresented writers. Authors of color, LGBTQIA+ authors, writers from various socioeconomic statuses, women writers, writers living with disability or authors living with mental illness, I could go on. Those deserving of wider recognition are those who still have to fight for recognition, in the literary world and outside of it.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? Time. Life and the responsibilities surrounding it are time-consuming, simply put. We have to try to keep a roof over our heads, food in our bellies; basic survival needs have to take priority. Being able to carve out the time, and sometimes energy, to write, edit, and rewrite can be tough. There’s never a lack of inspiration on my end—as an observer and patron of a global community I believe there’s always something to write about. It’s just finding the time amid life, and what comes with it, to get words onto paper or screen.
7. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of the book? Athletics, my love of and participation in sport. There’s a kinetic quality to the prose that I didn’t quite notice until I read the collection in its entirety. The illustration of movement and physicality is heavily influenced by my athletic career. I predominantly played basketball but dabbled in almost every sport. In examining the text I studied my language and found it reminiscent of the way I understand the fluidity, control, and movement of various games. The way wheat stalks bend and contort, how concrete feels under our feet in a sprint, our breathlessness, our muscle pulses as anxiety builds, or the way a rock can be weighted as perfectly as a baseball. I had no idea when I wrote these stories that that aspect of my life influenced the writing so immensely, but it’s everywhere if you look closely.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started These Bodies, what would you say? Nothing. The collection wouldn’t be what it is if I did.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? I’ve never thought about this. I have quite a few trusted readers, fellow writers, old professors, and so on. If I leaned in the way of trusted and transparent, I’d say a standout is Harry Man, an old tutor, poet, and friend. Harry’s understanding of my poetry and prose was the most all-encompassing and all-consuming I’d ever experienced. I’d never known someone to so wholly understand my process, utterances, and decisions the way he did. So his perspective and critiques are some I greatly cherish, as are those of many others.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? Metta Sáma once told me that just like in all things, when it comes to writing, you are more than one type of writer. It was a wonderfully simplistic piece of advice that touched on the limitations we inadvertently create for ourselves. I’ll always be grateful to her for those words, and much more.
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Francesca Ekwuyasi, whose debut novel, Butter Honey Pig Bread, was published yesterday by Arsenal Pulp Press. In Butter Honey Pig Bread, estranged twin sisters Taiye and Kehinde reunite in Lagos to visit their mother. As young children they had been inseparable, but a traumatic event created a fracture in the family that, left unexamined, expanded and festered over the years. Shifting between various time periods, the novel also tells the story of their mother, Kambirinachi, who had her own complex childhood. An intergenerational saga frequently enriched by the language of food, Butter Honey Pig Bread is a poignant tale of familial love and hardship. “Ekwuyasi’s sensuous prose, deft plotting, and keen insights into human nature combine to form a vision that feels like peering deep into the souls of a trio of dear friends,” writes Kai Cheng Thom. Francesca Ekwuyasi is a writer, artist, and filmmaker born in Lagos. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Brittle Paper, GUTS, Transition, Visual Art News, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Winter Tangerine Review,and the Malahat Review. Butter Honey Pig Bread was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.
1. How long did it take you to write Butter Honey Pig Bread? I started writing it in 2013 and worked on it on and off over six years.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? The most challenging thing was cultivating the discipline to finish it, as well as the discipline to “kill my darlings,” as they say during the editing process.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? The answer to this has changed and is likely to continue changing frequently, ha! I write in my bedroom, in the studio, in the kitchen, on my work computer at either of my day jobs, in my journal, on my phone. Sometimes, during my more disciplined periods, I write as soon as I wake up. Other times I record voice memos of ideas, plot, or dialogue on my phone while I’m walking or running errands. Sometimes I write every day, other times only a few times a week. Like I mentioned earlier I’m really working on that discipline thing!
4. What are you reading right now? Right now I’m reading a few things. I’ll list the last three I opened this week: The Book of Delights by Ross Gay, Luster by Raven Leilani, and In the Wake: On Blackness and Being by Christina Sharpe. I also thoroughly enjoy audio books—provided I dig the reader’s voice and cadence. I just started listening to The Midnight Library by Matt Haig.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Ooh this is a tricky question because my answers will be biased to my own tastes! I genuinely believe that any writer who is committed to their craft and doing the work with integrity deserves to be read by folks with whom their work resonates.
6. What is one thing that surprised you during the writing of Butter Honey Pig Bread? I was surprised by how much agency my characters seemed to have; the imagination is wild and impressionable. I was also surprised by my commitment and passion for the story. I didn’t expect it to mean so much to me, but it does.
7. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of the book? Reading was crucial, as well as indulging in many other forms of art, music, fine art, and performance. Talking to friends and peers, working out dialogue and ideas with them. And other forms of research!
8. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry? I don’t believe I know enough about this to have opinions on what needs to change really. I think the writing community and publishing industry exist in the larger context of the world, which is rife with inequity and brutality, crumbling under the pressure of late-stage capitalism, the horrifying symptoms of climate change—you get the gist. Anything that I think needs to change within writing communities and the publishing industry is inextricable from that. For example, the stories that we write and reward are not apolitical, nothing is, but that doesn’t mean they have to be didactic. So perhaps that’s my answer.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? My friends and my editor!
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? “Read more than you write. In expressing the ambition to be a writer, you are committing yourself to the community of other writers.” A quote from Teju Cole I found via the Aerogramme Writers’ Studio.
Francesca Ekwuyasi, author of Butter Honey Pig Bread.
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Zeyn Joukhadar, whose second novel, The Thirty Names of Night, is out today from Atria Books. In The Thirty Names of Night, a young Syrian American trans boy seizes an opportunity to investigate the mystery of his mother’s death. Five years ago she died in a suspicious fire shortly after she came across an exceedingly rare bird nesting on an old tenement building in Manhattan she was trying to protect from demolition. Everyone doubted the discovery; most ornithologists simply did not believe the species existed. Even the narrator doubted his mother, until now, when he comes across a tattered journal belonging to a long-disappeared Syrian American artist named Laila Z, which also makes mention of the bird. With his mother’s ghost frequently by his side, the narrator seeks out answers about the mysterious species and, along the way, makes unexpected discoveries about his family history and the queer and trans histories of his community. Zeyn Joukhadar is also the author of The Map of Salt and Stars (Touchstone, 2018), which won the Middle East Book Award for Youth Literature. His writing has appeared in the Paris Review, Salon, Shondaland, PANK, and Mizna, among other publications.
1. How long did it take you to write The Thirty Names of Night? Three years.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? Trying to put experiences that are inherently wordless—particularly around desire, embodiment, and existing outside of binary (cis) gender—into words. So much of who we are—and I use “we” here for all of us, including cis people—and how we experience the world and ourselves is touched by the language we have for gender. One of my main questions in the writing of Thirty Names was: When you exist outside of the cisgender binary and, by extension, live your life beyond that framework, how do you convey your experience of yourself? I think there are many answers to that question, some of which include visual art and the sacred. I explore both in the text. I wanted someone still in those early phases of self-discovery, when language is often fraught, to be able to recognize themselves.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? While I was writing Thirty Names I was nomadic, which for me meant that I moved every one to two months for over three years. Being on the move constantly meant that I had to be ready to write anywhere—on planes, on buses, at friends’ dining tables or spare-room desks, or on my laptop on someone’s sofa. Sometimes I’d jot down a scene using the notes function on my phone. I generally write every day for one project or another, and my best hours are often in the morning, though I’ll write at any time I can.
4. What are you reading right now? We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, edited by Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Rickey Laurentiis, the author of Boy With Thorn, which won the 2014 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the 2016 Levis Reading Prize.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? The three years of housing instability I experienced following my transition made it extremely difficult not only to have the physical space to write, but also the emotional and mental space to focus on my work. The logistics of navigating life as a trans person of color re housing, documentation, immigration, lack of access to health care, and physical and virtual safety are ever-present impediments to my creative projects. I often think of the economic and logistical hurdles other trans creators of color in my life face, and all the incredible work that we’re losing as a result, and it makes me sad and angry at the high costs of cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, imperialism, ableism, and racism. If we are invested in the kind of radically innovative art and literature of which we, as a society, most certainly have a desperate need, we have to better support queer and trans creators of color, especially Black trans women and transfeminine people, and we need to dismantle the systems designed to silence, incarcerate, and kill us. There is no other way.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? I remember my editor told me after reading one of the middle drafts of Thirty Names that she felt she understood something about the experience of being trans that she had never quite understood before. And what stuck with me was the fact that I had put into words a very specific experience of transness and of gender, maybe one of an infinite number of different experiences of transness, and it means something to me that both cis and trans people could identify with that experience and feel connected to it. There is no one single “trans novel” and there is no one single “trans experience,” just as there is no one single “gender experience.” Conceptions of and experiences with gender shape all of us, without exception.
8. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of The Thirty Names of Night? I’ve always drawn and painted—my father was a visual artist, so that was a big influence on me growing up—and I’ve always been particularly interested in nature art. During the writing process, I spent a lot of time drawing birds to explore the character of Laila Z. The team at Atria ended up turning one of my drawings—the yellow-crowned night heron—into a poster that we sent to early reviewers. It was wild seeing it on people’s Instagrams.
9. What, if anything, will you miss most about working on the book? I really loved writing the historical scenes. In 2019, when I was an artist in residence at the Arab American National Museum, I spent hours listening to the oral histories of Arab autoworkers in Detroit. It was one of the most moving parts of the research process. I felt connected to all the Arab Americans who had come before me and all the different lives they’d led. Knowing that there were queer and trans people in every time and place is also comforting for me. We’ve survived so much, have loved each other through so much, and I wanted to do justice to that history in TheThirty Names of Night.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? You have to become the person who can write the book you’re working on.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the protagonist of The Thirty Names of Nightidentified as a trans man. The narrator is trans and nonbinary.
Zeyn Joukhadar, author of The Thirty Names of Night. (Credit: Neha Gautam)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Simon Han, whose debut novel, Nights When Nothing Happened, is out today from Riverhead Books. Recent immigrants from China, the Chengs are attempting to settle into their new lives in an affluent suburb of Dallas, but find themselves drifting further and further apart in the process. Early in the novel, after a long day at her tech job, Patty Cheng wonders, “Who were these people she lived with, and what did they do when she was not there?” Her husband, Liang, is privately wrestling with his past while running an ailing photography business and caring for their children: eleven-year-old Jack, who keeps to himself, and five-year-old Annabel, a “Problem Kid” at school and a serial sleepwalker. For a while each individual’s troubles and alienations hang in a delicate balance, but then a misunderstanding involving another family in the neighborhood shatters any semblance of stability. A stirring family saga, Nights When Nothing Happens examines both the fragility and strength of the most intimate bonds. “Achingly tender and emotionally devastating,” writes Charles Yu. “A stunning debut that will stay with me.” Simon Han won the 2020 Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award for Fiction from Poets & Writers. He is also the recipient of awards from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, MacDowell, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Vanderbilt University, where he earned his MFA. His writing has appeared in the Atlantic, Guernica, and the Iowa Review, among other publications.
1. How long did it take you to write Nights When Nothing Happened? About six years.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? Understanding that it didn’t have to be, nor should it want to be, other books I love.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? In a different year it would be every other day or so. I try to go for two- or three-hour blocks to build momentum, to forget, even for a minute, that I’m writing at all—but that’s a luxury. Another luxury now: to write anywhere other than at this desk where I’m sitting at the moment. I miss writing in libraries so, so much.
4. What are you reading right now? A. Kendra Greene’s The Museum of Whales You Will Never See. It’s about Iceland’s museums, the people behind them, and so much more. And Siamak Vossoughi’s A Sense of the Whole—a book of flash fiction. It’s so good!
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? I finished Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s novel Dragonfly Sea recently, which hadn’t crossed my radar when it came out last year. It’s great. It’s about so many things—among them China’s entanglement with Kenya on a national and personal scale. And it rewired for me how language and rhythm can work on the page. Also Colleen Abel, who has a poetry collection called Remake that explores the body and the domestic space and it’s stunning.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? The people who gave Edward P. Jones’s books two stars on Amazon. Also Amazon.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? My editor was really good at helping me build my authority as a writer—on and off the page. To say things simply when they needed to be said simply, for example. To know that subtlety can be a form of authority.
8. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? Depends. Workshop isn’t for everyone, but it was amazing for me, as someone who hadn’t known much about the literary world, to be in a space where people took my made-up stories seriously. I think I needed that to take myself seriously. I know that’s not everyone’s experience though, and an MFA is a big commitment. With the pandemic there are more and more options out there too, including affordable and accessible virtual workshops.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? That’s a tough one. A lot of readers helped my book to be what it is. I will say that around my wife, I get the chance to work through images and situations and characters in their rawest form—basically, she lets me vomit out my ideas to her in a completely judgment-free space. That’s pretty special.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? Lorrie Moore said not to write from the assumption that you’re better than your characters. That one’s always stayed with me.
Simon Han, author of Nights When Nothing Happened. (Credit: Melissa Lukenbaugh)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Ellen Cooney, whose latest novel, One Night Two Souls Went Walking, is out today from Coffee House Press. The unnamed narrator of One Night Two Souls Went Walking has always ruminated on existential questions. She recalls asking her parents at an early age, “What is a soul?” Now in her mid-thirties, attending patients as an interfaith chaplain at a local hospital, she contemplates the same question, turning it over and over and finding new angles. Accompanied by a dog who might well be a ghost, she makes the rounds on the night shift, uncovering new truths about her patients and herself in the process. “This book will grab your heart and not let go,” writes John Grogan. Ellen Cooney is the author of nine previous novels, including The Mountaintop School for Dogs and Other Second Chances (Mariner Books, 2015) and Lambrusco (Pantheon, 2009). Her stories have also appeared in the New Yorker, Ontario Review, and New England Review, among other publications. Born in Massachusetts, she lives on the Phippsburg Peninsula in Maine.
1. How long did it take you to write One Night Two Souls Went Walking? I think about four years. Of actual writing, I mean. There were lots of drafts, each wildly different. It was such a long time coming. I’d had the main character in mind for ages, also the idea of a novel in some sort of medical setting. Why? I was the daughter of a nurse. In my teenhood I worked in our local hospital. As a mom I was in and out of hospitals all the time with my special-needs child. I’m a very ordinary fiction writer in that everything in my life is material. It’s mostly an issue of when to use what, and how. Which can take ages to become known to you!
2. What is the earliest memory that you associate with the book? The earliest are many and all about flying, or at least being up in the air and sort of floating around, looking at people and stuff below: memory fragments and vivid scenes involving a small me and that powerful, terrible desire to be like a bird or human kite. Terrible because you have to get it in your head that it’s a desire that will never come true. But then, for me, I was so lucky. I was a child poet. And also a playwright and a story writer.
Writing is like flying. Well, kind of. My personal greatest fortune is that I know how it feels when a paragraph or a sentence, after many, many tries in the creation, comes out right. Absolutely that’s a desire fulfilled.
3. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? Not losing my nerve. The form is a tricky one that needed to look so simple; it all just sort of happened. Also, not settling for a draft that was good, merely good, when it nagged at me that I could make it better, even take it to another level.
4. Where, when, and how often do you write? I only write in my writing room, which is small, and except for bookshelves, blank on the walls. Every day I come in here and write, and either it gets thrown out immediately, or saved for future deletion, until something starts working and a novel is happening. I try to keep a routine about it. Failure all the time! Once I get near what might be the end of the first draft, I have to be reminded to eat and sleep and like, show signs I am a normal functioning human being.
5. What are you reading right now? I always have a thing going on with some Italian poet from another age, which is my way of staying the grandchild of Italian immigrants—a part of me is always in their other-country of a home, with another language filling the air, always as poetry, even when members of my family were screaming insults or threatening to cause great harm to each other. “My” poet right now is Giuseppe Ungaretti. I am going through a dual-language edition from Archipelago Books of Allegria.
Never, though, am I reading just one thing. For stories I’m in and out of three collections, in daytime only, as these are works that delight me but also in different ways baffle me, scare me, and freak me out: The Lonesome Bodybuilder by Yukiko Motoya, Wild Milk by Sabrina Orah Mark, and Song for the Unraveling of the World by Brian Evenson. For evening reading I just started the novel River by Esther Kinsky, and I’m slowly absorbing the poetry-like Annotations by John Keene.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? I don’t think I’m sure what “wider recognition” means. But like lots of people, especially old-time English majors and getters of graduate degrees in lit, I think about the thing called “the canon,” especially, lately, in terms of American works and writers. You can think, for example, you know something about fiction of the first quarter of the twentieth century, and then one day in a used bookstore you happen upon a Dover Thrift Edition of something called American Indian Stories and Old Indian Legends by someone called Zitkala-Sa, and how come you didn’t know about these pieces? I do not think you can just blame yourself for not knowing such a thing before.
7. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? Impediments change from life phase to life phase. For me right now it’s all about energy and physical stresses, as I was very ill for a couple of months and while I’m fine now, more or less, I have to learn to live and work—which often mean the same thing—with limitations. I hate it that I can’t go strongly through a long writing shift, and I have to take naps like a toddler. But! I’m still around and still writing!
8. What is one thing that surprised you during the writing of One Night Two Souls Went Walking? Two of my favorite stories are by Gabriel García Márquez: “Eyes of a Blue Dog” and “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings.” In my novel there are no obvious indications of either work. Because isn’t that the best thing about inspirations? You steal and conceal.
Somewhere around Draft Number Eight, I realized that an element of each of those stories made it in, morphed of course into my own way of doing things. I was reminded of that angel and those dreamers in my own prose. I loved the surprise of that.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? I’ve had the same three first readers for ages and ages, and apart from them, I do not show manuscripts to anyone outside the publishing process. Of those three—son, wife, dearest old friend—the number one is my son. I was a teen mom, and for a long time it was just him and me. Which is to say, we go back. He is fifty. I’ve been reading to him his whole life. Lately, since we live on different coasts, him west and me east, we’re on the phone or videos. I read him the rawest, most vulnerable-making early drafts. He never has to use words to tell me when something is off or way less good than I could make it. He can grunt a certain way. Or breathe. Or make a face that’s sort of, “Meh.” Although he is not above outright letting me know something like, “The description of the guy in the next-to-last paragraph kind of sucks, Mom.”
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? I really heard this, because it came from myself: a rule, from a time when I needed it, laid out by the me of that present to the me of any future. “Do not write in your head.”
Somewhere in some anthology or collection of stories by Patricia Highsmith, there’s one about a fiction writer, writing fiction. Really actually writing. Punctuation and everything. The reader becomes a peeper, a spy on a creative act, and it’s thrilling and very intimate, and then whap, you find out the writer was imagining the writing, was doing the piece without writing it down, and whap again, the piece will never actually exist. Please if anyone knows what this story is or where it is, do not tell me; I never want to see it again. It’s too horrifying. I know exactly how it feels to sit down to write something I had planned out in my head—when finally in my day, or more likely my night, I had time to work—and nothing came, because I already wrote it.
Ellen Cooney, author of One Night Two Souls Went Walking. (Credit: Greta Rybus)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Valzhyna Mort, whose latest poetry collection, Music for the Dead and Resurrected, is out today from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Employing various poetic and musical forms, Mort searches for a genealogy in the labyrinthine history of Belarus. With the legacies of various catastrophes looming—from World War II to the Chernobyl fallout—she zooms in on private scenes that are at once gentle and violent. One poem, a lullaby, begins, “Snow glints and softens / a pig’s slaughter,” and throughout the collection there are many such striking contrasts. The cumulative effect is symphonic, generating a “music which, over accordion keys, / unclenches the fist of ancestry, / loosens fingers into rose petals.”Valzhyna Mort is also the author of Factory of Tears (Copper Canyon Press, 2008) and Collected Body (Copper Canyon Press, 2011). The recipient of fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the Amy Clampitt Residency, her work has appeared in numerous publications, including Granta, Poetry, and the New Yorker. Born in Minsk, Belarus, she writes in English and Belarusian.
1. How long did it take you to write Music for the Dead and Resurrected? Ten years of writing—four of them, intensely. What’s impossible to count are the years of lived obsessions that explode into a book.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? Knowing that, despite small victories of finishing poems, you are going to fail to capture that thing with words. That thing being the reason why you are writing in the first place.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? Where, when, and how often does a religious person worship? My Muse is with me always, everywhere.
4. What are you reading right now? I got this wonderful anthology of contemporary Chinese poetry in the Russian translation, and I’m savoring it by reading two poems a night before bed. Also on my bedside is Moyshe Kulbak’s novel The Zelmenyaners, which I open at random and read a few paragraphs at a time like poetry. The Zelmenyaners reminds me where I’m from. I’m also reading From Moscow to the Black Sea, Teffi’s memoir of traveling through Russia and Ukraine after the 1917 Revolution. My former student’s book of poetry, The Understudy’s Handbook by Steven Leyva. More new poetry books: Guillotine by Eduardo C. Corral, Obit by Victoria Chang, In the Lateness of the World by Carolyn Forché, The Dyzgraphxst by Canisia Lubrin.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? What is wider recognition, I wonder. Perhaps it’s when an author’s language becomes part of the cultural code? I come from a country where people do not read more than Americans do, but literature is a part of our cultural code. At the Belarusian protests against the authoritarian regime that is currently illegally holding onto power, you can see people holding posters with literary quotes, literary puns. There are books that are a part of everybody’s vocabulary. In the United States, even the “widely recognized” authors aren’t a part of a public vocabulary. Sports and TV shows are. As a result even a literary giant like Gwendolyn Brooks deserves wider recognition. Let’s try to connect to every American household right now and see how many of them have volumes of Emily Dickinson and Gwendolyn Brooks standing somewhere between a TV and a Crock-Pot. I don’t think that we’ll record any wide recognition.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? People who don’t read poetry.
7. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? Yes, but I don’t agree with this formulation. You pursue poetry, not an MFA. The goal of an MFA program is to provide you with mentorship, community, along with space, time, and money to grow, write, and think. It provides you with access to amazing libraries. It’s a utopia: two years of poetic self-care.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Music for the Dead and Resurrected, what would you say? Take another ten years with it? It’s a good thing I cannot go back in time for this.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? A translator. Nobody else has a reason for a reading so obsessive, so slow, so attentive. There’s only one committed literary relationship: between poems and their translator, and trust is at its foundation, especially if the poet is not familiar with the target language. A real translator is not a traitor, but somebody who gives up their lung for your work.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? James Baldwin’s “Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.”
Valzhyna Mort, author of Music for the Dead and Resurrected. (Credit: Tanya Kapitonava)
Follow our cover subject, Belarusian poet Valzhyna Mort, on her recent
trip to New York City. From a Ukranian diner in the East Village to a
conference hall in midtown, Mort shares her poetry and talks about the language and people that inspire her work.
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Erica Hunt, whose latest poetry collection, Jump the Clock, is out today from Nightboat Books. Collecting new and selected poems from the past four decades, Jump the Clock is a wide-ranging yet focused examination of the mechanisms of language. In the first poem, “Preface,” Hunt proposes, “We could eliminate the ritual of walking around ourselves, meet head on.” Here, and elsewhere, the poet models how to speak directly, honestly, and without foregoing complexity. She observes and speaks of body language and grief, love and justice, in scenes that feel at once surreal and hyperreal. Reinventing itself at every turn, Jump the Clock is a master class in attention and engagement. “These poems are embodied,” writes Yanyi. “They are meant to be savored and thought with the heart and the mind; they exist in our world.” Erica Hunt is the author of several previous books of poetry, including Local History (Roof Books, 1993) and Time Flies Right Before the Eyes (Belladonna*, 2015). Her poems and essays have also appeared in BOMB, Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions, Poetics Journal, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. She teaches at Brown University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
1. How long did it take you to write Jump the Clock? Jump the Clock assembles selections from five books of poetry written over a span of almost forty years. There are a few poems, never gathered in a volume and unpublished, but the majority passed the “would I read this poem more than once” test.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? The most challenging aspect of assembling this selection was suspending my inclination to look for a single integrated through line in the work and accepting that the through line is about the operation of multiple time signatures in poetry. By multiple time signatures I mean the time encapsulated in the poem, the “snapshot”; the time a poem prolongs as feeling or experience; that time contrasted with the time of reading the poem; and then the present time—the poem’s appearance here, early twenty-first century, amidst crumbling structures of white supremacy, patriarchy, maldistribution of wealth, and so on.
Many of my poems seek to invent a language—as if to break out of conventional usage, illuminate the sand pits, and find open paths to emancipation. Meaning binds the generic to the situation-specific, and readers use intuition and reason to see past language’s strictures on thinking and feeling and imagining. That sense of orchestration between our language for mediating the world and our social apprehensions is the book’s through line.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? I write almost every day, though when I was working full time and raising a family, that was not always possible. When I was working full time and parenting, I sometimes managed the exercise of writing one computer page a day, and many of those pages turned into poems over time. With that said, I have been writing for many years, keeping a journal practice for forty-eight years.
Often I write in response to art, a gallery, or museum show. I will write in the dark while watching a movie, what I see and hear, answers and questions to the scene unfolding in the intimacy of a theater, which is like writing after waking from a dream. I will write in response to newspaper articles, particularly outrageous reports—the strong emotion is an impetus to write my scorn or resistance. I will also write to music, especially music without words, though the soundtracks change from very abstract soundscapes and jazz improvisations to beats.
I am never without pen and paper.
4. What are you reading right now? Like many writers, I read several books at once. Right now, I am enjoying Ossuaries by Dionne Brand, {#289-128} by Randall Horton, and Numbers by Rachel Blau DuPlessis. I am reading them as book-length poems, though their strategies for achieving a “rested” but still mutable cohesion are different.
Increasingly I am interested in literature working across media and genre that incorporates the visual—DuPlessis, for instance, works with poetry and collage. I am also interested in how writers manifest their work through performance in the reading itself. Julie Patton, Tracie Morris, and Douglas Kearney are brilliant innovators in that realm.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? There are many poets who have received attention and then fallen out of fashion. In this group I place Melvin Tolson, Lorenzo Thomas, and Larry Eigner. Other writers deserving “wider” recognition are Wilson Harris, Carla Harryman, and Sarah Schulman. In poetry, Julie Patton, Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves, and Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? Impediments are shape-shifters, different at different times. Time and money—and the apparent lack—are constant. I am also a person who keeps busy: I teach, I am a community activist who is also attentive to care for family and friends. Sometimes I am the “impediment” and have to remind myself that a “no” is a “yes” to the chunk of time required for writing about difficult subjects with complexity, resistance, and seeing beyond the despair of the present.
7. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry? I participate in multiple writing communities, and they have provided different kinds of sustenance to me as a creative artist: Cave Canem, the Poetry Project, Belladonna Collaborative Language Poets, and the Naropa Summer Writing Program all have provided “homes” for my writing and thought. When I teach poetry, I urge my students not to get hung up on the “schools” and to be sure they sustain multiple sources for their work, and just as importantly, to participate in and outside literary communities: to be a part of multiple social worlds. The experience of working in community settings in a workshop, in a voter drive, in planning a demonstration, any volunteering or listening, provides material for one’s work beyond oneself.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Jump the Clock, what would you say? Trust the process from notes to draft to next draft. From reading critically to reading out loud. From performing to listening again. From redrafting to reframing. Books are not monuments but are particular instances for conversation and thinking through with readers.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? The poet and scholar Tonya Foster, who is the author of A Swarm of Bees in High Court, and my partner, the composer and performer Marty Ehrlich.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? From Elizabeth Alexander: As a poet, “Write—and publish—one piece of critical appreciation of another poet per year.”
From Rachel Blau DuPlessis in “Statement on Poetics”—paraphrasing now: A poem is “bottomless,” “intricate,” and “tangible” in detail. I like thinking this is true regardless of “school” or length. Here is what it has helped me to appreciate: A poem is a work made through language that bears rereading, to discover that difficulty is never without love.
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Khaled Mattawa, whose fifth poetry collection, Fugitive Atlas, is out today from Graywolf Press. Early in Fugitive Atlas, Mattawa poses the question, “How to stop thinking of bodies / as worth extinction, worth eating or enslaving”? Examining both ancient cruelties and contemporary social, political, and environmental crises, Mattawa exposes how humans have become desensitized to suffering, and searches for a path forward. Employing inventive and various forms—one poem, for instance, adopts the structure of an index to break down the language of military occupation—Mattawa reckons with what it means to be human in a troubled and troubling age. “These are poems of exceptionally real human and political consequence, filled with news that the news does not speak,” writes Alberto Riós. “Khaled Mattawa’s Fugitive Atlas is a work of uncommon, poignant character, of resonance and depth.” Khaled Mattawa is the author of four previous collections of poetry, most recently Tocqueville, and the translator of nine books of contemporary Arabic poetry. He received an MA and an MFA from Indiana University, and earned his PhD from Duke University.
1. How long did it take you to write Fugitive Atlas? Nine years.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? Settling on the core themes of the book and how best to represent them. For the first five years I did not think I had a book. But once the central sequence of poems emerged, it was a matter of creating a mural where all the parts fit to tell a kind of story.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? I write mostly at home. I begin with an idea and set it aside, but depending on how I’m drawn to it, I might or might not go back to finish the poem. I think that’s what happens. But in reality, writing seems like a dreamy activity to me. Fugitive Atlas has a sequence of haibun that I no longer recall how and when I wrote. The process must have involved being ensconced at my desk for several days. I realize that sounds torturous, but given that I have no memory of it, it was very likely an ecstatic experience. I don’t go on residencies because my schedule is never that open, but a ten-day residency at the University of Arizona Poetry Center was a very productive time for me. But there too I don’t remember which poems were written during that residency. Written in the sphere of the imagination, poems perhaps seek to be their own beings, not attached to us or to the time in which we wrote them.
4. What are you reading right now? The Devil’s Pool by George Sand.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? There are so many.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? Time and everything else. I am engaged in so many extracurricular activities—editing a journal, translation, arts activism, administration—that keep me from writing. But the truth is I need them to stay away from writing, or to refuel my mind for writing. After finishing a book, even if I have a project in mind, trying to write can be demoralizing. The new book project is insisting that it be new, that you renew yourself, which means you have to teach yourself how to write again. I don’t know if that’s an impediment. Maybe it’s just the enduring challenge of the process.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? My editor said, “This is your best work,” which made me feel very good about the book and about my career as a poet.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Fugitive Atlas, what would you say? I hear you’re working on a series of poems about Greek myths told from a postcolonial perspective. Good luck with that!
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? The editor I’m working with. I sought help from several friends with Fugitive Atlas, which I don’t do normally as I think it’s such a big imposition on one’s time. But I did this time and received excellent feedback. However, a book gets built and rebuilt in the editorial process, and for that the editor you’re working with is important. I very much enjoyed working with Jeff Shotts at Graywolf who read and reread the book several times.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? Don’t ever find your voice.
Khaled Mattawa, author of Fugitive Atlas. (Credit: Khairy Shaban)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Destiny O. Birdsong, whose debut poetry collection, Negotiations, is out today from Tin House Books. In Negotiations, Birdsong pulls no punches. She exposes and writes against tokenization, fetishization, anti-Black violence, and liberal complacency. On voting, she writes, “we all take the sticker; we all / brag of our civic duty, gliding home / on a wave of solidarity that feels / like kinship.” In another poem, she throws back racist comments at a man: “I hope someone tells you / everything your culture made / is meaningless: Stonehenge, democracies, and you.” Each line in Negotiations is this fierce and truthful. Whether addressing sexual assault and illness, or self-love and community, Birdsong maintains this intense and intimate register. In one poem, the narrator addresses her child self, imagining if only she could tell her, “she was right / in her utter belief she could build a world / and live in it alone.” Negotiations is a whole world of its own, a revolutionary manifesto and love letter. “These poems are desire, survival, the body, rage, vulnerability,” writes Jaquira Díaz. “A fierce celebration of Black womanhood.” Destiny O. Birdsong is a Louisiana-born poet, fiction writer, and essayist. She is the recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, Jack Jones Literary Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, and MacDowell. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where she earned both her MFA and PhD from Vanderbilt University.
1.How long did it take you to write Negotiations? Though some of the poems in thebookdate back to 2015, I started writing it in earnest in 2017, and it was a complete accident. That April I did my first 30/30 challenge—thirty poems in thirty days—in hopes of finishing another manuscript, but when I turned back to these poems during a residency later that year, I realized they were talking almost exclusively to each other, and doing something entirely different from the manuscript I’d intended to add them to. I wrote the last few poems to round out one of the middle sections in October 2019, after the book had been picked up. So in total, two and a half years. The other manuscript, which is more than a decade old, still isn’t finished.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? The most challenging thing hasn’t happened yet, which is my mother, my family, and a few other folks who are close to me reading the book. There’s a lot in it they don’t know about me, and my biggest fear is causing them pain when they find out. I hope that’s not the case, but that would be incredibly difficult for me.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? I don’t write things for public consumption every day, but I do journal most days. I believe that it clears my brain for the writing I do later, whether it be the same day or the following year. Sometimes it offers me a phrase or idea, a concept for a poem, or space to map out revisions for an essay. My writing times depend on the genre: I tend to write poems in the middle of the night, 2 to 5 AM; fiction in midday, from 2 to 5 PM; and essays whenever I have a block of time to work on a draft. I write where I live because I have trouble concentrating when other people are in the room, so coffee shops have always been off-limits for me. If the subject matter is heavy, I write in bed—that’s my safe space. Otherwise I’ll write on the couch with the TV on but muted, so I have someone to look up at every now and then, but not be bothered by the noise. If it’s nice out, I journal on my patio.
4. What are you reading right now? I just finished a collection of essays called Like Love by Michele Morano, and it was such a fascinating read. The book’s premise is about unconsummated romance in all its forms: with friends, complete strangers, parents, children. It confirmed much of what I’ve been feeling about my own friendships: There can be deep and sometimes even romantic love that just is and doesn’t have to try to be anything else—not sexual, not more platonic—and I can lean into it, flourish in it, give it back, and not feel weird or guilty for doing so.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Tara Betts. She really is a trailblazer for me when I think about the Black women who came before me, who write about what I write about, and who are still out here, doing all kinds of work, both on and off the page. Give her her flowers!
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? Right now? Money, which ultimately means time. I spend a lot of time—not to mention energy—doing stuff to pay my bills. I’d love to live at least for a little while not having to worry about that at all, and just writing.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? A couple of months ago, my agent, Kiele Raymond, told me, “Presses promote books; writers shape careers,” and that was such a helpful way to think about the bigger picture. It reminded me that: 1) A book is not an entire career, and 2) I can—and should—always be thinking about my writing life as a whole, and continue to work toward everything I want even as I prepare for the publication of my first collection. Her advice has also made it easier to pursue other passions right now, like writing essays and fiction that don’t necessarily have anything to do with the book.
8. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry? The contest model for poetry book acquisitions and unpaid journal publications. Sorry, that’s two, but they both operate on the same conceptual economy of lack that tells us we should be grateful for whatever we get because getting chosen is so hard. And that may be true, but it shouldn’t have to be.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? My friend Claire Jimenez. She’s an amazing fiction writer and essayist—and poet, too, but that might be a secret. I’ve learned so much from her, but the trust really comes from the fact that she’s a friend of my work, and I’ve only recently realized how important that is to me. I’ve had experiences where people tried to shape my writing to fit their own agendas or soothe their own egos, and she doesn’t do that. I know I can get an honest read from her. Plus, Claire is scrappy. When she believes in what you’re doing, she’ll fight for you, even if she has to fight against your own misconceptions about the quality of your work. I really admire that about her, and I try to give it back whenever we’re reading each other’s manuscripts.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? My best piece of writing advice came from the poet-scholar Chiyuma Elliott at a Cave Canem workshop back in 2009. I was a baby poet who loved grand finales for my poems, and in her feedback, she said very gently, “At the end of a poem, leave the door open.” I’ve spent every day of my writing life since learning all the ways you can leave a door open: unlocked, cracked, off the hinges. There are so many ways.
Correction: An earlier version of this article was incorrectly edited to state that the 30/30 challenge involved thirty minutes of writing a day for thirty days. Birdsong clarified the challenge she was referring to was to write thirty poems in thirty days.
Destiny O. Birdsong, author of Negotiations. (Credit: Hunter Armistead)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Heid E. Erdrich, whose latest poetry collection, Little Big Bully, is out today from Penguin Books. Witnessing the country in crisis—the decimation of wild bird populations, the epidemic of violence against Indigenous women, the endless land theft—Erdrich asks readers, “How did we come to this?” Often beginning with personal memory, she writes with an eye for detail and an attention to how language can both reveal and conceal truth. In a world where the bullies increasingly demand, “Avert your eyes / not so you do not see / but so you are not seen,” Erdrich’s poetry models how to stand, see and be seen, and resist. “This book broke me open,” writes Amy Gerstler, who chose the collection as a winner of the 2019 National Poetry Series. “It electrified me and made my hair stand on end, tingling on my head like a mob of hypersensitive antennae.” Heid E. Erdrich is the author of several previous poetry collections, including Curator of Ephemera at the New Museum for Archaic Media (Michigan State University Press, 2017) and Cell Traffic (University of Arizona Press, 2012). She has received fellowships and awards from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, McKnight Foundation, Bush Foundation, and Loft Literary Center, among other institutions. She grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota, and is Ojibwe, enrolled at Turtle Mountain.
1. How long did it take you to write Little Big Bully? This book came pretty quickly—it was a deep dive and a shock, really. Most of the poems were completed in January 2019. A few poems are from before then, and one or two are from 2020, but most of the work came in a rush during the polar vortex of 2019.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? Considering the personal when I generally write critical analysis through the second person or a kind of poetic persona who can stand for a lot of people as well as Native women like me. What I was trying to understand in writing Little Big Bully is the mechanism of abuse that puts all of us at risk. I had to write about my life, the events and abuse inflicted on me as a girl and adult, and worse, what happened in front of me as a child in a world beyond my family where I witnessed brutal misogyny.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? My writing practice is not disciplined. Sometimes I am in my unruly garden, or on a walk, or staring out our porch windows, or doom scrolling. I may look like I am not writing, but I am. I do have a study full of books and curious furnishings in vintage green colors I favor, and I go there most days. But mostly I try to catch a poem in the pool of my life—not unlike someone with a rod at a pond. If you look at them on a day when they don’t catch anything, you would not say they are not fishing. You may not see it, but I am always writing.
4. What are you reading right now? The Old Road by Staci Drouillard, a family story about an Ojibwe community along Lake Superior; Apple (Skin to the Core), a memoir in poems written and illustrated by Eric Gansworth (Onondaga); and my sister Louise Erdrich’s new novel in manuscript draft. I read a lot of titles at once and I don’t finish a lot of books, which I’d like to change.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? There are many great writers who don’t get enough attention who happen to be Native. Maybe their work is not so Native-forward that it can marketed that way, so publishers take a pass. Of course there are dozens and dozens of Native poets who should be better known. You can find many in the new Norton anthology of Native Nations poets edited by U.S. poet laureate Joy Harjo.
6. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry? Well, we’ve been saying how male and white it all is and are starting to say how rich it is too. It’s all so mysterious what people get paid for books, what the process is for publication, who decides what, how to get into the biz, how people get prizes or notice or reviews. There’s a lot I don’t know after thirty years. From my time working with visual artists and performers, I don’t think other fields are so closed-mouth. I’d love to see publishers and literary organizations be more up front about who they are and how they support Native and Black writers in particular.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? I don’t have an agent—another thing that baffles me as, primarily, a poet. But my editor Paul Slovak and all the folks at Penguin really helped me to accomplish my vision in every detail from revision to design. It’s not what they said, it was that they did not say no.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Little Big Bully, what would you say? Don’t be too subtle and do read a bit more about narcissistic abuse before you hand off the book.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? My sister Louise. She pays a lot of attention to the overall shape and impact of the poems in total. She never suggests an edit or ideas or anything substantive, she just gives me her reading and if it matches what I wanted to say, I know I’m on the right track.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? “Ah, go on. You’re living your life”—said to me by Grace Paley when I was not writing every day.
How has Amistad changed or grown in the past thirty years?
