Small Press Points: Mason Jar Press

Staff

Sometimes the best future is the one you don’t see coming. In 2014, when Michael B. Tager and Ian Anderson, classmates from the University of Baltimore MFA program, teamed up to self-publish Tager’s poetry chapbook, neither imagined building an independent press. But the pair enjoyed working together and steadily brought in new projects and team members, resulting in Mason Jar Press, which now boasts a catalogue of over twenty volumes of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and is operated by a staff of ten. Tager is the managing editor, and Anderson is the editor in chief and designer. “It’s been a wild ride, and we love it,” says Tager. Describing the business model of Mason Jar, which has remained in Baltimore, Tager says, “Much like our origin story, one thing leads to another. We’ll have an idea, or we will bring on a partner who wants to do a new thing, and we shrug and say, ‘Well, that sounds good. Let’s see where this goes.’” Readers will find more than thirty episodes of their podcast Lit!Pop!Bang! on the Mason Jar website, and the press publishes a literary journal, Jarnal, alongside two to five new titles a year in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Hybrid work is welcome, as exemplified by Tyrese Coleman’s How to Sit: A Memoir in Stories and Essays, which was published in 2018 and was a finalist for the PEN Open Book Award.

Later this year Mason Jar will publish A Prayer for a Non-Religious Autistic, a book of poems with elements of memoir by Lucas Scheelk, and Lesser American Boys, a short story collection by Zach VandeZande. The team is most interested in work that is “accessible avant-garde.” Tager explains: “We want it to be a little weird, a little off, but not relegated to ivory-tower readers. We want everyone to enjoy it and be challenged at the same time, either by form or content.” Between April 15 and July 15, writers can submit to Mason Jar’s inaugural 1729 Book Prize in Prose, which will award $1,000 and publication and is open to manuscripts in most prose genres. The contest is supported by local indie the Ivy Bookshop and will be judged by Diane Zinna. There is no entry fee.

Small Press Points: Bitter Oleander Press

by

Staff

2.16.22

Last year was a period of transition for Bitter Oleander Press, an independent publisher in Fayetteville, New York. After twenty-seven years of publication of the press’s celebrated biannual journal, the Bitter Oleander, editor and publisher Paul B. Roth sent the journal’s final issue to the printer in the fall and prepared to focus on Bitter Oleander’s books program. In this new phase the press will publish almost exclusively poetry in translation and is holding a no-fee open reading period through the end of March, expressing particular interest in manuscripts by “contemporary international poets whose work is either still unknown to an English-speaking audience or has hardly been published in translation.” It is an interest that is near and dear to Roth’s mission as a publisher, having consistently championed literature in translation through the press’s books and journal since its founding in 1974. “As an editor I’ve always wanted to present how our distinctive likenesses as humans mirror each other through the complexities of different languages,” says Roth.

The press publishes four to six books of poetry a year—typically “deep-image poetry, serious poetry, that doesn’t necessarily fall under the influence of any particular school or follow any formalized pattern of style.” Titles to be released in 2022 include a bilingual edition of Franca Mancinelli’s The Butterfly Cemetery: Selected Prose (2008–2021), translated from the Italian by John Taylor, and Andrea Moorhead’s Tracing the Distance, an English-language collection that won the 2021 Bitter Oleander Press Library of Poetry Award. To prospective Bitter Oleander authors and translators, Roth offers an invitation: “We’d like to consider more imaginative texts from translators whose poets take chances, who open doors that have previously had no keys.” 

 

 

Small Press Points: Black Ocean

by

Staff

4.14.21

I wanted to create a press that would bring the attention of a major publishing house to quality and design and treat poetry as a genre with frontlist potential,” says Janaka Stucky of Black Ocean, an independent press based in Boston and Chicago whose striking volumes have been captivating readers for more than fifteen years. As an emerging poet with roots in the DIY zine scene, Stucky longed to see publishers more energized about the poetry titles on their lists. Together with two friends, Stucky founded Black Ocean in 2004 to address this need. “We set out with a strong, simple visual identity and attention to detail,” he says. “I think our belief and commitment in the work, and a little luck, helped us quickly build an enthusiastic and dedicated readership.”

Today Black Ocean publishes fiction, nonfiction, and literature in translation alongside its poetry titles. Its Moon Country series “aims to widen the field of contemporary Korean poetry available in English translation, but also to challenge orientalist, neocolonial, and national literature discourses,” and an essay collection series titled Undercurrents brings a poet’s “lyric attention to language” to the form. This year Black Ocean will release three works in translation, as well as Kristina Marie Darling’s Silent Refusal: Essays on Contemporary Feminist Writing, Nathan Hoks’s poetry collection Nests in Air, and Zachary Schomburg’s Fjords, vol. II. Because of the press’s focus on new voices, “many people simply seek out ‘the next Black Ocean book,’” says Stucky. “It’s incredible that people trust us to help them discover their next favorite poetry title.” Black Ocean accepts submissions year-round via e-mail and does not charge a reading fee.

 

 

Small Press Points: Clash Books

by

Staff

2.17.21

The titles of Clash Books are by turns Gothic and playful and nervy, but they all share one quality: They must be spellbinding. Based in Troy, New York, and founded as a media website that evolved into a book publisher in 2017, Clash Books issues about twenty titles a year, an eclectic mix of art books, poetry, nonfiction, and fiction—“really, anything that excites us,” say editor in chief Leza Cantoral and managing editor Christoph Paul. “A big mission is to challenge genre expectations as well as to bring together a diversity of voices.”

This year the press will release titles as varied as Aaron Carnes’s pop-criticism apologia In Defense of Ska and Kevin Sampsell’s collage and poetry book I Made an Accident, alongside literary fiction and “a novel about waterfall goddesses, a trans fairy tale young adult novella, lots of fun and dark poetry, and some quality literary horror,” say the editors. Paul says he knows he has found the next Clash book when reading a submission if he has that “feeling you get when you hear a new song that you have to listen to again right away.” He adds, “I know it’s the next book when the middle is as strong as the beginning.” Clash is open for submissions year-round via e-mail and does not charge a reading fee. 

Small Press Points: Threadsuns

by

Staff

12.16.20

A new teaching press based at High Point University in North Carolina, Threadsuns draws its name and its vision from the title of a poem by Paul Celan. In the poem as translated by Pierre Joris, “Threadsuns” refers to “songs to sing beyond / mankind,” and it is to those songs that editor and publisher Michael Flatt hopes the press can offer a home. Flatt, who teaches creative writing at High Point, launched the press in early 2020 with the vision of providing student assistants with the kind of hands-on publishing experience that so inspired him as an MFA student—and that expanded his sense of global literature and the literary community. The press plans to publish three volumes a year, one each in the genres of poetry, prose, and work in translation.

“Our inclinations lean toward experimental work that maintains a connection to human experience,” says Flatt. Threadsuns released its first title, Brian Henry’s collection Permanent State, in October, and Ryoko Sekiguchi’s lyric essay The Present Voice, translated by Lindsay Turner, will follow. While getting Threadsuns off the ground amid the pandemic has been challenging, it has also underscored the press’s ambitions to engender connection and inspire a new generation of editors. “Permanent State, while not written during the pandemic, really speaks to the dynamics of power and powerlessness that one feels right now. The press itself is like that for me,” says Flatt. “I’m doing something, which is great, but also, you have to question what it actually does in the world. How can you make it more effective, more significant? And for me, that’s where the teaching comes in. If I can pass on this practice to others, teach them how to create community through publishing, then the project has some meaningful agency.” Threadsuns is open for submissions via e-mail year-round.

Small Press Points: FlowerSong Press

by

Staff

10.7.20

Edward Vidaurre, publisher and editor in chief of FlowerSong Press, describes the press’s authors as “an all-star team of healers” who are “not only invested in self but also community.” Founded in 2011 in McAllen, Texas, as VAO Publishing, FlowerSong “nurtures essential verse from, about, and through the borderlands,” championing writers from the United States, Latin America, and beyond. The press publishes poetry and prose, as well as titles for children and young adults in partnership with Juventud Press. New releases from FlowerSong include Dreaming With Mariposas by Sonia Gutiérrez, a magical bildungsroman in vignettes, and Luz at Midnight by Marisol Cortez, the “story of an ill-timed love that unfolds in the time of climate change.” Good Cop/Bad Cop, an anthology of art and writing responding to police brutality, is among the titles set for publication in 2021. An abiding commitment to both its readers and writers steers all facets of the press’s work. “The authors of FlowerSong know I push hard for them,” says Vidaurre. “For those who pick up a book from us, I want them to feel that these living words have been custom-made just for them in a beautiful book.” Vidaurre and his team also prioritize timely responses to submitters. “I read for the future of my community, my people that have been underrepresented,” says Vidaurre of seeking out new work for the press. “I want to read and say, ‘I see influences of Julio Cortázar, Allen Ginsberg, Miguel Hernández, Amiri Baraka, Gloria Anzaldúa,’ and then say, ‘But…this feels original, and there’s a truth here I haven’t read before.’” Submissions are open year-round through the press’s website.

Small Press Points: Vegetarian Alcoholic Press

by

Staff

8.12.20

What makes a book a Vegetarian Alcoholic Press book? “Connectivity and transcendence,” says Freddy La Force, the editor behind the Milwaukee press. Inspired by the city’s vibrant poetry scene, La Force started Vegetarian Alcoholic Press in 2014. “The writers I found myself admiring didn’t have MFAs or literary connections,” says La Force, “and it seemed like there should be more outlets for their work.” More than sixty-five books later, he remains committed to seeking talent outside entrenched hierarchies. La Force prefers that writers forgo cover letters when sending work, and submitting is always free. “You wouldn’t charge someone to apply for a job, and writing is work,” he says. Vegetarian Alcoholic produces twelve books a year, primarily poetry as well as some fiction, drama, art, and comics. The press recently published travis tate’s Maiden, which La Force describes as “insanely cerebral, sexy poems serving common themes . . . through a very playful, loving, queer, Black lens.” And Kelsey Marie Harris’s collection Spit (Verb) in My Mouth, a “singular treasury of gorgeous foul-mouthed gospels,” was released in August. Submissions are open year-round via e-mail. “The name of the press seems to make people want to submit stuff that attempts to be edgy or abrasive for its own sake,” says La Force. “What I’m really looking for are new forms of expression and new concepts of beauty. I think the best way to uplift people, whether from a personal or revolutionary standpoint, is to instill infinite imagination. Send the work you love. The stuff you felt like you had to write, regardless of your confidence in it.”

Small Press Points: A3 Press

I like to think that each chapbook is a journey,” says editor Shaun Levin of the immersive, imaginative volumes he publishes at the A3 Press. Founded in 2019 as an offshoot of the A3 Review and based in London and Madrid, the A3 Press produces between six and ten chapbooks each year, in a mix of prose, poetry, and art.

The press’s trademark is the unusual design of its chapbooks: Each is printed on a single sheet of paper that folds in the style of a map. “I like the fluidity that comes with the map fold, the sense of randomness and serendipity as you move through the chapbook,” says Levin. “You can move through the chapbook any way you want, start anywhere you want. It’s an adventure, a discovery.” Levin recently published poet Sara Eddy’s Tell the Bees, about “beekeeping and dealing with cancer,” and will release Elizabeth Briggs’s Made to Order and Mark Adams’s Peregrinus [Bede’s Walk] later this year. Submissions are open through October 1 via Submittable with a $20 reading fee, which goes toward production and paying the press’s authors. “Send us work that you feel only you could have written,” says Levin. “Deeply personal work that overshares and doesn’t hold back is particularly appealing to us.” 

Small Press Points: Dottir Press

by

Staff

4.8.20

Even though millions of books are published each year, many stories remain either silenced or mistold,” says Jennifer Baumgardner, founder of Dottir Press. A journalist and author for more than two decades, Baumgardner established the press in 2017 on the heels of her tenure as executive director of the Feminist Press, where she “discovered she liked the business side of books as much as she liked the writing side.” When Baumgardner saw that a politically charged children’s book she believed in might not find a home, she created Dottir Press to provide one. (That book, Anastasia Higginbotham’s Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness, is now a Dottir best-seller.) Located in New York City, the press publishes between six and eight works of fiction and nonfiction a year, including both adult and children’s titles. All are “books by feminists, for everyone,” as Dottir’s slogan declares.

“I believe in creating space for people to tell the truth about what has happened to them and to be vulnerable,” says Baumgardner. Forthcoming titles include transgender activist Cooper Lee Bombardier’s debut, Pass With Care (May 2020), a collection of autobiographical writings that explore masculinity, identity, and the body as systems habitually in flux; and Bett Williams’s memoir The Wild Kindness: A Psilocybin Odyssey (September 2020), which Baumgardner says is “funny and a real challenge to those who might colonize Indigenous knowledge of mushrooms.” The press is open for submissions by e-mail year-round. Baumgardner reads manuscripts with an eye for work that is politically engaged and will change its readers: “I love getting behind a book that truly could influence culture in positive ways.”

Small Press Points: The Cupboard Pamphlet

by

Staff

2.12.20

Consider the Cupboard Pamphlet your source for misfit books. “The Cupboard Pamphlet was formed to address the lack of publishing venues for prose chapbooks that are formally strange or conceptually bizarre,” say editors Kelly Dulaney and Todd Seabrook. Founded in 2008 by Adam Peterson and Dave Madden, the press originally printed free, anonymous pamphlets and evolved to concentrate on single-authored chapbooks. “The first of these were tape-bound, designed to be inexpensive and mobile—pocketable,” say Seabrook and Dulaney. Today this feeling of experiment and nerve continues to guide the press as it publishes four prose chapbooks a year by authors including Chanelle Benz, Brian Evenson, and Courtney Maum. Most of these works are thirty to seventy pages in length, although Dulaney and Seabrook avoid placing strictures on submissions.

“We like works that provide play and surprise in terms of form, structure, and language in addition to a sense of emotional sincerity,” they say. Seabrook is based in Cleveland, and Dulaney in Denver; they collaborate via phone calls and e-mail. Dulaney relishes one-on-one work with authors, while Seabrook “enjoys the physicality of the chapbook—designing it, printing it, and seeing it develop on the page.” All of the titles produced by the Cupboard Pamphlet are selected through an annual online contest with a submission fee of $20; the 2020 contest will run March 1 through May 1. This year Cupboard will publish 2019 contest winner Lia Woodall’s Remove to Play, “a game-based, nonfiction work about the spaces left open in the wake of a suicide” as well as books by J. S. DeYoung and Thomas Israel Hopkins and a coauthored work by Kara Dorris and Gwendolyn Paradice.

Small Press Points: Trembling Pillow Press

by

Staff

12.11.19

Poetry can change your life, and it doesn’t happen on the page; it happens in the rooms and places where poetry connects you to people who change how you are in the world,” says Megan Burns, publisher of Trembling Pillow Press in New Orleans. This sense of poetry as a means of community animates all of the press’s work. Trembling Pillow was established in the late nineties with an initial focus on making broadsides and occasional chapbooks but turned to producing full-length poetry books in 2006. Today Trembling Pillow publishes four or five poetry titles a year, about half of which are debut collections.

Burns approaches these editorial collaborations with first-time authors with particular care. “I am giving someone an experience that becomes the basis for future relationships in the writing world, and I want them to have a high bar,” she says, noting the years of devoted work that goes into a project before it ever reaches the press and a publisher’s obligation to treat a work with that same devotion. Trembling Pillow’s sensibility is eclectic—its titles vary from “feminist manifesto to punk rock memoir to collaborative eco-poetics to lyrical experimentation or rural horror manifestations”—but its poets share a willingness to take risks and to surprise. Among the press’s 2020 titles are Marty Cain’s The Wound Is (Not) Real: A Memoir, a hybrid text that mines the experiences of the author’s adolescence in Vermont; Erin M. Bertram’s It’s Not a Lonely World, about queerness and cancer; and Jenny Sadre-Orafai and Anne Champion’s Book of Levitations, a “modern-day poetic spell book.” Trembling Pillow is open for submissions year-round via Submittable; a $15 reading fee goes directly into producing more books and is waived in the month of December.

Small Press Points: Unnamed Press

by

Staff

10.9.19

Unnamed Press is an object lesson in thinking globally, acting locally. C. P. Heiser and Olivia Taylor Smith, two former staffers at the Los Angeles Review of Books, founded the press in 2014, drawing inspiration from the flourishing independent publishing scene in L.A.—and a sense that there was more work to do. “We saw that we could bring something different to the table, particularly through our initial focus on international voices and debut authors,” says Smith. Today the press publishes ten to twelve books each year, about half fiction and half nonfiction. Notable recent titles include Adam Popescu’s Nima (2019), in which a young Sherpa woman disguised as a man leads journalists to the foot of Mount Everest, and Man Booker Prize–winning translator Jennifer Croft’s memoir of sisterhood, Homesick (2019). Esmé Weijun Wang’s debut novel, The Border of Paradise (2016), remains a best-seller.

What does it take to curate such a dynamic, international list? “We travel a lot!” says Heiser. Favorite venues for connecting with new talent include the Dhaka Lit Fest in Bangladesh, the Frankfurt Book Fair, and the American Literary Translators Association’s annual conference. “We are a story-driven press that’s attracted to underrepresented or marginalized voices—not as a rule, but simply because, as editors, that’s what excites us,” says Heiser, pointing to Nima and The Border of Paradise as good examples. “Both explore important issues through some really surprising and refreshing points of view, which for lots of reasons bigger publishers found too challenging or risky.” Unnamed Press accepts queries and submissions via e-mail, and is open year-round.

Small Press Points: Acre Books

by

Staff

8.14.19

As the founding editor of the Cincinnati Review, Nicola Mason has a strong track record of spotting talented writers early in their careers. Under her leadership the review published the early work of fiction writers Caitlin Horrocks and Jamie Quatro and poets Jill Osier and Mai Der Vang. As Mason explained to Cincinnati magazine in June, after watching these writers and other contributors go on to win prestigious prizes and publish books, she thought, “We’re becoming talent scouts for everyone else; why can’t we become talent scouts for ourselves?”

So in 2017 Mason founded Acre Books, an imprint of the University of Cincinnati Press, where, along with poetry series editor Lisa Ampleman, she publishes two poetry collections, two novels, and two story collections each year. The press also welcomes hybrid forms. “I’ve always felt the boundaries separating genres and disciplines to be artificial,” says Mason. “Why shake one’s finger at innovation?” Mason also hopes to publish literary nonfiction but hasn’t yet found a book that’s the right fit. “I find a lot of creative nonfiction has an ‘all about me’ quality,” she says. “We want work that is grounded in self but that travels beyond it.” In October, Acre will publish Faylita Hicks’s poetry debut, HoodWitch, which Mason describes as “an absolute knockout full of power, pain, beauty, and magick.” Submissions in all genres are open via the press’s website; writers should include a brief description of the manuscript and ten sample pages. There is no reading fee.

 

 

Small Press Points: Cooper Dillon Books

by

Staff

6.12.19

A poem can exist in a specific cultural or emotional moment, but it can also sustain and be revisited over and over again,” says poet Adam Deutsch, the publisher of Cooper Dillon Books (www.cooperdillon.com), a ten-year-old press dedicated to “the values that make poetry timeless.” Deutsch and assistant editor Christine Bryant Cohen run the press from San Diego and Seattle, publishing one or two books a year. So far they have released six full-length poetry collections and eight chapbooks by writers such as Jill Alexander Essbaum, Melody S. Gee, and William Matthews.

Cooper Dillon’s most recent titles are Linda Dove’s chapbook Fearn (2019), a meditation on fear, and Mónica Gomery’s debut collection, Here Is the Night and the Night on the Road (2018), which Lillian-Yvonne Bertram says is “an exquisite study in the suddenness of numbered days and the radiant pain of living with love ‘tumbling forth.’” The press eschews contests and instead welcomes submissions year-round via Submittable with a $10 reading fee, which is waived if you purchase one of the press’s titles. Deutsch believes standard book-contest entry fees, typically $20 or $25, are too high and prefers the press to “remain open for when a writer feels that the time is right to submit.” He adds, “We see poetry as community, not competition.”

Small Press Points: BkMk Press

by

Staff

4.10.19

In the hardscrabble world of small presses, a ten-year anniversary is a major achievement, so BkMk Press, which is approaching its fiftieth, has much to celebrate. Founded in 1971 as an outlet for Midwestern writers, the press first published poetry chapbooks out of a local branch of the Johnson County Library in Kansas. Today BkMk’s office is located at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, where editor in chief Robert Stewart also oversees the press’s affiliated magazine, New Letters, and the radio show New Letters on the Air. BkMk annually releases about six full-length collections of poetry, short fiction, and nonfiction; it has published more than eighty titles by local, national, and international writers. “Book publishing continues to be dominated by the East Coast, but BkMk gives Missouri and the Midwest a seat at the publishing table,” says managing editor Ben Furnish. In July BkMk will publish Lorraine M. López’s story collection Postcards From the Gerund State, and in the fall it will release Beverly Burch’s poetry collection Latter Days of Eve and Jennifer Wisner Kelly’s story collection, Stone Skimmers. In honor of BkMk’s origins as a chapbook publisher, the editors plan to launch a chapbook competition in 2020. The press currently hosts two other annual contests: the John Ciardi Prize and the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize, given for a poetry collection and a story collection, respectively. Both competitions open on June 1 and include a $1,000 prize and publication. General submissions are open via Submittable and postal mail until June 30.

 

 

Small Press Points: BOAAT Press

by

Staff

2.13.19

When poet Sean Shearer started BOAAT Press in 2014, he wanted to combine his two loves: poetry and book arts. “Our aim was to create something beautiful as well as meaningful by publishing emerging writers and housing their words inside our signature books,” says managing editor Catherine Bresner, who joined the staff in 2015. That signature style is part of what has set BOAAT apart from the beginning: The press’s first titles, all chapbooks made from materials such as banana peels, seaweed, Spanish moss, cotton linters, and construction paper, resemble tidal waves, the seashore, or other nautical scenes. The editors even constructed some books out of wood to look like miniature docks, complete with fishing net and seashells. “These books don’t belong on bookshelves,” writes Shearer on the press’s website. “They belong out in the open, plopped on desks and coffee tables to turn heads and wow anyone in the room.” Today, in addition to handmade books, BOAAT publishes one traditionally bound chapbook and up to two full-length books each year through its two annual contests. The press also publishes BOAAT Journal, edited by poet sam sax, which has published up-and-coming poets including Cortney Lamar Charleston, Jameson Fitzpatrick, Emily Skaja, and Chelsea Dingman. The press’s forthcoming titles include Alison Stagner’s The Thing That Brought the Shadow Here, which Nick Flynn selected as winner of the 2018 book prize, and Alycia Pirmohamed’s Faces That Fled the Wind, which Camille Rankine chose as winner of the 2018 chapbook prize. Submissions to BOAAT Journal are open year-round; submissions for both the chapbook prize and book prize are open during the month of April.

Small Press Points: Spork Press

by

Staff

12.12.18

“To feature the work that amazed us,” Richard Siken says when asked why he and Drew Burk started the literary magazine Spork in 2000. “A parallel goal was to show that it was possible to start and run a magazine, and eventually a press, without external or institutional support and to maybe start chipping away at the notions of gates and gatekeepers. If you’re not asking for money or permission, then nobody can tell you no.” For the past nineteen years Siken and Burk have thus forged their own path through the literary landscape and in 2010, with the help of Jake Levine, Andrew Shuta, and Joel Smith, expanded the magazine into Spork Press, which now publishes chapbooks and full-length books of poetry and fiction. The editors, who are “invested in voice-driven work that evokes rather than recounts,” make all the press’s books by hand in Tucson, Arizona. “We’re looking for narrators that inhabit and enact,” the editors say on the website. “We want speakers that can render their investment in the subject matter.” Spork has published books of poetry by Kazim Ali, Sophia Le Fraga, and Ariana Reines, as well as books of fiction by Casey Hannan, Kathleen Rooney, and Colin Winnette. Recent titles include Jennifer Juneau’s novel, ÜberChef USA, and two poetry collections, Rae Gouirand’s Glass Is Glass Water Is Water and David Welch’s Everyone Who Is Dead. Looking ahead, the editors are experimenting with new production techniques—blind stamping, full-bleed wraparound covers, and designs that use overlapping transparent inks, for example—and are considering printing machine-made editions to meet demand. Spork will be open for submissions in the summer.

Small Press Points: Unicorn Press

by

Staff

10.10.18

After four years as an apprentice at poetry publisher Unicorn Press, Andrew Saulters took the reins from Alan Brilliant in 2016, fifty years after Brilliant founded the press in Santa Barbara, California. Saulters, who edits and binds the press’s books himself in Greensboro, North Carolina, seeks to carry on the editorial vision of Brilliant and his longtime partner, Teo Savory, who died in 1989. “I’ve tried to follow Al’s editorial spirit in looking at publishing as a way that work enters the cultural commons,” says Saulters. “It’s not enough that the publisher like the work, but the work should also add something to what is already available to readers.” Unicorn Press publishes four to six books of poetry each year, at least two of which are full-length collections, and counts Robert Bly and Muriel Rukeyser among its many authors. The press recently published a haiku collection by the Carolina African American Writers Collective, One Window’s Light, edited by Lenard D. Moore, and in November will release Lynn Otto’s first book, Real Daughter, and Wayne Johns’s Antipsalms. Otto and Johns were selected from the press’s first-book competition, held annually in the spring; the press is open to general submissions of full-length and chapbook-length poetry collections from October through December.

Small Press Points: 7.13 Books

by

Staff

6.13.18

July 13 holds special importance for writer and publisher Leland Cheuk. Not only is it the day that, in 2014, he found out his life had been saved by a successful bone marrow transplant from a stranger, but it’s also the day that his first novel, The Misadventures of Sulliver Pong, was picked up by the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography. Two years later, on the same day, Thought Catalog sent him an offer for his first story collection, Letters From Dinosaurs. So when Cheuk decided to start his own small press in 2016, he didn’t hesitate to name it 7.13 Books (713books.com). Publishing four to five fiction titles a year from debut writers, the press seeks to offer “a publishing experience that’s respectful to and even reverent of first-time authors.” Cheuk wants the press, which is located in New York City, to avoid the pitfalls of both traditional publishing houses—which he describes as elitist and at risk of publishing the same kinds of books—and indie presses, which he admits are often understaffed and unresponsive. Cheuk replies to each submission within four to eight weeks and offers brief constructive feedback even for those he rejects. The writing—not a writer’s pedigree—matters to him most. In July, 7.13 Books will publish Willie Davis’s Nightwolf, about a seventeen-year-old dropout whose brother has gone missing, and in the fall the press will release Jenn Stroud Rossmann’s The Place You’re Supposed to Laugh, about a working-class family in California’s Silicon Valley. Cheuk says both novels have wit and humor, noting that his own taste leans toward literary comedies. Submissions of story collections and novels are open until November 1 via Submittable.

Small Press Points: Bottlecap Press

by

Staff

4.11.18

“To put it in Hollywood terms,” says Bottlecap Press (bottlecap.press) founder and editor C. A. Mullins, “we think of ourselves more as producers than directors.” Established in Skagway, Alaska, in 2014, the self-described “millennial publishing outfit,” now based in central Missouri, is dedicated to putting its authors first by allowing them more creative control over their books.“Our philosophy is that we’re the ones working for the authors, not the other way around,” says Mullins. The press, which publishes one to two chapbooks and full-length books of poetry and fiction every month, offers editorial and design guidance more as “suggestions rather than mandates,” says Mullins. The resulting books, hand-printed by the editors, are diverse in design and aesthetic. Recent and forthcoming titles include Sarah Kennedy’s debut poetry collection, How to Find a Husband (April) and Andrew Duncan Worthington’s story collection A Very Small Forest Fire (June). In addition to traditional books, Bottlecap Press also welcomes mixed-media work: Kennedy’s collection, for example, incorporates photographs from her parents’ personal archives and is part of a larger performance project in conversation with Wendy Stehling’s 1985 book, How to Find a Husband in 30 Days. Mullins also plans to launch digital multimedia projects in the future, including a YouTube channel that will feature poetry, music, film, storytelling, performance art, and animation, and the editors have recently begun looking for artists to illustrate some of the press’s older chapbooks. The press accepts submissions in poetry, fiction, art, and video year-round via e-mail at bottlecappress@gmail.com.

Small Press Points: Gold Wake Press

by

Staff

2.14.18

Every small press faces the choice of whether or not to charge submission fees, which can help keep a press afloat but can also exclude writers who don’t have the money to submit. Some publishers, such as Atelier26, Sundress Publications, and Gold Wake Press (goldwake.com), offer an alternative: A writer can submit a manuscript after purchasing a book from the press’s catalogue. While the cost of purchasing a book will surely still prohibit some writers from submitting, the model not only ensures that writers will get something in return for their submissions, but that they will be more familiar with the press’s aesthetic before sending their work. “We found the usual model of requiring a submission fee to be unethical,” says Nick Courtright, who runs Gold Wake Press with writer Kyle McCord. “We’d also heard so many stories of presses not really doing much to sell books once they were published, as if the whole point of the press enterprise was not to sell books but to elicit submission fees. Because we want to support our authors, this is a great way to get their books into the hands of prospective readers.” Located in Austin, Texas, and Des Moines, the press publishes about eight titles a year across genres. “We’ve done crazy poetry books, serious poetry books, novels, illustrated memoirs, short story collections, and flash fiction,” says Courtright. The editors look for work that combines “daring content with meticulous attention to form.” Recent titles, such as Erin Stalcup’s novel, Every Living Species, and Frances Cannon’s graphic memoir, The Highs and Lows of Shapeshift Ma and Big-Little Frank, have blurred the line between image and word, while others, such as Glenn Shaheen’s short story collection, Carnivalia, have combined poetry and prose. In the fall the press launched a triannual journal, Gold Wake Live, which is open for submissions in all genres year-round via Submittable. For those who have purchased a Gold Wake Press title, the press is open to full-length manuscripts via Submittable from March 1 to April 15.

Small Press Points: Saddle Road Press

by

Staff

12.13.17

On a plateau at the center of the island of Hawai’i, Saddle Road runs between two nearly fourteen-thousand-foot volcanoes, one of which is active. “It is a strange, isolated, and terribly beautiful land of black lava and vast light,” says Ruth Thompson, the publisher of Saddle Road Press (saddleroadpress.com), founded in Hilo, Hawai’i, in 2011. A similar description might apply to the style of work that Thompson and her team of editors look to publish at Saddle Road Press. Michael Collins’s poetry collection Appearances (November 2017), for example, is a meditation on nature not as “some place you visit / some museum to nostalgia through,” but rather, Thompson says, as “a place of meeting and confrontation between nature and civilization, art and subject, consciousness and the unconscious, life and death.” Jessamyn Smith’s hybrid prose and poetry collection Gilgamesh/Wilderness (March 2018), a follow-up to her 2016 novel-in-stories The Inugami Mochi, addresses mythology, nature, and grief. Gillian Barlow’s essay collection, Nomad’s Home (February 2018), “interweaves the author’s experience in designing aboriginal housing with the ancient Japanese text ki, aikido, thoughts on the idea of ‘house,’ a long-buried family secret, Australian bars, racism, and the idea of translation,” says Thompson. The press publishes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, though the editors are specifically seeking collections of lyric essays and hybrid prose and poetry. The editors also plan to launch a chapbook series of work from or about islands in the Pacific. Submissions of full-length manuscripts are open until January 31 via Submittable.

Small Press Points: Holy Cow! Press

by

Staff

8.16.17

The name Holy Cow! Press, complete with exclamation point, came to publisher Jim Perlman in a dream. Forty years ago that dream became an independent press, which today boasts a catalogue of more than 125 poetry collections, novels, story collections, memoirs, biographies, and anthologies. Perlman, who runs the press out of his home in Duluth, Minnesota, is committed to publishing the work of writers living in the Midwest, a “territory traditionally ignored by larger indie publishers,” he says. The press has published the work of writers such as Minnesota poet laureate Joyce Sutphen, poet Louis Jenkins, young adult writer Jane Yolen, and the late Brenda Ueland. Holy Cow! Press releases three to five books each year, 40 percent of which Perlman estimates are poetry collections. To celebrate the press’s fortieth anniversary this year, Perlman has organized readings in Duluth; in October the press will also participate in the Iowa City Book Festival and the Twin Cities Book Festival, where Rain Taxi will hold a tribute event for the press with readings, a Q&A, and a book signing. Holy Cow! Press will also publish two new titles this fall: Subtle Variations and Other Stories (October) by Minneapolis author Miriam Karmel and Winds & Currents (November), a book of retold and illustrated Native American stories by Duluth author and artist Joan Henrik. Submissions are open year-round; send a query via e-mail or postal mail.

 

Small Press Points: Sibling Rivalry Press

by

Staff

2.15.17

“Our mission is to publish work that disturbs and enraptures,” says Bryan Borland, publisher of the Little Rock, Arkansas–based Sibling Rivalry Press (siblingrivalrypress.com). “The press has always positioned itself as a stage and a microphone for anyone who is ‘other’…. Any time we’ve been tempted to move toward more mainstream projects, the world has always had a way of reminding us that our purpose is to build bridges. I know firsthand that when you find someone whose voice makes you feel less alone, it can save your life.” Since founding Sibling Rivalry Press in 2010, Borland has consistently delivered on that mission. He and editor Seth Pennington have championed the work of many LGBTQIA authors, publishing the early work of up-and-coming poets such as Ocean Vuong, sam sax, Christopher Soto, and Saeed Jones, and also recently launched the Undocupoets Fellowship, given to undocumented or previously undocumented poets, to help defray the cost of poetry-related submission fees. And in January the press published If You Can Hear This: Poetry in Protest of an American Inauguration, an anthology of work by seventy poets responding to the recent presidential election. The press also publishes three literary magazines: Adrienne, a journal of poetry by queer women; Assaracus, a journal of poetry by gay men; and Callisto, a journal of queer fiction. The press recently published Kaveh Akbar’s chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic, and will also put out books from poets Franny Choi and Sarah Browning later this year. While Borland and Pennington publish work mostly by LGBTQIA authors and focus primarily on poetry, they are open to work of all genres from writers of all identities and sexual orientations. Manuscripts of any length can be submitted from March 1 through June 1.

Small Press Points: Aunt Lute Books

by

Staff

6.14.17

We’ve been publishing revolutionary queer women of color for thirty-five years,” write the editors of Aunt Lute Books on their website, “and we don’t plan to stop any time soon.” Editors Barb Wieser and Joan Pinkvoss founded Aunt Lute in Iowa City in 1982 to create opportunities for writers who they believed were excluded from mainstream publishing and feminism in the eighties. They have since published more than fifty books by over thirty writers, nearly all women of color, including feminist activists and writers Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and Judy Grahn. The press has also published several anthologies of work by marginalized communities, including Filipina and Filipina American writers (Babaylan, 2000) and South Asian women in the United States (Our Feet Walk the Sky, 1993). Now based in San Francisco, the nonprofit press publishes two to four books each year of mostly fiction and nonfiction. Forthcoming titles include a reprint of Juliana Delgado Lopera’s Cuéntamelo: Oral Histories by LGBT Latino Immigrants in the fall and a critical edition of Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza next spring. Although the editors are particularly interested in work by queer women of color, submissions of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by women of all backgrounds (to be considered for inclusion in future anthologies) are open year-round via postal mail. 

Small Press Points: Twisted Road Publications

by

Staff

4.12.17

The whole truth requires complex, multilayered stories,” says Joan Leggitt, publisher of Twisted Road Publications, “and not just stories relating the known world as the author sees it, but also stories of what might be, as we imagine our best and worst selves.” Guided by this principle, Leggitt founded Twisted Road in 2014 with the financial backing of a friend who was going through the final stages of a terminal illness. Based in Tallahassee, Florida, the press publishes three to four titles of fiction and nonfiction each year. Leggitt, who has worked as a book distributor and editor, finds few books challenge mainstream culture, and says Twisted Road favors “books that depict the shadowy places where the disenfranchised dwell.” She adds: “It seems as though corporate media is convinced that no one wants to hear from people with lower incomes and less education because it is generally assumed they have nothing interesting to say, nothing to teach us.” The press has published books that push against that stereotype, including Connie May Fowler’s memoir A Million Fragile Bones (April) about the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion in 2010; Tricia Booker’s memoir, The Place of Peace and Crickets (March), about her experience adopting children from Asia and Central America; and James Carpenter’s novel, No Place to Pray (September 2016), about two homeless alcoholics. Twisted Road is currently open to submissions via e-mail (submissions@twistedroadpublications.com). 

Small Press Points: Phoneme Media

After noticing that a lot of exciting international literature wasn’t reaching English-language readers—particularly books from lesser-known countries like Burundi and Mongolia, and those written in languages like Isthmus Zapotec and Uyghur—translators David Shook and Brian Hewes decided to do something about it. In 2013 they launched Phoneme Media (phonememedia.org), a nonprofit publisher “dedicated to promoting cross-cultural understanding, connecting people and ideas through translated books and films.”  Phoneme MediaBased in Los Angeles and funded by PEN Center USA, the press publishes twelve books of translated poetry and fiction each year, and also produces literary films—video poems, paratextual films, and short documentaries—that feature the press’s authors and translators. A look at just two months’ worth of Phoneme titles is a trip across several continents: In December the press released Smooth-Talking Dog, a poetry collection by Mexican writer Roberto Castillo Udiarte—also known as “the Godfather of Tijuana’s counterculture”—translated from the Spanish by Anthony Seidman. Richard Ali A Mutu’s novel Mr. Fix-It, translated from the Lingala language of the Democratic Republic of the Congo by Bienvenu Sene Mongaba and Sara Sene, was also released in December. This month the press publishes its first Icelandic translation, Cold Moons by Magnús Sigursson, translated by Meg Matich; as well as The Conspiracy, a thriller by exiled Venezuelan novelist Israel Centeno, translated from the Spanish by Guillermo Parra. The Conspiracy is the second book in Phoneme’s City of Asylum series, which features works by exiled writers receiving sanctuary in the United States. Phoneme’s general submissions are open year-round, and can be sent via e-mail to submissions@phonememedia.org. The press is particularly interested in books by women and those translated from non-Indo-European languages.

Small Press Points: Platypus Press

by

Staff

10.11.17

When Michelle Tudor and Peter Barnfather started Platypus Press in 2015, they considered themselves a bit of an odd fit, since neither had worked at a press or published much of their own work. But with a love of reading and a willingness to improvise and learn on the job, the pair launched the independent press to “unearth innovative contemporary poetry and prose from a broad variety of voices and experiences.” Two years later, Platypus Press has already released more than a dozen books, launched the online literary journal Wildness, and published a chapbook series through which it put out a poetry chapbook every day for twenty-four days. The press publishes mostly poetry but also nonfiction and fiction—next year Tudor says Platypus will make its “first proper lunge into the world of fiction” with a series of digital-only stories from five thousand to fifteen thousand words each. Based in Shropshire, England, Platypus mostly publishes writers from the United States and United Kingdom but has also released books by authors from Singapore, New Zealand, and India. The press’s first titles showcased the work of younger poets, many of whom are active on Tumblr, but Tudor and Barnfather have since expanded their catalogue. “As a press we are interested in all aspects of a poet’s career,” says Tudor. “We believe in giving a voice to poets at all stages of their writing journey.” Recent titles show this range, such as Shuly Cawood’s debut memoir, The Going and Goodbye, and a book of selected poems by L. G. Corey, who has been writing poetry for more than seventy years. In November Platypus will release A Portrait in Blues: Poems of the Body, an anthology that explores gender, identity, and the nature of the body. Submissions of full-length manuscripts and stories for the digital fiction shorts series are open year-round via e-mail.

Small Press Points: Platypus Press

by

Staff

10.11.17

When Michelle Tudor and Peter Barnfather started Platypus Press in 2015, they considered themselves a bit of an odd fit, since neither had worked at a press or published much of their own work. But with a love of reading and a willingness to improvise and learn on the job, the pair launched the independent press to “unearth innovative contemporary poetry and prose from a broad variety of voices and experiences.” Two years later, Platypus Press has already released more than a dozen books, launched the online literary journal Wildness, and published a chapbook series through which it put out a poetry chapbook every day for twenty-four days. The press publishes mostly poetry but also nonfiction and fiction—next year Tudor says Platypus will make its “first proper lunge into the world of fiction” with a series of digital-only stories from five thousand to fifteen thousand words each. Based in Shropshire, England, Platypus mostly publishes writers from the United States and United Kingdom but has also released books by authors from Singapore, New Zealand, and India. The press’s first titles showcased the work of younger poets, many of whom are active on Tumblr, but Tudor and Barnfather have since expanded their catalogue. “As a press we are interested in all aspects of a poet’s career,” says Tudor. “We believe in giving a voice to poets at all stages of their writing journey.” Recent titles show this range, such as Shuly Cawood’s debut memoir, The Going and Goodbye, and a book of selected poems by L. G. Corey, who has been writing poetry for more than seventy years. In November Platypus will release A Portrait in Blues: Poems of the Body, an anthology that explores gender, identity, and the nature of the body. Submissions of full-length manuscripts and stories for the digital fiction shorts series are open year-round via e-mail.

Small Press Points: Saddle Road Press

by

Staff

12.13.17

On a plateau at the center of the island of Hawai’i, Saddle Road runs between two nearly fourteen-thousand-foot volcanoes, one of which is active. “It is a strange, isolated, and terribly beautiful land of black lava and vast light,” says Ruth Thompson, the publisher of Saddle Road Press (saddleroadpress.com), founded in Hilo, Hawai’i, in 2011. A similar description might apply to the style of work that Thompson and her team of editors look to publish at Saddle Road Press. Michael Collins’s poetry collection Appearances (November 2017), for example, is a meditation on nature not as “some place you visit / some museum to nostalgia through,” but rather, Thompson says, as “a place of meeting and confrontation between nature and civilization, art and subject, consciousness and the unconscious, life and death.” Jessamyn Smith’s hybrid prose and poetry collection Gilgamesh/Wilderness (March 2018), a follow-up to her 2016 novel-in-stories The Inugami Mochi, addresses mythology, nature, and grief. Gillian Barlow’s essay collection, Nomad’s Home (February 2018), “interweaves the author’s experience in designing aboriginal housing with the ancient Japanese text ki, aikido, thoughts on the idea of ‘house,’ a long-buried family secret, Australian bars, racism, and the idea of translation,” says Thompson. The press publishes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, though the editors are specifically seeking collections of lyric essays and hybrid prose and poetry. The editors also plan to launch a chapbook series of work from or about islands in the Pacific. Submissions of full-length manuscripts are open until January 31 via Submittable.

Small Press Points: Gold Wake Press

by

Staff

2.14.18

Every small press faces the choice of whether or not to charge submission fees, which can help keep a press afloat but can also exclude writers who don’t have the money to submit. Some publishers, such as Atelier26, Sundress Publications, and Gold Wake Press (goldwake.com), offer an alternative: A writer can submit a manuscript after purchasing a book from the press’s catalogue. While the cost of purchasing a book will surely still prohibit some writers from submitting, the model not only ensures that writers will get something in return for their submissions, but that they will be more familiar with the press’s aesthetic before sending their work. “We found the usual model of requiring a submission fee to be unethical,” says Nick Courtright, who runs Gold Wake Press with writer Kyle McCord. “We’d also heard so many stories of presses not really doing much to sell books once they were published, as if the whole point of the press enterprise was not to sell books but to elicit submission fees. Because we want to support our authors, this is a great way to get their books into the hands of prospective readers.” Located in Austin, Texas, and Des Moines, the press publishes about eight titles a year across genres. “We’ve done crazy poetry books, serious poetry books, novels, illustrated memoirs, short story collections, and flash fiction,” says Courtright. The editors look for work that combines “daring content with meticulous attention to form.” Recent titles, such as Erin Stalcup’s novel, Every Living Species, and Frances Cannon’s graphic memoir, The Highs and Lows of Shapeshift Ma and Big-Little Frank, have blurred the line between image and word, while others, such as Glenn Shaheen’s short story collection, Carnivalia, have combined poetry and prose. In the fall the press launched a triannual journal, Gold Wake Live, which is open for submissions in all genres year-round via Submittable. For those who have purchased a Gold Wake Press title, the press is open to full-length manuscripts via Submittable from March 1 to April 15.

Small Press Points: BatCat Press

by

Staff

8.15.18

“In the beginning BatCat was truly an experiment,” says Deanna Baringer, the managing editor and supervising teacher of BatCat Press. “I didn’t know if high school kids would be capable of, let alone interested in, publishing and bookmaking.” Nearly ten years later BatCat is no longer an experiment but a full-fledged indie press run by a group of about ten students at Lincoln Park Performing Arts Charter School in Midland, Pennsylvania. The students do all the editing, printing, and binding by hand and publish two or three books per year, mostly poetry with some fiction and nonfiction titles, by debut and established writers alike. In June the press released Dustin Nightingale’s poetry chapbook, Ghost Woodpecker—which Baringer calls a “terse but punchy collection”—that was printed entirely via a handset letterpress, and Jessica Poli’s poetry collection Canyons. “The poems are quirky little lines that stick with you and make you think,” says Alexa Bocek, a BatCat editor from the class of 2019. The students work together to select the final manuscripts, a process they approach with great care. “Not only does it come down to whether or not the piece is good, but a lot of it is also whether it works for our audience and if there are aspects we can draw from to create design elements,” says Sarah Bett, who graduated in the spring. “Going through hundreds of manuscripts, it could become easy to just skim them and quickly decide that you didn’t like it. I had to grow more patient and able to look at each piece through a new perspective.” BatCat is open to submissions of full-length and chapbook-length manuscripts in any genre year-round via Submittable, though the editors read mostly in the fall. There is no age minimum to submit.

Small Press Points: Bottlecap Press

by

Staff

4.11.18

“To put it in Hollywood terms,” says Bottlecap Press (bottlecap.press) founder and editor C. A. Mullins, “we think of ourselves more as producers than directors.” Established in Skagway, Alaska, in 2014, the self-described “millennial publishing outfit,” now based in central Missouri, is dedicated to putting its authors first by allowing them more creative control over their books.“Our philosophy is that we’re the ones working for the authors, not the other way around,” says Mullins. The press, which publishes one to two chapbooks and full-length books of poetry and fiction every month, offers editorial and design guidance more as “suggestions rather than mandates,” says Mullins. The resulting books, hand-printed by the editors, are diverse in design and aesthetic. Recent and forthcoming titles include Sarah Kennedy’s debut poetry collection, How to Find a Husband (April) and Andrew Duncan Worthington’s story collection A Very Small Forest Fire (June). In addition to traditional books, Bottlecap Press also welcomes mixed-media work: Kennedy’s collection, for example, incorporates photographs from her parents’ personal archives and is part of a larger performance project in conversation with Wendy Stehling’s 1985 book, How to Find a Husband in 30 Days. Mullins also plans to launch digital multimedia projects in the future, including a YouTube channel that will feature poetry, music, film, storytelling, performance art, and animation, and the editors have recently begun looking for artists to illustrate some of the press’s older chapbooks. The press accepts submissions in poetry, fiction, art, and video year-round via e-mail at bottlecappress@gmail.com.

Small Press Points: BatCat Press

by

Staff

8.15.18

“In the beginning BatCat was truly an experiment,” says Deanna Baringer, the managing editor and supervising teacher of BatCat Press. “I didn’t know if high school kids would be capable of, let alone interested in, publishing and bookmaking.” Nearly ten years later BatCat is no longer an experiment but a full-fledged indie press run by a group of about ten students at Lincoln Park Performing Arts Charter School in Midland, Pennsylvania. The students do all the editing, printing, and binding by hand and publish two or three books per year, mostly poetry with some fiction and nonfiction titles, by debut and established writers alike. In June the press released Dustin Nightingale’s poetry chapbook, Ghost Woodpecker—which Baringer calls a “terse but punchy collection”—that was printed entirely via a handset letterpress, and Jessica Poli’s poetry collection Canyons. “The poems are quirky little lines that stick with you and make you think,” says Alexa Bocek, a BatCat editor from the class of 2019. The students work together to select the final manuscripts, a process they approach with great care. “Not only does it come down to whether or not the piece is good, but a lot of it is also whether it works for our audience and if there are aspects we can draw from to create design elements,” says Sarah Bett, who graduated in the spring. “Going through hundreds of manuscripts, it could become easy to just skim them and quickly decide that you didn’t like it. I had to grow more patient and able to look at each piece through a new perspective.” BatCat is open to submissions of full-length and chapbook-length manuscripts in any genre year-round via Submittable, though the editors read mostly in the fall. There is no age minimum to submit.

Small Press Points: 7.13 Books

by

Staff

6.13.18

July 13 holds special importance for writer and publisher Leland Cheuk. Not only is it the day that, in 2014, he found out his life had been saved by a successful bone marrow transplant from a stranger, but it’s also the day that his first novel, The Misadventures of Sulliver Pong, was picked up by the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography. Two years later, on the same day, Thought Catalog sent him an offer for his first story collection, Letters From Dinosaurs. So when Cheuk decided to start his own small press in 2016, he didn’t hesitate to name it 7.13 Books (713books.com). Publishing four to five fiction titles a year from debut writers, the press seeks to offer “a publishing experience that’s respectful to and even reverent of first-time authors.” Cheuk wants the press, which is located in New York City, to avoid the pitfalls of both traditional publishing houses—which he describes as elitist and at risk of publishing the same kinds of books—and indie presses, which he admits are often understaffed and unresponsive. Cheuk replies to each submission within four to eight weeks and offers brief constructive feedback even for those he rejects. The writing—not a writer’s pedigree—matters to him most. In July, 7.13 Books will publish Willie Davis’s Nightwolf, about a seventeen-year-old dropout whose brother has gone missing, and in the fall the press will release Jenn Stroud Rossmann’s The Place You’re Supposed to Laugh, about a working-class family in California’s Silicon Valley. Cheuk says both novels have wit and humor, noting that his own taste leans toward literary comedies. Submissions of story collections and novels are open until November 1 via Submittable.

Small Press Points: Unicorn Press

by

Staff

10.10.18

After four years as an apprentice at poetry publisher Unicorn Press, Andrew Saulters took the reins from Alan Brilliant in 2016, fifty years after Brilliant founded the press in Santa Barbara, California. Saulters, who edits and binds the press’s books himself in Greensboro, North Carolina, seeks to carry on the editorial vision of Brilliant and his longtime partner, Teo Savory, who died in 1989. “I’ve tried to follow Al’s editorial spirit in looking at publishing as a way that work enters the cultural commons,” says Saulters. “It’s not enough that the publisher like the work, but the work should also add something to what is already available to readers.” Unicorn Press publishes four to six books of poetry each year, at least two of which are full-length collections, and counts Robert Bly and Muriel Rukeyser among its many authors. The press recently published a haiku collection by the Carolina African American Writers Collective, One Window’s Light, edited by Lenard D. Moore, and in November will release Lynn Otto’s first book, Real Daughter, and Wayne Johns’s Antipsalms. Otto and Johns were selected from the press’s first-book competition, held annually in the spring; the press is open to general submissions of full-length and chapbook-length poetry collections from October through December.

Small Press Points: BatCat Press

by

Staff

8.15.18

“In the beginning BatCat was truly an experiment,” says Deanna Baringer, the managing editor and supervising teacher of BatCat Press. “I didn’t know if high school kids would be capable of, let alone interested in, publishing and bookmaking.” Nearly ten years later BatCat is no longer an experiment but a full-fledged indie press run by a group of about ten students at Lincoln Park Performing Arts Charter School in Midland, Pennsylvania. The students do all the editing, printing, and binding by hand and publish two or three books per year, mostly poetry with some fiction and nonfiction titles, by debut and established writers alike. In June the press released Dustin Nightingale’s poetry chapbook, Ghost Woodpecker—which Baringer calls a “terse but punchy collection”—that was printed entirely via a handset letterpress, and Jessica Poli’s poetry collection Canyons. “The poems are quirky little lines that stick with you and make you think,” says Alexa Bocek, a BatCat editor from the class of 2019. The students work together to select the final manuscripts, a process they approach with great care. “Not only does it come down to whether or not the piece is good, but a lot of it is also whether it works for our audience and if there are aspects we can draw from to create design elements,” says Sarah Bett, who graduated in the spring. “Going through hundreds of manuscripts, it could become easy to just skim them and quickly decide that you didn’t like it. I had to grow more patient and able to look at each piece through a new perspective.” BatCat is open to submissions of full-length and chapbook-length manuscripts in any genre year-round via Submittable, though the editors read mostly in the fall. There is no age minimum to submit.

Small Press Points: Spork Press

by

Staff

12.12.18

“To feature the work that amazed us,” Richard Siken says when asked why he and Drew Burk started the literary magazine Spork in 2000. “A parallel goal was to show that it was possible to start and run a magazine, and eventually a press, without external or institutional support and to maybe start chipping away at the notions of gates and gatekeepers. If you’re not asking for money or permission, then nobody can tell you no.” For the past nineteen years Siken and Burk have thus forged their own path through the literary landscape and in 2010, with the help of Jake Levine, Andrew Shuta, and Joel Smith, expanded the magazine into Spork Press, which now publishes chapbooks and full-length books of poetry and fiction. The editors, who are “invested in voice-driven work that evokes rather than recounts,” make all the press’s books by hand in Tucson, Arizona. “We’re looking for narrators that inhabit and enact,” the editors say on the website. “We want speakers that can render their investment in the subject matter.” Spork has published books of poetry by Kazim Ali, Sophia Le Fraga, and Ariana Reines, as well as books of fiction by Casey Hannan, Kathleen Rooney, and Colin Winnette. Recent titles include Jennifer Juneau’s novel, ÜberChef USA, and two poetry collections, Rae Gouirand’s Glass Is Glass Water Is Water and David Welch’s Everyone Who Is Dead. Looking ahead, the editors are experimenting with new production techniques—blind stamping, full-bleed wraparound covers, and designs that use overlapping transparent inks, for example—and are considering printing machine-made editions to meet demand. Spork will be open for submissions in the summer.

Small Press Points: Unicorn Press

by

Staff

10.10.18

After four years as an apprentice at poetry publisher Unicorn Press, Andrew Saulters took the reins from Alan Brilliant in 2016, fifty years after Brilliant founded the press in Santa Barbara, California. Saulters, who edits and binds the press’s books himself in Greensboro, North Carolina, seeks to carry on the editorial vision of Brilliant and his longtime partner, Teo Savory, who died in 1989. “I’ve tried to follow Al’s editorial spirit in looking at publishing as a way that work enters the cultural commons,” says Saulters. “It’s not enough that the publisher like the work, but the work should also add something to what is already available to readers.” Unicorn Press publishes four to six books of poetry each year, at least two of which are full-length collections, and counts Robert Bly and Muriel Rukeyser among its many authors. The press recently published a haiku collection by the Carolina African American Writers Collective, One Window’s Light, edited by Lenard D. Moore, and in November will release Lynn Otto’s first book, Real Daughter, and Wayne Johns’s Antipsalms. Otto and Johns were selected from the press’s first-book competition, held annually in the spring; the press is open to general submissions of full-length and chapbook-length poetry collections from October through December.

Small Press Points: BOAAT Press

by

Staff

2.13.19

When poet Sean Shearer started BOAAT Press in 2014, he wanted to combine his two loves: poetry and book arts. “Our aim was to create something beautiful as well as meaningful by publishing emerging writers and housing their words inside our signature books,” says managing editor Catherine Bresner, who joined the staff in 2015. That signature style is part of what has set BOAAT apart from the beginning: The press’s first titles, all chapbooks made from materials such as banana peels, seaweed, Spanish moss, cotton linters, and construction paper, resemble tidal waves, the seashore, or other nautical scenes. The editors even constructed some books out of wood to look like miniature docks, complete with fishing net and seashells. “These books don’t belong on bookshelves,” writes Shearer on the press’s website. “They belong out in the open, plopped on desks and coffee tables to turn heads and wow anyone in the room.” Today, in addition to handmade books, BOAAT publishes one traditionally bound chapbook and up to two full-length books each year through its two annual contests. The press also publishes BOAAT Journal, edited by poet sam sax, which has published up-and-coming poets including Cortney Lamar Charleston, Jameson Fitzpatrick, Emily Skaja, and Chelsea Dingman. The press’s forthcoming titles include Alison Stagner’s The Thing That Brought the Shadow Here, which Nick Flynn selected as winner of the 2018 book prize, and Alycia Pirmohamed’s Faces That Fled the Wind, which Camille Rankine chose as winner of the 2018 chapbook prize. Submissions to BOAAT Journal are open year-round; submissions for both the chapbook prize and book prize are open during the month of April.

Small Press Points: Spork Press

by

Staff

12.12.18

“To feature the work that amazed us,” Richard Siken says when asked why he and Drew Burk started the literary magazine Spork in 2000. “A parallel goal was to show that it was possible to start and run a magazine, and eventually a press, without external or institutional support and to maybe start chipping away at the notions of gates and gatekeepers. If you’re not asking for money or permission, then nobody can tell you no.” For the past nineteen years Siken and Burk have thus forged their own path through the literary landscape and in 2010, with the help of Jake Levine, Andrew Shuta, and Joel Smith, expanded the magazine into Spork Press, which now publishes chapbooks and full-length books of poetry and fiction. The editors, who are “invested in voice-driven work that evokes rather than recounts,” make all the press’s books by hand in Tucson, Arizona. “We’re looking for narrators that inhabit and enact,” the editors say on the website. “We want speakers that can render their investment in the subject matter.” Spork has published books of poetry by Kazim Ali, Sophia Le Fraga, and Ariana Reines, as well as books of fiction by Casey Hannan, Kathleen Rooney, and Colin Winnette. Recent titles include Jennifer Juneau’s novel, ÜberChef USA, and two poetry collections, Rae Gouirand’s Glass Is Glass Water Is Water and David Welch’s Everyone Who Is Dead. Looking ahead, the editors are experimenting with new production techniques—blind stamping, full-bleed wraparound covers, and designs that use overlapping transparent inks, for example—and are considering printing machine-made editions to meet demand. Spork will be open for submissions in the summer.

Small Press Points: BkMk Press

by

Staff

4.10.19

In the hardscrabble world of small presses, a ten-year anniversary is a major achievement, so BkMk Press, which is approaching its fiftieth, has much to celebrate. Founded in 1971 as an outlet for Midwestern writers, the press first published poetry chapbooks out of a local branch of the Johnson County Library in Kansas. Today BkMk’s office is located at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, where editor in chief Robert Stewart also oversees the press’s affiliated magazine, New Letters, and the radio show New Letters on the Air. BkMk annually releases about six full-length collections of poetry, short fiction, and nonfiction; it has published more than eighty titles by local, national, and international writers. “Book publishing continues to be dominated by the East Coast, but BkMk gives Missouri and the Midwest a seat at the publishing table,” says managing editor Ben Furnish. In July BkMk will publish Lorraine M. López’s story collection Postcards From the Gerund State, and in the fall it will release Beverly Burch’s poetry collection Latter Days of Eve and Jennifer Wisner Kelly’s story collection, Stone Skimmers. In honor of BkMk’s origins as a chapbook publisher, the editors plan to launch a chapbook competition in 2020. The press currently hosts two other annual contests: the John Ciardi Prize and the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize, given for a poetry collection and a story collection, respectively. Both competitions open on June 1 and include a $1,000 prize and publication. General submissions are open via Submittable and postal mail until June 30.

 

 

Small Press Points: BOAAT Press

by

Staff

2.13.19

When poet Sean Shearer started BOAAT Press in 2014, he wanted to combine his two loves: poetry and book arts. “Our aim was to create something beautiful as well as meaningful by publishing emerging writers and housing their words inside our signature books,” says managing editor Catherine Bresner, who joined the staff in 2015. That signature style is part of what has set BOAAT apart from the beginning: The press’s first titles, all chapbooks made from materials such as banana peels, seaweed, Spanish moss, cotton linters, and construction paper, resemble tidal waves, the seashore, or other nautical scenes. The editors even constructed some books out of wood to look like miniature docks, complete with fishing net and seashells. “These books don’t belong on bookshelves,” writes Shearer on the press’s website. “They belong out in the open, plopped on desks and coffee tables to turn heads and wow anyone in the room.” Today, in addition to handmade books, BOAAT publishes one traditionally bound chapbook and up to two full-length books each year through its two annual contests. The press also publishes BOAAT Journal, edited by poet sam sax, which has published up-and-coming poets including Cortney Lamar Charleston, Jameson Fitzpatrick, Emily Skaja, and Chelsea Dingman. The press’s forthcoming titles include Alison Stagner’s The Thing That Brought the Shadow Here, which Nick Flynn selected as winner of the 2018 book prize, and Alycia Pirmohamed’s Faces That Fled the Wind, which Camille Rankine chose as winner of the 2018 chapbook prize. Submissions to BOAAT Journal are open year-round; submissions for both the chapbook prize and book prize are open during the month of April.

Small Press Points: Cooper Dillon Books

by

Staff

6.12.19

A poem can exist in a specific cultural or emotional moment, but it can also sustain and be revisited over and over again,” says poet Adam Deutsch, the publisher of Cooper Dillon Books (www.cooperdillon.com), a ten-year-old press dedicated to “the values that make poetry timeless.” Deutsch and assistant editor Christine Bryant Cohen run the press from San Diego and Seattle, publishing one or two books a year. So far they have released six full-length poetry collections and eight chapbooks by writers such as Jill Alexander Essbaum, Melody S. Gee, and William Matthews.

Cooper Dillon’s most recent titles are Linda Dove’s chapbook Fearn (2019), a meditation on fear, and Mónica Gomery’s debut collection, Here Is the Night and the Night on the Road (2018), which Lillian-Yvonne Bertram says is “an exquisite study in the suddenness of numbered days and the radiant pain of living with love ‘tumbling forth.’” The press eschews contests and instead welcomes submissions year-round via Submittable with a $10 reading fee, which is waived if you purchase one of the press’s titles. Deutsch believes standard book-contest entry fees, typically $20 or $25, are too high and prefers the press to “remain open for when a writer feels that the time is right to submit.” He adds, “We see poetry as community, not competition.”

Small Press Points: BkMk Press

by

Staff

4.10.19

In the hardscrabble world of small presses, a ten-year anniversary is a major achievement, so BkMk Press, which is approaching its fiftieth, has much to celebrate. Founded in 1971 as an outlet for Midwestern writers, the press first published poetry chapbooks out of a local branch of the Johnson County Library in Kansas. Today BkMk’s office is located at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, where editor in chief Robert Stewart also oversees the press’s affiliated magazine, New Letters, and the radio show New Letters on the Air. BkMk annually releases about six full-length collections of poetry, short fiction, and nonfiction; it has published more than eighty titles by local, national, and international writers. “Book publishing continues to be dominated by the East Coast, but BkMk gives Missouri and the Midwest a seat at the publishing table,” says managing editor Ben Furnish. In July BkMk will publish Lorraine M. López’s story collection Postcards From the Gerund State, and in the fall it will release Beverly Burch’s poetry collection Latter Days of Eve and Jennifer Wisner Kelly’s story collection, Stone Skimmers. In honor of BkMk’s origins as a chapbook publisher, the editors plan to launch a chapbook competition in 2020. The press currently hosts two other annual contests: the John Ciardi Prize and the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize, given for a poetry collection and a story collection, respectively. Both competitions open on June 1 and include a $1,000 prize and publication. General submissions are open via Submittable and postal mail until June 30.

 

 

Small Press Points: Acre Books

by

Staff

8.14.19

As the founding editor of the Cincinnati Review, Nicola Mason has a strong track record of spotting talented writers early in their careers. Under her leadership the review published the early work of fiction writers Caitlin Horrocks and Jamie Quatro and poets Jill Osier and Mai Der Vang. As Mason explained to Cincinnati magazine in June, after watching these writers and other contributors go on to win prestigious prizes and publish books, she thought, “We’re becoming talent scouts for everyone else; why can’t we become talent scouts for ourselves?”

So in 2017 Mason founded Acre Books, an imprint of the University of Cincinnati Press, where, along with poetry series editor Lisa Ampleman, she publishes two poetry collections, two novels, and two story collections each year. The press also welcomes hybrid forms. “I’ve always felt the boundaries separating genres and disciplines to be artificial,” says Mason. “Why shake one’s finger at innovation?” Mason also hopes to publish literary nonfiction but hasn’t yet found a book that’s the right fit. “I find a lot of creative nonfiction has an ‘all about me’ quality,” she says. “We want work that is grounded in self but that travels beyond it.” In October, Acre will publish Faylita Hicks’s poetry debut, HoodWitch, which Mason describes as “an absolute knockout full of power, pain, beauty, and magick.” Submissions in all genres are open via the press’s website; writers should include a brief description of the manuscript and ten sample pages. There is no reading fee.

 

 

Small Press Points: Cooper Dillon Books

by

Staff

6.12.19

A poem can exist in a specific cultural or emotional moment, but it can also sustain and be revisited over and over again,” says poet Adam Deutsch, the publisher of Cooper Dillon Books (www.cooperdillon.com), a ten-year-old press dedicated to “the values that make poetry timeless.” Deutsch and assistant editor Christine Bryant Cohen run the press from San Diego and Seattle, publishing one or two books a year. So far they have released six full-length poetry collections and eight chapbooks by writers such as Jill Alexander Essbaum, Melody S. Gee, and William Matthews.

Cooper Dillon’s most recent titles are Linda Dove’s chapbook Fearn (2019), a meditation on fear, and Mónica Gomery’s debut collection, Here Is the Night and the Night on the Road (2018), which Lillian-Yvonne Bertram says is “an exquisite study in the suddenness of numbered days and the radiant pain of living with love ‘tumbling forth.’” The press eschews contests and instead welcomes submissions year-round via Submittable with a $10 reading fee, which is waived if you purchase one of the press’s titles. Deutsch believes standard book-contest entry fees, typically $20 or $25, are too high and prefers the press to “remain open for when a writer feels that the time is right to submit.” He adds, “We see poetry as community, not competition.”

Small Press Points: BkMk Press

by

Staff

4.10.19

In the hardscrabble world of small presses, a ten-year anniversary is a major achievement, so BkMk Press, which is approaching its fiftieth, has much to celebrate. Founded in 1971 as an outlet for Midwestern writers, the press first published poetry chapbooks out of a local branch of the Johnson County Library in Kansas. Today BkMk’s office is located at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, where editor in chief Robert Stewart also oversees the press’s affiliated magazine, New Letters, and the radio show New Letters on the Air. BkMk annually releases about six full-length collections of poetry, short fiction, and nonfiction; it has published more than eighty titles by local, national, and international writers. “Book publishing continues to be dominated by the East Coast, but BkMk gives Missouri and the Midwest a seat at the publishing table,” says managing editor Ben Furnish. In July BkMk will publish Lorraine M. López’s story collection Postcards From the Gerund State, and in the fall it will release Beverly Burch’s poetry collection Latter Days of Eve and Jennifer Wisner Kelly’s story collection, Stone Skimmers. In honor of BkMk’s origins as a chapbook publisher, the editors plan to launch a chapbook competition in 2020. The press currently hosts two other annual contests: the John Ciardi Prize and the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize, given for a poetry collection and a story collection, respectively. Both competitions open on June 1 and include a $1,000 prize and publication. General submissions are open via Submittable and postal mail until June 30.

 

 

Small Press Points: BOAAT Press

by

Staff

2.13.19

When poet Sean Shearer started BOAAT Press in 2014, he wanted to combine his two loves: poetry and book arts. “Our aim was to create something beautiful as well as meaningful by publishing emerging writers and housing their words inside our signature books,” says managing editor Catherine Bresner, who joined the staff in 2015. That signature style is part of what has set BOAAT apart from the beginning: The press’s first titles, all chapbooks made from materials such as banana peels, seaweed, Spanish moss, cotton linters, and construction paper, resemble tidal waves, the seashore, or other nautical scenes. The editors even constructed some books out of wood to look like miniature docks, complete with fishing net and seashells. “These books don’t belong on bookshelves,” writes Shearer on the press’s website. “They belong out in the open, plopped on desks and coffee tables to turn heads and wow anyone in the room.” Today, in addition to handmade books, BOAAT publishes one traditionally bound chapbook and up to two full-length books each year through its two annual contests. The press also publishes BOAAT Journal, edited by poet sam sax, which has published up-and-coming poets including Cortney Lamar Charleston, Jameson Fitzpatrick, Emily Skaja, and Chelsea Dingman. The press’s forthcoming titles include Alison Stagner’s The Thing That Brought the Shadow Here, which Nick Flynn selected as winner of the 2018 book prize, and Alycia Pirmohamed’s Faces That Fled the Wind, which Camille Rankine chose as winner of the 2018 chapbook prize. Submissions to BOAAT Journal are open year-round; submissions for both the chapbook prize and book prize are open during the month of April.

Small Press Points: Unnamed Press

by

Staff

10.9.19

Unnamed Press is an object lesson in thinking globally, acting locally. C. P. Heiser and Olivia Taylor Smith, two former staffers at the Los Angeles Review of Books, founded the press in 2014, drawing inspiration from the flourishing independent publishing scene in L.A.—and a sense that there was more work to do. “We saw that we could bring something different to the table, particularly through our initial focus on international voices and debut authors,” says Smith. Today the press publishes ten to twelve books each year, about half fiction and half nonfiction. Notable recent titles include Adam Popescu’s Nima (2019), in which a young Sherpa woman disguised as a man leads journalists to the foot of Mount Everest, and Man Booker Prize–winning translator Jennifer Croft’s memoir of sisterhood, Homesick (2019). Esmé Weijun Wang’s debut novel, The Border of Paradise (2016), remains a best-seller.

What does it take to curate such a dynamic, international list? “We travel a lot!” says Heiser. Favorite venues for connecting with new talent include the Dhaka Lit Fest in Bangladesh, the Frankfurt Book Fair, and the American Literary Translators Association’s annual conference. “We are a story-driven press that’s attracted to underrepresented or marginalized voices—not as a rule, but simply because, as editors, that’s what excites us,” says Heiser, pointing to Nima and The Border of Paradise as good examples. “Both explore important issues through some really surprising and refreshing points of view, which for lots of reasons bigger publishers found too challenging or risky.” Unnamed Press accepts queries and submissions via e-mail, and is open year-round.

Small Press Points: Acre Books

by

Staff

8.14.19

As the founding editor of the Cincinnati Review, Nicola Mason has a strong track record of spotting talented writers early in their careers. Under her leadership the review published the early work of fiction writers Caitlin Horrocks and Jamie Quatro and poets Jill Osier and Mai Der Vang. As Mason explained to Cincinnati magazine in June, after watching these writers and other contributors go on to win prestigious prizes and publish books, she thought, “We’re becoming talent scouts for everyone else; why can’t we become talent scouts for ourselves?”

So in 2017 Mason founded Acre Books, an imprint of the University of Cincinnati Press, where, along with poetry series editor Lisa Ampleman, she publishes two poetry collections, two novels, and two story collections each year. The press also welcomes hybrid forms. “I’ve always felt the boundaries separating genres and disciplines to be artificial,” says Mason. “Why shake one’s finger at innovation?” Mason also hopes to publish literary nonfiction but hasn’t yet found a book that’s the right fit. “I find a lot of creative nonfiction has an ‘all about me’ quality,” she says. “We want work that is grounded in self but that travels beyond it.” In October, Acre will publish Faylita Hicks’s poetry debut, HoodWitch, which Mason describes as “an absolute knockout full of power, pain, beauty, and magick.” Submissions in all genres are open via the press’s website; writers should include a brief description of the manuscript and ten sample pages. There is no reading fee.

 

 

Small Press Points: Cooper Dillon Books

by

Staff

6.12.19

A poem can exist in a specific cultural or emotional moment, but it can also sustain and be revisited over and over again,” says poet Adam Deutsch, the publisher of Cooper Dillon Books (www.cooperdillon.com), a ten-year-old press dedicated to “the values that make poetry timeless.” Deutsch and assistant editor Christine Bryant Cohen run the press from San Diego and Seattle, publishing one or two books a year. So far they have released six full-length poetry collections and eight chapbooks by writers such as Jill Alexander Essbaum, Melody S. Gee, and William Matthews.

Cooper Dillon’s most recent titles are Linda Dove’s chapbook Fearn (2019), a meditation on fear, and Mónica Gomery’s debut collection, Here Is the Night and the Night on the Road (2018), which Lillian-Yvonne Bertram says is “an exquisite study in the suddenness of numbered days and the radiant pain of living with love ‘tumbling forth.’” The press eschews contests and instead welcomes submissions year-round via Submittable with a $10 reading fee, which is waived if you purchase one of the press’s titles. Deutsch believes standard book-contest entry fees, typically $20 or $25, are too high and prefers the press to “remain open for when a writer feels that the time is right to submit.” He adds, “We see poetry as community, not competition.”

Small Press Points: BkMk Press

by

Staff

4.10.19

In the hardscrabble world of small presses, a ten-year anniversary is a major achievement, so BkMk Press, which is approaching its fiftieth, has much to celebrate. Founded in 1971 as an outlet for Midwestern writers, the press first published poetry chapbooks out of a local branch of the Johnson County Library in Kansas. Today BkMk’s office is located at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, where editor in chief Robert Stewart also oversees the press’s affiliated magazine, New Letters, and the radio show New Letters on the Air. BkMk annually releases about six full-length collections of poetry, short fiction, and nonfiction; it has published more than eighty titles by local, national, and international writers. “Book publishing continues to be dominated by the East Coast, but BkMk gives Missouri and the Midwest a seat at the publishing table,” says managing editor Ben Furnish. In July BkMk will publish Lorraine M. López’s story collection Postcards From the Gerund State, and in the fall it will release Beverly Burch’s poetry collection Latter Days of Eve and Jennifer Wisner Kelly’s story collection, Stone Skimmers. In honor of BkMk’s origins as a chapbook publisher, the editors plan to launch a chapbook competition in 2020. The press currently hosts two other annual contests: the John Ciardi Prize and the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize, given for a poetry collection and a story collection, respectively. Both competitions open on June 1 and include a $1,000 prize and publication. General submissions are open via Submittable and postal mail until June 30.

 

 

Small Press Points: Trembling Pillow Press

by

Staff

12.11.19

Poetry can change your life, and it doesn’t happen on the page; it happens in the rooms and places where poetry connects you to people who change how you are in the world,” says Megan Burns, publisher of Trembling Pillow Press in New Orleans. This sense of poetry as a means of community animates all of the press’s work. Trembling Pillow was established in the late nineties with an initial focus on making broadsides and occasional chapbooks but turned to producing full-length poetry books in 2006. Today Trembling Pillow publishes four or five poetry titles a year, about half of which are debut collections.

Burns approaches these editorial collaborations with first-time authors with particular care. “I am giving someone an experience that becomes the basis for future relationships in the writing world, and I want them to have a high bar,” she says, noting the years of devoted work that goes into a project before it ever reaches the press and a publisher’s obligation to treat a work with that same devotion. Trembling Pillow’s sensibility is eclectic—its titles vary from “feminist manifesto to punk rock memoir to collaborative eco-poetics to lyrical experimentation or rural horror manifestations”—but its poets share a willingness to take risks and to surprise. Among the press’s 2020 titles are Marty Cain’s The Wound Is (Not) Real: A Memoir, a hybrid text that mines the experiences of the author’s adolescence in Vermont; Erin M. Bertram’s It’s Not a Lonely World, about queerness and cancer; and Jenny Sadre-Orafai and Anne Champion’s Book of Levitations, a “modern-day poetic spell book.” Trembling Pillow is open for submissions year-round via Submittable; a $15 reading fee goes directly into producing more books and is waived in the month of December.

Small Press Points: Unnamed Press

by

Staff

10.9.19

Unnamed Press is an object lesson in thinking globally, acting locally. C. P. Heiser and Olivia Taylor Smith, two former staffers at the Los Angeles Review of Books, founded the press in 2014, drawing inspiration from the flourishing independent publishing scene in L.A.—and a sense that there was more work to do. “We saw that we could bring something different to the table, particularly through our initial focus on international voices and debut authors,” says Smith. Today the press publishes ten to twelve books each year, about half fiction and half nonfiction. Notable recent titles include Adam Popescu’s Nima (2019), in which a young Sherpa woman disguised as a man leads journalists to the foot of Mount Everest, and Man Booker Prize–winning translator Jennifer Croft’s memoir of sisterhood, Homesick (2019). Esmé Weijun Wang’s debut novel, The Border of Paradise (2016), remains a best-seller.

What does it take to curate such a dynamic, international list? “We travel a lot!” says Heiser. Favorite venues for connecting with new talent include the Dhaka Lit Fest in Bangladesh, the Frankfurt Book Fair, and the American Literary Translators Association’s annual conference. “We are a story-driven press that’s attracted to underrepresented or marginalized voices—not as a rule, but simply because, as editors, that’s what excites us,” says Heiser, pointing to Nima and The Border of Paradise as good examples. “Both explore important issues through some really surprising and refreshing points of view, which for lots of reasons bigger publishers found too challenging or risky.” Unnamed Press accepts queries and submissions via e-mail, and is open year-round.

Small Press Points: The Cupboard Pamphlet

by

Staff

2.12.20

Consider the Cupboard Pamphlet your source for misfit books. “The Cupboard Pamphlet was formed to address the lack of publishing venues for prose chapbooks that are formally strange or conceptually bizarre,” say editors Kelly Dulaney and Todd Seabrook. Founded in 2008 by Adam Peterson and Dave Madden, the press originally printed free, anonymous pamphlets and evolved to concentrate on single-authored chapbooks. “The first of these were tape-bound, designed to be inexpensive and mobile—pocketable,” say Seabrook and Dulaney. Today this feeling of experiment and nerve continues to guide the press as it publishes four prose chapbooks a year by authors including Chanelle Benz, Brian Evenson, and Courtney Maum. Most of these works are thirty to seventy pages in length, although Dulaney and Seabrook avoid placing strictures on submissions.

“We like works that provide play and surprise in terms of form, structure, and language in addition to a sense of emotional sincerity,” they say. Seabrook is based in Cleveland, and Dulaney in Denver; they collaborate via phone calls and e-mail. Dulaney relishes one-on-one work with authors, while Seabrook “enjoys the physicality of the chapbook—designing it, printing it, and seeing it develop on the page.” All of the titles produced by the Cupboard Pamphlet are selected through an annual online contest with a submission fee of $20; the 2020 contest will run March 1 through May 1. This year Cupboard will publish 2019 contest winner Lia Woodall’s Remove to Play, “a game-based, nonfiction work about the spaces left open in the wake of a suicide” as well as books by J. S. DeYoung and Thomas Israel Hopkins and a coauthored work by Kara Dorris and Gwendolyn Paradice.

Small Press Points: Trembling Pillow Press

by

Staff

12.11.19

Poetry can change your life, and it doesn’t happen on the page; it happens in the rooms and places where poetry connects you to people who change how you are in the world,” says Megan Burns, publisher of Trembling Pillow Press in New Orleans. This sense of poetry as a means of community animates all of the press’s work. Trembling Pillow was established in the late nineties with an initial focus on making broadsides and occasional chapbooks but turned to producing full-length poetry books in 2006. Today Trembling Pillow publishes four or five poetry titles a year, about half of which are debut collections.

Burns approaches these editorial collaborations with first-time authors with particular care. “I am giving someone an experience that becomes the basis for future relationships in the writing world, and I want them to have a high bar,” she says, noting the years of devoted work that goes into a project before it ever reaches the press and a publisher’s obligation to treat a work with that same devotion. Trembling Pillow’s sensibility is eclectic—its titles vary from “feminist manifesto to punk rock memoir to collaborative eco-poetics to lyrical experimentation or rural horror manifestations”—but its poets share a willingness to take risks and to surprise. Among the press’s 2020 titles are Marty Cain’s The Wound Is (Not) Real: A Memoir, a hybrid text that mines the experiences of the author’s adolescence in Vermont; Erin M. Bertram’s It’s Not a Lonely World, about queerness and cancer; and Jenny Sadre-Orafai and Anne Champion’s Book of Levitations, a “modern-day poetic spell book.” Trembling Pillow is open for submissions year-round via Submittable; a $15 reading fee goes directly into producing more books and is waived in the month of December.

Small Press Points: Dottir Press

by

Staff

4.8.20

Even though millions of books are published each year, many stories remain either silenced or mistold,” says Jennifer Baumgardner, founder of Dottir Press. A journalist and author for more than two decades, Baumgardner established the press in 2017 on the heels of her tenure as executive director of the Feminist Press, where she “discovered she liked the business side of books as much as she liked the writing side.” When Baumgardner saw that a politically charged children’s book she believed in might not find a home, she created Dottir Press to provide one. (That book, Anastasia Higginbotham’s Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness, is now a Dottir best-seller.) Located in New York City, the press publishes between six and eight works of fiction and nonfiction a year, including both adult and children’s titles. All are “books by feminists, for everyone,” as Dottir’s slogan declares.

“I believe in creating space for people to tell the truth about what has happened to them and to be vulnerable,” says Baumgardner. Forthcoming titles include transgender activist Cooper Lee Bombardier’s debut, Pass With Care (May 2020), a collection of autobiographical writings that explore masculinity, identity, and the body as systems habitually in flux; and Bett Williams’s memoir The Wild Kindness: A Psilocybin Odyssey (September 2020), which Baumgardner says is “funny and a real challenge to those who might colonize Indigenous knowledge of mushrooms.” The press is open for submissions by e-mail year-round. Baumgardner reads manuscripts with an eye for work that is politically engaged and will change its readers: “I love getting behind a book that truly could influence culture in positive ways.”

Small Press Points: The Cupboard Pamphlet

by

Staff

2.12.20

Consider the Cupboard Pamphlet your source for misfit books. “The Cupboard Pamphlet was formed to address the lack of publishing venues for prose chapbooks that are formally strange or conceptually bizarre,” say editors Kelly Dulaney and Todd Seabrook. Founded in 2008 by Adam Peterson and Dave Madden, the press originally printed free, anonymous pamphlets and evolved to concentrate on single-authored chapbooks. “The first of these were tape-bound, designed to be inexpensive and mobile—pocketable,” say Seabrook and Dulaney. Today this feeling of experiment and nerve continues to guide the press as it publishes four prose chapbooks a year by authors including Chanelle Benz, Brian Evenson, and Courtney Maum. Most of these works are thirty to seventy pages in length, although Dulaney and Seabrook avoid placing strictures on submissions.

“We like works that provide play and surprise in terms of form, structure, and language in addition to a sense of emotional sincerity,” they say. Seabrook is based in Cleveland, and Dulaney in Denver; they collaborate via phone calls and e-mail. Dulaney relishes one-on-one work with authors, while Seabrook “enjoys the physicality of the chapbook—designing it, printing it, and seeing it develop on the page.” All of the titles produced by the Cupboard Pamphlet are selected through an annual online contest with a submission fee of $20; the 2020 contest will run March 1 through May 1. This year Cupboard will publish 2019 contest winner Lia Woodall’s Remove to Play, “a game-based, nonfiction work about the spaces left open in the wake of a suicide” as well as books by J. S. DeYoung and Thomas Israel Hopkins and a coauthored work by Kara Dorris and Gwendolyn Paradice.

Small Press Points: A3 Press

I like to think that each chapbook is a journey,” says editor Shaun Levin of the immersive, imaginative volumes he publishes at the A3 Press. Founded in 2019 as an offshoot of the A3 Review and based in London and Madrid, the A3 Press produces between six and ten chapbooks each year, in a mix of prose, poetry, and art.

The press’s trademark is the unusual design of its chapbooks: Each is printed on a single sheet of paper that folds in the style of a map. “I like the fluidity that comes with the map fold, the sense of randomness and serendipity as you move through the chapbook,” says Levin. “You can move through the chapbook any way you want, start anywhere you want. It’s an adventure, a discovery.” Levin recently published poet Sara Eddy’s Tell the Bees, about “beekeeping and dealing with cancer,” and will release Elizabeth Briggs’s Made to Order and Mark Adams’s Peregrinus [Bede’s Walk] later this year. Submissions are open through October 1 via Submittable with a $20 reading fee, which goes toward production and paying the press’s authors. “Send us work that you feel only you could have written,” says Levin. “Deeply personal work that overshares and doesn’t hold back is particularly appealing to us.” 

Small Press Points: Dottir Press

by

Staff

4.8.20

Even though millions of books are published each year, many stories remain either silenced or mistold,” says Jennifer Baumgardner, founder of Dottir Press. A journalist and author for more than two decades, Baumgardner established the press in 2017 on the heels of her tenure as executive director of the Feminist Press, where she “discovered she liked the business side of books as much as she liked the writing side.” When Baumgardner saw that a politically charged children’s book she believed in might not find a home, she created Dottir Press to provide one. (That book, Anastasia Higginbotham’s Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness, is now a Dottir best-seller.) Located in New York City, the press publishes between six and eight works of fiction and nonfiction a year, including both adult and children’s titles. All are “books by feminists, for everyone,” as Dottir’s slogan declares.

“I believe in creating space for people to tell the truth about what has happened to them and to be vulnerable,” says Baumgardner. Forthcoming titles include transgender activist Cooper Lee Bombardier’s debut, Pass With Care (May 2020), a collection of autobiographical writings that explore masculinity, identity, and the body as systems habitually in flux; and Bett Williams’s memoir The Wild Kindness: A Psilocybin Odyssey (September 2020), which Baumgardner says is “funny and a real challenge to those who might colonize Indigenous knowledge of mushrooms.” The press is open for submissions by e-mail year-round. Baumgardner reads manuscripts with an eye for work that is politically engaged and will change its readers: “I love getting behind a book that truly could influence culture in positive ways.”

Small Press Points: Vegetarian Alcoholic Press

by

Staff

8.12.20

What makes a book a Vegetarian Alcoholic Press book? “Connectivity and transcendence,” says Freddy La Force, the editor behind the Milwaukee press. Inspired by the city’s vibrant poetry scene, La Force started Vegetarian Alcoholic Press in 2014. “The writers I found myself admiring didn’t have MFAs or literary connections,” says La Force, “and it seemed like there should be more outlets for their work.” More than sixty-five books later, he remains committed to seeking talent outside entrenched hierarchies. La Force prefers that writers forgo cover letters when sending work, and submitting is always free. “You wouldn’t charge someone to apply for a job, and writing is work,” he says. Vegetarian Alcoholic produces twelve books a year, primarily poetry as well as some fiction, drama, art, and comics. The press recently published travis tate’s Maiden, which La Force describes as “insanely cerebral, sexy poems serving common themes . . . through a very playful, loving, queer, Black lens.” And Kelsey Marie Harris’s collection Spit (Verb) in My Mouth, a “singular treasury of gorgeous foul-mouthed gospels,” was released in August. Submissions are open year-round via e-mail. “The name of the press seems to make people want to submit stuff that attempts to be edgy or abrasive for its own sake,” says La Force. “What I’m really looking for are new forms of expression and new concepts of beauty. I think the best way to uplift people, whether from a personal or revolutionary standpoint, is to instill infinite imagination. Send the work you love. The stuff you felt like you had to write, regardless of your confidence in it.”

Small Press Points: A3 Press

I like to think that each chapbook is a journey,” says editor Shaun Levin of the immersive, imaginative volumes he publishes at the A3 Press. Founded in 2019 as an offshoot of the A3 Review and based in London and Madrid, the A3 Press produces between six and ten chapbooks each year, in a mix of prose, poetry, and art.

The press’s trademark is the unusual design of its chapbooks: Each is printed on a single sheet of paper that folds in the style of a map. “I like the fluidity that comes with the map fold, the sense of randomness and serendipity as you move through the chapbook,” says Levin. “You can move through the chapbook any way you want, start anywhere you want. It’s an adventure, a discovery.” Levin recently published poet Sara Eddy’s Tell the Bees, about “beekeeping and dealing with cancer,” and will release Elizabeth Briggs’s Made to Order and Mark Adams’s Peregrinus [Bede’s Walk] later this year. Submissions are open through October 1 via Submittable with a $20 reading fee, which goes toward production and paying the press’s authors. “Send us work that you feel only you could have written,” says Levin. “Deeply personal work that overshares and doesn’t hold back is particularly appealing to us.” 

Small Press Points: FlowerSong Press

by

Staff

10.7.20

Edward Vidaurre, publisher and editor in chief of FlowerSong Press, describes the press’s authors as “an all-star team of healers” who are “not only invested in self but also community.” Founded in 2011 in McAllen, Texas, as VAO Publishing, FlowerSong “nurtures essential verse from, about, and through the borderlands,” championing writers from the United States, Latin America, and beyond. The press publishes poetry and prose, as well as titles for children and young adults in partnership with Juventud Press. New releases from FlowerSong include Dreaming With Mariposas by Sonia Gutiérrez, a magical bildungsroman in vignettes, and Luz at Midnight by Marisol Cortez, the “story of an ill-timed love that unfolds in the time of climate change.” Good Cop/Bad Cop, an anthology of art and writing responding to police brutality, is among the titles set for publication in 2021. An abiding commitment to both its readers and writers steers all facets of the press’s work. “The authors of FlowerSong know I push hard for them,” says Vidaurre. “For those who pick up a book from us, I want them to feel that these living words have been custom-made just for them in a beautiful book.” Vidaurre and his team also prioritize timely responses to submitters. “I read for the future of my community, my people that have been underrepresented,” says Vidaurre of seeking out new work for the press. “I want to read and say, ‘I see influences of Julio Cortázar, Allen Ginsberg, Miguel Hernández, Amiri Baraka, Gloria Anzaldúa,’ and then say, ‘But…this feels original, and there’s a truth here I haven’t read before.’” Submissions are open year-round through the press’s website.

Small Press Points: Vegetarian Alcoholic Press

by

Staff

8.12.20

What makes a book a Vegetarian Alcoholic Press book? “Connectivity and transcendence,” says Freddy La Force, the editor behind the Milwaukee press. Inspired by the city’s vibrant poetry scene, La Force started Vegetarian Alcoholic Press in 2014. “The writers I found myself admiring didn’t have MFAs or literary connections,” says La Force, “and it seemed like there should be more outlets for their work.” More than sixty-five books later, he remains committed to seeking talent outside entrenched hierarchies. La Force prefers that writers forgo cover letters when sending work, and submitting is always free. “You wouldn’t charge someone to apply for a job, and writing is work,” he says. Vegetarian Alcoholic produces twelve books a year, primarily poetry as well as some fiction, drama, art, and comics. The press recently published travis tate’s Maiden, which La Force describes as “insanely cerebral, sexy poems serving common themes . . . through a very playful, loving, queer, Black lens.” And Kelsey Marie Harris’s collection Spit (Verb) in My Mouth, a “singular treasury of gorgeous foul-mouthed gospels,” was released in August. Submissions are open year-round via e-mail. “The name of the press seems to make people want to submit stuff that attempts to be edgy or abrasive for its own sake,” says La Force. “What I’m really looking for are new forms of expression and new concepts of beauty. I think the best way to uplift people, whether from a personal or revolutionary standpoint, is to instill infinite imagination. Send the work you love. The stuff you felt like you had to write, regardless of your confidence in it.”

Small Press Points: Threadsuns

by

Staff

12.16.20

A new teaching press based at High Point University in North Carolina, Threadsuns draws its name and its vision from the title of a poem by Paul Celan. In the poem as translated by Pierre Joris, “Threadsuns” refers to “songs to sing beyond / mankind,” and it is to those songs that editor and publisher Michael Flatt hopes the press can offer a home. Flatt, who teaches creative writing at High Point, launched the press in early 2020 with the vision of providing student assistants with the kind of hands-on publishing experience that so inspired him as an MFA student—and that expanded his sense of global literature and the literary community. The press plans to publish three volumes a year, one each in the genres of poetry, prose, and work in translation.

“Our inclinations lean toward experimental work that maintains a connection to human experience,” says Flatt. Threadsuns released its first title, Brian Henry’s collection Permanent State, in October, and Ryoko Sekiguchi’s lyric essay The Present Voice, translated by Lindsay Turner, will follow. While getting Threadsuns off the ground amid the pandemic has been challenging, it has also underscored the press’s ambitions to engender connection and inspire a new generation of editors. “Permanent State, while not written during the pandemic, really speaks to the dynamics of power and powerlessness that one feels right now. The press itself is like that for me,” says Flatt. “I’m doing something, which is great, but also, you have to question what it actually does in the world. How can you make it more effective, more significant? And for me, that’s where the teaching comes in. If I can pass on this practice to others, teach them how to create community through publishing, then the project has some meaningful agency.” Threadsuns is open for submissions via e-mail year-round.

Small Press Points: FlowerSong Press

by

Staff

10.7.20

Edward Vidaurre, publisher and editor in chief of FlowerSong Press, describes the press’s authors as “an all-star team of healers” who are “not only invested in self but also community.” Founded in 2011 in McAllen, Texas, as VAO Publishing, FlowerSong “nurtures essential verse from, about, and through the borderlands,” championing writers from the United States, Latin America, and beyond. The press publishes poetry and prose, as well as titles for children and young adults in partnership with Juventud Press. New releases from FlowerSong include Dreaming With Mariposas by Sonia Gutiérrez, a magical bildungsroman in vignettes, and Luz at Midnight by Marisol Cortez, the “story of an ill-timed love that unfolds in the time of climate change.” Good Cop/Bad Cop, an anthology of art and writing responding to police brutality, is among the titles set for publication in 2021. An abiding commitment to both its readers and writers steers all facets of the press’s work. “The authors of FlowerSong know I push hard for them,” says Vidaurre. “For those who pick up a book from us, I want them to feel that these living words have been custom-made just for them in a beautiful book.” Vidaurre and his team also prioritize timely responses to submitters. “I read for the future of my community, my people that have been underrepresented,” says Vidaurre of seeking out new work for the press. “I want to read and say, ‘I see influences of Julio Cortázar, Allen Ginsberg, Miguel Hernández, Amiri Baraka, Gloria Anzaldúa,’ and then say, ‘But…this feels original, and there’s a truth here I haven’t read before.’” Submissions are open year-round through the press’s website.

Small Press Points: Threadsuns

by

Staff

12.16.20

A new teaching press based at High Point University in North Carolina, Threadsuns draws its name and its vision from the title of a poem by Paul Celan. In the poem as translated by Pierre Joris, “Threadsuns” refers to “songs to sing beyond / mankind,” and it is to those songs that editor and publisher Michael Flatt hopes the press can offer a home. Flatt, who teaches creative writing at High Point, launched the press in early 2020 with the vision of providing student assistants with the kind of hands-on publishing experience that so inspired him as an MFA student—and that expanded his sense of global literature and the literary community. The press plans to publish three volumes a year, one each in the genres of poetry, prose, and work in translation.

“Our inclinations lean toward experimental work that maintains a connection to human experience,” says Flatt. Threadsuns released its first title, Brian Henry’s collection Permanent State, in October, and Ryoko Sekiguchi’s lyric essay The Present Voice, translated by Lindsay Turner, will follow. While getting Threadsuns off the ground amid the pandemic has been challenging, it has also underscored the press’s ambitions to engender connection and inspire a new generation of editors. “Permanent State, while not written during the pandemic, really speaks to the dynamics of power and powerlessness that one feels right now. The press itself is like that for me,” says Flatt. “I’m doing something, which is great, but also, you have to question what it actually does in the world. How can you make it more effective, more significant? And for me, that’s where the teaching comes in. If I can pass on this practice to others, teach them how to create community through publishing, then the project has some meaningful agency.” Threadsuns is open for submissions via e-mail year-round.

594 Ways of Reading Jane Eyre

by

Bonnie Chau

2.12.20

Last summer, University of Oxford professor Matthew Reynolds, in collaboration with an international team of more than two dozen scholars, launched Prismatic Jane Eyre, a research project that explores the relationship between Charlotte Brontë’s classic 1847 novel and its many translated versions. In comparing the hundreds of translations that have been made across the globe in the more than 150 years since the book’s publication, Reynolds and his team hope to better understand the way a source text is read, absorbed, and transformed by translators, and the ways these translations reflect the culture in which they were created. 

The project grew out of Reynolds’s wish to do a “collaborative, comparative close reading of several translations in different languages,” he says. This idea soon led to questions about the larger context of those translations and what other translations existed in the world. Reynolds says he decided to focus on Jane Eyre “because its internal conflicts seemed likely to play out differently in different cultures, because it is a popular as well as a literary text, and also because translation has a role within the book.”

In the project’s first phase, a team led by Oxford postdoctoral researcher Eleni Philippou spent the past two years tracking down every single translation of Jane Eyre since its initial publication. They unearthed a total of 594 different translations into fifty-seven languages, including Irinarkh Vvedenskiĭ’s colloquial Russian translation from 1849, Amır Mas‘ūd Barzīn’s 1950 Persian translation that he abridged by omitting subjects “not interesting to the Persian reader,” Yu Jonghos  종호’s 2004 revision of his 1970 Korean translation that substituted the former’s ornate Chinese vocabulary for more modern Korean language, and Amal Omar Baseem al-Rifayii’s translation from 2014, the only known Arabic version by a female translator. 

A series of interactive world maps on the project’s website (prismaticjaneeyre.org) illustrate the scope and range of these many iterations, pinpointing each translation’s city of publication and noting its language, date, and translator. In this and other ways, the project emphasizes the individuality of translators, although, Reynolds says, “Usually all that is known of a translator is a name and often not even that—about 15 percent of the translators are anonymous, and an unknown number are pseudonymous.” The map’s color-coded display helps to illustrate where translations have proliferated. The website also features a time map through which users can trace the chronology of the translations, noting patterns or waves of popularity. For example, Jane Eyre was translated into Persian thirty times after 1950. “It was a surprise to discover how much those visualizations change one’s sense of where the book belongs,” Reynolds says. 

During the project’s second phase, to be rolled out this spring or early summer, the team will compare the language used in about twenty-five of the translation languages. For instance, different translations of the title—originally Jane Eyre: An Autobiography in English—highlight different interpretations of the book’s themes. Titles such as 简爱 Jianai [Jane Eyre/Simple Love] in Chinese, and Jane Eyre: Yıllar Sonra Gelen Mutluluk [Jane Eyre: Happiness Coming After Many Years] in Turkish emphasize the book as a love story, while titles such as Kapag bigo na ang lahat: hango sa Jane Eyre [When Everything Fails: A Novel of Jane Eyre] in Tagalog, and Yatim  یتیم; subtitled ژن ئر [Orphan: Jane Eyre] in Farsi might point more toward social issues. The team will also explore patterns in the translation of the book’s key words and phrases. The words plain and passion, for example, are repeated throughout the original novel to describe the protagonist; both have been translated in endless ways, in accordance with the translator’s readings of Jane’s temperament, and exemplify the ways narrative style can reveal a culture’s values. In the third phase of the project, scholars will use digital tools, including one that measures the uniqueness of words in a passage of text, to analyze how style shifts and stretches across different languages—a glimpse of how technology may contribute to the future study of literary translation. 

Reynolds and his collaborators hope the public will add to their understanding of the diversity of Jane Eyre’s translations. The team invites the public to alert them to missing translations, contribute personal translations of passages, and submit reflections, discoveries, observations, and theories. As the project proceeds, the Prismatic Jane Eyre website will be updated with findings, blog reports, and interactive features. In its fourth phase, in 2021, the project will publish a comprehensive volume of research, analysis, and essays, which will include a complete list of all the translations. 

Prismatic Jane Eyre is part of a larger Prismatic Translation project, hosted by the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation Research Centre, whose scholarship revolves around a set of theoretical stances on translation: “Translation is creative, not mechanical; it is a matter of growth as much as, or more than, loss. Translators are writers. Languages are not separate boxes but are rather intermingled areas on the ever-shifting continuum of language variation.” This attitude departs from historically conventional perspectives of translators as secondary or unoriginal. It also rejects the notion that translation takes place between discretely bounded languages and suggests instead that those boundaries are fluid and permeable. Reynolds hopes Prismatic Jane Eyre will further advance these ideas. “One of the main ideas driving the project is that everyone reads differently, and uses language differently, and that those differences are interesting,” he says. “The key thing in thinking about translation is not to reify standardized national languages but rather to recognize the great variety of textures and structures that language is made up of and the variability of the terrain that translation works across.”    

 

Bonnie Chau is the associate web editor of Poets & Writers, Inc.

The Endangered Poetry Project

by

Maggie Millner

2.14.18

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.

(Credit: India Roper-Evans)

The American Prison Writing Archive

by

Gila Lyons

12.13.17

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. 

Lit Mag Gives Voice to Homeless

by

Adrienne Raphel

10.12.16

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. 

Publishing, Empowering Teen Writers

by

Tara Jayakar

6.14.17

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.

(Credit: Kikomo.p Imagery)

Amanda Gorman Named National Youth Poet Laureate

by

Maggie Millner

4.27.17

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.”

Amanda Gorman, national youth poet laureate.
 

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.  
 

Q&A: Yang Inspires Young Readers

by

Dana Isokawa

2.15.17

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.

Academy Establishes Web Resource for Teen Poets

6.18.09

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.

Literature and the Environment

by

Maggie Millner

8.16.17

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.              

Writers, Editors Resist

by

Sarah M. Seltzer

4.12.17

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.

(Credit: Ed Lederman)

Dear President: A Message for the Next Commander in Chief From Fifty American Poets and Writers

by

Staff

8.17.16

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

 

Bullets Into Bells

by

Maya Popa

12.13.17

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.

The Radius of Arab American Writers

by

Marwa Helal

8.16.17

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)

Muslim Americans Take the Mic

by

Marwa Helal

12.14.16

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.”The M Word

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.

Singapore Unbound

by

Melynda Fuller

2.15.17

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. 

Muslim Americans Take the Mic

by

Marwa Helal

12.14.16

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.”The M Word

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.

The Translation Tango: On Being an Emerging Translator

by

Megan Berkobien

10.14.15

I’ve never liked traveling. It’s not that I haven’t enjoyed living abroad or visiting the various countries that have welcomed me. Rather, it’s something in the physical movement from place to place that unsettles. The movement between cultures and languages is a bodily experience; it marks you, and it can be exhausting to learn the new gestures, to contort your limbs into another semantic system, to conjugate your entire tongue. Even after years of not speaking Russian, though, I can still easily pull out the phrase: “My head hurts, do you have any aspirin?”

Last November I felt a similar body ache en route to Milwaukee, which was the location for the 2014 American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) conference. I entered the Hilton where the event took place—all high ceilings and polished marble floors—and pulled my carry-on luggage into the lobby, my arrival announced by a broken wheel. It wasn’t the romantic vision of becoming a translator—dreamily passing through the streets of Barcelona (though I’ve hallucinated those moments too)—but it was a momentous occasion nonetheless.

ALTA is something of a saving grace for literary translators in the United States. Having been around for nearly four decades, the organization has passed through several incarnations, the most recent transition being from its former institutional home in the Translation Center at the University of Texas in Dallas to an independently run nonprofit arts association in Bloomington, Indiana. Its annual conference draws hundreds of translators, editors, and critics to a different city each year for four days of events and after-dinner drinks. Though perhaps ALTA’s most ambitious undertaking is highlighting the work of its many members, including several special readings that celebrate a series of honors—the National Translation Award, the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize, and the most coveted award for emerging translators like me, the ALTA Travel Fellowship, which gives four to six up-and-coming translators the financial support to travel to the conference and introduce their work to hundreds of expectant ears. 

I arrived intentionally early that Wednesday, a habit meant to work against my travel anxiety. As a student in a PhD program (at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor), there’s a general expectation for me to attend academic conferences. Having gone to one of those a year earlier—the Modern Language Association conference in Chicago—my expectations for ALTA were, well, skewed. Sometimes these formal gatherings can feel absurd, even at odds with their expressed missions; in my experience, many graduate students are so nervous about their own panel performances that they miss events while preparing to present their fifteen-minute papers. 

So I suppose I was on autopilot when I scurried up to my hotel room that November afternoon, cloistering myself for the better part of three hours, preparing for the group reading I was scheduled to participate in with the other fellows instead of venturing out to meet other translators. My translation from Catalan of Llucia Ramis’s “The Port” had to bear the bulk of my unease: a change in tense here, one word swapped out for another there, until I wasn’t even sure about my English anymore. I knew it was time to leave when I couldn’t quite tell if the was a real word or not.

When I finally headed down to the conference to look for familiar faces, I found the registration line, extending from what was usually the coatroom, growing. And by the looks of those around me, I had overdressed. My choice of black business attire—against that sea of more colorful and casual garb—betrayed that it was, in fact, my first time. 

One by one, my fellow fellows and I spotted one another, our photos having been posted on the ALTA blog some time before the conference. We huddled before the spiral staircase, and our small talk first revolved around whether or not to affix the Fellow ribbons to our badges. The wonderful Marian Schwartz, our mentor, laughed at our general uncertainty and gave us the push we needed. For the rest of the night, the eyes of other veteran translators dropped straight to our chests: “You’re a fellow, eh?” 

Or, my personal favorite: “You don’t look anything like your picture, you know?” 

Receiving an ALTA Travel Fellowship was the biggest honor ever bestowed upon me, to be sure. I remember excusing myself for a moment to hurry back up to my room before the opening ceremony, moving in that excited gait one takes when one’s expecting you. In the elevator ride the lingering disquiet—of having to prove that I deserved to be there among esteemed translators—was interrupted by three lively women who invited me out for celebratory cocktails. And though I opted for the free local beer at the welcome dinner instead, I remembered their laughter later that night—perhaps not better than aspirin for a headache, but just enough medicine to soften the day’s chilled travels and the anticipation of the adventures to come. 

How did I arrive in Milwaukee, as an emerging translator? I fell in love with a certain text, of course. 

Seven years ago I was deep in the guttural trenches of my Russian language studies when I decided to begin university classes in Spanish and Portuguese. Knowing there would be few classes offered in Russian during upcoming semesters—and that those classes would often only cover the wise-old-male masters—I skimmed the course catalogue and happened upon another world entirely, in the department of Romance Languages and Literatures. I didn’t know how the transition would go, because my own story was the normal one: a few years of Spanish in high school, nothing substantive—I probably couldn’t even hold a regular conversation. But at least there was a clear path to work my way up to the more challenging classes and, eventually, achieve some semblance of fluency. What a word—fluency—a spectrum of signs that appear and disappear against one’s will. If you ask an emerging translator just what it means to be fluent, the pause often says more than the response.  

However, as a junior in college, instead of packing my bags and flying off to Latin America, I overcame that first step in the serpentine climb toward bilingualism through textual immersion: translation, that is. This approach is a gamble; most literature on the subject says that you have to live a culture in order to communicate it. But after reading Cristina Peri Rossi’s short story “Rumores” in a class about imagined cities, inhabiting a text seemed the more sensible (or maybe even the only possible) route.

When I began my initial attempt at translating this story, I had both Peri Rossi’s Cuentos reunidos [Collected Stories] and Cosmoagonías [Cosmoagonies], from which the story had sprawled out, beside me. The books were not enough. I also had several dictionaries on loan from the library and a dozen open tabs on my browser, from WordReference forums to pictures of Berlin in winter (“and after dark they would scrawl the words der traum in leben on desolate station platforms or metal shutters”). I knew Tobias Hecht’s brilliant version of the story was already available in English, thanks to Words Without Borders, though it was important for me to resist consulting it. Instead, I poured out my first impressions rather carelessly, listening more to my own sense of the thing than to the thing itself. This is where your own vision of the world takes over, and you wonder how to translate even a simple verb like contemplar, whether or not you really “contemplate the color of the sky.” (I suppose it depends on your translation strategy.) I only spent a few days on the story before putting it away. That’s how it went when I was first starting out; whenever I got frustrated, I would simply swap one cuento out for another. The first story I finished was the penultimate in the collection, “The Uprooted”—six paragraphs about people who weren’t really people at all. 

I ventured my first e-mail to Cristina three months afterward. I mused about the things I loved in a language not my own, things I saw inscribed in almost all of her printed pages. I had written with the secret intention of asking permission to publish my translation of “The Uprooted” in the undergraduate translation magazine I was founding at the time (a low-stakes venue, to be sure, for only a handful of people would ever read it). I made no mention of rights, however; instead I tried to win her over by treating her like a distant confidant, by drawing little sketches in words like private doodles in a notebook. Translation is a lovers’ tango, after all. 

The surprise was that she responded. 

Cristina wrote of love, of Borges, of what it meant to translate and be translated. She asked for a photo so that she could better know the person carrying fragments of her voice to new places, to Ann Arbor, to a time beyond when I would eventually publish her stories (she was more sure than I was on that point). From then on, we would speak about our own cities (real and imagined) as each season passed. In one of my most vulnerable moments, I sent her a video of me singing a Nat King Cole tune, a side of me that I only share with those closest to my heart, and she responded in complete shock that it was her favorite song—something I’m still not sure I believe. I had never trusted Walter Benjamin’s line that some texts call out to be translated at certain times, by certain people, but if I needed a sign, that was it. 

Really, I can’t quite remember when I switched verbs about the work I was doing, from “I want to become a translator” to “I am one.” As I try to hone in on it, the moments simply heap up. I don’t think I was a translator when I completed that first story of Cristina’s, but was I when I finally “completed” the entire collection of Cosmoagonies? (My gut still tells me no.) Or when I won an undergraduate award for it? (The award money was carelessly spent, but kept my spirits high.) Perhaps when I received my first publication acceptance? (“…yes I said yes I will Yes.”) Maybe, finally, when I stood up onstage and delivered another text from the Catalan to an audience of my colleagues in Milwaukee? (The importance of this gesture of acceptance by my colleagues was crucial, and there was my badge to prove it.) More than anything, I suppose, it was hearing, first through e-mail, then in person, from Cristina that my work mattered, and that she granted me poetic license to reinterpret, to re-create her stories, our languages now like shifting tectonic plates, scraping against each other to split the soil. 

But maybe the truth is that it still depends on the company I’m keeping.

My close friends hate that I’m a morning person, that I’m so god-awful cheery in those first fuzzy hours. At 8:30 AM I slipped down to the “First Time ALTA Participants” panel and nodded much too vigorously throughout. Then there were the panels on getting published, negotiating contracts, and self-publicity—standard but important fare for tenderfeet like me. At lunch, I can’t remember eating much as I listened to everyone’s stories: of Sara, whose first novel, Girl at War, was just coming out with Random House; or of Tenzin, who had worked a few years as special assistant to the Representative of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. 

It was hard not to feel a bit intimidated, but I derived some courage from the book exhibition, where I came across Marcelle Sauvageot’s Commentary, translated by Christine Schwartz Hartley and Anna Moschovakis, published by Ugly Duckling Presse. I then attended several bilingual readings and enjoyed some exquisite coffee at break. At around 4:00 PM the other fellows and I met up for our practice session before the reading. Knowing that I first had to read from the source text (a beautiful Majorcan story with the ends of the first-person singular verbs cut off like dangling fingertips) seemed the real test. I stumbled through sentences like a drunk, my mouth too close to the microphone to make any sense. 

The ballroom was packed with about a hundred expectant audience members that evening. The room itself, with its velvety interiors and ornamental framing, demanded the kind of reverential silence one imagines to be truly “literary.” I was fourth in line, just enough time to let the anxiety eat me up as I waited. 

The first few words in a different language always pop out haphazardly, I think. Yet, when I saw all the smiling faces before me, even the Catalan words hopped out of my mouth. Record un eriçó devorat per les formigues…. I remember looking down and seeing my friend Julia’s face—Julia is another wonderful Portuguese-Spanish-Catalan translator—her eyes closed as she listened to me speak. It felt almost natural. Perhaps more natural than when I speak Catalan during my stays in Barcelona. 

After the event, I felt the high that only reading work to an audience can give you. A couple of friends greeted me at the back of the room, and though I gleefully received their congratulations (in measure, of course), my immediate reaction was: But how did my Catalan sound? 

“Your voice gets so deep when you speak it,” Julia said. 

Another friend, Nate, remarked how strange it was too.

“Like a man’s,” I said. 

Maybe not like a man’s, though. Maybe something completely different, like the voice of a bumbling alien. Or maybe like a foreign radio sounding out from between my teeth, the static getting in the way.  

We spent some time comparing our voices in Spanish, Catalan, and English. Only mine refused to stay put. If I were to point to a palpable aspect of my own transition to a serious translator (de debò), it’s just this feeling of performance. And I’m always hoping that it’s normal, that we’re all just actors in separate acts.

After the reading, a group of us ventured out into the snow. It was that time of year when snow is a welcome sight, when it’s new and soft and dreamy. Flakes that remind you of when you were younger.

In a sports bar a few streets away from the hotel, I ordered a cider and began chatting with Kaija Straumanis, editorial director for Open Letter Books. We didn’t really talk all that much about literature. It’s not that we wouldn’t have enjoyed it, but there’s a point when you’d rather know a person as a person instead of merely talking shop (this is, perhaps, the corrective to performance). For as much as our days are swept up between printed lines and promotional e-mails, the ALTA conference gives translators a good excuse—and rare opportunity—to truly meet those other individuals in the field. 

As one who lives outside New York City, these moments of connection are vital for me. Having worked for several different literary journals, I had only ever known the larger community of so-called emerging translators through digital interfaces: e-mails, Trello, Twitter. And the recent addition of the conversation forums offered by the Emerging Literary Translators’ Network in America (ELTNA) has made it even easier to get and stay in contact when difficult questions come up for new translators. For translators, perhaps unlike a lot of other professions, there’s still a lot of fog surrounding the process of making an entrance into the larger field, especially if you want to make a living at it. 

I hesitate to say it, but I think that many of us believe that the period of emergence ends with a first print book publication. It’s certainly a big question we all carry with us, and it often seemed on the tip of my tongue whenever I discussed my own work and the work of other young translators at the ALTA conference. Working as an intern for Open Letter this past summer, however, has partly changed my mind about that. 

Publishing, need I say it, is a complicated business. Many of the independent presses dedicated to filling their catalogues with books in translation are underfunded and overextended. Even when a translated title slides into an editor’s hands, even if it corresponds with a publisher’s specific vision, it’s more a question of timing—to avoid the term luck—than talent. Because if there’s one thing that became apparent at the conference last winter, it’s that a lack of talented translators is not the problem. 

One of the things that I love about the translation community as I’ve come to know it is how we actively read one another’s writing. Certain presses, I believe, become allies as well. If I spot an Open Letter or Two Lines Press title on a shelf, I can’t really help but go look, read a passage, negotiate how many meals I might have to give up for it (two, usually, depending on my budget). But I don’t mind paying that money, because sitting in front of a computer for hours while thinking about another translator’s writing—as well as being counseled by patient editors like Kaija—has made me acutely aware of the work behind editorial negotiation, especially at presses like Open Letter that actively collaborate with early-career translators. 

My first full-length translation, Peri Rossi’s novella Strange Flying Objects, is forthcoming later this year from Ox and Pigeon, a relatively new press dedicated to literature in translation. But the most notable aspect of their mission? They’re still completely digital. It’s a surprising fact, as some readers might already know, because the few translation-based publishing houses that first pursued the e-book route quickly discovered that many of their readers still want things: artifacts, collectibles, proof of an author’s life beyond death. And as a translator I feel that pull too. I want to see a book materialized before me in the form through which I’ve been taught to revere it.  But I think that if we’re really going to make space for emerging translators in such a tight market, we can’t simply ignore the e-book: We need to explore its possibilities and make it our own. I anticipate that some form of this topic will move out of private conversations and take center stage at the next conference, as more and more translators register with ALTA to stake a claim in the community to which they belong.

Almost a year after being named a 2014 fellow, and as I prepare for my trip to the upcoming conference in Tucson, Arizona, I think I’m coming around to something: Perhaps the figure of the emerging translator doesn’t really exist. I’m not saying this to be dismissive. Translation is a skill, one to be honed, and we should celebrate the recent initiatives that make room for translators in the early stages of their craft. I would not be writing this article, for example, had I not been chosen by ALTA to represent a new cohort last year, had I not been funded by my PhD program to pursue my translations, had I not been welcomed by Open Letter to engage in the thornier issues of the editorial process. But I want to question what it means to have “made it,” to be “present” on the scene, to be emerging, and to have emerged.

Instead, I find that being a translator is always a process of recognizing, forgetting, and retracing the routes we make through texts. Sometimes I look back at stories I’ve translated (few though they are) and can hardly remember working through certain lines. And I know that, whatever translation I might publish in the future, another reading will reveal infelicities—things that once made sense but that now suddenly fall flat—but also those tender spots, moments in which I recognize not only the author, but also myself and the many other translator-writers who have made their way into my consciousness.

And I know I’m not saying anything new. To quote Peter Cole in the Spring 2015 issue of the Paris Review, “Smart people say such dumb and disappointing things about translation.” But if we’re saying dumb things—if we’re articulating our fear of failure, of the status of the profession, of the worlds we’re trying to inhabit—it’s only because translation is such an impossibly personal act, despite the texts never really being our own. So we say dumb things, but in the right company—whether in the rooms of the ALTA conference or in forums online—those remarks tend to make the right sense. 

 

Megan Berkobien is pursuing a PhD in comparative literature at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Her translations from the Catalan and Spanish have been featured in Words Without Borders, Palabras Errantes, and Asymptote, among other publications.

How Do You Translate a Gunshot? Charlie Hebdo, Francophone Culture, and the Translation Conundrum

by

Jennifer Solheim

10.14.15

This past May, more than four months after the January 7 massacres at the Charlie Hebdo offices, I arrived in Paris for a research trip. On one of my first days there, I stopped in the Place de la République to see the vestiges of the impromptu Charlie memorial on the Marianne monument. In the words of Charlie Hebdo scholar Jane Weston Vauclair, the day after the killings, “people gathered in [the Place de la République] haltingly, haphazardly and almost confusedly. [There were] candles, and someone climbed the monument to put a black armband [on one of the statues of Marianne]. There was applause from the crowd at someone at least doing something, with sporadic burstings out of ‘Liberté d’expression!’” In the days and weeks that followed, graffiti appeared on the monument as well. On the bright May afternoon when I visited, it was mostly back to old purposes: People sat on its round base, eating sandwiches, talking on their phones; skateboarders used it to break their falls. But some of the armbands remained, along with Je suis Charlie (“I am Charlie”) scrawled in various spots, fanzine-like images plastered here and there, and one of the Mariannes had a black X scrawled across her lips. 

I snapped pictures and posted a few shots on Instagram and Facebook. I was thinking about showing these pictures to students in my Paris literature and culture course at the University of Illinois in Chicago this fall. I could literally point to different elements of the pictures to show the layers of history and culture. We could, for instance, compare this current iteration of Marianne, with the black X on her lips, to the many artistic representations of Marianne in France since she first became an allegory of French liberty opposed to monarchical rule in 1792.

Of course I was also considering the awful events of January 7 that took place so close to the Place de la République. As many know, the Charlie staff was holding a meeting when two brothers, Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, stormed their offices and shot twelve people to death. I thought about the blank horror of moving from the sound of familiar voices to the sound of gunshots. Did the victims know why they were being killed? Did they think of the Danish cartoon affair in that moment? Did they hear the first gunshots before they were deafened by the noise? Were they already deaf by the time the shooters proclaimed the vicious attack on behalf of Islam?

But the true stakes of posting my photos became even clearer to me later that evening, when I returned to the home of my friends Weston Vauclair and her husband, David, in the Bastille. Weston Vauclair is an independent scholar, translator, and teacher in Paris; she wrote her dissertation on Charlie Hebdo and its predecessor, Hara-Kiri. Jane and David have also cowritten a book about the history of Charlie Hebdo, forthcoming from the publisher Eyrolles. Needless to say, both Jane and David have been in demand on the lecture circuit since the attacks. Jane was heading to Belfast in a few weeks for a conference on the Charlie Hebdo attacks that was almost canceled due to alleged safety concerns. She was also wrangling with the cancellation of the two panels on Charlie Hebdo at the joint International Graphic Novel and Comics Conference and International Bande Dessinée Society Conference at the University of London Institute in Paris (ULIP), which were called off after the near cancellation of the Belfast conference. 

“But,” Jane wondered aloud as we sat with David in their living room drinking tea, “if we can’t utter the words Charlie Hebdo, why is the panel on the representation of Islam in cartoons allowed to stand?” This led to a series of satiric questions on Jane’s part, which she later posted online as part of her protest over the censure of Charlie at the conference: 

  • Is it okay to mention Charlie Hebdo out loud as a word in the building?  
  • If one encounters a ULIP student, may we ask them their opinion on the Charlie Hebdo panels being removed?
  • Is it possible to wear a ‘Je suis Charlie’ T-shirt?
  • Is it possible to wear a ‘Je ne suis pas Charlie’ T-shirt?
  • Is it possible to wear a T-shirt that looks like ‘Je suis Charlie’ but in fact says something else? 
  • Is it possible to bring copies of Charlie Hebdo into the building?
  • Is it possible to bring copies of the old Charlie Hebdo (from the ’70s?) into the building 
  • Is it possible to mention Hara-Kiri but in fact mean something else when we say it?
  • May I talk about Charlie Hebdo but in a language only I can understand?
  • Is interpretive dance allowed?

Before I went to bed that night, I looked at the Charlie memorial photos again, this time in my Facebook feed. These photos were “liked,” of course, particularly the one in which Je suis Charlie was most prominent. Given everything, perhaps I needed to write a lengthy description of why this site for the impromptu memorial was significant. But the fact is, the image had already come and gone in my friends’ news feeds, and they wouldn’t necessarily look back at this point. That shift in context—on-site to online, local to global—made such a difference in understanding. And that’s when the question occurred to me: How do you translate those gunshots? They are the signal events that led to Charlie Hebdo’s global renown. We all know that understanding the society and history from which translated works arise can help the reader immeasurably. But how, as translators, can we render the texts related to particularly stark, awful, and uncrafted moments like the Charlie Hebdo shootings faithfully? 

As a teacher and researcher, my focus is on contemporary immigrant cultures from North Africa and the Middle East in France. I was introduced to Charlie Hebdo not through my research—although the connections, thanks to the January events, seem glaringly apparent now—but through Weston Vauclair, when we first met as lecturers in Paris while finishing our dissertations. 

When I mentioned to colleagues that I had a place to stay in Paris for this research trip prior to the January 7 massacre, I didn’t say I’d be staying with a Charlie Hebdo scholar—I said that my friend Jane works on contemporary political satire, because in our generation of academics, the great majority of us hadn’t heard of Charlie Hebdo before the attacks. In fact, the satiric newspaper was debating whether or not to shut down completely in the weeks before the killings due to flagging readership and state funding cuts. So this act of translation is not only across cultures, but a traversal of historic event. Charlie Hebdo is tricky to translate in time, to say the least, because its meaning changed swiftly, profoundly, and irrevocably following the attacks.

But while the connections between Charlie and Francophone cultures in France may only now seem clear and urgent, the field of Francophone studies is not new to this translation conundrum. Let’s begin once more with a question: Francophone is a great word, isn’t it? It sounds like a brass instrument. In introducing me at talks, scholars outside my field have at times hesitated over the pronunciation, and it’s not a term that has a clearly delineated meaning even within the field of studies in French. 

Indeed, Francophonie can be considered an instrument of change—and sometimes a war of words. The celebrated Martinican writer and politician Aimé Césaire called it back in 1946 with the title of his surrealist poetry collection Miraculous Arms, referring to literary language as a symbolic weapon. As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, “A Césaire poem explodes and whirls about itself like a rocket.” Rather than taking up arms, Césaire chose to pick up the pen. Literary language is itself the weapon in the case of Césaire, among many other Francophone writers. Francophonie—as opposed to the misguided, fundamentalist violence of the Kouachis—does not use guns to express dissent. Instead, Francophone language often embodies symbolic violence. It issues a vigorous yet peaceful call for social change. 

But as Francophone works move from language to language, or from page to stage to screen, some of the symbolic punch of the language is inevitably lost. For example, in the English translation of Assia Djebar’s Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade (Heinemann, 1993), in which the metaphor of writing the body parallels Djebar’s masterful retelling of the French invasion of Algiers in 1830, there are several footnotes to support the translated text. Lebanese Quebecois playwright Wajdi Mouawad’s Incendies was adapted for the screen in the moving Denis Villeneuve film of the same name, and yet much of the vital humor surrounding the stark and horrifying Lebanese Civil War was lost in doing so.  

These shortcomings are no fault of translators. To use a brutal but appropriate idiom, if a gun were held to my head to define Francophone, I would say that as compared to French, Francophone connotes a linguistic choice. These writers were raised in multilingual families, and were most often educated in French. They could also express themselves fluently (and likely eloquently) in Arabic, Kabyle, Wolof, and Mandarin Chinese, to use just a few examples; instead, they opt to situate their fictional works in the French cultural terrain, to be published by a Francophone press, ideally both in their home country and in France. Francophonie is not only a linguistic choice, it is often a sociocultural and political choice. Play across languages is often paramount in Francophone works. While we see play with language across social classes in French works such as Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, which vividly brings to life the banter of Parisian street urchins, Hugo’s work still lives within one language, and one culture. 

These cultural translation issues have been brought to the fore with Kamel Daoud’s newly translated novel, The Meursault Investigation, released in the United States earlier this year by the independent publisher Other Press. When a French person picks up the Actes Sud edition of Meursault, contre-enquête from a thick stack on one of the display tables at a French bookstore (we can assume this sort of display, because the novel was heavily promoted, critically acclaimed, and widely distributed), they might first notice the red band around the book jacket announcing Daoud’s novel as the 2015 recipient of the Prix Goncourt for a First Novel. Next, they might notice the names: Daoud (an Algerian Berber name, not a French one), and if they are versed in twentieth-century literary classics, they will likely recognize the name Meursault as the name of the antihero in Albert Camus’s renowned 1942 novel, L’Étranger (The Stranger). They might then notice the cover art: an aerial shot of a young man with dark hair, striding down a beach. Even if this French reader hadn’t yet read about Daoud’s debut, these details would indicate that this novel has something to do with the murdered Arab in Camus’s novel. I use the word indicate as a sort of translation metaphor here, for the word’s derivation comes from the French word for clue: indice. These clues leave a trail, but you need to have both social and cultural acumen in order to follow. 

So it’s not nearly so easy to leave this trail of clues for Daoud’s novel in the U.S. context: Beautifully translated by John Cullen, its publication in the United States was heralded by an excerpt in the New Yorker and a cover story in the New York Times Magazine. Where Daoud’s debut has been widely read in France, the nature of the publications that have lauded The Meursault Investigation suggests an educated and well-read audience—in other words, a niche readership. No one is expecting Meursault to become a best-seller; no one expects that Kamel Daoud will become a household name like Stephen King or John Grisham. This is one of the inherent problems for translation presses in the United States: Just as Charlie Hebdo was about to declare bankruptcy in January, due in part to new austerity measures that cut state arts funding, in the United States arts funding is a rare and precious commodity. So a work needs to hold the promise of sales in order to be published. 

Meursault—which is in direct dialogue, both in its reception and within the text itself, with Camus’s most famous novel—is ripe for publication in translation. And part of what makes The Stranger such a compelling work is its central act of violence. But how often does it occur to readers to imagine the sound of the gunshot in The Stranger? The victim in that book was described only as an Arab (as opposed to an Algerian like Camus, who was pied noir, meaning an Algerian of French descent). Has Meursault ever been called a terrorist? Not in any context I know. In the words of the Cure song that imagines the moment of the Arab’s death, he is simply “The stranger / killing an Arab.” And it’s with indignation that Harun, the narrator of The Meursault Investigation and the younger brother of the Arab killed by Meursault, says in the opening pages of the novel: “Good God, how can you kill someone and then take even his own death away from him?” Meursault portrays Harun’s struggle to overcome his mother’s obsessive mourning for Musa (the name given to Camus’s anonymous Arab in Meursault—two names that in French sound very similar) and an attempt to recover the identity of Musa. Harun was a young child when his brother died, and so he has to rely on the stories his mother told him as well as his own vague memories, with the gaps filled by his understanding of Algerian society and culture in the years preceding the war:

Most of Mama’s tales…concentrated on chronicling Musa’s last day, which was also, in a way, the first day of his immortality. She would [turn] a simple, young man from the poorer quarters of Algiers into an invincible, long-awaited hero, a kind of savior… In other [versions], he’d answered the call of some friends—uled el-huma, sons of the neighborhood—idle young men interested in skirts, cigarettes, and scars. 

Ultimately, Harun tells us, Musa’s body—in other words, his story—cannot be recovered. In other words, Camus’s Arab will forever remain untranslatable to his readership:

You’re here because you think, as I once thought, that you can find Musa or his body, identify the place where the murder was committed, and trumpet your discovery to the whole world…. You want to find a corpse…. But Musa’s body will remain a mystery. There’s not a word in the book about it. 

So the sound of a gunshot translates differently when the aggressor is someone like the Kouachi brothers, native speakers of French and French citizens whose last name bears the markings of a different country and culture. And the cultural effect is redoubled when the body penetrated by the bullet is a French artist whose work appears, when stripped of context, to be aggressive toward minority cultures, if not outright racist. 

It is here that the translation of words alone falls short as well. Charlie Hebdo not only publishes political cartoons that are part of a genre called bête et méchant (stupid and mean); it also publishes political essays thematically related to the cartoons that flank them. But those essays have rarely been mentioned in the debates over liberty of expression following the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Setting aside the diverse backgrounds of the cartoonists themselves, those essays have been cut out of the frame in the aftermath and translation of the Charlie killings. Nor is the long history of political satire and caricature in France made clear, alongside the sacrosanct French duty to mock and question the role of religious institutions in society. This was a major stake in the French Revolution. The symbol of Marianne speaks to Charlie’s raison d’être as well: to extricate Catholicism from the French state following centuries of divine rule by monarchs and aristocrats who exploited French peoples and lands with the understanding that God gave them the right to do so. 

Just for the record, the best way I have found to explain Charlie Hebdo since the January attacks is to compare it to The Colbert Report broadcast in a different country with subtitles. If we take Stephen Colbert’s famous caricature of Bill O’Reilly and isolate his words; if we don’t know that the show was on Comedy Central and that the channel never broadcasts any kind of bona fide news or journalism; if we don’t know about Fox News or The Daily Show; then Stephen Colbert simply sounds like a scary-ass racist. So it goes when we look at Charlie Hebdo cartoons in isolation. It makes sense, when we think of the gunshot-translation problem, that so many great American writers chose to boycott the PEN Awards this past spring, and it makes equal sense that several great American writers and graphic novelists chose to take the boycotting writers’ places at the ceremony. 

We must stand at the intersection of writing, translation, and teaching to try to grasp for an answer to the gunshot-translation conundrum. When I think now about taking pictures in the Place de la République, it reminds me first and foremost of the privilege of translation work: I know this corner of the world in its historical and cultural depth. I teach, write, and translate French and Francophone cultures from the French into English. I am also reminded of how connected, and yet fragile, we all can be: As a gunshot passes from a handheld gun into the body of another, that shot and its morbid results can resonate across time, culture, history. How to translate a gunshot? What a strange and tenuous privilege to articulate such a question.  

 

Jennifer Solheim is a French scholar and teacher, fiction writer, and literary translator whose work has appeared in Akashic Books’ Mondays Are Murder Series, Confrontation, Conclave: A Journal of Character, Fiction Writers Review, and Inside Higher Ed. She is working on a novel set in the immigrant neighborhoods of Paris. Her website is www.jennifersolheim.com.

Instinct, Energy, and Luck: An Indie-Publisher Roundtable on Literature in Translation

by

Jeremiah Chamberlin

10.14.15

In the years I worked as a bookseller after college, I had the good fortune to encounter a wide range of literatures in translation. The indie bookshop I worked at, the now-closed Canterbury Booksellers in Madison, Wisconsin, had a section devoted to the work of Nobel Prize winners, as well as an international-fiction section. One of my fondest and most surprising reading experiences came after picking up a pale-green galley of Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Knopf, 1997), knowing nothing yet of this author, but soon tumbling in awe through Murakami’s (translated) prose.

It wasn’t until I began working with the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation (EKF), an organization dedicated to creating connections among Bulgarian, American, and British writers, that I truly began to learn about the challenges of international literature reaching our shores, as well as the importance of nurturing an audience for it. Only approximately 3 percent of the books published in this country are works in translation, and, as the editors of the website Three Percent state, “In terms of literary fiction and poetry, the number is actually closer to 0.7 percent.”

Yet what I was discovering each summer I visited Bulgaria was an incredibly rich and diverse literary tradition—one in which I deeply wanted to immerse myself but was unable to because so few of these books had been translated into English. And Bulgaria is but one small country in the region. What other marvelous books from nearby neighbors like Greece and Serbia and Turkey was I not finding on the shelves back in the United States? The world of English-language publishing suddenly felt extremely small.

Through my work with the EKF, I also started meeting the editors and publishers of presses and literary journals, each passionate about bringing the best of international literature to English-speaking readers—places like Dalkey Archive Press and New Vessel Press, as well as publications like Absinthe: A Journal of World Literature in Translation and Words Without Borders.

So, as part of this issue dedicated to independent publishing, I planned to sit down with five editors and publishers to talk with them about the state of international literature, the particular challenges of focusing on books in translation, how to find readers for their titles, and what the industry should be paying attention to in the future.

Joining me were Barbara Epler, publisher and editor in chief of New Directions; CJ Evans, editorial director of Two Lines Press and editor of the biannual journal Two Lines: World Writing in Translation; Chad Post, founder and editor of Open Letter Books and Three Percent; Michael Reynolds, editor in chief of Europa Editions; and Jill Schoolman, founder and publisher of Archipelago Books.

How did you each come to publishing, particularly working with literature in translation? What drew you initially or continues to draw you today?
Michael Reynolds:
I never imagined a career in publishing until I woke up one day and had one. I was living in Rome in the early 2000s, at about the same time the founders and publishers of Europa Editions, Sandro Ferri and Sandra Ozzola Ferri, were thinking about opening an American publishing house. At the time, I was doing odd jobs, among them running a writers festival in Rome with a couple of friends. Thanks to this work I was meeting quite a few Italian writers and publishing people. I got wind of what Sandro and Sandra were planning to do and decided to knock on the door of their Italian publishing house and offer my services—I had no idea of what those services might be.

As with most things in life, timing is everything. I was in the right place at the right time, because Sandro and Sandra were getting ready to announce the opening of Europa Editions at the Frankfurt Book Fair. That was the summer of 2004.

The seed of the idea started growing in them right after 9/11, when it seemed that once again the world was balkanizing, that the free exchange of ideas and opinions was being threatened, and that a surreal hysteria was enveloping the world—remember Freedom Fries? At the time, people all over the world, common people not intellectuals or academics, seemed to have fewer and fewer channels for communicating or communing. Sandro and Sandra [who founded Europa’s sister company in Italy, Edizioni EO, in the 1970s with the purpose of bringing unpublished, unknown, and under-appreciated authors from Eastern Europe to the Italian market] asked themselves what, as publishers, they could do to help overcome that communication breakdown. At the time, it also seemed to them—and, incidentally, not to anyone else—that an American publishing house focused on work in translation was a good business opportunity.

But beyond the business opportunity and the ideological motivation, there was also a more basic impulse: the desire to share something good. The fact that many of their favorite writers from Europe and elsewhere were not available to American readers because no publisher was in a position or of a persuasion to publish them in the States seemed almost unbearable. The explosion of social media demonstrates the basic human urge to share something that you feel strongly about with others. Europa was founded with this idea of sharing, of exchange, as its cornerstone.

My interest in international literature extends beyond the company that I work for, but I think it has found a natural home at Europa. And what continues to draw me to work with books in translation today is precisely this idea that something good is something that should be shared, in most cases with as many people as possible. I don’t believe that publishing work in translation should be considered a priori a noble endeavor. And I’m also dubious about the quantitative approach to evaluating where we’re at in terms of inclusiveness of literature in translation in the American culture of reading. I simply know that there are good, deserving, important, interesting, entertaining, provocative books being written in languages other than English. It’s a shame when those books cannot be read and talked about by people in America, the UK, Australia, etc. It impoverishes us all.

CJ Evans: Like Michael, I didn’t envision a career in publishing. I was working as the host in a “family brewpub”—which is as horrible as it sounds—in Portland in 2002 and a friend suggested I go up to Tin House magazine and see if they needed a poetry reader. I read for them for a while, then was hired as an editorial assistant for the magazine and to help with the development of the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop. When my wife and I moved to San Francisco in 2010, a friend suggested I check out the Center for the Art of Translation, which was, at the time, publishing an annual of international literature called Two Lines

I came on as the managing editor of Two Lines shortly thereafter. From the time I started, Olivia Sears, the founder of Two Lines and the Center, was talking about what the next steps for the journal might be. We had all of these wonderful contacts, primarily translators, built up from the nearly two decades of publishing, and felt that we could be doing more. We considered doing regional anthologies, but in nearly every issue we put out there was an excerpt from a book that we thought should be published in English, but couldn’t think of quite the right fit for a press to send the translator to. So, in 2012, Olivia; Scott Esposito, the marketing manager; and I decided we’d go for it and start the press to publish those books ourselves. 

Though I have always read literature in translation, my professional background had been much more focused on contemporary American literature. The way I like to think about it is that I don’t have any special interest in international literature. I’m, personally, very much not interested in the cultural dialogue aspects of it, even though I do see that there’s value in that. I’m interested in publishing the best books I can get my hands on, in a small press environment. And I firmly believe a huge percentage of the best books and writers are not in English. It is continually shocking to me how much amazing work hasn’t been published in translation yet. I think of a writer like Marie NDiaye, with whom we’ve done two books; she won the Prix Goncourt and was the youngest writer to ever be a finalist for the Man Booker Prize. Someone of her stature would be unavailable to a press of our size in the US if she was writing in English. But because she’s French I’m able to publish her.

Barbara Epler: Not to be an echo chamber, but I also never thought I was going into publishing as a profession. If it is one!

I was disenchanted with staying on the professor track—and why I ever thought I would be one is long lost—and I was in love with someone in NYC and thrilled to get here. So I told my parents I was taking a year or two off before grad school and that I would get a job in publishing—thinking that that would be as easy as falling off a log. But then I couldn’t type and no one would hire me and it wasn’t until I met Griselda Ohannessian, who was running New Directions, that I met anyone who would talk to me.  

Now, it’s thirty-one years later.  

Jill Schoolman: I, too, sort of stumbled into publishing after having wandered around for a while trying various things. I started out working in film; I did a film course in Maine, worked on a few films in New York and then in Paris. In Paris I was also doing other things to make ends meet, like delivering pizzas on mopeds. After a few years of freelance film work, I started sniffing around for other possibilities. I then met Dan Simon and started interning for Seven Stories Press, where I learned a great deal about the business and about how much fun it could be to publish books. I was instinctively drawn to international literature. I grew up on a diet of classics from different parts of the world, I love traveling, and I love discovering a culture through its books and films.

After working as an editor with Seven Stories for a few years, I started dreaming out loud about starting a press devoted to international literature. It felt like a good moment to do it, and the people around me encouraged me to try to make it happen. I decided that if we set up Archipelago Books as a not-for-profit press, we might be able to be less dependent on book sales for survival. I’m very glad we did this. I was working out of my studio apartment for about a year, even after I hired a colleague and we enlisted a couple interns. My cat never seemed to mind, until our first books appeared in 2004, and she urged us in her way to find some office space.

Chad Post: After graduating from college, I worked at a couple of indie bookstores: Schuler Books & Music in Grand Rapids, Michigan, then Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh, North Carolina. I learned a ton of stuff from working in bookstores about the business end of things. But I ended up leaving [bookselling] because I wanted to get into the other side of things, helping decide which books would be sold, rather than hoping for someone else to make it possible for me to try and convince others to read these books.

At that time, Dalkey Archive had started a fellowship program, which was like grad school for publishing, but with a worse stipend. I was the first or second fellow to do this, back in the summer of 2000, and I quickly transitioned from working on editorial things to working with bookstores, and a year later was the director of marketing and sales. Fast forward seven years, and I ended up at the University of Rochester with two other former Dalkey employees, working on setting up a new publishing house that would support the literary translation programs the university wanted to launch. 

I think the thing I like best about being here in Rochester is the varied nature of what I’m doing as a “publisher.” Open Letter is a component of the University of Rochester, so our reader outreach and educational opportunities come more directly from a place geared toward expanding minds and whatnot.

The publishing side of things has been pretty tough. It takes a lot to get established sales wise, and although we’ve had some decent successes—Zone by Mathias Enard, The Golden Calf by Ilf & Petrov, The Private Lives of Trees by Alejandro Zambra—there hasn’t been that true breakout title that changes your fortunes or gets the big mainstream media outlets to start paying attention to you. We have no Sebald or Bolaño or Ferrante or Knausgaard. One day!

Point being, if my job were only predicated on sales and our NEA grant, it would be fine, but maybe unremarkable? I think the things that define our organization, and the reasons I’m still in publishing—which can be grueling, especially if you started your press and are too close to it, emotionally tied to the successes and failures of the books—are all the ancillary things we do for readers: the Three Percent blog; the Translation Database, which, thanks to the wealth of data I’ve accumulated, is allowing me to work on a research project about how many books by women are translated from various languages and countries; the Best Translated Book Award; the podcast I do with Tom Roberge; even the World Cup of Literature and Women’s World Cup of Literature—two fun projects that I put together just to help get more people talking about more international literature.

The other thing that I really like about my position is working with young translators. Four to six translators come here every fall to get their MA, and I work with them all on a weekly basis, through the two classes I teach, by talking with them in the office, reading their samples, and organizing a weekly translation workshop for all the translators in the Rochester area—of which there are many, including Kerri Pierce and Lytton Smith, who are two of the best in the country. Without this sort of interaction, I think we’d really be cut off from the book world. Especially since there is no indie bookstore in town. 

What issues do you feel are most pressing for independent publishers in general and those working with literature in translation in particular?
Reynolds: In my mind, the No. 1 issue concerning the publication of work in translation is that of discoverability and promotion. I’m not entirely convinced that we have to dramatically increase the number of books in translation published here at all costs, but I definitely think that we need to grow the audience for those books that are published. Over the past ten to twenty years it seems to me that the focus has been on printing as many titles in translation as possible. But printing is not the same as publishing. I would like to see us all work more, and together, on innovative and effective ways of getting our books into the hands of a larger number of readers.

Evans: I very much agree with Michael that discoverability and promotion are the main difficulties we face, although I’m not ignoring the fact that editors at both small presses and major houses would identify the same challenge. Could any of us ever have enough readers? We made a very conscious decision early on to keep our list small so that we could continue to build the audience for our backlist and have every title we publish be a frontlist title.

In some ways I feel the literary community is coming around to translated literature, and the field has certainly grown in respect and readership since Olivia Sears started the journal Two Lines more than twenty years ago, but it still feels that we’re relegated to second class, that our books need to be classified in some category other than merely “books.” I love that organizations like PEN and Chad’s Best Translated Book Award exist, but I don’t understand why these translated books need to be distinguished from books written in English when it comes to awards and reviews. I don’t want our books to be “translated” books or “international” books, but just really good books. End stop.

I think some of this comes from a strategic mistake of the international-lit community years ago, when many translated titles were marketed as being “good for you” literature—marketed as books that would broaden a reader’s horizons. Some of it is ignorance about the artistry and skill of translators. Some of it, perhaps, is merely a type of systemic high-minded xenophobia. I think battling these challenges both within this smaller community of translation presses and within the slightly larger pool of literary presses and readers is essential to continued growth and sustainability.

Epler: I agree, and also, I think the main concern is finding readers for amazing books. Not necessarily flooding the market with more and more translations—as if that vision of emulating the flood of new English-language titles will get anyone anywhere. Say we wanted to have the German ratio of translated titles. Really? If we approach 40 or 50 percent, then we would have, say, 100,000 new translated titles annually. That also seems crackers. 

Schoolman: I’d say the most mysterious [issue] is how to survive. Someone should write a how-to book on the subject. How to keep our authors and translators writing, and how to stay afloat as a press when what trickles in doesn’t always amount to what’s flowing out in various directions. Because the dimensions of the industry—publishers, booksellers, librarians, reviewers and bloggers, distributors, readers, writers, agents, translators, educators—are changing so rapidly we need to find new ways of collaborating.

It’s an ongoing challenge to figure out what each book needs—they all have different needs and are born in different circumstances. It’s a creative process that involves instinct, energy, and luck. The most elusive question remains, How can we get our books noticed, and read?

Post: The publishing business can be really infuriating, and the fact that the main business model for the past few decades has been one of acceleration—acquire more presses; publish more books, faster; make them available quicker—is a good example of that. The field has created a glut that might have some benefits—more voices being published—but also ends up with a “throw shit at the wall and see what sticks” way of promotion. For presses like the ones here, we need to be more innovative and interesting to cut through the six-figure marketing campaigns and seven-figure advances.

What are some of the means by which you have tried to break into the market as independent publishers?
Post
: First and foremost, when I think of our five presses and how we distinguish ourselves from most of the others, I think of the cover design. Archipelago is maybe the most distinct with the square format, but four of us all use covers that go together as a sort of set. And although New Directions doesn’t have one overriding “look,” there are subsets, like the Pearl series, and an overarching sort of feel to the look of the books. I don’t want to speak for anyone else, but it’s helped us in getting people to recognize the press and to be able to know right off the bat that they’re looking at an Open Letter title when they see it in the store. My hope is that a good experience with one of our books makes a reader more willing to pick up the others, trusting that we won’t lead them astray, even if they haven’t heard of the particular author. And being able to identify our books at a glance should, theoretically, help that.

This is also in line with why we offered subscriptions right from the start. Although the content and styles of the books range widely, they somehow fit together and look nice on a bookshelf.

Evans: I agree with Chad that it’s important to develop a strong, identifiable brand—though I loathe that word—and that also extends to the voice of the press. One of the things I love about the presses in this roundtable is that each has its own aesthetic in acquisitions as well. In addition, with each book we try to find and target what we call the “one bigger pond” of readers. We don’t want to just step into the biggest ponds and always be the smallest fish holding out to land the cover of the NYRB, we want to step into the slightly bigger pond and see if we can wreak a little havoc as medium fish. We’d love to have that breakout title, but a lot of presses have gone under waiting for their Roberto Bolaño or Nell Zink.

For most titles we also put aside a little bit of money to try…something. Whether [it’s] a funky mailing to bookstore buyers, some extra ARCs to target academic or library sales, special events with new partners, whatever we think will work best with the resources we have for that title, with the idea that we’re also trying to make new connections for the press as a whole.

Subscriptions have been essential, as has been our nonprofit status, which lets us take some risks on books and marketing as we build the press—we’re the new kids on the block so we’re still in a period of experimentation. I certainly agree with Barbara that more and more books is not the answer—not only in translation—and I think trying to “create” readers sounds like a pretty tall challenge; I’d rather just poach readers of contemporary American literature for translated literature.

Epler: Long ago New Directions was heavily branded by the old black-and-white paperbacks, but now it’s less so. I think I can detect a sort of spectrum of design for our books, but I imagine that’s pretty much in the eye of the beholder in this case. I’d say more that New Directions tries to always bring out books of a certain quality and originality, to maintain among book buyers, booksellers, reviewers, and readers a sort of sense of what you’ll be getting if you pick up a New Directions book, which we hope is real art and deep pleasure.

However, I think this is so much more a preoccupation of publishers than of readers, who tend to follow writers, rather than thinking much about which house is bringing the writer out. I think it helps a lot if you can stick with authors and really represent them in English, and over time keep building their body of work here, which is a long and costly process but can really work, and result in a strong audience. Live events and getting the author and translator here is also key, as are appearances in magazines.

To put the books across, I think it’s a matter of trying everything you can think of and of having the sort of dedicated staff you need: It can be Crazy Town as far as how hard everyone here has to work. But it is immensely satisfying when you do find an audience for a great writer.

Reynolds: For Europa, it has been very much about branding. I gather there are more highfalutin words for this process—creating a personality, an identity, etc., that readers, retail partners, and members of the reviewing community learn to distinguish and trust over time—but I guess in the end it is just plain old branding. I like to think of what we do as being a conversation with these various players, meaning that I think of our publishing program as being a dialogue with readers. In the editorial choices we make and the way we go about publishing we are opening a conversation with an affirmation along the lines of: “This is what we think is important, interesting, significant, and entertaining. Take a look! What do you think?” We demarcate this conversation in a variety of ways: uniform design, acquisitions that fall within a certain range on the broad spectrum between experimental/densely literary and commercial, a way of approaching translation, etc. If we remain consistent with these aspects then we create an identity that can potentially ferry new, unknown, and foreign writers into the market.

In the end, I think it’s all about the books. This is a mantra I repeat to myself often. I don’t think publishers of our kind are in a position to make a success out of a really crappy book. The big guys and gals can do that; they have the marketing and leverage not only to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear but also to fill that purse with gold. We can’t. We have to have good books, quality books that fit into the brand/identity/personality/conversation we have established with readers and retailers. What I’m sure we’ve all experienced, almost on a daily basis, is the opposite: failing to reach an audience with what we consider to be a really great book, one that sits perfectly on our list. You can do everything possible for a book and it still doesn’t work.

I’d like to talk a bit about the work of “outreach.” Obviously, this kind of activity fits more squarely into the mission of a nonprofit or a press connected with a university in the way Open Letter is. But I think it is also something that all presses should engage in. We have lost the ability to talk about books in meaningful ways. Most people are unable to go much further than a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down, or appraise a work of literature with more than “I hated it” or “I loved it.” As a culture—I mean outside of our very limited clique—we have become critically illiterate; we no longer know how to understand, let alone express, the social, political, cultural, historical significance of a book. For that matter, we are almost incapable of expressing its significance for us even on a personal level. It may just be the way of the world—I think many people are conversant on the social and cultural significance of Breaking Bad, for example—and I should get over it. At the same time, I think a more critically literate readership would not only be important for the culture but would also mean that presses like ours would sell more books. Thus, perhaps efforts to grow this kind of critical literacy should be calculated more explicitly as part of our marketing budget. We are, after all, not simply trying to “break into the market” but also attempting to shape that market.

Let’s talk about a “critically literate readership,” the decline of which people often attribute, at least in part, to the shuttering of book pages in newspapers and decreased coverage for literature in periodicals. But at the same time, as the editor in chief of Fiction Writers Review, I also know that there are a number of venues out there for thoughtful discussion of books. So where are people having the sorts of conversations about books that you wished more readers were aware of? Or what avenues for outreach would you either direct people toward to widen those conversations or propose creating, if you’re not already engaged in doing so?
Reynolds: I think you’re opening up a can of worms with this one. The conversation is long, deep, and broad. I’m going to try to condense some of my thoughts into morsels.

I like Fiction Writers Review and I respect what you’re doing there. In many ways it corresponds to exactly the kind of conversation about books that I suggested in my earlier answer we lack. But the context does not. This is not really because FWR and like-minded venues are doing something wrong, but rather because the media of mass culture are not behind you. Forgive me if I’m wrong, but I imagine that the readers of FWR belong to a specific demographic and in many ways represent a cultural elite; and, perhaps even more poignantly, are mostly writers, who may or may not be real readers—a whole other can of worms. There is, as a result, an insularity to that kind of conversation that is unhelpful for the larger goal of making books and discussion about books relevant to “the masses.”

Consider the sheer number and the production quality of television programs about sports, movies, celebrities, TV, and the immense creativity that goes into developing and duplicating formats on these subjects. These programs cater to and shape the opinions and the conversations of many millions of people. As far as I know, there is currently no TV format dealing with books. Do we need one? Christ, I don’t know. I haven’t owned a TV for thirty-five years. But I do find the idea of using the means of mass culture to diffuse a vocabulary for talking about books appealing.

To be honest, the place where I see the kind of conversation about books that I desire happening most often is in the good old-fashioned book group. Book-group members, if you exclude New York, mostly don’t work in publishing and are not connected to the book industry at all. They are not academics. They are working people, housewives, the elderly, etc., who seek a congenial “third place” connected to their passion for reading and for talking. If the label and the formalities of running a book group fell away, this kind of atmosphere, and this kind of conversation, is my ideal. This “third place/great good place” idea that, frankly, I first heard about only a few years ago at Winter Institute, has crystallized a lot of my thinking on these questions. When I imagine “conversation about books” I don’t think of a lecture hall, an online magazine, publishing parties, or the pages of the New York Times; I think of a pub. Specifically I think of the pub on the corner of my street where I sometimes stop for a beer on my way home. If, in that context, in cities and towns across the country, in addition to talking about the merits of a sports player or a celebrity, patrons were also hotly debating the merits of a recent novel and pulling apart what was innovative about it and what had been rehashed from the literary tradition, I would feel that we had gone a long way to becoming “critically literate” as a culture.

Fostering this dialogue cannot be simply a question of preaching to the choir or making privileged people more privileged. As such, in my opinion, the organizations we must entrust to foster the ability to appreciate, place, understand, and talk about books are: public schools, libraries, community and continuing-education systems, universities. Other noninstitutional organizations whose efforts I feel run in this direction are in-school initiatives like Girls Write Now and writers and poets in the schools; failed experiments like Book Night, and more successful ones like One City, One Book; college “freshman reads” programs; etc.

page_5: 

We, as an industry, have our share of the blame in all this. We publish too many books. We publish too many insignificant books. As a result it becomes very difficult for an important book, one that can be enjoyed and talked about by people from many walks of life, to make its way amid the dreck to readers.

This will sound like a cop-out—we haven’t really initiated or engaged in any specific outreach programs—but I think our publishing program itself, and the readership it targets, are both conceived partially as a response to this crisis in critical literacy.

I also agree that online journals, book sites, and the like can be a bit of an echo chamber and perhaps broadcast to a narrow audience. This is partly the reason FWR founded an annual daylong literary symposium in Ann Arbor, free and open to the public, called the State of the Book, and why we now are one of the sponsors for the Voices of the Middle West festival each spring—a similar event that tries to nurture a broader conversation about books in collaboration with the university and some local community organizations. We especially try to reach out to younger readers and college students through these various channels. I’m curious to hear from others about similar programs that you’ve found equally beneficial on this front, or initiatives that might be adopted elsewhere, whether they’re projects of your own or others. And, of course, those engines—whether online or on the ground—that are helping foster the most productive conversations.
Schoolman: I love the long-form critical essay, in which the lines between writer, reader, and critic blur, where there is room to explore the inner world of a book and its cultural context, where there is room for the critic-writer’s own ideas to emerge and breathe. There are still places where this is possible: the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Threepenny Review, Guernica, Asymptote, Music & Literature, the White Review, the Quarterly Conversation.

I agree with Michael that the best, most far-reaching conversations about books can happen in a local bar—the relationship between the overworked editor and the local bar is of course another question to explore—where people can express themselves without a lot of literary jargon. Archipelago has an ongoing relationship with a fantastic organization based in Staten Island, New York, called OutLOUD. It does an inspiring job of bringing people of all ages together from various walks of life to read and think about books and art. The conversations about our books and the worlds each has emerged from are always alive and move in surprising directions.

I’m intrigued by Michael’s comment about writers not necessarily counting as readers. Are you saying that they read in a different way? That reading is perhaps more essential to them than to other people? Or…?

Reynolds: Sorry, Jill. My comment about writers/readers wasn’t clear at all. I just meant that I am often surprised at how writers or those who have aspirations to be writers are not careful, prolific readers and converse about books in too businesslike a way, if at all. In addition, a high number of visitors to FWR and other similar venues may not be an indication of a largish public engaging in meaningful discussion about books and their place in the culture and society because many of those visitors may be aspiring writers engaging in the conversation in order to advance their careers rather than to pursue a genuine, disinterested engagement with the literary and artistic questions being raised. I’m not necessarily against writers advancing their careers! But this is not the kind of critical literacy, nor the kind of disinterested dialogue, I was talking about in my original comment.

Post: All the places Jill mentions are ones I would think to recommend as well. Drawing on Michael’s response, though, I do think there is a difference between the audiences reading the White Review or Quarterly Conversation—mostly people looking for high-minded discussion of capital-L Literature—and casual readers discussing books in a bar. To create and sustain a vibrant book culture we need to have outlets from both ends of the spectrum—along with Twitter conversations that range in quality from witty banter to knee-jerk reactions to measured comments [from] book clubs and mainstream reviews—since there’s no single way people can, or should, be interacting with and talking about books. Although what’s most important, in my opinion, is getting people who aren’t writers or publishing people talking about books. That’s what we exist for, right?

When I worked in independent bookstores, the sort of conversation Michael and I are pining for seemed to happen on a regular basis, both among booksellers and with customers. It probably still does, but there’s no bookstore in Rochester where this experience could possibly take place—something that’s likely the case in a lot of other midsize cities. My local bar, NOX, is actually book-themed, so it could be a bar where books are discussed. I would very much like that.

Reynolds: The conclusion to this whole conversation: books and booze, together forever!

Post: Cheers!

Epler: That sort of sounds like a wrap. Or last call? Just a final note so I don’t feel like a liar: I hands-down agree with talking up books anywhere and everywhere—which is why we have canaries here tweeting away, though I don’t know what they might be twittering—and we love any book talk from the highbrow journals to suburban book clubs to bar chats, but I do have to say—just to be honest—that New Directions just doesn’t do the sort of outreach that’s been mentioned, and much admired by me, such as Jill’s OutLOUD efforts and FWR’s engagement with local community organizations. We donate books to prisons and to some libraries, and give time to PEN and whatnot, but really we’re not that socially conscious. Maybe the old dog can learn new tricks, but that’s the truth these days. Now, back to the bar!

Evans: Practically, I’d love to see an organized effort in MFA programs and colleges to encourage the next generation who want to get into publishing to pursue some of the areas behind the scenes. If every person who starts a new literary journal in the next year would instead focus on hosting a book club at a local bookstore—or bar!—we’d be a healthier community. Or tackle the problems in literary magazine distribution. Or work at nonprofit fund-raising and/or lobbying for literary nonprofits. These are not as sexy as being an editor—although I assume my fellow panelists will agree that there’s very little that’s sexy about actually being an editor—but the same attention in the MFA programs to the real health of publishing as to pedagogy could do a lot for the industry.

I apologize for ending on a down note, but a certain amount of the reading audience is just gone—there’s simply other media that appeals more to a lot of the broader audience. But we’ve hopefully learned, after the rise and leveling of the e-book panic, that there continues to be an audience, and a sizable one, for literary books. But we need to rebuild the base of our industry and foster not readers necessarily, but rather those who will get the books into the readers’ hands. More book clubs. More diversity. More lobbying. More education nonprofits. More pop-up bookstores. More ideas and risks and people to start the casual conversations in the bar that end deep at last call.

Jeremiah Chamberlin teaches at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he is the assistant director of the English Department Writing Program. He is also the editor in chief of Fiction Writers Review as well as a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

An Interview With Translator Wyatt Mason

by

Max Winter

4.5.02

Wyatt Mason’s Rimbaud Complete, published by Modern Library in March, is a translation of the complete writings of French poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891). The book contains all of his poetry—from his earliest juvenilia to his later poems, which Rimbaud wrote in his early twenties, before he stopped writing poems altogether. The volume contains fifty pages of previously untranslated material, including all the poet’s earliest verse, a school notebook, and a rough draft of his best known poem A Season In Hell.

Mason has also translated five books by contemporary French author Pierre Michon, and was a finalist for the French American Foundation Translation Prize for his first publication, Michon’s Masters and Servants (Mercury House, 1997). Mason’s complete translation of Rimbaud’s correspondence is forthcoming from Counterpoint in 2003.

Poets & Writers Magazine asked Mason what drew him to the work of Rimbaud, what particular characteristics attracted him to the idea of translating him so thoroughly.

Wyatt Mason: I came to Rimbaud later than many. I remember reading A Season in Hell when I was sixteen and not liking it: It seemed to lurch around a lot, had an odd rhythm. I assumed-disastrously-that meant it wasn’t good. I was too young, too inexperienced, or just too stupid to realize that the very quality I disliked was one of its virtues, or, at least, I would later come to appreciate it as such.

P&W: So what changed your mind?

WM: Time, and dumb luck. About ten years ago, when I was living in Italy for the winter, I rented a house in an off-season tourist town. The house had a few books on its shelves. A Bible of course; Moravia, Calvino; and a translation of some Rimbaud, bilingual French/Italian. Initially, I used it as a sort of grammar-Rimbaud as Italian tutor-admittedly, not the most distinguished use of a great poet. That misuse was short-lived though. I soon found I liked the poems a great deal, and devoured everything.

P&W: Do you remember which poem first caught your attention?

WM: Absolutely: “Faim.” “Hunger” in English. The images in that poem were entirely his own. The narrator speaks of quenching his hunger with a meal of earth and stone, rock, air, loam. He eats pebbles underfoot, old church stones. And if that weren’t voracious enough, we get a wolf devouring a bird, spitting out feathers, the narrator comparing the wolf’s hunger to his own, not for a bird, but for himself. It’s lyrical and musical, and at the same time raw and unflinching. A balance apparent in Rimbaud’s best work. He takes Whitman’s grounding in the experiencing of the natural, his interest in self, but digs in his claws, bites.

P&W: Can you say a little more about Whitman and Rimbaud?

WM: There are lots of interesting connections, some meaningful, some just fun. Whitman’s first version of Leaves of Grass came out when Rimbaud was a year old, and his final expanded version the year Rimbaud died. Whitman’s book took 37 years to write; Rimbaud’s life took the same amount to live. Both poets are seen as sensualists of a kind, though that only gets us so far: There has always been the idea of the poet with a capital P. Sappho is as interested in bodies as Whitman; Wordsworth as interested in the natural world as Rimbaud. But the type and depth of engagement is different in each.

What seems new in Whitman is his self-consciousness, his depiction of himself celebrating what the poet traditionally celebrates: Portraiture becomes self-portraiture. The poem is not about a grassy field but about the poet grabbing handfuls of that field. There is a similar force at work in Rimbaud, as in “Hunger,” but Rimbaud is grazing that field. Whitman and Rimbaud both use “I” in their poems, but they define them very differently. Yes, Whitman’s “Song of Myself” features a celebratory “I” lusting through the landscape; yes, Rimbaud’s poem “Sensation” features a solitary “I” in nature, as happy alone, he says, as if with a woman. The difference is the guilelessness of Whitman’s “I”: It celebrates itself; it contains multitudes. It is democratic, is many in one, e pluribus unum. Rimbaud’s “I” is a separatist, is somebody else: “Je est un autre.” I see Rimbaud wearing many masks, adopting different personae and shedding them just as Pound would do later. Whitman’s “I” is always Whitman. Rimbaud’s “I” is a term of art, not a matter of confession.

P&W: So how did you end up translating all of his work?

WM: Well, I started translating a few of his poems when I found that book in Italy. He’s irresistible, because he seems so easy, so direct, so personal. Everybody tries to translate Rimbaud, and everybody, at least everybody sensible, gives up: He’s really very hard to convey in all his richness. I worked on various of his poems from time to time in my notebooks-in retrospect laying a sort of foundation-before many years later Modern Library asked me to do the complete works.

P&W: What makes translating Rimbaud particularly challenging?

MW: His entire lifetime of composing poetry was compressed into about five years—five years during which his style can been seen evolving from month to month. Like Picasso, he doesn’t have a style: He has styles. That changing voice is difficult enough to appreciate in French, and altogether treacherous in translation.

P&W: Given that his style changed often over the course of his life, what quality remains constant or “consistent” throughout?

WM: That’s difficult to answer, as it tends to become reductive. Too often Rimbaud is saddled with labels like “visionary,” “unsparing,” “bloodless,” descriptions that have more to do with our misunderstanding of his life than our appreciation of his poetry. A familiarity with all his work brings a reader to Rimbaud’s preoccupation with passage. That theme seems undeniable. I could say “departure,” but it puts too fine a point on things, leads us stumblingly to the “poem-as-prognostication school” that believes A Season in Hell is some sort of psychic itinerary for Rimbaud’s later years. Reading Rimbaud, I think of Joyce’s description, evolved from Flaubert, of the artist standing back, paring his fingernails in the face of his creation. Of course, Rimbaud would famously turn his back on his work entirely, but while he was still at it he achieved a distanced poise hinted at all along and perfected in many of the late poems in Illuminations. And yet, contradictorily, his passage to that remove is through experience, often of the dirt beneath the fingernails variety, the rending and devouring of flesh.

One might say Rimbaud’s inconsistency is what’s most consistent. Ultimately, though, what makes a poet different from another, and what makes his work lasting and essential, is his eye, which some call “voice.” Rimbaud’s eye roams a world of girls with orange and green lips, talking boats, descriptions of rabbits’ visions, children looking out rain-coated windows, all of it seen in passing. The only still points in Rimbaud are the fact of the poems. Perhaps a provisional answer to your question then would be that Rimbaud is always a poet of movement. Even a poem like “Faun,” a description of silence and stillness, is disturbed by motion. Rimbaud’s poems fidget, wander, won’t stay still.

P&W: How would you compare the experience of translating Rimbaud with the other translations you’ve done-of renowned French prose writer Pierre Michon for instance?

WM: Michon’s narratives are short: A novel from him weighs in at around 15,000 words. In place of length, there’s density. Sentences go on for pages, are richly musical, full of echoes to earlier passages and dependent on sonorities and rhythms for a great deal of their power. Roger Shattuck says Michon’s writing can at any time lift or lower into semi-hallucinatory effects that recall Arthur Rimbaud’s assaults on conventional perception. So there’s a kinship that isn’t accidental: Michon read Rimbaud early and often, and has written a super little book called Rimbaud the Son that I’m doing into English right now. Anyway, I’d say that translating Michon’s writing requires the same level of engagement necessary when working with a poet of Rimbaud’s complexity and rigor. This isn’t always the case. Some writing is more transparent.

While no one sensible would argue that Hemingway didn’t put as much thought and craft into his style as Faulkner did, translating Hemingway would be a hell of a lot easier. Translation is basically close reading, and Hemingway is an easier read than Faulkner (which is, of course, not a comment on their relative artistic merits). All translation requires a dedication to meaning, but to get a Michon or Rimbaud right requires an extra engagement to the musical qualities of their language. Not every prose writer is a stylist, though every serious prose writer must at some point engage the question of style in narrative. Every poet, however, is by definition a stylist. “Style” or “voice” or “eye” is how we tell them apart. In order to maintain that telling difference, the translator has to serve often contradictory impulses: to the truth of meaning and the truth of music. Without both, the original gets hopelessly lost.

P&W: Some would argue that literal translation is the only acceptable way of proceeding without losing the poem.

WM: Literal translation is a necessary fiction. Borges says the idea of literal translation comes from translations of the Bible: “If we think of the infinite intelligence of God undertaking a literary task, then every word, every letter, must have been thought out. It might be blasphemy to tamper with the text written by an endless, eternal intelligence.” Borges found the idea of literal translation distasteful. He liked to imagine a time when “translation will be considered something in itself . . . when men will care for beauty, not for the circumstances of beauty.” Because: A poem is always lost in translation. So the key is finding it again in the language you’re translating into. The whole “literalism and its discontents” kerfuffle can’t be resolved-both sides have their points-but at least it can be anecdotally fun.

There’s the story about Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson. Nabokov, who never spent more than six years on a novel, spent twelve on his translation of Pushkin’s Onegin. He considered it the most important work of Russian literature, and dedicated himself to seeing justice done to it in English. The whole thing-notes, introduction, commentary-ends up being four volumes, around a thousand pages, Nabokov’s longest work. A masterpiece, one would think. When it comes out, Nabokov’s old friend Wilson reviews it. And trashes it. Says Nabokov doesn’t know Russian, gets words wrong. He also accuses Nabokov of being too literal, of stubbornly and pedantically refusing to put his considerable poetical gifts at the service of approximating the beauty of Pushkin’s Russian in English.

On one hand, Wilson’s response is just silly. Nabokov spoke and wrote English, French, and Russian with equal facility: In his phrase, he was born “a perfectly normal tri-lingual child.” Wilson was a dedicated student of Russian, but the idea of him correcting Nabokov on that count is comical. What isn’t so ridiculous is for Wilson to chastise Nabokov’s reluctance to come up with more lyrical solutions than he does. That’s an entirely reasonable point of view, one philosophically at odds with Nabokov’s position: He wasn’t trying to be lyrical. He was trying to be exact, to create a useful book for students, not a poem of equal value, which he believed was impossible. If he’d had the time, Nabokov would have translated a great deal more, and with the same objective. This was a man who taught comp-lit for over a decade at Cornell, fighting through what he considered abominable translations. If we look at his copies of the Constance Garnett Anna Karenina or the Muirs’ Kafka, he’s always correcting them. Nabokov’s allegiance, as a translator, was to students of the original, of whom he was one. Any translator’s ultimate allegiance must be to his readers, but always in the service of his writers.

Literal translations, like Nabokov’s Onegin, Wallace Fowlie’s Rimbaud, or Donald Frame’s Montaigne, are valuable scholarly works of unimpeachable integrity and seriousness. But none captures the very quality that makes each writer most unique: his style. Since most readers of works in translation will never read the original, translations destined for the general reader must convey style and substance in equal measure. To do so, the translator requires (in Nabokov’s famous formula) “a scholar’s passion and a poet’s patience blent.” How each of us interprets that equation is, of course, where the fun begins.

P&W: What value do you think reconsidering Rimbaud would have for contemporary readers and writers?

WM: When we look at Rimbaud, we can’t see him. There’s the same problem with Van Gogh. Van Gogh isn’t a painter anymore: He’s “the patron saint of the beaux-arts.” We look at a wheatfield and see a suicide; we look at a self-portrait and think about the whore he gave a piece of his ear to as a Christmas gift; we see squiggles and think of him dying for his art. We don’t see pictures: We see fame. Rimbaud’s mythic posterity has done a similar disservice to his poetry.

If we think of Rimbaud at all we think of the gay poet, or the adolescent poet, or the drug-addicted poet. These labels are problematic for all sorts of reasons, beginning with the facts of his life, which often don’t support the more exotic claims made for his biography. Regardless of what he may or may not have lived, we know without a doubt that he wrote poems. We even have them available to us. Yet it’s inevitable that when we go to the poems with such preconceptions, they’re all we end up finding.

The basic example: Letters and manuscripts bear out beyond any doubting that Rimbaud and poet Paul Verlaine were close friends. What follows from these facts is instructive: first, a supposition made by most of the biographers (variously corroborated through anecdote and documentation), that Verlaine and Rimbaud were lovers; then, in the hands of recent biographers such as Graham Robb, a deduction that Rimbaud was firmly gay; followed by an interpretation by writers such as Benjamin Ivry (in his Rimbaud of a few years back), that Rimbaud’s poems are gay poems; and finally, by Rimbaud critic Robert Greer Cohen, a conclusion that A Season in Hell, Rimbaud’s best-known work, should be read as the story of Verlaine and Rimbaud’s affair. This maddening plunge into conjecture, assumption, and narrow-mindedness is the rule of law in reading Rimbaud. Take the pages of critical space devoted to his self-proclaimed “long, involved, and logical derangement of all the senses.” It makes him seem like a wild-man, a hell-raiser, an image to which many have grown attached: poet as party-animal.

I am not saying that Rimbaud wasn’t a wild-man. Rather, that I neither know nor care. What I know, after the chronological study that translating his complete works entailed, is evidence of an entirely different sort of fellow: a methodical poet who underwent a long, involved and logical engagement with the history of poetry. For when I translated those parts of his legacy that no one had bothered to translate before, a new Rimbaud emerged. Translating his student works, an early notebook, multiple drafts of key poems, and his fragmentary rough draft of A Season in Hell, I watched a poet deliberately forge an individual style by stealing from his predecessors. By looking, I saw-perhaps more clearly than with any other poet-how Rimbaud became Rimbaud. So many collected works of the Great Poets are these unassailable tomes. Eliot and Yeats and so many others pruned their Complete Works into a final, canonical form, discarding lesser efforts, or adjusting lines here and there, or, as with Whitman, rewriting one poem for 37 years. Rimbaud’s complete works are a partial mess, full of perfect and imperfect things. I don’t claim this makes him better or worse, only unique: His art remains forever unfinished. It’s full of false starts and wrong turns, and even a surprisingly happy ending. That happy ending, in the form of A Season in Hell and Illuminations, is the creation of a unique poetic voice, that, like all art, is one imagination speaking to another. And that’s always worth reconsideration.

What Is Written for You: From Starvation to Salvation in Bulgaria

by

Angela Rodel

10.14.15

How did I become a translator of Bulgarian literature? Americans love to ask me this, while most Bulgarians shrug this question off, saying, “Taka ti e pisano” (“That’s what is written for you”)—by the hand of fate, presumably. While I’ve never been much of a believer in fate, or a fan of starvation, I have always had a propensity for the exotic, the off-the-beaten-path. Not surprisingly, my first celebrity crush as a child was Cyndi Lauper, and I dressed the part with bracelets all the way up both arms and a turquoise shag-rug vest. This was followed by infatuations with punk rock and finally Bulgarian folk music. You don’t have to be Freud’s second cousin to figure out why the exotic might attract a white girl from Minnesota, where the closest thing we have to ethnic identity is a vague vision of Teutonic great-grandparents coming across the ocean to take up their poses in American Gothic. (And yes, I got hit by lots of snowballs from kids who didn’t appreciate my attempt at flamboyance.) 

So how could I resist when my high school suddenly started offering Russian alongside milquetoast German, Spanish, and French? My sixteen-year-old heart skipped a beat when I saw the Cyrillic letters frolicking across the Language Arts bulletin board, the frilly, coquettish Ж, the cat-tailed Ц, and poor “backward” Я. A happy coincidence or fate? In any case, the Cyrillic alphabet led me to study Russian literature and Slavic linguistics at Yale, where I got my first taste of Bulgarian folksinging thanks to the Yale Slavic Chorus. When I heard the choir sing the first few notes of a Bulgarian song, belted out in sternum-shattering voices, I knew I had found my newest obsession: the mystery of Bulgarian voices. The tightly packed, dissonant harmonies, the razor-sharp timbre of unapologetically loud voices meant to be heard across a field or across a mountaintop—it made my hair stand on end and my whole soul resonate. I didn’t know this love affair would last far longer than Cyndi Lauper or punk rock had, and that it would be even more deeply transformational. 

In 1996, after I graduated from Yale, I was off to Bulgaria like a shot to study Bulgarian language and folksinging at the source, on a one-year Fulbright grant. But when I landed in gritty, gray Sofia at the height of an economic and political spasm brought on by hyperinflation and inept governance, the Bulgarian voice I thought I knew was nowhere to be found; the haunting voice of the shepherd had been largely drowned out in the postsocialist cacophony. That didn’t cool my interest in Bulgaria but rather stoked it, as this turn of events forced me to pay attention to the other, more contemporary Bulgarian voices on the cultural scene. 

After bouncing back and forth between Bulgaria and grad school in ethnomusicology at UCLA for more years than I should probably admit publicly, in 2004 I landed a Fulbright-Hays grant to study Bulgarian folksinging. Again, was it happy coincidence or fate that the first week I arrived, a Japanese friend and fellow Bulgarian-music-o-phile took me to a party, which just happened to be the after party of a book launch? There we fell into an hours-long jam session with a pair of Bulgarian poets, who also happened to be musicians. At the end of the night they asked me to join the band they were starting. So I did, and what subsequently became known as an “ethno-rock-poetry band,” playing at readings, book launches, literary festivals, and art performances, introduced me to the world of contemporary Bulgarian literature. One of our earliest gigs was part of Liturne (Lit Tour), a flash mob before flash mobs were known in Bulgaria. We lugged a decrepit amplifier around downtown Sofia, begging electricity from coffee shops and screeching out poetry and music to any passersby who cared to listen. Our fellow mobsters included some folks destined to become solid names in the Bulgarian literary scene: Georgi Gospodinov, Dimiter Kenarov, Angel Igov, and others. Through these adventures I realized that the literary scene in Bulgaria was surprisingly vibrant: It seemed deliciously old-world, like Paris in the 1920s, with writers gathered in circles and generations, everyone knowing everyone else (for better or worse). There was a real sense of discourse; readings took place almost every evening, followed by brandy-, cigarette-, and feta-cheese-fueled debates in cafés and pubs. The writing itself was very raw, experimental in form and content, daring and provocative, not shoehorned to fit publishers’ or even readers’ expectations.

Speaking of pubs: I was sitting in one in 2005 as my Fulbright-Hays grant was winding down, laughing, drinking, and haranguing with a group of Bulgarian writers. I recall very vividly the thought that occurred to me in dead seriousness for the first time: I could just stay. And in comparison to the forbidding landscape that is academia in the United States, the landscape of Bulgaria in the early 2000s did not look anywhere near as starvation-prone: The country had just joined NATO; EU accession was around the corner; and the arts, including literature, were in an upswing after the lean decade following 1989. So with just four hundred dollars in my bank account and no clear plan, I snipped the lifeline to my American existence. 

As a linguistics geek in my heart of hearts, I had always thought translation would be fun, yet had never seriously considered it as a career. But now, faced with survival beyond the apron- and-purse strings of the university, I looked around and found a gig: translating for Vagabond, a lifestyle magazine of sorts for expats in Bulgaria, whose editor in chief was Anthony Georgieff (picture the quintessential cigar-chomping, green-visor-wearing editor of Hollywood lore, but with a cigarette and fedora instead). Not only did this gig stave off starvation, but to this day I am thankful for Anthony’s unminced words, which were a necessary crash course for me in nuts-and-bolts editing and translating, which my fancy Yale education in linguistics and literature hadn’t provided me with. I learned not to hover too closely over the original text, but also not to take too many liberties with the style and content. On the side, I continued translating literature informally as I had done over the past year, helping out friends and friends-of-friends who needed poems, short stories, and novel excerpts translated into English—as well as writing query letters to magazines and publishers. Most of these early efforts disappeared into the void that is the English-language publishing world, sinking like a brick in a bog. Who had heard of Bulgaria then, let alone Bulgarian literature? Bulgaria had no Nobel laureate, no Big Novel as most Eastern European countries had. My first “real” literary job with the promise of “real” pay was working with Georgi Tenev to translate his Party Headquarters—which had won the Vick Prize, given annually for the best Bulgarian novel, but which, due to a string of errors that I can in hindsight call comedic, has not yet seen the light of day. It will be published by Open Letter in February 2016.

Although there were good translators working from Bulgarian to French and German at that time, native speakers of English willing and able to translate Bulgarian literature were few and far between. So perhaps it really was “written for me,” or perhaps it was just a happy accident, but I turned out to be in the right place at the right time: I was a native speaker of English with close ties to the Sofia literary scene, and the wonderful Elizabeth Kostova Foundation (EKF) had just fired up in 2007, beginning to lay the necessary groundwork to get English-language publishers and magazines interested in the black hole that Bulgarian literature appeared to be to the outside world. Thanks to EKF and its outreach efforts, I was eventually able to get paying jobs translating Bulgarian literature practically full-time. The threat of starvation receded, replaced by the hope of salvation: There was so much good meat for the soul out there, calling out to be translated. And finally some American publishers were ready to join the feast. 

The bulk of this new soul-meat—for me, at least—was the new prose coming out in the 2000s. To give a brief history of recent Bulgarian literature: The year 1989 remains a muddled boundary in Bulgaria. Unlike the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia or the smashing of the Berlin Wall, what happened here was more akin to an ignoble perestroika, an internal coup in which communist insiders deposed the longtime dictator, Todor Zhivkov. While a change to democracy ensued, the state security apparatus and much of the nomenclature remained largely in place, with the communists-turned-socialists winning elections on and off for the next two decades while reformers struggled with the frustrating lack of lustration laws and political will to curb corruption. 

Against this tumultuous backdrop, it is not surprising that in the 1990s Bulgarian writers largely turned inward—producing highly psychological, confessional writing, often experimental in form. This was not only a rejection of communist-era monumentalism, but also a demonstrative way to give the bird to the perceived degradation of Bulgarian culture. During this time, poetry was the chosen genre for many writers, given its commercially antithetical nature. This, however, combined with the dearth of dissident prose from socialist times, made it difficult for Bulgarian writers to ride the post-1989 wave of interest in Eastern European literature, which was centered primarily on prose. 

Much of this changed with the international success of Georgi Gospodinov’s Natural Novel, which was published in Bulgaria in 1999 and released by Dalkey Archive Press in English in 2005, and is both highly postmodernist and erudite yet infinitely readable. Indeed, the early years of the twenty-first century saw a surge of novels from Bulgarian writers who, like Gospodinov, were previously better known for their poetry, as well as from younger writers who had come of age postsocialism and who embraced an international idiom with the novel as its flagship form.  

So how I did I dig into this meat? Since I became a translator rather by accident, I had to devise my strategies from scratch. Unlike translators who work with “big languages” such as Spanish or French, I unfortunately didn’t have an MA program or even a community of fellow English-speaking natives, off whom I could bounce my linguistics woes (although plenty of English-speaking Bulgarian friends were invaluable in this regard). For example, Bulgaria was part of the Ottoman Empire for nearly five centuries, thus some of the most colorful words in Bulgarian today are Turkish borrowings that, when used in place of their Slavic synonyms, add a facetious flavor, like a good inside joke. (Juxtaposed against the dull Slavic turgoviya for “trade” or “business,” the Turkish borrowing alushverish, with its tang of not-quite-aboveboard wheeling-and-dealing, is far more vivid: To my great amusement, in Istanbul I have seen stores advertise their alushverish in broad daylight!) The liveliness these Turkishisms continue to inject in the Bulgarian language can most clearly be seen in Bay Ganyo, a late nineteenth-century fictional character invented by Aleko Konstantinov. In the novel of the same name, a group of college students tells stories about Bay Ganyo, an archetypal backwoods slyboots and huckster of rose oil who goes around Europe committing cringeworthy cultural faux pas. Interestingly enough, however, to the twenty-first-century reader, Bay Ganyo himself actually sounds more vivid and “contemporary” thanks in large part to the Turkishisms that pepper his speech, while the students describing his exploits sound irretrievably archaic and stilted to the modern ear—a testament to the enduring power of this lexical subset in Bulgarian language and literature. The anguish for the English-language translator is that we have no corresponding register that captures the tongue-in-cheek tang of this vocabulary—perhaps certain Yiddish borrowings such as putz and shyster in American English come closest, but they lack the whole corresponding cultural-historical paradigm that Turkish borrowings in Bulgarian bring in tow.

Socialist terminology is another bugbear for the American translator of Bulgarian literature, since we again have no sociohistorical parallel, while much of contemporary Bulgarian literature addresses the country’s socialist past. One hallmark of socialist-speak is its bombastic nonsensicality—highfalutin phrases that upon further inspection are devoid of content, or rather, the content itself is in the very bombastic sense of the words rather than in their meaning. Hence the translator is faced with the uncomfortable task of trying to capture this pathos-laden hollowness without sounding merely like a bad translation. This challenge has dogged me for years, most recently rearing its head in Georgi Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow, my translation of which was published in English by Open Letter this past spring. The novel is a rumination on childhood, which for Gospodinov was lived out under socialism and hence inextricably linked with it; the author makes use of socialist-speak, often for comic or nostalgic effect, as in this “Letter to a Young Comsomol Member”:

Dear Young Man, 

There are moments in a person’s life that are never forgotten. Today, with trembling hands you untie the knot of your scarlet Pioneer’s neckerchief, replacing it with a red Comsomol membership booklet. This is a symbol of the great trust the Party and our heroic and hardworking people have in you. 

Be decent and daring in word and deed! Dedicate the drive of your youth and the wisdom of your mature years to that which is dearest to all generations—the Homeland!

Here at least I was saved by the fact that Gospodinov himself comments on the absurdity of the language: “Yet another stellar example of socialist-speak. I now see that it is a mouthful: Be decent and daring in word and deed! Dedicate the drive.… What are all those Ds, why make the tongue scoot along on its ass?” In Georgi Tenev’s Party Headquarters, however, another work riddled with socialist-speak, I’ve had to plunge wholeheartedly into the pathos, hoping the reader will follow suit and recognize this as a deliberate stylistic choice. 

The poetic aspect of Bulgarian prose is another challenge, with Gospodinov again as a good example. He cut his teeth as a poet, thus the sound of his prose, the rhythm, is extremely important. Indeed, much of the expressiveness of The Physics of Sorrow comes from this poetic sensibility—the emotional impact comes from his brief, poignant snapshots of being. I was lucky to be a translator in situ, living in the epicenter of Bulgarian literary production during the months I worked on the translation. I would get together regularly with Gospodinov to pick his brain, run ideas past him, and ruminate about the best ways to tackle a particular passage—all over coffee, of course. 

So, when asked another question Americans love: What are you doing in Bulgaria? My facetious answer is “Having fun!” But it’s actually not at all far from the truth. Being a translator of Bulgarian literature is one of the best, most intellectually and spiritually fulfilling careers I could imagine—despite the lurking specter of starvation. I prefer to see it as artistic salvation from the workaday world, an outlet for my own creativity, which also allows me to give back to this strange and wonderful country that has been kind enough to take me in and offer me a home. It has been an honor for me to serve as a bridge through which the international literary community has come to know wonderful Bulgarian works. And as portentous as it may sound, now that I have a Bulgarian passport, I seem to have gotten a Bulgarian state of mind right along with it: I just might agree that through some strange twist of fate, these books and this translator’s life that I have come to love were in some small way also written for me

 

Angela Rodel is a professional literary translator living and working in Bulgaria. She received a 2014 NEA translation grant for Georgi Gospodinov’s novel The Physics of Sorrow (Open Letter Books, 2015), as well as a 2010 PEN Translation Fund Grant for Georgi Tenev’s story collection Holy Light. Five novels in her translation have been published by U.S. and UK publishers.

 

Instinct, Energy, and Luck: An Indie-Publisher Roundtable on Literature in Translation

by

Jeremiah Chamberlin

10.14.15

In the years I worked as a bookseller after college, I had the good fortune to encounter a wide range of literatures in translation. The indie bookshop I worked at, the now-closed Canterbury Booksellers in Madison, Wisconsin, had a section devoted to the work of Nobel Prize winners, as well as an international-fiction section. One of my fondest and most surprising reading experiences came after picking up a pale-green galley of Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Knopf, 1997), knowing nothing yet of this author, but soon tumbling in awe through Murakami’s (translated) prose.

It wasn’t until I began working with the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation (EKF), an organization dedicated to creating connections among Bulgarian, American, and British writers, that I truly began to learn about the challenges of international literature reaching our shores, as well as the importance of nurturing an audience for it. Only approximately 3 percent of the books published in this country are works in translation, and, as the editors of the website Three Percent state, “In terms of literary fiction and poetry, the number is actually closer to 0.7 percent.”

Yet what I was discovering each summer I visited Bulgaria was an incredibly rich and diverse literary tradition—one in which I deeply wanted to immerse myself but was unable to because so few of these books had been translated into English. And Bulgaria is but one small country in the region. What other marvelous books from nearby neighbors like Greece and Serbia and Turkey was I not finding on the shelves back in the United States? The world of English-language publishing suddenly felt extremely small.

Through my work with the EKF, I also started meeting the editors and publishers of presses and literary journals, each passionate about bringing the best of international literature to English-speaking readers—places like Dalkey Archive Press and New Vessel Press, as well as publications like Absinthe: A Journal of World Literature in Translation and Words Without Borders.

So, as part of this issue dedicated to independent publishing, I planned to sit down with five editors and publishers to talk with them about the state of international literature, the particular challenges of focusing on books in translation, how to find readers for their titles, and what the industry should be paying attention to in the future.

Joining me were Barbara Epler, publisher and editor in chief of New Directions; CJ Evans, editorial director of Two Lines Press and editor of the biannual journal Two Lines: World Writing in Translation; Chad Post, founder and editor of Open Letter Books and Three Percent; Michael Reynolds, editor in chief of Europa Editions; and Jill Schoolman, founder and publisher of Archipelago Books.

How did you each come to publishing, particularly working with literature in translation? What drew you initially or continues to draw you today?
Michael Reynolds:
I never imagined a career in publishing until I woke up one day and had one. I was living in Rome in the early 2000s, at about the same time the founders and publishers of Europa Editions, Sandro Ferri and Sandra Ozzola Ferri, were thinking about opening an American publishing house. At the time, I was doing odd jobs, among them running a writers festival in Rome with a couple of friends. Thanks to this work I was meeting quite a few Italian writers and publishing people. I got wind of what Sandro and Sandra were planning to do and decided to knock on the door of their Italian publishing house and offer my services—I had no idea of what those services might be.

As with most things in life, timing is everything. I was in the right place at the right time, because Sandro and Sandra were getting ready to announce the opening of Europa Editions at the Frankfurt Book Fair. That was the summer of 2004.

The seed of the idea started growing in them right after 9/11, when it seemed that once again the world was balkanizing, that the free exchange of ideas and opinions was being threatened, and that a surreal hysteria was enveloping the world—remember Freedom Fries? At the time, people all over the world, common people not intellectuals or academics, seemed to have fewer and fewer channels for communicating or communing. Sandro and Sandra [who founded Europa’s sister company in Italy, Edizioni EO, in the 1970s with the purpose of bringing unpublished, unknown, and under-appreciated authors from Eastern Europe to the Italian market] asked themselves what, as publishers, they could do to help overcome that communication breakdown. At the time, it also seemed to them—and, incidentally, not to anyone else—that an American publishing house focused on work in translation was a good business opportunity.

But beyond the business opportunity and the ideological motivation, there was also a more basic impulse: the desire to share something good. The fact that many of their favorite writers from Europe and elsewhere were not available to American readers because no publisher was in a position or of a persuasion to publish them in the States seemed almost unbearable. The explosion of social media demonstrates the basic human urge to share something that you feel strongly about with others. Europa was founded with this idea of sharing, of exchange, as its cornerstone.

My interest in international literature extends beyond the company that I work for, but I think it has found a natural home at Europa. And what continues to draw me to work with books in translation today is precisely this idea that something good is something that should be shared, in most cases with as many people as possible. I don’t believe that publishing work in translation should be considered a priori a noble endeavor. And I’m also dubious about the quantitative approach to evaluating where we’re at in terms of inclusiveness of literature in translation in the American culture of reading. I simply know that there are good, deserving, important, interesting, entertaining, provocative books being written in languages other than English. It’s a shame when those books cannot be read and talked about by people in America, the UK, Australia, etc. It impoverishes us all.

CJ Evans: Like Michael, I didn’t envision a career in publishing. I was working as the host in a “family brewpub”—which is as horrible as it sounds—in Portland in 2002 and a friend suggested I go up to Tin House magazine and see if they needed a poetry reader. I read for them for a while, then was hired as an editorial assistant for the magazine and to help with the development of the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop. When my wife and I moved to San Francisco in 2010, a friend suggested I check out the Center for the Art of Translation, which was, at the time, publishing an annual of international literature called Two Lines

I came on as the managing editor of Two Lines shortly thereafter. From the time I started, Olivia Sears, the founder of Two Lines and the Center, was talking about what the next steps for the journal might be. We had all of these wonderful contacts, primarily translators, built up from the nearly two decades of publishing, and felt that we could be doing more. We considered doing regional anthologies, but in nearly every issue we put out there was an excerpt from a book that we thought should be published in English, but couldn’t think of quite the right fit for a press to send the translator to. So, in 2012, Olivia; Scott Esposito, the marketing manager; and I decided we’d go for it and start the press to publish those books ourselves. 

Though I have always read literature in translation, my professional background had been much more focused on contemporary American literature. The way I like to think about it is that I don’t have any special interest in international literature. I’m, personally, very much not interested in the cultural dialogue aspects of it, even though I do see that there’s value in that. I’m interested in publishing the best books I can get my hands on, in a small press environment. And I firmly believe a huge percentage of the best books and writers are not in English. It is continually shocking to me how much amazing work hasn’t been published in translation yet. I think of a writer like Marie NDiaye, with whom we’ve done two books; she won the Prix Goncourt and was the youngest writer to ever be a finalist for the Man Booker Prize. Someone of her stature would be unavailable to a press of our size in the US if she was writing in English. But because she’s French I’m able to publish her.

Barbara Epler: Not to be an echo chamber, but I also never thought I was going into publishing as a profession. If it is one!

I was disenchanted with staying on the professor track—and why I ever thought I would be one is long lost—and I was in love with someone in NYC and thrilled to get here. So I told my parents I was taking a year or two off before grad school and that I would get a job in publishing—thinking that that would be as easy as falling off a log. But then I couldn’t type and no one would hire me and it wasn’t until I met Griselda Ohannessian, who was running New Directions, that I met anyone who would talk to me.  

Now, it’s thirty-one years later.  

Jill Schoolman: I, too, sort of stumbled into publishing after having wandered around for a while trying various things. I started out working in film; I did a film course in Maine, worked on a few films in New York and then in Paris. In Paris I was also doing other things to make ends meet, like delivering pizzas on mopeds. After a few years of freelance film work, I started sniffing around for other possibilities. I then met Dan Simon and started interning for Seven Stories Press, where I learned a great deal about the business and about how much fun it could be to publish books. I was instinctively drawn to international literature. I grew up on a diet of classics from different parts of the world, I love traveling, and I love discovering a culture through its books and films.

After working as an editor with Seven Stories for a few years, I started dreaming out loud about starting a press devoted to international literature. It felt like a good moment to do it, and the people around me encouraged me to try to make it happen. I decided that if we set up Archipelago Books as a not-for-profit press, we might be able to be less dependent on book sales for survival. I’m very glad we did this. I was working out of my studio apartment for about a year, even after I hired a colleague and we enlisted a couple interns. My cat never seemed to mind, until our first books appeared in 2004, and she urged us in her way to find some office space.

Chad Post: After graduating from college, I worked at a couple of indie bookstores: Schuler Books & Music in Grand Rapids, Michigan, then Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh, North Carolina. I learned a ton of stuff from working in bookstores about the business end of things. But I ended up leaving [bookselling] because I wanted to get into the other side of things, helping decide which books would be sold, rather than hoping for someone else to make it possible for me to try and convince others to read these books.

At that time, Dalkey Archive had started a fellowship program, which was like grad school for publishing, but with a worse stipend. I was the first or second fellow to do this, back in the summer of 2000, and I quickly transitioned from working on editorial things to working with bookstores, and a year later was the director of marketing and sales. Fast forward seven years, and I ended up at the University of Rochester with two other former Dalkey employees, working on setting up a new publishing house that would support the literary translation programs the university wanted to launch. 

I think the thing I like best about being here in Rochester is the varied nature of what I’m doing as a “publisher.” Open Letter is a component of the University of Rochester, so our reader outreach and educational opportunities come more directly from a place geared toward expanding minds and whatnot.

The publishing side of things has been pretty tough. It takes a lot to get established sales wise, and although we’ve had some decent successes—Zone by Mathias Enard, The Golden Calf by Ilf & Petrov, The Private Lives of Trees by Alejandro Zambra—there hasn’t been that true breakout title that changes your fortunes or gets the big mainstream media outlets to start paying attention to you. We have no Sebald or Bolaño or Ferrante or Knausgaard. One day!

Point being, if my job were only predicated on sales and our NEA grant, it would be fine, but maybe unremarkable? I think the things that define our organization, and the reasons I’m still in publishing—which can be grueling, especially if you started your press and are too close to it, emotionally tied to the successes and failures of the books—are all the ancillary things we do for readers: the Three Percent blog; the Translation Database, which, thanks to the wealth of data I’ve accumulated, is allowing me to work on a research project about how many books by women are translated from various languages and countries; the Best Translated Book Award; the podcast I do with Tom Roberge; even the World Cup of Literature and Women’s World Cup of Literature—two fun projects that I put together just to help get more people talking about more international literature.

The other thing that I really like about my position is working with young translators. Four to six translators come here every fall to get their MA, and I work with them all on a weekly basis, through the two classes I teach, by talking with them in the office, reading their samples, and organizing a weekly translation workshop for all the translators in the Rochester area—of which there are many, including Kerri Pierce and Lytton Smith, who are two of the best in the country. Without this sort of interaction, I think we’d really be cut off from the book world. Especially since there is no indie bookstore in town. 

What issues do you feel are most pressing for independent publishers in general and those working with literature in translation in particular?
Reynolds: In my mind, the No. 1 issue concerning the publication of work in translation is that of discoverability and promotion. I’m not entirely convinced that we have to dramatically increase the number of books in translation published here at all costs, but I definitely think that we need to grow the audience for those books that are published. Over the past ten to twenty years it seems to me that the focus has been on printing as many titles in translation as possible. But printing is not the same as publishing. I would like to see us all work more, and together, on innovative and effective ways of getting our books into the hands of a larger number of readers.

Evans: I very much agree with Michael that discoverability and promotion are the main difficulties we face, although I’m not ignoring the fact that editors at both small presses and major houses would identify the same challenge. Could any of us ever have enough readers? We made a very conscious decision early on to keep our list small so that we could continue to build the audience for our backlist and have every title we publish be a frontlist title.

In some ways I feel the literary community is coming around to translated literature, and the field has certainly grown in respect and readership since Olivia Sears started the journal Two Lines more than twenty years ago, but it still feels that we’re relegated to second class, that our books need to be classified in some category other than merely “books.” I love that organizations like PEN and Chad’s Best Translated Book Award exist, but I don’t understand why these translated books need to be distinguished from books written in English when it comes to awards and reviews. I don’t want our books to be “translated” books or “international” books, but just really good books. End stop.

I think some of this comes from a strategic mistake of the international-lit community years ago, when many translated titles were marketed as being “good for you” literature—marketed as books that would broaden a reader’s horizons. Some of it is ignorance about the artistry and skill of translators. Some of it, perhaps, is merely a type of systemic high-minded xenophobia. I think battling these challenges both within this smaller community of translation presses and within the slightly larger pool of literary presses and readers is essential to continued growth and sustainability.

Epler: I agree, and also, I think the main concern is finding readers for amazing books. Not necessarily flooding the market with more and more translations—as if that vision of emulating the flood of new English-language titles will get anyone anywhere. Say we wanted to have the German ratio of translated titles. Really? If we approach 40 or 50 percent, then we would have, say, 100,000 new translated titles annually. That also seems crackers. 

Schoolman: I’d say the most mysterious [issue] is how to survive. Someone should write a how-to book on the subject. How to keep our authors and translators writing, and how to stay afloat as a press when what trickles in doesn’t always amount to what’s flowing out in various directions. Because the dimensions of the industry—publishers, booksellers, librarians, reviewers and bloggers, distributors, readers, writers, agents, translators, educators—are changing so rapidly we need to find new ways of collaborating.

It’s an ongoing challenge to figure out what each book needs—they all have different needs and are born in different circumstances. It’s a creative process that involves instinct, energy, and luck. The most elusive question remains, How can we get our books noticed, and read?

Post: The publishing business can be really infuriating, and the fact that the main business model for the past few decades has been one of acceleration—acquire more presses; publish more books, faster; make them available quicker—is a good example of that. The field has created a glut that might have some benefits—more voices being published—but also ends up with a “throw shit at the wall and see what sticks” way of promotion. For presses like the ones here, we need to be more innovative and interesting to cut through the six-figure marketing campaigns and seven-figure advances.

What are some of the means by which you have tried to break into the market as independent publishers?
Post
: First and foremost, when I think of our five presses and how we distinguish ourselves from most of the others, I think of the cover design. Archipelago is maybe the most distinct with the square format, but four of us all use covers that go together as a sort of set. And although New Directions doesn’t have one overriding “look,” there are subsets, like the Pearl series, and an overarching sort of feel to the look of the books. I don’t want to speak for anyone else, but it’s helped us in getting people to recognize the press and to be able to know right off the bat that they’re looking at an Open Letter title when they see it in the store. My hope is that a good experience with one of our books makes a reader more willing to pick up the others, trusting that we won’t lead them astray, even if they haven’t heard of the particular author. And being able to identify our books at a glance should, theoretically, help that.

This is also in line with why we offered subscriptions right from the start. Although the content and styles of the books range widely, they somehow fit together and look nice on a bookshelf.

Evans: I agree with Chad that it’s important to develop a strong, identifiable brand—though I loathe that word—and that also extends to the voice of the press. One of the things I love about the presses in this roundtable is that each has its own aesthetic in acquisitions as well. In addition, with each book we try to find and target what we call the “one bigger pond” of readers. We don’t want to just step into the biggest ponds and always be the smallest fish holding out to land the cover of the NYRB, we want to step into the slightly bigger pond and see if we can wreak a little havoc as medium fish. We’d love to have that breakout title, but a lot of presses have gone under waiting for their Roberto Bolaño or Nell Zink.

For most titles we also put aside a little bit of money to try…something. Whether [it’s] a funky mailing to bookstore buyers, some extra ARCs to target academic or library sales, special events with new partners, whatever we think will work best with the resources we have for that title, with the idea that we’re also trying to make new connections for the press as a whole.

Subscriptions have been essential, as has been our nonprofit status, which lets us take some risks on books and marketing as we build the press—we’re the new kids on the block so we’re still in a period of experimentation. I certainly agree with Barbara that more and more books is not the answer—not only in translation—and I think trying to “create” readers sounds like a pretty tall challenge; I’d rather just poach readers of contemporary American literature for translated literature.

Epler: Long ago New Directions was heavily branded by the old black-and-white paperbacks, but now it’s less so. I think I can detect a sort of spectrum of design for our books, but I imagine that’s pretty much in the eye of the beholder in this case. I’d say more that New Directions tries to always bring out books of a certain quality and originality, to maintain among book buyers, booksellers, reviewers, and readers a sort of sense of what you’ll be getting if you pick up a New Directions book, which we hope is real art and deep pleasure.

However, I think this is so much more a preoccupation of publishers than of readers, who tend to follow writers, rather than thinking much about which house is bringing the writer out. I think it helps a lot if you can stick with authors and really represent them in English, and over time keep building their body of work here, which is a long and costly process but can really work, and result in a strong audience. Live events and getting the author and translator here is also key, as are appearances in magazines.

To put the books across, I think it’s a matter of trying everything you can think of and of having the sort of dedicated staff you need: It can be Crazy Town as far as how hard everyone here has to work. But it is immensely satisfying when you do find an audience for a great writer.

Reynolds: For Europa, it has been very much about branding. I gather there are more highfalutin words for this process—creating a personality, an identity, etc., that readers, retail partners, and members of the reviewing community learn to distinguish and trust over time—but I guess in the end it is just plain old branding. I like to think of what we do as being a conversation with these various players, meaning that I think of our publishing program as being a dialogue with readers. In the editorial choices we make and the way we go about publishing we are opening a conversation with an affirmation along the lines of: “This is what we think is important, interesting, significant, and entertaining. Take a look! What do you think?” We demarcate this conversation in a variety of ways: uniform design, acquisitions that fall within a certain range on the broad spectrum between experimental/densely literary and commercial, a way of approaching translation, etc. If we remain consistent with these aspects then we create an identity that can potentially ferry new, unknown, and foreign writers into the market.

In the end, I think it’s all about the books. This is a mantra I repeat to myself often. I don’t think publishers of our kind are in a position to make a success out of a really crappy book. The big guys and gals can do that; they have the marketing and leverage not only to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear but also to fill that purse with gold. We can’t. We have to have good books, quality books that fit into the brand/identity/personality/conversation we have established with readers and retailers. What I’m sure we’ve all experienced, almost on a daily basis, is the opposite: failing to reach an audience with what we consider to be a really great book, one that sits perfectly on our list. You can do everything possible for a book and it still doesn’t work.

I’d like to talk a bit about the work of “outreach.” Obviously, this kind of activity fits more squarely into the mission of a nonprofit or a press connected with a university in the way Open Letter is. But I think it is also something that all presses should engage in. We have lost the ability to talk about books in meaningful ways. Most people are unable to go much further than a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down, or appraise a work of literature with more than “I hated it” or “I loved it.” As a culture—I mean outside of our very limited clique—we have become critically illiterate; we no longer know how to understand, let alone express, the social, political, cultural, historical significance of a book. For that matter, we are almost incapable of expressing its significance for us even on a personal level. It may just be the way of the world—I think many people are conversant on the social and cultural significance of Breaking Bad, for example—and I should get over it. At the same time, I think a more critically literate readership would not only be important for the culture but would also mean that presses like ours would sell more books. Thus, perhaps efforts to grow this kind of critical literacy should be calculated more explicitly as part of our marketing budget. We are, after all, not simply trying to “break into the market” but also attempting to shape that market.

Let’s talk about a “critically literate readership,” the decline of which people often attribute, at least in part, to the shuttering of book pages in newspapers and decreased coverage for literature in periodicals. But at the same time, as the editor in chief of Fiction Writers Review, I also know that there are a number of venues out there for thoughtful discussion of books. So where are people having the sorts of conversations about books that you wished more readers were aware of? Or what avenues for outreach would you either direct people toward to widen those conversations or propose creating, if you’re not already engaged in doing so?
Reynolds: I think you’re opening up a can of worms with this one. The conversation is long, deep, and broad. I’m going to try to condense some of my thoughts into morsels.

I like Fiction Writers Review and I respect what you’re doing there. In many ways it corresponds to exactly the kind of conversation about books that I suggested in my earlier answer we lack. But the context does not. This is not really because FWR and like-minded venues are doing something wrong, but rather because the media of mass culture are not behind you. Forgive me if I’m wrong, but I imagine that the readers of FWR belong to a specific demographic and in many ways represent a cultural elite; and, perhaps even more poignantly, are mostly writers, who may or may not be real readers—a whole other can of worms. There is, as a result, an insularity to that kind of conversation that is unhelpful for the larger goal of making books and discussion about books relevant to “the masses.”

Consider the sheer number and the production quality of television programs about sports, movies, celebrities, TV, and the immense creativity that goes into developing and duplicating formats on these subjects. These programs cater to and shape the opinions and the conversations of many millions of people. As far as I know, there is currently no TV format dealing with books. Do we need one? Christ, I don’t know. I haven’t owned a TV for thirty-five years. But I do find the idea of using the means of mass culture to diffuse a vocabulary for talking about books appealing.

To be honest, the place where I see the kind of conversation about books that I desire happening most often is in the good old-fashioned book group. Book-group members, if you exclude New York, mostly don’t work in publishing and are not connected to the book industry at all. They are not academics. They are working people, housewives, the elderly, etc., who seek a congenial “third place” connected to their passion for reading and for talking. If the label and the formalities of running a book group fell away, this kind of atmosphere, and this kind of conversation, is my ideal. This “third place/great good place” idea that, frankly, I first heard about only a few years ago at Winter Institute, has crystallized a lot of my thinking on these questions. When I imagine “conversation about books” I don’t think of a lecture hall, an online magazine, publishing parties, or the pages of the New York Times; I think of a pub. Specifically I think of the pub on the corner of my street where I sometimes stop for a beer on my way home. If, in that context, in cities and towns across the country, in addition to talking about the merits of a sports player or a celebrity, patrons were also hotly debating the merits of a recent novel and pulling apart what was innovative about it and what had been rehashed from the literary tradition, I would feel that we had gone a long way to becoming “critically literate” as a culture.

Fostering this dialogue cannot be simply a question of preaching to the choir or making privileged people more privileged. As such, in my opinion, the organizations we must entrust to foster the ability to appreciate, place, understand, and talk about books are: public schools, libraries, community and continuing-education systems, universities. Other noninstitutional organizations whose efforts I feel run in this direction are in-school initiatives like Girls Write Now and writers and poets in the schools; failed experiments like Book Night, and more successful ones like One City, One Book; college “freshman reads” programs; etc.

page_5: 

We, as an industry, have our share of the blame in all this. We publish too many books. We publish too many insignificant books. As a result it becomes very difficult for an important book, one that can be enjoyed and talked about by people from many walks of life, to make its way amid the dreck to readers.

This will sound like a cop-out—we haven’t really initiated or engaged in any specific outreach programs—but I think our publishing program itself, and the readership it targets, are both conceived partially as a response to this crisis in critical literacy.

I also agree that online journals, book sites, and the like can be a bit of an echo chamber and perhaps broadcast to a narrow audience. This is partly the reason FWR founded an annual daylong literary symposium in Ann Arbor, free and open to the public, called the State of the Book, and why we now are one of the sponsors for the Voices of the Middle West festival each spring—a similar event that tries to nurture a broader conversation about books in collaboration with the university and some local community organizations. We especially try to reach out to younger readers and college students through these various channels. I’m curious to hear from others about similar programs that you’ve found equally beneficial on this front, or initiatives that might be adopted elsewhere, whether they’re projects of your own or others. And, of course, those engines—whether online or on the ground—that are helping foster the most productive conversations.
Schoolman: I love the long-form critical essay, in which the lines between writer, reader, and critic blur, where there is room to explore the inner world of a book and its cultural context, where there is room for the critic-writer’s own ideas to emerge and breathe. There are still places where this is possible: the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Threepenny Review, Guernica, Asymptote, Music & Literature, the White Review, the Quarterly Conversation.

I agree with Michael that the best, most far-reaching conversations about books can happen in a local bar—the relationship between the overworked editor and the local bar is of course another question to explore—where people can express themselves without a lot of literary jargon. Archipelago has an ongoing relationship with a fantastic organization based in Staten Island, New York, called OutLOUD. It does an inspiring job of bringing people of all ages together from various walks of life to read and think about books and art. The conversations about our books and the worlds each has emerged from are always alive and move in surprising directions.

I’m intrigued by Michael’s comment about writers not necessarily counting as readers. Are you saying that they read in a different way? That reading is perhaps more essential to them than to other people? Or…?

Reynolds: Sorry, Jill. My comment about writers/readers wasn’t clear at all. I just meant that I am often surprised at how writers or those who have aspirations to be writers are not careful, prolific readers and converse about books in too businesslike a way, if at all. In addition, a high number of visitors to FWR and other similar venues may not be an indication of a largish public engaging in meaningful discussion about books and their place in the culture and society because many of those visitors may be aspiring writers engaging in the conversation in order to advance their careers rather than to pursue a genuine, disinterested engagement with the literary and artistic questions being raised. I’m not necessarily against writers advancing their careers! But this is not the kind of critical literacy, nor the kind of disinterested dialogue, I was talking about in my original comment.

Post: All the places Jill mentions are ones I would think to recommend as well. Drawing on Michael’s response, though, I do think there is a difference between the audiences reading the White Review or Quarterly Conversation—mostly people looking for high-minded discussion of capital-L Literature—and casual readers discussing books in a bar. To create and sustain a vibrant book culture we need to have outlets from both ends of the spectrum—along with Twitter conversations that range in quality from witty banter to knee-jerk reactions to measured comments [from] book clubs and mainstream reviews—since there’s no single way people can, or should, be interacting with and talking about books. Although what’s most important, in my opinion, is getting people who aren’t writers or publishing people talking about books. That’s what we exist for, right?

When I worked in independent bookstores, the sort of conversation Michael and I are pining for seemed to happen on a regular basis, both among booksellers and with customers. It probably still does, but there’s no bookstore in Rochester where this experience could possibly take place—something that’s likely the case in a lot of other midsize cities. My local bar, NOX, is actually book-themed, so it could be a bar where books are discussed. I would very much like that.

Reynolds: The conclusion to this whole conversation: books and booze, together forever!

Post: Cheers!

Epler: That sort of sounds like a wrap. Or last call? Just a final note so I don’t feel like a liar: I hands-down agree with talking up books anywhere and everywhere—which is why we have canaries here tweeting away, though I don’t know what they might be twittering—and we love any book talk from the highbrow journals to suburban book clubs to bar chats, but I do have to say—just to be honest—that New Directions just doesn’t do the sort of outreach that’s been mentioned, and much admired by me, such as Jill’s OutLOUD efforts and FWR’s engagement with local community organizations. We donate books to prisons and to some libraries, and give time to PEN and whatnot, but really we’re not that socially conscious. Maybe the old dog can learn new tricks, but that’s the truth these days. Now, back to the bar!

Evans: Practically, I’d love to see an organized effort in MFA programs and colleges to encourage the next generation who want to get into publishing to pursue some of the areas behind the scenes. If every person who starts a new literary journal in the next year would instead focus on hosting a book club at a local bookstore—or bar!—we’d be a healthier community. Or tackle the problems in literary magazine distribution. Or work at nonprofit fund-raising and/or lobbying for literary nonprofits. These are not as sexy as being an editor—although I assume my fellow panelists will agree that there’s very little that’s sexy about actually being an editor—but the same attention in the MFA programs to the real health of publishing as to pedagogy could do a lot for the industry.

I apologize for ending on a down note, but a certain amount of the reading audience is just gone—there’s simply other media that appeals more to a lot of the broader audience. But we’ve hopefully learned, after the rise and leveling of the e-book panic, that there continues to be an audience, and a sizable one, for literary books. But we need to rebuild the base of our industry and foster not readers necessarily, but rather those who will get the books into the readers’ hands. More book clubs. More diversity. More lobbying. More education nonprofits. More pop-up bookstores. More ideas and risks and people to start the casual conversations in the bar that end deep at last call.

Jeremiah Chamberlin teaches at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he is the assistant director of the English Department Writing Program. He is also the editor in chief of Fiction Writers Review as well as a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Small Press Points: Damaged Goods Press

by

Staff

12.15.21

The two-person editorial team behind Damaged Goods Press operates with a clear sense of purpose: “We are doing this out of love and admiration for queer and trans peoples’ resilience in a world filled with bigotry and violence,” says Caseyrenée Lopez, the founding editor and publisher, who runs the press alongside prose editor Willy Miller. Based in Richmond, Virginia, Damaged Goods has published poetry and lyrical nonfiction by queer and trans writers since 2015.

While Lopez has seen the literary landscape become more inclusive with time, they note there are still few publishers that are exclusively dedicated to queer and trans voices. Damaged Goods Press offers a particularly liberated platform for these writers: “We like weird,” says Lopez. “If it’s complex and nonlinear, that’s even better.” They hope that Damaged Goods titles will challenge readers’ understanding of “personhood, the self, and of what literature is and can be.” Lopez cites the press’s most recent chapbook, disseueraunce by Tamsin Blaxter—“a story of love gone awry”—as well as When the Mo(n)ths (Dis)Appeared by Lydja Uta Szatkowska and void of pronouns by m/ryan murphy, as among the “offbeat books” that reflect the Damaged Goods ethos. The press aims to publish one or two chapbooks, full-length books, or anthologies each year, and the editors are currently considering submissions for publication in 2022. “If you are writing in a way that seems like it’s not represented in publishing, send it our way,” says Lopez. “I want to see math equations and foreign languages or created languages and new forms.” Damaged Goods Press accepts submissions via e-mail from October to February and does not charge a reading fee. 

Lambda Expands Writers in Schools

by

Brian Gresko

12.15.21

For over five years Lambda Literary—a national organization that champions lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) books and authors—has been changing the lives of students across New York City through its free Writers in Schools program. The program centers on a simple yet profound idea: Through reading books by LGBTQ authors, then meeting those authors in person to hear about their life experiences, youth will learn to celebrate queerness. In September, Lambda announced that in recognition of the program’s value, the New York City Council had decided to grant the program four times the amount it previously received in funding: $400,000, up from $100,000.

The program is designed for both clubs and classrooms, from kindergarten through twelfth grade. For classrooms, Lambda provides books along with curriculum materials to help teachers guide discussion, while for clubs, like a school’s gender-sexuality alliance, the books become springboards for less formal, more relaxed conversations about identity. 

Program manager Monica Carter, who has been involved with Writers in Schools since its inception in New York City in 2015, says the highlight for students is always the author visit. A writer might come to a classroom to facilitate a book discussion, chat with a club about their writing and life, or address a school-wide assembly. Lambda staff members are thoughtful about laying the groundwork to make each visit a success: For example, teachers are given guidance on how to prepare their students so that the experience feels safe for both the authors and the youth. 

Chinelo Okparanta, whose second novel, Harry Sylvester Bird, is forthcoming from Mariner Books in July, has been a part of the program since 2017 and has visited a number of high schools throughout New York City. Over e-mail she said, “I always expect that I will learn as much from the students as they learn from me, so it’s important for me to listen well and ask questions, too.” Through talking with students, she said, “I have stumbled upon new ways of understanding the world—and of interrogating my work.” 

Meredith Talusan, author of the memoir Fairest (Viking, 2020), worked with high school students this past spring in a virtual environment. Like Okparanta she was impressed by the students’ rigorous curiosity. “While I was discussing the relationship between my trans and immigrant identities, I remember one of the students not only referring to my book, but also quoting an article I’d completely forgotten I wrote and comparing the way I talked about my identities in the article versus the book. I doubt I’ve ever been so closely read!”

For queer students these events can be life-changing. “We’ve seen the number of students who feel safe coming out increase after the author visits,” Carter says. Sometimes students come out to the authors during the event itself. “These visits have real-life, real-time impacts that help increase the acceptance and affirmation of queer kids and queer identity.” A 2019 survey from GLSEN, a national organization dedicated to LGBTQ student rights and safety, supports what Lambda hears anecdotally: In schools where students have this kind of curriculum exposure to queer identity, 66.9 percent of queer students report that their peers are “somewhat or very accepting of LGBTQ people,” compared to 37.9 percent at schools without it.

In some cases the program has had a school-wide effect. The concept of talking openly about pronouns has been introduced to the school culture. According to Carter, some school administrators have even reversed their decisions against providing students with gender-inclusive bathrooms. 

With its increased funding, the Writers in Schools program will be bringing books and author visits to ten thousand New York City public school students this school year alone. As in years past, many of the schools will be Title 1 schools, where the majority of students’ families are low-income. Lambda also runs free poetry workshops, in addition to virtual citywide events with best-selling authors such as Charlie Jane Anders, Malinda Lo, and Benjamin Alire Sáenz. These provide opportunities for an even broader group of queer students—and teachers, too—to encounter someone who models how to live with honesty and joy. “These events are celebrations of reading as well as queer life,” Carter says. “They become a touchstone for queer students and their allies.”

Darnell L. Moore signs copies of his memoir, No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America, for students at Forsyth Satellite Academy in 2019. (Credit: Monica Carter)
 

Outside of New York City, Lambda has run pilot programs in Oakland and Milwaukee. Carter hopes that, with the success of this program in the nation’s largest public school system, other cities will reach out and the program can expand even further. 

But no matter how the program scales up, Carter reiterates that it all comes back to the books and the people at the schools who seek out these connections. “This wouldn’t happen if it weren’t for the authors’ work,” she says. “And the students, who open their hearts and their minds to other experiences, and the educators who are committed to doing the things that need to be done in order to make safe spaces for queer students and their allies in their school.” 

 

Brian Gresko is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York, where he co-runs Pete’s Reading Series. 

Novelist and short-story writer Chinelo Okparanta (seated, second from left) with students at Vanguard High School in 2018. (Credit: Jennifer Cruz-Flores)

Craft Capsule: Queer Characters Who Behave Badly

by

Peter Kispert

2.15.21

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Thumbnail: Evie S.

Craft Capsule: Creating a Seasonal Writing Practice

by

Khadijah Queen

1.4.21

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Thumbnail: Oliver Hihn

Craft Capsule: Writing Hot

by

Jordan Kisner

11.30.20

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Thumbnail: Dmitry Bayer

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

by

Chen Chen

11.2.20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11. I started off as a fiction writer. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

ENDNOTES

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

 

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

Thumbnail: Romain Gille

Craft Capsule: We Are All Translators

by

Jenny Bhatt

9.21.20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10. Negotiating with what remains untranslatable.

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

 

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

Thumbnail: Patrick Tomasso

Craft Capsule: Doors vs. Corridors

by

Will Harris

8.17.20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Thumbnail: Kilarov Zaneit

Craft Capsule: The Authority of Black Childhood

by

Joy Priest

7.6.20

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

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

— from “Ars Poetica” by Joy Priest

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

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

*

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

*

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

*

I was a better poet when I was a child.

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

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

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

*

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

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

*

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

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

 

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

Thumbnail: Dustin Humes

Craft Capsule: Notes From the Cutting Room Floor

by

Sejal Shah

5.18.20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

22. Sometimes I skim the notes.

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

 

ENDNOTES

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

 

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

Thumbnail: Judith Browne

Craft Capsule: Reading Backwards

by

Carter Sickels

3.30.20

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Thumbnail: Amie LeeKing

Craft Capsule: Consulting the Tarot

by

Emma Copley Eisenberg

2.24.20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Thumbnail: Altınay Dinç

Craft Capsule: Start, Stop, Change

by

Mimi Lok

1.12.20

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

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

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

What needs to start? 

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

What needs to stop?

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

What needs to change?

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

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

 

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

Craft Capsule: The End

by

Cameron Awkward-Rich

12.30.19

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Thumbnail: Maximilian Paradiz 

Craft Capsule: Revising the Archive

by

Cameron Awkward-Rich

12.9.19

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Craft Capsule: Oblique Strategies

by

Kimberly King Parsons

7.15.19

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Craft Capsule: “Unlikable” Characters

by

Crystal Hana Kim

7.25.18

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Craft Capsule: Multiple Narrators

by

Crystal Hana Kim

7.18.18

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Craft Capsule: Who Are You?

by

Crystal Hana Kim

7.4.18

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Craft Capsule: Tao Te Ching

by

Simon Van Booy

6.13.18

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have faith.  

Laugh.  

Cry.

Sleep.

Dream.

 

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

Craft Capsule: A Bird in the Sky

by

Simon Van Booy

6.6.18

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t ever forget that.

 

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

Craft Capsule: Find Your Metaphor

by

Sandra Beasley

4.4.17

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Craft Capsule: The Egg in My Pocket

by

Christina Baker Kline

2.21.17

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

Craft Capsule: Deny the Accident

by

Christina Baker Kline

3.7.17

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

***

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

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

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

 

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

Craft Capsule: Good Sense

by

Christina Baker Kline

2.28.17

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

***

The problem of beginning…

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

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

 

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

Craft Capsule: Good Sense

by

Christina Baker Kline

2.28.17

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

***

The problem of beginning…

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

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

 

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

Craft Capsule: Good Sense

by

Christina Baker Kline

2.28.17

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

***

The problem of beginning…

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

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

 

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

Craft Capsule: Tolstoy’s Short Chapters

by

Christina Baker Kline

3.28.17

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

***

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

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

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

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

 

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

Craft Capsule: Visual Prompts

by

Christina Baker Kline

3.21.17

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

***

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

(Credit: Joe Bonomo)

Craft Capsule: Making Conversation

by

Christina Baker Kline

3.14.17

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

***

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

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

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

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

 

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

Craft Capsule: Making Conversation

by

Christina Baker Kline

3.14.17

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

***

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

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

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

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

 

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

Craft Capsule: Beware the Indeterminate “It”

by

Sandra Beasley

4.11.17

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Craft Capsule: Deny the Accident

by

Christina Baker Kline

3.7.17

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

***

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

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

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

 

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

Craft Capsule: A Bird in the Sky

by

Simon Van Booy

6.6.18

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t ever forget that.

 

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

Craft Capsule: A Form of Salvation

by

Simon Van Booy

6.20.18

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

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

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

Now you know. Creativity is a form of salvation.  

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

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

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

 

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

Craft Capsule: Find Your Voice

by

Simon Van Booy

6.27.18

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Craft Capsule: The Art of Research

by

Crystal Hana Kim

7.11.18

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Craft Capsule: The Art of Research

by

Crystal Hana Kim

7.11.18

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Craft Capsule: Who Are You?

by

Crystal Hana Kim

7.4.18

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

The Darkness Within: In Praise of the Unlikable

by

Steve Almond

12.13.17

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

Tell us how you really feel, Ahab.

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

by

Joseph Master

12.11.17

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That had to be jarring.
It was.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your writing? Boring?

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

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

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

Yep.
Where?

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

(Credit: Derek Shapton)

Where the Past Begins: An Interview With Amy Tan

by

Alison Singh Gee

10.13.17

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

(Credit: Julian Johnson)

The Heart of the Novel: Nicholas Montemarano and Eric Puchner

11.6.17

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craft Capsule: Find Your Voice

by

Simon Van Booy

6.27.18

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Craft Capsule: Infinite Distance, or The Starry Archipelagoes

by

Dan Beachy-Quick

3.6.18

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Craft Capsule: Hundreds of Eyes

by

Dan Beachy-Quick

2.20.18

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

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

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

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

 

I. Lines

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

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

But then, as Emily Dickinson offers it,

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

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

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

 

II. Sentences

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

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

 

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

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

by

Dan Beachy-Quick

2.13.18

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

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

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

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

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

 

I. The Craft of Humility

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

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

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

 

II. The Craft of Love

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Craft Capsule: Left Brain, Right Brain

by

Sandra Beasley

4.25.17

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

 

***

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

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

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

 

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

Craft Capsule: The Art of Targeted Revision

by

Sandra Beasley

4.18.17

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

***

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

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

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

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

 

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

Craft Capsule: The Scourge of Technology

by

Tayari Jones

1.23.18

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

Craft Capsule: Finding Your Story

by

Tayari Jones

1.16.18

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

***

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

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

So where was the novel?

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

Craft Capsule: Gin and Scotch Tape

by

Sandra Beasley

5.2.17

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Craft Capsule: Real Time vs. Page Time

by

Wiley Cash

9.26.17

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Craft Capsule: The Art of Active Dialogue

by

Wiley Cash

9.12.17

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Gaston,” the boy finally said.

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

The boy shrugged.

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

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

But what if I’d used gerunds?

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

Craft Capsule: Rhyme and the Delay in Time

by

Dan Beachy-Quick

2.27.18

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

by

Dan Beachy-Quick

2.13.18

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

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

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

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

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

 

I. The Craft of Humility

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

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

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

 

II. The Craft of Love

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Craft Capsule: Every Novel Is a Journey

by

Tayari Jones

2.6.18

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

***

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

Luckily, I had a craft epiphany.

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

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

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

So, what to do?

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

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

 

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

Craft Capsule: Finding the Center

by

Tayari Jones

1.30.18

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craft Capsule: Who Are You?

by

Crystal Hana Kim

7.4.18

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Craft Capsule: A Bird in the Sky

by

Simon Van Booy

6.6.18

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t ever forget that.

 

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

Craft Capsule: Finding Your Story

by

Tayari Jones

1.16.18

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

***

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

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

So where was the novel?

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

Craft Capsule: Writing “After”

by

Cameron Awkward-Rich

12.16.19

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Craft Capsule: Ordering the Story Collection

by

Kimberly King Parsons

7.22.19

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Craft Capsule: Elegy

by

Cameron Awkward-Rich

12.23.19

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

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

Diana Fuss

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Craft Capsule: In Praise of Writing in Longhand

by

Kimberly King Parsons

7.29.19

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Craft Capsule: Multiple Narrators

by

Crystal Hana Kim

7.18.18

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Craft Capsule: A Form of Salvation

by

Simon Van Booy

6.20.18

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

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

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

Now you know. Creativity is a form of salvation.  

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

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

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

 

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

Craft Capsule: Revising the Archive

by

Cameron Awkward-Rich

12.9.19

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Craft Capsule: Oblique Strategies

by

Kimberly King Parsons

7.15.19

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Craft Capsule: Who Are You?

by

Crystal Hana Kim

7.4.18

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Craft Capsule: Start, Stop, Change

by

Mimi Lok

1.12.20

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

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

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

What needs to start? 

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

What needs to stop?

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

What needs to change?

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

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

 

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

Craft Capsule: Revising the Archive

by

Cameron Awkward-Rich

12.9.19

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Craft Capsule: Oblique Strategies

by

Kimberly King Parsons

7.15.19

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Craft Capsule: Consulting the Tarot

by

Emma Copley Eisenberg

2.24.20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Thumbnail: Altınay Dinç

Craft Capsule: Start, Stop, Change

by

Mimi Lok

1.12.20

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

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

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

What needs to start? 

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

What needs to stop?

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

What needs to change?

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

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

 

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

Craft Capsule: Revising the Archive

by

Cameron Awkward-Rich

12.9.19

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Craft Capsule: Minor Characters

by

Carter Sickels

4.27.20

This is no. 58 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Families, however troubled, have their own unique way of functioning, like a single organism that holds its secrets, memories, habits, and narratives close. In my new novel, The Prettiest Star, the central story is about the Jacksons, who are learning to be with one another again after twenty-four-year-old Brian, who has recently found out he is HIV-positive, returns home after six years away in New York City. I wanted the novel—which is told from the perspectives of Brian, his younger sister, and his mother—to wrestle with internal family dynamics, but I quickly realized, in order to understand the Jacksons individually and as a family, I also needed them to engage with characters outside their immediate circle. 

Early on, I sent Brian’s younger sister, fourteen-year-old Jess, to the public swimming pool with a couple girls on her softball team. I had to get her away from her parents, brother, and relatives in order to understand how much the family secrets weigh on every moment of her life, but also to see Jess with more clarity—what makes her tick, what is she like? At the swimming pool, Jess feels both bored and uncomfortable around her teammates, who are only interested in impressing boys. When a couple of boys approach the girls, the scene also reveals a spark of resistance and sass in Jess I didn’t know she had. These minor characters brought tension and texture to the narrative, but also gave me insight into one of my major characters.

Sometimes, minor characters develop into key players—perhaps not quite major characters, but close. When Nick Marshall showed up in my novel, he was a minor character who quickly grew into one of my favorites and earned more time on the playing field. Nick is an outsider—a loner, a hood. He’s from a poor family, his parents are divorced, he smokes and drinks beer, and he’s a talented artist. Nick engages Jess outside of the sealed family, where she forms another life. When she’s with Nick, she shows a side of herself her family doesn’t see: rebellious, talkative, and flirtatious. Jess and Nick discuss death, dreams, disappointments. Without Nick, not only would major plot points vanish, but also Jess’s complexities and layers would recede. And in order for Nick to be believable, I had to spend time with him, I had to develop him the same way I did the central characters—figuring out his background, his personality and hobbies, his dreams and fears and joys.

Not all characters must change, and in fact, many of them won’t. But they still demand attention and need to be written with specificity and precision. Maybe readers will only catch a glimpse of their true depths because in this particular novel, these minor characters exist in order to reveal another facet of the protagonist, advance the narrative, or build tension—but we also sense they are complex, mysterious beings who could easily walk out of the pages of this book into a different one that tells their story, in which they are the stars. 

I tell my students to make their characters talk to and mingle with one other—don’t let your characters exist in a vacuum. If you’re stuck, or need a different way of looking at your story, bring in a cranky neighbor, an old flame, a great-aunt, a salesman, a bad date. How does your protagonist engage with this person? What do they say, what do they think? What’s their body language? Often it’s the minor characters who reveal something unexpected and surprising about the central characters, and sometimes, these minor figures catch the light in way that makes you want to listen closer, to follow them home and learn more.

 

Carter Sickels’s second novel, The Prettiest Star, will be published by Hub City Press on May 19. He is also the author of The Evening Hour (Bloomsbury, 2012), which was a finalist for an Oregon Book Award and a Lambda Literary Award. His essays and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in various publications, including GuernicaBellevue Literary ReviewGreen Mountains Review, and BuzzFeed. The recipient of the 2013 Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Award, Sickels has also earned fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. He is an assistant professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University, where he teaches in the Bluegrass Writers low-residency MFA program. 

Thumbnail: Joel Filipe

Craft Capsule: Catalogues, Cetaceans, and Casey Kasem

by

Carter Sickels

4.20.20

This is no. 57 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

My second novel, The Prettiest Star, examines America during the time of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, when the U.S. government, churches, schools, and families turned their backs on gay men who were dying. I was a young teenager during that time. I remember Ryan White on TV, the jokes at school, the rampant homophobia. For my research I read many books, newspapers, magazines, oral histories. I watched feature films and documentaries. I talked to friends. Much of the research was difficult and heavy and sad. 

But I also needed to study and compile those seemingly more frivolous details that are actually crucial to capturing a specific time and place: the clothes, music, movies, hairstyles, and so on. My personal memories of the 1980s helped, but for inspiration, accuracy, and veracity, I knew I had to explore a variety of archives to lead me into the past.   

If you grew up in the 1980s, you may remember the JCPenney and Sears catalogues. The size of phone books, they arrived in the mail with each new season. The most important was the Christmas catalogue; when I was a kid, I pored over the newspaper-print pages of toys and wrote up a detailed list for Santa. My parents had thrown out our copies years ago, so I ordered a few from eBay. When the catalogues arrived, they smelled faintly of cigarette smoke. One of them featured model Cheryl Tiegs wearing a safari-style jumpsuit and cuddling with a Bengal tiger kitten. The catalogues made excellent coffee table books—my guests flipped nostalgically through the pages, laughing at the absurdity. 

There were pages and pages of fashion: watches with bright bands, women posing in leotards and leg warmers, very serious men in silk pajamas. I studied the clothes and shoes my characters would wear, hairstyles. I learned the cost of things: men’s warm-up suit, $37.99; sheepskin car-seat cover, $99.99; answering machine, $179.00. The pictures helped me design my characters’ homes, too: the heavy peach drapes, the harvest-gold oven. Which objects would show up in my characters’ rooms and closets? One of my narrators, Jess, who’s fourteen, wears a Walkman to escape family tension and secrecy. I remembered the art of making mixed tapes, the sound of the rewinding cassette, the feeling of the foam on my ears. 

At antique and secondhand stores, I hunted for old magazines and found copies of TV Guide, People, and Life. Online research opened up a world of music videos and TV commercials, sound bites from Casey Kasem’s America’s Top 40, and eighties photographs of malls, SeaWorld, and high schools. On a wall in my office, I hung a picture of a tape store at a mall next to a found photo of an old woman in her kitchen, which reminded me of one of my characters. Along with all the found photos, I hung xeroxes of Nan Goldin’s brilliant photographs documenting the queer and artist community of 1980s New York—all the pain and loss, and love; Alvin Baltrop’s photographs of queer life and the West Side Piers in the seventies and eighties; and William Yang’s heartbreaking portraits of gay, HIV-positive men. And, because Jess loves whales, I tacked images of orcas that I’d cut out of the issue of National Geographic she would have read in 1984. 

It’s easy to get lost in the writing. I enjoy the hours and hours of research and immersing myself in the world of the novel. For me, the pictures on the walls and photographs and catalogues create a collage of visual reminders, a kind of map that inspires me to step inside. 

 

Carter Sickels’s second novel, The Prettiest Star, will be published by Hub City Press on May 19. He is also the author of The Evening Hour (Bloomsbury, 2012), which was a finalist for an Oregon Book Award and a Lambda Literary Award. His essays and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in various publications, including GuernicaBellevue Literary ReviewGreen Mountains Review, and BuzzFeed. The recipient of the 2013 Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Award, Sickels has also earned fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. He is an assistant professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University, where he teaches in the Bluegrass Writers low-residency MFA program. 

Thumbnail: Daniel Schludi

Craft Capsule: Multiple Points of View

by

Carter Sickels

4.13.20

This is no. 56 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich, A Home at the End of the World by Michael Cunningham, The Poisonwood Diaries by Barbara Kingsolver, The Birds of Opulence by Crystal Wilkinson, People in Trouble by Sarah Schulman, There There by Tommy Orange. All of these wonderful novels use multiple points of view and weave a tapestry of voices, with each character relaying their own version of the story to tell a broader narrative of family, place, or community.

My novel The Prettiest Star, set in 1986, follows Brian Jackson, a young, gay, HIV-positive man, who leaves New York City to return to the rural small town where he grew up and where his family still lives. When I first started writing, I wrote from the point of view of Jess, Brian’s fourteen-year-old sister, about the day Brian returns. Then I wrote sections from Brian’s perspective: What was it like to come back to the home he couldn’t wait to escape? A few months in I wrote a chapter from their mother Sharon’s perspective and suddenly realized I would need all three voices to tell this story of shame, secrets, and silences, and the complicated ties of familial love and betrayal. Writing from Sharon’s point of view gave me another angle into the story—a complicated, troubling one. Sharon is the voice of restraint and denial. She loves her son, but her worry about what neighbors and God will think get in the way.

Despite its reputation, first-person point of view is not easy to pull off. My first creative writing teacher, the brilliant Eve Shelnutt, had very strong opinions about writing, and she warned me to not even try first-person narration until I’d written at least twenty or thirty stories in third person. First-person narration seems easy to write because when it’s done well, the voice sounds intimate and authentic—we believe. But as the writer, you’re making particular choices about diction, syntax, and rhythm, so that you create a voice that sounds natural, but isn’t, most likely, exactly how that character would talk. 

Juggling multiple first-person narrators created another challenge: The individual voices must sound unique and separate, yet their differences should not be so obvious that they draw attention to the artifice of first person. For my three characters, in addition to trying to capture their voices through word choices and syntax, I paid attention to their interior lives: How do they think and feel, how do they view the world, and what is important to them? Their emotional timbre and interiority led me to their voices: Sharon’s denial, Jess’s youthful savviness, and Brian’s hurt, fear, and anger. Brian is the anchor of the novel, and his sections were the most difficult to write. A couple years into the process, I figured out that if I framed Brian’s sections as video diaries—he uses a video camera to document his last summer, and directly addresses the viewer/reader about his experiences as a queer man living during the AIDS epidemic—I could set his chapters apart, and reveal him at his most vulnerable, artistic, and honest. Moreover, the dated video diaries serve as a ticking clock; like so many young gay men, Brian will not survive this plague, but he wants to bear witness and document for posterity.

Alternating between characters chapter by chapter also informed my approach to the writing process. Some days, I switched between characters—an hour with Jess, then an hour with Brian. This approach gave me a better sense of how the novel worked as a whole. And it was sometimes a relief to move from one character to another, to get out of one character’s head and dive into another’s. On other days, I spent the hours intensely focused on a single character—immersed in one voice, one side of the story. I followed a similar approach when I printed out a full draft to revise—I read aloud all the Sharon chapters together, then all the Brian chapters, then all of Jess’s. Did the characters’ voices sound consistent? Did they carry their sections? Did the characters have their own individual narrative arcs? Then I arranged the chapters in the correct order and read my novel from beginning to end, paying close attention to how the alternating voices built tension and created momentum. 

Writing a novel with multiple first-person narrators was challenging, but it also brought me a lot of pleasure and joy. I tried to fully inhabit my characters—to write from a place of empathy while digging deep into their flaws, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities.  

 

Carter Sickels’s second novel, The Prettiest Star, will be published by Hub City Press on May 19. He is also the author of The Evening Hour (Bloomsbury, 2012), which was a finalist for an Oregon Book Award and a Lambda Literary Award. His essays and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in various publications, including GuernicaBellevue Literary ReviewGreen Mountains Review, and BuzzFeed. The recipient of the 2013 Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Award, Sickels has also earned fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. He is an assistant professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University, where he teaches in the Bluegrass Writers low-residency MFA program. 

Thumbnail: Jason Leung

Craft Capsule: Cut for Time

by

Carter Sickels

4.6.20

This is no. 55 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

When you’re reading a good novel, you’re not usually thinking about the passages the author cut, the intense revision process, or all the pages the author wrote in order to get to The Writing. These sweaty, often clumsy and inelegant pages don’t show up in the book you’re holding, but they were essential to finishing the novel.

My first novel, The Evening Hour, about Cole Freeman, a small-time drug dealer and nurse’s home aide living in the coalfields of West Virginia, took six years to write. The novel uses third-person limited narration, but in order to figure out Cole, I filled up notebooks with him speaking in first person—this voice wasn’t strong enough to carry the novel, but it revealed his innermost thoughts and feelings. I also wrote monologues for the other characters to learn how people viewed Cole. I did not intend for any of this “extra” writing to go into the novel, but it was invaluable—a way for me to gather information about Cole’s family and community, and better understand his conflicts, secrets, and desires. 

I’ve kept writing journals for years; they’re a hodgepodge of personal memories, ideas, quotes, observations. A few years ago, when I team-taught a novel writing class with the author Alexis Smith, she wisely suggested keeping a journal dedicated solely and entirely to your novel—nothing goes in unless novel-related. 

My new novel, The Prettiest Star, took around four and a half years to write. Most of this time, I was sitting at my desk, typing on my laptop. But I also filled up four Decomposition Books with material. These novel-notebooks are raw and intimate, brewing with my questions, concerns, ideas. They contain crucial writing around and behind the novel, the words and scraps of ideas and shimmers of light that spill beyond the pages of the manuscript. They’re a form of play, and all writers need time to play. Now that the novel is finished, they’re an archive, and a reminder of how messy, exhilarating, joyful, and confounding the writing process is, a mix of hard work and faith and a little bit of magic. 

Found in the pages of my notebooks:

• Lists of scenes to write
• Character sketches
• Character freewrites and monologues: their dreams, hopes, fears, memories
• Chapter outlines
• Lists of clothing, movies, TV shows, music 
• Descriptions of characters’ rooms
• Hypotheticals: What would happen if this happened, or that
• Timelines
• Blueprints of houses
• Maps of the town
• Early working titles 
• Lists of character names, street names, restaurants
• Lists of objects from the eighties (sticker books, Rubik’s Cube, etc.) 
• Notes on important events, imagery, or places to return to (i.e. the abandoned drive-in)
• Questions, questions, questions—about characters, plot, structure, themes. How does Jess find out Brian has AIDS? How do the rumors get started?

 

Carter Sickels’s second novel, The Prettiest Star, will be published by Hub City Press on May 19. He is also the author of The Evening Hour (Bloomsbury, 2012), which was a finalist for an Oregon Book Award and a Lambda Literary Award. His essays and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in various publications, including Guernica, Bellevue Literary Review, Green Mountains Review, and BuzzFeed. The recipient of the 2013 Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Award, Sickels has also earned fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. He is an assistant professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University, where he teaches in the Bluegrass Writers low-residency MFA program. 

Thumbnail: Jon Tyson

Craft Capsule: Researching IRL

by

Emma Copley Eisenberg

3.2.20

This is no. 51 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

“I was slow to realize that if we write what we know,” writes Margot Livesey in her book The Hidden Machinery: Essays on Writing, “research could help me know more.” I retweet this quote, but add the comment: “So can reporting.” 

I never wanted to be a reporter or a journalist. The word journalist had always conjured the image of someone in black dress pants and sensible shoes. Journalists, if femme, definitely carry purses, and all of my purses are collecting massive cat-fur bunnies at the bottom of a closet that mostly houses an air conditioning duct. But there came a time when I was living in Charlottesville, Virginia, when the hellmouth of the culture wars that were to become the forces that shaped the 2016 election opened, and all around me I saw things I could not explain—the Rolling Stone article about the University of Virginia’s culture of rape was released, then “debunked.” A Black UVA student leader was badly beaten and the campus was flooded, not with empathy, but with racist celebration. Two girls, one white and cis, the other Black and trans, went missing to vastly different results. The fiction I was working on began to seem limp and pointless in the face of such blatant evil and abject confusion. I began—as any good millennial might—on my phone. I Googled murder and why people do it, I Googled white supremacy and why people do it. But it didn’t take me long to figure out that the answers I sought weren’t there, not on that screen and not in that small enclosed car interior that held only me. They were somewhere else, with someone else. 

This is what reporting means: You pick up the phone and dial a number and ask the person on the other side some questions and write down or record what they say. Or you get in a car and drive to where that person lives. They let you in and you look around at their house and taste what their water tastes like and then you ask them questions and write down or record what they say. That’s it. That’s the magic. 

For it is magic. You ask the right person the right question at the right time, and they’ll tell you something that has never before been told in the history of the world. Where do we think the information on the internet comes from? At some point, some person who knew a true thing told that information to another person, and they wrote it down. Of course, many people may say many true things that contradict each other, but that is true too. You write down or record what they all say. 

I am not sure why so many literary writers who otherwise enjoy making truth eschew reporting—so hard! So scary! And I could write a whole other screed on the dangers of what so many of us often do: link to a story that links to another story that links to another story the original basis of which is maybe untrue or maybe just a single source that nobody bothered to fact-check—but that is for another day. Suffice it to say, reporting has become a key tool in my nonfiction, not because I have any particular skill for the process, but because I don’t mind picking up the phone (Jewish upward mobility patterns) and seeing what happens. There is a particular joy in knowing you don’t know, in acknowledging that your imagination and experience do not contain what is necessary to say the truest possible thing. If you are not careful, reporting may, as it has for me, become a kind of addiction because once you start knowing what you don’t know, it is nearly impossible to stop.

 

Emma Copley Eisenberg is the author of The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia (Hachette Books, 2020). Her writing has appeared in McSweeney’sGranta, the Los Angeles Review of BooksAmerican Short Fiction, the Paris Review Daily, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, and other outlets. She is also the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Wurlitzer Foundation, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and Lambda Literary. She lives in Philadelphia, where she directs Blue Stoop, a hub for the literary arts. 

Thumbnail: Sylvie Rosokoff

Craft Capsule: Stillness and Silence

by

Mimi Lok

1.20.20

This is no. 47 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I am one of those people who enjoys reading articles about the rituals and habits of writers. Partly because the articles acknowledge the work and commitment that goes into writing a story or a book, and partly because they demystify the process a little. But I’ll admit that I’m also reading because, in the same way that I’ve clicked on BuzzFeed listicles of household items that promise to magically increase my happiness quotient, I’m often hoping for a quick fix when I feel stuck or unproductive. 

I’ve repeatedly thrown myself too eagerly into a new writing ritual, hoping it will unlock something and then inspiration will flow. I’ve tried only writing at certain times of day or night. I’ve tried maintaining an immaculately organized desk, pens and notebook neatly lined up along the table’s edge. I’ve tried writing in the dark cave of a closet, and in front of a window, the view ideally green and leafy, though a view of a brick wall, it turns out, is fine too. One writer I know cannot work without the bustle of people around her, which becomes a reassuring sort of white noise. I often like a quietish room with faint sounds of human life, but have also been able to write with a teenager playing video games next to me. Total isolation, I’ve discovered, feels claustrophobic and lonely. 

I’ve come to realize that, rather than striving to create the best atmosphere for writing, what really matters is creating the conditions for pre-writing. Silence. And by silence I don’t mean the absence of external noise, but of internal noise. As Kimberlee Pérez describes it, silence is “a point of entry into deep listening.” 

So how does one create silence? One way is through meditation.  

I consider myself a lousy meditator. Not that it’s a competitive sport or anything, but I am the first to admit I could do it more often, and for longer. Still, more than taking a walk, or going for a run, or taking a shower, or eating a packet of chocolate digestive biscuits, I’ve found that meditating helps my writing. When I meditate, I’m definitely not turning over a writing problem in my mind. I’m just trying to pay attention—trying being the operative word—to nothing but my breath. In, out. In, out. It’s bloody difficult to do. Only when I invite stillness do I have to contend with how cluttered and hectic my mind really is, like a monkey on amphetamines jumping from branch to vine to branch, ooh what’s that over there, I’ll swing onto that roof as well, oh no! I’ve landed in pigeon shit, oh well, look, banana! (This is what 99 percent of meditating is like. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar.) And I never expect epiphanies, but sometimes in that monkey mess or in very rare moments of equanimity, thoughts will shoot up from the depths and break the surface. 

Afterwards, I am most definitely not full of clarity or calm. But I usually find I have a little bit more space in my head, and I’m a little bit more alert. I might not return to the writing straight away. I might make a cup of tea first, or leave it until later that day, or the next day. But when I do return to the page, I encounter the work, more often than not, in a slightly different way, the path ahead cleared of whatever obstacles were previously blocking it. Or maybe the obstacles were previously invisible to me and now I can identify them. 

Meditation is not a quick fix, or a hotline to call up in a moment of crisis. Like writing, it requires practice so that the mind gets used to stilling and quieting itself enough to listen. It’s like going to a mental gym, and even if 99 percent of the time my thoughts fly all over the place, the practice does eventually translate into a kind of discipline of the mind when I’m writing, and helps me to stay in the moment of the story—to focus and immerse myself, and to listen for what comes next.  

How to meditate:

  1. Turn off or silence your phone and put it in another room.
     
  2. Set an analog timer for fifteen minutes.
     
  3. Find a sitting position (chair, cushion, stool, etcetera) that you think you’ll be comfortable in for that duration.
     
  4. Close your eyes and focus on your breath in the space between your nostrils and your upper lip. (Sometimes I like to count my breaths up to ten, then start over so that it doesn’t feel as if I’m breathing into the howling abyss of eternity.)
     
  5. If you feel your mind stray, breathe in and out more deeply for a few breaths, then return to normal breathing.
     
  6. If you feel your mind stray, don’t beat yourself up about it. Just return to your breath with the gentleness and patience you might employ if you had to guide a lamb or a small child away from a cliff edge.
     
  7. Rinse and repeat until the timer goes off. 

 

Mimi Lok is the author of the story collection Last of Her Name (Kaya Press, 2019), which was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. She is the recipient of a Smithsonian Ingenuity Award and an Ylvisaker Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Fiction Prize and the Susan Atefat Arts and Letters Prize for nonfiction. Her work can be found in McSweeney’s, Electric Literature, and Literary Hub, among other outlets. She is currently working on a novel. Lok is also the cofounder, executive director, and editor of Voice of Witness, an award-winning human rights/oral history nonprofit that amplifies marginalized voices through a book series and a national education program.

Thumbnail: Chi Tranter

Craft Capsule: Stillness and Silence

by

Mimi Lok

1.20.20

This is no. 47 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I am one of those people who enjoys reading articles about the rituals and habits of writers. Partly because the articles acknowledge the work and commitment that goes into writing a story or a book, and partly because they demystify the process a little. But I’ll admit that I’m also reading because, in the same way that I’ve clicked on BuzzFeed listicles of household items that promise to magically increase my happiness quotient, I’m often hoping for a quick fix when I feel stuck or unproductive. 

I’ve repeatedly thrown myself too eagerly into a new writing ritual, hoping it will unlock something and then inspiration will flow. I’ve tried only writing at certain times of day or night. I’ve tried maintaining an immaculately organized desk, pens and notebook neatly lined up along the table’s edge. I’ve tried writing in the dark cave of a closet, and in front of a window, the view ideally green and leafy, though a view of a brick wall, it turns out, is fine too. One writer I know cannot work without the bustle of people around her, which becomes a reassuring sort of white noise. I often like a quietish room with faint sounds of human life, but have also been able to write with a teenager playing video games next to me. Total isolation, I’ve discovered, feels claustrophobic and lonely. 

I’ve come to realize that, rather than striving to create the best atmosphere for writing, what really matters is creating the conditions for pre-writing. Silence. And by silence I don’t mean the absence of external noise, but of internal noise. As Kimberlee Pérez describes it, silence is “a point of entry into deep listening.” 

So how does one create silence? One way is through meditation.  

I consider myself a lousy meditator. Not that it’s a competitive sport or anything, but I am the first to admit I could do it more often, and for longer. Still, more than taking a walk, or going for a run, or taking a shower, or eating a packet of chocolate digestive biscuits, I’ve found that meditating helps my writing. When I meditate, I’m definitely not turning over a writing problem in my mind. I’m just trying to pay attention—trying being the operative word—to nothing but my breath. In, out. In, out. It’s bloody difficult to do. Only when I invite stillness do I have to contend with how cluttered and hectic my mind really is, like a monkey on amphetamines jumping from branch to vine to branch, ooh what’s that over there, I’ll swing onto that roof as well, oh no! I’ve landed in pigeon shit, oh well, look, banana! (This is what 99 percent of meditating is like. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar.) And I never expect epiphanies, but sometimes in that monkey mess or in very rare moments of equanimity, thoughts will shoot up from the depths and break the surface. 

Afterwards, I am most definitely not full of clarity or calm. But I usually find I have a little bit more space in my head, and I’m a little bit more alert. I might not return to the writing straight away. I might make a cup of tea first, or leave it until later that day, or the next day. But when I do return to the page, I encounter the work, more often than not, in a slightly different way, the path ahead cleared of whatever obstacles were previously blocking it. Or maybe the obstacles were previously invisible to me and now I can identify them. 

Meditation is not a quick fix, or a hotline to call up in a moment of crisis. Like writing, it requires practice so that the mind gets used to stilling and quieting itself enough to listen. It’s like going to a mental gym, and even if 99 percent of the time my thoughts fly all over the place, the practice does eventually translate into a kind of discipline of the mind when I’m writing, and helps me to stay in the moment of the story—to focus and immerse myself, and to listen for what comes next.  

How to meditate:

  1. Turn off or silence your phone and put it in another room.
     
  2. Set an analog timer for fifteen minutes.
     
  3. Find a sitting position (chair, cushion, stool, etcetera) that you think you’ll be comfortable in for that duration.
     
  4. Close your eyes and focus on your breath in the space between your nostrils and your upper lip. (Sometimes I like to count my breaths up to ten, then start over so that it doesn’t feel as if I’m breathing into the howling abyss of eternity.)
     
  5. If you feel your mind stray, breathe in and out more deeply for a few breaths, then return to normal breathing.
     
  6. If you feel your mind stray, don’t beat yourself up about it. Just return to your breath with the gentleness and patience you might employ if you had to guide a lamb or a small child away from a cliff edge.
     
  7. Rinse and repeat until the timer goes off. 

 

Mimi Lok is the author of the story collection Last of Her Name (Kaya Press, 2019), which was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. She is the recipient of a Smithsonian Ingenuity Award and an Ylvisaker Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Fiction Prize and the Susan Atefat Arts and Letters Prize for nonfiction. Her work can be found in McSweeney’s, Electric Literature, and Literary Hub, among other outlets. She is currently working on a novel. Lok is also the cofounder, executive director, and editor of Voice of Witness, an award-winning human rights/oral history nonprofit that amplifies marginalized voices through a book series and a national education program.

Thumbnail: Chi Tranter

Craft Capsule: Living Images

by

Emma Copley Eisenberg

3.9.20

This is no. 52 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Lynda Barry has this thing about images; she says they’re alive. The writer and comics artist’s philosophy on making art is difficult to explain because it’s so true—but I’ll try. Find an image from your memory that’s alive and then draw or write it, she says, whichever is more your thing. Anything can be an image. Your first phone number when you say it out loud, a flash of an old notebook with a snowman in it, a brick wall you saw yesterday. 

Almost all of my projects have started from images. For my nonfiction book, The Third Rainbow Girl, it was the image of three women hitchhikers: two on one side of the road, the third on the other side and heading in the opposite direction. For my short story “Fat Swim,” it was the image of a little fat girl looking through a chain-link fence to watch a group of fat women in bathing suits happily playing together in a pool. I cannot remember if Lynda Barry says this or if I say this, but the key to turning an image into a narrative is to ask: Into what life does this image come? For whom is this image urgent?

It doesn’t sound like something Lynda Barry would say. It sounds too pragmatic, and too focused on making an image into something, something you can package and sell, and LB isn’t usually that into somethings. Her books on the craft of writing and drawing, What It Is, Picture This: The Near-Sighted Monkey Book, Syllabus: Notes From an Accidental Professor, and Making Comics, are much more focused on the nothings than the somethings: the places where memory crashes up onto the sand of the present and leaves a shadow impression once it’s retreated, the spaces in childhood for abject despair that just never get filled in, the ways that ghosts of childhood play can morph and change and haunt us, telling us our ideas and feelings are not even worth recording. Of all these books, What It Is has the most to say about images and the craft of writing. I know exactly where this book is in my house at all times. I can see it now, downstairs on the biggest bottom bookshelf nestled up against the fancy Aperture catalogue, with its big smooth cover and its slick pages, once textured collages LB made with her own hands but now the regular thickness of regular paper. 

For a while I kept a notebook of three images from my day and made my writing students do the same. They could be images from the present or from the past: a red sneaker against a silver background on Philly’s El train, the look on my old cat’s face when he stuck his nose in my ear to wake me up, or whatever else came up that day. When I was empty sitting down to write at my desk, I could flip through this image catalogue and see what caught, what still felt alive. I should probably start doing that again. 

 

Emma Copley Eisenberg is the author of The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia (Hachette Books, 2020). Her writing has appeared in McSweeney’sGranta, the Los Angeles Review of BooksAmerican Short Fiction, the Paris Review Daily, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, and other outlets. She is also the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Wurlitzer Foundation, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and Lambda Literary. She lives in Philadelphia, where she directs Blue Stoop, a hub for the literary arts. 

Thumbnail: Guillaume Paumier

Craft Capsule: In Praise of Drastic Measures

by

Mimi Lok

2.3.20

This is no. 49 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

It can be helpful, at a certain point in a writing project, to change up elements that previously felt off limits. One of these elements is setting. 

About ten years ago I came across a short news article about a woman in Japan who’d been arrested for sneaking into a man’s home and living in his closet. When the police asked why she’d done it, she said that she had nowhere else to live. I tried to find out more, but every piece I found recycled the same couple of paragraphs. It didn’t make sense to me that there wasn’t more to the story—there was so much more I wanted to know. I kept thinking, Who is this woman? 

Her story became the basis for my novella “The Woman in the Closet”—the final story in my debut collection, Last of Her Name. For the longest time I’d kept the setting faithful to the article, to both honor the inspiration for the story and to help ground my fictional extrapolations in a culturally and socially specific context. But when I was working on the manuscript with my editor, Sunyoung Lee, we grappled with a couple of issues with the story. First: The other stories in the collection focused on Chinese characters. This story, with its Japanese protagonist and setting, was an outlier in that sense, and I twisted myself into knots trying to connect it to the rest of the collection. Maybe the protagonist, Granny Ito, was half Chinese? Or maybe she was Chinese and immigrated to Japan? It all felt rather strained. The other issue with the story was that, as careful as I’d tried to be, I’d still tripped up on certain details that Sunyoung, whose husband is Japanese, pointed out were culturally inaccurate, such as the kind of soup one would serve a guest in a certain situation. The casual reader wouldn’t have caught it, but someone familiar with Japanese culture and customs would, and I didn’t want to have anything in there that would be a distraction. I was prepared to go through the story again with a fine-tooth comb to try and catch other inaccuracies, but then Sunyoung asked, “Is there a particular reason why it’s set in Japan?” I bristled at the notion that it could be set anywhere but Japan, but at the same time my defense of the choice sounded, well, defensive, when said aloud. Sunyoung asked me to consider changing the setting, and if it didn’t feel right then we’d stick to the original and figure out how to make it work.

I relocated the story to Hong Kong, changing the names, locations, cultural references, and so on. Almost immediately I felt the story clicking along with more ease. But I soon encountered a different issue: Hong Kong, unlike Japan, doesn’t have tent villages, and tent villages feature prominently in the story. Then I thought, But it could…in the future. Given the increasing wealth disparity in Hong Kong and the city’s ongoing instability—though the current protests hadn’t started yet when I wrote this story—I decided it wasn’t at all beyond the realm of possibility. So the story moved from Japan to Hong Kong, from the present to the near-future, and Granny Ito became Granny Ng. Just like that, the story was infused with a different, subtly futuristic kind of energy that rippled back through the other stories in the collection—stories that also jumped around in time and place, but which all occupied the past or present. Ending the collection with a story set in the future felt right. Even now, when I imagine the two versions of the story next to each other, I see the original through a slightly dim, faded Polaroid filter, and the final version with the clarity of a bright, blue sky.                   

 

Mimi Lok is the author of the story collection Last of Her Name (Kaya Press, 2019), which was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. She is the recipient of a Smithsonian Ingenuity Award and an Ylvisaker Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Fiction Prize and the Susan Atefat Arts and Letters Prize for nonfiction. Her work can be found in McSweeney’s, Electric Literature, and Literary Hub, among other outlets. She is currently working on a novel. Lok is also the cofounder, executive director, and editor of Voice of Witness, an award-winning human rights/oral history nonprofit that amplifies marginalized voices through a book series and a national education program.

Craft Capsule: Voice in the Epistolary Story

by

Mimi Lok

1.27.20

This is no. 48 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Epistolary stories can be tricky to pull off—they can seem contrived, awkward, or precious. There’s often a delicate balance at play when calibrating the reader’s awareness of the form and their immersion in the world of the story. In the case of letters, the letter writer’s voice, in this regard, is crucial. It’s a bit like being driven by a guide through an unfamiliar landscape—you’re looking at the scenery and at people going about their business, aware that you can only see so much through the windscreen and passenger side window, but you’re okay with that because you know you’re in a car. But what you don’t want to be thinking about is how broken-down or fancy the car is, or how your guide is driving, because you only tend to notice someone’s driving when you’re worried they don’t have full control of the vehicle.

I wrestled with voice a lot in my epistolary story “The Wrong Dave,” which appeared in my debut collection, Last of Her Name. The protagonist, Dave, a soon-to-be-married man in London, embarks upon an illicit correspondence with Yi, a wedding crasher he briefly met several years ago in Hong Kong. Yi contacts him out of the blue, grief-stricken after a death in her family, and Dave suspects she’s writing to the wrong Dave. Still, he decides to continue writing to her. From this point in the story on, the reader, like Dave, sees Yi entirely through her e-mail exchanges with Dave, who becomes increasingly infatuated with her.

Writing this story, I considered how letters allow for absence and omission, and how those elements can help fuel a fantasy of someone you don’t know that well. E-mail is such a strange, inadequate medium of communication, and because so much is left out and what remains is magnified, sometimes way out of proportion, it becomes fertile ground for misunderstanding and obsession. So while we see the various external and internal aspects of Dave’s life and follow him around a fair bit, I wanted the reader to have limited access to Yi. I wanted her to be tantalizing to the reader as well as to Dave—not exactly in the same way, but enough to believe why Dave would be so drawn to her. 

The e-mails brought out the very different ways in which Dave and Yi express themselves and what that says about why they’re writing to the other person. Yi’s e-mails are almost an unfiltered stream of consciousness—you get the feeling she’s not even thinking about what she’s writing—but Dave is extremely neurotic and careful about every word, as if he’s worried he’s going to expose himself in some way. For Yi, she wants to be seen—she uses the e-mails to try and make a human connection—but she’s also screaming her grief and anger into the void. It was really freeing for me, someone who tends more towards Dave’s type of e-mail neurosis, to write in Yi’s voice. Dave, however, definitely hides behind the medium. Its remove from the physical world, combined with its immediacy, lets him continue to feed his secret correspondence and romanticizing of Yi, completely free of consequence—or so he thinks.

The limited access to Yi leads the reader, like Dave, to project various ideas about the kind of person she might be, or the kind of person Dave might want her to be—the difference being that the reader is more aware of this projection than Dave himself is. She says so much, but to what is Dave really paying attention? And in Dave’s case, there’s the dissonance between the insight the reader has into his life and the vastness of what he chooses not to reveal about himself in his e-mails. 

So, in the case of epistolary stories based on letters, it’s important to understand why the characters are writing to each other, what kind of language is particular to them, and what the form reveals or hides—and how that squares with what you want revealed, or hidden from, your reader.

 

Mimi Lok is the author of the story collection Last of Her Name (Kaya Press, 2019), which was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. She is the recipient of a Smithsonian Ingenuity Award and an Ylvisaker Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Fiction Prize and the Susan Atefat Arts and Letters Prize for nonfiction. Her work can be found in McSweeney’s, Electric Literature, and Literary Hub, among other outlets. She is currently working on a novel. Lok is also the cofounder, executive director, and editor of Voice of Witness, an award-winning human rights/oral history nonprofit that amplifies marginalized voices through a book series and a national education program.

Thumbnail: Joanna Kosinska

Craft Capsule: Voice in the Epistolary Story

by

Mimi Lok

1.27.20

This is no. 48 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Epistolary stories can be tricky to pull off—they can seem contrived, awkward, or precious. There’s often a delicate balance at play when calibrating the reader’s awareness of the form and their immersion in the world of the story. In the case of letters, the letter writer’s voice, in this regard, is crucial. It’s a bit like being driven by a guide through an unfamiliar landscape—you’re looking at the scenery and at people going about their business, aware that you can only see so much through the windscreen and passenger side window, but you’re okay with that because you know you’re in a car. But what you don’t want to be thinking about is how broken-down or fancy the car is, or how your guide is driving, because you only tend to notice someone’s driving when you’re worried they don’t have full control of the vehicle.

I wrestled with voice a lot in my epistolary story “The Wrong Dave,” which appeared in my debut collection, Last of Her Name. The protagonist, Dave, a soon-to-be-married man in London, embarks upon an illicit correspondence with Yi, a wedding crasher he briefly met several years ago in Hong Kong. Yi contacts him out of the blue, grief-stricken after a death in her family, and Dave suspects she’s writing to the wrong Dave. Still, he decides to continue writing to her. From this point in the story on, the reader, like Dave, sees Yi entirely through her e-mail exchanges with Dave, who becomes increasingly infatuated with her.

Writing this story, I considered how letters allow for absence and omission, and how those elements can help fuel a fantasy of someone you don’t know that well. E-mail is such a strange, inadequate medium of communication, and because so much is left out and what remains is magnified, sometimes way out of proportion, it becomes fertile ground for misunderstanding and obsession. So while we see the various external and internal aspects of Dave’s life and follow him around a fair bit, I wanted the reader to have limited access to Yi. I wanted her to be tantalizing to the reader as well as to Dave—not exactly in the same way, but enough to believe why Dave would be so drawn to her. 

The e-mails brought out the very different ways in which Dave and Yi express themselves and what that says about why they’re writing to the other person. Yi’s e-mails are almost an unfiltered stream of consciousness—you get the feeling she’s not even thinking about what she’s writing—but Dave is extremely neurotic and careful about every word, as if he’s worried he’s going to expose himself in some way. For Yi, she wants to be seen—she uses the e-mails to try and make a human connection—but she’s also screaming her grief and anger into the void. It was really freeing for me, someone who tends more towards Dave’s type of e-mail neurosis, to write in Yi’s voice. Dave, however, definitely hides behind the medium. Its remove from the physical world, combined with its immediacy, lets him continue to feed his secret correspondence and romanticizing of Yi, completely free of consequence—or so he thinks.

The limited access to Yi leads the reader, like Dave, to project various ideas about the kind of person she might be, or the kind of person Dave might want her to be—the difference being that the reader is more aware of this projection than Dave himself is. She says so much, but to what is Dave really paying attention? And in Dave’s case, there’s the dissonance between the insight the reader has into his life and the vastness of what he chooses not to reveal about himself in his e-mails. 

So, in the case of epistolary stories based on letters, it’s important to understand why the characters are writing to each other, what kind of language is particular to them, and what the form reveals or hides—and how that squares with what you want revealed, or hidden from, your reader.

 

Mimi Lok is the author of the story collection Last of Her Name (Kaya Press, 2019), which was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. She is the recipient of a Smithsonian Ingenuity Award and an Ylvisaker Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Fiction Prize and the Susan Atefat Arts and Letters Prize for nonfiction. Her work can be found in McSweeney’s, Electric Literature, and Literary Hub, among other outlets. She is currently working on a novel. Lok is also the cofounder, executive director, and editor of Voice of Witness, an award-winning human rights/oral history nonprofit that amplifies marginalized voices through a book series and a national education program.

Thumbnail: Joanna Kosinska

Craft Capsule: Voice in the Epistolary Story

by

Mimi Lok

1.27.20

This is no. 48 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Epistolary stories can be tricky to pull off—they can seem contrived, awkward, or precious. There’s often a delicate balance at play when calibrating the reader’s awareness of the form and their immersion in the world of the story. In the case of letters, the letter writer’s voice, in this regard, is crucial. It’s a bit like being driven by a guide through an unfamiliar landscape—you’re looking at the scenery and at people going about their business, aware that you can only see so much through the windscreen and passenger side window, but you’re okay with that because you know you’re in a car. But what you don’t want to be thinking about is how broken-down or fancy the car is, or how your guide is driving, because you only tend to notice someone’s driving when you’re worried they don’t have full control of the vehicle.

I wrestled with voice a lot in my epistolary story “The Wrong Dave,” which appeared in my debut collection, Last of Her Name. The protagonist, Dave, a soon-to-be-married man in London, embarks upon an illicit correspondence with Yi, a wedding crasher he briefly met several years ago in Hong Kong. Yi contacts him out of the blue, grief-stricken after a death in her family, and Dave suspects she’s writing to the wrong Dave. Still, he decides to continue writing to her. From this point in the story on, the reader, like Dave, sees Yi entirely through her e-mail exchanges with Dave, who becomes increasingly infatuated with her.

Writing this story, I considered how letters allow for absence and omission, and how those elements can help fuel a fantasy of someone you don’t know that well. E-mail is such a strange, inadequate medium of communication, and because so much is left out and what remains is magnified, sometimes way out of proportion, it becomes fertile ground for misunderstanding and obsession. So while we see the various external and internal aspects of Dave’s life and follow him around a fair bit, I wanted the reader to have limited access to Yi. I wanted her to be tantalizing to the reader as well as to Dave—not exactly in the same way, but enough to believe why Dave would be so drawn to her. 

The e-mails brought out the very different ways in which Dave and Yi express themselves and what that says about why they’re writing to the other person. Yi’s e-mails are almost an unfiltered stream of consciousness—you get the feeling she’s not even thinking about what she’s writing—but Dave is extremely neurotic and careful about every word, as if he’s worried he’s going to expose himself in some way. For Yi, she wants to be seen—she uses the e-mails to try and make a human connection—but she’s also screaming her grief and anger into the void. It was really freeing for me, someone who tends more towards Dave’s type of e-mail neurosis, to write in Yi’s voice. Dave, however, definitely hides behind the medium. Its remove from the physical world, combined with its immediacy, lets him continue to feed his secret correspondence and romanticizing of Yi, completely free of consequence—or so he thinks.

The limited access to Yi leads the reader, like Dave, to project various ideas about the kind of person she might be, or the kind of person Dave might want her to be—the difference being that the reader is more aware of this projection than Dave himself is. She says so much, but to what is Dave really paying attention? And in Dave’s case, there’s the dissonance between the insight the reader has into his life and the vastness of what he chooses not to reveal about himself in his e-mails. 

So, in the case of epistolary stories based on letters, it’s important to understand why the characters are writing to each other, what kind of language is particular to them, and what the form reveals or hides—and how that squares with what you want revealed, or hidden from, your reader.

 

Mimi Lok is the author of the story collection Last of Her Name (Kaya Press, 2019), which was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. She is the recipient of a Smithsonian Ingenuity Award and an Ylvisaker Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Fiction Prize and the Susan Atefat Arts and Letters Prize for nonfiction. Her work can be found in McSweeney’s, Electric Literature, and Literary Hub, among other outlets. She is currently working on a novel. Lok is also the cofounder, executive director, and editor of Voice of Witness, an award-winning human rights/oral history nonprofit that amplifies marginalized voices through a book series and a national education program.

Thumbnail: Joanna Kosinska

Craft Capsule: Cut for Time

by

Carter Sickels

4.6.20

This is no. 55 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

When you’re reading a good novel, you’re not usually thinking about the passages the author cut, the intense revision process, or all the pages the author wrote in order to get to The Writing. These sweaty, often clumsy and inelegant pages don’t show up in the book you’re holding, but they were essential to finishing the novel.

My first novel, The Evening Hour, about Cole Freeman, a small-time drug dealer and nurse’s home aide living in the coalfields of West Virginia, took six years to write. The novel uses third-person limited narration, but in order to figure out Cole, I filled up notebooks with him speaking in first person—this voice wasn’t strong enough to carry the novel, but it revealed his innermost thoughts and feelings. I also wrote monologues for the other characters to learn how people viewed Cole. I did not intend for any of this “extra” writing to go into the novel, but it was invaluable—a way for me to gather information about Cole’s family and community, and better understand his conflicts, secrets, and desires. 

I’ve kept writing journals for years; they’re a hodgepodge of personal memories, ideas, quotes, observations. A few years ago, when I team-taught a novel writing class with the author Alexis Smith, she wisely suggested keeping a journal dedicated solely and entirely to your novel—nothing goes in unless novel-related. 

My new novel, The Prettiest Star, took around four and a half years to write. Most of this time, I was sitting at my desk, typing on my laptop. But I also filled up four Decomposition Books with material. These novel-notebooks are raw and intimate, brewing with my questions, concerns, ideas. They contain crucial writing around and behind the novel, the words and scraps of ideas and shimmers of light that spill beyond the pages of the manuscript. They’re a form of play, and all writers need time to play. Now that the novel is finished, they’re an archive, and a reminder of how messy, exhilarating, joyful, and confounding the writing process is, a mix of hard work and faith and a little bit of magic. 

Found in the pages of my notebooks:

• Lists of scenes to write
• Character sketches
• Character freewrites and monologues: their dreams, hopes, fears, memories
• Chapter outlines
• Lists of clothing, movies, TV shows, music 
• Descriptions of characters’ rooms
• Hypotheticals: What would happen if this happened, or that
• Timelines
• Blueprints of houses
• Maps of the town
• Early working titles 
• Lists of character names, street names, restaurants
• Lists of objects from the eighties (sticker books, Rubik’s Cube, etc.) 
• Notes on important events, imagery, or places to return to (i.e. the abandoned drive-in)
• Questions, questions, questions—about characters, plot, structure, themes. How does Jess find out Brian has AIDS? How do the rumors get started?

 

Carter Sickels’s second novel, The Prettiest Star, will be published by Hub City Press on May 19. He is also the author of The Evening Hour (Bloomsbury, 2012), which was a finalist for an Oregon Book Award and a Lambda Literary Award. His essays and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in various publications, including Guernica, Bellevue Literary Review, Green Mountains Review, and BuzzFeed. The recipient of the 2013 Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Award, Sickels has also earned fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. He is an assistant professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University, where he teaches in the Bluegrass Writers low-residency MFA program. 

Thumbnail: Jon Tyson

Craft Capsule: Metabolizing

by

Emma Copley Eisenberg

3.16.20

This is no. 53 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

The writer and comics artist Lynda Barry says that the mind is at its most relaxed and creative when the body (hands, usually) are engaged in something mindless and repetitive. She suggests drawing, of course. In her “Writing the Unthinkable” workshop, she has participants draw a spiral while they listen, urging them to try to keep the concentric circles as close together as possible. 

I like drawing for this purpose, but I prefer driving. The hands go on the wheel, the windshield opens the eyes up, the foot lifts up and down. The sun is bright and you unclip the sun visor from its little holder and rotate it to a more pleasing position. You turn the radio up or scan until you find something nice or hard or whatever it is that matches your mood. I like to sip from the straw of my water bottle as I drive, and I like to use the turn signal. I probably turn my head too much to check my blind spot, but the movement of it feels both careful and good. 

What is it about these small movements and the feeling of the world rushing past that makes bits of language, sentences, phrases, whole paragraphs sometimes, rush fully formed into the mind? Fairly often, I have to pull over at a welcome station or scenic view turnoff to type them into my phone. People have told me I could dictate, record my voice, but I don’t—it’s not the same. It’s not the sound of my voice I want to record; it’s the rhythm of the words and the way they look next to one another. 

In 2011, after I packed up my 1997 white Toyota Tacoma, equipped with a platform bed in the back and fitted with West Virginia wildlife plates that I’d purchased with two identical post-office money orders, I drove away from the place where I’d been living for the past eighteen months or so, a place I didn’t yet have any language to describe. All I knew was that for a while I couldn’t eat and I couldn’t talk to anyone and I couldn’t live anywhere else. What I could do was drive. I drove more than ten thousand miles in about three months, making a great oval through the upper middle, west coast, lower middle, and east coast of the United States. 

Very little language, very few sentences came to me during that drive, as they usually do now. I wasn’t a writer yet. But what did come to me as I drove across the prairies and past the football fields in Kansas, toward the crashing sunset in Denver, through the storms of Oregon Route 1, and down the snowy Grand Canyon BLM roads was understanding, insight. I processed as I drove; if you will, I metabolized, taking in sadness and confusion and spitting out miles. What had I done and what had they done and who even was I? Certain answers presented themselves in the form of a gay cowboy bar in West Texas and the parking lot of Faulkner’s Rowan Oaks. It would take me ten more years to write them down, but driving released them from my bloodstream. It was a start. 

 

Emma Copley Eisenberg is the author of The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia (Hachette Books, 2020). Her writing has appeared in McSweeney’sGranta, the Los Angeles Review of BooksAmerican Short Fiction, the Paris Review Daily, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, and other outlets. She is also the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Wurlitzer Foundation, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and Lambda Literary. She lives in Philadelphia, where she directs Blue Stoop, a hub for the literary arts. 

Thumbnail: Jason Abdilla

Craft Capsule: Multiple Points of View

by

Carter Sickels

4.13.20

This is no. 56 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich, A Home at the End of the World by Michael Cunningham, The Poisonwood Diaries by Barbara Kingsolver, The Birds of Opulence by Crystal Wilkinson, People in Trouble by Sarah Schulman, There There by Tommy Orange. All of these wonderful novels use multiple points of view and weave a tapestry of voices, with each character relaying their own version of the story to tell a broader narrative of family, place, or community.

My novel The Prettiest Star, set in 1986, follows Brian Jackson, a young, gay, HIV-positive man, who leaves New York City to return to the rural small town where he grew up and where his family still lives. When I first started writing, I wrote from the point of view of Jess, Brian’s fourteen-year-old sister, about the day Brian returns. Then I wrote sections from Brian’s perspective: What was it like to come back to the home he couldn’t wait to escape? A few months in I wrote a chapter from their mother Sharon’s perspective and suddenly realized I would need all three voices to tell this story of shame, secrets, and silences, and the complicated ties of familial love and betrayal. Writing from Sharon’s point of view gave me another angle into the story—a complicated, troubling one. Sharon is the voice of restraint and denial. She loves her son, but her worry about what neighbors and God will think get in the way.

Despite its reputation, first-person point of view is not easy to pull off. My first creative writing teacher, the brilliant Eve Shelnutt, had very strong opinions about writing, and she warned me to not even try first-person narration until I’d written at least twenty or thirty stories in third person. First-person narration seems easy to write because when it’s done well, the voice sounds intimate and authentic—we believe. But as the writer, you’re making particular choices about diction, syntax, and rhythm, so that you create a voice that sounds natural, but isn’t, most likely, exactly how that character would talk. 

Juggling multiple first-person narrators created another challenge: The individual voices must sound unique and separate, yet their differences should not be so obvious that they draw attention to the artifice of first person. For my three characters, in addition to trying to capture their voices through word choices and syntax, I paid attention to their interior lives: How do they think and feel, how do they view the world, and what is important to them? Their emotional timbre and interiority led me to their voices: Sharon’s denial, Jess’s youthful savviness, and Brian’s hurt, fear, and anger. Brian is the anchor of the novel, and his sections were the most difficult to write. A couple years into the process, I figured out that if I framed Brian’s sections as video diaries—he uses a video camera to document his last summer, and directly addresses the viewer/reader about his experiences as a queer man living during the AIDS epidemic—I could set his chapters apart, and reveal him at his most vulnerable, artistic, and honest. Moreover, the dated video diaries serve as a ticking clock; like so many young gay men, Brian will not survive this plague, but he wants to bear witness and document for posterity.

Alternating between characters chapter by chapter also informed my approach to the writing process. Some days, I switched between characters—an hour with Jess, then an hour with Brian. This approach gave me a better sense of how the novel worked as a whole. And it was sometimes a relief to move from one character to another, to get out of one character’s head and dive into another’s. On other days, I spent the hours intensely focused on a single character—immersed in one voice, one side of the story. I followed a similar approach when I printed out a full draft to revise—I read aloud all the Sharon chapters together, then all the Brian chapters, then all of Jess’s. Did the characters’ voices sound consistent? Did they carry their sections? Did the characters have their own individual narrative arcs? Then I arranged the chapters in the correct order and read my novel from beginning to end, paying close attention to how the alternating voices built tension and created momentum. 

Writing a novel with multiple first-person narrators was challenging, but it also brought me a lot of pleasure and joy. I tried to fully inhabit my characters—to write from a place of empathy while digging deep into their flaws, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities.  

 

Carter Sickels’s second novel, The Prettiest Star, will be published by Hub City Press on May 19. He is also the author of The Evening Hour (Bloomsbury, 2012), which was a finalist for an Oregon Book Award and a Lambda Literary Award. His essays and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in various publications, including GuernicaBellevue Literary ReviewGreen Mountains Review, and BuzzFeed. The recipient of the 2013 Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Award, Sickels has also earned fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. He is an assistant professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University, where he teaches in the Bluegrass Writers low-residency MFA program. 

Thumbnail: Jason Leung

Craft Capsule: Cut for Time

by

Carter Sickels

4.6.20

This is no. 55 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

When you’re reading a good novel, you’re not usually thinking about the passages the author cut, the intense revision process, or all the pages the author wrote in order to get to The Writing. These sweaty, often clumsy and inelegant pages don’t show up in the book you’re holding, but they were essential to finishing the novel.

My first novel, The Evening Hour, about Cole Freeman, a small-time drug dealer and nurse’s home aide living in the coalfields of West Virginia, took six years to write. The novel uses third-person limited narration, but in order to figure out Cole, I filled up notebooks with him speaking in first person—this voice wasn’t strong enough to carry the novel, but it revealed his innermost thoughts and feelings. I also wrote monologues for the other characters to learn how people viewed Cole. I did not intend for any of this “extra” writing to go into the novel, but it was invaluable—a way for me to gather information about Cole’s family and community, and better understand his conflicts, secrets, and desires. 

I’ve kept writing journals for years; they’re a hodgepodge of personal memories, ideas, quotes, observations. A few years ago, when I team-taught a novel writing class with the author Alexis Smith, she wisely suggested keeping a journal dedicated solely and entirely to your novel—nothing goes in unless novel-related. 

My new novel, The Prettiest Star, took around four and a half years to write. Most of this time, I was sitting at my desk, typing on my laptop. But I also filled up four Decomposition Books with material. These novel-notebooks are raw and intimate, brewing with my questions, concerns, ideas. They contain crucial writing around and behind the novel, the words and scraps of ideas and shimmers of light that spill beyond the pages of the manuscript. They’re a form of play, and all writers need time to play. Now that the novel is finished, they’re an archive, and a reminder of how messy, exhilarating, joyful, and confounding the writing process is, a mix of hard work and faith and a little bit of magic. 

Found in the pages of my notebooks:

• Lists of scenes to write
• Character sketches
• Character freewrites and monologues: their dreams, hopes, fears, memories
• Chapter outlines
• Lists of clothing, movies, TV shows, music 
• Descriptions of characters’ rooms
• Hypotheticals: What would happen if this happened, or that
• Timelines
• Blueprints of houses
• Maps of the town
• Early working titles 
• Lists of character names, street names, restaurants
• Lists of objects from the eighties (sticker books, Rubik’s Cube, etc.) 
• Notes on important events, imagery, or places to return to (i.e. the abandoned drive-in)
• Questions, questions, questions—about characters, plot, structure, themes. How does Jess find out Brian has AIDS? How do the rumors get started?

 

Carter Sickels’s second novel, The Prettiest Star, will be published by Hub City Press on May 19. He is also the author of The Evening Hour (Bloomsbury, 2012), which was a finalist for an Oregon Book Award and a Lambda Literary Award. His essays and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in various publications, including Guernica, Bellevue Literary Review, Green Mountains Review, and BuzzFeed. The recipient of the 2013 Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Award, Sickels has also earned fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. He is an assistant professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University, where he teaches in the Bluegrass Writers low-residency MFA program. 

Thumbnail: Jon Tyson

Craft Capsule: Consulting the Tarot

by

Emma Copley Eisenberg

2.24.20

This is no. 50 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I was raised in a house of reason where there was no God, no witchcraft, no science fiction, no astrology, and certainly no tarot. These things were for the weak, and we were not weak. But I’ll never forget when I read Uncle Tom’s Cabin and it dawned on me why Tom prayed so much: He was just trying to get through the day. I was weak, I knew. To make it from dawn to dusk, I too needed all the help I could get. 

Tarot came into my life through the friend, the friend I lost, and it is the thing she gave me more than any other for which I offer her my supreme gratitude. To be fair, I acquired the deck itself—The Wild Unknown by Kim Krans—much earlier; I bought it on impulse late one night on the gushing recommendation of someone I’d met at a party. You are not supposed to buy a tarot deck for yourself, I learned later, perhaps because without the blessing of someone you love to imbue the paper and images with power, a deck of cards is just a deck of cards.

I cannot now separate tarot from the friend, and I cannot separate tarot from writing. She and I became friends during the period when the card of the moon, which according to my deck “encompasses the idea of the Wild Unknown,” was my near constant companion. She taught me how to do the simplest spread—past, present, future—and led me to Michelle Tea’s book on tarot, life, and writing, Modern Tarot: Connecting With Your Higher Self Through the Wisdom of the Cards. Past, present, future; beginning, middle, and end. My friend and I began to draw a single card to set the mood for our writing sessions together, held at a ramshackle coworking space in the neighborhood where we lived.

What I like about drawing a single card before writing is that it allows me a single place to put my feelings about that day’s words—all my fear that the words won’t come and all my fear that they will. Drawing a single card, the mother of pentacles, for instance, which offers an image of a deer and her fawn, gives me a door at which to knock when I can’t see any of that paragraph’s architecture. She excels in the home, the card says: Perhaps I’ll turn my scent diffuser on, or I’ll have a character bake a scone, or I’ll think about why some person in my book moved around so much from place to place. It’s not so much a place to start writing but rather a way to give the day’s writing a particular mood or scent or inflection. Draw the death card, which in The Wild Unknown simply means that “something in your life needs to end…something is trying to find closure,” and the idea of ending and closure will start bonking around in my brain until it hits something in my writing that needed either to finish or to begin. Each card is like a prompt I suppose, except instead of being wacky and contrived, it feels like a prompt I gave myself from the darkest recesses of my unconscious, a shortcut to the place I was trying to go. 

I drew a card every day while writing The Third Rainbow Girl, which explores a mysterious act of violence in Pocahontas County, West Virginia in 1980, the Appalachian community where it transpired, and my own time in the place as a national service worker. For nearly the entirety of the fifteen months when I was most actively engaged, sentence by sentence, in writing the book, I dreamed about murder—either murdering or being murdered—every night. Then every morning I went to the deck and chose a card. I am not exaggerating when I say that I chose the moon card almost every time, no matter how well I shuffled. The card’s overall theme: vivid dreams and fears. I read the card’s description so many times I can recite it by heart:

[The moon] is the shadow realm, the place where dreams, fears, and mysteries are born. Much darkness can linger here, and if you aren’t careful, this can lead to periods of anxiety and self-doubt almost as if you’ve lost your way in a house of mirrors. Many great artists have roamed this inner landscape. It’s where imagination and creativity drift freely upon the midnight air.

That about summed it up. Fuck the fucking moon, I began to say aloud each time I drew it. Fuck this fucking book.

But the moon would not be fucked and neither would the book I was writing; they would not go away until they went away and maybe not even then. Eventually, I finished the book and I lost the friend. I’m drawing new cards these days—a lot of pentacles, the suit of home and hearth. I hope I drift less and dig more in the next book, but of course, it’s not up to me. 

 

Emma Copley Eisenberg is the author of The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia (Hachette Books, 2020). Her writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, Granta, the Los Angeles Review of Books, American Short Fiction, the Paris Review Daily, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, and other outlets. She is also the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Wurlitzer Foundation, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and Lambda Literary. She lives in Philadelphia, where she directs Blue Stoop, a hub for the literary arts. 

Thumbnail: Altınay Dinç

Craft Capsule: Start, Stop, Change

by

Mimi Lok

1.12.20

This is no. 46 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

For many writers with long-brewing projects, starting a new year can stir up dread, excitement, grim resolve, or all of the above. Mid-January becomes a time of early reckoning: Have I stuck to my guns? Backslid already? Realized, aghast, that my goals were far too lofty? Resolutions are often focused on starting new things, but not enough is said about the value of simply carrying on, taking a moment to reflect on existing projects, and adjusting or even stopping the approaches that are no longer working. 

Whenever I feel stuck or overwhelmed with a writing project, I try to take a step back and ask myself three questions: What needs to start? What needs to stop? What needs to change? And then I make lists or action items in response to those questions. It might look something like this:

What needs to start? 

  • Write the scene or chapter you’ve been avoiding. Drink a shot of tequila and write the bloody thing. In one sitting. Tape over the delete button if necessary.
  • Admit that the work has reached the point where it needs to leave the house. Share it with the person who will tell you things you don’t want to hear but who will ultimately help you make it stronger.
  • Look farther afield for things that feed your creative brain and soul. Get your nose out of a book and get thee to an art museum, concert, or stand-up comedy show. It doesn’t have to be tangibly connected to your project, but it will wake up different parts of you and might even spark ideas.

What needs to stop?

  • Control. Release your characters from their toddler harnesses and let them do what they want to do instead of what you want them to do.
  • Narrator as bodycam. Stop treating your first-person narrator as a passive, disembodied set of eyes and ears, and turn them into an actual human being the reader can see, hear, and feel.
  • Procrastination. Specifically, the kind that’s rooted in a lack of interest and motivation rather than a lack of confidence. If some high power decreed you could only tell one last story before you died, would this be it? If the answer is “umm…,” then put this project aside and find the story that feels compelling and urgent to you, and that only you can tell.

What needs to change?

  • Point of view. Does it have to be the POV you’ve chosen? Why? What would happen if you changed it?
  • Scope. Recognize how you’ve been limiting the story and expand or shrink the world of your story accordingly. This could be related to the number of characters you want to focus on, or settings, or time periods. Or it could be about redistributing the amount of time spent with various characters and their world(s). See how it affects the intensity and focus.
  • Setting. How important is your chosen time and place to the story you want to tell? Would the story change if it were relocated, set in another time period?

The stop/start/change tool is something I’ve borrowed from my other life in the nonprofit sector (mostly in terms of assessing projects and organizational priorities), but which can be handily applied to other areas of life too: friendships, marriages, exercise routines, to name a few.

 

Mimi Lok is the author of the story collection Last of Her Name (Kaya Press, 2019), which was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. She is the recipient of a Smithsonian Ingenuity Award and an Ylvisaker Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Fiction Prize and the Susan Atefat Arts and Letters Prize for nonfiction. Her work can be found in McSweeney’s, Electric Literature, and Literary Hub, among other outlets. She is currently working on a novel. Lok is also the cofounder, executive director, and editor of Voice of Witness, an award-winning human rights/oral history nonprofit that amplifies marginalized voices through a book series and a national education program.

Craft Capsule: Notes From the Cutting Room Floor

by

Sejal Shah

5.18.20

This is no. 60 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

An essay collection consists of more than several pieces between two covers. There is always the ghost manuscript: what is cut, what has been moved, shaped, revised. In my first book, This Is One Way to Dance, there are notes at the end of the text—they are narrative, include sources for quoted material, acknowledge readers and editors, and are not numbered. This essay is another kind of commentary. Each piece rewrites what came before. In a way, I am still rewriting my book and its notes—notes to oneself, to one’s reader, you; they are a conversation. 

I wrote the first draft of this essay in longhand; later, I typed it. At some point, I began numbering my thoughts as a way of keeping track. When I cut and pasted different sections of the text, I preserved the original numbers to trace the movement of information. In doing so, I attempt to show my writing process in the tradition of visible mending.

1. In Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, there are footnotes. There are three epigraphs at the beginning, each on a different page (I love this, the space). Many of the footnotes lead to Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature. The chapters are short, sometimes only a page, and the footnotes don’t feel like an interruption, but pleasurable, recursive reading. There is an overture disavowing prologues. After the overture is a gorgeous prologue: “The memoir is at its core, an act of resurrection. Memoirists…manipulate time; resuscitate the dead. They put themselves, and others, into necessary context.” If I had read In the Dreamhouse while working on my book, I might have written a different prologue. So many beats to a book, architecture, a tonal range, a key. All of these elements are questions that ask: Who is your audience? To whom and how do I wish to explain myself?1 

3. Are prologues and codas forms of notes? Is an introduction?

20. Here is a ghost note, something I cut from the introduction of my book: “I grew up seeing and later studying with Garth Fagan Dance. A noted choreographer, Fagan is associated with the Black Arts Movement. Fagan technique draws from ballet, modern dance, and Afro-Caribbean dance. I learned: You could invent your own language. You didn’t have to fit yourself into someone else’s forms. You didn’t have to explain yourself.”

4. I wanted my notes to go before the acknowledgments, to be part of the body of This Is One Way to Dance. In the published copy, my notes follow the acknowledgments, per the press’s house style, which is The Chicago Manual of Style. I realize I don’t believe in style manuals.

17. Somewhere in a book (an introduction) or outside it (an interview), you will have to explain why you wrote your book. At each stage of the publishing process you use a different form: a proposal, a press sheet, a preface, a prologue, an afterward, a Q&A. Sometimes I still stumble. From the preface of Sonja Livingston’s memoir, Ghostbread: “I wrote this book because the pain and power and beauty of childhood inspire me. I wrote it selfishly, to make sense of chaos. I wrote it unselfishly, to bear witness. For houses and gardens and children most of us never see.” 

Part of me wants to never explain anything. Part of me worries I have explained too much and still missed what is most important. The settling and unsettling of the self. Navigating, meditating, mediating. Not identity, but movement. A book, through architecture or by words, must instruct the reader in how to read it. Both are important.

2. For a book review, I remember finding out, after already reading far into the text, that a glossary and notes existed at the back. This changed my reading of the book. With no table of contents and no superscript numbers, how would you know to look for notes and a glossary? Do you flip to the back of the book to see what happens, in case you die before you finish reading,2 in order to know what something means?

4. (a) My book ends with the last sentence of the notes: “And there are many reasons to dance.” 

5. I am talking to my friend Prageeta Sharma, a poet, about notes. She mentions Brian Blanchfield’s Proxies: Essays Near Knowing, which begins with a section called “[A Note].” Blanchfield writes, “At the end of this book there is a rolling endnote called ‘Correction.’ It sets right much—almost certainly not all—of what between here and there I get wrong. It runs to twenty-one pages. It may still be running.” This feels true to me about writing a book. Trying to right it, but in the end, it’s a series of notations and corrections, assertions and deletions. Traces.

6. The poet Rick Barot told me his second book had notes. Not his first and third. And not his fourth, the most recent, The Galleons. He says he is anti-notes now.3 I get that.

28. Are notes like parentheses? (Say it clearly or not at all.) 

7. The writer Michael Martone wrote a book called Michael Martone, and the chapters are written in the style of “Contributors’ Notes” and his contributors’ notes are stories. Contributors’ notes are stories we tell about ourselves; they are fictions. 

10. How are notes different than sources? I wrote notes for many of my essays, but not all of them. Notes were sometimes meant to be a place to credit sources, but they also became their own commentary. They sprawled. I credit writing prompts, editors, readers, and books. Some of that could have been folded into acknowledgments. I credited sources for titles and images. I wrote about the Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage during the time and day of our ceremony and why this mattered to me. Actually, that was a kind of afterward.

13. I am writing for the kind of people who read notes. Those are my readers, my people. 

16. (a) In my book there is a coda titled “Voice Texting With My Mother.” I did not title it a coda. At some point I lost track of what needed a classification or title and what could exist as part of the invisible architecture of the book.

18. In her short “A Note from the Author,” Tyrese Coleman writes: “How to Sit [a Memoir in Stories and Essays] challenges the concept that a distinction needs to be made when the work is memory-based, because memories contain their own truth regardless of how they are documented.” 

9. This winter I read Cathy Park Hong’s book of essays, Minor Feelings. I realized, when I reached the end of the book, I had been expecting notes. Her essays are muscular, theoretical, personal, and include history, cultural commentary, friendships, family, and literature—a whole essay on the artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and her cross-genre memoir, Dictée. It surprised me to learn I liked the lack of notes in her book. It meant theorists and sources were often foregrounded in the essays themselves. In Hong’s work I saw a different model—the essay as a “coalitional form.” A model that foregrounds voices and perspectives beyond the essayist’s own—one that she credits writers in the tradition of Hilton Als, James Baldwin, and Maggie Nelson. 

19. An introduction is like a toast at a wedding. No, I cannot satisfactorily address so many audiences—pivot—who is an introduction for? Why not just begin? Whose job is it to host?

27. I read the acknowledgments and the notes in most books. I want to know how a book came together.

22. Sometimes I skim the notes.

14. I have to be honest: I am intrigued by the idea of no notes. Maybe for the next book.

 

ENDNOTES

1. After I turned in my proofs last December, I read Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings. Hong writes about Myung Mi Kim, “the first poet who said I [Hong] didn’t need to sound like a white poet nor did I have to ‘translate’ my experiences so that they sounded accessible to a white audience…Illegibility was a political act.” Yes. I believe this.
2. What Harry does in
When Harry Met Sally.
3. [E-mail from Rick] “When I say I’m now ‘anti-notes,’ this mostly refers to my last book, 
The Galleons. There’s a lot of background research in the book, but I didn’t want a notes section to make the book seem like a ‘project’ book.  After all, my research for the book was driven by lyrical sentiment and opportunity—it wasn’t systematic…”

 

Sejal Shah’s debut essay collection, This Is One Way to Dance, will be published by the University of Georgia Press in June. Her writing can be found in Brevity, Conjunctions, Guernica, Kenyon Review, the Literary Review, the Margins, and the Rumpus. She is also the recipient of a 2018 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in fiction. Shah is on the faculty of The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University, and lives in Rochester, New York. 

Thumbnail: Judith Browne

Craft Capsule: Reading Backwards

by

Carter Sickels

3.30.20

This is no. 54 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

When I was getting my MFA many years ago, a member of the workshop passed on a piece of advice he’d once heard: Read your manuscript backwards. At the time, I didn’t pay much attention (he was a bit of a know-it-all), but the advice stuck with me, clanging around in my brain, and I’ve since turned to it when line editing and hammering out bigger structural issues.

Reading backwards doesn’t mean you read from right to left, or from the bottom of the page to the top. What I do is print out the manuscript, start with the top of the last page, and work my way back to page one. This exercise works differently for me depending on where I am in the process. When I have a final draft, reading backwards helps with line editing. When I read backwards, I use my brain in a different way, and it slows down my reading. I focus on the words, not the story, and spot repetition and unnecessary words.

Reading backwards has also helped me resolve structural issues and build narrative tension. I was struggling with a short story I’d been trying to write for months. It wasn’t working but I couldn’t figure out why. I let the manuscript sit and cool, like a hot potato; when I returned to it after a few more months, I tried the backwards reading trick. The ending of the story worked, but how did I get there? There were holes in the plot, and too much exposition that glossed over important information. The first-person narrator, so focused on his lover, never stepped up or revealed any insight into his own interior. I hadn’t written any scenes with him alone or with other characters. These backwards-reading discoveries helped me restructure and revise the story; I cut exposition, wrote new scenes, and rearranged the scenes I already had to amplify the tension. 

When I’m stuck I’ll try looking at the story from a fresh angle—whether reading backwards, changing the font, hanging pages on the wall or spreading them out on the floor. I read the entire manuscript aloud. I retype. These are all ways to trick myself into approaching the novel from a different place. Sometimes it works. And when it does, it’s like seeing the project with a new pair of eyes—catching what I missed, or discovering a hidden door that leads me to the true story. 

 

Carter Sickels’s second novel, The Prettiest Star, will be published by Hub City Press on May 19. He is also the author of The Evening Hour (Bloomsbury, 2012), which was a finalist for an Oregon Book Award and a Lambda Literary Award. His essays and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in various publications, including Guernica, Bellevue Literary Review, Green Mountains Review, and BuzzFeed. The recipient of the 2013 Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Award, Sickels has also earned fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. He is an assistant professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University, where he teaches in the Bluegrass Writers low-residency MFA program. 

Thumbnail: Amie LeeKing

Craft Capsule: Consulting the Tarot

by

Emma Copley Eisenberg

2.24.20

This is no. 50 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I was raised in a house of reason where there was no God, no witchcraft, no science fiction, no astrology, and certainly no tarot. These things were for the weak, and we were not weak. But I’ll never forget when I read Uncle Tom’s Cabin and it dawned on me why Tom prayed so much: He was just trying to get through the day. I was weak, I knew. To make it from dawn to dusk, I too needed all the help I could get. 

Tarot came into my life through the friend, the friend I lost, and it is the thing she gave me more than any other for which I offer her my supreme gratitude. To be fair, I acquired the deck itself—The Wild Unknown by Kim Krans—much earlier; I bought it on impulse late one night on the gushing recommendation of someone I’d met at a party. You are not supposed to buy a tarot deck for yourself, I learned later, perhaps because without the blessing of someone you love to imbue the paper and images with power, a deck of cards is just a deck of cards.

I cannot now separate tarot from the friend, and I cannot separate tarot from writing. She and I became friends during the period when the card of the moon, which according to my deck “encompasses the idea of the Wild Unknown,” was my near constant companion. She taught me how to do the simplest spread—past, present, future—and led me to Michelle Tea’s book on tarot, life, and writing, Modern Tarot: Connecting With Your Higher Self Through the Wisdom of the Cards. Past, present, future; beginning, middle, and end. My friend and I began to draw a single card to set the mood for our writing sessions together, held at a ramshackle coworking space in the neighborhood where we lived.

What I like about drawing a single card before writing is that it allows me a single place to put my feelings about that day’s words—all my fear that the words won’t come and all my fear that they will. Drawing a single card, the mother of pentacles, for instance, which offers an image of a deer and her fawn, gives me a door at which to knock when I can’t see any of that paragraph’s architecture. She excels in the home, the card says: Perhaps I’ll turn my scent diffuser on, or I’ll have a character bake a scone, or I’ll think about why some person in my book moved around so much from place to place. It’s not so much a place to start writing but rather a way to give the day’s writing a particular mood or scent or inflection. Draw the death card, which in The Wild Unknown simply means that “something in your life needs to end…something is trying to find closure,” and the idea of ending and closure will start bonking around in my brain until it hits something in my writing that needed either to finish or to begin. Each card is like a prompt I suppose, except instead of being wacky and contrived, it feels like a prompt I gave myself from the darkest recesses of my unconscious, a shortcut to the place I was trying to go. 

I drew a card every day while writing The Third Rainbow Girl, which explores a mysterious act of violence in Pocahontas County, West Virginia in 1980, the Appalachian community where it transpired, and my own time in the place as a national service worker. For nearly the entirety of the fifteen months when I was most actively engaged, sentence by sentence, in writing the book, I dreamed about murder—either murdering or being murdered—every night. Then every morning I went to the deck and chose a card. I am not exaggerating when I say that I chose the moon card almost every time, no matter how well I shuffled. The card’s overall theme: vivid dreams and fears. I read the card’s description so many times I can recite it by heart:

[The moon] is the shadow realm, the place where dreams, fears, and mysteries are born. Much darkness can linger here, and if you aren’t careful, this can lead to periods of anxiety and self-doubt almost as if you’ve lost your way in a house of mirrors. Many great artists have roamed this inner landscape. It’s where imagination and creativity drift freely upon the midnight air.

That about summed it up. Fuck the fucking moon, I began to say aloud each time I drew it. Fuck this fucking book.

But the moon would not be fucked and neither would the book I was writing; they would not go away until they went away and maybe not even then. Eventually, I finished the book and I lost the friend. I’m drawing new cards these days—a lot of pentacles, the suit of home and hearth. I hope I drift less and dig more in the next book, but of course, it’s not up to me. 

 

Emma Copley Eisenberg is the author of The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia (Hachette Books, 2020). Her writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, Granta, the Los Angeles Review of Books, American Short Fiction, the Paris Review Daily, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, and other outlets. She is also the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Wurlitzer Foundation, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and Lambda Literary. She lives in Philadelphia, where she directs Blue Stoop, a hub for the literary arts. 

Thumbnail: Altınay Dinç

Craft Capsule: The Authority of Black Childhood

by

Joy Priest

7.6.20

This is no. 64 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Outside / its case, the mind is a beehive / fallen in the wild grasses / of an abandoned playground.

— from “Ars Poetica” by Joy Priest

It’s January 2, 2020. I’m traveling by car with a painter back to the artists’ compound that I’m staying at for a seven-month residency—a blip-stage between the MFA I finished in May 2019 and the PhD I will start in August 2020, a deliberate detour in the longer academic-poet road on which I find myself. About it, slightly in mourning. Alone in study, but wholeheartedly wanting to be closer to the people in this poetry thing.

The painter has found a way to subsist outside the university engine, working in the residency office, leading Zumba classes in the morning, painting in her studio at night. We’re talking about what academia does to artists, and, as we’re riding—from Wellfleet back to Provincetown, at the very tip of the Cape, isolated at the end of the land—she says, “I really do feel like this chapter for me has been about unlearning.”

*

“Sometimes a moment of liberation is suspended by the tight grip of contradiction,” my friend Bernardo says, which captures this moment I have in the car with the painter, as well as the larger social context we’re sailing through like a tiny, mobile dot on the periphery of the U.S. map. I was liberated by the painter’s articulation but jealous that I hadn’t pulled it out of my subconscious first: unlearning. This had been my project for the first three months of the fellowship, but I’d thought I was wasting time because that project had not yet been named. Wasting time—a feeling shaped by the values of academia, a microcosm of our larger society and its ailing imagination, which burdens artists and writers with paradigms of productivity and surplus contributions to an inaccessible archive. I had been unlearning that.

*

Usually, when stuck in a vehicle, poetry-talk is boring at worst, frustrating at best. A Lyft driver or seatmate on a plane will inevitably ask, “When did you start writing poetry?” I find this frustrating because I haven’t yet crafted a creative approach to the question, but, more importantly, because such a question precludes the true answer.

*

I was a better poet when I was a child.

During the nineties in Kentucky, I was a child in solitude. There was a lack of artificial stimuli, my technology limited to a Sega Genesis that I spent more time blowing dust from than playing. My single mother was at work. The only other person in the house was my grandfather, a man in his seventies, who—I didn’t know at the time—was white. He defined our relationship with board games, puzzles, basketball, or boxing on a box TV set—the technology of his time. With his racist perspectives, he attempted to define my identity, which I didn’t yet understand, but felt, intuitively. 

In place of understanding, in place of the internet, I cultivated a practice in noticing. This is how I developed my approach to the page, before I had an awareness of “craft.” Poetry wasn’t what I did or what I started doing in a single moment from the past onward, it was the way I thought, who I had to be in my grandfather’s household, the way my mind worked to make sense of something.

There isn’t a single event that led to me becoming a poet. There isn’t a beginning to me writing poetry—there is only the beginner’s mind. This is what I find myself trying to get back to in my unlearning: the authority of a child’s imagination—what we possess before we are fully indoctrinated into adulthood and the accepted ways of making sense of things. 

*

I spent a lot of time outside of my grandfather’s house, in the backyard. My mind was a beehive. A chaotic, intuitive knot of thought-impulses that I needed to wrest apart, investigate, ruminate on, understand. I found myself watching the ants at ground-level, making a daily visit to the carpenter bees and their perfectly round holes in the rotting wood. 

When I was inside, I noticed the difference between my grandfather’s skin and mine. I knew my hair was more like the hair of darker people, who he was always saying bad things about. I knew that he didn’t want me to be like them, but I couldn’t understand why. I couldn’t understand why, but I could notice. I kept a record of these little noticings as a substitute for clarity around what I was noticing. This conversation with myself as a Black child supplemented what I learned, or what adults sought to teach me (what a white child learns or is taught by white adults). This practice of noticing, or overhearing, was my seminal craft approach. 

*

Pulling away the scaffolding of craft “knowledge,” which I’ve accumulated as an adult poet, has led me to this—notebooks full of little noticings and meditations, overhearings and mishearings, notions that haunt me, lines that keep coming up. Writing a poem this way becomes less strained: that accumulation of craft had become a cheesecloth through which I struggled to write. 

These little noticings are the only way I wish to start a poem, or any conversation about craft. It is how I get closer to an understanding of what something or someone—my imaginary friend, my ancestors, my intuition, the flora and fauna—is trying to tell me, and I embrace this as a spiritual craft as well as a technical one. It is my resistance to the limits of the U.S. popular imagination, which condescends to the childhood imagination in tropes and shorthand, which does not know, can no longer remember, what the child knows.

 

Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower, which won the 2019 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press in September. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in numerous publications, including BOAAT, Connotation Press, Four Way Review, espnW, Gulf Coast, Mississippi Review, and Poetry Northwest, and have been anthologized in The Louisville Anthology (Belt Publishing, September 2020), A Measure of Belonging: Writers of Color on the New American South (Hub City Press, October 2020) and Best New Poets 2014, 2016, and 2019. A doctoral student in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston, Priest has also been a journalist, a theater attendant, a waitress, and a fast food worker. She has facilitated writing workshops and arbitration programs with adult and juvenile incarcerated women, and has taught composition, rhetoric, comedy, and African American arts and culture at the university level.

Thumbnail: Dustin Humes

Craft Capsule: Breaking Genre

by

Sejal Shah

6.15.20

This is no. 63 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I.

I’ve always been drawn to hybrid forms, but I didn’t think of them as hybrid until I had to describe my writing to someone else. To say “hybrid” means that you accept genre classifications and other people’s designations. I don’t. I also don’t walk around thinking of myself as hyphenated.1 I’m just me. Some of us don’t fit in the lines someone else drew. 

Like all writers, I am a combination of where I grew up, what I read, who my parents are, the languages I spoke, how safe it is for me to walk at night, my brain chemistry, the number of countries in which my parents grew up, the number of times you told me that I got the job/award/prize because I don’t look like you, the number of ways I learned to duck and weave when you blocked the door. Like all of us, I am a product of how I learned formally or informally what was what—what counts, who counts, and to whom. 

My undergraduate thesis was half poetry, half stories. I wrote and read poetry in high school and college, but then began writing prose. My lines got longer, and line breaks began to feel arbitrary. In my just-released book, This Is One Way to Dance, five of the twenty-three essays were once called stories. There is also an opening poem and a closing poem, which I think of as a lyrical coda. I cannibalized parts of what had once been the nonfiction introduction to my MFA fiction thesis to find the sounds to open and close the essays.2 

Where did my stories go? Where did my poetry go? Even as I pivoted to more nonfiction work, these forms were still there, buried, or sometimes not buried at all. In one essay3 last year, I included fiction in marked, indented sections. In writing about neurodiversity, institutional racism, and sexual harassment, I used excerpts of published short stories of mine to offer a counternarrative and voice—what the nonfiction narrator could not say in her essay. In nonfiction, I was recounting an event. In fiction, I could go to a distressing place without having to explain it. I looked for places where the language needed a different pitch, for example, when I was describing mania: 

I wanted to return to the ocean, I wanted to get cooked. I wrote on the walls in charcoal because all of the other surfaces could move and then I wouldn’t find them. I might not find you.4

Stories allowed me to say what I could not have otherwise said, at least at the time of writing. In the period in which I wrote those stories, I could not have written, as nonfiction, about the reality of being diagnosed with manic depression, adjusting to psychiatric meds that had a severe side-effect of aphasia and cognitive dampening:

They said take this pill. This one or that one, two before sleep. Take four: in the morning or at night. It’s best to avoid alcohol…These things, they said, happen sometimes. There is no relief.5

There is magic in fiction, in not having everything you write be attached directly to you. In my stories I draw from a wilder field, and I’m not worried about how something sounds, if it would make my public self cringe. If you grow up in a deeply private, Hindu, conservative, traditional family as I did, fiction and poetry offered a different code, a cover. I missed that cover when I tried to move to straight nonfiction.6 So why force it? Why choose? I want whatever genre allows me to speak the deepest truth. 

 

II.

Of course, in attempting to make a book, I encountered how the publishing and academic industries enforce limitations, rules, and expectations on writers of color, particularly in regard to genre. We are formless, but to be published you have to choose a form.

My original manuscript for what became This Is One Way to Dance was half stories, half essays, but I did not label them. Most of the pieces had already been published in print journals or online. They had been worked on, vetted, polished, edited. Several agents contacted me over the years, but no one wanted to represent the essay collection as it looks now or my (still) unpublished story collection. I learned that some editors who considered the hybrid manuscript read the stories as nonfiction. Because I wrote either in first or second person, because my narrators were women, because they were South Asian American, because I wrote about Rochester and Brooklyn and New York City and Massachusetts, the unspoken assumption was that I was writing about me.

I published my book without an agent. I still don’t have one. If you are a woman, if you are a writer of color, publishing can only imagine you in a certain box, in a narrative that makes sense to them. There’s a lack of imagination and perspective. There’s racism. At some point I got tired of readers assuming what happens in my stories actually happened. (If you need to know: I don’t have a sister who killed herself; I did grow up in Rochester; I never lived in Ithaca; I did not sleep with my professor. I write essays. If I’m calling it fiction, it’s for a reason). 

Let’s talk about two male writers both named John. John Updike and John Edgar Wideman have both drawn from some autobiographical material in their novels, but their work is accepted and reviewed as fiction. And yet most publishers don’t know how to market, let alone perceive, work by a woman of color as imagined. Our work is seen as ethnographic, dictation, not crafted, not composite, not fiction. White publishing can’t imagine that we too can create, can imagine, can make a story, can make believe. Can make money. Can be of worth, of value. They don’t believe some stories are worth advances, are worth the suspension of disbelief. 

 

III.

In her essay “Genre and Genre Theory,” my graduate school classmate, poet and scholar Dawn Lundy Martin, describes the memory of writing a poem in response to the murder of Yusef Hawkins, a Black teenager murdered by a mob of white men in 1989. It was one of the first times she knew she might be a poet, she says, describing the rightness of the form: “Poetry was the genre that allowed for a manipulation of language so that it could be stretched beyond its everyday capacity to accommodate horrific realities that make up human experience. It creates an illogic, an appropriate response to the rational narratives that attempted, with little success, to provide language for Yusef Hawkins’s murder.”

She goes on to argue for leaning into this “illogic”: poetry’s capacity to stretch, its capacity to defy genre, to create space for the unruly: “If we cannot communicate across a genre ‘divide,’ then perhaps we cannot communicate across a race ‘divide.’” In other words, how we think about writing and genre has urgent implications in real life. 

Martin’s words on poetry—her belief in a genre that breaks genre—are a comfort in and of themselves, but more than that, I was struck by the range of her essay—how the form and content of the essay made the case for crossing boundaries. I saw her place and connect a young Black man killed in 1989 and the newspaper account of it and academia and unsafe neighborhoods and genre and her position as the director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh. I saw her write about power and get paid. I saw the academy implicated through language. I want to do that. I am already—writing in this tradition of unsettling genre, of fashioning queer texts. In a blurb for This Is One Way to Dance, Martin wrote: “If a queer text is an unsettled one, crossing cultures, crossing genres, then this book of essays rescripts what we think we know about identity.”

Ultimately, I had to choose a classification for my first book. At the fork in the road, I chose nonfiction; I chose what granted me the most space: essays. Editor and writer Valerie Boyd solicited my work for Crux, the literary nonfiction series she coedits at University of Georgia Press. I made a new manuscript, cutting most of the stories and replacing them with essays. 

Even as I claim a genre, I step outside it.7 It says “essays” on the cover of This Is One Way to Dance, but this word will always contain a more complicated truth—the history and movement and genre slippage and time woven into my text and its history, which I hope offers some kind of challenge to power, to the intent to classify, to discipline. I began sending out my hybrid manuscript in 2016. I sent the first iteration of the nonfiction manuscript in 2017. Then, life: #MeToo, PTSD, a move, an illness, a resettling and evaluating of the manuscript, two rounds of academic peer review (nothing is fast in the academy, and I’m not fast either). My book was published in 2020. In a global pandemic, mass protests and mourning, executions and terror, a reckoning—enough—some movement toward what looks like change.  

Language fractures, is further fractured by others, in its attempt to be spoken. I understand the difficulty and the contortion. I am speaking anyways.

 

IV.

I read my work aloud when I am working on it, when I am revising. My husband read aloud This Is One Way to Dance when I was going through proofs. The sentences have to land; the sounds have to hit a certain note. I’m thinking of when you tune a violin and the string next to it needs to vibrate. That is how I work in most any genre when I am most true to myself. I don’t think about labels. I don’t care about what to call it, what it will be called. We are called. I listen for the sound.

 

ENDNOTES

1. I had a girlhood. It was American because I was in America. I once wrote on Facebook: “I don’t hate Indian [as a qualifier] and I do use it—I just hate the assumptions that writer = white and the rest of us need to have who we are qualified. There’s a writer and then a woman writer. Or a Black writer. Or an Indian American writer. Why not just say writer?” 
2. I always go by sound, which engenders its own accidental hybrid forms. I think of voice-texting and autocorrect. For years if I said my husband’s name, “Raj,” the phone wrote down “Roger.” “Saris” became “sorrows.”
3. “Even If You Can’t See It: Invisible Disability & Neurodiversity” in the Kenyon Review Online.
4. From my story “Watch Over Me; Turn a Blind Eye” in the
Asian American Literary Review.
5. From my story “Climate, Man, Vegetation” in Drunken Boat.
6. In 2011 my friend the poet Philip White told me he thought “Street Scene,” an essay in my book, could be called a lyric essay. I looked up the definition and agreed this rang true: My essay had qualities of both poetry and the essay. It was the first time I had heard this term. 
7. I asked two poets of color, Sarah Gambito and Cathy Park Hong, to help me launch my book. During my virtual launch, they spoke about my books not only as essays, but also claimed and named them as prose poems, meditations. I didn’t know why I asked them and not fiction writers—in my academic career I was a fiction writer through graduate school, visiting professorships, fellowships, and a tenure-track job—but it was a relief to be legible to poets who were always my first tribe.

 

Sejal Shah is the author of This Is One Way to Dance (University of Georgia Press). Her writing can be found in BrevityConjunctionsGuernicaKenyon Review, the Literary Review, the Margins, and the Rumpus. She is also the recipient of a 2018 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in fiction. Shah is on the faculty of The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University, and lives in Rochester, New York. 

Thumbnail: Michele Bitetto

Craft Capsule: Break It Down or Shorter Forms

by

Sejal Shah

6.1.20

This is no. 62 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Working right now—in the twenty-first century, in the pandemic—I find my attention is even more fragmented than usual. It’s splintered. I’ve had to connect to people via Skype, WhatsApp, Zoom, and send messages via e-mail, Twitter, Instagram, and—the grandfather of social media—Facebook. Each platform presents itself differently, and I present myself differently. Then there’s the distractions of the phone itself: A text comes in, then another notification. I cannot remember my name after switching from one portal to another all day. I forget passwords. I forgot my neighbor’s name. 

With my attention so dispersed, I find myself writing in shorter forms, using fragments to build a larger structure. My debut essay collection, This Is One Way to Dance, is composed of twenty-three essays—some are more traditional and longform, but others are short lyric essays, segmented essays, varying in length. There is a list essay, too. 

Making a book means figuring out the binding, the connective tissue, but the scale of that task can be daunting. Using shorter forms, smaller canvases—and markers and signposts in the longer essays—helped me not feel overwhelmed by the subject matter: racism, immigration, depression, mental health, neurodivergence, the lack of basic geography and knowledge Americans have about most other cultures (even writing that out feels exhausting). Using numbers in a list essay, subheadings in a segmented essay, breaking up my own words with words from other writers, an asterisk or ornament to signal a pause—all this somehow gave my work more space, breath, silence, and pauses, especially in painful matters. 

*

This week I picked up my copy of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, which I bought in 1995 and read in my twenties during my first trip to England and Italy. I only saw today that the binding had split. I’ve referred to it a lot over the years, often in teaching. In the chapter “Short Assignments,” Lamott writes: “Often when you sit down to write, what you have in mind is an autobiographical novel about your childhood, or a play about the immigrant experience, or a history of—oh, say—say women. But this is like trying to scale a glacier…then your mental illnesses arrive at the desk like your sickest, most secretive relatives.” In that same chapter she refers to an object that steadies her: “I go back to trying to breathe, slowly and calmly, and I finally notice the one-inch picture frame that I put on my desk to remind me of short assignments.”

When I write, sometimes I think of that one-inch picture frame: its visual representation of Bird by Bird and short assignments. My version of the short assignment is writing four hundred words or four sentences for The Grind, a peer e-mail accountability group for writers. It’s using timers, for fifteen minutes or an hour, or doing coworking sessions with writer friends.

Sometimes I feel we all are telling the same story again and again, but it’s an important story and the thing is to be able to hear it. I sometimes find it easier to see the story—to hold the different threads of an essay—if I divide up the text, if there are visual breaks and spaces, numbers. 

Later in Bird by Bird, Lamott reminds us of another object, another tool of the short form that might be especially useful: index cards. When I reread her description of keeping the cards everywhere, all over the house, I thought, Now, that’s the problem. I forgot about index cards! I sometimes remember to type notes into my phone or record a voice memo, but then don’t do anything with them. But paper: That helps. To see it. This is a problem with the phone.

*

My attraction to scaffolding and shorter forms comes partially from how I think. I was formally diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in my forties—unusually late. When I was in graduate school in my twenties, my doctor thought I had attention deficit disorder. I could get evaluated for free through our graduate student health insurance, but I kept losing the slip of paper. We used to laugh about this. I didn’t pursue a diagnosis, because I didn’t think having one would help me. Either way I had to figure out how to get my work done. Asian Americans are supposed to be good at school. (I was good at some parts of it, but not others.) Just try harder. I present as normal or as high-functioning. The doctor I’ve known longest in my life, my father, always said doctors can’t do anything for you. You have to help yourself. 

The doctor before my most recent one would not prescribe ADHD medication to me because he said, “You should have been diagnosed by age nine.” (My report cards read, “Talks too much, reads too much, easily distracted, not trying to the best of her ability.” But I didn’t disrupt the class by jumping around—girls don’t present in the way boys do and our medical and educational systems use white men as the standard. I wasn’t throwing erasers, so of course I wasn’t diagnosed.) My husband teaches middle school. To him, it’s very clear I have ADHD. I live with my brain and he lives with me. I spend a lot of time trying to organize papers, e-mails, to-dos, grocery lists. And thinking of where I last left that list or notebook. I think associatively, not in a linear way. Numbers and subheadings help me to translate or render those associative leaps to a reader, or to make them legible: a visual signal we are shifting gears.

This is part of why it took a long time to figure out the structure for my book. A book is a long form. It requires stepping back to see the forest. Left to my own devices, I see leaves and trees. Shorter forms, dividing up longer essays, bird by bird, restored a sense of agency. They granted me permission to not say everything—or to say just enough. There is a learning curve to know how and when to choose a particular short form or how to divide something and break it down. Not all subjects will be unlocked by fragments or subheadings, numbers or lists. But as I practice—found my one-inch picture frame, index cards, list essays, the thing that worked for my brain—I began to speak on my own terms.

 

Sejal Shah is the author of This Is One Way to Dance (University of Georgia Press). Her writing can be found in BrevityConjunctionsGuernicaKenyon Review, the Literary Review, the Margins, and the Rumpus. She is also the recipient of a 2018 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in fiction. Shah is on the faculty of The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University, and lives in Rochester, New York. 

Thumbnail: Hassan Pasha

Craft Capsule: Feel Your Way

by

Sejal Shah

5.25.20

This is no. 61 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

1.
During the last year I lived in New York, I started dancing again at a Sunday morning class in the West Village called “Sweat Your Prayers.” An old boyfriend told me I should go. I was stuck on him, not great, but he did bring some good things into my life and this was one of them. The class was in the style of 5Rhythms, an ecstatic dance and movement meditation practice: 11:00 AM, no talking, a DJ, flowy clothes, everyone moving. A lot of white people, some people of color. They danced; we danced. The music sets changed, but the pattern remained steady, following the five rhythms: Flowing, Staccato, Chaos, Lyrical, Stillness. Shapes emerge from movement, unbidden, in an intuitive way. Not speaking opened up another way of communicating with one’s self and the other dancers in the room—through the repetition of movement, in how we dodged some people and were drawn to others. 

2.
I moved intuitively in dance class. It was a class based on improvisation, not a final performance. Making a book involves intuition, too, but then you have to stop and think: How can I make sense of this for a reader? A book is a performance, a gathering, a repetition, a ritual, and a thing, an object. There is an end point.

3.
My first book will be published next week, but it took me twenty years to write. The essays that comprise This Is One Way to Dance were written, revised, then collected and stitched together in what proved to be a long process of encountering and attempting to contain and shape a lot of life, stylistic choices, and past selves—as much as the work—between two covers. A few essays began as short stories but as I worked, they became legible as essays through editing, shaping, metamorphosis. 

The process of finding a form for my book produced a tension between my instinctive sense of how the essays were connected, and the pressure I felt to utilize some kind of discernible structure or concept to link them. Framework often emerges slowly, an invisible labor. 

In my book, one way I created structure was through the use of dates, timestamps. I followed Joan Didion’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem as an example and placed timestamps at the end of each piece: the year I wrote it and, if relevant, the year I revised it. The stamps offer me—and the reader—a moment to consider time: its mysterious nature and passing.

4.
I learned the term “front matter” from Tom, my book’s project editor. Before this, I had not considered how the beginning of a book is put together, how it unfolds. The front matter includes the title page, copyright page, dedication, epigraph, table of contents, preface or introduction. It can include acknowledgments, too.

After the front matter in my book is an opening poem, a prologue. I called it “Prelude” after “Prelude: Discipline is Freedom,” a dance choreographed by the artist Garth Fagan many years ago, a piece I grew up seeing. The dance is an invocation of sorts, with parts of a dance class woven within: the repetition of fundamental movements, foundational exercises, floor sequences, four women passing here, four men there, now slow, now speedy, now ratcheting up, now a solo. 

Before the introduction, before the poem, is the title page: the book’s title, the author’s name, the publisher’s name, the place of publication. There is also a childhood photo of me, dressed up to dance, in front of our old house wearing a chuniya chori my grandmother sewed, with Ba standing a ways behind me, visible in the glass door. 

“Prelude” begins with brackets, “[ ],” then my name in Gujarati. Then the first line in English: “I am trying to describe what it feels like //.” Working on the frontmatter, and the book as a whole, meant conversations with Tom and the designer Erin: deliberations about the language of captions, Gujarati script, typeface, size, margins, ornaments, headings. The permission to quote from Toni Morrison’s essay, “The Site of Memory,” is on the copyright page as per the agreement. All of this was new to me—this level of detail that belongs to a book. 

5.
I bought Martha Graham’s Blood Memory: An Autobiography last year, because I wanted structure and language and forms from the world of dance. I was searching for a connection to something fundamental; a structure I could rely on as I shaped my book from so many pieces. Classifications, levels, subgenres, terminology. I didn’t find my book’s structure there, but I found these words: “There are always ancestral footsteps behind me, pushing me, when I am creating a new dance, and gestures are flowing through me.” This movement.

6.
My book’s internal architecture began with academic fields of study, disciplines. I organized essays under subheadings of American Studies, Area Studies, Cultural Studies, and Women’s Studies. School had been my house for many years, but I no longer live there. I live somewhere else now. 

7.
Another try: I took the title of one of my lyric essays, “Castle, Fort, Lookout, House,” and divided my book into four sections: Castle, Fort, Lookout, House. The essay itself is one of my favorites: It’s an incantation built from years of reading fairy tales and love stories, romances, epics. Where is home? What is the journey? Who do you love? But it felt artificial to classify the other essays under these images, as they are.

8.
A third try. These categories from dance: Space, Time, Direction. Too abstract. 

9. 
Ultimately, I realized that my book is a series of gestural movements, beginning from its spine, the tree. An old photograph to place us, to bring the past into now, though the whole book is a weaving of this time into that time, the way we carry the past with us in our bones, in our cells. 

10.
There has to be movement and stretching, shapes, a direction. I thought of mudras, which I learned from studying Bharata Natyam and Kuchipudi, two styles of classical Indian dance. Anjali mudra is one used often at the end of yoga and dance classes. Palms pressed together: a balancing. So much of writing is what has been cut away. A book is a series of choices; it is what remains.  

 11.
To dance is a way to integrate: to shed for a moment the weight and sense of being seen. It’s not lost, exactly, but being seen does not dominate. To move through the world, there is no leaving race behind. Not in this country. But to dance is to allow yourself to feel out through your arms, the sensation of being held in space, moving in a direction, grounded in a place. To be a person and not only a girl, not only a brown body, but to be embodied and therefore the subject, the I. In my “Prelude,” my opening poem, I borrow a line from a poem by Kamala Das: “I too call myself I.” I use different punctuation: “[(I, too, call myself I)].”

Working this way—in both dance and writing—takes time, to feel your way into the structure by sound. I look for my glasses on a morning bedside table cluttered with books, a glass of water, pens, a lamp, hand lotion, a weighted lavender eye pillow. How can you find your glasses if you can’t see? You feel your way.

 

Sejal Shah’s debut essay collection, This Is One Way to Dance, will be published by the University of Georgia Press in June. Her writing can be found in Brevity, Conjunctions, Guernica, Kenyon Review, the Literary Review, the Margins, and the Rumpus. She is also the recipient of a 2018 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in fiction. Shah is on the faculty of The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University, and lives in Rochester, New York. 

Thumbnail: Nikoline Arns

Craft Capsule: Feel Your Way

by

Sejal Shah

5.25.20

This is no. 61 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

1.
During the last year I lived in New York, I started dancing again at a Sunday morning class in the West Village called “Sweat Your Prayers.” An old boyfriend told me I should go. I was stuck on him, not great, but he did bring some good things into my life and this was one of them. The class was in the style of 5Rhythms, an ecstatic dance and movement meditation practice: 11:00 AM, no talking, a DJ, flowy clothes, everyone moving. A lot of white people, some people of color. They danced; we danced. The music sets changed, but the pattern remained steady, following the five rhythms: Flowing, Staccato, Chaos, Lyrical, Stillness. Shapes emerge from movement, unbidden, in an intuitive way. Not speaking opened up another way of communicating with one’s self and the other dancers in the room—through the repetition of movement, in how we dodged some people and were drawn to others. 

2.
I moved intuitively in dance class. It was a class based on improvisation, not a final performance. Making a book involves intuition, too, but then you have to stop and think: How can I make sense of this for a reader? A book is a performance, a gathering, a repetition, a ritual, and a thing, an object. There is an end point.

3.
My first book will be published next week, but it took me twenty years to write. The essays that comprise This Is One Way to Dance were written, revised, then collected and stitched together in what proved to be a long process of encountering and attempting to contain and shape a lot of life, stylistic choices, and past selves—as much as the work—between two covers. A few essays began as short stories but as I worked, they became legible as essays through editing, shaping, metamorphosis. 

The process of finding a form for my book produced a tension between my instinctive sense of how the essays were connected, and the pressure I felt to utilize some kind of discernible structure or concept to link them. Framework often emerges slowly, an invisible labor. 

In my book, one way I created structure was through the use of dates, timestamps. I followed Joan Didion’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem as an example and placed timestamps at the end of each piece: the year I wrote it and, if relevant, the year I revised it. The stamps offer me—and the reader—a moment to consider time: its mysterious nature and passing.

4.
I learned the term “front matter” from Tom, my book’s project editor. Before this, I had not considered how the beginning of a book is put together, how it unfolds. The front matter includes the title page, copyright page, dedication, epigraph, table of contents, preface or introduction. It can include acknowledgments, too.

After the front matter in my book is an opening poem, a prologue. I called it “Prelude” after “Prelude: Discipline is Freedom,” a dance choreographed by the artist Garth Fagan many years ago, a piece I grew up seeing. The dance is an invocation of sorts, with parts of a dance class woven within: the repetition of fundamental movements, foundational exercises, floor sequences, four women passing here, four men there, now slow, now speedy, now ratcheting up, now a solo. 

Before the introduction, before the poem, is the title page: the book’s title, the author’s name, the publisher’s name, the place of publication. There is also a childhood photo of me, dressed up to dance, in front of our old house wearing a chuniya chori my grandmother sewed, with Ba standing a ways behind me, visible in the glass door. 

“Prelude” begins with brackets, “[ ],” then my name in Gujarati. Then the first line in English: “I am trying to describe what it feels like //.” Working on the frontmatter, and the book as a whole, meant conversations with Tom and the designer Erin: deliberations about the language of captions, Gujarati script, typeface, size, margins, ornaments, headings. The permission to quote from Toni Morrison’s essay, “The Site of Memory,” is on the copyright page as per the agreement. All of this was new to me—this level of detail that belongs to a book. 

5.
I bought Martha Graham’s Blood Memory: An Autobiography last year, because I wanted structure and language and forms from the world of dance. I was searching for a connection to something fundamental; a structure I could rely on as I shaped my book from so many pieces. Classifications, levels, subgenres, terminology. I didn’t find my book’s structure there, but I found these words: “There are always ancestral footsteps behind me, pushing me, when I am creating a new dance, and gestures are flowing through me.” This movement.

6.
My book’s internal architecture began with academic fields of study, disciplines. I organized essays under subheadings of American Studies, Area Studies, Cultural Studies, and Women’s Studies. School had been my house for many years, but I no longer live there. I live somewhere else now. 

7.
Another try: I took the title of one of my lyric essays, “Castle, Fort, Lookout, House,” and divided my book into four sections: Castle, Fort, Lookout, House. The essay itself is one of my favorites: It’s an incantation built from years of reading fairy tales and love stories, romances, epics. Where is home? What is the journey? Who do you love? But it felt artificial to classify the other essays under these images, as they are.

8.
A third try. These categories from dance: Space, Time, Direction. Too abstract. 

9. 
Ultimately, I realized that my book is a series of gestural movements, beginning from its spine, the tree. An old photograph to place us, to bring the past into now, though the whole book is a weaving of this time into that time, the way we carry the past with us in our bones, in our cells. 

10.
There has to be movement and stretching, shapes, a direction. I thought of mudras, which I learned from studying Bharata Natyam and Kuchipudi, two styles of classical Indian dance. Anjali mudra is one used often at the end of yoga and dance classes. Palms pressed together: a balancing. So much of writing is what has been cut away. A book is a series of choices; it is what remains.  

 11.
To dance is a way to integrate: to shed for a moment the weight and sense of being seen. It’s not lost, exactly, but being seen does not dominate. To move through the world, there is no leaving race behind. Not in this country. But to dance is to allow yourself to feel out through your arms, the sensation of being held in space, moving in a direction, grounded in a place. To be a person and not only a girl, not only a brown body, but to be embodied and therefore the subject, the I. In my “Prelude,” my opening poem, I borrow a line from a poem by Kamala Das: “I too call myself I.” I use different punctuation: “[(I, too, call myself I)].”

Working this way—in both dance and writing—takes time, to feel your way into the structure by sound. I look for my glasses on a morning bedside table cluttered with books, a glass of water, pens, a lamp, hand lotion, a weighted lavender eye pillow. How can you find your glasses if you can’t see? You feel your way.

 

Sejal Shah’s debut essay collection, This Is One Way to Dance, will be published by the University of Georgia Press in June. Her writing can be found in Brevity, Conjunctions, Guernica, Kenyon Review, the Literary Review, the Margins, and the Rumpus. She is also the recipient of a 2018 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in fiction. Shah is on the faculty of The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University, and lives in Rochester, New York. 

Thumbnail: Nikoline Arns

Craft Capsule: Obsessions, Hobbies, Dreams

by

Carter Sickels

5.4.20

This is no. 59 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Early in the writing of my second novel, The Prettiest Star, I thought about what TV shows one of the protagonists, Jess, a fourteen-year-old girl, would be watching in 1986, when the novel begins. MTV, of course, and a lot of sitcoms. But what about when she was younger, what shaped her? I grew up in the eighties, and before my family had cable or a satellite dish, we had four channels from which to choose. Like most kids from that time, I watched a lot of PBS. In addition to Sesame Street, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and The Electric Company, a nature show always seemed to be on: Nova or Wild America. While I was thinking about Jess’s TV habits, I also watched the 2013 documentary Blackfish, a heartbreaking indictment of SeaWorld’s practice of raising orcas in captivity, and remembered when I visited SeaWorld Ohio as a kid. (Yes, they actually had whales in Ohio; the park closed in 2000.)

What if Jess watched a lot of nature shows? What if she fell in love with killer whales, the way some kids do with horses? Maybe she goes to SeaWorld Ohio, and since she’s never been to the ocean, the shows and books she reads about whales transport her from small-town Ohio to the wildness and mystery of the sea. As I did more research, I started to hear Jess’s voice—and her brainy knowledge of whale facts and details worked their way into the novel. Before this, I didn’t know much about whales, except that they were beautiful and spectacular and mysterious. This is something I love about writing fiction—entering, if only briefly, other worlds, and learning about topics and places and people you may never encounter in real life. 

The killer whales also began to resonate thematically, which surprised me—the orcas’ relationships to family, matriarchy, and mourning the dead reflected and deepened some of my explorations in my novel of how my human characters relate to one another. The Prettiest Star revolves around Jess’s older brother, Brian Jackson, a young gay man diagnosed with AIDs, who has returned to his family’s home in the small, conservative town where he grew up, and asks how his family will, or will not, care for him. Similarly, like Jess’s love for whales, Brian’s love for David Bowie reverberates throughout the novel, even influencing the title. For Brian, a queer kid growing up in a small conservative town in Appalachia, Bowie’s music represented hope and magic and possibility.

What interests your characters, what obsesses them? What are their hobbies? What do they dream about, what do they love? Maybe they play basketball, read tarot cards, collect matchbooks, idolize Dolly Parton, dream about outer space. What is that thing that lights your character up, and gives you a way inside—so that you’re not writing from the outside, but inhabiting the character from within? A hobby, a gesture, a dream may help you understand and develop your characters, and just may deepen the novel’s ideas, building stronger connections between characters, themes, and imagery.  

 

Carter Sickels’s second novel, The Prettiest Star, will be published by Hub City Press on May 19. He is also the author of The Evening Hour (Bloomsbury, 2012), which was a finalist for an Oregon Book Award and a Lambda Literary Award. His essays and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in various publications, including GuernicaBellevue Literary ReviewGreen Mountains Review, and BuzzFeed. The recipient of the 2013 Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Award, Sickels has also earned fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. He is an assistant professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University, where he teaches in the Bluegrass Writers low-residency MFA program. 

Thumbnail: Bart van meele

Craft Capsule: Obsessions, Hobbies, Dreams

by

Carter Sickels

5.4.20

This is no. 59 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Early in the writing of my second novel, The Prettiest Star, I thought about what TV shows one of the protagonists, Jess, a fourteen-year-old girl, would be watching in 1986, when the novel begins. MTV, of course, and a lot of sitcoms. But what about when she was younger, what shaped her? I grew up in the eighties, and before my family had cable or a satellite dish, we had four channels from which to choose. Like most kids from that time, I watched a lot of PBS. In addition to Sesame Street, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and The Electric Company, a nature show always seemed to be on: Nova or Wild America. While I was thinking about Jess’s TV habits, I also watched the 2013 documentary Blackfish, a heartbreaking indictment of SeaWorld’s practice of raising orcas in captivity, and remembered when I visited SeaWorld Ohio as a kid. (Yes, they actually had whales in Ohio; the park closed in 2000.)

What if Jess watched a lot of nature shows? What if she fell in love with killer whales, the way some kids do with horses? Maybe she goes to SeaWorld Ohio, and since she’s never been to the ocean, the shows and books she reads about whales transport her from small-town Ohio to the wildness and mystery of the sea. As I did more research, I started to hear Jess’s voice—and her brainy knowledge of whale facts and details worked their way into the novel. Before this, I didn’t know much about whales, except that they were beautiful and spectacular and mysterious. This is something I love about writing fiction—entering, if only briefly, other worlds, and learning about topics and places and people you may never encounter in real life. 

The killer whales also began to resonate thematically, which surprised me—the orcas’ relationships to family, matriarchy, and mourning the dead reflected and deepened some of my explorations in my novel of how my human characters relate to one another. The Prettiest Star revolves around Jess’s older brother, Brian Jackson, a young gay man diagnosed with AIDs, who has returned to his family’s home in the small, conservative town where he grew up, and asks how his family will, or will not, care for him. Similarly, like Jess’s love for whales, Brian’s love for David Bowie reverberates throughout the novel, even influencing the title. For Brian, a queer kid growing up in a small conservative town in Appalachia, Bowie’s music represented hope and magic and possibility.

What interests your characters, what obsesses them? What are their hobbies? What do they dream about, what do they love? Maybe they play basketball, read tarot cards, collect matchbooks, idolize Dolly Parton, dream about outer space. What is that thing that lights your character up, and gives you a way inside—so that you’re not writing from the outside, but inhabiting the character from within? A hobby, a gesture, a dream may help you understand and develop your characters, and just may deepen the novel’s ideas, building stronger connections between characters, themes, and imagery.  

 

Carter Sickels’s second novel, The Prettiest Star, will be published by Hub City Press on May 19. He is also the author of The Evening Hour (Bloomsbury, 2012), which was a finalist for an Oregon Book Award and a Lambda Literary Award. His essays and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in various publications, including GuernicaBellevue Literary ReviewGreen Mountains Review, and BuzzFeed. The recipient of the 2013 Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Award, Sickels has also earned fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. He is an assistant professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University, where he teaches in the Bluegrass Writers low-residency MFA program. 

Thumbnail: Bart van meele

Craft Capsule: Doors vs. Corridors

by

Will Harris

8.17.20

This is no. 68 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

During the pandemic, with so many doors locked and shuttered, I lived in the corridors of my house. Thom Gunn describes the corridor as a “separate place between the thought and felt”—a place of uncertainty, where thoughts are unformed and feelings suppressed. It’s probably not surprising, then, that the few poems I managed to eke out were meandering, confused, and muffled.

As the architecture of my house extended into what I wrote, I started looking for poems about houses—either set indoors or using the “house” as a metaphor for the craft of poetry. I was trying to work out what kind of house poetry should be, and how much confusion that house might be able to contain. Soon enough I turned to Emily Dickinson: 

I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –

I always read this stanza with the ironic hint of the estate agent in her tone (“Superior—for Doors” is particularly funny), which seems to mock the idea you could ever really compare poetry to a house. Though it can feel like using a conceit means committing to it entirely, here the analogy is loosely held, self-consciously tenuous: “If you look to your right, you’ll see some windows. How many? Numerous. And if you look down there, yup, superior doors. You won’t get that with Prose.” The lightness of tone is part of the image she projects about poetry. 

But I read it with another, darker Dickinson poem in the back of my head, this one taking the house less as a metaphor for poetry than for the poet’s interior life:

One need not be a Chamber – to be haunted – 
One need not be a House –
The Brain has Corridors – surpassing 
Material Place

These lines suggest that when you forgo “Material Place” and build your house in “Possibility” you open yourself up to a particular danger: being haunted. Where the other poem began with a confident assertion of habitation—“I dwell”—here the speaker expresses horror at the idea of being dwelt in: “The Brain has Corridors.” The tone is repetitious, fevered, as though the speaker has been running up and down their internal corridors for hours. The effect of this is compounded by the use of the impersonal pronoun “One” and that definite article before “Brain”—not my brain but the brain—which suggests a traumatic detachment from the body; and “surpassing,” hanging at the end of the line makes it feel like those brain corridors are only getting bigger, longer, more labyrinthine. 

What’s missing from the second poem is a door of the kind Dickinson thought made poetry so superior—and without one, there’s no means of escape. Door and corridor may sound related but there’s no etymological link between them. The word door comes from the Old English duru and has always meant the same thing. Corridor is from the Italian corridoio, referring to a “running-place.” They represent two forms of possibility, each reliant on the other: The door is a portal, signifying insight, while the corridor is an in-between place, signifying uncertainty and confusion. 

An important way to understand the corridor might be via the horror film in which a shadowy figure always seems to be lurking at the other end, or the protagonist is trapped, running down an endless dark passage full of locked doors. Where the corridor represents terror, the door is freedom.

*

During lockdown I also turned to Bhanu Kapil’s book How to Wash a Heart and stopped at this section:

When what you perform 
At the threshold
Is at odds 
With what happens
When the front door is closed,
Then you are burning
The toast 
And you are letting the butter
Fester.

The front door is where the internal becomes public, even if briefly. But in order for an act to be meaningful, what you “perform” at the threshold must have some relationship to what happens behind it. Kapil’s lines make me think of those people in expensive houses who voted to privatize Britain’s National Health Service last December and then stepped out onto their doorsteps this spring to clap enthusiastically in support of nurses and carers. They make me think of what the threshold can conceal. The door only has meaning in relation to the corridor.

In early July, Bhanu and I did a reading together on Zoom. She began hers by lighting a small candle. She had some shallots next to her that she’d picked from Wittgenstein’s garden in Cambridge. The effect of these gestures wasn’t just to welcome the listener in. It was to create an open space into which the poem could emerge, where we could meet it. In trying to harmonize inner and outer, in letting out what festers, the distance between our two screens fell away.

After the reading, I thought back to Dickinson’s haunted house poem. It’s driven by a claustrophobic fear of the internal. Even the “External Ghost” or hidden “Assassin” (other threats that feature in Dickinson’s poem) are less terrifying than the prospect of “self encounter.” The self is a more ambiguous, volatile element. It could stay hidden forever: “Ourself, behind ourself concealed,” reads one line in the poem. You might think you’ve turned a corner, the front door in sight, only to find yourself lost down another passageway. 

But this is only a nightmare if you’re looking for a door. The beauty of Kapil’s How to Wash a Heart lies in its openness: “I want to be split / Into two parts / Or a thousand pieces.” The self that’s been split into a thousand pieces has nothing to lose. What’s not whole cannot be broken. Likewise, the poem doesn’t have to form a coherent whole—a portal to insight. It doesn’t have to involve finding the right door and standing outside of it proudly. It can also mean walking the corridors, afraid and confused.

 

Will Harris is the author of the poetry collection RENDANG (Wesleyan University Press, 2020), which was selected as a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. He has worked in schools and led workshops at the Southbank Centre and currently teaches for the Poetry School. A contributing editor at the Rialto, he lives in London. 

Thumbnail: Kilarov Zaneit

Craft Capsule: The Authority of Black Childhood

by

Joy Priest

7.6.20

This is no. 64 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Outside / its case, the mind is a beehive / fallen in the wild grasses / of an abandoned playground.

— from “Ars Poetica” by Joy Priest

It’s January 2, 2020. I’m traveling by car with a painter back to the artists’ compound that I’m staying at for a seven-month residency—a blip-stage between the MFA I finished in May 2019 and the PhD I will start in August 2020, a deliberate detour in the longer academic-poet road on which I find myself. About it, slightly in mourning. Alone in study, but wholeheartedly wanting to be closer to the people in this poetry thing.

The painter has found a way to subsist outside the university engine, working in the residency office, leading Zumba classes in the morning, painting in her studio at night. We’re talking about what academia does to artists, and, as we’re riding—from Wellfleet back to Provincetown, at the very tip of the Cape, isolated at the end of the land—she says, “I really do feel like this chapter for me has been about unlearning.”

*

“Sometimes a moment of liberation is suspended by the tight grip of contradiction,” my friend Bernardo says, which captures this moment I have in the car with the painter, as well as the larger social context we’re sailing through like a tiny, mobile dot on the periphery of the U.S. map. I was liberated by the painter’s articulation but jealous that I hadn’t pulled it out of my subconscious first: unlearning. This had been my project for the first three months of the fellowship, but I’d thought I was wasting time because that project had not yet been named. Wasting time—a feeling shaped by the values of academia, a microcosm of our larger society and its ailing imagination, which burdens artists and writers with paradigms of productivity and surplus contributions to an inaccessible archive. I had been unlearning that.

*

Usually, when stuck in a vehicle, poetry-talk is boring at worst, frustrating at best. A Lyft driver or seatmate on a plane will inevitably ask, “When did you start writing poetry?” I find this frustrating because I haven’t yet crafted a creative approach to the question, but, more importantly, because such a question precludes the true answer.

*

I was a better poet when I was a child.

During the nineties in Kentucky, I was a child in solitude. There was a lack of artificial stimuli, my technology limited to a Sega Genesis that I spent more time blowing dust from than playing. My single mother was at work. The only other person in the house was my grandfather, a man in his seventies, who—I didn’t know at the time—was white. He defined our relationship with board games, puzzles, basketball, or boxing on a box TV set—the technology of his time. With his racist perspectives, he attempted to define my identity, which I didn’t yet understand, but felt, intuitively. 

In place of understanding, in place of the internet, I cultivated a practice in noticing. This is how I developed my approach to the page, before I had an awareness of “craft.” Poetry wasn’t what I did or what I started doing in a single moment from the past onward, it was the way I thought, who I had to be in my grandfather’s household, the way my mind worked to make sense of something.

There isn’t a single event that led to me becoming a poet. There isn’t a beginning to me writing poetry—there is only the beginner’s mind. This is what I find myself trying to get back to in my unlearning: the authority of a child’s imagination—what we possess before we are fully indoctrinated into adulthood and the accepted ways of making sense of things. 

*

I spent a lot of time outside of my grandfather’s house, in the backyard. My mind was a beehive. A chaotic, intuitive knot of thought-impulses that I needed to wrest apart, investigate, ruminate on, understand. I found myself watching the ants at ground-level, making a daily visit to the carpenter bees and their perfectly round holes in the rotting wood. 

When I was inside, I noticed the difference between my grandfather’s skin and mine. I knew my hair was more like the hair of darker people, who he was always saying bad things about. I knew that he didn’t want me to be like them, but I couldn’t understand why. I couldn’t understand why, but I could notice. I kept a record of these little noticings as a substitute for clarity around what I was noticing. This conversation with myself as a Black child supplemented what I learned, or what adults sought to teach me (what a white child learns or is taught by white adults). This practice of noticing, or overhearing, was my seminal craft approach. 

*

Pulling away the scaffolding of craft “knowledge,” which I’ve accumulated as an adult poet, has led me to this—notebooks full of little noticings and meditations, overhearings and mishearings, notions that haunt me, lines that keep coming up. Writing a poem this way becomes less strained: that accumulation of craft had become a cheesecloth through which I struggled to write. 

These little noticings are the only way I wish to start a poem, or any conversation about craft. It is how I get closer to an understanding of what something or someone—my imaginary friend, my ancestors, my intuition, the flora and fauna—is trying to tell me, and I embrace this as a spiritual craft as well as a technical one. It is my resistance to the limits of the U.S. popular imagination, which condescends to the childhood imagination in tropes and shorthand, which does not know, can no longer remember, what the child knows.

 

Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower, which won the 2019 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press in September. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in numerous publications, including BOAAT, Connotation Press, Four Way Review, espnW, Gulf Coast, Mississippi Review, and Poetry Northwest, and have been anthologized in The Louisville Anthology (Belt Publishing, September 2020), A Measure of Belonging: Writers of Color on the New American South (Hub City Press, October 2020) and Best New Poets 2014, 2016, and 2019. A doctoral student in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston, Priest has also been a journalist, a theater attendant, a waitress, and a fast food worker. She has facilitated writing workshops and arbitration programs with adult and juvenile incarcerated women, and has taught composition, rhetoric, comedy, and African American arts and culture at the university level.

Thumbnail: Dustin Humes

Craft Capsule: Notes From the Cutting Room Floor

by

Sejal Shah

5.18.20

This is no. 60 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

An essay collection consists of more than several pieces between two covers. There is always the ghost manuscript: what is cut, what has been moved, shaped, revised. In my first book, This Is One Way to Dance, there are notes at the end of the text—they are narrative, include sources for quoted material, acknowledge readers and editors, and are not numbered. This essay is another kind of commentary. Each piece rewrites what came before. In a way, I am still rewriting my book and its notes—notes to oneself, to one’s reader, you; they are a conversation. 

I wrote the first draft of this essay in longhand; later, I typed it. At some point, I began numbering my thoughts as a way of keeping track. When I cut and pasted different sections of the text, I preserved the original numbers to trace the movement of information. In doing so, I attempt to show my writing process in the tradition of visible mending.

1. In Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, there are footnotes. There are three epigraphs at the beginning, each on a different page (I love this, the space). Many of the footnotes lead to Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature. The chapters are short, sometimes only a page, and the footnotes don’t feel like an interruption, but pleasurable, recursive reading. There is an overture disavowing prologues. After the overture is a gorgeous prologue: “The memoir is at its core, an act of resurrection. Memoirists…manipulate time; resuscitate the dead. They put themselves, and others, into necessary context.” If I had read In the Dreamhouse while working on my book, I might have written a different prologue. So many beats to a book, architecture, a tonal range, a key. All of these elements are questions that ask: Who is your audience? To whom and how do I wish to explain myself?1 

3. Are prologues and codas forms of notes? Is an introduction?

20. Here is a ghost note, something I cut from the introduction of my book: “I grew up seeing and later studying with Garth Fagan Dance. A noted choreographer, Fagan is associated with the Black Arts Movement. Fagan technique draws from ballet, modern dance, and Afro-Caribbean dance. I learned: You could invent your own language. You didn’t have to fit yourself into someone else’s forms. You didn’t have to explain yourself.”

4. I wanted my notes to go before the acknowledgments, to be part of the body of This Is One Way to Dance. In the published copy, my notes follow the acknowledgments, per the press’s house style, which is The Chicago Manual of Style. I realize I don’t believe in style manuals.

17. Somewhere in a book (an introduction) or outside it (an interview), you will have to explain why you wrote your book. At each stage of the publishing process you use a different form: a proposal, a press sheet, a preface, a prologue, an afterward, a Q&A. Sometimes I still stumble. From the preface of Sonja Livingston’s memoir, Ghostbread: “I wrote this book because the pain and power and beauty of childhood inspire me. I wrote it selfishly, to make sense of chaos. I wrote it unselfishly, to bear witness. For houses and gardens and children most of us never see.” 

Part of me wants to never explain anything. Part of me worries I have explained too much and still missed what is most important. The settling and unsettling of the self. Navigating, meditating, mediating. Not identity, but movement. A book, through architecture or by words, must instruct the reader in how to read it. Both are important.

2. For a book review, I remember finding out, after already reading far into the text, that a glossary and notes existed at the back. This changed my reading of the book. With no table of contents and no superscript numbers, how would you know to look for notes and a glossary? Do you flip to the back of the book to see what happens, in case you die before you finish reading,2 in order to know what something means?

4. (a) My book ends with the last sentence of the notes: “And there are many reasons to dance.” 

5. I am talking to my friend Prageeta Sharma, a poet, about notes. She mentions Brian Blanchfield’s Proxies: Essays Near Knowing, which begins with a section called “[A Note].” Blanchfield writes, “At the end of this book there is a rolling endnote called ‘Correction.’ It sets right much—almost certainly not all—of what between here and there I get wrong. It runs to twenty-one pages. It may still be running.” This feels true to me about writing a book. Trying to right it, but in the end, it’s a series of notations and corrections, assertions and deletions. Traces.

6. The poet Rick Barot told me his second book had notes. Not his first and third. And not his fourth, the most recent, The Galleons. He says he is anti-notes now.3 I get that.

28. Are notes like parentheses? (Say it clearly or not at all.) 

7. The writer Michael Martone wrote a book called Michael Martone, and the chapters are written in the style of “Contributors’ Notes” and his contributors’ notes are stories. Contributors’ notes are stories we tell about ourselves; they are fictions. 

10. How are notes different than sources? I wrote notes for many of my essays, but not all of them. Notes were sometimes meant to be a place to credit sources, but they also became their own commentary. They sprawled. I credit writing prompts, editors, readers, and books. Some of that could have been folded into acknowledgments. I credited sources for titles and images. I wrote about the Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage during the time and day of our ceremony and why this mattered to me. Actually, that was a kind of afterward.

13. I am writing for the kind of people who read notes. Those are my readers, my people. 

16. (a) In my book there is a coda titled “Voice Texting With My Mother.” I did not title it a coda. At some point I lost track of what needed a classification or title and what could exist as part of the invisible architecture of the book.

18. In her short “A Note from the Author,” Tyrese Coleman writes: “How to Sit [a Memoir in Stories and Essays] challenges the concept that a distinction needs to be made when the work is memory-based, because memories contain their own truth regardless of how they are documented.” 

9. This winter I read Cathy Park Hong’s book of essays, Minor Feelings. I realized, when I reached the end of the book, I had been expecting notes. Her essays are muscular, theoretical, personal, and include history, cultural commentary, friendships, family, and literature—a whole essay on the artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and her cross-genre memoir, Dictée. It surprised me to learn I liked the lack of notes in her book. It meant theorists and sources were often foregrounded in the essays themselves. In Hong’s work I saw a different model—the essay as a “coalitional form.” A model that foregrounds voices and perspectives beyond the essayist’s own—one that she credits writers in the tradition of Hilton Als, James Baldwin, and Maggie Nelson. 

19. An introduction is like a toast at a wedding. No, I cannot satisfactorily address so many audiences—pivot—who is an introduction for? Why not just begin? Whose job is it to host?

27. I read the acknowledgments and the notes in most books. I want to know how a book came together.

22. Sometimes I skim the notes.

14. I have to be honest: I am intrigued by the idea of no notes. Maybe for the next book.

 

ENDNOTES

1. After I turned in my proofs last December, I read Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings. Hong writes about Myung Mi Kim, “the first poet who said I [Hong] didn’t need to sound like a white poet nor did I have to ‘translate’ my experiences so that they sounded accessible to a white audience…Illegibility was a political act.” Yes. I believe this.
2. What Harry does in
When Harry Met Sally.
3. [E-mail from Rick] “When I say I’m now ‘anti-notes,’ this mostly refers to my last book, 
The Galleons. There’s a lot of background research in the book, but I didn’t want a notes section to make the book seem like a ‘project’ book.  After all, my research for the book was driven by lyrical sentiment and opportunity—it wasn’t systematic…”

 

Sejal Shah’s debut essay collection, This Is One Way to Dance, will be published by the University of Georgia Press in June. Her writing can be found in Brevity, Conjunctions, Guernica, Kenyon Review, the Literary Review, the Margins, and the Rumpus. She is also the recipient of a 2018 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in fiction. Shah is on the faculty of The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University, and lives in Rochester, New York. 

Thumbnail: Judith Browne

Craft Capsule: We Are All Translators

by

Jenny Bhatt

9.21.20

This is no. 73 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Literary translation is about being a close reader in the source language and a skilled writer in the target language. Of course, a language is not merely words, phrases, idioms, diction, and syntax. Languages contain entire cultures within them, entire ways of thinking and being, too. Those of us who translate other writers’ works do so because we want to dive deep and fully immerse ourselves in another world—to pay attention to more than the literal content and preserve the emotions, cultural nuances, and humor from the source to target language.  

This is not unlike how, as readers and writers, we seek to inhabit the worlds of fictional characters. We are all translators. The process of reading involves translating and interpreting the writer’s meaning and intent. The process of writing involves interpreting and giving voice to our own thoughts, which are guided by the things we have read, seen, heard, and experienced. As Mexican poet Octavio Paz famously wrote, “No text is entirely original because language itself, in its essence, is already a translation: firstly, of the nonverbal world and secondly, since every sign and every phrase is the translation of another sign and another phrase.”

Due to the accretions of traditions and culture over centuries, it is not possible to seamlessly transpose two languages when translating. Similarly, due to our conditioning and subjectivity, it is not possible for two readers to read the same text entirely the same way. And it is not possible for two writers to create entirely the same story. A single piece of writing can have multiple acceptable readings and translations due to the flexibility of language, suppleness of imagination, and versatility of craft techniques. 

I was a writer before I became a translator. But I learned to appreciate linguistic, aesthetic, and cultural diversity more profoundly because of translation work. There are ten key practices of the discipline that pull me in each time:

1. Reading a work closely and repetitively to know it, sometimes even better than the original writer.

2. Listening to the tonalities, textures, rhythms, cadences, and diction in both languages to capture the writer’s voice as fully as possible.

3. Learning nuanced meanings of words and phrases in the target language by seeing them used with different specificity and significance in the source language.

4. Hunting for le mot juste that honors the complexities of both languages.

5. Discovering aesthetic reinterpretations of an original work to suit a new readership or audience linguistically, intellectually, and intuitively. 

6. Deliberating over the subtexts, cultural implications, and stylistic choices made by the original writer in the source language to recreate them in the target language without losing any literary merit.

7. Interrogating the politics of the writer, their text, and the source and target languages.

8. Meditating on the original writer’s themes to convey them with the proper intentions and emotions.

9. Deepening my understanding of the world, past and present, by transforming something foreign into something familiar.

10. Negotiating with what remains untranslatable.

With only one book of translation and a handful of shorter works completed, I am still developing these practices into technical proficiencies. However, as each translation project helps me hone and refine my skills, I am also leveraging these lessons more frequently in my reading and writing. Literary translation is, in the end, about actively co-creating a text with its original writer by adding more shape, context, nuance, and texture to it. Aren’t we all better off as readers if we learn to do the same? And aren’t we stronger writers when we draw from, build onto, and expand upon the world of literature that has come before us?

 

Jenny Bhatt is a writer, translator, and literary critic. She is the host of the Desi Books podcast and the author of the short story collection Each of Us Killers (7.13 Books, 2020). Her literary translation of Gujarati writer Dhumketu’s best short fiction is forthcoming from HarperCollins India in late 2020. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Literary Hub, Longreads, Poets & Writers Magazine, the Millions, Electric Literature, the Rumpus, and Kenyon Review. Having lived and worked in India, England, Germany, Scotland, and various parts of the United States, she now lives in a suburb of Dallas.

Thumbnail: Patrick Tomasso

Craft Capsule: Doors vs. Corridors

by

Will Harris

8.17.20

This is no. 68 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

During the pandemic, with so many doors locked and shuttered, I lived in the corridors of my house. Thom Gunn describes the corridor as a “separate place between the thought and felt”—a place of uncertainty, where thoughts are unformed and feelings suppressed. It’s probably not surprising, then, that the few poems I managed to eke out were meandering, confused, and muffled.

As the architecture of my house extended into what I wrote, I started looking for poems about houses—either set indoors or using the “house” as a metaphor for the craft of poetry. I was trying to work out what kind of house poetry should be, and how much confusion that house might be able to contain. Soon enough I turned to Emily Dickinson: 

I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –

I always read this stanza with the ironic hint of the estate agent in her tone (“Superior—for Doors” is particularly funny), which seems to mock the idea you could ever really compare poetry to a house. Though it can feel like using a conceit means committing to it entirely, here the analogy is loosely held, self-consciously tenuous: “If you look to your right, you’ll see some windows. How many? Numerous. And if you look down there, yup, superior doors. You won’t get that with Prose.” The lightness of tone is part of the image she projects about poetry. 

But I read it with another, darker Dickinson poem in the back of my head, this one taking the house less as a metaphor for poetry than for the poet’s interior life:

One need not be a Chamber – to be haunted – 
One need not be a House –
The Brain has Corridors – surpassing 
Material Place

These lines suggest that when you forgo “Material Place” and build your house in “Possibility” you open yourself up to a particular danger: being haunted. Where the other poem began with a confident assertion of habitation—“I dwell”—here the speaker expresses horror at the idea of being dwelt in: “The Brain has Corridors.” The tone is repetitious, fevered, as though the speaker has been running up and down their internal corridors for hours. The effect of this is compounded by the use of the impersonal pronoun “One” and that definite article before “Brain”—not my brain but the brain—which suggests a traumatic detachment from the body; and “surpassing,” hanging at the end of the line makes it feel like those brain corridors are only getting bigger, longer, more labyrinthine. 

What’s missing from the second poem is a door of the kind Dickinson thought made poetry so superior—and without one, there’s no means of escape. Door and corridor may sound related but there’s no etymological link between them. The word door comes from the Old English duru and has always meant the same thing. Corridor is from the Italian corridoio, referring to a “running-place.” They represent two forms of possibility, each reliant on the other: The door is a portal, signifying insight, while the corridor is an in-between place, signifying uncertainty and confusion. 

An important way to understand the corridor might be via the horror film in which a shadowy figure always seems to be lurking at the other end, or the protagonist is trapped, running down an endless dark passage full of locked doors. Where the corridor represents terror, the door is freedom.

*

During lockdown I also turned to Bhanu Kapil’s book How to Wash a Heart and stopped at this section:

When what you perform 
At the threshold
Is at odds 
With what happens
When the front door is closed,
Then you are burning
The toast 
And you are letting the butter
Fester.

The front door is where the internal becomes public, even if briefly. But in order for an act to be meaningful, what you “perform” at the threshold must have some relationship to what happens behind it. Kapil’s lines make me think of those people in expensive houses who voted to privatize Britain’s National Health Service last December and then stepped out onto their doorsteps this spring to clap enthusiastically in support of nurses and carers. They make me think of what the threshold can conceal. The door only has meaning in relation to the corridor.

In early July, Bhanu and I did a reading together on Zoom. She began hers by lighting a small candle. She had some shallots next to her that she’d picked from Wittgenstein’s garden in Cambridge. The effect of these gestures wasn’t just to welcome the listener in. It was to create an open space into which the poem could emerge, where we could meet it. In trying to harmonize inner and outer, in letting out what festers, the distance between our two screens fell away.

After the reading, I thought back to Dickinson’s haunted house poem. It’s driven by a claustrophobic fear of the internal. Even the “External Ghost” or hidden “Assassin” (other threats that feature in Dickinson’s poem) are less terrifying than the prospect of “self encounter.” The self is a more ambiguous, volatile element. It could stay hidden forever: “Ourself, behind ourself concealed,” reads one line in the poem. You might think you’ve turned a corner, the front door in sight, only to find yourself lost down another passageway. 

But this is only a nightmare if you’re looking for a door. The beauty of Kapil’s How to Wash a Heart lies in its openness: “I want to be split / Into two parts / Or a thousand pieces.” The self that’s been split into a thousand pieces has nothing to lose. What’s not whole cannot be broken. Likewise, the poem doesn’t have to form a coherent whole—a portal to insight. It doesn’t have to involve finding the right door and standing outside of it proudly. It can also mean walking the corridors, afraid and confused.

 

Will Harris is the author of the poetry collection RENDANG (Wesleyan University Press, 2020), which was selected as a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. He has worked in schools and led workshops at the Southbank Centre and currently teaches for the Poetry School. A contributing editor at the Rialto, he lives in London. 

Thumbnail: Kilarov Zaneit

Craft Capsule: The Authority of Black Childhood

by

Joy Priest

7.6.20

This is no. 64 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Outside / its case, the mind is a beehive / fallen in the wild grasses / of an abandoned playground.

— from “Ars Poetica” by Joy Priest

It’s January 2, 2020. I’m traveling by car with a painter back to the artists’ compound that I’m staying at for a seven-month residency—a blip-stage between the MFA I finished in May 2019 and the PhD I will start in August 2020, a deliberate detour in the longer academic-poet road on which I find myself. About it, slightly in mourning. Alone in study, but wholeheartedly wanting to be closer to the people in this poetry thing.

The painter has found a way to subsist outside the university engine, working in the residency office, leading Zumba classes in the morning, painting in her studio at night. We’re talking about what academia does to artists, and, as we’re riding—from Wellfleet back to Provincetown, at the very tip of the Cape, isolated at the end of the land—she says, “I really do feel like this chapter for me has been about unlearning.”

*

“Sometimes a moment of liberation is suspended by the tight grip of contradiction,” my friend Bernardo says, which captures this moment I have in the car with the painter, as well as the larger social context we’re sailing through like a tiny, mobile dot on the periphery of the U.S. map. I was liberated by the painter’s articulation but jealous that I hadn’t pulled it out of my subconscious first: unlearning. This had been my project for the first three months of the fellowship, but I’d thought I was wasting time because that project had not yet been named. Wasting time—a feeling shaped by the values of academia, a microcosm of our larger society and its ailing imagination, which burdens artists and writers with paradigms of productivity and surplus contributions to an inaccessible archive. I had been unlearning that.

*

Usually, when stuck in a vehicle, poetry-talk is boring at worst, frustrating at best. A Lyft driver or seatmate on a plane will inevitably ask, “When did you start writing poetry?” I find this frustrating because I haven’t yet crafted a creative approach to the question, but, more importantly, because such a question precludes the true answer.

*

I was a better poet when I was a child.

During the nineties in Kentucky, I was a child in solitude. There was a lack of artificial stimuli, my technology limited to a Sega Genesis that I spent more time blowing dust from than playing. My single mother was at work. The only other person in the house was my grandfather, a man in his seventies, who—I didn’t know at the time—was white. He defined our relationship with board games, puzzles, basketball, or boxing on a box TV set—the technology of his time. With his racist perspectives, he attempted to define my identity, which I didn’t yet understand, but felt, intuitively. 

In place of understanding, in place of the internet, I cultivated a practice in noticing. This is how I developed my approach to the page, before I had an awareness of “craft.” Poetry wasn’t what I did or what I started doing in a single moment from the past onward, it was the way I thought, who I had to be in my grandfather’s household, the way my mind worked to make sense of something.

There isn’t a single event that led to me becoming a poet. There isn’t a beginning to me writing poetry—there is only the beginner’s mind. This is what I find myself trying to get back to in my unlearning: the authority of a child’s imagination—what we possess before we are fully indoctrinated into adulthood and the accepted ways of making sense of things. 

*

I spent a lot of time outside of my grandfather’s house, in the backyard. My mind was a beehive. A chaotic, intuitive knot of thought-impulses that I needed to wrest apart, investigate, ruminate on, understand. I found myself watching the ants at ground-level, making a daily visit to the carpenter bees and their perfectly round holes in the rotting wood. 

When I was inside, I noticed the difference between my grandfather’s skin and mine. I knew my hair was more like the hair of darker people, who he was always saying bad things about. I knew that he didn’t want me to be like them, but I couldn’t understand why. I couldn’t understand why, but I could notice. I kept a record of these little noticings as a substitute for clarity around what I was noticing. This conversation with myself as a Black child supplemented what I learned, or what adults sought to teach me (what a white child learns or is taught by white adults). This practice of noticing, or overhearing, was my seminal craft approach. 

*

Pulling away the scaffolding of craft “knowledge,” which I’ve accumulated as an adult poet, has led me to this—notebooks full of little noticings and meditations, overhearings and mishearings, notions that haunt me, lines that keep coming up. Writing a poem this way becomes less strained: that accumulation of craft had become a cheesecloth through which I struggled to write. 

These little noticings are the only way I wish to start a poem, or any conversation about craft. It is how I get closer to an understanding of what something or someone—my imaginary friend, my ancestors, my intuition, the flora and fauna—is trying to tell me, and I embrace this as a spiritual craft as well as a technical one. It is my resistance to the limits of the U.S. popular imagination, which condescends to the childhood imagination in tropes and shorthand, which does not know, can no longer remember, what the child knows.

 

Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower, which won the 2019 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press in September. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in numerous publications, including BOAAT, Connotation Press, Four Way Review, espnW, Gulf Coast, Mississippi Review, and Poetry Northwest, and have been anthologized in The Louisville Anthology (Belt Publishing, September 2020), A Measure of Belonging: Writers of Color on the New American South (Hub City Press, October 2020) and Best New Poets 2014, 2016, and 2019. A doctoral student in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston, Priest has also been a journalist, a theater attendant, a waitress, and a fast food worker. She has facilitated writing workshops and arbitration programs with adult and juvenile incarcerated women, and has taught composition, rhetoric, comedy, and African American arts and culture at the university level.

Thumbnail: Dustin Humes

Craft Capsule: On Becoming a Pop Star, I Mean, a Poet

by

Chen Chen

11.2.20

This is no. 77 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

1. I started to write poetry because of a secret that I had trouble sharing even with myself.

2. I continue to write poetry because, in the fifth grade, my short story about a pregnant witch living in Venice received the following peer critique: “You do know it takes nine months for the baby to grow inside the mom, not two?” I write poetry because I wish I’d responded, “You do know this is a witch baby???” 

3. I knew I would always be a poet after a barely audible “goodbye” in the doorway of a tenth-floor apartment. How there was no elevator and it was the middle of summer and I had to walk down and down those stairs. 

4. I wake up craving poetry because Sawako Nakayasu once said, “I work mostly in poetry because it claims to be neither fiction nor nonfiction, because it acknowledges the gap between what really was or is, and what is said about it.”1 

5. Poetry because French class, Russian class. Because Mandarin and English and Hokkien at home. Because English. Because I learn and learn, then forget so much Mandarin. Because I forgot all my Hokkien2 by age seven. Poetry because my first-year advisor in college, a professor of Russian Studies, asked me why all my three-page Tolstoy responses were so late. “Go on,” she said, “give us your narrative.” Poems because I loved how her prompt was a comment on the expected form of my response. Poet because I said, “Time management’s an issue,” which really meant I wanted every paper to be about everything and I wanted Takeshi Kaneshiro’s character in Chungking Express and I wanted Takeshi Kaneshiro and was rewatching the film over and over and Googling stills. 

6. In eighth grade I began writing poetry outside of school assignments because I couldn’t keep imitating Robert Frost. I kept writing poetry because it seemed no one else with a secret like this looked like me.

7. Poet because I am a failed musician. Failed painter. Failed scientist obsessed with the moon.3 Failed gymnast, though once I was very, very good at cartwheeling. Poetry because my favorite scenes in Power Rangers were when, instead of running, they all backflipped and backflipped to where the fighting would take place.

8. The violence of the state. The silence of the h in French words, like homme. How violent, many homes. To ask, “Where is home?” as if it’s ever a simple question. To say, “I have a home” as if it’s an unremarkable statement. To say “I have” in Russian, you use a genitive construction that translates to the awkward English, “At me there is.” At home the adults asked, “Why did you get an A-?” in three different languages; there were no questions about whether I would ever start hating myself for what and whom I loved.   

9. I continue to read poetry because it seems every poem has a big secret at its core and I always want to know if it’s a big gay secret. Because Anna Akhmatova wrote, “Sunset in the ethereal waves: / I cannot tell if the day / is ending, or the world, or if / the secret of secrets is inside me again”4 and that seems pretty gay to me. Because Denise Levertov wrote, “Two girls discover / the secret of life / in a sudden line of / poetry”5 and that sounds definitely gay. 

Because for years I had to settle for subtext and total projection. 

Because when I found Justin Chin’s Bite Hard in a college library, I glanced at just one poem then added the book to my stack to check out. Because I moved it to the middle of the stack, as if hiding it from both the sky and the ground. Because I was so moved to see both “Chinese New Year” and “ex-boyfriends” in one poem. Because was it hide or protect, and do I know the difference now? 

10. In English, I still have trouble with lie versus lay, which I always feel ashamed to admit, though I know English is a troublesome, troubling language that makes one want to lay down, to lie one’s body on its side till all one’s lies have tumbled out from one’s head and belly, and are lain out like one single shadow-body of a liar on the grass. 

11. I started off as a fiction writer. 

12.  I started as a reader of fantastical literature, a writer of both fantasy and science fiction. I started on the playground, telling friends that the jungle gym was a spaceship and we’d better hurry onboard before it took off: “Danny, you’re new to the cause, like me. Amanda, you’re the chosen one, our only hope.” I couldn’t get enough of the galactic, magic, any-kind-of-epic mission; the dueling-with-lasers-or-wands journey. I acted them out, wrote them down. 

Moments of poetry occurred in my stories when I stayed too long in the pocket dimension of an emotion; when I strayed too far into the magic of an image; when I mismanaged the time and leapt through the wormhole/plot-hole back to my implausible Venice and its witch baby. Poetry erupted when I couldn’t keep performing the narrative I was supposed to—that of a boy who liked Amandas, not Dannys. 

13. Looking back, dueling with lasers or wands sounds definitely phallic. 

14. I became a poet after my friends no longer wanted to play the games we made up. After they decided to only play games that would help them grow up. But growing up, for me, meant no longer just playing at, dancing around what I desired. And some days I wanted to grow up. And some days I wanted to die. 

15. I had to Google “coming out.” I had to Google “lie vs. lay.” I had to Google “gay and Asian” and found mainly what white men had to say about bodies like mine. I had to Google “gay Asian American literature.” I had to Google “queer.” I had to Google “fag.” I had to search for one sentence with “I” that eventually I could say out loud. 

16. Poems became my favorite way of telling stories because poems can tell a secret and talk about telling that secret and along the way become another secret.

17. Of course, all this can and does happen in other genres too. And when I write poems I’m drawing on aspects of fantastical fiction, autobiography, realist fiction, standup comedy, Tolstoy as much as Takeshi Kaneshiro, TV shows that got way too many seasons, and elements I don’t want to be able to name. In recent years, lots of prose poems and lyric essay–esque pieces have been showing their blocky faces to me. And very recently, a teensy spoonful of fiction. To call myself poet just makes the most sense, personally, creatively. Poet is where I feel freest to do this and that and wtf.

18. Some nights I just want to be an international sex symbol/pop star with Grammy-worthy vocal chops but still a ton of totally relatable habits, like eating bread. I envy the pop song that can end simply6 by repeating its chorus over and over, slowly fading out yet also burrowing itself into your ear. 

19. A barely audible “hey” in the collapsed year. The violence of state-sanctioned language. My own unbroken, snowy silences. To ask “Where is home?” as if there is one answer. To write home in a poem, like a poem could be a home—is this happy or sad? Strange yet not uncommon, to weep with and into joy. A form of power, a kind of language: to weep and disobey silence. My favorite silence is a space for thought, is spaciousness. A wormhole named Maybe. A parallel galaxy called Another Way. 

20. I continue to poet because now I have all these poet friends who’ll text me to ask what poems I’m writing and I have to start writing again so they’ll stop bugging me and I never want them to stop. 

I continue to poet because I’m not satisfied with the definitions behind, the narratives around “coming out,” “lie vs. lay,” “gay and Asian,” “gay Asian American literature,” “queer,” “fag.” I am always trying to say the everything I’ve lived, am living, but I never want to feel like I’ve said it all. 

For years I believed poetry was the only place where I could be all my selves, any self. I wrote, trying to answer the question, “How can a poem hold the myriad me’s and realms and loves and ferocities and shards and velocities—this whole multiverse that the life cannot, yet?” But can a poem do this? A book of poems? Is poetry a place? 

I am a poet because I ask poetry to do too much, and then it does it. 

 

ENDNOTES

1. From a working note that prefaced a set of Nakayasu’s poems published in How2
2. Except what my parents call each other. 
3. What joy! Poets! Not caring one bit how annoying we are when we go on and on about the moon!
4. “A land not mine,” translated by Jane Kenyon in
From Room to Room (Alice James Books, 1978). 
5. “The Secret” in
O Taste and See (New Directions, 1964). 
6. With the best pop music, this is no simple feat; the chorus has to be excellent.

 

Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017), which was longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry and won the Publishing Triangle Thom Gunn Award. His work has appeared in many publications, including Poetry and the 2015 and 2019 editions of The Best American Poetry. He has received a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Kundiman and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at Brandeis University as the Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence. 

Thumbnail: Romain Gille

Craft Capsule: We Are All Translators

by

Jenny Bhatt

9.21.20

This is no. 73 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Literary translation is about being a close reader in the source language and a skilled writer in the target language. Of course, a language is not merely words, phrases, idioms, diction, and syntax. Languages contain entire cultures within them, entire ways of thinking and being, too. Those of us who translate other writers’ works do so because we want to dive deep and fully immerse ourselves in another world—to pay attention to more than the literal content and preserve the emotions, cultural nuances, and humor from the source to target language.  

This is not unlike how, as readers and writers, we seek to inhabit the worlds of fictional characters. We are all translators. The process of reading involves translating and interpreting the writer’s meaning and intent. The process of writing involves interpreting and giving voice to our own thoughts, which are guided by the things we have read, seen, heard, and experienced. As Mexican poet Octavio Paz famously wrote, “No text is entirely original because language itself, in its essence, is already a translation: firstly, of the nonverbal world and secondly, since every sign and every phrase is the translation of another sign and another phrase.”

Due to the accretions of traditions and culture over centuries, it is not possible to seamlessly transpose two languages when translating. Similarly, due to our conditioning and subjectivity, it is not possible for two readers to read the same text entirely the same way. And it is not possible for two writers to create entirely the same story. A single piece of writing can have multiple acceptable readings and translations due to the flexibility of language, suppleness of imagination, and versatility of craft techniques. 

I was a writer before I became a translator. But I learned to appreciate linguistic, aesthetic, and cultural diversity more profoundly because of translation work. There are ten key practices of the discipline that pull me in each time:

1. Reading a work closely and repetitively to know it, sometimes even better than the original writer.

2. Listening to the tonalities, textures, rhythms, cadences, and diction in both languages to capture the writer’s voice as fully as possible.

3. Learning nuanced meanings of words and phrases in the target language by seeing them used with different specificity and significance in the source language.

4. Hunting for le mot juste that honors the complexities of both languages.

5. Discovering aesthetic reinterpretations of an original work to suit a new readership or audience linguistically, intellectually, and intuitively. 

6. Deliberating over the subtexts, cultural implications, and stylistic choices made by the original writer in the source language to recreate them in the target language without losing any literary merit.

7. Interrogating the politics of the writer, their text, and the source and target languages.

8. Meditating on the original writer’s themes to convey them with the proper intentions and emotions.

9. Deepening my understanding of the world, past and present, by transforming something foreign into something familiar.

10. Negotiating with what remains untranslatable.

With only one book of translation and a handful of shorter works completed, I am still developing these practices into technical proficiencies. However, as each translation project helps me hone and refine my skills, I am also leveraging these lessons more frequently in my reading and writing. Literary translation is, in the end, about actively co-creating a text with its original writer by adding more shape, context, nuance, and texture to it. Aren’t we all better off as readers if we learn to do the same? And aren’t we stronger writers when we draw from, build onto, and expand upon the world of literature that has come before us?

 

Jenny Bhatt is a writer, translator, and literary critic. She is the host of the Desi Books podcast and the author of the short story collection Each of Us Killers (7.13 Books, 2020). Her literary translation of Gujarati writer Dhumketu’s best short fiction is forthcoming from HarperCollins India in late 2020. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Literary Hub, Longreads, Poets & Writers Magazine, the Millions, Electric Literature, the Rumpus, and Kenyon Review. Having lived and worked in India, England, Germany, Scotland, and various parts of the United States, she now lives in a suburb of Dallas.

Thumbnail: Patrick Tomasso

Craft Capsule: Doors vs. Corridors

by

Will Harris

8.17.20

This is no. 68 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

During the pandemic, with so many doors locked and shuttered, I lived in the corridors of my house. Thom Gunn describes the corridor as a “separate place between the thought and felt”—a place of uncertainty, where thoughts are unformed and feelings suppressed. It’s probably not surprising, then, that the few poems I managed to eke out were meandering, confused, and muffled.

As the architecture of my house extended into what I wrote, I started looking for poems about houses—either set indoors or using the “house” as a metaphor for the craft of poetry. I was trying to work out what kind of house poetry should be, and how much confusion that house might be able to contain. Soon enough I turned to Emily Dickinson: 

I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –

I always read this stanza with the ironic hint of the estate agent in her tone (“Superior—for Doors” is particularly funny), which seems to mock the idea you could ever really compare poetry to a house. Though it can feel like using a conceit means committing to it entirely, here the analogy is loosely held, self-consciously tenuous: “If you look to your right, you’ll see some windows. How many? Numerous. And if you look down there, yup, superior doors. You won’t get that with Prose.” The lightness of tone is part of the image she projects about poetry. 

But I read it with another, darker Dickinson poem in the back of my head, this one taking the house less as a metaphor for poetry than for the poet’s interior life:

One need not be a Chamber – to be haunted – 
One need not be a House –
The Brain has Corridors – surpassing 
Material Place

These lines suggest that when you forgo “Material Place” and build your house in “Possibility” you open yourself up to a particular danger: being haunted. Where the other poem began with a confident assertion of habitation—“I dwell”—here the speaker expresses horror at the idea of being dwelt in: “The Brain has Corridors.” The tone is repetitious, fevered, as though the speaker has been running up and down their internal corridors for hours. The effect of this is compounded by the use of the impersonal pronoun “One” and that definite article before “Brain”—not my brain but the brain—which suggests a traumatic detachment from the body; and “surpassing,” hanging at the end of the line makes it feel like those brain corridors are only getting bigger, longer, more labyrinthine. 

What’s missing from the second poem is a door of the kind Dickinson thought made poetry so superior—and without one, there’s no means of escape. Door and corridor may sound related but there’s no etymological link between them. The word door comes from the Old English duru and has always meant the same thing. Corridor is from the Italian corridoio, referring to a “running-place.” They represent two forms of possibility, each reliant on the other: The door is a portal, signifying insight, while the corridor is an in-between place, signifying uncertainty and confusion. 

An important way to understand the corridor might be via the horror film in which a shadowy figure always seems to be lurking at the other end, or the protagonist is trapped, running down an endless dark passage full of locked doors. Where the corridor represents terror, the door is freedom.

*

During lockdown I also turned to Bhanu Kapil’s book How to Wash a Heart and stopped at this section:

When what you perform 
At the threshold
Is at odds 
With what happens
When the front door is closed,
Then you are burning
The toast 
And you are letting the butter
Fester.

The front door is where the internal becomes public, even if briefly. But in order for an act to be meaningful, what you “perform” at the threshold must have some relationship to what happens behind it. Kapil’s lines make me think of those people in expensive houses who voted to privatize Britain’s National Health Service last December and then stepped out onto their doorsteps this spring to clap enthusiastically in support of nurses and carers. They make me think of what the threshold can conceal. The door only has meaning in relation to the corridor.

In early July, Bhanu and I did a reading together on Zoom. She began hers by lighting a small candle. She had some shallots next to her that she’d picked from Wittgenstein’s garden in Cambridge. The effect of these gestures wasn’t just to welcome the listener in. It was to create an open space into which the poem could emerge, where we could meet it. In trying to harmonize inner and outer, in letting out what festers, the distance between our two screens fell away.

After the reading, I thought back to Dickinson’s haunted house poem. It’s driven by a claustrophobic fear of the internal. Even the “External Ghost” or hidden “Assassin” (other threats that feature in Dickinson’s poem) are less terrifying than the prospect of “self encounter.” The self is a more ambiguous, volatile element. It could stay hidden forever: “Ourself, behind ourself concealed,” reads one line in the poem. You might think you’ve turned a corner, the front door in sight, only to find yourself lost down another passageway. 

But this is only a nightmare if you’re looking for a door. The beauty of Kapil’s How to Wash a Heart lies in its openness: “I want to be split / Into two parts / Or a thousand pieces.” The self that’s been split into a thousand pieces has nothing to lose. What’s not whole cannot be broken. Likewise, the poem doesn’t have to form a coherent whole—a portal to insight. It doesn’t have to involve finding the right door and standing outside of it proudly. It can also mean walking the corridors, afraid and confused.

 

Will Harris is the author of the poetry collection RENDANG (Wesleyan University Press, 2020), which was selected as a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. He has worked in schools and led workshops at the Southbank Centre and currently teaches for the Poetry School. A contributing editor at the Rialto, he lives in London. 

Thumbnail: Kilarov Zaneit

Craft Capsule: Writing Hot

by

Jordan Kisner

11.30.20

This is no. 80 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

When I was a writing student, a professor once commented to me that my writing was a little intense. I don’t remember exactly what he said, and he wasn’t unkind, but it was something like “Your writing is always at eleven,” or “Your writing is always just so hot-blooded.” 

This comment elicited a mixed reaction at the time. I wasn’t proud. I didn’t sense that this was a compliment. He was giving me a note: Learn to tone it down sometimes. It felt respectful in its way, as if he were saying, “Okay, you can write like your hair is on fire, but make sure that’s not the only thing you can do.” Which is a good and teacherly thing to do, to discourage a student from leaning too heavily on the thing that feels good, to point out tics and habits. But as a young writer—a female writer, a queer writer—to hear an older male professor note that your work is unrelentingly intense can set off a clamor of questions, insecurities, suspicions, irritations, doubts, shames. This is maybe especially the case when the young writer is writing (as I was) about her own life and self, the source of this overmuchness. 

So I was a little embarrassed, concerned that “intense” was code for melodramatic, maudlin, tacky, purple. Childish. Overfeminine. Hysterical. But also, I wanted to be an intense writer. What was the point of writing if it wasn’t vivid and compelling, if it wasn’t transporting, if it didn’t make you rock back in your seat? I wrote then, and write now, I suppose, to express an intensity to the condition of being, an aliveness that feels full and bewildering. 

After that, though, I spent several years trying to write in a way that was hot-blooded, or full of feeling, but also somehow cool. Writing that was fierce and ardent while being unimpeachably in control of itself. I’ve tried a few ways to do this over the years. The first, maybe, we’ll call The Didion method: Bury feeling in a near-hysterical radiance of detail or texture when describing absolutely mundane things like sock brands; directly reference imminent emotional breakdown (or past breakdown) in prose so deadpan and commanding it seems like possibly a complex joke. Then there is what we might call The Nelson: Go straight to eleven, get poetic and hot about sex, love, heartbreak, pain, and then stave off accusations of mawkishness with theory and academically rigorous discussions of the sex. 

I love both these methods—and Joan Didion and Maggie Nelson—but lately I’ve been thinking about what you lose when you insist on cooling down your prose. Early this summer I had a conversation with Ocean Vuong on my Thresholds podcast during which he spoke about his reclamation of prose that some might dismiss as purple. “I am interested in using a style that a lot of men have deemed too prissy for them to use in the present,” he told me. “It feels like drag to me—to be extra! There’s too much glitter because we want to be blindingly present and seen.” He was speaking about the historical moment when emotional and beautiful writing was deemed feminine and therefore less worthy, and the way that as a [queer] man he might begin to excavate and subvert that. He reminded me, also, that you can find fun and even joy in just going ahead and writing at eleven, writing hot, writing like your hair is on fire—to be blindingly present and seen.  

 

Jordan Kisner is the author of the essay collection Thin Places (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). Her writing has also appeared in the Atlantic, the Believer, the Guardian, n+1, the New York Times Magazine, and the Paris Review Daily. The recipient of fellowships from Pioneer Works, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and Art Omi, she is currently a fellow at the Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas. 

Thumbnail: Dmitry Bayer

Craft Capsule: On Becoming a Pop Star, I Mean, a Poet

by

Chen Chen

11.2.20

This is no. 77 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

1. I started to write poetry because of a secret that I had trouble sharing even with myself.

2. I continue to write poetry because, in the fifth grade, my short story about a pregnant witch living in Venice received the following peer critique: “You do know it takes nine months for the baby to grow inside the mom, not two?” I write poetry because I wish I’d responded, “You do know this is a witch baby???” 

3. I knew I would always be a poet after a barely audible “goodbye” in the doorway of a tenth-floor apartment. How there was no elevator and it was the middle of summer and I had to walk down and down those stairs. 

4. I wake up craving poetry because Sawako Nakayasu once said, “I work mostly in poetry because it claims to be neither fiction nor nonfiction, because it acknowledges the gap between what really was or is, and what is said about it.”1 

5. Poetry because French class, Russian class. Because Mandarin and English and Hokkien at home. Because English. Because I learn and learn, then forget so much Mandarin. Because I forgot all my Hokkien2 by age seven. Poetry because my first-year advisor in college, a professor of Russian Studies, asked me why all my three-page Tolstoy responses were so late. “Go on,” she said, “give us your narrative.” Poems because I loved how her prompt was a comment on the expected form of my response. Poet because I said, “Time management’s an issue,” which really meant I wanted every paper to be about everything and I wanted Takeshi Kaneshiro’s character in Chungking Express and I wanted Takeshi Kaneshiro and was rewatching the film over and over and Googling stills. 

6. In eighth grade I began writing poetry outside of school assignments because I couldn’t keep imitating Robert Frost. I kept writing poetry because it seemed no one else with a secret like this looked like me.

7. Poet because I am a failed musician. Failed painter. Failed scientist obsessed with the moon.3 Failed gymnast, though once I was very, very good at cartwheeling. Poetry because my favorite scenes in Power Rangers were when, instead of running, they all backflipped and backflipped to where the fighting would take place.

8. The violence of the state. The silence of the h in French words, like homme. How violent, many homes. To ask, “Where is home?” as if it’s ever a simple question. To say, “I have a home” as if it’s an unremarkable statement. To say “I have” in Russian, you use a genitive construction that translates to the awkward English, “At me there is.” At home the adults asked, “Why did you get an A-?” in three different languages; there were no questions about whether I would ever start hating myself for what and whom I loved.   

9. I continue to read poetry because it seems every poem has a big secret at its core and I always want to know if it’s a big gay secret. Because Anna Akhmatova wrote, “Sunset in the ethereal waves: / I cannot tell if the day / is ending, or the world, or if / the secret of secrets is inside me again”4 and that seems pretty gay to me. Because Denise Levertov wrote, “Two girls discover / the secret of life / in a sudden line of / poetry”5 and that sounds definitely gay. 

Because for years I had to settle for subtext and total projection. 

Because when I found Justin Chin’s Bite Hard in a college library, I glanced at just one poem then added the book to my stack to check out. Because I moved it to the middle of the stack, as if hiding it from both the sky and the ground. Because I was so moved to see both “Chinese New Year” and “ex-boyfriends” in one poem. Because was it hide or protect, and do I know the difference now? 

10. In English, I still have trouble with lie versus lay, which I always feel ashamed to admit, though I know English is a troublesome, troubling language that makes one want to lay down, to lie one’s body on its side till all one’s lies have tumbled out from one’s head and belly, and are lain out like one single shadow-body of a liar on the grass. 

11. I started off as a fiction writer. 

12.  I started as a reader of fantastical literature, a writer of both fantasy and science fiction. I started on the playground, telling friends that the jungle gym was a spaceship and we’d better hurry onboard before it took off: “Danny, you’re new to the cause, like me. Amanda, you’re the chosen one, our only hope.” I couldn’t get enough of the galactic, magic, any-kind-of-epic mission; the dueling-with-lasers-or-wands journey. I acted them out, wrote them down. 

Moments of poetry occurred in my stories when I stayed too long in the pocket dimension of an emotion; when I strayed too far into the magic of an image; when I mismanaged the time and leapt through the wormhole/plot-hole back to my implausible Venice and its witch baby. Poetry erupted when I couldn’t keep performing the narrative I was supposed to—that of a boy who liked Amandas, not Dannys. 

13. Looking back, dueling with lasers or wands sounds definitely phallic. 

14. I became a poet after my friends no longer wanted to play the games we made up. After they decided to only play games that would help them grow up. But growing up, for me, meant no longer just playing at, dancing around what I desired. And some days I wanted to grow up. And some days I wanted to die. 

15. I had to Google “coming out.” I had to Google “lie vs. lay.” I had to Google “gay and Asian” and found mainly what white men had to say about bodies like mine. I had to Google “gay Asian American literature.” I had to Google “queer.” I had to Google “fag.” I had to search for one sentence with “I” that eventually I could say out loud. 

16. Poems became my favorite way of telling stories because poems can tell a secret and talk about telling that secret and along the way become another secret.

17. Of course, all this can and does happen in other genres too. And when I write poems I’m drawing on aspects of fantastical fiction, autobiography, realist fiction, standup comedy, Tolstoy as much as Takeshi Kaneshiro, TV shows that got way too many seasons, and elements I don’t want to be able to name. In recent years, lots of prose poems and lyric essay–esque pieces have been showing their blocky faces to me. And very recently, a teensy spoonful of fiction. To call myself poet just makes the most sense, personally, creatively. Poet is where I feel freest to do this and that and wtf.

18. Some nights I just want to be an international sex symbol/pop star with Grammy-worthy vocal chops but still a ton of totally relatable habits, like eating bread. I envy the pop song that can end simply6 by repeating its chorus over and over, slowly fading out yet also burrowing itself into your ear. 

19. A barely audible “hey” in the collapsed year. The violence of state-sanctioned language. My own unbroken, snowy silences. To ask “Where is home?” as if there is one answer. To write home in a poem, like a poem could be a home—is this happy or sad? Strange yet not uncommon, to weep with and into joy. A form of power, a kind of language: to weep and disobey silence. My favorite silence is a space for thought, is spaciousness. A wormhole named Maybe. A parallel galaxy called Another Way. 

20. I continue to poet because now I have all these poet friends who’ll text me to ask what poems I’m writing and I have to start writing again so they’ll stop bugging me and I never want them to stop. 

I continue to poet because I’m not satisfied with the definitions behind, the narratives around “coming out,” “lie vs. lay,” “gay and Asian,” “gay Asian American literature,” “queer,” “fag.” I am always trying to say the everything I’ve lived, am living, but I never want to feel like I’ve said it all. 

For years I believed poetry was the only place where I could be all my selves, any self. I wrote, trying to answer the question, “How can a poem hold the myriad me’s and realms and loves and ferocities and shards and velocities—this whole multiverse that the life cannot, yet?” But can a poem do this? A book of poems? Is poetry a place? 

I am a poet because I ask poetry to do too much, and then it does it. 

 

ENDNOTES

1. From a working note that prefaced a set of Nakayasu’s poems published in How2
2. Except what my parents call each other. 
3. What joy! Poets! Not caring one bit how annoying we are when we go on and on about the moon!
4. “A land not mine,” translated by Jane Kenyon in
From Room to Room (Alice James Books, 1978). 
5. “The Secret” in
O Taste and See (New Directions, 1964). 
6. With the best pop music, this is no simple feat; the chorus has to be excellent.

 

Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017), which was longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry and won the Publishing Triangle Thom Gunn Award. His work has appeared in many publications, including Poetry and the 2015 and 2019 editions of The Best American Poetry. He has received a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Kundiman and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at Brandeis University as the Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence. 

Thumbnail: Romain Gille

Craft Capsule: We Are All Translators

by

Jenny Bhatt

9.21.20

This is no. 73 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Literary translation is about being a close reader in the source language and a skilled writer in the target language. Of course, a language is not merely words, phrases, idioms, diction, and syntax. Languages contain entire cultures within them, entire ways of thinking and being, too. Those of us who translate other writers’ works do so because we want to dive deep and fully immerse ourselves in another world—to pay attention to more than the literal content and preserve the emotions, cultural nuances, and humor from the source to target language.  

This is not unlike how, as readers and writers, we seek to inhabit the worlds of fictional characters. We are all translators. The process of reading involves translating and interpreting the writer’s meaning and intent. The process of writing involves interpreting and giving voice to our own thoughts, which are guided by the things we have read, seen, heard, and experienced. As Mexican poet Octavio Paz famously wrote, “No text is entirely original because language itself, in its essence, is already a translation: firstly, of the nonverbal world and secondly, since every sign and every phrase is the translation of another sign and another phrase.”

Due to the accretions of traditions and culture over centuries, it is not possible to seamlessly transpose two languages when translating. Similarly, due to our conditioning and subjectivity, it is not possible for two readers to read the same text entirely the same way. And it is not possible for two writers to create entirely the same story. A single piece of writing can have multiple acceptable readings and translations due to the flexibility of language, suppleness of imagination, and versatility of craft techniques. 

I was a writer before I became a translator. But I learned to appreciate linguistic, aesthetic, and cultural diversity more profoundly because of translation work. There are ten key practices of the discipline that pull me in each time:

1. Reading a work closely and repetitively to know it, sometimes even better than the original writer.

2. Listening to the tonalities, textures, rhythms, cadences, and diction in both languages to capture the writer’s voice as fully as possible.

3. Learning nuanced meanings of words and phrases in the target language by seeing them used with different specificity and significance in the source language.

4. Hunting for le mot juste that honors the complexities of both languages.

5. Discovering aesthetic reinterpretations of an original work to suit a new readership or audience linguistically, intellectually, and intuitively. 

6. Deliberating over the subtexts, cultural implications, and stylistic choices made by the original writer in the source language to recreate them in the target language without losing any literary merit.

7. Interrogating the politics of the writer, their text, and the source and target languages.

8. Meditating on the original writer’s themes to convey them with the proper intentions and emotions.

9. Deepening my understanding of the world, past and present, by transforming something foreign into something familiar.

10. Negotiating with what remains untranslatable.

With only one book of translation and a handful of shorter works completed, I am still developing these practices into technical proficiencies. However, as each translation project helps me hone and refine my skills, I am also leveraging these lessons more frequently in my reading and writing. Literary translation is, in the end, about actively co-creating a text with its original writer by adding more shape, context, nuance, and texture to it. Aren’t we all better off as readers if we learn to do the same? And aren’t we stronger writers when we draw from, build onto, and expand upon the world of literature that has come before us?

 

Jenny Bhatt is a writer, translator, and literary critic. She is the host of the Desi Books podcast and the author of the short story collection Each of Us Killers (7.13 Books, 2020). Her literary translation of Gujarati writer Dhumketu’s best short fiction is forthcoming from HarperCollins India in late 2020. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Literary Hub, Longreads, Poets & Writers Magazine, the Millions, Electric Literature, the Rumpus, and Kenyon Review. Having lived and worked in India, England, Germany, Scotland, and various parts of the United States, she now lives in a suburb of Dallas.

Thumbnail: Patrick Tomasso

The Campaign to Save Lambda Literary

by

Emma Hine

4.28.20

Last June, Alexander Chee stood in front of a cheering crowd at the 2019 Lambda Literary Awards to receive the organization’s Trustee Award, which, as actor Anthony Rapp explained in Chee’s introduction, honors “individuals who have broken new ground through their achievements, passionate commitment, and contributions” to the LGBTQ literature and arts community. In his acceptance speech Chee said, “I’ve been thinking about this ecosystem that our communities create, that bit by bit lifts us up even though we don’t know it at the time.” 

Lambda Literary is itself an ecosystem, and its numerous programs have been lifting up LGBTQ writers around the country since 1987, when L. Page (Deacon) Maccubbin, owner of Lambda Rising Bookstore in Washington, D.C., published the first Lambda Book Report, which brought attention to LGBTQ titles. The organization became a nonprofit ten years later, and its stated mission is to nurture and advocate for LGBTQ writers, “elevating the impact of their words to create community, preserve our legacies, and affirm the value of our stories and our lives.” More than 500 authors have attended the Lambda Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices; more than 7,000 young people in New York City have read and met with LGBTQ writers through the LGBTQ Writers in the Schools program; more than 3,500 authors have been celebrated at the Lambda Literary Awards, affectionately known as the “Lammys”; and more than 320,000 readers have browsed reviews of LGBTQ books on the online Lambda Literary Review.

But after more than thirty years championing LGBTQ literature, says the president of the organization’s Board of Trustees, Amy Scholder, Lambda Literary needs help to survive the devastating financial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. “There is no other organization that supports LGBTQ writers and readers of all ages,” she says. “I don’t want to imagine a world in which our programs cease to exist, but that’s the reality we’ve been facing since this pandemic struck.”

So, less than a year after Chee received the Trustee Award, he—along with numerous other members of the writing community, including Jennifer Benka, Eileen Myles, and Christopher Soto—has turned to social media to ask his fellow readers and writers to help the organization stay afloat. Myles tweeted, “There are plenty of lgbt writers who have careers only because this organization shepherded them & saw them & rewarded them. It’s the lifeblood right next to the writing itself. Straight or lgbt this is your literature.” Benka, the president and executive director of the Academy of American Poets, said over e-mail that Lambda is “critical to ensuring that LGBTQ literature and writers are visible and represented.”

With nonprofits across the country navigating new, uncertain terrain, why has the current crisis proven so devastating to Lambda Literary? Executive director Sue Landers explains that although the organization’s programs and reach have continued to expand over the past thirty-two years, “Lambda Literary has always operated along very thin margins, and sometimes at a loss.” She notes that Lambda, like many similar organizations that serve historically marginalized communities, “does not have deep cash reserves or an endowment to help us mitigate such large and sweeping income losses.” 

Landers adds that despite previous periods of financial loss, “what COVID-19 has wrought is unprecedented in the history of Lambda.” The nonprofit depends on a combination of different types of contributions to cover expenses, including individual donations, admission fees from priced programming, and local, state, and national grants—and the current pandemic has disrupted all of these income streams at once. For the first time in the organization’s history, Lambda leadership had to cancel the Lambda Literary Awards ceremony, which, along with “bringing together the full spectrum of queer writers and book lovers,” is an important annual fund-raiser. Last year, Landers says they raised $10,000 when Lambda Award–winning writer and board member Rakesh Satyal “took the stage and belted out a rendition of ‘Someone Like You’ from Jekyll & Hyde that inspired audience members to give.”

The Lammys are not the only program of Lambda Literary to be affected; the LGBTQ Writers in the Schools program, which brings queer writers into New York City classrooms, has also been suspended. “At a time when LGBTQ young people are particularly vulnerable, it broke our hearts to not being able to continue this extraordinarily affirming work,” says Landers. Because the program is financed through grants, its suspension has also resulted in a loss of funding. “These are just two examples,” Landers adds. “Other programs are facing similar postponement or curtailing, which has translated into lost revenue.”

Scholder and Landers are looking to widen their circle of contributors, “not only to get us through COVID, but to double down on our community commitment to nurturing and celebrating the queer imagination.” Their primary method is through a crowd-funding campaign—the one Chee, Myles, Benka, and others have recently been tweeting about. Collected under the hashtag #SaveLambdaLiterary, the campaign had, as of April 27, raised more than $123,000 from over a thousand individual donors; writer Chuck Forester has also pledged a $25,000 matching gift. Landers notes it will take at least $250,000 total “to ensure that Lambda can survive as an organization and adapt its programs for whatever shape this world’s ‘new normal’ takes,” but that the response and support has been “extraordinary.” It’s a reflection of how Lambda’s community knows, she says, “especially in bad times like these, how important it is to lift up our narratives and celebrate queer life.”

 

Emma Hine is the author of Stay Safe, which received the 2019 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry and is forthcoming from Sarabande Books in January 2021. Her poems and essays have recently appeared in 32 Poems, Colorado Review, Copper Nickel, Guernica, and the Southern Review, among other publications.

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated that an online Lambda Awards ceremony will take place on June 1. The winners will be announced on June 1, but no ceremony has yet been planned.

Resources for Writers in the Time of Coronavirus

8.11.20

As writers, teachers, publishers, booksellers, and librarians in our local, national, and international communities grapple with how to proceed in their creative, financial, professional, and personal lives during this time of uncertainty, we are compiling a list of resources we hope you will find useful. We will be updating this list as we learn of new resources and opportunities. (If you know about an opportunity, initiative, or helpful resource not on this list, please send an e-mail to editor@pw.org.) 

 

Financial Resources

The Academy of American Poets, the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses, and the National Book Foundation have established the Literary Arts Emergency Fund to help writing organizations outlast the coronavirus pandemic. With the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the three nonprofits will administer a total of $3.5 million via one-time grants of $5,000 to $50,000. Applications were accepted through August 7.

The Poets & Writers COVID-19 Relief Fund provides emergency assistance to writers having difficulty meeting their basic needs due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In the initial round of funding, Poets & Writers distributed 107 grants of $1,000 each to writers from twenty-six states. A second round of funding, in which the organization expects to be able to distribute grants of $1,000 to approximately thirty writers, closed on June 28.

The initiative Artists Relief, sponsored by a coalition of arts grantmakers—the Academy of American Poets, Artadia, Creative Capital, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, MAP Fund, National YoungArts Foundation, and United States Artists—will award a total of $10 million, half of which was contributed by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to artists and writers “facing dire financial emergencies due to the impact of COVID-19.” Applicants who are twenty-one or older, able to receive taxable income in the United States regardless of their citizenship status, and have lived and worked primarily in the United States over the last two years are eligible to apply for $5,000 grants. Artists Relief will also serve as an informational resource, and will collaborate with Americans for the Arts to launch the “COVID-19 Impact Survey for Artists and Creative Workers.”

The Writers Emergency Assistance Fund, sponsored by the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA), helps established freelance writers “who cannot work because they are currently ill or caring for someone who is ill.” Applicants need not be members of the ASJA but must have five published articles from regional or national publications or one book published by a major publishing house.

Authors League Fund offers assistance to professional authors, journalists, and poets who “find themselves in financial need because of medical or health-related problems, temporary loss of income, or other misfortune.” 

Carnegie Fund for Authors awards “grants to published authors who are in need of emergency financial assistance as a result of illness or injury to self, spouse, or dependent child, or who has had some other misfortune that has placed the applicant in pressing and substantial pecuniary need.”

The PEN America Writers’ Emergency Fund distributes grants of $500 to $1,000 to U.S.-based professional writers, including fiction and nonfiction authors, poets, playwrights, screenwriters, translators, and journalists, who demonstrate an acute financial need, especially one resulting from the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak. 

Artist Relief Tree is “set up to collect donations from those of us with the means to help. We intend to support artists, particularly freelance artists, in a small way. Unfortunately we cannot hope to replace artists’ entire fees or lost work, but we wish to provide hope, make a small difference, and show solidarity with colleagues and Friends.” A group of artists—Andrew Crooks, Marco Cammarota, Morgan Brophy, Rachel Stanton, Tehvon Fowler-Chapman, and Thomas Morris—organized the fund. Note: This group is not taking new requests for funds at the moment.

Queer Writers of Color Relief Fund, started by Luther Hughes, founder of Shade Literary Arts, seeks to “help at least 100 queer writers of color who have been financially impacted by the current COVID-19. Priority will be given to queer trans women of color and queer disabled writers of color, but I hope this relief fund will help as many queer writers of color as it can.”

The Creator Fund, from the e-mail marketing company ConvertKit, is offering financial assistance of up to $500 for artists and small business owners—the term “creator” is loosely defined. The mini-grants can be used for groceries, childcare, rent, mortgage or medical expenses. The Fund, which will disburse $185,300 in total, is now closed to new applications after receiving more than sixteen thousand applications.

The Dramatist Guild Foundation’s Emergency Grants are available to “individual playwrights, composers, lyricists, and book writers in dire need of funds due to severe hardship or unexpected illness.” The grants, which typically range between $500 and $3,000, are intended to support expenses related to healthcare, childcare, housing, disability, natural disaster relief, and other unforeseen circumstances. Applicants will be notified in two to four weeks.

Substack, an e-mail newsletter platform, will administer a total of $100,000 to individuals “writing, or thinking about writing, on Substack” through its Independent Writer Grant Program. Individuals who are experiencing economic hardship due to the coronavirus pandemic can apply for grants from $500 to $5,000, in addition to mentorship from the Substack team. Applications are open through April 7. (It is free to join Substack and start an e-mail newsletter; if you decide to charge your audience a subscription fee, Substack takes 10 percent.) 

The Freelancers Relief Fund, organized by the Freelancers Union, will offer “financial assistance of up to $1,000 per freelance household to cover lost income and essential expenses not covered by government relief programs” including food supplies, utility payments, and cash assistance to cover lost income. Freelancers who reside in the United States, derive most of their income from freelance work, and have experienced “a sudden decrease of at least 50 percent of income as a direct result of the COVID-19 pandemic” are eligible. Applications have been temporarily closed due to the overwhelming response the fund received from its community.

We Need Diverse Books (WNDB) will administer emergency grants of $500 through the WNDB Emergency Fund for Diverse Creatives in Children’s Publishing to “diverse authors, illustrators, and publishing professionals who are experiencing dire financial need.” Traditionally published writers and illustrators who have lost income due to canceled festival, school, or library visits, are eligible, as are furloughed publishing professionals—editors, agents, publicists, designers, and sales positions—who work in the field of children’s literature. Only U.S. residents are eligible. Applicants should receive a response in two to three weeks.

The Maurice Sendak Foundation has dedicated $100,000 to the new Maurice Sendak Emergency Relief Fund, which will be administered by the New York Foundation for the Arts. The fund will offer grants of up to $2,500 to children’s picture book artists and writers who “have experienced financial hardship from loss of income as a direct result of the [COVID-19] crisis.”  Children’s picture book artists and/or writers who have published at least one picture book in the last five years and are residents of the United States or U.S. territories are eligible. Applications will open on April 23 and close after six hundred applications are received; grantees will be notified by May 15.

As part of its response to the COVID-19 crisis, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project (EHRP) offers emergency hardship grants of $500 to $1,500 to professional journalists based in the United States. EHRP will prioritize the unemployed, single parents, members of one-income families with young children, and people with acute medical needs over the age of fifty-five. Applications are reviewed on an ongoing basis. EHRP also accepts pitches from independent journalists for stories on “the intersection of the coronavirus and financial suffering in America, with an emphasis on writers and photographers who are themselves experiencing significant economic hardship caused by the pandemic.” EHRP typically pays reporters roughly a dollar a word or $300 to $500 a day for photojournalists.

The Foundation for Contemporary Arts (FCA) has established a temporary Emergency Grants COVID-19 Fund to “meet the needs of experimental artists who have been impacted by the economic fallout from postponed or canceled performances and exhibitions.” Individual artists who make “work of a contemporary, experimental nature,” live in the United States or U.S. territories, and have a U.S. Tax ID number are eligible to apply for grants of $1,500. FCA supports artists working in poetry, dance, music/sound, performance art/theater, and the visual arts. Applications are open through May 31.

 

Location-Specific Financial Resources

The California Relief Fund for Artists and Cultural Practitioners program, created by the California Arts Council in response to the economic crisis and impending financial needs of individual artists resulting from the coronavirus pandemic, will award a total of $920,000 via unrestricted $1,000 rapid-relief grants to more than 900 individual artists and cultural practitioners in the state of California. “Grants will be distributed to reflect the cultural and geographic diversity of the state of California—including those who are of historically underserved communities who are especially vulnerable financially due to this economic crisis.” Applicants must be current, full-time residents of the state of California, artists or cultural practitioners; and must not be eligible for or currently receiving traditional California state unemployment insurance (UI) benefits. The application deadline is August 18 at 3 PM PDT.

Literary Arts in Portland, Oregon, has created the Booth Emergency Fund for Writers “to provide meaningful financial relief to Oregon’s writers, including cartoonists, spoken word poets, and playwrights.” Awards of $1,000 each will be given to 100 writers at the end of the application period, which runs through May 13. (If additional funds are secured for this purpose, Literary Arts may open up a second round of applications later in June.) Since COVID-19 is disproportionately impacting communities of color, Literary Arts is prioritizing funding “for writers identifying as Black, Indigenous, and/or People of Color.” Funds are intended to be used for (but are not limited to) recouping financial losses due to canceled events, offsetting loss of income for teachers, and support for artists working full- or part-time in the service industry “or other professions who have lost income.” 

The Boston Artist Relief Fund “will award grants of $500 and $1,000 to individual artists who live in Boston whose creative practices and incomes are being adversely impacted by Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19).”

The Oregon Science Fiction Convention’s Clayton Memorial Medical Fund helps professional science fiction, fantasy, horror, and mystery writers living in the Pacific Northwest states of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska deal with the financial burden of medical expenses.

NC Artists Relief Fund, sponsored by Artspace, PineCone, United Arts Council, and VAE Raleigh, supports “creative individuals who have been financially impacted by gig cancellations due to the outbreak of COVID-19.” All donated funds “will go directly to artists and arts presenters in North Carolina. Musicians, visual artists, actors, DJ’s, dancers, teaching artists, filmmakers, comedians, and other creative individuals and arts presenters are experiencing widespread cancellations due to this global pandemic.”

The Safety Net Fund is offering financial support to artists who typically make their living offline, at in-person events and performances. To qualify, you must reside in the Bay Area (or near it, as some San Joaquin and Santa Cruz county zip codes are eligible), provide proof of an artistic endeavor in the last six months, cannot be eligible for unemployment insurance from the state, and must have earned less than $1,000 of income in the last thirty days.

The San Francisco Arts & Artists Relief Fund, cosponsored by the Center for Cultural Innovation, San Francisco Arts Commission, and Grants for the Arts, offers funds to “mitigate COVID-19 related financial losses that artists and small to mid-sized arts and culture organizations have suffered.” Individuals based in San Francisco who are eligible for, or currently on employment, are eligible for grants of up to $2,000. Organizations that conduct a majority of their work in San Francisco and operate on a budget of less than $2 million are eligible for grants of up to $25,000.

The Personal Emergency Relief Fund, sponsored by Springboard for the Arts, helps artists in Minnesota “recover from personal emergencies by helping pay an unanticipated, emergency expense.” Artists can request up to $500 for lost income “due to the cancellation of a specific, scheduled gig or opportunity (i.e. commissions, performances, contracts) due to coronavirus/COVID-19 precautionary measures.” 

Max Kansas City’s Emergency Grants offers grants of up to $1,000 to New York State residents who are professionals in the creative arts. “Individuals who have made their living through their art form either professionally or personally and demonstrate a financial need for medical aid, legal aid, or housing” are eligible.

The NYC Low-Income Artist/Freelancer Relief Fund, organized by Shawn Escarciga and Nadia Tykulsker, offers grants of up to $150 to “low-income, BIPOC, trans/GNC/NB/Queer artists and freelancers whose livelihoods are being affected by this pandemic in NYC.”

The New Orleans Business Alliance’s Relief Fund offers grants of $500 to $1,000 to “meet the needs of gig economy workers who have been directly impacted via loss of income.” Writers who live in New Orleans, earn more than 60 percent of their income via gig-work, and are below a certain income level are eligible.

Artist Trust’s COVID-19 Artist Trust Relief Fund offers grants of $500 to $5,000 to “artists whose livelihoods have been impacted by COVID-19” and are residents of Washington State. The grants are intended to help artists who are coping with lost wages and earnings, lost income from canceled events and performances, medical expenses, rent and mortgage payments, food, utilities, and other living expenses.

The Indy Arts & Culture COVID-19 Emergency Relief Fund, sponsored by a coalition of community funders and the Arts Council of Indianapolis, offers $500 grants to “individuals working in the arts sector and impacted by the current public health crisis,” especially those working at small to mid-sized nonprofit arts and cultural organizations. Applicants must live in Marion or one of the seven surrounding counties in Indiana.

The Cultural Relief Fund offers grants of up to $2,000 to individuals in the Seattle area for “emergencies related to the COVID-19 virus and to support the creative responses cultural workers offer in times of crisis.” The first round of funding was available April 1 through May 15. Applications are reviewed weekly; applicants will be notified within ten business days. 

The Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council Emergency Fund for Artists offers grants of up to $500 to artists dealing with financial losses due to canceled events, canceled classes, or school closures. Artists who live in Pittsburgh (in Allegheny, Beaver, Butler, Washington, Lawrence, Indiana, Greene, Fayette, Washington, and Westmoreland counties) are eligible. Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis.

The Canadian Writers’ Emergency Relief Fund, financed by the Writers’ Trust of Canada, the Writers’ Union of Canada (TWUC), and the Royal Bank of Canada, will distribute $150,000 to writers in Canada that have “seen contracted or projected income evaporate due to the current public health crisis.” Poets, fiction writers, nonfiction writers, and young adult writers with a track record of publication (or self-published writers who are members of TWUC) who will lose more than $1,500 between March and May 2020 are eligible to apply for grants of $1,500. The application deadline was April 9.

The Atlanta Artist Lost Gig Fund, administered by the arts nonprofit C4 Atlanta, offers grants of up to $500 to artists in the Atlanta area who “have unmet essential needs due to lost revenue from canceled upcoming events and gigs.” Artists who make their living from their practice are eligible.

The Culture Connects Coalition Artist Relief Fund, cosponsored by the City of Santa Fe Arts and Culture Department and the Lannan Foundation, will administer grants of $500 to artists who live in Santa Fe County and have suffered financial losses due to canceled events, including  readings, panels, and teaching opportunities. Priority will be given to requests from Black/Indigenous/People of Color, transgender and nonbinary artists, and/or artists with disabilities. The current round of applications is open until May 17; the next round of applications will open on June 1.

 

Resources for Working Remotely

Zoom: “How do I host a video meeting?”

Vimeo: “How to plan a virtual event: Vimeo’s live production experts tell all”

Creative Capital: “Thinking About Livestreaming as an Artist? Read This First.” Artists Yara Travieso and Brighid Greene describe how to approach livestreaming and survey platforms available to writers: Instagram, HowIRound, Vimeo, Twitch, YouTube, Facebook, and Zoom.

The Chronicle of Higher Education offers advice for teaching during the coronavirus, including Moving Online Now: How to Keep Teaching During Coronavirus, a collection of articles, advice, and opinion pieces on online learning; “The Quandary: How Do I Support a Student Who’s Sick With Covid-19?”; “Eight Ways to Be More Inclusive in Your Zoom Teaching”; and more.

The National Endowment for the Arts has put together a list of ways to create an inclusive experience for virtual and digital events. “Resources to Help Ensure Accessibility of Your Virtual Events for People with Disabilities” includes information about captioning, sign language interpretation, virtual platform accessibility features, and more. 

 

Resources for Booksellers

The American Booksellers Association’s Coronavirus Resources for Booksellers includes immediate steps to take during the outbreak, ABA initiatives during the outbreak, and opportunities for financial assistance.

Book Industry Charitable Foundation (Binc) offers assistance “for the medical expenses of booksellers and to help booksellers in specific cases where store closure and/or loss of scheduled pay leads to the inability to pay essential household bills for an individual or family.”

The #SaveIndieBookstores campaign fund—organized by James Patterson, Reese’s Book Club, the ABA, and Binc—will administer financial assistance to independent bookstores, “the hearts and souls of main streets in cities and towns all across the United States.” Applications will be open from April 10 to April 27.

 

Resources for Librarians

The Help a Library Worker Out (HALO) Fund, organized by the nonprofit EveryLibrary Institute, will administer grants of up to $250 to library workers, librarians, and library staff who are “experiencing personal or household financial difficulties during this time of crisis.” Individuals who reside in the United States or U.S. territories and have lost work or experienced a significant wage reduction—or are part of a household in which a member has lost their job or seen their income reduced—are eligible. HALO grants can be used toward personal expenses such as food, rent or mortgage payments, cell phone and internet expenses, medicine, or household needs. Grants are made on a rolling basis.

The American Library Association’s (ALA) Pandemic Preparedness page includes news on how librarians are dealing with the pandemic, professional development and training resources, and lists of federal, state, and local resources. The ALA also hosts free webinars on topics such as considering copyright during a crisis, navigating the impact of COVID-19 on library technical services, using a library’s virtual presence to reach users with disabilities, and more.

 

Resources for Readers and Writers

The New York Public Library is offering expanded access to its online research databases. Research librarians and curators are also available for online consultations.

Audible has assembled a free collection of audiobooks, including literary classics and books for young readers. 

Many university presses and other not-for-profit publishers are collaborating with Project MUSE to offer free access to books and journals. 

Independent publisher Archipelago Books is unlocking access to thirty e-books through April 2.

As usual, the Academy of American Poets and the Poetry Foundation, among other organizations, offer free-to-access poetry archives.

The editors at Brightly, a subsidiary of Penguin Random House, have assembled “Reading Through It Together,” a set of educational resources and reading exercises for children and teens.

In partnership with Simon & Schuster, the Folger Shakespeare Library is sharing resources from its video and audio recordings archive—including footage of the Folger Theatre’s 2008 production of MacBeth—through July 1. 

The Sequential Artists Workshop (SAW) in Gainesville, Florida, is making five of its most popular online courses in comics and graphic storytelling available for free.

Calamari Press has made digital copies of all its book titles, as well as back issues of Sleepingfish literary magazine, available for free.

Writer Suleika Jaouad has organized a daily creativity project, the Isolation Journals, through which she sends daily journaling prompts via e-mail from some of her favorite writers, artists, and musicians, including Elizabeth Gilbert, Erin Khar, Esmé Weijun Wang, Georgia Clark, Hallie Goodman, Ilya Kaminsky, Jen Pastiloff, Jon Batiste, Jordan Kisner, Kiese Laymon, Lily Brooks-Dalton, Mari Andrew, Melissa Febos, Nora McInerney, Rachel Cargle, Ruthie Lindsey, and more. 

The Authors Guild posted their webinar “Coronavirus Relief Programs for Authors and Freelancers,” featuring Mary Rasenberger and Umair Kazi, the Authors Guild’s executive director and director of policy and advocacy, respectively, and Marcum LLP partner Robert Pesce. The trio covers “how authors and freelancers can benefit from the government relief programs for economic assistance during the coronavirus crisis.” They discuss qualification criteria for unemployment, loan terms, and other information about the process.  

As usual, Poets & Writers offers weekly writing inspiration through The Time Is Now, which features writing prompts in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, and Writers Recommend, through which authors share the rituals, art, books, music, movies, and habits that get them writing. 

 

Other Resources

NYC Covid Care, a volunteer network of more than 2,500 mental health professionals, life coaches, spiritual care providers, organizers, and crisis line operators based in New York City, offers free support to those in crisis. All essential workers and their families based in the New York City Metro Area are eligible to participate. Applicants will be contacted by a volunteer professional via phone or video-conference for a confidential consultation.

COVID-19 Freelance Artists Resources is “an aggregated list of FREE resources, opportunities, and financial relief options available to artists of all disciplines.”

Creative Capital’s List of Arts Resources During the COVID-19 Outbreak

Kickstarter’s COVID-19 Coronavirus Artist Resources

New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Emergency Grants Page

BOMB magazine’s COVID-19 Artist Resources and Closing the Distance: New Spaces for Community, an “ongoing list of online tools, workshops, and livestreams to keep you company and engaged in the time of COVID-19.”

National Endowment for the Arts COVID-19 Resources for Artists and Arts Organizations

Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts has compiled a national directory of organizations that offer legal services to artists, some of which are provided pro bono. Membership and processing fees vary by organization.

The Community of Literary Magazines and Presses COVID-19 Resources for Indie Publishers lists emergency grants and resources available to independent publishers and other literary stakeholders.

Just Shelter, a project started by Evicted author Matthew Desmond and Tessa Lowinske Desmond, offers a state-by-state directory of more than six hundred organizations that work to “preserve affordable housing, prevent eviction, and reduce family homelessness.” 

The Authors Guild posted its webinar “Coronavirus Relief Programs for Authors and Freelancers,” featuring Mary Rasenberger and Umair Kazi, the Authors Guild’s executive director and director of policy and advocacy, respectively, and Marcum LLP partner Robert Pesce. The trio covers “how authors and freelancers can benefit from the government relief programs for economic assistance during the coronavirus crisis.” They discuss qualification criteria for unemployment, loan terms, and other information about the process. 

The Whiting Foundation offers notes from financial guru and artist Amy Smith’s April webinars “Unemployment Compensation for Freelancers and Self-Employed Individuals,” “Applying for PPP and EIDL Relief as an Organization,” and “Applying for PPP and EIDL Relief as an Individual.”

 

Cancellations and Postponements: Retreats and Contests Affected by the Crisis

6.19.20

As event organizers across the literary community adapt and change plans to help keep us all well, we are compiling a list of canceled and postponed conferences, residencies, and award deadlines. (If you know about a cancellation or award not on this list, please send an e-mail to editor@pw.org.) Be sure to check back for updates.

 

Cancelled or Postponed Conferences and Festivals

The Bay Area Book Festival, originally planned for May 2 to May 3, 2020, has been rescheduled for May 1 to May 2, 2021. Beginning May 1, 2020, the festival will also offer virtual programming as the Bay Area Book Festival Unbound, featuring live and recorded events held through the festival’s YouTube channel.  Visit the festival’s website for additional information on both the rescheduled festival and this year’s virtual programming.

The Conversations & Connections conference, sponsored by Barrelhouse magazine and originally planned for April 18, 2020, has been canceled. In response to the cancellation, Barrelhouse staff have organized the Spring 2020 Read-In and Write-In, featuring an online book group and an online workshop with guest lectures from writers and editors as well as generative writing “sprint” sessions. Visit the Barrelhouse website for information on these online events, and visit the conference’s website for additional information on the conference cancellation.

The Granta & Wesleyan Writers Conference, originally planned for June 24 to June 28, 2020, has been rescheduled for June 23 to June 27, 2021. Visit the conference’s website for additional information.

The Iceland Writers Retreat, originally planned for April 29 to May 3, 2020, has been rescheduled for October 14 to October 18, 2020. Visit the conference’s website for addtional information.

The Indiana University Writers’ Conference, originally planned for May 30 to June 3, 2020, has been canceled. The conference will be held again in 2021. Visit the conference’s website for additional information.

The Iowa Summer Writing Festival, originially planned for June and July 2020, has been canceled. Visit the festival’s website for additional information, and visit its Facebook page for writing prompts from festival instructors in coming weeks. 

The Jackson Hole Writers Conference, originally planned for June 2020, has been canceled. In response to the cancellation, starting in late April 2020, select components of the originally scheduled programming will be offered online, including workshops, panels, and manuscript critiques. Visit the conference’s website for additional information on the cancellation and on alternative online programming.

The Los Angeles Festival of Books, originally planned for April 18 to April 19, 2020, has been rescheduled for October 3 to October 4, 2020. Visit the festival’s website for additional information.

The Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing Summer Writers’ Conference, originally planned for June 7 to June 13, 2020, and from June 14 to June 20, 2020, has been rescheduled for June 6 to June 12, 2021, and from June 13 to June 19, 2021. Visit the conference’s website for additional information.

The Nantucket Book Festival, originally planned for June 18 to June 21, 2020, has been canceled as an in-person event in downtown Nantucket, Massachusetts. A virtual festival featuring guest writers will be offered instead. A festival celebrating local writers will also be planned for later in the year. Visit the festival’s website for additional infomation on the cancellation as well as the virtual conference and local writers’ festival.

The North Carolina Writers’ Network Spring Conference, originally planned for April 18, 2020, has been canceled. In response to the cancellation, the North Carolina Writers’ Network will offer the North Carolina Writers’ Network Cabin Fever Conference from April 16 to April 18, 2020, a virtual conference featuring “630 minutes of high-quality, socially-distant instruction in the craft and business of writing.” Visit the organization’s website for additional information on the cancellation as well as the virtual conference. 

The NYC Writer’s Hotel Poetry Weekend, originally planned for May 21 to May 25, 2020, has been rescheduled for October 22 to October 26, 2020. Visit the conference’s website for additional information.

The NYC Writer’s Hotel All-Fiction Writers Conference, originally planned for June 3 to June 9, 2020, has been rescheduled for October 14 to October 18, 2020. Visit the conference’s website for additional information.

The Orion Enviromental Writers’ Workshop, originally planned for June 21 to June 26, 2020, has been canceled. The workshop will be offered instead in a reimagined, “more intimate” format from October 25 to October 30, 2020. Visit the workshop’s website for additional information.

The Poetry at Round Top festival, originally planned for April 24 to April 26, 2020, has been canceled. The festival will be held again from April 16 to April 18, 2021. Visit the festival’s website for additional information.

The Sarah Lawrence College Publish and Promote Your Book Conference, originally planned for June 13, 2020, has been postponed. Visit the conference’s website for additional information, including updates on rescheduling.

The Sewanee Writers’ Conference, originally planned for July 21 to August 2, 2020, has been canceled. Visit the conference’s website for additional information.

The Split This Rock Poetry Festival, originally planned for March 26 to March 28, 2020, has been canceled. In response to the cancellation, the festival will be offering online programming including a virtual bookfair, readings, and free workshops. Visit the festival’s website for additional information, including virtual event details.

The 50th anniversary Squaw Valley Writers Workshops, originally planned for July 6 to July 13, 2020, have been postponed to July 5 to July 12, 2021. The 2020 summer workshops in fiction, nonfiction, and memoir have been canceled; the 2020 summer workshop in poetry will be offered online as the “Virtual Valley” from June 20 to June 27, 2020. Visit the conference’s website for additional information.

The Tin House Summer Workshop, originally planned for July 12 to July 19, 2020, as an in-person event on the Reed College campus in Portland, Oregon, has been reimagined as a virtual workshop. The virtual program in short fiction and novel writing will be held from July 12 to July 18, 2020. The virtual program in poetry, nonfiction, and the graphic novel will be held from July 19 to July 26, 2020. Visit the workshop’s website for additional information.

The Wordplay festival, originally planned for May 9, 2020, as an in-person event at the Loft Literary Center and adjacent spaces in Minneapolis, has been reimagined as a virtual festival. The virtual festival will be offered from April 7, 2020, to May 9, 2020, and will feature events with more than 100 authors. This programming is offered in conjuction with the Boston Book Festival, Bronx Book Festival, Wisconsin Book Festival, Charleston to Charleston Literary Festival, and other festivals. Visit the festival’s website for additional information.

The Wyoming Writers Conference, originally planned for June 5 to June 7, 2020, has been canceled. Visit the conference’s website for additional information.

 

Canceled or Postponed Contest Deadlines

The deadline for the 2020 Crook’s Corner Book Prize, sponsored by the Crook’s Corner Book Prize Foundation, has been extended. The new deadline is June 1, 2020. Visit the foundation’s website for additional information.

The deadline for the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize has been extended for books published between January 1 and June 30. Previously, books published during the first half of the year were required to be submitted by a deadline of June 30, 2020; this deadline has been waived. The deadline for all submissions is now December 31, 2020. Visit the competition’s website for additional information.

The deadline for the 2020 Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition has been extended. The new deadline is September 1, 2020. Visit the competition’s website for additional information.

The deadline for the 2020 Montreal International Poetry Prize, sponsored by McGill University, has been extended. The new deadline is June 1, 2020. Visit the competition’s website for additional information.

The deadline for the 2020 PEN/Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History, sponsored by PEN America, has been extended. Thew new deadline is August 1, 2020. Visit PEN America’s website for additional information.

The 2020 Troubadour International Poetry Prize, sponsored by Coffee-House Poetry, has been rescheduled. The prize, originally scheduled this year as a spring contest, has been rescheduled with a deadline of September 28, 2020; visit the Coffee-House Poetry website for additional information.

 

Authors Reimagine Live Events During the Coronavirus Pandemic

by

Michael Bourne

3.23.20

Six years ago, when Emily St. John Mandel published Station Eleven (Knopf, 2014), her best-selling novel about a pandemic flu that decimated the world’s population, she couldn’t have known that her next novel, The Glass Hotel (Knopf, 2020), would arrive at the height of a pandemic flu outbreak that, if not as lethal as the fictional “Georgia flu” of her earlier book, is nevertheless upending the world economy—and, not incidentally, her twenty-five-city book tour.

“Yeah, irony, right?” Mandel says with a rueful chuckle. “I maintain that this is nowhere near as bad as the Georgia flu. We’re not going to end our days in traveling Shakespearean theater companies crossing a post-apocalyptic wasteland.”

Perhaps not, but the coronavirus pandemic has radically disrupted the book business, setting off waves of bookstore closures and book festival cancellations, making it nearly impossible for authors like Mandel to tour in support of their books. For now these closures and cancellations are only affecting books published this spring, but if the national lockdowns continue, it could send lasting shockwaves through the always fragile publishing ecosystem. 

Already, though, authors and booksellers are teaming up to shift canceled live events online using digital tools like Zoom and Facebook Live. Mandel herself will be participating in a live digital Q&A Tuesday, March 24, with author Isaac Fitzgerald, hosted by Brooklyn’s Greenlight Books, where Mandel was originally scheduled to launch her book in person. The same night, a new organization, A Mighty Blaze, run by writers Jenna Blum and Caroline Leavitt, will be featuring Facebook Live events for Laura Zigman’s new novel Separation Anxiety (Ecco, 2020) and Andrea Bartz’s novel The Herd (Ballantine, 2020), along with a slate of debut authors.

It remains to be seen how effective these digital book events will be, especially for smaller presses that rely on in-person events at bookstores and festivals to introduce their authors to readers, says Mary Gannon, executive director of the Community of Literary Magazine and Presses. “I think everybody is trying to pivot and reinvent as quickly as possible just to experiment with how these events might work,” she says. “So it’s hard to tell at this point if digital events can make up for canceled live ones, but there’s kind of nothing else to do.”

No matter how successful these digital events are, virus-related lockdown orders and restrictions on in-person gatherings will hurt authors and the book industry more generally, Gannon says. When fears of infection slashed attendance at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference earlier in March, she says, many of the small presses in her organization saw sales for the month drop by as much as 20 or 30 percent, just from the loss of in-person sales from that one event.

“I think there’s going to be serious negative impact on both small and large publishers, but the smaller publishers are the ones that are more at risk because they have fewer resources,” she says. “It’s especially important right now for us to support literary magazines and small presses in any way we can. They’re essential to ensuring the health and diversity of the literary arts.”

Indeed, Paul Bogaards, deputy publisher at Knopf and Pantheon Books, offers a slightly more sanguine view of the disruption to live author events. At Knopf and Pantheon, imprints of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, which is a part of Penguin Random House, Bogaards says, all book tours have been canceled or postponed through the end of April, which impacts about a dozen titles at just those two imprints. “I can’t speak for the industry, but given the CDC protocols in place, no one is touring,” he says. “Physical gatherings are kaput. Boots-on-the-ground book tours are dead for the moment.”

But, he says, critics haven’t stopped reviewing books, authors continue to sit for interviews, and publishers are able to maintain their social media campaigns. “Touring is just one spoke in the wheel of book promotion and publicity,” he says, “and, in point of fact, publishers are doing less of it than they once did.”

Bogaards is encouraged by upticks in sales of commercial fiction and topical nonfiction, along with titles that touch directly on contagious diseases like Stephen King’s The Stand (Doubleday, 1978), Albert Camus’s The Plague (Gallimard, 1947), and Mandel’s Station Eleven. Publishers are hoping the enforced down-time will spark renewed interest in their classic titles. To that end, Knopf and Pantheon are launching social media initiatives designed to prompt readers toward its backlist catalog. “I mean, if you are under a government-ordered lockdown, what better way to travel than through the pages of a book?” he says.

In the meantime, authors at small and large publishers are exploring digital alternatives to live events. Blum and Leavitt, the organizers behind A Mighty Blaze, were among the first to see the need for a hub for writers whose book tours were stranded by the pandemic. The idea for the site came about after Leavitt, author of twelve books, including With or Without You, due out in August from Algonquin, learned that the Texas Library Association Conference, where she had been invited to appear, had to cancel and move its offerings online.

“I had spent a lot of time memorizing what I thought was a funny speech, with hand movements and everything,” she says. “I made a video of it and I sent it to Algonquin just for a lark, and they liked it so much they said, ‘Ooh, we can send that out.’ So I started the ‘Nothing is Cancelled Book Tour,’ where I told authors to make little videos and I’d post them as if they were in a bookstore. All I asked is that they shout out another writer and shout out an indie bookstore.”

The site took off, and Leavitt quickly joined forces with Blum, author of The Lost Family (HarperCollins, 2018). Calling themselves “two women writers in yoga pants trying to help other writers whose book tours have been canceled,” the pair has already attracted more than fifty industry partners, including Poets & Writers and two hundred author participants.

“It’s grown exponentially every day,” says Blum. “I would say it’s been growing faster than COVID. We’ve been having so many writers join us, and so many industry people from publishers to publicists to agents to indie bookstores to literary conferences and festivals—everybody wants to help.”

Still, digital events aren’t for everyone. Poet Tess Taylor is publishing two collections this spring, Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange, commissioned by New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and Rift Zone, due from Red Hen Press in April. Taylor was able to attend a reading for Last West at MoMA in February, but most of the subsequent events for that book, along with twenty-five more events planned for Rift Zone, have all been canceled.

The two books contained a decade’s worth of poems, Taylor says, and she spent a year organizing the events to support them. “It feels like building a sandcastle,” she says. “You know, you build it up and up and up and then a wave comes and it knocks it down. I don’t know if I’m sad or angry. I’m all those things, and then sometimes I’m just humbled because what’s going on is so much bigger than just us or me.”

Living as she does in California, which is currently under a shelter-in-place order, Taylor says she will be throwing herself a digitally streamed “imaginary book party” with fellow poet Judy Halebsky, inviting friends “to have a glass of wine and watch us give our reading” online, and plans to regularly post poems by poets she admires. But she admits to feeling ambivalent about moving her live events online.

“I’m using social media because I want to be in a community right now at this moment when we can’t go out in the world, but I love people,” she says. “I love human beings. I really miss them. I love bookstores and want to support them. I love the feeling of live poetry, having it read, being in a room where someone is sharing their words and their breath with you—in the most wonderful way, not in a toxic way. Poetry is a beautiful way of sharing breath, and I miss that.”

 

 

Michael Bourne is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

From top: Emily St. John Mandel, author of Glass Hotel; Caroline Leavitt, cofounder of A Mighty Blaze and author of With or Without You; and Tess Taylor, author of Rift Zone.

(Credit: Mandel: Michel Leroy; Leavitt: Jeff Tamarkin; Taylor: Taylor Schreiner)

Lambda Literary Looks to the Future

by

Jonathan Vatner

8.15.18

When poet Sue Landers started in July as the new executive director of Lambda Literary, the Los Angeles–based nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting LGBTQ writers and literature, it represented a kind of homecoming. More than twenty years ago, when Landers was an MFA student at George Mason University, she worked at Lambda Rising, the bookstore in Washington, D.C., where the seeds of Lambda Literary germinated. In 1987 the bookstore’s owner, L. Page “Deacon” Maccubbin, published the first issue of the Lambda Book Report, which included author interviews and reviews of books by LGBTQ writers. He also launched the Lambda Literary Awards—“the Lammys”—to honor queer writers. These initiatives grew into Lambda Literary, which celebrates its thirtieth anniversary this year.

Landers takes the reins of a vibrant organization with an important mission: to ensure that a diversity of queer voices are heard and that LGBTQ stories become, and remain, part of the human story. Despite the widespread media visibility of the LGBTQ community, queer literature—especially by nonwhite and transgender writers—still struggles for attention among mainstream publishers and audiences. “Having our stories told and cherished really can save lives,” says Amy Scholder, president of the Lambda Literary board of directors. “So often bullying depends on the oppressed feeling isolated. Our literature is a way for people not to be isolated.” 

Before coming to Lambda, Landers worked for more than a decade in education at the College Board. She was chosen for the new role because of “her passion for the LGBTQ literary community and her ability to articulate that passion,” Scholder says. Landers has also published three books of poetry, most recently Franklinstein (Roof Books, 2016). “It was very appealing to us that she understands from personal experience what it means to be a writer in the world.” 

Landers succeeds Tony Valenzuela, who stepped down after nine years as the organization’s executive director. “The ten-year mark is enough time for a director,” Valenzuela says. “I didn’t want to get stale—I didn’t even want to approach that.” Whereas Valenzuela expanded and professionalized the organization, introducing new programs and increasing the staff from just himself to a team of six, Landers hopes to make each program larger and more inclusive. “Tony has grown the organization in ways that I’m awed by,” Landers says. “I’m looking to continue his work and expand it, so that more people can participate, particularly queer and trans people with disabilities, and queer and trans people of color.”

The organization’s reach has certainly expanded since its early days. The Lammys, which began as a small affair in 1989, has since grown into a large-scale annual awards ceremony held in New York City. The thirtieth annual awards, which were held in June, counted notable writers Roxane Gay, Alison Bechdel, Edmund White, and Rebecca Solnit as award winners and presenters. The organization also publishes an online journal, Lambda Literary Review, an evolution of the Lambda Book Report, and Nepantla, a journal dedicated to queer poets of color. In addition the organization has launched three new programs: LGBTQ Writers in Schools, the Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices, and Lambda LitFest. The LGBTQ Writers in Schools program brings authors into New York City public school classrooms to discuss their books and promote understanding and acceptance of difference. The program was founded under Valenzuela’s leadership in 2012, and Landers hopes to expand it to other school districts across the United States; it is currently in development in Los Angeles.

The Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices, founded in 2007, convenes a diverse cohort of queer writers in five genres—fiction, nonfiction, genre fiction, playwriting, and poetry—each summer in Los Angeles for a week of workshops and craft classes taught by established authors. This year the faculty included novelist Chinelo Okparanta and journalist Benoit Denizet-Lewis. Novelist Justin Torres was a student in the retreat’s first year; novelist Nicole Dennis-Benn and poet Chen Chen were more recent participants. “Many of these writers go in unsure about their ability, and they come out transformed,” Valenzuela says. “And they’re not only getting published; they’re winning prizes and gaining [visibility] in the wider literary world.”

Founded in 2017, the annual Lambda LitFest is the newest addition to the organization’s programming. A weeklong literary festival held in Los Angeles, this year’s LitFest will take place September 29 to October 6, with readings, performances, panel discussions, and other literary events held throughout the city. Lambda Literary hopes to expand LitFest to other cities in the future.

The organization recently announced its first-ever Leadership Council, which includes writers Hilton Als, Kate Bornstein, Alok Vaid-Menon, and Judith Markowitz, who will help Lambda Literary strengthen its resources. With the help of the council, the organization will continue to carry out its mission to provide advocacy and support to queer writers. “We are still a collection of communities at risk,” Landers says. “Our stories give us the tools we need to fight back.” 

 

Jonathan Vatner is a fiction writer in Yonkers, New York. His novel, Carnegie Hill, is forthcoming from Thomas Dunne Books in August 2019.

Sue Landers

(Credit: Natasha Dwyer)

Lambda’s San Diego School Initiative

by

Jonathan Vatner

2.10.15

Going to high school in San Diego now comes with an additional privilege: the chance to discuss contemporary works of LGBTQ literature and history with their authors. Lambda Literary, a Los Angeles–based nonprofit devoted to the promotion of LGBTQ literature, first launched the LGBTQ Writers in Schools program in 2012, in an effort to bring LGBTQ authors to high school and college classrooms across the United States. Last October, in the first partnership of its kind, Lambda teamed up with the San Diego Unified School District to bring the program to classes throughout the entire district—the second largest in California, with about thirty thousand high school students.

Prior to the new alliance, Writers in Schools had facilitated only nine visits with individual schools since its inception. Tony Valenzuela, the executive director of Lambda Literary, believes that partnering with a school system rather than focusing on individual schools will help increase awareness and adoption of the program. “To make this program work, teachers need to know it exists,” Valenzuela says. San Diego Unified will help connect its schools with Lambda and promote the program, and also aims to arrange an author visit for each of its twenty-four high schools by the end of the school year.

The state of California recently implemented the FAIR Education Act, which requires public schools to teach the history, culture, and literature of LGBTQ people. Writers in Schools is a way of doing just that. “We make sure to give students and staff access to materials that might not come their way otherwise,” says Linda Trousdale, a high school program manager for San Diego Unified who helped implement the new endeavor. “We’d like to have at least one opportunity in every school, if not more.”

Teachers can request an author visit or video chat with their class or with the school’s student-run LGBTQ extracurricular organization, and Lambda Literary will handle the rest. If teachers don’t have a specific author or work in mind, Valenzuela recommends they choose one from the Rainbow List, the American Library Association’s annual selection of LGBTQ-themed literature for children and young adults.

Valenzuela hopes Lambda Literary’s new partnership with San Diego Unified will help generate similar ones in other school systems throughout the country. He has already fielded queries from school districts in New York and Colorado, whose representatives have expressed interest in forming their own Writers in Schools partnerships. In the meantime, there has been a good deal of positive feedback from students. “For students in the closet, the affirmative self-identity they get through LGBTQ literature can be very important to them in their coming-out process,” says Valenzuela. “For out students, being exposed to artists in their community is really valuable. And from feedback we’ve gotten, even straight students are really hungry to learn about the LGBTQ experience and to be exposed to LGBTQ writers.”

Meanwhile, participating authors, who take part on a volunteer basis, appreciate the chance to talk about their work with a classroom of engaged students. Nick Burd, who Skyped with a group of high school students at Etiwanda High School in Rancho Cucamonga, California, when Writers in Schools was just being introduced, was surprised at how much the conversation moved him. “The experience of high schoolers is a lot more intense and personal than that of older readers,” Burd says. The students he spoke with, who identified as LGBTQ and aspired to become professional writers, asked questions about Burd’s life and work as a queer writer of color, and discussed his young adult novel, The Vast Fields of Ordinary (Dial Books, 2009), a coming-of-age story about a teenage boy learning to navigate his life as a young gay man. “Somebody who’s older might say, ‘This is a good book,’” Burd says. “When they’re that age, they say, ‘This is my life.’”

Jonathan Vatner is a fiction writer in Brooklyn, New York. He is the staff writer for Hue, the alumni magazine of the Fashion Institute of Technology.

Expanding the Audience for Books

by

Gila Lyons

8.15.18

The National Book Foundation (NBF) is perhaps best known for the National Book Awards, one of the biggest annual events in literature since it began in the 1950s. But $1.4 million in new grant money will help the folks behind the NBF prove the organization is more than just an awards show. “The awards are great and make a big impact, but one night is not how you make readers or expand audience,” says NBF executive director Lisa Lucas. “There are people who aren’t plugged into the next new read. Not every community is supplied with ongoing cultural events and artists doing readings and events. Inclusivity is about being in as many places as possible, especially where there isn’t a lot of programming.” 

The nonprofit organization, which seeks to “celebrate the best literature in America, expand its audience, and ensure that books have a prominent place in American culture,” announced in May that it will put the $1.4 million toward expanding NBF Presents, a series of public programs for regions and populations with limited access to literary events and resources. By partnering with libraries, schools, festivals, and performance venues across the United States over the next three years, NBF Presents will host a series of initiatives to connect literature to cultural and social issues and expand access to books.

The NBF received $900,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, along with additional funding from the Art for Justice Fund, the Ford Foundation, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, among other institutions. “A lot of people making these grants understand the power of information and arming people with access to all kinds of information,” Lucas says. “It’s not just about regional isolation or low-income communities; everyone needs a little push toward the book, toward the emotional and practical benefits of reading.” The Pew Center reported in March that 24 percent of American adults did not read a book in the previous year. The aim of NBF Presents is to improve that percentage and to remind people of the power of reading: “We become more empathic, better informed, more aware of the political and personal context of our lives,” says Lucas.

This year NBF Presents will focus its programming on mass incarceration, the work of James Baldwin, and New York City writers and artists. One of the program’s initiatives, Literature for Justice, will bring together a coalition of writers to recommend books that will help people better understand the problem of mass incarceration in the United States. “When you read a whole book, and spend ten or fourteen hours with a text, it becomes part of you,” Lucas says. “We feel like literature has the capacity to change hearts and minds.” The program will release the reading list in September and start hosting events in October.

In mid-August the NBF launched its Author in Focus program, a series of events that center on the work of a different author each year, beginning with James Baldwin. The NBF has partnered with Velvet Film, which produced the 2016 Baldwin documentary I Am Not Your Negro, to host nationwide educational and public programming focused on connecting Baldwin’s work to current social issues. And in June the foundation kicked off its Notes From the Reading Life event series, copresented with the New York Public Library. The program hosts discussions in the Bronx, Manhattan, and Staten Island, pairing nonliterary celebrities like artists, actors, and comedians with authors to talk about books, which are then available to attendees. Four events took place this June, pairing comedian Desus Nice and critic Rebecca Carroll, writers Alexandra Kleeman and Alex Gilvarry, fashion expert and TV personality Tim Gunn and novelist Min Jin Lee, and art curator Thelma Golden and novelist Kaitlyn Greenidge. 

The positive impact of the program is already visible. At the Bronx library event featuring Nice and Carroll, Lucas reports, “There were an enormous number of Desus fans listening to him talk about reading Richard Wright. At the end there was a line of people signing up for library cards.” That’s the kind of engagement the National Book Foundation hopes to see across its new programming. “I live in a book bubble where people believe in books and feel that information and access is really important,” Lucas says. “But we cannot speak to just ourselves anymore. Literature is meant to be disseminated, shared, and valued by all.” 

 

Gila Lyons has written about feminism, mental health, and social justice for the New York Times, Salon, Vox, Cosmopolitan, HuffPost, Good, and other publications. Find her on Twitter, @gilalyons, or on her website, gilalyons.com.

TV personality Tim Gunn and novelist Min Jin Lee at a NBF Presents event in June. (Credit: National Book Foundation)

Barbershop Books

by

Christine Ro

6.13.18

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.

At the Center of Hip-Hop and Poetry

by

LaToya Jordan

4.11.18

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.

I, Too Arts Collective

by

LaToya Jordan

2.14.18

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.

(Credit: David Flores)

A New Center for Black Poetics

by

Tara Jayakar

8.17.16

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.

Q&A: Thomas’s App for Young Readers

by

Jennifer Baker

6.14.17

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).

Kaya Thomas

(Credit: Faith Rotich)

Q&A: Nicole Sealey Leads Cave Canem

by

Tayari Jones

4.12.17

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.         

Nicole Sealey

(Credit: Murray Greenfield )

A New Center for Black Poetics

by

Tara Jayakar

8.17.16

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.

Q&A: Lisa Lucas Looks to Guernica’s Future

by

Cat Richardson

10.15.14

Lisa Lucas, the volunteer publisher of Guernica for the past two years, recently became its first-ever paid staff member and will continue her role as publisher in a new, full-time capacity. Along with announcing her appointment, the ten-year-old online magazine of art and politics is celebrating its continuing success in a number of ways: by launching an initiative to pay its writers, who previously contributed on a volunteer basis; by publishing a print edition (the 2014 Guernica Annual, which after a successful crowdfunding campaign over the summer was released in October); and by throwing a gala this month at New York City’s Museum of the Moving Image. As she prepares to guide the magazine into its second decade, Lucas speaks about the past and future of Guernica.

What’s different now that you’re coming on full-time as Guernica’s publisher?
I was laughing about this with a friend—“we announced that I have the exact same job!” But coming on full-time means I’m not distracted and can take some of the burden off the staff. Everyone has a paying job [outside of the magazine], and on top of that they’re spending hours and hours sneaking Guernica in before breakfast, sneaking it in at lunch, because everybody loves it so much. There’s nothing that I’m more passionate about or believe in more. Now more of our ideas can be made real more quickly, whereas sometimes we took a year to do something because there just wasn’t the manpower.

Guernica has always been digital. Why a print annual?
It’s tangible and beautiful. You can actually see the breadth and scope of all the work that the contributors and editors have been doing, and I think that really commemorates the past year. Digital media is tricky because the way you interact with it is all over the place—you see a link on Facebook or Twitter, then maybe scroll through, but it’s difficult to see the whole picture, which is easier to see in print.

How would you like to see the magazine grow?
We want to continually think about voice, and the people represented in our pages, and how that reflects the world. We’ve always tried to be diverse. For me, being a person of color in an industry where there aren’t a ton of them means that you push harder. Our staff is very diverse right now, and that changes what the work is like. Everyone’s curiosity is different, and the writers they know and the networks they move in are different. And I think everyone can always do better, even Guernica. It’s not that we’re not thoughtful. [The founding editors] are global in their thinking across the board, and I want to respect and honor that while also acknowledging that we’re not flawless. No one is. Except Beyoncé—she woke up like that. We have to do the work, and we have to think about speaking to new audiences. I want more people to come to the table and feel invited. I want to speak to them through the writers we publish, how we market and disseminate the work, and to make sure we’re paying attention.

What are you holding on to as Guernica moves forward?
Guernica has always known what it is as a magazine. We were digital in 2004, which was pretty early. There were no guidelines and no money being exchanged, so we were able to just be honest and work hard, and do things we believe in, and work with people we love. I came in at year eight, but that was the feeling then—and is very much the feeling that still exists—and it’s really beautiful. Retaining that spirit as we plan for what we want to be at twenty-five is an interesting challenge. It’s important to think internationally, and to be intricate, and edit beautifully in a digital setting, and now it’s groundwork time.

Cat Richardson is the managing editor of Bodega Magazine and a poetry editor at Phantom Limb Press.

Q&A: Sarah Browning Splits This Rock

by

Nadia Q. Ahmad

2.14.18

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.  

Sarah Browning

(Credit: Kristin Adair)

Q&A: Sokolowski’s Inspiring Word Work

by

Adrienne Raphel

12.12.17

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.

(Credit: Joanne Watson, Merriam-Webster)

Q&A: Wilson Leads the Feminist Press

by

Jennifer Baker

10.11.17

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).

Q&A: Lena Dunham’s Lenny Imprint

by

Kevin Larimer

8.16.17

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.

(Photo: Stephanie Keenan.)

Q&A: Sherrod Celebrates Amistad Press

by

Dana Isokawa

8.17.16

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.

 

Q&A: Lena Dunham’s Lenny Imprint

by

Kevin Larimer

8.16.17

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.

(Photo: Stephanie Keenan.)

Q&A: Wilson Leads the Feminist Press

by

Jennifer Baker

10.11.17

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).

A New Home for Hugo House

by

Lora Shinn

4.11.18

The Seattle literary arts organization Hugo House once made its home in a ramshackle two-story building with peeling paint outside and a yellow bucket to catch leaking rainwater inside. But with a growing number of visitors each year, the house could no longer comfortably support all the nonprofit’s programs. “We loved the old house, but we couldn’t fix it,” says Linda Breneman, who founded Hugo House with Andrea Lewis and Frances McCue in the late nineties. “It didn’t quite have the infrastructure we needed for more classrooms, a nicer space for literary events, better space for employees, and ADA accessibility.”

In August a shiny new $7.1 million Hugo House will open at the site of its original home. Located in one of Seattle’s first arts districts, on Eleventh Avenue across from a busy city park, Hugo House’s ten-thousand-square-foot space will appropriately serve more than ten thousand Seattle-area writers and readers annually. The larger building will allow the nonprofit to expand its offerings of classes, workshops, one-on-one consultations, readings, and book signings, providing a bigger, better hub for the Seattle writing community. “It’s a place for writers to gather,” says Tree Swenson, the nonprofit’s executive director.

Hugo House is named after Richard Hugo, who grew up in a poor Seattle neighborhood and eventually became a successful poet and beloved writing teacher. “The new building is a great way to honor the poet, whose art lifted him far beyond his underprivileged origins,” says Swenson, who knew Hugo personally. The space, on which builders broke ground in May 2016, will feature a light-flooded entryway with expansive windows, leading to a publicly accessible “salon.” The building will include six classrooms (up from the original four) and a 1,527-square-foot, 150-seat theater for readings and events, to be hosted in partnership with other organizations in Seattle.

The design of the new and improved Hugo House reflects the organization’s commitment to inspiring writers. “The imagination is summoned the minute you come in,” Swenson says. “NBBJ, a major international architectural firm, really listened and came up with a design that reflects the quirkiness of the writerly soul.” (The firm boasts clients such as Google, Microsoft, Cambridge University, and Stanford University, along with hospitals, courthouses, and libraries across the United States and abroad.) A team of designers from the firm met with Hugo House staff to form a planning committee, whose goal was to visualize a functional interior, tailored to enhance creativity. “We focused on how you create these environments that are eccentric and eclectic,” says NBBJ architect and partner Ryan Mullenix.

The interior of the building will be full of surprises and unconventional design elements. Each classroom will be constructed of different materials, including wood plank, cork, and frosted glass, with dry-erase walls for impromptu class notes. The house will also feature “staircases to nowhere” and benches that double as bookcases. A “pencil wall” in one classroom will hold hundreds of pencils. Curated quotes from Richard Hugo will be hidden around the building: near electrical outlets, at the edge of a restroom mirror, or in peekaboo windows. “You might find a quote on the ceiling,” Mullenix says, “and it will hopefully encourage people to come back.”

Initial planning for the space began in 2012, and in 2015 staff embarked on an effort to raise the necessary millions for estimated project costs. Benefactors, grants, and enthusiastic supporters provided $6.35 million. This spring Washington State gave more than $1 million in the form of a Building for the Arts grant. A community-wide campaign is currently raising funds for the remaining costs.

Staff members consider the new building’s early success an encouraging counter-narrative to the ways in which arts and nonprofit organizations are often evicted from their buildings, especially in city centers, thanks to rapid development and booming real estate prices. “Cultural spaces are being pushed out,” Swenson says. “As in any rapidly gentrifying city, we wonder, ‘What if other developers had this idea, to integrate an arts or cultural spot in new buildings, to keep the soul of a city alive?’”

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization officially designated Seattle a “City of Literature” in October. Since its founding, Hugo House has played a significant role in building that literary culture in the Emerald City. “Every city needs to have a place open to all writers, wherever they are in their journey,” Swenson says. “If you love books, reading, writing, and words, the literary community is so welcoming, and people will guide you. Writers helping writers.”    

 

Lora Shinn is a freelance writer and recovering librarian, whose literature-related work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Kirkus Reviews, and Voice of Youth Advocates, among other publications.

Hugo House’s original home on Eleventh Avenue in Seattle.

The American Writers Museum

by

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum

8.16.17

What do Tupac Shakur’s “Dear Mama,” Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Jack Kerouac’s 120-foot scroll upon which he famously penned On the Road, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” all have in common? They are on display, side by side, at the American Writers Museum (AWM) in downtown Chicago, which officially opened its doors to the public in May.

A museum focused solely on the nation’s writers and writing, the AWM is the first of its kind in the United States. Founder Malcolm O’Hagan, an Irish engineer and scientist who lives in Washington, D.C., was inspired by the Dublin Writers Museum, which opened in 1991. “I love literature, in particular poetry, and just love spending my time with Irish writers there,” O’Hagan says. “When I looked into visiting an American version, I was shocked to learn none existed. So I decided to start one myself.”

Eight years later, after nearly $10 million in private funds was raised and “months upon months” were spent debating the museum’s design and focus, the AWM was born. Housed a block from Millennium Park, on Chicago’s “cultural mile”—so called for its many museums, colleges, and theaters—the nearly 11,000-square-foot museum displays everything from Walt Whitman’s verse to Octavia Butler’s reflections on writing to Timex’s famous slogan, “It takes a licking and keeps on ticking.” The variety is no accident. Rather than hire a single expert of American letters, the AWM formed a committee of writers, scholars, critics, and arts administrators from around the country to determine what the museum should celebrate.

“When we set out to define ‘American writing,’ we realized we didn’t want to just house literature,” says O’Hagan. “We also weren’t interested in the idea of the ‘best’ writing or in sealing the museum off for academics or quote-unquote ‘readers.’” Instead, the museum aims for a broader reach, focusing on how American writers and writing have shaped the country’s identity and culture and continue to inform everyday lives. “Our mission, like perhaps all important writing, is to include, not exclude. So we focused more on the extraordinary history of American writing, the array of types and backgrounds of people who have contributed to it, and the story of America our writing collectively tells.”

To create this inclusive space, O’Hagan and his team of developers hired Amaze Design, a firm known for creating visually striking, interactive learning spaces such as the American Jazz Museum in Kansas City, Missouri, and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in Alabama. The final product is a vibrant, inspiring space that allows museumgoers to interact with the writers of America’s past and present and get inspired to write themselves. In “Mind of a Writer,” patrons can bang away like Hemingway at a bank of old typewriters and hang their masterpieces on the “Story of the Day” wall for others to enjoy. The “Word Play” exhibit houses a variety of word games on a virtual tabletop, encouraging visitors to write and share original poems. “This isn’t a library,” says O’Hagan. “It’s not a place where you want to go sit down and read. It’s a three-dimensional space where you interact with what you find, not just look at it and move on.”

In addition to the interactive portions of the museum, several exhibits focus on the history and range of American writing. A mural depicting a tree full of squirrels reading famous children’s books fills an entire wall of the “Children’s Literature Gallery.” The exhibit in the main hall, “American Voices,” celebrates a hundred emblematic American writers below a sixty-foot timeline of American history, starting with the exploration of the Americas by Europeans in 1492 and ending in the present day. On an opposite wall, a “Surprise Bookshelf” encourages visitors to explore less literary writing, such as cookbooks, sports writing, journalism, and song lyrics.

So far, the museum has been a success. Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, Cook County board president Toni Preckwinkle, authors Stuart Dybek and David McCullough, and other writers, booksellers, and community members attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony in May, and the museum is already on track to reach its goal of 120,000 visitors annually. The museum also offers regular events and resources, such as readings, workshops, author discussions, and storytelling hours, and the staff hopes to expand the museum’s programming by partnering with writing organizations across the country.

The museum’s opening comes at a tenuous time for the arts in America, with funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities being threatened. But its early success is a reminder of the public’s interest in American writers and writing, and the AWM seems poised to affirm and protect the value of American literature for years to come. “It will be an enormous resource,” Dybek said at the museum’s opening ceremony. “And hopefully it will spread through the United States this notion that you can have this kind of local, cultural institution—something that passes on the culture.” 
 

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum is a freelance writer, editor, ghostwriter, and writing coach. His poetry collection, Ghost Gear, was published by the University of Arkansas Press in 2014. His website is andrewmk.com.

The Poetry Coalition Takes Flight

by

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum

2.15.17

Poetry Is Going Extinct, Government Data Show.” “Does Poetry Still Matter?” “Poetry Is Dead. Does Anybody Really Care?” These headlines, the likes of which seem to crop up on the Internet every year, suggest the same thing: Poetry is no longer relevant in America. No one reads it, and no one cares. “Thankfully, they’re wrong,” says Jennifer Benka, executive director of the Academy of American Poets. “People are turning to poetry, not away. That’s the story the Poetry Coalition plans to tell.”

The Poetry Coalition is a partnership of twenty poetry organizations from across the United States, including the Academy of American Poets, the Wick Poetry Center, the University of Arizona Poetry Center, LAMBDA Literary, and the Cave Canem Foundation, whose goal is to enhance the visibility of poetry and its impact on American culture as well as on the lives of people of all ages and backgrounds throughout the country. 

The coalition began to take shape in November 2015, when leaders of fifteen of the twenty participating organizations gathered at the Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to explore how they might work together. “We determined that if we leveraged our unique assets as poetry organizations across the nation and collaborated on our actual programming, we would inspire more interest and support in the art form,” Benka says. The time for such a collaboration seems right, as—despite what the headlines suggest—the popularity of poetry appears to be on the rise. “We’re seeing gigantic increases in people subscribing to poetry journals and Listservs,” says Benka, who notes that coalition members’ websites have also seen increased traffic in the past couple of years. “There are more journals than ever…. Everything is trending up. Nothing is trending down.”

The coalition’s first project, “Because We Come From Everything: Poetry & Migration,” launches this month and will present an array of programs on the theme of migration. Throughout the month, each member organization will present a program or project focused on the theme. CantoMundo and Letras Latinas—which both work to promote the voices of Latino and Latina poets—will publish essays and interviews with poets on Latina and Latino poetry and migration on the Letras Latinas blog each day. The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival will address migration through a more environmental lens by copresenting The Birds of May at the Princeton Environmental Film Festival, which will be held in Princeton, New Jersey, from March 28 to April 2. The film examines the diminishment of New Jersey’s Delaware Bayshore after Hurricane Sandy and the ensuing threat posed to the migratory patterns of the endangered red knot bird. The Alliance for Young Artists & Writers’ National Student Poets Program, meanwhile, will post poems by National Student Poets as well as others that tackle the migration theme to their Tumblr page with the hashtag #WeComeFromEverything. 

The list of programs is as innovative as it is socially relevant, especially amid increased national conversations about immigration. “Any way you tackle migration is going to have social relevance,” says Benka, “but it’s particularly appropriate for a collection of nonprofits in support of poetry to be doing it, and we’re excited by the variety of interpretations and mediums of the programs we’re putting together.” Once the initiative is complete, the coalition plans to evaluate its success and organize similar initiatives.

While it’s hard to predict how the coalition will enhance the visibility of poetry among the general public, the organizers believe that working together to promote poetry across shared themes will demonstrate the form’s particular and powerful impact on, within, and across communities. “Poetry uniquely inspires empathy and greater understanding between people,” says Benka. “What better way to build on the popularity of poetry and to tell the true story of the art form than via poetry itself?”    

 

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum is a freelance writer, editor, ghostwriter, and writing coach. He is the acquisitions editor of Upper Rubber Boot Books, founder and editor in chief of poemoftheweek.org, founder and editor of the Floodgate Poetry Series, and founder of the Little Grassy Literary Festival. His poetry collection, Ghost Gear, was published by the University of Arkansas Press in 2014. His website is andrewmk.com.
       

Whitman, Alabama

by

Maya C. Popa

6.14.17

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. 

The Shakespeare Sonnet Project

by

Maya C. Popa

10.12.16

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.

Calling Ishmael

by

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum

12.15.15

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.

   

Dear Readers, You Are Not Alone

by

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum

12.14.16

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-Ketchum is 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.

Honoring Pat Conroy’s Legacy

by

Jonathan Vatner

2.15.17

In March of last year Pat Conroy, the best-selling South Carolina author of such lyrical, semiautobiographical Southern epics as The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini, died of pancreatic cancer. In the weeks after, his closest friends established a nonprofit writers center and museum to pay tribute to the author’s legacy. Officially launched in February, the Pat Conroy Literary Center offers a growing roster of workshops, readings, lectures, book clubs, and special events to nourish a vibrant creative community in Conroy’s adoptive hometown of Beaufort, South Carolina. “We want the center to be a haven for writers and readers, a nexus point in Southern literary life,” says Jonathan Haupt, the center’s executive director.

The idea for the center started with Marly Rusoff, Conroy’s friend of forty years and his agent for the past decade. At Conroy’s funeral, someone suggested erecting a statue in Beaufort; the idea was quickly dismissed. “My reaction was, ‘My God, Pat would hate that,’” Rusoff recalls. “What you need is a writing center, helping people the way he wanted to be helped when he was a young writer.” Conroy self-published his first book, The Boo, in 1970, and when Houghton Mifflin offered him $7,500 for his memoir The Water Is Wide, he naively replied that he couldn’t possibly raise that much money to print the book. Once he established himself in the publishing industry, Conroy dedicated himself to launching the careers of talented writers, offering advice, encouragement, and critique—not to mention effusive blurbs. Rusoff sees the center as an extension of this lifelong pursuit. 

Rusoff herself has experience in building such organizations: In the seventies, her Minneapolis bookstore became the site of the Loft, now one of the nation’s largest nonprofit literary centers. For the Pat Conroy center’s headquarters, Rusoff and her partner, Mihai Radulescu, rented a house in downtown Beaufort, owned by the mayor and his brother. The house is not unlike the one described in The Great Santini—a columned antebellum Charleston-style affair, rocking chairs on the porch and all—and it’s within walking distance of Tidalholm, the mansion used in the film. The center held a soft opening in October with a rotating exhibition of Conroy materials, including his writing desk, his father’s flight jacket, and the handwritten opening pages of The Prince of Tides.

Haupt and the board, chaired by Jane T. Upshaw, the distinguished chancellor emerita of the University of South Carolina in Beaufort, have organized the center’s programming around Conroy’s two central lessons for writers. “He believed that the best thing for being a better writer is to be a better reader,” Haupt says. “We want to honor that with an elaborate book-club model to help people read more intensely, more deeply, and with greater empathy. To writers, he said to go deeper. When you think you’re there, you’re not even close.” 

In keeping with this second lesson, the center invites local instructors and visiting writers to offer craft workshops focused on character development as well as talks and master classes. The faculty includes Bernie Schein and his daughter Maggie Schein, both loyal friends of Conroy’s; New York Times best-selling authors Patti Callahan Henry and Mary Alice Monroe; and South Carolinian novelist Bren McClain. 

The center will sponsor numerous special events in Beaufort and Charleston. The Watering Hole, a group of Southern poets of color, will be teaching workshops in August at the Penn Center on nearby St. Helena Island, where Conroy is buried and where he first heard Martin Luther King Jr. speak. A series called “Evenings of Story and Song,” also planned for this year, will blend literature and live music. And the center will offer guided tours of Beaufort and Charleston, the two places most steeped in Conroy lore. Haupt also plans to extend the center’s reach by sponsoring book festivals and other events throughout the South.

The center’s signature event is the annual Pat Conroy Literary Festival, which will be held October 20 to October 22 in Beaufort and features readings, performances, panels, screenings, and workshops. Haupt created the festival in 2015 as a seventieth birthday celebration for Conroy, who attended nearly all the sessions. In 2016, the second annual event was held in his memory. “That first festival was such a gift to us,” Haupt says. “No one knew, not even Pat, that he was sick.”

Those who can’t make it to Beaufort can read and contribute to Porch Talk, the center’s new blog, which is hosted by writer Janis Owens and features essays on craft and publishing. “It’s not a shrine to Pat,” Haupt says of the blog. “We’d love writers at all levels of their career to participate, to make writing and publishing a little less mysterious.”

For novelist Cassandra King, Conroy’s widow and the center’s honorary chair, the new institution honors his memory perfectly. Conroy was a voracious reader and rapt listener, King says, generous to a fault. “I’m thrilled that we’re able to keep his spirit going in this way,” she says. “I just know he would be proud.” 

 

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.

Honoring Pat Conroy’s Legacy

by

Jonathan Vatner

2.15.17

In March of last year Pat Conroy, the best-selling South Carolina author of such lyrical, semiautobiographical Southern epics as The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini, died of pancreatic cancer. In the weeks after, his closest friends established a nonprofit writers center and museum to pay tribute to the author’s legacy. Officially launched in February, the Pat Conroy Literary Center offers a growing roster of workshops, readings, lectures, book clubs, and special events to nourish a vibrant creative community in Conroy’s adoptive hometown of Beaufort, South Carolina. “We want the center to be a haven for writers and readers, a nexus point in Southern literary life,” says Jonathan Haupt, the center’s executive director.

The idea for the center started with Marly Rusoff, Conroy’s friend of forty years and his agent for the past decade. At Conroy’s funeral, someone suggested erecting a statue in Beaufort; the idea was quickly dismissed. “My reaction was, ‘My God, Pat would hate that,’” Rusoff recalls. “What you need is a writing center, helping people the way he wanted to be helped when he was a young writer.” Conroy self-published his first book, The Boo, in 1970, and when Houghton Mifflin offered him $7,500 for his memoir The Water Is Wide, he naively replied that he couldn’t possibly raise that much money to print the book. Once he established himself in the publishing industry, Conroy dedicated himself to launching the careers of talented writers, offering advice, encouragement, and critique—not to mention effusive blurbs. Rusoff sees the center as an extension of this lifelong pursuit. 

Rusoff herself has experience in building such organizations: In the seventies, her Minneapolis bookstore became the site of the Loft, now one of the nation’s largest nonprofit literary centers. For the Pat Conroy center’s headquarters, Rusoff and her partner, Mihai Radulescu, rented a house in downtown Beaufort, owned by the mayor and his brother. The house is not unlike the one described in The Great Santini—a columned antebellum Charleston-style affair, rocking chairs on the porch and all—and it’s within walking distance of Tidalholm, the mansion used in the film. The center held a soft opening in October with a rotating exhibition of Conroy materials, including his writing desk, his father’s flight jacket, and the handwritten opening pages of The Prince of Tides.

Haupt and the board, chaired by Jane T. Upshaw, the distinguished chancellor emerita of the University of South Carolina in Beaufort, have organized the center’s programming around Conroy’s two central lessons for writers. “He believed that the best thing for being a better writer is to be a better reader,” Haupt says. “We want to honor that with an elaborate book-club model to help people read more intensely, more deeply, and with greater empathy. To writers, he said to go deeper. When you think you’re there, you’re not even close.” 

In keeping with this second lesson, the center invites local instructors and visiting writers to offer craft workshops focused on character development as well as talks and master classes. The faculty includes Bernie Schein and his daughter Maggie Schein, both loyal friends of Conroy’s; New York Times best-selling authors Patti Callahan Henry and Mary Alice Monroe; and South Carolinian novelist Bren McClain. 

The center will sponsor numerous special events in Beaufort and Charleston. The Watering Hole, a group of Southern poets of color, will be teaching workshops in August at the Penn Center on nearby St. Helena Island, where Conroy is buried and where he first heard Martin Luther King Jr. speak. A series called “Evenings of Story and Song,” also planned for this year, will blend literature and live music. And the center will offer guided tours of Beaufort and Charleston, the two places most steeped in Conroy lore. Haupt also plans to extend the center’s reach by sponsoring book festivals and other events throughout the South.

The center’s signature event is the annual Pat Conroy Literary Festival, which will be held October 20 to October 22 in Beaufort and features readings, performances, panels, screenings, and workshops. Haupt created the festival in 2015 as a seventieth birthday celebration for Conroy, who attended nearly all the sessions. In 2016, the second annual event was held in his memory. “That first festival was such a gift to us,” Haupt says. “No one knew, not even Pat, that he was sick.”

Those who can’t make it to Beaufort can read and contribute to Porch Talk, the center’s new blog, which is hosted by writer Janis Owens and features essays on craft and publishing. “It’s not a shrine to Pat,” Haupt says of the blog. “We’d love writers at all levels of their career to participate, to make writing and publishing a little less mysterious.”

For novelist Cassandra King, Conroy’s widow and the center’s honorary chair, the new institution honors his memory perfectly. Conroy was a voracious reader and rapt listener, King says, generous to a fault. “I’m thrilled that we’re able to keep his spirit going in this way,” she says. “I just know he would be proud.” 

 

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.

Lambda’s San Diego School Initiative

by

Jonathan Vatner

2.10.15

Going to high school in San Diego now comes with an additional privilege: the chance to discuss contemporary works of LGBTQ literature and history with their authors. Lambda Literary, a Los Angeles–based nonprofit devoted to the promotion of LGBTQ literature, first launched the LGBTQ Writers in Schools program in 2012, in an effort to bring LGBTQ authors to high school and college classrooms across the United States. Last October, in the first partnership of its kind, Lambda teamed up with the San Diego Unified School District to bring the program to classes throughout the entire district—the second largest in California, with about thirty thousand high school students.

Prior to the new alliance, Writers in Schools had facilitated only nine visits with individual schools since its inception. Tony Valenzuela, the executive director of Lambda Literary, believes that partnering with a school system rather than focusing on individual schools will help increase awareness and adoption of the program. “To make this program work, teachers need to know it exists,” Valenzuela says. San Diego Unified will help connect its schools with Lambda and promote the program, and also aims to arrange an author visit for each of its twenty-four high schools by the end of the school year.

The state of California recently implemented the FAIR Education Act, which requires public schools to teach the history, culture, and literature of LGBTQ people. Writers in Schools is a way of doing just that. “We make sure to give students and staff access to materials that might not come their way otherwise,” says Linda Trousdale, a high school program manager for San Diego Unified who helped implement the new endeavor. “We’d like to have at least one opportunity in every school, if not more.”

Teachers can request an author visit or video chat with their class or with the school’s student-run LGBTQ extracurricular organization, and Lambda Literary will handle the rest. If teachers don’t have a specific author or work in mind, Valenzuela recommends they choose one from the Rainbow List, the American Library Association’s annual selection of LGBTQ-themed literature for children and young adults.

Valenzuela hopes Lambda Literary’s new partnership with San Diego Unified will help generate similar ones in other school systems throughout the country. He has already fielded queries from school districts in New York and Colorado, whose representatives have expressed interest in forming their own Writers in Schools partnerships. In the meantime, there has been a good deal of positive feedback from students. “For students in the closet, the affirmative self-identity they get through LGBTQ literature can be very important to them in their coming-out process,” says Valenzuela. “For out students, being exposed to artists in their community is really valuable. And from feedback we’ve gotten, even straight students are really hungry to learn about the LGBTQ experience and to be exposed to LGBTQ writers.”

Meanwhile, participating authors, who take part on a volunteer basis, appreciate the chance to talk about their work with a classroom of engaged students. Nick Burd, who Skyped with a group of high school students at Etiwanda High School in Rancho Cucamonga, California, when Writers in Schools was just being introduced, was surprised at how much the conversation moved him. “The experience of high schoolers is a lot more intense and personal than that of older readers,” Burd says. The students he spoke with, who identified as LGBTQ and aspired to become professional writers, asked questions about Burd’s life and work as a queer writer of color, and discussed his young adult novel, The Vast Fields of Ordinary (Dial Books, 2009), a coming-of-age story about a teenage boy learning to navigate his life as a young gay man. “Somebody who’s older might say, ‘This is a good book,’” Burd says. “When they’re that age, they say, ‘This is my life.’”

Jonathan Vatner is a fiction writer in Brooklyn, New York. He is the staff writer for Hue, the alumni magazine of the Fashion Institute of Technology.

Craft Capsule: Bisexuality on the Page

by

Christopher Gonzalez

11.1.21

This is no. 113 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

In a review of Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021) for the Atlantic, Caleb Crain writes of the character Felix, who is identified in-text as bisexual, “I came to think of his bisexuality as a bay leaf that was said to have been added to the soup but hadn’t been.” To Crain, the matter of Felix’s bisexuality “goes largely unsubstantiated.” Fascinating! And I mean that sincerely. I do not wish to debate or analyze the role of bisexuality within Rooney’s novel specifically, but I think this nugget of criticism, the idea that queerness must be substantiated on the page, is a far more interesting discussion to have.

When I started writing the stories that became my debut collection, I wasn’t fully out yet. I began writing the oldest story, “Half Hearted,” about a man who fears his heart may devour itself, back in 2015. I was a senior in college and just figuring out that I was maybe, kinda, could be into men. In my first drafts, the protagonist, Hector, was straight, lonely, and in love with a woman, living his life in a fog of isolation. It was a mess. I tried writing it in the second-person, in the first, and in the third (which is where I landed). I tried and failed writing it as a piece of flash fiction. Nothing stuck. But later, when I was in the process of slowly coming out to myself and then friends, I decided to make Hector queer and turn his love interest into a man. Something clicked into place. I finally figured out how to finish his narrative. The story was less about loneliness and more about his fear that he might not be able to open himself up fully to another person, to the intimacy he most desired. This same fear roiled inside of me.

This is not to say that swapping out names is the key to making something queer. That switch was a first step for me, but not an end point. And the more I wrote, the more I wondered if queerness wasn’t something I needed to try so hard to make explicit; the emotions I explore and interrogate in my fiction will always be inseparable from my place in this world as a bisexual man of color. Whether any particular story of mine is about lovers of the same gender, different genders, or friendships without sexual attraction, I still feel they are layered with a humming pulse of queerness—in the portrayals of intimacy and desire, in the characters’ longing hearts, in their fierce uncertainty.

Labels can be valuable, after all, without them, there will always be a chance that a character intended as bisexual will be read as gay or straight. But how much does this matter? And if labels are included, is it an invitation for readers to test their validity? Is that a test one can truly pass? Is any of this actually the point of fiction?

I only ask questions, because I honestly don’t know.

Just as my writing has shifted and grown over the last seven years so has my relationship to my queerness. And so, it’s possible my stories about bisexual characters may feel surface-level to another reader, perhaps one that is more familiar with a wider canon of bisexual fiction, or perhaps one expecting it to look like something else entirely. What that something else is, I’d love to know.

 

Christopher Gonzalez is a queer Puerto Rican writer living in New York City. His debut story collection, I’m Not Hungry but I Could Eat, is forthcoming from Santa Fe Writers Project in December. His writing has also appeared in Catapult, Cosmonauts Avenue, the Forge, Little Fiction, Lunch Ticket, the Millions, and the Nation, among other publications. He serves as a fiction editor for Barrelhouse and spends his waking hours tweeting about Oscar Isaac, book publishing, trash television, and the Popeyes spicy chicken sandwich @livesinpages.

Thumbnail: Hossein Rivandi

Craft Capsule: On Writing Fat Characters

by

Christopher Gonzalez

10.25.21

This is no. 112 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

You might consider it a bit of a cop-out that I open my short story collection I’m Not Hungry but I Could Eat (Santa Fe Writers Project, 2021) with an author’s note: “Every narrator in this collection is a bisexual Puerto Rican cub with the exception of one—in that story, the narrator is gay.” And maybe it is! What started out as a joke I made on Twitter became a necessary signpost. Make no mistake, I beg, these characters are not Latinx in the vague sense; they’re Puerto Rican. They’re queer, yes, but with an experience more specifically rooted in bisexuality. All these elements are important to me, though perhaps the word with the most weight, pardon the pun, is cub. (I also considered using bear. In any case, situating their body sizes and type within a queer framework was vital to the project.) I have consumed so much queer media focused on bodies that were white and slim, or muscular and white, or tall and white, and I wanted my fat bisexual characters of color to exist in all their realities without an ounce of doubt from the reader.

You could say I’m unnecessarily defensive. I am. It was hammered into me as a young writer that the cruel default in fiction is characters who are white and straight and cisgender unless marked as some kind of “other.” What, then, becomes the presumed default for the body?

Writing the body is absolutely a matter of craft. How much should we foreground physical description, particularly when it comes to the narrator? I’ll admit I’m quite lazy on this front. I prefer to keep my details lean. First-person narrators don’t need to weigh themselves or stare in the mirror and describe the shape of their gut, unless, of course, they must. Jeans may fit snuggly, or a jacket may not close, or a zipper may break. I think there are times when such incidents work, but can our fat characters exist without the body becoming a playground for everyday violences? The fat body can be greatly loved as well, and the language for describing it can be lush, velvety, and serve the narrative—in which case, yes, bring it on. I’ll gulp up every word! But what if that’s not the project either?

With my own book, I wondered if I could write characters for whom fatness was not always an immediate concern. Could such a point be highlighted in fifteen stories side by side? I chose to create my own baseline and, on the matter of when and when not to include descriptions, I ultimately landed on: It just depends. I’m most hyperaware of my own body in specific situations—during sex, while eating among friends, or while trying on clothes, to name a few. Where does it feel most natural for a character to take a beat to consider their own body? And what is illuminated when you do mention it?

These questions were also on my mind while reading Jaime Cortez’s phenomenal and hilarious debut story collection Gordo (Black Cat, 2021). The main character’s nickname “Gordo” does a lot of the heavy lifting (again, sorry, sorry) in establishing his physique, and his size is mentioned by other characters offhandedly or more pointedly in arguments, but I was primed and much more interested to look at the observations made by Gordo himself. In “Ofelia’s Last Ride,” the final story in the collection, Gordo reflects on his body during a visit to Mexico: “Normally, I don’t like it when people tell me I’m fat…I better get used to it, because here in the barrio everybody and their dog are going to remind me I’m fat. People who don’t even know me call me Gordo.” Later, he describes how the only outfit he has to wear to a funeral doesn’t quite fit over his stomach. This scene feels so perfectly placed: Life and death, the end of childhood. A familiar frustration against a new loss. The comedy of a too-small shirt. The moment also serves as a continuation of his earlier thought, that his fatness is always there, a fact of his existence. I then revisited Gordo in the stories where his body wasn’t directly acknowledged. I considered how he moved through the narratives, always visible whether he was a passive observer or active participant. The full picture we get is this tenderhearted kid who is overwhelmingly kind and sincere, and alive with laughter.

After reading Gordo, I felt more confident in my decision to prompt readers of my book. I want them to have a similar kind of understanding from the jump. These characters grappling with loneliness and heartache and anxiety, who fuck and love and contain anger, who are frustrated by their own inability to takes risks, who, yes, love or at the very least feel passionately about food, are all fat. Their fatness is neither an obstacle to overcome nor portrayed in an overly positive light. Their fatness, like mine, just is.

 

Christopher Gonzalez is a queer Puerto Rican writer living in New York City. His debut story collection, I’m Not Hungry but I Could Eat, is forthcoming from Santa Fe Writers Project in December. His writing has also appeared in Catapult, Cosmonauts Avenue, the Forge, Little Fiction, Lunch Ticket, the Millions, and the Nation, among other publications. He serves as a fiction editor for Barrelhouse and spends his waking hours tweeting about Oscar Isaac, book publishing, trash television, and the Popeyes spicy chicken sandwich @livesinpages.

Thumbnail: Bruno Dias

Craft Capsule: Body in the Mirror

by

Susan Stinson

3.22.21

This is no. 92 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

When I was an undergraduate, I saw a call for writing about fatness for the anthology Shadow on a Tightrope: Writing by Women on Fat Oppression (Aunt Lute Books, 1983), which became a feminist classic, still in print decades later. I was a young writer who very much wanted to be published. I had been fat all my life. I knew that the shape of my body had been central in defining the shape of my life, but I had no language for how to write or even think about that. The cultural tropes for fat women were virulently dismissive. I knew that they did not represent who I was. The hate language that was regularly shouted at me on the street didn’t either, but I didn’t know how to start to say anything else.

Soon after I graduated, I moved from Colorado to Boston. I got a job at a drugstore and started figuring out how to be a writer. I gave myself the simple assignment to look in the mirror and try to describe myself accurately and, to the best of my ability, without judgment. I chose to do this naked, but the exercise can be equally powerful if the writer is wearing clothes.

It proved to be enormously difficult, both emotionally and because I found that I had extremely limited options for language with which to describe my body. I have said elsewhere that it took participation in grassroots feminism and reading great poets (for me, Gertrude Stein and Walt Whitman) before I could find my belly with my hands and write that it was soft to the touch. Eventually, though, I got there. This is from a lyric essay in my chapbook of poetry and essays, Belly Songs: In Celebration of Fat Women:

My belly pours, hangs, moves, grows hair, shines in marks that fall like fingers curing up around its sides. I am loose, I hang. There are not enough names for the places where my fat gathers on me; there is belly, thigh, hip, chin, but no simple way to say soft-mound-between-breast-and-arms, or low-full-folds-that-are-sides.

I didn’t just observe my body. I also touched it.

I take my belly in my hands. It’s warm. My fingers feel cool, but quickly warm, too. It has a good weight, is soft. I sit very still, and feel the pulse in my thumbs, then find the pulse in the place of my thickest fat. It’s delicate and regular, there, yes, there, yes, there. It comes from the underside where my palms are resting, from the left half and the right half, from veins that curve out the with rest of me. This is not dead lard. It’s my body. It’s my living fat.

Writing Belly Songs opened a vein of literary exploration that eventually resulted in three novels. It changed the way I move through the world too. Having language for fatness—for that aspect of my body I had once understood to be too shameful to speak of—allowed me to begin to know, say, and be more fully who I am. All of that anguished silence was distracting. Living with less of it makes me more present for every other aspect of life. I’ve written about other things, but I know that I’m not done with this topic.

This exercise is useful for any writer. The body is the vessel for all sensory knowledge. Describing one’s physical self with accurate, nuanced attention is like plugging into an electrical socket. There’s a charge. If a writer runs into obstacles to finding language for his, her, or their specific body, then the strategies that arise from grappling with that, or even just touching it lightly, can be revelatory. It has been for me.

 

Susan Stinson is a writer, editor, and teacher. She is the author of four novels, including Spider in a Tree (Small Beer Press, 2013) and Martha Moody (Spinsters Ink Books, 1995; Small Beer Press, 2020). Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Curve, Lambda Literary Review, Seneca Review, and Kenyon Review Online. She is also a recipient of the Outstanding Mid-Career Novelists’ Prize from Lambda Literary. Born in Texas and raised in Colorado, she lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Thumbnail: Oscar Blair

Craft Capsule: Vertigo

by

Blair Hurley

9.13.21

This is no. 108 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

At least once a year my mother would be laid up for a day or two, unable to get out of bed because of titanic waves of dizziness. These bouts of vertigo were infrequent but severe—and frightening because absolutely nothing could be done to diminish their magnitude. My grandmother had the same condition, and both she and my mother would describe the experience as, ultimately, indescribable. Lying in bed, afraid to turn her head, my mother tried so hard to explain what it felt like, to doctors, to family members; it seemed important for someone else to feel the unfeelable thing, to understand the swaying seas inside her head.

I’ve experienced the affliction of vertigo myself. It is both miserable and, I realize, increasingly essential to my understanding of what makes good writing. More than anything else I want my readers to feel the feeling it gives me—an utterly humbling disorientation. The first time I experienced it, I was in my twenties, standing in my kitchen preparing dinner after a long day of teaching and commuting on two trains and a bus and back again. While stirring some peppers in a pan, suddenly it felt like the space between my ears expanded. The room simultaneously shrank and grew. It felt like I could feel the earth rotating in space and I was left behind.

I felt a spark of recognition a few years later when I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s classic movie Vertigo. The plot is twisty and incredible, one of Hitchcock’s more bizarre; it involves a doppelgänger, a faked murder, reincarnation, and a man with a fear of heights. The film also introduced viewers to the disorienting Dolly Zoom or Vertigo Effect, in which the camera zooms in while moving backward. I found the story captivating and the sensation of strangeness, the encounter with the uncanny, unforgettable.

There’s something literary about the experience of vertigo. A writer friend once asked me what emotion I most wanted to feel when reading a great short story, and I said, “unsettled.” I want that feeling of strangeness and otherworldliness, the sense that something is vaguely wrong—what precisely I cannot say. I love stories where the trains don’t run on time or people take wrong turns down blind alleys, ripping open unexpected doors in the story. For a story to give a reader a truly memorable experience, we need that shift in the third act, when the story we think we’re reading goes deeper and darker and becomes something entirely different.

The best depiction I’ve seen in pop culture of vertigo is the horror movie Get Out’s chilling invention “the sunken place.” After being hypnotized by his girlfriend’s mother, the protagonist finds himself in a black field of stars, falling forever in time, loose from any gravity or tether or friendly solid ground. The world only visible as a distant keyhole of unreachable light. The feeling of being divorced from yourself, or the narrative you had for your life.

In my classes on plot structure I tell students how stories tend to follow binary paths: either A or B. The good guys win or the bad guys do; the couple breaks up or stays together; she is fired from her job or the boss shows mercy; the abuser does the terrible act or abstains. But what we’re searching for as writers is that elusive third option: that pathway unforeseen at the beginning, surprising and yet apt, natural and uncanny. In a Murakami story, a character on a Ferris wheel sees herself in a distant apartment window; a character in an elevator stops between floors and enters a new world. In an Alice Munro story, a woman who has begun a tentative flirtation with a man suddenly learns that his child died in a terrible accident of his doing; a woman in a decades-long affair, who believes a maid has been blackmailing her for years, learns it is actually her lover doing the blackmailing. Reading these swerves in Murakami and Munro’s fiction, I feel the thrill of disorientation in these revelations, when a story forces me to reevaluate everything that has gone before.

But how do you come up with the twist? How do you send your characters wheeling and catapulting into the sinkholes and empty spaces lurking at the edges of their lives? Like Murakami and Munro, try drawing closer to your character, and consider what is most fragile about their lives. What if you removed one card from this house? What would shift, what would fall? What is the card you can remove to do the most damage? What is breakable about your character’s life? What would they reach out to for solid ground?

Like Dostoevsky’s seizures or Hildegard von Bingen’s migraines, I suppose, my brief episodes of vertigo remind me periodically of the limited, shattering experience of living in a body, and they remind me of how fundamentally unstable the earth under my feet can be. They prepared me for other, less literal but equally potent bouts of vertigo in my life: When my mother died, a profound disorientation came into my universe and has never really left. I’m teetering along the rail of a narrative that I never expected to be riding on, full of fraught memories, melancholy Christmases, moments when I wonder how it could be possible that I’ve gone six, seven, eight years without hearing her voice. I think for many people, life is a process of shock and disorientation and finding your footing, again and again.

I try to remember that in the stories I tell. To show how a relationship, a job, a dream, a romance, are all fragile things that do not belong to us and can be taken away. But there is a person who remains. The sinkhole opens, and a window into character is opened too. After the sinkhole opens, how do I reevaluate the story, character, and form? Who is the person spinning out into space?

 

Blair Hurley is the author of The Devoted (Norton, 2018), which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Her writing can also be found in Electric Literature, the Georgia Review, Guernica, Ninth Letter, the Paris Review Daily, and West Branch, among other publications. The recipient of a 2018 Pushcart Prize, she received her BA from Princeton University and her MFA from New York University.

Thumbnail: unukorno

Craft Capsule: The “Routine” of Writing With Chronic Pain

by

Anjali Enjeti

7.12.21

This is no. 104 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Most days my eyes pop open around 3:30 AM. If I’m lucky, I’ll fall back asleep until 4 or 4:30. What wakes me in the wee hours of the morning isn’t a child, chirping birds, or the siren from the nearby firehouse—it’s pain. I’ve had chronic tailbone pain, coccydynia, for half of my life. It’s at its worst when I’m sitting or lying down, but lingers when I stand. I also have Hashimoto’s disease, which causes, among other things, stiffening, swelling, and joint pain, and I was most recently diagnosed with a rare but benign tumor, which has impacted my mobility.

My book tour(s) this spring bookended my myriad attempts to relieve my pain. A few weeks before my essay collection, Southbound: Essays on Identity, Inheritance, and Social Change, was published in April, I had a medical procedure to relieve my tailbone pain. (Unfortunately, it failed.) In June, I ended my book tour for my novel, The Parted Earth, with a surgery to remove the tumor. (It succeeded.) Over those two months I spent countless hours at five different doctors’ offices, and in the evenings I tuned into online events for my books.

I’m not alone. Many writers write while in pain and find ways to produce compelling work. In the Paris Review Daily, Nafissa Thompson-Spires described writing with chronic illness this way: “It means something to me to be able to produce when something is daily trying to take me out.” I couldn’t agree more. Some days I can’t get out of bed. Often I have to write while lying on my stomach, propped up on my elbows in a modified Sphinx pose, my back covered in ice packs. Still, I manage to find a way to write words that I’m proud of.

Chronic pain has made me reassess what it means to maintain a creative writing practice, and what this creative writing practice can or should look like. When my three children were little, I figured out how to write around their sleep schedules and stomach viruses. But chronic pain tosses my intentions to write at a certain time or on a specific day out the window. It has therefore forced me to challenge traditional notions of writing productivity.

In a piece for Literary Hub, Sonya Huber, author of Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays From a Nervous System (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), arrives at this conclusion: “I now think of my writing practice far more holistically, as a season of time, rather than a hard deadline. Thinking of time more broadly accommodates my physical needs on a given day, while still ensuring that I keep moving forward.”

I have been following Huber’s lead for years, dividing my creative writing goals, literally, into seasons. By this winter solstice, I hope to complete the first rewrite of my next novel. Finishing up just before the holidays is my goal, even though I know that I may have to go weeks without writing due to pain. And what happens if I do not succeed in meeting this self-imposed deadline?

Absolutely nothing. There is always another season.

What I have also built into this “schedule” (if it can be called that) is grace and forgiveness. My body has earned rest and restoration. My mind deserves the space to process the trauma and grief that comes from a life in constant pain. As a writer in pain, I can’t afford to yield an inch to guilt or regret for not writing.

Perhaps, while writing in pain, I have learned a valuable lesson that I never would have learned otherwise. I’m still a writer, even if I spend entire days lying on a heap of ice packs instead of chipping away at a manuscript. I’m a writer no matter how many or how few words actually make it to the page.

 

Anjali Enjeti is an author, teacher, and organizer. Her first essay collection, Southbound: Essays on Identity, Inheritance, and Social Change (University of Georgia Press, 2021), and her first novel, The Parted Earth (Hub City Press, 2021), were both published in the spring. The recipient of awards from the South Asian Journalists Association and the American Society of Journalists and Authors, she has written for Oxford American, USA Today, Harper’s Bazaar, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, among other publications. She cofounded the Georgia chapter of They See Blue, an organization for South Asian Democrats, and served on the Georgia AAPI Leadership Council for the Biden-Harris campaign. She teaches in the MFA program at Reinhardt University in Waleska, Georgia.

Thumbnail: Joyce McCown

Craft Capsule: Night Call

by

Alex Dimitrov

6.7.21

This is no. 100 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

New York’s streets are everywhere in my poems. In February of 2014 I used the city quite literally. It was for a project called Night Call. The idea was to travel to strangers and read them poems in bed, or in the most intimate space of their homes. For many people this ended up being the kitchen or living room. For one guy, his balcony in Tribeca. Mostly though, strangers walked me right into their bedrooms and offered me a glimpse of their lives.

I’ve lived in New York for more than ten years. It still feels like the city doesn’t need me or know that I’m here. And to be honest, I like that. I’m a writer who thrives off resistance. That kind of pushback and being ignored excites me. In Night Call, I wanted to fuse that feeling with the intimacy of going over to someone’s apartment. Being in a person’s space is often more intimate than sleeping with them. It’s an alluring exchange: people showing you where they spend the majority of their lives. The poem is also an exchange. It’s like showing you a map to the interior though not the interior itself. The poem, to me, is a conversation between people.

I announced Night Call on social media and offered to do readings for anyone who didn’t know me. That was the catch, they had to be total strangers. They could be in any borough and had the choice of four separate Sundays on which we could meet. I’d leave my apartment around eight in the evening with poems and my phone. Nothing more. Maybe a pack of cigarettes (though I was trying to quit). Sometimes I didn’t know the gender of the person I was going to read to (based on their name) and I didn’t care either. I took the N and the R and the 6 and the B trains. Most of the readings were quick. Twenty or twenty-five minutes. Other times I wouldn’t leave someone’s apartment until two or three in the morning and I’d cab back, exhausted and exhilarated both. People offered me drinks, told me stories about their childhoods, affairs, the death of their parents. They took me up to their roofs, made me coffee, showed me things they had written or painted. One stranger cooked me dinner and told me she regretted both of her marriages. “Don’t get married,” she said. “There are more interesting things to do with people.” I’ll never forget the way she kept adjusting a silver pendant around her neck.

At the time I had a nine-to-five job and I’m not sure how I got up on those Monday mornings. Several major media outlets asked to cover Night Call but I declined. I’ve never written or talked about it before. It was private. My interest was to open up a new space between the reader and the poet and between the reader and the poem. I wanted to demystify both. I wanted people, in the privacy of their beds, to encounter the poem like a bedtime story (being read to having been one of the only pleasures of my childhood).

The poems I read were from drafts of my second book, Together and by Ourselves. The strangers in Night Call were the first people to hear it. It’s my favorite book I’ve written and my most personal, too. In some ways I wrote it to survive the change in an important relationship. It’s amazing the things people shared with me when I read them those poems. We usually sat across from each other on top of the bedspread, sometimes about one or two arm-lengths apart, sometimes for long stretches of time, often in silence.

For about a month, in the dead of winter, I went to the Village and Queens and Brooklyn, and almost to Staten Island once but it was too late at that point. Some people I read to ended up becoming my friends. I remember even those I haven’t seen again, which is most of them. I remember what they told me about their lives and I remember their faces. The poem is, of course, a place to remember. It keeps people’s voices and things right there, outside time. And those first hours after midnight, when Night Call would often take place, they feel outside time to me also. It’s a beautiful illusion. The imagination is the only real freedom. That’s what Night Call helped me remember. I had forgotten it too.

 

Alex Dimitrov is the author of three books of poems, including Love and Other Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2021), as well as the chapbook American Boys (Floating Wolf Quarterly, 2012). His work has been published in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Paris Review, and Poetry. He was previously the senior content editor at the Academy of American Poets, where he edited the Poem-a-Day series and American Poets. He has taught creative writing at Princeton University, Columbia University, and New York University, among other institutions. With Dorothea Lasky, he is the coauthor of Astro Poets: Your Guides to the Zodiac (Flatiron Books, 2019). Dimitrov lives in New York City.

Thumbnail: Guillaume Técher

Craft Capsule: What’s So Funny?

by

Kristen Arnett

4.26.21

This is no. 96 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I do not consider myself a craft expert, but I do consider myself an aficionado of the dumb stuff that makes me laugh. Television plots centered on easily solved miscommunications? Check. Dogs that look like they’re smiling? Oh yeah. Writing that asks me to unpack the joke, repackage it, and then try to resell it as a brand-new product? Oh baby, absolutely yes.

There is something compelling about the standard joke format. What is the “standard” joke, you might ask? The best way to describe it is to consider the Dad Joke. Think of puns and silly wordplay. Or the Man Walks Into a Bar format. It’s the knock-knock joke your weird uncle tells at a family barbeque, one you wind up telling your kids years later. It’s the joke that gets modified with each retelling. Its primary purpose is simply that: retelling.

How many ways can you write the joke and still get a laugh?

For example, when I was growing up, my family inherited an ancient computer from my elderly aunt. She had managed to download a virus before gifting it to us, so its main use became listening to an animated bird do an abbreviated stand-up routine. Pete the Repeat Parrot fluttered in vibrant green-pink-yellow, squawking his fool head off, desperate to tell you his one and only zinger. Here is that joke:

“Pete and Repeat sat on a fence. Pete fell off. Who was left?”

Obviously, the answer here (and the joke itself) is found in the Repeat. But the humor came from the trajectory of the experience: It was funny at first because hey, it’s an unexpected joke. After a while, it became funny because our parents got so angry every time the bird popped up and disrupted their work. Further down the line, it was funny for a different reason entirely: The joke embedded itself in the language of our family. “Stop being such a Pete the Repeat,” I’d say when my brother was being especially annoying. The joke expanded, more fascinating than the original. It became its own story and contained its own plot trajectory.

I think about this a lot in my work. How can I repackage the initial premise of a joke in more colorful wrapping and offer it up to the reader as something brand-new? Gifting them the same bit, but a different experience of it? Often this means I need to situationally experience jokes for the first time as my characters experience them. Humor is subjective; it requires background to understand how any person would receive something as funny. As I write, I understand that even if the joke isn’t funny to the characters in the scene, it retains humor for the reader.

Another example: the scene in Rebecca Dinerstein Knight’s novel Hex (Viking, 2020) in which a large mattress is unexpectedly delivered during a dinner party. It’s left awkwardly on the entryway rug and no one knows what to do with it. There’s the joke setup. Later on, a guest at the dinner party exits the entryway bathroom and trips over the mattress, which was not there when he initially entered. That is a use of the mattress in a different comedic way, yet it is still the same joke: weird mattress where it shouldn’t be. The party continues along with the mattress, which gets used as the site of further hilarity. There are drunken secrets told on it, even an impromptu karaoke dance session occurs on its quilted top. Same joke, repackaged and retold to great and hilarious effect.

When considering how humor can sit inside fiction, perhaps imagine it as the same strange and unexpected body wearing different disguises to a costume event. If you can get the joke to put on a fake mustache and successfully reenter the party they have already been kicked out of, perhaps it is worth letting them stick around a while longer. Let them spike the punch. See what other kind of mischief they can get into. I bet it is worth repeating.

 

Kristen Arnett is a queer writer based in Florida. She is the author of the novel Mostly Dead Things (Tin House, 2019), which was a New York Times best-seller, and the story collection Felt in the Jaw (Split/Lip Press, 2017). Her writing has also appeared in the New York Times, North American Review, Gulf Coast, Guernica, and McSweeney’s, among other publications. Her second novel, With Teeth, is forthcoming from Riverhead Books in June.

Thumbnail: David Waite

Craft Capsule: The Short Short Story

by

Peter Kispert

2.22.21

This is no. 89 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I was assigned that first short short story in college, which I still return to today: Amy Hempel’s knockout “Going,” a three-page piece from her collection Reasons to Live (Knopf, 1985). Sitting in my dorm room, students loud in the common area outside, I recall thinking I had missed some pages, then the unmistakable feeling that I couldn’t have possibly. That perfect last line at the very bottom of the page, punctuating a deeply satisfying story that defied conventional narrative. There are moments one experiences as a reader and writer that blow the world wide open in the best way, and reading this story was one of those; to anyone who would (pretend to) listen, I couldn’t stop talking about it.

Short short stories hold the obvious charge of compressing narrative in a rather extreme way, but what I initially loved about writing the form was the possibility to attend to reverberation. I noticed how a detail could echo out more apparent, and controlled, than in the longer works of fiction I had been drafting. The attention of the reader had become, in writing these brief pieces, an available consideration, if not yet a manageable one. I had assumed that short short prose was written quickly because it was so quick to read, but as so often happens, the sketches began to take longer, and serious effort, the more I learned.

In my debut story collection, I Know You Know Who I Am, published by Penguin Books last year, I wrote about queer characters trapped by (often elaborate) falsehoods. I featured several short short stories of just one or two pages to mirror the restriction that I felt the liars of my fiction not only possessed but frequently valued. These narrators and protagonists are constricted by their deceptions, and sometimes say little, or just enough, to their own ends. In this way, the shorter pieces in the book felt true, and rang out with echoes from the longer stories in the book: doublings that hinted at a presiding consciousness over the collection, which I vied to make available, if not explicit.

The short short story form is, speaking frankly, often slighted. Quick, confident work can render something more like scene, and leave the reader ambivalent. Reader investment can be hard to manage. A detail can become a redundant crutch. The best short pieces are closed systems in which elements of narrative are brought into careful relief. And resonate in brevity that masks a world of meaning and complexity beneath their small surfaces.

Several years after studying that first short short story, I attended a reading Hempel gave at the New York Summer Writers Institute at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs. At the time, I was working as an academic administrator for a gifted youth program (hosted by the same university) for children whose talents extended to running loudly down the hallways outside that auditorium as Hempel read beautifully from a longer story, “The Dog of the Marriage.” I remember thinking, as I sat rapt in that auditorium, how intricate the piece was. How each of its scenes delivered precise, accumulating thematic echoes. The spectacular ending. It called to mind the experience of first flipping that page—once, then again, for the words that couldn’t be there. Later, while walking from the campus gym, I passed by her near the main lawn. Of course, I couldn’t say one word.

 

Peter Kispert is the author of the debut story collection I Know You Know Who I Am (Penguin Books, 2020), which was selected as a Best Book of the Year by Elle and a Best LGBTQ Book of the Year by O, the Oprah Magazine. His stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in GQ, Esquire, them, Playboy, and other publications. He is finishing work on his first novel.

Thumbnail: Jakob Andreasen

Craft Capsule: Rethinking Theory and Poetics

by

Khadijah Queen

1.11.21

This is no. 85 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I entered my English PhD program in the fall of 2016 knowing that I wanted to write criticism—I felt excited to dive into prose and formally shape what I had learned about reading and writing literature over the course of nearly two decades. I wasn’t as excited about theory. My experience reading Heidegger during my MFA involved extreme disagreement, to put it mildly—disagreement with both classmates and my professor, not to mention Heidegger himself. This time around, as I read Foucault and structuralist texts, revisited Derrida and Baudrillard and Plato, I realized that their theories didn’t quite align with mine; when I tried to apply their thinking, it rang false. I came to different conclusions around what was important in shaping meaning within a text. Their texts are foundational, but they didn’t seem capable of even conceiving of the work I wanted to analyze—particularly literature by Black women. I also felt that the books I was assigned to analyze in class, works by John Ashbery and Ralph Ellison, for example, could benefit from a fresher, more updated approach to their work—an approach that didn’t take their being classics for granted, but examined, with feminist, queer and critical race theories in mind, how they approached both content and form. 

The literary criticism class I took was aggressively white, misogynist, and dead. The language of analysis favored rather violent words like argue, interrogate, force, demand, impose, rupture. The more I read, the less I understood why literary analysis had to be so painful. I loved literature! Why couldn’t I love analysis as well? I wondered, too, why literary analysis couldn’t reflect the love that we as writers and thinkers and readers have for the work. Objectivity felt like a farce; the so-called rigor felt like busywork, fake and antiproductive. The language of literary criticism (and the field overall, frankly) is steeped in imperialist hierarchy and exclusivity. If I wanted something more inclusive, I needed to read into the present and future as well as the past with, to paraphrase Audre Lorde’s famous quote, all new tools. 

I found myself approaching more feeling-centered analyses, in direct opposition to objectivity, which didn’t stand up to scrutiny as a default praxis, in my opinion. I decided to compile and add to a new critical framework to approach the work I wanted to study. Upon the recommendation of my advisor, Dr. Tayana Hardin, I found kinship, brilliance, and wisdom in Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s Revolutionary Mothering, and the interviews with Toni Cade Bambara, Nikki Giovanni, Maya Angelou, and Sonia Sanchez in Claudia Tate’s hard-to-find 1984 treasure Black Women Writers at Work. I revisited Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider and Toni Morrison’s The Origin of Others. To help me articulate what I wanted to express about literary analysis and the field of literary theory, I drew inspiration and training from Edward Said’s Humanism and Democratic Criticism, Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return, and—surprisingly—Roland Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text. By foregrounding enjoyment, aesthetically and content-wise, I could access nineteenth-century authors like Herman Melville in ways that acknowledged underlying queerness and class concerns in the work, as well as my own perspective as a Black woman. 

After reading and hearing about the nightmarishly racist and damaging experiences of my peers who had undertaken doctoral study, I was determined to enjoy my experience. I had to fight to identify and create that enjoyment, but once I did, I cherished and nurtured it. If you find literary theory inadequate for your needs, too convoluted, too dead—you aren’t alone. You can imagine new thinking methods for yourself, and trust your responses to theories that may be established and entrenched, but have outlived an unquestioned existence. 

Asking questions of one’s own work is part of any professional writing practice; it follows that our thinking about how writing works—in terms of craft, theory, and the work we choose to canonize—also benefits from periodic reexamination. If a work cannot stand up to such questioning, it is not only valuable to articulate why, but to point to works that do hold up to scrutiny. When we search for alternatives to problematic texts—alternatives that past critics may have overlooked or even actively dismissed—we expand the reach, influence, and richness of literature overall. Instead of lamenting “the death of the canon,” we can celebrate the power of human creativity to evolve for the better. We can recognize that we’ve always had examples of that power—all we have to do is remain open to changing how, and where, we look for and analyze it.

 

Khadijah Queen is the author of six books, including Anodyne (Tin House, 2020) and I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On (YesYes Books, 2017). Her writing has also appeared in American Poetry Review, BuzzFeed, Fence, Poetry, and Tin House, among other publications. Holding a PhD in English from the University of Denver and an MFA from Antioch University, she teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and for Regis University’s Mile High MFA program.

Thumbnail: Jaredd Craig

Craft Capsule: The Arc of Epiphany

by

Jordan Kisner

12.7.20

This is no. 81 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I continually puzzle over something the essayist Amy Benson said during a seminar on “the lyric essay.” Or maybe she didn’t say it but alluded to it by the structure of her syllabus. This was a while ago, but essentially she proposed that essays might follow one of a few types of arcs: the arc of narrative, the arc of argument, the arc of epiphany.

This concept made intuitive sense to me. The feeling of the word arc—which for me always conjures the bowing of a ship’s prow, something sturdy and flexible, something constructed but buoyant, something that cuts through water and ice but is smooth enough to run your hand over—matches the feeling of an essay. The arc of narrative seems clear enough: The essay uses as its keel the rising and falling action of story. Its end point is coterminous with a feeling of resolution, or maybe just arrival, in the narrative. The arc of argument shapes an essay around an idea that needs advancing, a thought that needs interrogating and articulating—whether it’s clearly an argument or just a notion the writer is toying with. 

But what is an essay that follows the arc of epiphany?

I don’t remember how Benson defined it, and I prefer it that way. This way the arc of epiphany is something I get to imagine, to theorize, to puzzle over, to strive within. Is it an essay that provokes an epiphany? An essay that finds its arrival point in a moment of epiphany or bright realization? Does it replicate, structurally, the feeling of epiphany: total confusion followed by rupture and maybe rapture, followed by reassessment of everything that came before in light of the new knowledge, followed, perhaps, by disillusionment or fading fervor? Is it an essay that completely upends itself part of the way through and starts over on new premises? Does it just go right ahead and manifest the divine, as the word’s earliest uses in English (first, to describe Christ’s appearance to the Magi; and then to denote the revelation of a divinity more generally) would indicate?

When I wrote my first book, Thin Places, I toyed with creating an arc of epiphany not only within a single essay but through an arrangement of essays—or, to put it in geometric terms, a major arc produced by a series of minor arcs. I wanted to make a collection of essays that each individually riffed on the epiphanic (say, by ending with the appearance of a holy orange; or by putting the reader in a prolonged confrontation with death; or by pulling a U-turn halfway through a piece about debutante balls to talk about queerness) but also collectively and gradually, through sequential reading, crested into something like the epiphanic. I wanted that big inrush of air, that clearer picture, that sudden recognition of pattern. 

This is an extremely lofty goal, I realize, and I didn’t necessarily think such a thing would be possible (not least because I still wonder what “arc of epiphany” means), but it gave me something to play with and push against. Most writing that I like—of my own or by other people—is written as a genuine and urgent attempt to understand something inscrutable. When the writer stretches to comprehend something just out of their reach, or to articulate something for which they have no words—that’s when the air begins to crackle. It feels like a goal worth reaching for, even and especially if you have to make up its rubric yourself.

 

Jordan Kisner is the author of the essay collection Thin Places (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). Her writing has also appeared in the Atlantic, the Believer, the Guardiann+1, the New York Times Magazine, and the Paris Review Daily. The recipient of fellowships from Pioneer Works, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and Art Omi, she is currently a fellow at the Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas.

Thumbnail: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Photo Library

Craft Capsule: On Nightmares

by

Chen Chen

11.9.20

This is no. 78 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

1.
A nightmare: realizing I need to restructure this essay, again, and it’s due tomorrow. 

A nightmare: COVID-19 cases on the rise again all across the country. 

A nightmare: how often essayists, especially poets-turned-essayists, like to remind everyone that essay comes from the French verb essayer, meaning to try, to attempt, to test. 

Not a nightmare: I love the try, the attempt. 

A nightmare: the test. The test freaks me out. 

A nightmare: how long it’s taken in the United States for COVID tests to become more accessible. 

Why do I prefer the nightmare of being dreadfully stuck, working on a poem, over the nightmare of being dreadfully stuck, working on an essay? 

A collective, ongoing nightmare: the pandemic. 

2.
Working on my essays for this series has been both a welcome distraction and (as I knew would happen) a dive into the deep end of my anxieties. The process feels nightmarish because my preferred method of exploring and articulating craft ideas is writing poems (and it seems I’ve gotten to the point in my poetry writing where I can befriend the dread, the stuck-ness). Or through conversation: engaging with students and connecting with friends, all of which happens these days over the shared nightmare known as Zoom. 

Also, I hate paragraphs. The blocky-ness of paragraphs makes me anxious, like I’m trapped in a box and, in the essay form, can only move from one box to another. I feel I have to make sense. Too much sense. I like paragraphs in prose poems, because I’m freer to do—I know better how to do—weird things with sentences. Or not write sentences at all. 

I think of Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey (Wave Books, 2012), a collection of essays based on lectures she was required to give as a teacher—at one point, Ruefle describes lectures as “bad dreams.” Ruefle has commented frequently on the fact that this one volume on poetry has far outsold her books of poetry; that people would rather read about poetry, than read a poem. That for many, poetry remains a nightmare. 

Poetry, to me, is the best dreaming. 

A form of breaking out of the Zoom room or the chain of paragraphs, into an expanse of fresh blooms,1 a field bursting with sunflowers. 

Still I’m drawn to essays for how they document a thought process, an attempt to think clearly and deeply. And I love good essays on poetry. I love Madness, Rack, and Honey. I’d like to write craft essays like Ruefle’s. I’m not sure that is possible, given our very different brains. But maybe my brain can do something else and figure out ways to enjoy writing an essay, or at least dislike it less. 

Could it be that my fear of the essay draws me to it? I’m afraid I won’t write as well in this genre, but the challenge entices. I’m nervous to delve into new subjects and discover scary truths, but surprise is also one of the key reasons I write anything. After all, in poetry it’s usually the door I don’t want to open that leads me to the room I most need to investigate.2

3.
I’ve long wanted to examine nightmares in my poetry. I’m intrigued by how fear can act as a signpost on the path to truth; how terror can mean getting closer to a complicated reality. I’ve written poems based on dreams—wild dreams that contain some frightening revelation at their core—but I have yet to write a poem based on a straight-up nightmare. Specifically, I’ve been itching to write a poem about my two recurring nightmares involving high school French teachers. 

One nightmare stars my sophomore year instructor, my favorite one, as a highly trained assassin. Her weapon of choice: one of my mother’s beloved Chinese cleavers. Somehow she manages very clean kills. In the nightmare I admire her and am also terrified. Sometimes I am the target, for getting a B on a quiz, say, and before the final blow she reminds me, “Cravate is a feminine noun, despite it referring to men’s neckties! It’s LA cravate, UNE cravate, SA cravate!” If I experience this again, I hope I remember to respond, “But anyone can wear a necktie!” Other times the nightmare gets loftier and the target is a corrupt politician, usually French. One time I am the corrupt French politician. 

I haven’t had this nightmare in a while, and I miss it—perhaps because 2020 is a global waking nightmare. What sleeping nightmare of mine could compare with Trump, COVID, and the police? I hesitate to type it out, but I miss this assassin nightmare because I wish there were worse consequences for the Trump administration. I wish there were consequences at all. As someone invested in abolition, I can’t advocate for prison. I have to imagine and help build other types of justice and accountability, ones that don’t rely on punishment and vengeance. At the same time, the part of me that misses the assassin nightmare would love for something nightmarish to visit these leaders who’ve abandoned all duty to the people. 

Another part of me misses this nightmare because seeing my mother’s cleaver in it is like seeing a part of her. I also associate high school language study with her because she teaches Mandarin at that level. I haven’t seen my mother since this pandemic was declared a pandemic. She’s immunocompromised and has been taking every precaution. Every call with her begins with her asking, “Have you been staying at home?” and ends with her command, “Keep staying at home.” My father, who never texts, texted me last week to say, “Avoid travel to any hot spots,” while travel ads pop up on my TV. Back in March my partner’s father was quarantined in a hospital in upstate New York after experiencing COVID-like symptoms. It was four days, but it felt like a year before the test results came back: negative. 

I check the news and check the news. I check social media, texts. I pick up the phone. The friends of friends with the virus. The friends with the virus. 

4.
Perhaps my fear of writing essays has to do with how my brain always associates the act with an academic assignment, a requirement, a grammar test that I might fail. It doesn’t help that so far most of the essays I write have in fact been assigned to me. They do help pay the bills. I do love a prompt. But is it, on some level, masochism? Is all my writing, in some way, a testing to which I subject myself, over and over? Am I perpetually trying to win a French teacher’s approval? 

The other French teacher nightmare goes like this: On an otherwise blissfully uneventful day, I receive a letter from my high school. I know something is amiss before even opening it. For a long time I just stare at it; it stares back from my coffee table. Then I open it. And it says because I never finished my senior year French project, I never actually passed high school. Therefore I have to return to school, where this time I will also reside. The second I step back into that memory-drenched building, I am met by my senior year French instructor. She looks me over then says in the most disappointed yet unsurprised way, “Bonjour.” 

What terrifies me in this dream is not the disruption of everyday life (by a cleaver-wielding assassin like in my other nightmare), but the resurrection of days I’ve long put behind me, a time and a self I’d rather not reinhabit. Not that high school was all stuffy, all busy work. No, I had many brilliant teachers and classmates, many life-changing experiences. This nightmare is the nightmare that my life didn’t really change. What I fear is going back to school but never learning, never growing. 

What I love is the school of poetry, which invites me to play anew and wonder differently and try strange things—to test in the sense of to experiment. To test in the sense of encountering nerve-wracking challenges, but trusting that the fear is a sign of one’s hunger for and effort toward real growth. Maybe one day I will experience essay writing more like that: an experiment in good fear. 

5.
A poem I find instructive for writing about nightmares is “The Dream”3 by Aracelis Girmay, one of my former professors, whose work continues to nourish as well as push me. Indeed, Girmay’s writing always reminds me how poems themselves can be the best poetry teachers. I also return to this one because it focuses on a mother, the figure beside or behind the French teacher of my first nightmare. Here is the startling start of “The Dream”: 

Last night, all night
the dream, the dead
mother, my small sister,
tiny, her mouth
over my shoulder
(screaming) like a knapsack
when she heard the news,
& my brother playing
the stereo. I howled
like the coyotes; myself.

The poem then shifts from the howl to a sunlit, tranquil scene, the way dreams can, suddenly and completely. “The Nightmare” ultimately wouldn’t be the most fitting title for this poem. The word dream can encompass good ones and bad. That said, nightmare can contain the abject as well as the gorgeous (my favorite horror movies have stellar aesthetics). My French teacher nightmares feature both terror and tenderness—fear of disappointing the mother/teacher figure, but also admiration for her and a longing for a time when I could, on a regular basis, talk with her in person. Rereading Girmay’s poem I realize that at the heart of the poem I want to write are questions like: How do fear and affection sit side by side? Why do I connect French teachers and mothers in this manner? 

This is what I mean by poems being the best poetry teachers: They offer an array of techniques to emulate, yes, but more fundamentally and expansively, they conjure up uncomfortable questions and encourage bewildering (sometimes frightening) leaps in imagination.

6.
One week, feeling particularly defeated by this essay, I write a draft of my poem “The Nightmare.” It reads ridiculous, then not, which seems like how a lot of my writing goes. I’d like one day to write a poem that shifts from not one bit ridiculous to utterly. Still, this poem is some new occurrence. Every truly new poem4 is its own strange school. 

I revise and revise. The poem teaches me about how my recurring nightmares are linked to the world’s shared nightmare of COVID-19. How afraid I am, as a teacher myself now, to be back this fall; how fortunate I feel that my university has allowed me to teach online; how much I miss teaching in person; how angry I am that not every teacher “gets to” do this. 

I revise and revise the ending of this essay. I’m afraid of being so direct and so pared down in my diction. But I know from poetry that it’s often when I’m trying the least to be “poetic” that the most charged truths emerge. 

Truths like: I’m afraid my students will get sick. I’m afraid of losing a student, more than one student. I think I should be more afraid of getting very sick too. I miss my mother, who, as a high school Mandarin teacher, knows that school is more than a building, but misses her classroom. I’m relieved she has the option to teach online as well. I miss many of my high school teachers and hope they are safe and finding ways to rest. 

To dream, both literally and creatively. To speak back to the nightmares, both personal and collective.

 

ENDNOTES

1. A beautiful nightmare: how much poets adore the word bloom.
2. In life, I know better than to go exploring attics, basements, or other favorite hangout spots of vengeful ghosts and demons. 
3. From
Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions, 2011).
4. I mean new mainly in terms of process; new to the writer. The big hope is that the poem will then do something new for a reader.

 

Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017)which was longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry and won the Publishing Triangle Thom Gunn Award. His work has appeared in many publications, including Poetry and the 2015 and 2019 editions of The Best American Poetry. He has received a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Kundiman and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at Brandeis University as the Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence. 

Thumbnail: Chuttersnap

Craft Capsule: The Art of Literary Criticism

by

Jenny Bhatt

9.28.20

This is no. 74 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

A personal manifesto for literary criticism:

1. On close reading: Before reviewing, read a book at least three times for the following: text, subtext, and what’s left off the page. Often the latter two will reveal more about the writer’s true intent.

2. On references and associations: A good review is, first and foremost, about expanding the literary conversation between the text, the author, other readers, and ourselves—determining what the text means to us as individuals and as societies. Enrich your frames of reference by reading widely, purposefully, and mindfully. And then look for the literary associations, assemblages, affinities, and networks of relevant ideas, texts, people, and objects. Remember W. H. Auden’s sixth must-have for literary criticism: “Throw light upon the relation of art to life, to science, economics, ethics, religion, etc.”

3. On fairness: Ensure fairness and balance for the author and for readers (of both the review and the work itself). It is not enough to say what’s good or bad about a book. Make the case with evidence as to why. It is also not enough to write an information-filled essay that’s missing a “so what?” Every major point in the review should answer the twofold question: Why is this good or bad, and why does it matter?

4. On argument: Never speculate. Always contextualize. The review thesis must have plausible counterarguments, and the essay must include and respond to those counterarguments. That said, don’t indulge in what Virginia Woolf called the “desiccation of the living tissues of literature into a network of little bones” as some critics do with their “able and industrious pens.”

5. On comparison: Keep in mind Elizabeth Hardwick’s indictment: “How often we read a beginner’s review that compares a thin thing to a fat one. ‘John Smith, like Tolstoy, is very interested in the way men interact under the conditions of battle.’ Well, no.” Also, resist your cognitive biases—recency, confirmation, in-group, distinction, and attentional—in such comparative analysis.

6. On building up versus tearing down: A work of literature can do so much more than “demystify, destabilize, denaturalize, deconstruct, debunk, decipher,” as Rita Felski reminds us in The Limits of Critique (University of Chicago Press, 2015). It can, more significantly, also “recontextualize, reconfigure, remake, recharge perceptions.” Instead of simply focusing on excavating a text for causes, conditions, and motives, follow Felski’s advice to reflect on the text’s revelations and possibilities. Because, as Felski argues, “Works of art do not only subvert, but also convert; they do not only inform but also transform—a transformation that is not just a matter of intellectual readjustment but one of affective realignment as well (a shift of mood, a sharpened sensation, an unexpected surge of affinity or disorientation).”

7. On readership: Understand the target audience of a book—never mind who its writer or translator or publisher might have intended—and whether it meets their needs. Engage the reader as a smart, active participant in the conversation rather than a passive receiver of information. Felski’s four modes of textual engagement—recognition, enchantment, knowledge, and shock—also apply to how we engage with a review. Recognition is about the text as a source of self-interpretation and self-understanding. Enchantment is that pleasurable self-forgetting while reading. Knowledge refers to what literature discloses about the world beyond oneself. Shock speaks to the troubling and taboo aspects of human existence.

8. On language: Be specific, precise, and clear. Craft each sentence to make the review aesthetically pleasing. But avoid overwrought sentences that call more attention to themselves (or to you) than to the points they are making.

9. On the why: The payoff of writing criticism is deepening our reading pleasure and making it time well-spent. It helps us create a sense of understanding amid the constant activity of our surroundings. As Virginia Woolf wrote: “Poems and novels, histories and memoirs, dictionaries and blue-books; books written in all languages by men and women of all tempers, races, and ages jostle each other on the shelf. And outside the donkey brays, the women gossip at the pump, the colts gallop across the fields. Where are we to begin? How are we to bring order into this multitudinous chaos and so get the deepest and widest pleasure from what we read?”

10. On the so what: Do all of the above because a book is a sociocultural, historical, and political artifact. Like all human creations, it is a product of our experiences and reflects our desires, conflicts, and potential. Critiquing literature well involves learning about some crucial aspects of ourselves as individuals and as a species. It is how we elevate and preserve our literary traditions.

 

Jenny Bhatt is a writer, translator, and literary critic. She is the host of the Desi Books podcast and the author of the short story collection Each of Us Killers (7.13 Books, 2020). Her literary translation of Gujarati writer Dhumketu’s best short fiction is forthcoming from HarperCollins India in late 2020. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Literary Hub, LongreadsPoets & Writers Magazine, the Millions, Electric Literature, the Rumpus, and Kenyon Review. Having lived and worked in India, England, Germany, Scotland, and various parts of the United States, she now lives in a suburb of Dallas.

Thumbnail: Markus Winkler

Craft Capsule: Lyric vs. Narrative

by

Will Harris

8.24.20

This is no. 69 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

A few years ago I showed a series of new poems to some friends and a deflating word kept coming up: narrative. The poems involved a speaker moving through London, having random encounters. They were baggy poems that contained events, but I didn’t think of them as narrative. I had been trying to avoid some of the pitfalls of the lyric; now I worried I’d unintentionally slipped into another mode, one that was artificial and linear, associated with dead white men known—like brands of cake—by their surnames: Wordsworth, Browning, (Mr.) Kipling. 

I started thinking about the differences between lyric and narrative. Maybe the biggest one is time. According to Aristotle, narrative is the “imitation of an action,” and that requires time in which to happen. A lyric, on the other hand, if it was filmed, might flit across the screen in a second or two. Take fragment 105A by Sappho—one of the first lyric poets—translated here by Anne Carson: 

as the sweetapple reddens on a high branch 
   high on the highest branch and the applepickers forgot—
no, not forgot: were unable to reach

Summary: Person reaches for apple. End of shot. 

But in that moment, the real action has nothing to do with apples. It’s internal: a swerving thought-line, folding back in on itself. Those apples—too high to pick, and thus objects of longing—represent something the speaker either forgets about (maybe wants to forget about) or chooses to remember as out of reach.

Though Sappho didn’t conceive of this as a whole poem, it feels of a piece with the contemporary lyric. “Disembodied, the poem provokes longing,” writes poet and scholar Jennifer Moxley. “The song it sings is either a lament of exile from the body or a celebration of freedom from its material prison, depending on the direction of the winds.” Or as the literary critic Helen Vendler puts it: In lyric, voice is “made abstract,” emancipated from time and space; it’s “the gesture of immortality and freedom.” By contrast, “the novel is the gesture of the historical and the spatial.” 

This transcendental view of the lyric has made some poets want to throw all conventional distinctions out the window. At a talk for the Kootenay School of Writing in 1990, Lisa Robertson identifies Bruce Andrews as one such poet who railed against, as he put it, “the intrinsic evils of narrative, lyric, identity among other traditional constructions.” Behind this rage at “traditional constructions”—tied to systems of structural oppression like capitalism—is the understandable desire to renew language by purging it. 

Though what else would that kind of purged language erase? Identity is rarely a choice; it chooses you. But writing through identity, whether I like it or not, has been my way to engage with the social and political conditions in which I exist—to reclaim, in small part, the choice that racialization takes away. This might explain why I lean on narrative sometimes, and why I’ve tried to set it—unintentionally or otherwise—against the lyric. Because my experience is “historical and spatial,” as much as it gestures towards “freedom.”

Questions still nag, though: Why bother? Why say “lyric” or “narrative”? Why not invent new forms, new genres, new terms? Why not just write

I can only respond—I’m talking to myself here—that the poles of lyric and narrative have helped me navigate the blank night of the page. They’ve helped me to think, in particular, about how time functions: With narrative, a focus on action centers time; with lyric, the suspension of time centers language. 

And sometimes I go back to The Virago Book of Fairy Tales to remember how varied and strange “narrative” can be—to remind myself that it doesn’t have to limit the work of poets at all. This is the first paragraph of a Greenlandic tale:

There was woman who was old, blind and likewise unable to walk. Once she asked her daughter for a drink of water. The daughter was so bored with her old mother that she gave her a bowl of her own piss. The old woman drank it all up, then said: “You’re a nice one, daughter. Tell me—which would you prefer as a lover, a louse or a sea scorpion?”

This could be reconstituted as a lyric. It demands—and rewards—a careful consideration of word choice and rhythm: the use of “likewise” in the first sentence; that phrase “nice one”; the ambiance of violent boredom. 

But it’s not a lyric. If you changed the words of a lyric poem—like that Sappho fragment earlier—it would become another poem altogether. If you changed the words here, the content would survive; narrative doesn’t rely quite so heavily on language itself for meaning. In this case, it’s already survived translation to reach us. And more could be added to it, taken away, spun off. 

This is the place I always end up at: The poem comes to life where lyric and narrative meet—where time and language cross over—and a possibility emerges of a poem that’s neither lyric nor narrative, but contains elements of both. Which has a body that moves through time and space, even as language tugs it skyward.

 

Will Harris is the author of the poetry collection RENDANG (Wesleyan University Press, 2020), which was selected as a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. He has worked in schools and led workshops at the Southbank Centre and currently teaches for the Poetry School. A contributing editor at the Rialto, he lives in London. 

Thumbnail: Charlotte Noelle

Craft Capsule: Craft Is Not Objective

by

Joy Priest

7.13.20

This is no. 65 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

In order to discuss ways to practice craft—the sustained attention that distinguishes poets from those who occasionally write poems or carpenters from those who once made a table of compromised integrity—we must first establish that craft is not an objective activity. Craft is not simply technical. If we take our craft seriously, or even if we want to play, we must realize that what we bring to craft is the world that crafted us. The way we work, our technique, holds all of our subconscious anxieties and desires. 

Toni Morrison talked about the U.S. literary imagination as one that has been wholly constructed from an uninterrogated unease. That is, a subconscious response to the presence of Blackness, and all of the resulting politesse, avoidance, shorthand, and metaphorical language—purity and innocence (read: light), and sinfulness and evil (read: dark)—that maintaining such an anxiety requires.

In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Morrison writes,

For some time now, I have been thinking about the validity or vulnerability of a certain set of assumptions conventionally accepted among literary historians or critics and circulated as “knowledge.” This knowledge holds that traditional, canonical American literature is free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the four-hundred-year old presence of, first, Africans and then African Americans in the United States. It assumes that this presence—which shaped the body politic, the Constitution, and the entire history of the culture—has had no significant place or consequence in the origin and development of that culture’s literature…. Just as the formation of the nation necessitated coded language and purposeful restriction to deal with the racial disingenuousness and moral frailty at its heart, so too did the literature, whose founding characteristics extend into the twentieth century, reproduce the necessity for codes and restriction. 

This “knowledge” has been internalized, to some degree, by all Americans, but some of us are subjects of it, and some of us are subjugated by it. Still, Morrison is interested in how this phenomenon occurs in the U.S. literary imagination not because it is a problem of Black people—as is often assumed when a Black writer writes about race—but because she wants to understand “the impact of racism on those who perpetuate it,” to “see what racial ideology does to the mind, imagination, and behavior of masters,” and to “observe how their lavish exploration of literature manages not to see meaning in the thunderous, theatrical presence of black surrogacy”—that which is released, which seeps out uninterrogated, undetected, that subconscious obsession. 

*

To practice craft, let us go back to the child. To that time before an awareness of formal craft: the beginner’s mind. To that fleeting moment before we fully absorbed the tropes of the U.S. literary imagination. Is this possible? Was it ever? Did we retain any of what we worked so hard to outgrow? 

As a subjugated child, what drove my craft—my record of little noticings and the subsequent piecing of them together, like the box puzzles I worked on with my grandfather—was a desire to know the truth about myself in a household where the adults secreted (secret-ed and secreted) my Blackness; hid it and released it; quieted it and let it seep; vigilantly avoided it and therefore obsessed over it. I knew that I was keeping a secret for my white grandfather, even if I didn’t know why. I noticed the releasing and seeping, even when he didn’t. After all, I was a child. 

After all, I was a Black child. The world outside my grandfather’s house wouldn’t let me avoid this truth.  

*

What shapes your craft? Your technical discipline? What shapes what you notice and therefore what you attend to? What do you refuse to notice and therefore deny? 

What do you see about yourself? Is there an active, critical interrogation of the self? Is there self-discipline (which is distinct from being policed or policing the self)? Self-discipline is an internal cultivation or a spiritual exercise, while being policed or self-policing is an external social force placed upon us to protect the material interests of the ruling elite. This must be a spiritual practice, this craft thing. Because, otherwise, this new knowledge-construction, this record-making, will reproduce the official knowledge and narratives of the status quo, inherent in which is that uninterrogated unease, that subconscious, but seeping, racism. 

When you go back to the child, when you achieve the beginner’s mind as an adult, you aren’t an authentic beginner anymore. Once you know craft, no matter how much you unlearn it, you hold that knowledge, alongside your newly remembered childhood attentiveness. Place this unlearning next to a self-discipline instead of a canonical knowledge or academic discipline. 

If you are white, notice yourself:

When you are sitting there working on an image, a metaphor, a simile, a symbol, an allusion; when you are considering personification, the narrative, the elliptical, the word choice, the music and your approach to music; when you are working in an elevated, established, and legitimized system of prosody—

What are you avoiding? What are you leaving out? What is uninterrogated? What trope is activated in that allusion, that figuration? What is behind your shorthand, your word choice, your line break? What is behind the way you employ color? The language of color? Who do you sacrifice for your music?

Are you exhausted? Good. The child isn’t. Don’t be the “knowledge”-holding adult. Be the noticing child. 

*

What did Ciara, Hannah, Markis, Abigail, Devonte, and Jeremiah notice before Jennifer and Sarah Hart drove them over that cliff in 2018? What did they have to notice as they tried to survive? What did the adults, who could have protected them, refuse to notice?

What do the children at the border notice from inside the cages, where they remain, still, today? Our avoidance, our passive refusal to notice them, keeps them there. 

 

Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower, which won the 2019 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press in September. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in numerous publications, including BOAAT, Connotation Press, Four Way Review, espnW, Gulf Coast, Mississippi Review, and Poetry Northwest, and have been anthologized in The Louisville Anthology (Belt Publishing, September 2020), A Measure of Belonging: Writers of Color on the New American South (Hub City Press, October 2020) and Best New Poets 2014, 2016, and 2019. A doctoral student in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston, Priest has also been a journalist, a theater attendant, a waitress, and a fast food worker. She has facilitated writing workshops and arbitration programs with adult and juvenile incarcerated women, and has taught composition, rhetoric, comedy, and African American arts and culture at the university level.

Thumbnail: New York Public Library

Craft Capsule: Craft Is Not Objective

by

Joy Priest

7.13.20

This is no. 65 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

In order to discuss ways to practice craft—the sustained attention that distinguishes poets from those who occasionally write poems or carpenters from those who once made a table of compromised integrity—we must first establish that craft is not an objective activity. Craft is not simply technical. If we take our craft seriously, or even if we want to play, we must realize that what we bring to craft is the world that crafted us. The way we work, our technique, holds all of our subconscious anxieties and desires. 

Toni Morrison talked about the U.S. literary imagination as one that has been wholly constructed from an uninterrogated unease. That is, a subconscious response to the presence of Blackness, and all of the resulting politesse, avoidance, shorthand, and metaphorical language—purity and innocence (read: light), and sinfulness and evil (read: dark)—that maintaining such an anxiety requires.

In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Morrison writes,

For some time now, I have been thinking about the validity or vulnerability of a certain set of assumptions conventionally accepted among literary historians or critics and circulated as “knowledge.” This knowledge holds that traditional, canonical American literature is free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the four-hundred-year old presence of, first, Africans and then African Americans in the United States. It assumes that this presence—which shaped the body politic, the Constitution, and the entire history of the culture—has had no significant place or consequence in the origin and development of that culture’s literature…. Just as the formation of the nation necessitated coded language and purposeful restriction to deal with the racial disingenuousness and moral frailty at its heart, so too did the literature, whose founding characteristics extend into the twentieth century, reproduce the necessity for codes and restriction. 

This “knowledge” has been internalized, to some degree, by all Americans, but some of us are subjects of it, and some of us are subjugated by it. Still, Morrison is interested in how this phenomenon occurs in the U.S. literary imagination not because it is a problem of Black people—as is often assumed when a Black writer writes about race—but because she wants to understand “the impact of racism on those who perpetuate it,” to “see what racial ideology does to the mind, imagination, and behavior of masters,” and to “observe how their lavish exploration of literature manages not to see meaning in the thunderous, theatrical presence of black surrogacy”—that which is released, which seeps out uninterrogated, undetected, that subconscious obsession. 

*

To practice craft, let us go back to the child. To that time before an awareness of formal craft: the beginner’s mind. To that fleeting moment before we fully absorbed the tropes of the U.S. literary imagination. Is this possible? Was it ever? Did we retain any of what we worked so hard to outgrow? 

As a subjugated child, what drove my craft—my record of little noticings and the subsequent piecing of them together, like the box puzzles I worked on with my grandfather—was a desire to know the truth about myself in a household where the adults secreted (secret-ed and secreted) my Blackness; hid it and released it; quieted it and let it seep; vigilantly avoided it and therefore obsessed over it. I knew that I was keeping a secret for my white grandfather, even if I didn’t know why. I noticed the releasing and seeping, even when he didn’t. After all, I was a child. 

After all, I was a Black child. The world outside my grandfather’s house wouldn’t let me avoid this truth.  

*

What shapes your craft? Your technical discipline? What shapes what you notice and therefore what you attend to? What do you refuse to notice and therefore deny? 

What do you see about yourself? Is there an active, critical interrogation of the self? Is there self-discipline (which is distinct from being policed or policing the self)? Self-discipline is an internal cultivation or a spiritual exercise, while being policed or self-policing is an external social force placed upon us to protect the material interests of the ruling elite. This must be a spiritual practice, this craft thing. Because, otherwise, this new knowledge-construction, this record-making, will reproduce the official knowledge and narratives of the status quo, inherent in which is that uninterrogated unease, that subconscious, but seeping, racism. 

When you go back to the child, when you achieve the beginner’s mind as an adult, you aren’t an authentic beginner anymore. Once you know craft, no matter how much you unlearn it, you hold that knowledge, alongside your newly remembered childhood attentiveness. Place this unlearning next to a self-discipline instead of a canonical knowledge or academic discipline. 

If you are white, notice yourself:

When you are sitting there working on an image, a metaphor, a simile, a symbol, an allusion; when you are considering personification, the narrative, the elliptical, the word choice, the music and your approach to music; when you are working in an elevated, established, and legitimized system of prosody—

What are you avoiding? What are you leaving out? What is uninterrogated? What trope is activated in that allusion, that figuration? What is behind your shorthand, your word choice, your line break? What is behind the way you employ color? The language of color? Who do you sacrifice for your music?

Are you exhausted? Good. The child isn’t. Don’t be the “knowledge”-holding adult. Be the noticing child. 

*

What did Ciara, Hannah, Markis, Abigail, Devonte, and Jeremiah notice before Jennifer and Sarah Hart drove them over that cliff in 2018? What did they have to notice as they tried to survive? What did the adults, who could have protected them, refuse to notice?

What do the children at the border notice from inside the cages, where they remain, still, today? Our avoidance, our passive refusal to notice them, keeps them there. 

 

Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower, which won the 2019 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press in September. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in numerous publications, including BOAAT, Connotation Press, Four Way Review, espnW, Gulf Coast, Mississippi Review, and Poetry Northwest, and have been anthologized in The Louisville Anthology (Belt Publishing, September 2020), A Measure of Belonging: Writers of Color on the New American South (Hub City Press, October 2020) and Best New Poets 2014, 2016, and 2019. A doctoral student in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston, Priest has also been a journalist, a theater attendant, a waitress, and a fast food worker. She has facilitated writing workshops and arbitration programs with adult and juvenile incarcerated women, and has taught composition, rhetoric, comedy, and African American arts and culture at the university level.

Thumbnail: New York Public Library

Craft Capsule: Lyric vs. Narrative

by

Will Harris

8.24.20

This is no. 69 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

A few years ago I showed a series of new poems to some friends and a deflating word kept coming up: narrative. The poems involved a speaker moving through London, having random encounters. They were baggy poems that contained events, but I didn’t think of them as narrative. I had been trying to avoid some of the pitfalls of the lyric; now I worried I’d unintentionally slipped into another mode, one that was artificial and linear, associated with dead white men known—like brands of cake—by their surnames: Wordsworth, Browning, (Mr.) Kipling. 

I started thinking about the differences between lyric and narrative. Maybe the biggest one is time. According to Aristotle, narrative is the “imitation of an action,” and that requires time in which to happen. A lyric, on the other hand, if it was filmed, might flit across the screen in a second or two. Take fragment 105A by Sappho—one of the first lyric poets—translated here by Anne Carson: 

as the sweetapple reddens on a high branch 
   high on the highest branch and the applepickers forgot—
no, not forgot: were unable to reach

Summary: Person reaches for apple. End of shot. 

But in that moment, the real action has nothing to do with apples. It’s internal: a swerving thought-line, folding back in on itself. Those apples—too high to pick, and thus objects of longing—represent something the speaker either forgets about (maybe wants to forget about) or chooses to remember as out of reach.

Though Sappho didn’t conceive of this as a whole poem, it feels of a piece with the contemporary lyric. “Disembodied, the poem provokes longing,” writes poet and scholar Jennifer Moxley. “The song it sings is either a lament of exile from the body or a celebration of freedom from its material prison, depending on the direction of the winds.” Or as the literary critic Helen Vendler puts it: In lyric, voice is “made abstract,” emancipated from time and space; it’s “the gesture of immortality and freedom.” By contrast, “the novel is the gesture of the historical and the spatial.” 

This transcendental view of the lyric has made some poets want to throw all conventional distinctions out the window. At a talk for the Kootenay School of Writing in 1990, Lisa Robertson identifies Bruce Andrews as one such poet who railed against, as he put it, “the intrinsic evils of narrative, lyric, identity among other traditional constructions.” Behind this rage at “traditional constructions”—tied to systems of structural oppression like capitalism—is the understandable desire to renew language by purging it. 

Though what else would that kind of purged language erase? Identity is rarely a choice; it chooses you. But writing through identity, whether I like it or not, has been my way to engage with the social and political conditions in which I exist—to reclaim, in small part, the choice that racialization takes away. This might explain why I lean on narrative sometimes, and why I’ve tried to set it—unintentionally or otherwise—against the lyric. Because my experience is “historical and spatial,” as much as it gestures towards “freedom.”

Questions still nag, though: Why bother? Why say “lyric” or “narrative”? Why not invent new forms, new genres, new terms? Why not just write

I can only respond—I’m talking to myself here—that the poles of lyric and narrative have helped me navigate the blank night of the page. They’ve helped me to think, in particular, about how time functions: With narrative, a focus on action centers time; with lyric, the suspension of time centers language. 

And sometimes I go back to The Virago Book of Fairy Tales to remember how varied and strange “narrative” can be—to remind myself that it doesn’t have to limit the work of poets at all. This is the first paragraph of a Greenlandic tale:

There was woman who was old, blind and likewise unable to walk. Once she asked her daughter for a drink of water. The daughter was so bored with her old mother that she gave her a bowl of her own piss. The old woman drank it all up, then said: “You’re a nice one, daughter. Tell me—which would you prefer as a lover, a louse or a sea scorpion?”

This could be reconstituted as a lyric. It demands—and rewards—a careful consideration of word choice and rhythm: the use of “likewise” in the first sentence; that phrase “nice one”; the ambiance of violent boredom. 

But it’s not a lyric. If you changed the words of a lyric poem—like that Sappho fragment earlier—it would become another poem altogether. If you changed the words here, the content would survive; narrative doesn’t rely quite so heavily on language itself for meaning. In this case, it’s already survived translation to reach us. And more could be added to it, taken away, spun off. 

This is the place I always end up at: The poem comes to life where lyric and narrative meet—where time and language cross over—and a possibility emerges of a poem that’s neither lyric nor narrative, but contains elements of both. Which has a body that moves through time and space, even as language tugs it skyward.

 

Will Harris is the author of the poetry collection RENDANG (Wesleyan University Press, 2020), which was selected as a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. He has worked in schools and led workshops at the Southbank Centre and currently teaches for the Poetry School. A contributing editor at the Rialto, he lives in London. 

Thumbnail: Charlotte Noelle

Craft Capsule: Craft Is Not Objective

by

Joy Priest

7.13.20

This is no. 65 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

In order to discuss ways to practice craft—the sustained attention that distinguishes poets from those who occasionally write poems or carpenters from those who once made a table of compromised integrity—we must first establish that craft is not an objective activity. Craft is not simply technical. If we take our craft seriously, or even if we want to play, we must realize that what we bring to craft is the world that crafted us. The way we work, our technique, holds all of our subconscious anxieties and desires. 

Toni Morrison talked about the U.S. literary imagination as one that has been wholly constructed from an uninterrogated unease. That is, a subconscious response to the presence of Blackness, and all of the resulting politesse, avoidance, shorthand, and metaphorical language—purity and innocence (read: light), and sinfulness and evil (read: dark)—that maintaining such an anxiety requires.

In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Morrison writes,

For some time now, I have been thinking about the validity or vulnerability of a certain set of assumptions conventionally accepted among literary historians or critics and circulated as “knowledge.” This knowledge holds that traditional, canonical American literature is free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the four-hundred-year old presence of, first, Africans and then African Americans in the United States. It assumes that this presence—which shaped the body politic, the Constitution, and the entire history of the culture—has had no significant place or consequence in the origin and development of that culture’s literature…. Just as the formation of the nation necessitated coded language and purposeful restriction to deal with the racial disingenuousness and moral frailty at its heart, so too did the literature, whose founding characteristics extend into the twentieth century, reproduce the necessity for codes and restriction. 

This “knowledge” has been internalized, to some degree, by all Americans, but some of us are subjects of it, and some of us are subjugated by it. Still, Morrison is interested in how this phenomenon occurs in the U.S. literary imagination not because it is a problem of Black people—as is often assumed when a Black writer writes about race—but because she wants to understand “the impact of racism on those who perpetuate it,” to “see what racial ideology does to the mind, imagination, and behavior of masters,” and to “observe how their lavish exploration of literature manages not to see meaning in the thunderous, theatrical presence of black surrogacy”—that which is released, which seeps out uninterrogated, undetected, that subconscious obsession. 

*

To practice craft, let us go back to the child. To that time before an awareness of formal craft: the beginner’s mind. To that fleeting moment before we fully absorbed the tropes of the U.S. literary imagination. Is this possible? Was it ever? Did we retain any of what we worked so hard to outgrow? 

As a subjugated child, what drove my craft—my record of little noticings and the subsequent piecing of them together, like the box puzzles I worked on with my grandfather—was a desire to know the truth about myself in a household where the adults secreted (secret-ed and secreted) my Blackness; hid it and released it; quieted it and let it seep; vigilantly avoided it and therefore obsessed over it. I knew that I was keeping a secret for my white grandfather, even if I didn’t know why. I noticed the releasing and seeping, even when he didn’t. After all, I was a child. 

After all, I was a Black child. The world outside my grandfather’s house wouldn’t let me avoid this truth.  

*

What shapes your craft? Your technical discipline? What shapes what you notice and therefore what you attend to? What do you refuse to notice and therefore deny? 

What do you see about yourself? Is there an active, critical interrogation of the self? Is there self-discipline (which is distinct from being policed or policing the self)? Self-discipline is an internal cultivation or a spiritual exercise, while being policed or self-policing is an external social force placed upon us to protect the material interests of the ruling elite. This must be a spiritual practice, this craft thing. Because, otherwise, this new knowledge-construction, this record-making, will reproduce the official knowledge and narratives of the status quo, inherent in which is that uninterrogated unease, that subconscious, but seeping, racism. 

When you go back to the child, when you achieve the beginner’s mind as an adult, you aren’t an authentic beginner anymore. Once you know craft, no matter how much you unlearn it, you hold that knowledge, alongside your newly remembered childhood attentiveness. Place this unlearning next to a self-discipline instead of a canonical knowledge or academic discipline. 

If you are white, notice yourself:

When you are sitting there working on an image, a metaphor, a simile, a symbol, an allusion; when you are considering personification, the narrative, the elliptical, the word choice, the music and your approach to music; when you are working in an elevated, established, and legitimized system of prosody—

What are you avoiding? What are you leaving out? What is uninterrogated? What trope is activated in that allusion, that figuration? What is behind your shorthand, your word choice, your line break? What is behind the way you employ color? The language of color? Who do you sacrifice for your music?

Are you exhausted? Good. The child isn’t. Don’t be the “knowledge”-holding adult. Be the noticing child. 

*

What did Ciara, Hannah, Markis, Abigail, Devonte, and Jeremiah notice before Jennifer and Sarah Hart drove them over that cliff in 2018? What did they have to notice as they tried to survive? What did the adults, who could have protected them, refuse to notice?

What do the children at the border notice from inside the cages, where they remain, still, today? Our avoidance, our passive refusal to notice them, keeps them there. 

 

Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower, which won the 2019 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press in September. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in numerous publications, including BOAAT, Connotation Press, Four Way Review, espnW, Gulf Coast, Mississippi Review, and Poetry Northwest, and have been anthologized in The Louisville Anthology (Belt Publishing, September 2020), A Measure of Belonging: Writers of Color on the New American South (Hub City Press, October 2020) and Best New Poets 2014, 2016, and 2019. A doctoral student in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston, Priest has also been a journalist, a theater attendant, a waitress, and a fast food worker. She has facilitated writing workshops and arbitration programs with adult and juvenile incarcerated women, and has taught composition, rhetoric, comedy, and African American arts and culture at the university level.

Thumbnail: New York Public Library

Craft Capsule: The Art of Literary Criticism

by

Jenny Bhatt

9.28.20

This is no. 74 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

A personal manifesto for literary criticism:

1. On close reading: Before reviewing, read a book at least three times for the following: text, subtext, and what’s left off the page. Often the latter two will reveal more about the writer’s true intent.

2. On references and associations: A good review is, first and foremost, about expanding the literary conversation between the text, the author, other readers, and ourselves—determining what the text means to us as individuals and as societies. Enrich your frames of reference by reading widely, purposefully, and mindfully. And then look for the literary associations, assemblages, affinities, and networks of relevant ideas, texts, people, and objects. Remember W. H. Auden’s sixth must-have for literary criticism: “Throw light upon the relation of art to life, to science, economics, ethics, religion, etc.”

3. On fairness: Ensure fairness and balance for the author and for readers (of both the review and the work itself). It is not enough to say what’s good or bad about a book. Make the case with evidence as to why. It is also not enough to write an information-filled essay that’s missing a “so what?” Every major point in the review should answer the twofold question: Why is this good or bad, and why does it matter?

4. On argument: Never speculate. Always contextualize. The review thesis must have plausible counterarguments, and the essay must include and respond to those counterarguments. That said, don’t indulge in what Virginia Woolf called the “desiccation of the living tissues of literature into a network of little bones” as some critics do with their “able and industrious pens.”

5. On comparison: Keep in mind Elizabeth Hardwick’s indictment: “How often we read a beginner’s review that compares a thin thing to a fat one. ‘John Smith, like Tolstoy, is very interested in the way men interact under the conditions of battle.’ Well, no.” Also, resist your cognitive biases—recency, confirmation, in-group, distinction, and attentional—in such comparative analysis.

6. On building up versus tearing down: A work of literature can do so much more than “demystify, destabilize, denaturalize, deconstruct, debunk, decipher,” as Rita Felski reminds us in The Limits of Critique (University of Chicago Press, 2015). It can, more significantly, also “recontextualize, reconfigure, remake, recharge perceptions.” Instead of simply focusing on excavating a text for causes, conditions, and motives, follow Felski’s advice to reflect on the text’s revelations and possibilities. Because, as Felski argues, “Works of art do not only subvert, but also convert; they do not only inform but also transform—a transformation that is not just a matter of intellectual readjustment but one of affective realignment as well (a shift of mood, a sharpened sensation, an unexpected surge of affinity or disorientation).”

7. On readership: Understand the target audience of a book—never mind who its writer or translator or publisher might have intended—and whether it meets their needs. Engage the reader as a smart, active participant in the conversation rather than a passive receiver of information. Felski’s four modes of textual engagement—recognition, enchantment, knowledge, and shock—also apply to how we engage with a review. Recognition is about the text as a source of self-interpretation and self-understanding. Enchantment is that pleasurable self-forgetting while reading. Knowledge refers to what literature discloses about the world beyond oneself. Shock speaks to the troubling and taboo aspects of human existence.

8. On language: Be specific, precise, and clear. Craft each sentence to make the review aesthetically pleasing. But avoid overwrought sentences that call more attention to themselves (or to you) than to the points they are making.

9. On the why: The payoff of writing criticism is deepening our reading pleasure and making it time well-spent. It helps us create a sense of understanding amid the constant activity of our surroundings. As Virginia Woolf wrote: “Poems and novels, histories and memoirs, dictionaries and blue-books; books written in all languages by men and women of all tempers, races, and ages jostle each other on the shelf. And outside the donkey brays, the women gossip at the pump, the colts gallop across the fields. Where are we to begin? How are we to bring order into this multitudinous chaos and so get the deepest and widest pleasure from what we read?”

10. On the so what: Do all of the above because a book is a sociocultural, historical, and political artifact. Like all human creations, it is a product of our experiences and reflects our desires, conflicts, and potential. Critiquing literature well involves learning about some crucial aspects of ourselves as individuals and as a species. It is how we elevate and preserve our literary traditions.

 

Jenny Bhatt is a writer, translator, and literary critic. She is the host of the Desi Books podcast and the author of the short story collection Each of Us Killers (7.13 Books, 2020). Her literary translation of Gujarati writer Dhumketu’s best short fiction is forthcoming from HarperCollins India in late 2020. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Literary Hub, LongreadsPoets & Writers Magazine, the Millions, Electric Literature, the Rumpus, and Kenyon Review. Having lived and worked in India, England, Germany, Scotland, and various parts of the United States, she now lives in a suburb of Dallas.

Thumbnail: Markus Winkler

Craft Capsule: Lyric vs. Narrative

by

Will Harris

8.24.20

This is no. 69 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

A few years ago I showed a series of new poems to some friends and a deflating word kept coming up: narrative. The poems involved a speaker moving through London, having random encounters. They were baggy poems that contained events, but I didn’t think of them as narrative. I had been trying to avoid some of the pitfalls of the lyric; now I worried I’d unintentionally slipped into another mode, one that was artificial and linear, associated with dead white men known—like brands of cake—by their surnames: Wordsworth, Browning, (Mr.) Kipling. 

I started thinking about the differences between lyric and narrative. Maybe the biggest one is time. According to Aristotle, narrative is the “imitation of an action,” and that requires time in which to happen. A lyric, on the other hand, if it was filmed, might flit across the screen in a second or two. Take fragment 105A by Sappho—one of the first lyric poets—translated here by Anne Carson: 

as the sweetapple reddens on a high branch 
   high on the highest branch and the applepickers forgot—
no, not forgot: were unable to reach

Summary: Person reaches for apple. End of shot. 

But in that moment, the real action has nothing to do with apples. It’s internal: a swerving thought-line, folding back in on itself. Those apples—too high to pick, and thus objects of longing—represent something the speaker either forgets about (maybe wants to forget about) or chooses to remember as out of reach.

Though Sappho didn’t conceive of this as a whole poem, it feels of a piece with the contemporary lyric. “Disembodied, the poem provokes longing,” writes poet and scholar Jennifer Moxley. “The song it sings is either a lament of exile from the body or a celebration of freedom from its material prison, depending on the direction of the winds.” Or as the literary critic Helen Vendler puts it: In lyric, voice is “made abstract,” emancipated from time and space; it’s “the gesture of immortality and freedom.” By contrast, “the novel is the gesture of the historical and the spatial.” 

This transcendental view of the lyric has made some poets want to throw all conventional distinctions out the window. At a talk for the Kootenay School of Writing in 1990, Lisa Robertson identifies Bruce Andrews as one such poet who railed against, as he put it, “the intrinsic evils of narrative, lyric, identity among other traditional constructions.” Behind this rage at “traditional constructions”—tied to systems of structural oppression like capitalism—is the understandable desire to renew language by purging it. 

Though what else would that kind of purged language erase? Identity is rarely a choice; it chooses you. But writing through identity, whether I like it or not, has been my way to engage with the social and political conditions in which I exist—to reclaim, in small part, the choice that racialization takes away. This might explain why I lean on narrative sometimes, and why I’ve tried to set it—unintentionally or otherwise—against the lyric. Because my experience is “historical and spatial,” as much as it gestures towards “freedom.”

Questions still nag, though: Why bother? Why say “lyric” or “narrative”? Why not invent new forms, new genres, new terms? Why not just write

I can only respond—I’m talking to myself here—that the poles of lyric and narrative have helped me navigate the blank night of the page. They’ve helped me to think, in particular, about how time functions: With narrative, a focus on action centers time; with lyric, the suspension of time centers language. 

And sometimes I go back to The Virago Book of Fairy Tales to remember how varied and strange “narrative” can be—to remind myself that it doesn’t have to limit the work of poets at all. This is the first paragraph of a Greenlandic tale:

There was woman who was old, blind and likewise unable to walk. Once she asked her daughter for a drink of water. The daughter was so bored with her old mother that she gave her a bowl of her own piss. The old woman drank it all up, then said: “You’re a nice one, daughter. Tell me—which would you prefer as a lover, a louse or a sea scorpion?”

This could be reconstituted as a lyric. It demands—and rewards—a careful consideration of word choice and rhythm: the use of “likewise” in the first sentence; that phrase “nice one”; the ambiance of violent boredom. 

But it’s not a lyric. If you changed the words of a lyric poem—like that Sappho fragment earlier—it would become another poem altogether. If you changed the words here, the content would survive; narrative doesn’t rely quite so heavily on language itself for meaning. In this case, it’s already survived translation to reach us. And more could be added to it, taken away, spun off. 

This is the place I always end up at: The poem comes to life where lyric and narrative meet—where time and language cross over—and a possibility emerges of a poem that’s neither lyric nor narrative, but contains elements of both. Which has a body that moves through time and space, even as language tugs it skyward.

 

Will Harris is the author of the poetry collection RENDANG (Wesleyan University Press, 2020), which was selected as a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. He has worked in schools and led workshops at the Southbank Centre and currently teaches for the Poetry School. A contributing editor at the Rialto, he lives in London. 

Thumbnail: Charlotte Noelle

Craft Capsule: On Nightmares

by

Chen Chen

11.9.20

This is no. 78 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

1.
A nightmare: realizing I need to restructure this essay, again, and it’s due tomorrow. 

A nightmare: COVID-19 cases on the rise again all across the country. 

A nightmare: how often essayists, especially poets-turned-essayists, like to remind everyone that essay comes from the French verb essayer, meaning to try, to attempt, to test. 

Not a nightmare: I love the try, the attempt. 

A nightmare: the test. The test freaks me out. 

A nightmare: how long it’s taken in the United States for COVID tests to become more accessible. 

Why do I prefer the nightmare of being dreadfully stuck, working on a poem, over the nightmare of being dreadfully stuck, working on an essay? 

A collective, ongoing nightmare: the pandemic. 

2.
Working on my essays for this series has been both a welcome distraction and (as I knew would happen) a dive into the deep end of my anxieties. The process feels nightmarish because my preferred method of exploring and articulating craft ideas is writing poems (and it seems I’ve gotten to the point in my poetry writing where I can befriend the dread, the stuck-ness). Or through conversation: engaging with students and connecting with friends, all of which happens these days over the shared nightmare known as Zoom. 

Also, I hate paragraphs. The blocky-ness of paragraphs makes me anxious, like I’m trapped in a box and, in the essay form, can only move from one box to another. I feel I have to make sense. Too much sense. I like paragraphs in prose poems, because I’m freer to do—I know better how to do—weird things with sentences. Or not write sentences at all. 

I think of Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey (Wave Books, 2012), a collection of essays based on lectures she was required to give as a teacher—at one point, Ruefle describes lectures as “bad dreams.” Ruefle has commented frequently on the fact that this one volume on poetry has far outsold her books of poetry; that people would rather read about poetry, than read a poem. That for many, poetry remains a nightmare. 

Poetry, to me, is the best dreaming. 

A form of breaking out of the Zoom room or the chain of paragraphs, into an expanse of fresh blooms,1 a field bursting with sunflowers. 

Still I’m drawn to essays for how they document a thought process, an attempt to think clearly and deeply. And I love good essays on poetry. I love Madness, Rack, and Honey. I’d like to write craft essays like Ruefle’s. I’m not sure that is possible, given our very different brains. But maybe my brain can do something else and figure out ways to enjoy writing an essay, or at least dislike it less. 

Could it be that my fear of the essay draws me to it? I’m afraid I won’t write as well in this genre, but the challenge entices. I’m nervous to delve into new subjects and discover scary truths, but surprise is also one of the key reasons I write anything. After all, in poetry it’s usually the door I don’t want to open that leads me to the room I most need to investigate.2

3.
I’ve long wanted to examine nightmares in my poetry. I’m intrigued by how fear can act as a signpost on the path to truth; how terror can mean getting closer to a complicated reality. I’ve written poems based on dreams—wild dreams that contain some frightening revelation at their core—but I have yet to write a poem based on a straight-up nightmare. Specifically, I’ve been itching to write a poem about my two recurring nightmares involving high school French teachers. 

One nightmare stars my sophomore year instructor, my favorite one, as a highly trained assassin. Her weapon of choice: one of my mother’s beloved Chinese cleavers. Somehow she manages very clean kills. In the nightmare I admire her and am also terrified. Sometimes I am the target, for getting a B on a quiz, say, and before the final blow she reminds me, “Cravate is a feminine noun, despite it referring to men’s neckties! It’s LA cravate, UNE cravate, SA cravate!” If I experience this again, I hope I remember to respond, “But anyone can wear a necktie!” Other times the nightmare gets loftier and the target is a corrupt politician, usually French. One time I am the corrupt French politician. 

I haven’t had this nightmare in a while, and I miss it—perhaps because 2020 is a global waking nightmare. What sleeping nightmare of mine could compare with Trump, COVID, and the police? I hesitate to type it out, but I miss this assassin nightmare because I wish there were worse consequences for the Trump administration. I wish there were consequences at all. As someone invested in abolition, I can’t advocate for prison. I have to imagine and help build other types of justice and accountability, ones that don’t rely on punishment and vengeance. At the same time, the part of me that misses the assassin nightmare would love for something nightmarish to visit these leaders who’ve abandoned all duty to the people. 

Another part of me misses this nightmare because seeing my mother’s cleaver in it is like seeing a part of her. I also associate high school language study with her because she teaches Mandarin at that level. I haven’t seen my mother since this pandemic was declared a pandemic. She’s immunocompromised and has been taking every precaution. Every call with her begins with her asking, “Have you been staying at home?” and ends with her command, “Keep staying at home.” My father, who never texts, texted me last week to say, “Avoid travel to any hot spots,” while travel ads pop up on my TV. Back in March my partner’s father was quarantined in a hospital in upstate New York after experiencing COVID-like symptoms. It was four days, but it felt like a year before the test results came back: negative. 

I check the news and check the news. I check social media, texts. I pick up the phone. The friends of friends with the virus. The friends with the virus. 

4.
Perhaps my fear of writing essays has to do with how my brain always associates the act with an academic assignment, a requirement, a grammar test that I might fail. It doesn’t help that so far most of the essays I write have in fact been assigned to me. They do help pay the bills. I do love a prompt. But is it, on some level, masochism? Is all my writing, in some way, a testing to which I subject myself, over and over? Am I perpetually trying to win a French teacher’s approval? 

The other French teacher nightmare goes like this: On an otherwise blissfully uneventful day, I receive a letter from my high school. I know something is amiss before even opening it. For a long time I just stare at it; it stares back from my coffee table. Then I open it. And it says because I never finished my senior year French project, I never actually passed high school. Therefore I have to return to school, where this time I will also reside. The second I step back into that memory-drenched building, I am met by my senior year French instructor. She looks me over then says in the most disappointed yet unsurprised way, “Bonjour.” 

What terrifies me in this dream is not the disruption of everyday life (by a cleaver-wielding assassin like in my other nightmare), but the resurrection of days I’ve long put behind me, a time and a self I’d rather not reinhabit. Not that high school was all stuffy, all busy work. No, I had many brilliant teachers and classmates, many life-changing experiences. This nightmare is the nightmare that my life didn’t really change. What I fear is going back to school but never learning, never growing. 

What I love is the school of poetry, which invites me to play anew and wonder differently and try strange things—to test in the sense of to experiment. To test in the sense of encountering nerve-wracking challenges, but trusting that the fear is a sign of one’s hunger for and effort toward real growth. Maybe one day I will experience essay writing more like that: an experiment in good fear. 

5.
A poem I find instructive for writing about nightmares is “The Dream”3 by Aracelis Girmay, one of my former professors, whose work continues to nourish as well as push me. Indeed, Girmay’s writing always reminds me how poems themselves can be the best poetry teachers. I also return to this one because it focuses on a mother, the figure beside or behind the French teacher of my first nightmare. Here is the startling start of “The Dream”: 

Last night, all night
the dream, the dead
mother, my small sister,
tiny, her mouth
over my shoulder
(screaming) like a knapsack
when she heard the news,
& my brother playing
the stereo. I howled
like the coyotes; myself.

The poem then shifts from the howl to a sunlit, tranquil scene, the way dreams can, suddenly and completely. “The Nightmare” ultimately wouldn’t be the most fitting title for this poem. The word dream can encompass good ones and bad. That said, nightmare can contain the abject as well as the gorgeous (my favorite horror movies have stellar aesthetics). My French teacher nightmares feature both terror and tenderness—fear of disappointing the mother/teacher figure, but also admiration for her and a longing for a time when I could, on a regular basis, talk with her in person. Rereading Girmay’s poem I realize that at the heart of the poem I want to write are questions like: How do fear and affection sit side by side? Why do I connect French teachers and mothers in this manner? 

This is what I mean by poems being the best poetry teachers: They offer an array of techniques to emulate, yes, but more fundamentally and expansively, they conjure up uncomfortable questions and encourage bewildering (sometimes frightening) leaps in imagination.

6.
One week, feeling particularly defeated by this essay, I write a draft of my poem “The Nightmare.” It reads ridiculous, then not, which seems like how a lot of my writing goes. I’d like one day to write a poem that shifts from not one bit ridiculous to utterly. Still, this poem is some new occurrence. Every truly new poem4 is its own strange school. 

I revise and revise. The poem teaches me about how my recurring nightmares are linked to the world’s shared nightmare of COVID-19. How afraid I am, as a teacher myself now, to be back this fall; how fortunate I feel that my university has allowed me to teach online; how much I miss teaching in person; how angry I am that not every teacher “gets to” do this. 

I revise and revise the ending of this essay. I’m afraid of being so direct and so pared down in my diction. But I know from poetry that it’s often when I’m trying the least to be “poetic” that the most charged truths emerge. 

Truths like: I’m afraid my students will get sick. I’m afraid of losing a student, more than one student. I think I should be more afraid of getting very sick too. I miss my mother, who, as a high school Mandarin teacher, knows that school is more than a building, but misses her classroom. I’m relieved she has the option to teach online as well. I miss many of my high school teachers and hope they are safe and finding ways to rest. 

To dream, both literally and creatively. To speak back to the nightmares, both personal and collective.

 

ENDNOTES

1. A beautiful nightmare: how much poets adore the word bloom.
2. In life, I know better than to go exploring attics, basements, or other favorite hangout spots of vengeful ghosts and demons. 
3. From
Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions, 2011).
4. I mean new mainly in terms of process; new to the writer. The big hope is that the poem will then do something new for a reader.

 

Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017)which was longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry and won the Publishing Triangle Thom Gunn Award. His work has appeared in many publications, including Poetry and the 2015 and 2019 editions of The Best American Poetry. He has received a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Kundiman and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at Brandeis University as the Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence. 

Thumbnail: Chuttersnap

Craft Capsule: The Art of Literary Criticism

by

Jenny Bhatt

9.28.20

This is no. 74 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

A personal manifesto for literary criticism:

1. On close reading: Before reviewing, read a book at least three times for the following: text, subtext, and what’s left off the page. Often the latter two will reveal more about the writer’s true intent.

2. On references and associations: A good review is, first and foremost, about expanding the literary conversation between the text, the author, other readers, and ourselves—determining what the text means to us as individuals and as societies. Enrich your frames of reference by reading widely, purposefully, and mindfully. And then look for the literary associations, assemblages, affinities, and networks of relevant ideas, texts, people, and objects. Remember W. H. Auden’s sixth must-have for literary criticism: “Throw light upon the relation of art to life, to science, economics, ethics, religion, etc.”

3. On fairness: Ensure fairness and balance for the author and for readers (of both the review and the work itself). It is not enough to say what’s good or bad about a book. Make the case with evidence as to why. It is also not enough to write an information-filled essay that’s missing a “so what?” Every major point in the review should answer the twofold question: Why is this good or bad, and why does it matter?

4. On argument: Never speculate. Always contextualize. The review thesis must have plausible counterarguments, and the essay must include and respond to those counterarguments. That said, don’t indulge in what Virginia Woolf called the “desiccation of the living tissues of literature into a network of little bones” as some critics do with their “able and industrious pens.”

5. On comparison: Keep in mind Elizabeth Hardwick’s indictment: “How often we read a beginner’s review that compares a thin thing to a fat one. ‘John Smith, like Tolstoy, is very interested in the way men interact under the conditions of battle.’ Well, no.” Also, resist your cognitive biases—recency, confirmation, in-group, distinction, and attentional—in such comparative analysis.

6. On building up versus tearing down: A work of literature can do so much more than “demystify, destabilize, denaturalize, deconstruct, debunk, decipher,” as Rita Felski reminds us in The Limits of Critique (University of Chicago Press, 2015). It can, more significantly, also “recontextualize, reconfigure, remake, recharge perceptions.” Instead of simply focusing on excavating a text for causes, conditions, and motives, follow Felski’s advice to reflect on the text’s revelations and possibilities. Because, as Felski argues, “Works of art do not only subvert, but also convert; they do not only inform but also transform—a transformation that is not just a matter of intellectual readjustment but one of affective realignment as well (a shift of mood, a sharpened sensation, an unexpected surge of affinity or disorientation).”

7. On readership: Understand the target audience of a book—never mind who its writer or translator or publisher might have intended—and whether it meets their needs. Engage the reader as a smart, active participant in the conversation rather than a passive receiver of information. Felski’s four modes of textual engagement—recognition, enchantment, knowledge, and shock—also apply to how we engage with a review. Recognition is about the text as a source of self-interpretation and self-understanding. Enchantment is that pleasurable self-forgetting while reading. Knowledge refers to what literature discloses about the world beyond oneself. Shock speaks to the troubling and taboo aspects of human existence.

8. On language: Be specific, precise, and clear. Craft each sentence to make the review aesthetically pleasing. But avoid overwrought sentences that call more attention to themselves (or to you) than to the points they are making.

9. On the why: The payoff of writing criticism is deepening our reading pleasure and making it time well-spent. It helps us create a sense of understanding amid the constant activity of our surroundings. As Virginia Woolf wrote: “Poems and novels, histories and memoirs, dictionaries and blue-books; books written in all languages by men and women of all tempers, races, and ages jostle each other on the shelf. And outside the donkey brays, the women gossip at the pump, the colts gallop across the fields. Where are we to begin? How are we to bring order into this multitudinous chaos and so get the deepest and widest pleasure from what we read?”

10. On the so what: Do all of the above because a book is a sociocultural, historical, and political artifact. Like all human creations, it is a product of our experiences and reflects our desires, conflicts, and potential. Critiquing literature well involves learning about some crucial aspects of ourselves as individuals and as a species. It is how we elevate and preserve our literary traditions.

 

Jenny Bhatt is a writer, translator, and literary critic. She is the host of the Desi Books podcast and the author of the short story collection Each of Us Killers (7.13 Books, 2020). Her literary translation of Gujarati writer Dhumketu’s best short fiction is forthcoming from HarperCollins India in late 2020. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Literary Hub, LongreadsPoets & Writers Magazine, the Millions, Electric Literature, the Rumpus, and Kenyon Review. Having lived and worked in India, England, Germany, Scotland, and various parts of the United States, she now lives in a suburb of Dallas.

Thumbnail: Markus Winkler

Craft Capsule: The Arc of Epiphany

by

Jordan Kisner

12.7.20

This is no. 81 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I continually puzzle over something the essayist Amy Benson said during a seminar on “the lyric essay.” Or maybe she didn’t say it but alluded to it by the structure of her syllabus. This was a while ago, but essentially she proposed that essays might follow one of a few types of arcs: the arc of narrative, the arc of argument, the arc of epiphany.

This concept made intuitive sense to me. The feeling of the word arc—which for me always conjures the bowing of a ship’s prow, something sturdy and flexible, something constructed but buoyant, something that cuts through water and ice but is smooth enough to run your hand over—matches the feeling of an essay. The arc of narrative seems clear enough: The essay uses as its keel the rising and falling action of story. Its end point is coterminous with a feeling of resolution, or maybe just arrival, in the narrative. The arc of argument shapes an essay around an idea that needs advancing, a thought that needs interrogating and articulating—whether it’s clearly an argument or just a notion the writer is toying with. 

But what is an essay that follows the arc of epiphany?

I don’t remember how Benson defined it, and I prefer it that way. This way the arc of epiphany is something I get to imagine, to theorize, to puzzle over, to strive within. Is it an essay that provokes an epiphany? An essay that finds its arrival point in a moment of epiphany or bright realization? Does it replicate, structurally, the feeling of epiphany: total confusion followed by rupture and maybe rapture, followed by reassessment of everything that came before in light of the new knowledge, followed, perhaps, by disillusionment or fading fervor? Is it an essay that completely upends itself part of the way through and starts over on new premises? Does it just go right ahead and manifest the divine, as the word’s earliest uses in English (first, to describe Christ’s appearance to the Magi; and then to denote the revelation of a divinity more generally) would indicate?

When I wrote my first book, Thin Places, I toyed with creating an arc of epiphany not only within a single essay but through an arrangement of essays—or, to put it in geometric terms, a major arc produced by a series of minor arcs. I wanted to make a collection of essays that each individually riffed on the epiphanic (say, by ending with the appearance of a holy orange; or by putting the reader in a prolonged confrontation with death; or by pulling a U-turn halfway through a piece about debutante balls to talk about queerness) but also collectively and gradually, through sequential reading, crested into something like the epiphanic. I wanted that big inrush of air, that clearer picture, that sudden recognition of pattern. 

This is an extremely lofty goal, I realize, and I didn’t necessarily think such a thing would be possible (not least because I still wonder what “arc of epiphany” means), but it gave me something to play with and push against. Most writing that I like—of my own or by other people—is written as a genuine and urgent attempt to understand something inscrutable. When the writer stretches to comprehend something just out of their reach, or to articulate something for which they have no words—that’s when the air begins to crackle. It feels like a goal worth reaching for, even and especially if you have to make up its rubric yourself.

 

Jordan Kisner is the author of the essay collection Thin Places (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). Her writing has also appeared in the Atlantic, the Believer, the Guardiann+1, the New York Times Magazine, and the Paris Review Daily. The recipient of fellowships from Pioneer Works, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and Art Omi, she is currently a fellow at the Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas.

Thumbnail: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Photo Library

Craft Capsule: On Nightmares

by

Chen Chen

11.9.20

This is no. 78 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

1.
A nightmare: realizing I need to restructure this essay, again, and it’s due tomorrow. 

A nightmare: COVID-19 cases on the rise again all across the country. 

A nightmare: how often essayists, especially poets-turned-essayists, like to remind everyone that essay comes from the French verb essayer, meaning to try, to attempt, to test. 

Not a nightmare: I love the try, the attempt. 

A nightmare: the test. The test freaks me out. 

A nightmare: how long it’s taken in the United States for COVID tests to become more accessible. 

Why do I prefer the nightmare of being dreadfully stuck, working on a poem, over the nightmare of being dreadfully stuck, working on an essay? 

A collective, ongoing nightmare: the pandemic. 

2.
Working on my essays for this series has been both a welcome distraction and (as I knew would happen) a dive into the deep end of my anxieties. The process feels nightmarish because my preferred method of exploring and articulating craft ideas is writing poems (and it seems I’ve gotten to the point in my poetry writing where I can befriend the dread, the stuck-ness). Or through conversation: engaging with students and connecting with friends, all of which happens these days over the shared nightmare known as Zoom. 

Also, I hate paragraphs. The blocky-ness of paragraphs makes me anxious, like I’m trapped in a box and, in the essay form, can only move from one box to another. I feel I have to make sense. Too much sense. I like paragraphs in prose poems, because I’m freer to do—I know better how to do—weird things with sentences. Or not write sentences at all. 

I think of Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey (Wave Books, 2012), a collection of essays based on lectures she was required to give as a teacher—at one point, Ruefle describes lectures as “bad dreams.” Ruefle has commented frequently on the fact that this one volume on poetry has far outsold her books of poetry; that people would rather read about poetry, than read a poem. That for many, poetry remains a nightmare. 

Poetry, to me, is the best dreaming. 

A form of breaking out of the Zoom room or the chain of paragraphs, into an expanse of fresh blooms,1 a field bursting with sunflowers. 

Still I’m drawn to essays for how they document a thought process, an attempt to think clearly and deeply. And I love good essays on poetry. I love Madness, Rack, and Honey. I’d like to write craft essays like Ruefle’s. I’m not sure that is possible, given our very different brains. But maybe my brain can do something else and figure out ways to enjoy writing an essay, or at least dislike it less. 

Could it be that my fear of the essay draws me to it? I’m afraid I won’t write as well in this genre, but the challenge entices. I’m nervous to delve into new subjects and discover scary truths, but surprise is also one of the key reasons I write anything. After all, in poetry it’s usually the door I don’t want to open that leads me to the room I most need to investigate.2

3.
I’ve long wanted to examine nightmares in my poetry. I’m intrigued by how fear can act as a signpost on the path to truth; how terror can mean getting closer to a complicated reality. I’ve written poems based on dreams—wild dreams that contain some frightening revelation at their core—but I have yet to write a poem based on a straight-up nightmare. Specifically, I’ve been itching to write a poem about my two recurring nightmares involving high school French teachers. 

One nightmare stars my sophomore year instructor, my favorite one, as a highly trained assassin. Her weapon of choice: one of my mother’s beloved Chinese cleavers. Somehow she manages very clean kills. In the nightmare I admire her and am also terrified. Sometimes I am the target, for getting a B on a quiz, say, and before the final blow she reminds me, “Cravate is a feminine noun, despite it referring to men’s neckties! It’s LA cravate, UNE cravate, SA cravate!” If I experience this again, I hope I remember to respond, “But anyone can wear a necktie!” Other times the nightmare gets loftier and the target is a corrupt politician, usually French. One time I am the corrupt French politician. 

I haven’t had this nightmare in a while, and I miss it—perhaps because 2020 is a global waking nightmare. What sleeping nightmare of mine could compare with Trump, COVID, and the police? I hesitate to type it out, but I miss this assassin nightmare because I wish there were worse consequences for the Trump administration. I wish there were consequences at all. As someone invested in abolition, I can’t advocate for prison. I have to imagine and help build other types of justice and accountability, ones that don’t rely on punishment and vengeance. At the same time, the part of me that misses the assassin nightmare would love for something nightmarish to visit these leaders who’ve abandoned all duty to the people. 

Another part of me misses this nightmare because seeing my mother’s cleaver in it is like seeing a part of her. I also associate high school language study with her because she teaches Mandarin at that level. I haven’t seen my mother since this pandemic was declared a pandemic. She’s immunocompromised and has been taking every precaution. Every call with her begins with her asking, “Have you been staying at home?” and ends with her command, “Keep staying at home.” My father, who never texts, texted me last week to say, “Avoid travel to any hot spots,” while travel ads pop up on my TV. Back in March my partner’s father was quarantined in a hospital in upstate New York after experiencing COVID-like symptoms. It was four days, but it felt like a year before the test results came back: negative. 

I check the news and check the news. I check social media, texts. I pick up the phone. The friends of friends with the virus. The friends with the virus. 

4.
Perhaps my fear of writing essays has to do with how my brain always associates the act with an academic assignment, a requirement, a grammar test that I might fail. It doesn’t help that so far most of the essays I write have in fact been assigned to me. They do help pay the bills. I do love a prompt. But is it, on some level, masochism? Is all my writing, in some way, a testing to which I subject myself, over and over? Am I perpetually trying to win a French teacher’s approval? 

The other French teacher nightmare goes like this: On an otherwise blissfully uneventful day, I receive a letter from my high school. I know something is amiss before even opening it. For a long time I just stare at it; it stares back from my coffee table. Then I open it. And it says because I never finished my senior year French project, I never actually passed high school. Therefore I have to return to school, where this time I will also reside. The second I step back into that memory-drenched building, I am met by my senior year French instructor. She looks me over then says in the most disappointed yet unsurprised way, “Bonjour.” 

What terrifies me in this dream is not the disruption of everyday life (by a cleaver-wielding assassin like in my other nightmare), but the resurrection of days I’ve long put behind me, a time and a self I’d rather not reinhabit. Not that high school was all stuffy, all busy work. No, I had many brilliant teachers and classmates, many life-changing experiences. This nightmare is the nightmare that my life didn’t really change. What I fear is going back to school but never learning, never growing. 

What I love is the school of poetry, which invites me to play anew and wonder differently and try strange things—to test in the sense of to experiment. To test in the sense of encountering nerve-wracking challenges, but trusting that the fear is a sign of one’s hunger for and effort toward real growth. Maybe one day I will experience essay writing more like that: an experiment in good fear. 

5.
A poem I find instructive for writing about nightmares is “The Dream”3 by Aracelis Girmay, one of my former professors, whose work continues to nourish as well as push me. Indeed, Girmay’s writing always reminds me how poems themselves can be the best poetry teachers. I also return to this one because it focuses on a mother, the figure beside or behind the French teacher of my first nightmare. Here is the startling start of “The Dream”: 

Last night, all night
the dream, the dead
mother, my small sister,
tiny, her mouth
over my shoulder
(screaming) like a knapsack
when she heard the news,
& my brother playing
the stereo. I howled
like the coyotes; myself.

The poem then shifts from the howl to a sunlit, tranquil scene, the way dreams can, suddenly and completely. “The Nightmare” ultimately wouldn’t be the most fitting title for this poem. The word dream can encompass good ones and bad. That said, nightmare can contain the abject as well as the gorgeous (my favorite horror movies have stellar aesthetics). My French teacher nightmares feature both terror and tenderness—fear of disappointing the mother/teacher figure, but also admiration for her and a longing for a time when I could, on a regular basis, talk with her in person. Rereading Girmay’s poem I realize that at the heart of the poem I want to write are questions like: How do fear and affection sit side by side? Why do I connect French teachers and mothers in this manner? 

This is what I mean by poems being the best poetry teachers: They offer an array of techniques to emulate, yes, but more fundamentally and expansively, they conjure up uncomfortable questions and encourage bewildering (sometimes frightening) leaps in imagination.

6.
One week, feeling particularly defeated by this essay, I write a draft of my poem “The Nightmare.” It reads ridiculous, then not, which seems like how a lot of my writing goes. I’d like one day to write a poem that shifts from not one bit ridiculous to utterly. Still, this poem is some new occurrence. Every truly new poem4 is its own strange school. 

I revise and revise. The poem teaches me about how my recurring nightmares are linked to the world’s shared nightmare of COVID-19. How afraid I am, as a teacher myself now, to be back this fall; how fortunate I feel that my university has allowed me to teach online; how much I miss teaching in person; how angry I am that not every teacher “gets to” do this. 

I revise and revise the ending of this essay. I’m afraid of being so direct and so pared down in my diction. But I know from poetry that it’s often when I’m trying the least to be “poetic” that the most charged truths emerge. 

Truths like: I’m afraid my students will get sick. I’m afraid of losing a student, more than one student. I think I should be more afraid of getting very sick too. I miss my mother, who, as a high school Mandarin teacher, knows that school is more than a building, but misses her classroom. I’m relieved she has the option to teach online as well. I miss many of my high school teachers and hope they are safe and finding ways to rest. 

To dream, both literally and creatively. To speak back to the nightmares, both personal and collective.

 

ENDNOTES

1. A beautiful nightmare: how much poets adore the word bloom.
2. In life, I know better than to go exploring attics, basements, or other favorite hangout spots of vengeful ghosts and demons. 
3. From
Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions, 2011).
4. I mean new mainly in terms of process; new to the writer. The big hope is that the poem will then do something new for a reader.

 

Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017)which was longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry and won the Publishing Triangle Thom Gunn Award. His work has appeared in many publications, including Poetry and the 2015 and 2019 editions of The Best American Poetry. He has received a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Kundiman and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at Brandeis University as the Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence. 

Thumbnail: Chuttersnap

Craft Capsule: The Art of Literary Criticism

by

Jenny Bhatt

9.28.20

This is no. 74 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

A personal manifesto for literary criticism:

1. On close reading: Before reviewing, read a book at least three times for the following: text, subtext, and what’s left off the page. Often the latter two will reveal more about the writer’s true intent.

2. On references and associations: A good review is, first and foremost, about expanding the literary conversation between the text, the author, other readers, and ourselves—determining what the text means to us as individuals and as societies. Enrich your frames of reference by reading widely, purposefully, and mindfully. And then look for the literary associations, assemblages, affinities, and networks of relevant ideas, texts, people, and objects. Remember W. H. Auden’s sixth must-have for literary criticism: “Throw light upon the relation of art to life, to science, economics, ethics, religion, etc.”

3. On fairness: Ensure fairness and balance for the author and for readers (of both the review and the work itself). It is not enough to say what’s good or bad about a book. Make the case with evidence as to why. It is also not enough to write an information-filled essay that’s missing a “so what?” Every major point in the review should answer the twofold question: Why is this good or bad, and why does it matter?

4. On argument: Never speculate. Always contextualize. The review thesis must have plausible counterarguments, and the essay must include and respond to those counterarguments. That said, don’t indulge in what Virginia Woolf called the “desiccation of the living tissues of literature into a network of little bones” as some critics do with their “able and industrious pens.”

5. On comparison: Keep in mind Elizabeth Hardwick’s indictment: “How often we read a beginner’s review that compares a thin thing to a fat one. ‘John Smith, like Tolstoy, is very interested in the way men interact under the conditions of battle.’ Well, no.” Also, resist your cognitive biases—recency, confirmation, in-group, distinction, and attentional—in such comparative analysis.

6. On building up versus tearing down: A work of literature can do so much more than “demystify, destabilize, denaturalize, deconstruct, debunk, decipher,” as Rita Felski reminds us in The Limits of Critique (University of Chicago Press, 2015). It can, more significantly, also “recontextualize, reconfigure, remake, recharge perceptions.” Instead of simply focusing on excavating a text for causes, conditions, and motives, follow Felski’s advice to reflect on the text’s revelations and possibilities. Because, as Felski argues, “Works of art do not only subvert, but also convert; they do not only inform but also transform—a transformation that is not just a matter of intellectual readjustment but one of affective realignment as well (a shift of mood, a sharpened sensation, an unexpected surge of affinity or disorientation).”

7. On readership: Understand the target audience of a book—never mind who its writer or translator or publisher might have intended—and whether it meets their needs. Engage the reader as a smart, active participant in the conversation rather than a passive receiver of information. Felski’s four modes of textual engagement—recognition, enchantment, knowledge, and shock—also apply to how we engage with a review. Recognition is about the text as a source of self-interpretation and self-understanding. Enchantment is that pleasurable self-forgetting while reading. Knowledge refers to what literature discloses about the world beyond oneself. Shock speaks to the troubling and taboo aspects of human existence.

8. On language: Be specific, precise, and clear. Craft each sentence to make the review aesthetically pleasing. But avoid overwrought sentences that call more attention to themselves (or to you) than to the points they are making.

9. On the why: The payoff of writing criticism is deepening our reading pleasure and making it time well-spent. It helps us create a sense of understanding amid the constant activity of our surroundings. As Virginia Woolf wrote: “Poems and novels, histories and memoirs, dictionaries and blue-books; books written in all languages by men and women of all tempers, races, and ages jostle each other on the shelf. And outside the donkey brays, the women gossip at the pump, the colts gallop across the fields. Where are we to begin? How are we to bring order into this multitudinous chaos and so get the deepest and widest pleasure from what we read?”

10. On the so what: Do all of the above because a book is a sociocultural, historical, and political artifact. Like all human creations, it is a product of our experiences and reflects our desires, conflicts, and potential. Critiquing literature well involves learning about some crucial aspects of ourselves as individuals and as a species. It is how we elevate and preserve our literary traditions.

 

Jenny Bhatt is a writer, translator, and literary critic. She is the host of the Desi Books podcast and the author of the short story collection Each of Us Killers (7.13 Books, 2020). Her literary translation of Gujarati writer Dhumketu’s best short fiction is forthcoming from HarperCollins India in late 2020. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Literary Hub, LongreadsPoets & Writers Magazine, the Millions, Electric Literature, the Rumpus, and Kenyon Review. Having lived and worked in India, England, Germany, Scotland, and various parts of the United States, she now lives in a suburb of Dallas.

Thumbnail: Markus Winkler

Craft Capsule: What’s So Funny?

by

Kristen Arnett

4.26.21

This is no. 96 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I do not consider myself a craft expert, but I do consider myself an aficionado of the dumb stuff that makes me laugh. Television plots centered on easily solved miscommunications? Check. Dogs that look like they’re smiling? Oh yeah. Writing that asks me to unpack the joke, repackage it, and then try to resell it as a brand-new product? Oh baby, absolutely yes.

There is something compelling about the standard joke format. What is the “standard” joke, you might ask? The best way to describe it is to consider the Dad Joke. Think of puns and silly wordplay. Or the Man Walks Into a Bar format. It’s the knock-knock joke your weird uncle tells at a family barbeque, one you wind up telling your kids years later. It’s the joke that gets modified with each retelling. Its primary purpose is simply that: retelling.

How many ways can you write the joke and still get a laugh?

For example, when I was growing up, my family inherited an ancient computer from my elderly aunt. She had managed to download a virus before gifting it to us, so its main use became listening to an animated bird do an abbreviated stand-up routine. Pete the Repeat Parrot fluttered in vibrant green-pink-yellow, squawking his fool head off, desperate to tell you his one and only zinger. Here is that joke:

“Pete and Repeat sat on a fence. Pete fell off. Who was left?”

Obviously, the answer here (and the joke itself) is found in the Repeat. But the humor came from the trajectory of the experience: It was funny at first because hey, it’s an unexpected joke. After a while, it became funny because our parents got so angry every time the bird popped up and disrupted their work. Further down the line, it was funny for a different reason entirely: The joke embedded itself in the language of our family. “Stop being such a Pete the Repeat,” I’d say when my brother was being especially annoying. The joke expanded, more fascinating than the original. It became its own story and contained its own plot trajectory.

I think about this a lot in my work. How can I repackage the initial premise of a joke in more colorful wrapping and offer it up to the reader as something brand-new? Gifting them the same bit, but a different experience of it? Often this means I need to situationally experience jokes for the first time as my characters experience them. Humor is subjective; it requires background to understand how any person would receive something as funny. As I write, I understand that even if the joke isn’t funny to the characters in the scene, it retains humor for the reader.

Another example: the scene in Rebecca Dinerstein Knight’s novel Hex (Viking, 2020) in which a large mattress is unexpectedly delivered during a dinner party. It’s left awkwardly on the entryway rug and no one knows what to do with it. There’s the joke setup. Later on, a guest at the dinner party exits the entryway bathroom and trips over the mattress, which was not there when he initially entered. That is a use of the mattress in a different comedic way, yet it is still the same joke: weird mattress where it shouldn’t be. The party continues along with the mattress, which gets used as the site of further hilarity. There are drunken secrets told on it, even an impromptu karaoke dance session occurs on its quilted top. Same joke, repackaged and retold to great and hilarious effect.

When considering how humor can sit inside fiction, perhaps imagine it as the same strange and unexpected body wearing different disguises to a costume event. If you can get the joke to put on a fake mustache and successfully reenter the party they have already been kicked out of, perhaps it is worth letting them stick around a while longer. Let them spike the punch. See what other kind of mischief they can get into. I bet it is worth repeating.

 

Kristen Arnett is a queer writer based in Florida. She is the author of the novel Mostly Dead Things (Tin House, 2019), which was a New York Times best-seller, and the story collection Felt in the Jaw (Split/Lip Press, 2017). Her writing has also appeared in the New York Times, North American Review, Gulf Coast, Guernica, and McSweeney’s, among other publications. Her second novel, With Teeth, is forthcoming from Riverhead Books in June.

Thumbnail: David Waite

Craft Capsule: Night Call

by

Alex Dimitrov

6.7.21

This is no. 100 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

New York’s streets are everywhere in my poems. In February of 2014 I used the city quite literally. It was for a project called Night Call. The idea was to travel to strangers and read them poems in bed, or in the most intimate space of their homes. For many people this ended up being the kitchen or living room. For one guy, his balcony in Tribeca. Mostly though, strangers walked me right into their bedrooms and offered me a glimpse of their lives.

I’ve lived in New York for more than ten years. It still feels like the city doesn’t need me or know that I’m here. And to be honest, I like that. I’m a writer who thrives off resistance. That kind of pushback and being ignored excites me. In Night Call, I wanted to fuse that feeling with the intimacy of going over to someone’s apartment. Being in a person’s space is often more intimate than sleeping with them. It’s an alluring exchange: people showing you where they spend the majority of their lives. The poem is also an exchange. It’s like showing you a map to the interior though not the interior itself. The poem, to me, is a conversation between people.

I announced Night Call on social media and offered to do readings for anyone who didn’t know me. That was the catch, they had to be total strangers. They could be in any borough and had the choice of four separate Sundays on which we could meet. I’d leave my apartment around eight in the evening with poems and my phone. Nothing more. Maybe a pack of cigarettes (though I was trying to quit). Sometimes I didn’t know the gender of the person I was going to read to (based on their name) and I didn’t care either. I took the N and the R and the 6 and the B trains. Most of the readings were quick. Twenty or twenty-five minutes. Other times I wouldn’t leave someone’s apartment until two or three in the morning and I’d cab back, exhausted and exhilarated both. People offered me drinks, told me stories about their childhoods, affairs, the death of their parents. They took me up to their roofs, made me coffee, showed me things they had written or painted. One stranger cooked me dinner and told me she regretted both of her marriages. “Don’t get married,” she said. “There are more interesting things to do with people.” I’ll never forget the way she kept adjusting a silver pendant around her neck.

At the time I had a nine-to-five job and I’m not sure how I got up on those Monday mornings. Several major media outlets asked to cover Night Call but I declined. I’ve never written or talked about it before. It was private. My interest was to open up a new space between the reader and the poet and between the reader and the poem. I wanted to demystify both. I wanted people, in the privacy of their beds, to encounter the poem like a bedtime story (being read to having been one of the only pleasures of my childhood).

The poems I read were from drafts of my second book, Together and by Ourselves. The strangers in Night Call were the first people to hear it. It’s my favorite book I’ve written and my most personal, too. In some ways I wrote it to survive the change in an important relationship. It’s amazing the things people shared with me when I read them those poems. We usually sat across from each other on top of the bedspread, sometimes about one or two arm-lengths apart, sometimes for long stretches of time, often in silence.

For about a month, in the dead of winter, I went to the Village and Queens and Brooklyn, and almost to Staten Island once but it was too late at that point. Some people I read to ended up becoming my friends. I remember even those I haven’t seen again, which is most of them. I remember what they told me about their lives and I remember their faces. The poem is, of course, a place to remember. It keeps people’s voices and things right there, outside time. And those first hours after midnight, when Night Call would often take place, they feel outside time to me also. It’s a beautiful illusion. The imagination is the only real freedom. That’s what Night Call helped me remember. I had forgotten it too.

 

Alex Dimitrov is the author of three books of poems, including Love and Other Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2021), as well as the chapbook American Boys (Floating Wolf Quarterly, 2012). His work has been published in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Paris Review, and Poetry. He was previously the senior content editor at the Academy of American Poets, where he edited the Poem-a-Day series and American Poets. He has taught creative writing at Princeton University, Columbia University, and New York University, among other institutions. With Dorothea Lasky, he is the coauthor of Astro Poets: Your Guides to the Zodiac (Flatiron Books, 2019). Dimitrov lives in New York City.

Thumbnail: Guillaume Técher

Craft Capsule: Who Cares?

by

Jordan Kisner

12.21.20

This is no. 83 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I feel lately that there’s so little I know how to say about writing in a general, prescriptive sense, despite the fact that I write for a living, despite the fact that I teach writing and can, in that context, usually manage prescriptive statements. The “craft” of writing to me feels synonymous with the craft of sitting still, which I find difficult; or the craft of patiently pursuing the rightest, most elegant piece for whatever part of the puzzle is in front of me; the craft of making little rituals to call forth both order and chaos; the craft of snacking; the craft of eavesdropping. Once, when I was about fifteen and had no aspirations to write at all, I spent a few days with an author of a famous book about teenage girls and their derangements, and she remarked to me that I would be a writer. This surprised and flattered me. I thought maybe she could see something about my mind. “You carry a notebook,” she pointed out. The craft of having a pen on hand.

This tension between the writer’s need to take her mind seriously and the reality that most of the world is less automatically enthralled with it, feels like one of the hardest things to get right, especially for anyone whose written I is themselves. Taking an inner life seriously but not too seriously, I think, is as much a technique or a practice as anything else. Inner life drives most of the writing I find fascinating, whether or not the end result is explicitly about the writer. Take Anne Boyer’s The Undying. Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. Homie by Danez Smith. Still Life With Oyster and Lemon by Mark Doty. On Immunity by Eula Biss. All different forms (memoir, poetry, researched essay, novel) and all totally about and deeply drawn from a writer’s interiority—their questions, their experiences, their loves, their griefs, their memories. I could now—but won’t—name five books that could be described the same way but feel, to me, solipsistic and masturbatory. 

This is the high-wire act with which I am personally concerned from a craft perspective: how to write with your full self, and perhaps including yourself, while not writing in a way that’s just so far up your own navel.

Who cares, who cares, who cares, I sometimes want to write in the margins of my students’ essays. I don’t, remembering the teachers who kindly didn’t write that in my margins though I am absolutely sure they wanted to. I don’t mean the question cruelly—or literally: They care, obviously! And often I do, too—but it would be felt as cruelty, probably. Which is too bad because it’s a worthy question. It’s maybe the most salient question I could present to my students. It is the question I ask myself most often when I’m working, honestly. (I am asking it right now.) 

When we say a work is masturbatory, we mean that it was written to please the person who made it to the neglect of anyone else’s pleasure. It is, to use the argot of writing pedagogy, “writer-based,” as opposed to “reader-based.” “Writer-based” prose feels good for the writer, maybe, but it does not do much for a reader—because it has not really considered the reader. It has not concerned itself with whether a reader will, or should, find pleasure or meaning in the experience. 

So to consider who might care and why—this is a kindness, an ethic, a canny nod to pleasure. How many people do you want to bring into the circle with you? The craft of obsessive query: Who cares about flower seasons, about autopsies, about writing, a dead lake, a dead musician, a particular septuagenarian’s books? Why would they care? Just because I care, will anyone else? Assuming that not everyone will care about everything, whom do I wish to address? Who would I like to make care?

 

Jordan Kisner is the author of the essay collection Thin Places (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). Her writing has also appeared in the Atlantic, the Believer, the Guardiann+1, the New York Times Magazine, and the Paris Review Daily. The recipient of fellowships from Pioneer Works, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and Art Omi, she is currently a fellow at the Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas.

Thumbnail: Sean Benesh

Craft Capsule: The Schedule

by

Jordan Kisner

12.14.20

This is no. 82 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Maya Angelou rented herself a hotel room and went off to it every morning at six-thirty. Susan Sontag forbade herself from reading until the evening. Kafka wrote all night. Capote wrote laying down all day. Virginia Woolf wrote standing up. Gertrude Stein wrote outside, in the countryside, preferably while looking at a cow. Alice Munro wrote when her children napped. Robert Lowell worked in bed with a bottle of milk. Auden used speed. Didion needed an hour before dinner with a drink to go over the day’s work. Ntozake Shange wrote with Perrier and a glass of wine at a cafe during off-hours. 

I have one friend who washes her hands before she sits down to write. Another friend gets up at the crack of dawn. A third friend works by word-count quotas and keeps a sticky note next to her so she can note the incremental increases: five hundred words here, two hundred words there. 

I have no daily habits or routines, other than coffee and walking the dog. For years I’ve tried. There was a period of time in graduate school when I wrote from ten to one on either side of the clock, but that became less feasible once I had a partner. For long stretches I’ll make myself write a few pages right when I wake up, a version of the “morning pages” in Julia Cameron’s The Artist Way, a pseudo spiritual guide to sorting out your creativity problems that’s popular among writers and artists I know—but then I’ll stop. At the beginning of this year, I wrote a note to myself declaring the intention to start with my own writing first (as opposed to e-mail or contract work) and to begin with five minutes of meditation for focus. I do not do this. If I were to look back over my notebooks from the last five years, I’d find failed attempt after failed attempt to make myself a schedule, to develop a program, to devise some infrastructure for the nebulous work of materializing thoughts and arranging them in words.

Many writers I know are strange and obsessive about the notion of keeping a schedule, even and especially when they don’t. I am one of those. I imagine it will make writing easier, because for me at least writing feels not just technically difficult but spiritually difficult. It feels as extractive as it is expressive. Routine, I suspect, would alleviate this, or at least get me more inured to it. It would make me more productive, maybe. It would make my labor more legible as labor, not only to the world but to myself. Sitting at a desk at appointed hours, like the rest of the desk-bound workforce—in other words cosplaying work as others perform it—might mitigate the suspicion that my chosen vocation, which involves spending a lot of time motionlessly staring into space, is too loose and diaphanous to be real work. Elizabeth Gilbert keeps a “militaristic” schedule, waking up at four-thirty and writing all morning, on the theory that you can’t choose when the muse shows up; if you show up you’ve done your part. This sounds right and totally soothing to me. 

I’ve never managed it. Something about my personality refuses it and insists I work in spurts, at random hours, crashing deadlines and taking ill-advised breaks and wasting just so much time. And of course there is no right way to have a writing schedule; of course brilliant writers have written at all hours and according to all manner of quirky or mundane habits; of course the only thing anyone cares about in the end is whether you wrote and whether it’s any good. But it’s continued to bother and fascinate me, this question of managing writing by tightly managing time. But then last night I happened to read (for work, at 11:45 PM) the latest book by Eileen Myles, which is a slim volume that’s sort of about being a writer and a lot about having an apartment, and Myles wrote something that broke over me like a huge wave of relief: “Literature is wasted time.”

It really takes so much time to become a writer and you have to be able to roll in time itself, that was my experience, it seems to me, like a dog likes to roll in dead fish at the beach. Or a dog (my dog) stands in the shit of a stable underneath the body of a horse (trembling) and feels awe. Cause there’s so much shit and there’s so much horse.

Reading this was startling and clarifying. The Schedule, or whatever I’m imagining when I comb the archives of Daily Routines (an excellent blog, if you’re into snooping the day planners of dead writers—which clearly I am), makes time and writing very tidy. Writing isn’t very tidy, which my inner time-anarchist seems to have always known. Writing—or the writing that feels good coming out of my hands—is much more like trembling, like awe, or even like shit. It bears the mark of abundance, a so-muchness of time, thought, sensation; you can roll around in it. It gets to feel like forever. 

 

Jordan Kisner is the author of the essay collection Thin Places (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). Her writing has also appeared in the Atlantic, the Believer, the Guardian, n+1, the New York Times Magazine, and the Paris Review Daily. The recipient of fellowships from Pioneer Works, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and Art Omi, she is currently a fellow at the Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas.

Thumbnail: Daniele Levis Pelusi

Craft Capsule: Against Universality, in Praise of Anger

by

Chen Chen

11.16.20

This is no. 79 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Of my fury,
I come like a joint popping into place.

—Sarah Gambito, “Of My Fury”1 

Another thing you didn’t mention in your letter: the fact that you must feel profoundly alone.

—Yanyi, “How Do I Write About My Identity Authentically?”2

 

1. One of my earliest crushes was Tuxedo Mask. I still think he’s a babe. 

2. During my MFA, I wrote a love poem that referenced Tuxedo Mask plus another early crush, Spider-Man. I don’t remember if I brought it to workshop. I remember feeling anxious that someone might advise cutting those references in order to make it a more “timeless” poem. How angry I got, thinking that would likely happen. 

3. One of my favorite movies is Sailor Moon R: The Movie, in which an alien dude named Fiore develops a big crush on Tuxedo Mask. Sailor Moon, who’s destined to be with Tuxedo Mask, has to fight Fiore for her man. Also, save the Earth. 

4. During an MFA workshop, a white classmate declared he represented “millions of readers” who would stop reading a poem if they came across a stanza in Mandarin. He insisted I cut it to one line, if the poem needed even that. 

5. Which is more universal: a species of bird that some readers will have to look up or an animated character that some readers will have to look up? 

6. These days I embrace writing to an Asian American reader, or more specifically, a queer Asian American reader, a queer Chinese American reader. It’s taken me a long time to get to this place and some days I forget how much I can embrace it. 

7. A white professor in my MFA advised us not to use the term white people in poetry because it was “alienating.”

8. I love that Tuxedo Mask fights with roses, that Sailor Moon fights with her tiara and eventually with even mightier, gorgeouser accessories. I love that when you visit sailormoon.fandom.com, your mouse arrow transforms into her Spiral Moon Heart Rod. 

9. Which is more universal: Tuxedo Mask, Spider-Man, the Great Sphinx of Giza, or a queer Asian American poet referencing each in a love poem for another big nerd?

10. Another white classmate called the Mandarin “gobbledygook.” Of course, neither classmate complained about the French in a previous poem—or in others, my references to Russian literature. 

11. Fiore, whose name means flower in Italian, is obsessed with finding the perfect one for Tuxedo Mask, who gave him a rose when they were both lonely children. Fiore was lonely because he seemed to be the only one left of his species. Tuxedo Mask, who back then was only Mamoru, was lonely because his parents had just been killed in a car accident. After years of wandering alone through space, an exhausted Fiore landed on Earth, outside the hospital where Mamoru was staying. Mamoru found him and the two immediately formed a deep bond. When, just a short time later, Fiore had to leave3 the Earth due to its incompatible atmosphere, he made it his mission to find a gift worthy of the one who had made him feel no longer alone. 

12. The Mandarin was translated in the poem itself. Now I’m working on poems that keep my Mandarin untranslated. Full stanzas.4

Which is more universal: Italian, Mandarin, French, Russian, Japanese, English, or the English dub of Sailor Moon R: The Movie

13. In recent years my work has been praised for transcending identity categories. I know this is a well-intentioned compliment, and I feel fortunate to be read with enthusiasm. But I wonder if a white dude has ever been praised for transcending his white dudery. 

14. In an interview about her second book, Some Say the Lark (Alice James Book, 2017), Jennifer Chang discusses the expectation to write about and from identity in straightforward ways: 

Early in my career…I would repeatedly encounter the critique that my work seemed unrelated to my biography. I understood that these editors and judges were reading my work as insufficiently Asian American…. I thought my writing was Asian American, despite the lack of whatever they think makes for authentic Asian American writing. Ethnography? Bilingualism? And yet, at the same time, I wondered if I was hiding behind metaphor and mythology because I didn’t know or want to write about race or identity. I was confused. Wasn’t writing about the self an interrogation of identity? Or, worse, had I internalized the misguided aesthetic imperative that literature be apolitical and universal (and therefore nonthreatening to white readers)?5

15. Fan interpretations of Fiore’s feelings for Tuxedo Mask range from they’re totally gay to aww friends. In the movie itself Sailor Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, and Venus briefly discuss whether something romantic had occurred between the two. The English dub downplays this possibility, as it did with the anime TV series, for an overtly gay relationship between two women, Sailor Uranus and (my fave!) Sailor Neptune.6 

16. In recent years my work has been compared to Frank O’Hara’s. A lot. It’s flattering; I love O’Hara. His appetite for pop culture, everyday conversation, play. His gayness. His gaiety and his gravity. He’s a big influence. Still, there’s something odd about how this is considered such high praise: to be compared to a canonical white poet. “You’re the next Frank O’Hara!” “You’re like an Asian O’Hara!” I’ve been thinking of writing a poem titled “Frank O’Hara Is the White Me.”7

17. One afternoon I tried to talk to a white professor about the complicated feelings I had when visiting extended family in China after not being able to see them for over a decade. She then showed me pictures from her vacation travels in China, Vietnam, Cambodia. 

18. Jennifer Chang: 

In writing Some Say the Lark, I was intentional about writing about race and my Asian American identity on my own terms. I wanted to make the reader uncomfortable. I wanted the reader to know I was pissed off at the world and quite possibly at her.8 

19. After searching the cosmos for the perfect flower for Tuxedo Mask, Fiore is deceived by a beautiful but parasitic space plant called the Xenian Flower, who possesses him, turns his sorrow into a lust for vengeance. Fiore believes that he must attack the Earth—to punish humanity for letting Tuxedo Mask be lonely and to claim the planet for his perfect gift to fully bloom, i.e. drain all life energy from the world. Fiore asserts that Tuxedo Mask can never be truly unlonely with anyone except him. He works to destroy the Sailor Scouts defending the Earth, in particular Sailor Moon, whose connection with Tuxedo Mask drives him into a jealous fury. 

20. I wasn’t surprised by the confidence with which my white classmate claimed to know how millions of readers read. Nor was I surprised that he didn’t say white readers. What I was taken aback by was the implication that that many people would even come across a poem of mine—how he framed his critique as concern: that I’d be losing out on all these potential readers. As though he were looking out for me, as a friend.

21. Another white classmate said he found Nikky Finney’s Head Off & Split (TriQuarterly Books, 2011) “alienating.” Another referred to Kiki Petrosino’s Hymn for the Black Terrific (Sarabande Books, 2013) as “another one of those books all about identity.” Which is more universal: a white student feeling excluded from a text or Black students and students of color being excluded from the field of literature? Which is universal: a white professor’s anger over getting called white or an Asian American student’s anger over racism as well as queerphobia in workshops, literature courses, program culture, the culture of the university? 

22. What makes my poems queer and Asian American? In another version of this essay I type twelve single-spaced pages trying to answer that. I could keep going. Into this universe.9 

23. If you cut my yellow wrists, I’ll teach my yellow toes to write. 
If you cut my yellow fists, I’ll teach my yellow feet to fight.

—Marilyn Chin, “Blues on Yellow”10 

These lines blaze from a postcard I keep tacked above my bed. They’re among the first things I see when I wake up. They bless me as I’m falling asleep. The lines are by groundbreaking Chinese American poet Marilyn Chin; the postcard is made by Kundiman, a groundbreaking organization that supports Asian American writers and readers. When I write groundbreaking, I mean world-reshaping, heart-replenishing. 

24. Yes, most of my MFA classes took place in a building called “Hall of Languages,” but really all of them were in a department called English that made some students comfortably ignorant and some deeply alienated by insisting it was the universe. Yes, during that time I fell in love with the boy I’m still with today. But I was lonely, lonely, lonely in school.

25. As I write this essay, the pandemic. As I write, cops beating up protestors. I tell my friend Muriel Leung, a poet I met through Kundiman, that I haven’t been doing well lately. She sends a letter, a candle, and a sticker. The sticker is of Sailor Moon in her classic ready-to-fight pose with the magnificent caption: “Sailor Moon says: FUCK RACIST POLICE.” 

26. Anger, loneliness, and hope for a better writing community led me to apply and apply for the Kundiman Retreat—led me to my first retreat, summer of 2014. I had just completed the second year of my MFA and had one more to go. I needed Kundiman; I so needed that first retreat where I got to work with, among other brilliances, those cited in this essay: cofounder Sarah Gambito, executive director Cathy Linh Che, home group leader Jennifer Chang, and poetry faculty Marilyn Chin. Chin, whose work I first read in college. Chin, who at one point during the retreat, looked around the room where more than thirty fellows new and returning were gathered, and said: “You are the future of Asian American literature.” 

27. I continue to need Kundiman. It continues to evolve, sometimes with shortcomings. In my experience the organization is committed to engaging in the less comfortable discussions so crucial for real growth. I’m glad to see the expansion of funding and leadership opportunities as well as the addressing of serious gaps in who gets to attend the retreat—who needs an Asian American literary space and isn’t yet finding the access. I’m glad for those who’ve spoken up11 with urgent critique, with loving anger, to hold Kundiman and other organizations like it accountable. 

That anger gives me hope and encourages me to add my own critical voice. In particular, I’d like to reiterate the demand for these organizations to do more to support Black Asians, Pacific Islanders, and West Asians. I want always to be part of Asian American writing communities where accountability isn’t avoided and difference isn’t flattened.

28. I hope to one day write something as beautiful as Sailor Moon’s catchphrase, “In the name of the moon, I’ll punish you!” Though my abolitionist politics would revise that to: “In the name of the moon, let’s fight for nonpunitive forms of justice!” 

29. I’d like white writers to get angrier. Why did so few of my white grad school classmates speak out? Some of my Asian American peers could get angrier too. About racism. About who still gets left out of Asian American spaces. About anti-Blackness in Asian America.  

30. In a final effort to stop Sailor Moon, Fiore tries to take from her the immensely powerful Silver Crystal. Sailor Moon says that she wants to save him, too; that he doesn’t have to be lonely anymore, but Fiore won’t hear it. Suddenly a vision, seemingly from the Silver Crystal, allows Fiore to see that it was Sailor Moon, back then only Usagi and also a child, who first gave Mamoru the rose that he would give Fiore. Usagi had come to the same hospital, carrying a bouquet of roses to celebrate the birth of her sister. Realizing this, Fiore is able to break the Xenian Flower’s grip on his heart. Meanwhile, Sailor Moon has died, having depleted her life energy to save Earth. To make amends, Fiore finally hands Tuxedo Mask the perfect flower: one containing his own life energy, which he tells his great love to use to revive Sailor Moon. This act is Fiore’s last. 

31. Why does the alien have to sacrifice everything to save everyone else, in the end? 

32. How often I was critiqued in workshop for being alienating, being alien. How often I am praised now for being so specific and yet (and yet!) so relatable.12 As though my only options are bad alien or good alien. Or Frank O’Hara with a perpetual crush on Tuxedo Mask. 

33. If the particular is the doorway to the universal, who maintains the door? Who made it? Do I want to travel to that universe anyway? If the particulars must be understandable, palatable to a white audience, is that a universe or is that the white gaze? 

34. I think of Paul Celan—a poet whose work is steeped in his Jewishness, his always-fraught relationship with the German language, his having survived the Holocaust. In a speech delivered in 1958 he said, “For the poem does not stand outside time. True, it claims the infinite and tries to reach across time—but across, not above.”13 Then again, am I quoting Celan here because he’s a poet I believe white poets will listen to? He doesn’t fit easily at all into whiteness, yet I remember my white classmates being completely unbothered by having to learn his particular history. 

35. “Why are you so angry all the time?” I get asked, sometimes in response to the mere mention of race or sexuality. I’m not angry 24-7, but I believe in the power of a queer person of color’s anger. It is fear of such power that leads to the dismissive title of Angry Minority.14 And I recognize that as a cis man of Chinese descent, my anger tends to get treated in the white imagination as more “rational” or less threatening (this depends on the status of “China” in the white imagination). Still, I’ve been dismissed by white people as “just upset,” “too frustrated,” “divisive,” and (my fave!) “anguished”—as though my anger towards racism and other issues is the issue.15 

I’ve come to love my powerful anger; it’s fueled and steered me in the best directions. I also don’t experience anger as separate from other emotions. For instance, my anger is a part of my joy—because without it, what kind of joy is possible? A deluded, diluted one. The country I live in is racist, misogynist, ableist, transphobic, queerphobic, classist, imperialist, genocidal. Part of the anger is that a basic recognition of (not even a reckoning with) this reality is not universal. 

36. And to what extent have I internalized white literary sensibilities? To what degree am I still writing, living in their restrictive universe? 

37. The ending of Jennifer Chang’s “Again a Solstice”16

What it does even mean to write a poem? 
It means today 
I’m correcting my mistakes. 
It means I don’t want to be lonely. 

38. Another reading of the movie’s ending: Sailor Moon—through her connection with Tuxedo Mask but just as much through her friendship with the other Sailor Scouts—shows Fiore what love looks like, free of the draining anger of jealousy, the anger of a crushing loneliness. And Fiore responds with an enormous act of love. I wish it didn’t have to involve dying though; I dream for Fiore an untragic conclusion. A scene of him eventually revived, too, and finding his own fierce circle. 

39. Since my book was published, I’ve traveled across the United States and have gotten to meet so many Asian American, queer Asian American, queer Chinese American readers. I’ve also met readers of Asian descent in the U.K. and in New Zealand, many of them queer. These experiences confirmed what my truest self always knew, what white MFA culture didn’t: that impassioned readers for my work—at its most idiosyncratically identity-filled—exist.17 These experiences also pushed me to think further on the term Asian diasporic—not only for those outside the United States or those who don’t identify as American, but also for when Asian American slides into a violent18 U.S. nationalism. I’m also interested in what the term Sino offers over Chinese,19 when Chinese gets weaponized for nationalist aims. Queer can also get appropriated, become reductive, lose its radical politics. How to keep these terms active, alive? 

40. When asked what advice he would give to “emerging writers, particularly of marginalized identities,” poet Michael Wasson said: 

For marginalized identities, discover the deep complexities in who you are & what spaces you & your body occupy. I hope you stay true to your path…because too often we are told to simplify & make the work accessible to the reader (i.e. white, hetero, male). This ends up watering down the nuance of the histories that you’ve been trusted to carry through each day.20

41. Toni Morrison was asked again and again about whether she found the label “Black woman writer” limiting. One of her responses: 

Oh, so boring, oh God.… You know, “male French writer;” is that limiting? No, I don’t think it is. But I understood instantly that [“Black woman writer”] was meant to be.…

So instead of pretending that the label had no force in the minds of readers, I decided very early on that I would not just accept it, but wear it. Force people to say “Black woman writer” and then to see what the fallout would be. I don’t want to be an honorary white man.

But that doesn’t narrow the field. Not for me.

It’s an interesting, rich terrain in which to work. If I tried to compare it with something that is probably more powerful in terms of culture, it would be like saying “Black music.” And what does that mean? Does that sound narrow?21

42. In these months, this year of pandemic, I miss so many of my favorite people—so much of my universe. I text, call, Zoom. Attend online readings. Reread the poems that hold me, that reinvent holding. I search for the perfect sticker to send to Muriel.

43. Rewatching the movie, I develop a crush on Fiore. The way he tells the gay truth about his feelings. The way he lyrically meditates on loneliness. The way he gives me a different way. Not an Asian version of someone else, neither good nor bad alien, no: a badass truth-teller with great hair. 

44. When the term universal comes up, ask: Whose universe?22 When the term timeless: Who can stand outside of time? When transcends categories: Why not transgress? I don’t want to transcend. I want to sing about living in a tangle of histories and dreams. Embrace that song, I’m reminding myself. Keep writing in and to a vastness of queer Asian trouble—a cosmos full of protest and tiaras, laughter and pissed-off poems, roses and ruptures and hot stubborn shit-starters who live. 

 

ENDNOTES

1. Matadora (Alice James, 2004). 
2. An installment from the poet’s Substack, The Reading, published in July 2020
3. Until Fiore’s return years later, Mamoru/Tuxedo Mask is unsure whether he was a real or imaginary friend.
4. In a 2018 interview for the Rumpus, Cathy Linh Che responds to a question about translating the Vietnamese in her poetry: 

I don’t.…

When I write, my primary audience is someone who occupies my exact same language and identity space…. Those who don’t understand Vietnamese can understand the language around it, or they can look it up. I’ve seen my parents labor over dictionaries their whole lives to decode letters from government officials—I think English-speaking audiences can do the same for my parents’ words.

5. From a 2018 interview with Tupelo Quarterly
6. The English version made them cousins—as though that would make their romantic dynamic less odd. 
7. After completing the first full draft of this essay, I discovered an orientalist poem by O’Hara that begins “At night Chinamen jump / on Asia with a thump” and ends “we couple in the grace / of that mysterious race” (from “Poem” in
The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, University of California Press, 1995). 
8. From the same interview as earlier. 
9. I carry with me Ocean Vuong’s lines, “The most beautiful part of your body / is where it’s headed,” from “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong,” in
Night Sky With Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon, 2016). 
10. 
Rhapsody in Plain Yellow (Norton, 2003). 
11. I’ve gone back and forth on whether to provide a more detailed account; due to the complexity of the issues and privacy concerns, I’ve decided, for this essay, to keep the details of these internal community discussions internal. 
12. As with universality, I question the assumptions behind relatability and how it gets used, especially in workshop. Same with empathy—who gets to empathize? Who’s prioritized when relating to a piece? Should a writer of color aim for a text that invites empathy? Why not critique the white imagination instead—and push white writers to do more of that work? Read: “Empathy Is an End Point,” a 2017 conversation in Sublevel between Solmaz Sharif and Rickey Laurentiis. 
13. “Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen.” Translated by Rosemarie Waldrop in
Paul Celan: Collected Prose (Sheep Meadow Press, 1986). With gratitude to Dorothy J. Wang, whose Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry (Stanford University Press, 2014) is where I first encountered this speech.
14. Grateful for this June 2020 conversation in
Los Angeles Review of Books between Omar Sakr and George Abraham, in which Abraham says: “This circles back to your point about how we’re being read versus Read. It’s almost as easy for the publishing world to ignore our voices as it is for them to lazily read and casually misinterpret us, assigning implicitly racist labels on our work like ‘amply justified anger.’”
15. I’m indebted to Sara Ahmed’s work on how talking about the problem means becoming the problem, a phenomenon she identifies and explores in
Living a Feminist Life (Duke University Press, 2017).
16.
Some Say the Lark (Alice James Books, 2017).
17. Being a poet, I never expected a giant audience (though poetry readership in the United States has been growing). Still, it’s good to laugh at those who insisted I’d never have any real audience and so must write more “broadly.”

18. Is this word redundant? I’m suspicious of most nationalisms and U.S. nationalism I recognize as inherently violent—as inextricable from white supremacy. 
19. Thanks also to
sinθ magazine for opening up a myriad of distinct possibilities for Sino literary discourse and community. 
20. A 2018 interview on VIDA. 
21. A 2003 interview for Wisconsin Public Radio.
22. Whose verse gets to be read as a universe?

 

Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017)which was longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry and won the Publishing Triangle Thom Gunn Award. His work has appeared in many publications, including Poetry and the 2015 and 2019 editions of The Best American Poetry. He has received a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Kundiman and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at Brandeis University as the Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence. 

Thumbnail: NASA

Craft Capsule: Revising Folktales and Myths

by

Jenny Bhatt

10.5.20

This is no. 75 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Archetypes from folktales, fairy tales, and myths appear again and again in a wide range of contemporary stories and genres. But even if they are familiar, there is a sense that each archetype is a kind of blank slate: We can read our own interpretations into them both as readers and writers. Each time one is retold, new colors, shapes, and shadows are filled in to suit more contemporary tastes. Each new version gives us, beyond a fresh context, a way to understand our present world through an ancient one.

Why are writers of various stripes drawn to the tradition of revisionism, of retelling or subverting these age-old stories? First, folktales and myths hold a pervasive and persuasive charm because we’ve heard them from an early age. They are cultural, historical, and aesthetic artifacts passed down from generation to generation. Second, we often need to recast older works because the stereotypes and clichés that we are willing to accept or the things that need to be explained have changed. So revisionism helps us keep these stories alive and relevant for our times. Third, we get a certain satisfaction from working with the specific forms and techniques generally employed by such stories. Beyond the pleasure and play involved, we’re also adding to time-honored and beloved literary traditions.

For some of the stories in my collection, Each of Us Killers, I reached back to Gujarati folklore and Hindu myths. Gujarat is a west-coast state in India that over the centuries has seen a regular influx of travelers and immigrants from other places with ancient cultures, such as Greece, Persia, East Africa, and Arabia. Gujarati folklore and language absorbed and adapted aspects of those cultures, meaning many indigenous stories began to incorporate new traditions, rituals, and beliefs. In a similar manner, I’ve participated in the ongoing revisionism tradition by integrating contemporary themes and responding to or subverting older ones.

Here is how I have observed, classified, and approached three revisionism traditions:

Retelling: This keeps the main plot and story elements but uses different forms or points of view to explore new themes. The goal is to bring something old and something new together, causing both recognition and surprise. For instance, “Separation Notice” in my collection is a straight retelling about the Hindu god, Vishnu. While I’ve stayed true to the widely accepted myths, I’ve explored new themes by using the epistolary form and a formal business voice with a celestial (as opposed to a human) resources manager’s point of view.

Adaptation: This preserves most of the original plot but differs in structural elements like the setting, frame, or time period to complicate or raise questions about the original’s contemporary relevance. My story “Journey to a Stepwell” includes a Gujarati folktale I heard often from my mother in childhood. I never cared for its misogynistic morality so I added plot elements and a contemporary frame. And I subverted the ending.

Spinoff: This tells a new story centering a minor character from the original story. Other characters may recur but in different ways. In my story “The Waiting,” a dead wife’s ghost narrates the story about her grieving husband. In Indian folklore, many stories feature dead lovers or spouses haunting their beloveds because of “unfinished business.” Such stories typically focus on the one who is alive and how they are driven to deal with that business. My version complicates all of that, centering the emotions and concerns of the dead over those of the living. 

For any such work to stand out, it needs to accomplish at least one of these three things. First, the revised version has to colonize the original to the extent that readers internalize the revised version as easily as the original. For example, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which was based in large part on ancient Greek myths about Prometheus, is as memorable as its predecessor. Second, the revised version needs to defamiliarize or dismantle stereotypes so that our understanding and interaction with classic identities evolve too. For example, much of Angela Carter’s 1979 collection, The Bloody Chamber, which draws heavily on fairy tales and folktales, gives us new ways of looking at the old stereotype of the oppressed or imprisoned woman seeking liberation. And, finally, the revised version must engage with and broaden discussions around key evolving socio-political narratives of our times. I admire, for instance, the feminist revisions of the Odyssey in Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad and Madeline Miller’s Circe.

Complex as all this may sound, these simple classic stories remain endless troves of profound truths and pleasures that writers can discover with each revision.

 

Jenny Bhatt is a writer, translator, and literary critic. She is the host of the Desi Books podcast and the author of the short story collection Each of Us Killers (7.13 Books, 2020). Her literary translation of Gujarati writer Dhumketu’s best short fiction is forthcoming from HarperCollins India in late 2020. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Literary Hub, LongreadsPoets & Writers Magazine, the Millions, Electric Literature, the Rumpus, and Kenyon Review. Having lived and worked in India, England, Germany, Scotland, and various parts of the United States, she now lives in a suburb of Dallas.

Craft Capsule: Witness vs. Withness

by

Will Harris

8.31.20

This is no. 70 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Poems express a relationship between a subject and an object, but they don’t just say, Here’s a subject (“I”), here’s an object (“you,” a “tree”), this is how they relate (“I saw a red leaf”). They express something about the nature—and possibilities—of the subject-object relationship. 

One model for the subject-object relationship can be found in the poetry of witness, a term coined by Carolyn Forché. The poetry of witness, Forché writes, is “the literature of that-which-happened and its mode is evidentiary rather than representational—as evidentiary, in fact, as spilled blood.” Her most famous poem, “The Colonel,” begins “What you have heard is true,” before giving a gruesome account of her meal with a Salvadoran military leader who spills a sack of human ears onto the table in front of her. 

The poem derives power from its “truth,” its objectivity. Reading it, however, makes me wonder how active—or troublingly passive—a witness is in what they see. In bearing witness to spilled blood and writing about it to what extent does the poet participate in that violence? Think of the phrase bear witness. “Witness” might sound abstract and legalistic by itself; “bear” gives it weight and physicality. It gives the witnessing “I”/eye presence in the world, like a rain-buffeted journalist clutching at their notepad. It establishes a relationship that is simple—however difficult it may be—in the sense that there is a clear “I” (the subject) that goes out into the world to witness something (the object) and bring back an account of it.

In my own work, I’ve always been uncomfortable with how subjects and objects relate—maybe this comes from the experience of being objectified through race, and from my perennial uncertainty as to my own subject position. (What am “I”?) Recently I was thinking about the amazing simplicity with which John the Baptist’s relationship to Jesus is described in the Bible: “He [John] was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light” (John 1:8). A few lines later, the gospel author uses an unusual past form of bear: “John bare witness of him, and cried” (1:15). Though the pun is probably unintentional, that slide from bear to bare derives such power, for me, from the implied metaphor of witness as a physical act: It is a weight you can carry and sometimes a weight you can throw off, leaving the subject (yourself) bare and exposed. Perhaps this idea of baring witness is the logical extension of Forché’s position, offering a beautiful—if impossible—possibility: That of a subjectless perspective, an act of seeing that obliterates the self. 

In Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 1997), Saidiya Hartman claims that there’s an “uncertain line between witness and spectator.” Accordingly, she refuses to reproduce the graphic account of Aunt Hester’s beating from the first chapter of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, first published in 1845. It’s too easy to put such horror into words and so think that you’ve faced up to it. Accounts of extreme hurt may prompt indignation, but Hartman argues that they eventually “immure us to pain by virtue of their familiarity.” That in some sense, to demand “suffering be materialized and evidenced” is more “obscene” than the original torture.

The refusal to type out an act of violence again—to re-witness it—points to a different subject-object relation. It acknowledges that the subject is implicated in what and how they see. And if we care about respecting the suffering of others this needs to be taken into account. Witness carries no moral imperative in itself; the act of seeing is not inherently virtuous. Or you could say, its moral charge lies less in the “evidence” it provides than in how it’s rendered in language. The viewing “I”/eye is a fiction, inasmuch as it cleanly separates the subject from the object. So the job of the writer is not just to choose what to look at, but to work out how to represent the complex relationships embedded in the act of looking.

In an endnote at the back of her book Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (Routledge, 2000), Sara Ahmed argues for a particular reading of Heidegger’s notion of Mitsein (being-with or with-ness): “I would argue that ‘with-ness’ could be theorized as pre-ontological, that is, before one ‘is,’ one is ‘with.’ In other words, with-ness could be theorized as prior to being.”

Reading that makes me think of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s bleak and beautiful poem “I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.” In it, the speaker—or subject—is depressed, crying, cut off from someone he refers to only as “dearest him.” The problem is that though the object of the speaker’s affection isn’t present he isn’t fully absent either. He’s as visible as if he were in front of him, his absence texturing the world. Subject and object are no longer distinct from one another. In such a state, the self is implicated—emotionally and ethically—in the other. It’s impossible to conceive of “being” without “being-with.” Hopkins writes: “With witness I speak this.” In my head that line always reads: “With withness I speak this.”

 

Will Harris is the author of the poetry collection RENDANG (Wesleyan University Press, 2020), which was selected as a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. He has worked in schools and led workshops at the Southbank Centre and currently teaches for the Poetry School. A contributing editor at the Rialto, he lives in London. 

Thumbnail: Nazar Sharafutdinov

Craft Capsule: The Black Bildungsroman

by

Joy Priest

7.20.20

This is no. 66 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things

—1 Corinthians 13:11

At some point while putting together the manuscript that would become my debut poetry collection, Horsepower, I got it into my mind that I was writing a bildungsroman—a bildungsroman in poems. Maybe someone used this term when my poem was up in workshop, or maybe one of my MFA professors suggested it in office hours. Before this point, I’d been talking about it for several years as “an escape narrative,” but it was, specifically, the escape narrative of a child. 

The coming-of-age story, as we know it in the American literary canon, usually depicts a white boy-child—possessed of naïveté and mischief, prone to being punished—who sets off on a literal or figurative journey, during which he is presented with a series of lessons and, through them, reaches a stage of maturity or young adulthood. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer likely comes to mind. 

Originally a German literary genre, the word bildungsroman translates to “novel of education” or “novel of formation.” “Coming of age” is a derivative of this genre, but similarly signals to a process of maturation or the development of a character. This genre was—and still is—seen as a useful way to teach children what “childish things” they should leave behind, to what character and behavior they should aspire. But when the genre developed in the American tradition, it took on America’s subconscious anxieties. 

What has white U.S. society historically seen as “childish”? Are the lessons of the traditional canon useful for everyone? Harmful to some? Not too long ago—and still in some instances and places—adult Black men were referred to as “boy” by white citizens, adult and child alike, and Black people and traditions are often still not seen as “sophisticated.”

As a poet, I spend a lot of time trying to recover what I’ve been encouraged to leave in childhood—imagination and wonder, but also, as a Black person, certain aspects of my identity. Because of this double-consciousness, I’m inclined to peel back the dogma of adulthood, and I have found one of the layers of this education to be an assimilation project. Inherent in this assimilation project is a belief in the superiority of white things: customs, canons, behavior, hairstyles, speaking and writing styles. 

Is a genre in this tradition useful for non-white children if to become an adult in our society is to adopt white customs, while certain features of Black culture (the way we wear our hair or dress or speak or communicate) are seen as “childish” or “unsophisticated”? What is the relationship between Black culture and “professionalism”? What is “sophisticated” literature? What do these standards of adulthood teach Black children about themselves, about what they should aspire to and what they should leave behind? But, more important, what would a Black child’s coming-of-age story reveal or teach us about our society? 

*

Bring on the children, imitate the children. Not childish, but child-like. 

 —“Swagger Jackson’s Revenge,” Jay Electronica

I remember a particular experience in workshop around a poem in my manuscript now titled “Self-Portrait as Disney Princess.” In the poem, the speaker speaks directly to her child-self who is galivanting around the urban-pastoral of her backyard. The direct address performs two functions. The first is description—the speaker describes the scene in which she finds her child-self in memory: “You are green / as the colonial Pippins piling beneath a neighbor’s Newtown.” The second function is recovery—rather than merely describing the fixed scene that the child inhabits, the adult-speaker contextualizes the scene with the wisdom of hindsight, or, in other words, the adult-speaker speaks from the other side of the lessons that have led her to this matured vantage: “Never a child with other children. Dead summer, so dark / The bottoms of your feet look as if you’ve skipped through ash.” 

During the workshop, most of my cohort read the poem as tragic—there was a sense of pity around the child, who they felt was trapped in the household of her racist grandfather. What bothered me the most was their feeling that she was doomed. But one person, another Black woman at the table, recognized the poem’s nuanced, complex emotional tones, which held a simultaneity—survival but also exploration, subjugation but also Black joy. Some of these plot-outcomes and behaviors of the child-speaker might be read as failure via a white canonical understanding of the bildungsroman because some of the necessary lessons and strategies for a Black child’s survival and arrival at adulthood—escape, waywardness, the rejection of a hero or savior complex—directly conflict with the values of a white-supremacist society. 

After this workshop, I began to look at my work-in-progress as part of a distinct genre with its own respective conventions: the Black bildungsroman. During the revision stage, I asked myself: What are some of the distinguishing features characteristic of Black childhood that are illegible in the traditional bildungsroman? What did I want to honor, recover, rescue? 

Once I had this framework, I could transform the work; I could craft what would normally be seen as tragic as triumphant. Escape could be skilled and elusive. Waywardness could be aspirational. The Black child didn’t have to return to society and the status quo, fitting in better. The Black child could be celebrated as a perpetual runaway. 

In the Black bildungsroman, the narrative arc does not result in the child arriving at maturity or adulthood because the Black child lacks the freedom to come of age naively, and must, from the beginning, possess a wisdom of the conflicts and dangers inherent to adulthood, namely the violence that results from a societal creed of white superiority. The Black bildungsroman presents an arc at the end of which the Black child has become adept at surviving such a society. Rather than a “novel of education” or a “novel of formation,” the Black bildungsroman is a collection of preservation or a collection of survival, the preservation and survival of the Black child in the world created by the poet, and in the sensibility and memory of the adult-speaker. 

*

When I was a child, I spoke not, I learned to understand the adults around me, to think like them, I lived with an adult’s awareness: but when I became an adult, I went back to rescue the child, to encourage the child, to honor the child. 

 

Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower, which won the 2019 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press in September. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in numerous publications, including BOAAT, Connotation Press, Four Way Review, espnW, Gulf Coast, Mississippi Review, and Poetry Northwest, and have been anthologized in The Louisville Anthology (Belt Publishing, September 2020), A Measure of Belonging: Writers of Color on the New American South (Hub City Press, October 2020) and Best New Poets 2014, 2016, and 2019. A doctoral student in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston, Priest has also been a journalist, a theater attendant, a waitress, and a fast food worker. She has facilitated writing workshops and arbitration programs with adult and juvenile incarcerated women, and has taught composition, rhetoric, comedy, and African American arts and culture at the university level.

Craft Capsule: The Black Bildungsroman

by

Joy Priest

7.20.20

This is no. 66 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things

—1 Corinthians 13:11

At some point while putting together the manuscript that would become my debut poetry collection, Horsepower, I got it into my mind that I was writing a bildungsroman—a bildungsroman in poems. Maybe someone used this term when my poem was up in workshop, or maybe one of my MFA professors suggested it in office hours. Before this point, I’d been talking about it for several years as “an escape narrative,” but it was, specifically, the escape narrative of a child. 

The coming-of-age story, as we know it in the American literary canon, usually depicts a white boy-child—possessed of naïveté and mischief, prone to being punished—who sets off on a literal or figurative journey, during which he is presented with a series of lessons and, through them, reaches a stage of maturity or young adulthood. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer likely comes to mind. 

Originally a German literary genre, the word bildungsroman translates to “novel of education” or “novel of formation.” “Coming of age” is a derivative of this genre, but similarly signals to a process of maturation or the development of a character. This genre was—and still is—seen as a useful way to teach children what “childish things” they should leave behind, to what character and behavior they should aspire. But when the genre developed in the American tradition, it took on America’s subconscious anxieties. 

What has white U.S. society historically seen as “childish”? Are the lessons of the traditional canon useful for everyone? Harmful to some? Not too long ago—and still in some instances and places—adult Black men were referred to as “boy” by white citizens, adult and child alike, and Black people and traditions are often still not seen as “sophisticated.”

As a poet, I spend a lot of time trying to recover what I’ve been encouraged to leave in childhood—imagination and wonder, but also, as a Black person, certain aspects of my identity. Because of this double-consciousness, I’m inclined to peel back the dogma of adulthood, and I have found one of the layers of this education to be an assimilation project. Inherent in this assimilation project is a belief in the superiority of white things: customs, canons, behavior, hairstyles, speaking and writing styles. 

Is a genre in this tradition useful for non-white children if to become an adult in our society is to adopt white customs, while certain features of Black culture (the way we wear our hair or dress or speak or communicate) are seen as “childish” or “unsophisticated”? What is the relationship between Black culture and “professionalism”? What is “sophisticated” literature? What do these standards of adulthood teach Black children about themselves, about what they should aspire to and what they should leave behind? But, more important, what would a Black child’s coming-of-age story reveal or teach us about our society? 

*

Bring on the children, imitate the children. Not childish, but child-like. 

 —“Swagger Jackson’s Revenge,” Jay Electronica

I remember a particular experience in workshop around a poem in my manuscript now titled “Self-Portrait as Disney Princess.” In the poem, the speaker speaks directly to her child-self who is galivanting around the urban-pastoral of her backyard. The direct address performs two functions. The first is description—the speaker describes the scene in which she finds her child-self in memory: “You are green / as the colonial Pippins piling beneath a neighbor’s Newtown.” The second function is recovery—rather than merely describing the fixed scene that the child inhabits, the adult-speaker contextualizes the scene with the wisdom of hindsight, or, in other words, the adult-speaker speaks from the other side of the lessons that have led her to this matured vantage: “Never a child with other children. Dead summer, so dark / The bottoms of your feet look as if you’ve skipped through ash.” 

During the workshop, most of my cohort read the poem as tragic—there was a sense of pity around the child, who they felt was trapped in the household of her racist grandfather. What bothered me the most was their feeling that she was doomed. But one person, another Black woman at the table, recognized the poem’s nuanced, complex emotional tones, which held a simultaneity—survival but also exploration, subjugation but also Black joy. Some of these plot-outcomes and behaviors of the child-speaker might be read as failure via a white canonical understanding of the bildungsroman because some of the necessary lessons and strategies for a Black child’s survival and arrival at adulthood—escape, waywardness, the rejection of a hero or savior complex—directly conflict with the values of a white-supremacist society. 

After this workshop, I began to look at my work-in-progress as part of a distinct genre with its own respective conventions: the Black bildungsroman. During the revision stage, I asked myself: What are some of the distinguishing features characteristic of Black childhood that are illegible in the traditional bildungsroman? What did I want to honor, recover, rescue? 

Once I had this framework, I could transform the work; I could craft what would normally be seen as tragic as triumphant. Escape could be skilled and elusive. Waywardness could be aspirational. The Black child didn’t have to return to society and the status quo, fitting in better. The Black child could be celebrated as a perpetual runaway. 

In the Black bildungsroman, the narrative arc does not result in the child arriving at maturity or adulthood because the Black child lacks the freedom to come of age naively, and must, from the beginning, possess a wisdom of the conflicts and dangers inherent to adulthood, namely the violence that results from a societal creed of white superiority. The Black bildungsroman presents an arc at the end of which the Black child has become adept at surviving such a society. Rather than a “novel of education” or a “novel of formation,” the Black bildungsroman is a collection of preservation or a collection of survival, the preservation and survival of the Black child in the world created by the poet, and in the sensibility and memory of the adult-speaker. 

*

When I was a child, I spoke not, I learned to understand the adults around me, to think like them, I lived with an adult’s awareness: but when I became an adult, I went back to rescue the child, to encourage the child, to honor the child. 

 

Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower, which won the 2019 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press in September. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in numerous publications, including BOAAT, Connotation Press, Four Way Review, espnW, Gulf Coast, Mississippi Review, and Poetry Northwest, and have been anthologized in The Louisville Anthology (Belt Publishing, September 2020), A Measure of Belonging: Writers of Color on the New American South (Hub City Press, October 2020) and Best New Poets 2014, 2016, and 2019. A doctoral student in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston, Priest has also been a journalist, a theater attendant, a waitress, and a fast food worker. She has facilitated writing workshops and arbitration programs with adult and juvenile incarcerated women, and has taught composition, rhetoric, comedy, and African American arts and culture at the university level.

Craft Capsule: Possible and Impossible

by

Will Harris

9.7.20

This is no. 71 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

In her essay “Erasing the Signs of Labor Under the Signs of Happiness,” poet and translator Sophie Collins takes issue with the idea that translation work should always be filled with “joy.” Despite often feeling excited by translating, she writes that the process also “evokes feelings of uncertainty and self-consciousness, and—perhaps more frequently than might be imagined—breakdown and frustration.” I don’t translate but I can sympathize with this experience, which I associate with reading and writing. Not having grown up in a bookish household, a part of me—however much I read or write—still finds books hard, inscrutable things. And if hard things allow for a kind of pleasure, it’s a pleasure laced with darker feelings of failure, apathy, and self-doubt. 

At a Zoom event in May, Sophie and I chatted about a poet and critic we both admire: Veronica Forrest-Thomson—a writer who’s helped both of us think about how to read and understand poems. Over the last few months, I’ve been running an online course based around Forrest-Thomson’s Poetic Artifice, a barbed, idiosyncratic monograph published after her death in 1975 at the age of twenty-seven. It begins with a question: “How do poems work?” For Forrest-Thomson, one way that poems work is by refusing normal sense. In doing so, they bring to the surface what she calls the “nonmeaningful aspects” of language: sound patterns, echoes, connotations. These aren’t “nonmeaningful” in the sense of being meaningless; they’re just not what we might focus on in a message from a friend or when reading an article—in those situations, we glean a text for information. In a poem, the language of information is being put to a different use. It gleans us: We find scraps of words, memories, and desires that collect and connect in unknown ways in our preverbal imagination.

This is why Forrest-Thomson reacts against what she calls “the tendency to make the already-known or already-thought the point of arrival, to make poetry an obscure and figured statement which one understands by translating it into the already-known.” One of the things that put me off poetry for a long time was the idea that poems were really saying something simple, but using “obscure and figured” language to do it. So the reader’s job was to “translate” the poem into normal, “already-known” sense, in the process showing off their supposed intelligence. 

Forrest-Thomson writes about a line by the French surrealist Max Jacob, “Dahlia! dahlia! que Dalila lia” (Dahlia! Dahlia! that Delilah tied together), which joyfully defies translation into “the already-known.” In her words, “Our pleasure in the line comes from a realization that what seems, at first, a complete surrender of the conscious mind to an impersonal network of meaningless verbal resemblances, in fact reveals the latent intentionality of poetic language.” We surrender to the poem, but not passively. Instead, we become part of the meaning-making process, plugged into the poem’s play of connotations and “verbal resemblances.” For example, Jacob draws our attention the pun and resemblance between the French verb “lia” and “dahlia.” Lia (or lier) means “to tie up,” or figuratively “to bind.” The poet’s role, by extension, is to bind and loosen the threads between sound and sense.

*

Forrest-Thomson’s thinking on the pleasure (or joy) of reading led me back to her own poems, tracing the point at which her theories blur into her writing. I’ve thought a lot about two lines, in particular, from her poem “Cordelia, or ‘A Poem Should Not Mean, But Be’”: 

Waste not and want not while you’re here
The possibles of joy.

I love the way Forrest-Thomson repurposes the sanctimony of “waste not and want not,” raising the stakes by adding “while you’re here” (which brings out the morbidity of “waste”), and then complicating it with that incredible phrase: “The possibles of joy.” It feels like an anti-homiletic homily. And, as in much of Forrest-Thomson’s work, it’s a parable about how to read poems.

On the one hand, “waste not and want not” suggests a certain frugality (save up your pennies, make every moment count). On the other hand, “possibles” indicates profusion, both as a casual synonym for alternatives and as a philosophical term referring to possible worlds. Forrest-Thomson seems to argue that we shouldn’t waste joy. Which is to say, we shouldn’t deny the “latent intentionality” of the poem—its “possibles”—by reducing it to joyless paraphrase. Even as it might prove impossible to discuss a poem without curtailing it through description, it’s still crucial to recognize that the poem’s “I” is a voice licensed to perform numerous, contradictory statements.

I connect those lines in “Cordelia” with these from Sylvia Plath’s “Purdah,” which is the last poem Forrest-Thomson discusses in Poetic Artifice, part of a final, passionate argument in favor of poems where “the ‘I’ is clothed in its negation,” not asserting its “already-known” self on the reader.

… I 
Revolve in my
Sheath of impossibles,

Priceless and quiet

Plath’s speaker—like the one in “Cordelia”—takes pleasure in being “enigmatical”, constantly deflecting and undermining her self-image. The jagged line breaks after “I” and “my” draw out this sense of the self coming briefly into view before disappearing again. Elsewhere in the poem, she writes, “My visibilities hide. / I gleam like a mirror.” 

I can’t help but read Forrest-Thomson’s “possibles of joy” and Plath’s “sheath of impossibles” as two ways of saying something similar: The “I” is at once a series of open “possibles,” capable of being read and reread, and a series of “impossibles,” incapable of being finally understood. Maybe this gets at what makes reading poems so frustrating sometimes. They’re plural and profuse, possible and impossible. But acknowledging this frustration—the fact that poems often fill me with a sense of failure—also affirms why I go back to them. Uncertainty and frustration aren’t opposed to pleasure; they’re bound up in it.

 

Will Harris is the author of the poetry collection RENDANG (Wesleyan University Press, 2020), which was selected as a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. He has worked in schools and led workshops at the Southbank Centre and currently teaches for the Poetry School. A contributing editor at the Rialto, he lives in London. 

Craft Capsule: The Cinema Factory

by

Joy Priest

8.3.20

This is no. 67 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

What is “craft” anyway? Google says: an activity involving skill or technique in making things. If the activity is poetry, you might think about how you deploy figurative language, the choices you make around form and structure, and so on. But because I come out of a tradition that orients me as a trickster to the status quo, I often avoid formal craft “rules” and rely mostly on instinct when drafting a poem. I wrote poetry before I encountered “formal” craft techniques, and in this “amateur hour” period of poetry writing, in this private activity, I developed these instincts about what sounded good or what worked. “The objective is not to transmit my tricks to you, it’s for you to become the trick factory for yourself,” says my friend, poet and educator Tongo Eisen-Martin. Sure, you can sometimes borrow a trick factory—like that used clarinet workbook you checked out for a semester in middle school band, until you could play the basic tunes—but eventually you have to build your own oeuvre. 

For the most part, I’m not conscious of my trick factory until the revision stage, and I mostly focus my technique on the line: What can I fit onto a single line? Where to break? What can I juxtapose on the same line to suggest, like a subliminal layer, the revelation of the poem? When I went to put together my debut collection, Horsepower, I realized I had yet to develop a trick factory for this level of the process—curating an entire collection. Before you put together a collection, craft is something that happens at the level of a single poem. What is best for that poem? What does that poem need or what is it trying to do? When revising your manuscript, however, you begin to think about the poems not as individual units but as part of a larger work. How do you order the poems in a way that constructs a cohesive whole? How does a single poem need to be revised to serve the arc of the collection? 

My teacher Nikky Finney had to prompt me to consider formal craft at this level and stage of revision: “What tense is this?” she asked spreading the pages of a few carefully selected poems from the collection across her office table. “Future perfect?” When I went back to look at the organizing tense in each poem, I realized I had made these choices intuitively, and now they appeared to be rendered in an arbitrary manner—too arbitrary. Nikky suggested that I try revising all the poems set in the speaker’s childhood in the same tense in order to create a reliable system that signaled to the reader where they were in the story. 

As I worked on this system and began to order the poems, the formation of a nonlinear narrative materialized, a cinematic experience. I began to think of curating the collection like one would a film, splicing and cutting, pasting scenes together, camera cutaways and zoom-ins. I’d been reading Kara Keeling’s The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, The Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Duke University Press, 2007), and I’d fallen in love with the concept of the Black Femme figure—where she might appear or, commonly, be overlooked in mainstream frames. Could my poems be scenes? Frames in which the Black girl-child appeared, rescued from the margins? A collection of preservation and survival, a way to honor Black childhood?

Nikky’s suggestion to focus on tense helped me begin to see how I could build this cinematic experience within the collection. But I also quickly noticed that there was more than tense at play. The nonlinear narrative arc of these poems was also informed by point of view and address—a whole complex of narrative elements. I realized that I could select from this complex in order to strategically release information—important information about the passage of time, the relationship between the physical setting and the speaker’s emotional state, and the relationship between the adult speaker and her child self. 

To give an example of this complex of narrative elements: I realized that the several poems Nikky had isolated were all narrated by a child speaker in present tense, but with omniscient foresight. The effect is the speaker speaking as her child self in first-person “I,” but with details for the reader that the child could not know in the moment the memory captures. 

In the middle of the title poem, “Horsepower,” the speaker tells us: 

Beyond the spires 
is a larger world I do not know 
exists. A mile West, in my line 
of vision, is a family 
I do not know 
I have. 

The child speaker in this memory cannot know that this family existed at the time of this setting. In fact, she tells you she doesn’t know. What this communicates to us is that it is actually the adult speaker talking, in a kind of omniscient first-person as her child-self. The poem could’ve easily been: “Beyond the spires / is a larger world she does not know exists…a family / she does not know / she has,”—a close third-person narrator, typical of fiction. 

In another poem rendered in this way, the speaker recalls her own birth: “I am born in the season of color-blocking and crack, / in the dawn of the Reagan era.” I am rather than I was. Such a configuration—first-person present tense—puts the reader or listener, to whom the story is addressed, immediately down into the scene, making the layer of memory—explicitly pronounced in first-person past tense—indetectable. Via this complex, the speaker is also able to slip in important assessments and analyses of the sociopolitical elements of the setting—something that might feel inauthentic in a young child’s voice. 

In understanding how these omniscient child poems were working, and the patterns that some of the other poems obeyed, I developed my own technique, or to borrow Eisen-Martin’s metaphor: I developed my own trick—the cinema factory by which the collection ran. 

What craft elements will you use to assemble your poetry collection? What tools will you use to inform the narrative? Will you move along a progressive line, or will there be alternate paths, cutaways and flashes, trick mirrors?

 

Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower, which won the 2019 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press in September. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in numerous publications, including BOAAT, Connotation Press, Four Way Review, espnW, Gulf Coast, Mississippi Review, and Poetry Northwest, and have been anthologized in The Louisville Anthology (Belt Publishing, September 2020), A Measure of Belonging: Writers of Color on the New American South (Hub City Press, October 2020) and Best New Poets 2014, 2016, and 2019. A doctoral student in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston, Priest has also been a journalist, a theater attendant, a waitress, and a fast food worker. She has facilitated writing workshops and arbitration programs with adult and juvenile incarcerated women, and has taught composition, rhetoric, comedy, and African American arts and culture at the university level.

Thumbnail: Jeremy Yap

Craft Capsule: Revising Folktales and Myths

by

Jenny Bhatt

10.5.20

This is no. 75 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

Archetypes from folktales, fairy tales, and myths appear again and again in a wide range of contemporary stories and genres. But even if they are familiar, there is a sense that each archetype is a kind of blank slate: We can read our own interpretations into them both as readers and writers. Each time one is retold, new colors, shapes, and shadows are filled in to suit more contemporary tastes. Each new version gives us, beyond a fresh context, a way to understand our present world through an ancient one.

Why are writers of various stripes drawn to the tradition of revisionism, of retelling or subverting these age-old stories? First, folktales and myths hold a pervasive and persuasive charm because we’ve heard them from an early age. They are cultural, historical, and aesthetic artifacts passed down from generation to generation. Second, we often need to recast older works because the stereotypes and clichés that we are willing to accept or the things that need to be explained have changed. So revisionism helps us keep these stories alive and relevant for our times. Third, we get a certain satisfaction from working with the specific forms and techniques generally employed by such stories. Beyond the pleasure and play involved, we’re also adding to time-honored and beloved literary traditions.

For some of the stories in my collection, Each of Us Killers, I reached back to Gujarati folklore and Hindu myths. Gujarat is a west-coast state in India that over the centuries has seen a regular influx of travelers and immigrants from other places with ancient cultures, such as Greece, Persia, East Africa, and Arabia. Gujarati folklore and language absorbed and adapted aspects of those cultures, meaning many indigenous stories began to incorporate new traditions, rituals, and beliefs. In a similar manner, I’ve participated in the ongoing revisionism tradition by integrating contemporary themes and responding to or subverting older ones.

Here is how I have observed, classified, and approached three revisionism traditions:

Retelling: This keeps the main plot and story elements but uses different forms or points of view to explore new themes. The goal is to bring something old and something new together, causing both recognition and surprise. For instance, “Separation Notice” in my collection is a straight retelling about the Hindu god, Vishnu. While I’ve stayed true to the widely accepted myths, I’ve explored new themes by using the epistolary form and a formal business voice with a celestial (as opposed to a human) resources manager’s point of view.

Adaptation: This preserves most of the original plot but differs in structural elements like the setting, frame, or time period to complicate or raise questions about the original’s contemporary relevance. My story “Journey to a Stepwell” includes a Gujarati folktale I heard often from my mother in childhood. I never cared for its misogynistic morality so I added plot elements and a contemporary frame. And I subverted the ending.

Spinoff: This tells a new story centering a minor character from the original story. Other characters may recur but in different ways. In my story “The Waiting,” a dead wife’s ghost narrates the story about her grieving husband. In Indian folklore, many stories feature dead lovers or spouses haunting their beloveds because of “unfinished business.” Such stories typically focus on the one who is alive and how they are driven to deal with that business. My version complicates all of that, centering the emotions and concerns of the dead over those of the living. 

For any such work to stand out, it needs to accomplish at least one of these three things. First, the revised version has to colonize the original to the extent that readers internalize the revised version as easily as the original. For example, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which was based in large part on ancient Greek myths about Prometheus, is as memorable as its predecessor. Second, the revised version needs to defamiliarize or dismantle stereotypes so that our understanding and interaction with classic identities evolve too. For example, much of Angela Carter’s 1979 collection, The Bloody Chamber, which draws heavily on fairy tales and folktales, gives us new ways of looking at the old stereotype of the oppressed or imprisoned woman seeking liberation. And, finally, the revised version must engage with and broaden discussions around key evolving socio-political narratives of our times. I admire, for instance, the feminist revisions of the Odyssey in Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad and Madeline Miller’s Circe.

Complex as all this may sound, these simple classic stories remain endless troves of profound truths and pleasures that writers can discover with each revision.

 

Jenny Bhatt is a writer, translator, and literary critic. She is the host of the Desi Books podcast and the author of the short story collection Each of Us Killers (7.13 Books, 2020). Her literary translation of Gujarati writer Dhumketu’s best short fiction is forthcoming from HarperCollins India in late 2020. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Literary Hub, LongreadsPoets & Writers Magazine, the Millions, Electric Literature, the Rumpus, and Kenyon Review. Having lived and worked in India, England, Germany, Scotland, and various parts of the United States, she now lives in a suburb of Dallas.

Craft Capsule: On Nightmares

by

Chen Chen

11.9.20

This is no. 78 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

1.
A nightmare: realizing I need to restructure this essay, again, and it’s due tomorrow. 

A nightmare: COVID-19 cases on the rise again all across the country. 

A nightmare: how often essayists, especially poets-turned-essayists, like to remind everyone that essay comes from the French verb essayer, meaning to try, to attempt, to test. 

Not a nightmare: I love the try, the attempt. 

A nightmare: the test. The test freaks me out. 

A nightmare: how long it’s taken in the United States for COVID tests to become more accessible. 

Why do I prefer the nightmare of being dreadfully stuck, working on a poem, over the nightmare of being dreadfully stuck, working on an essay? 

A collective, ongoing nightmare: the pandemic. 

2.
Working on my essays for this series has been both a welcome distraction and (as I knew would happen) a dive into the deep end of my anxieties. The process feels nightmarish because my preferred method of exploring and articulating craft ideas is writing poems (and it seems I’ve gotten to the point in my poetry writing where I can befriend the dread, the stuck-ness). Or through conversation: engaging with students and connecting with friends, all of which happens these days over the shared nightmare known as Zoom. 

Also, I hate paragraphs. The blocky-ness of paragraphs makes me anxious, like I’m trapped in a box and, in the essay form, can only move from one box to another. I feel I have to make sense. Too much sense. I like paragraphs in prose poems, because I’m freer to do—I know better how to do—weird things with sentences. Or not write sentences at all. 

I think of Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey (Wave Books, 2012), a collection of essays based on lectures she was required to give as a teacher—at one point, Ruefle describes lectures as “bad dreams.” Ruefle has commented frequently on the fact that this one volume on poetry has far outsold her books of poetry; that people would rather read about poetry, than read a poem. That for many, poetry remains a nightmare. 

Poetry, to me, is the best dreaming. 

A form of breaking out of the Zoom room or the chain of paragraphs, into an expanse of fresh blooms,1 a field bursting with sunflowers. 

Still I’m drawn to essays for how they document a thought process, an attempt to think clearly and deeply. And I love good essays on poetry. I love Madness, Rack, and Honey. I’d like to write craft essays like Ruefle’s. I’m not sure that is possible, given our very different brains. But maybe my brain can do something else and figure out ways to enjoy writing an essay, or at least dislike it less. 

Could it be that my fear of the essay draws me to it? I’m afraid I won’t write as well in this genre, but the challenge entices. I’m nervous to delve into new subjects and discover scary truths, but surprise is also one of the key reasons I write anything. After all, in poetry it’s usually the door I don’t want to open that leads me to the room I most need to investigate.2

3.
I’ve long wanted to examine nightmares in my poetry. I’m intrigued by how fear can act as a signpost on the path to truth; how terror can mean getting closer to a complicated reality. I’ve written poems based on dreams—wild dreams that contain some frightening revelation at their core—but I have yet to write a poem based on a straight-up nightmare. Specifically, I’ve been itching to write a poem about my two recurring nightmares involving high school French teachers. 

One nightmare stars my sophomore year instructor, my favorite one, as a highly trained assassin. Her weapon of choice: one of my mother’s beloved Chinese cleavers. Somehow she manages very clean kills. In the nightmare I admire her and am also terrified. Sometimes I am the target, for getting a B on a quiz, say, and before the final blow she reminds me, “Cravate is a feminine noun, despite it referring to men’s neckties! It’s LA cravate, UNE cravate, SA cravate!” If I experience this again, I hope I remember to respond, “But anyone can wear a necktie!” Other times the nightmare gets loftier and the target is a corrupt politician, usually French. One time I am the corrupt French politician. 

I haven’t had this nightmare in a while, and I miss it—perhaps because 2020 is a global waking nightmare. What sleeping nightmare of mine could compare with Trump, COVID, and the police? I hesitate to type it out, but I miss this assassin nightmare because I wish there were worse consequences for the Trump administration. I wish there were consequences at all. As someone invested in abolition, I can’t advocate for prison. I have to imagine and help build other types of justice and accountability, ones that don’t rely on punishment and vengeance. At the same time, the part of me that misses the assassin nightmare would love for something nightmarish to visit these leaders who’ve abandoned all duty to the people. 

Another part of me misses this nightmare because seeing my mother’s cleaver in it is like seeing a part of her. I also associate high school language study with her because she teaches Mandarin at that level. I haven’t seen my mother since this pandemic was declared a pandemic. She’s immunocompromised and has been taking every precaution. Every call with her begins with her asking, “Have you been staying at home?” and ends with her command, “Keep staying at home.” My father, who never texts, texted me last week to say, “Avoid travel to any hot spots,” while travel ads pop up on my TV. Back in March my partner’s father was quarantined in a hospital in upstate New York after experiencing COVID-like symptoms. It was four days, but it felt like a year before the test results came back: negative. 

I check the news and check the news. I check social media, texts. I pick up the phone. The friends of friends with the virus. The friends with the virus. 

4.
Perhaps my fear of writing essays has to do with how my brain always associates the act with an academic assignment, a requirement, a grammar test that I might fail. It doesn’t help that so far most of the essays I write have in fact been assigned to me. They do help pay the bills. I do love a prompt. But is it, on some level, masochism? Is all my writing, in some way, a testing to which I subject myself, over and over? Am I perpetually trying to win a French teacher’s approval? 

The other French teacher nightmare goes like this: On an otherwise blissfully uneventful day, I receive a letter from my high school. I know something is amiss before even opening it. For a long time I just stare at it; it stares back from my coffee table. Then I open it. And it says because I never finished my senior year French project, I never actually passed high school. Therefore I have to return to school, where this time I will also reside. The second I step back into that memory-drenched building, I am met by my senior year French instructor. She looks me over then says in the most disappointed yet unsurprised way, “Bonjour.” 

What terrifies me in this dream is not the disruption of everyday life (by a cleaver-wielding assassin like in my other nightmare), but the resurrection of days I’ve long put behind me, a time and a self I’d rather not reinhabit. Not that high school was all stuffy, all busy work. No, I had many brilliant teachers and classmates, many life-changing experiences. This nightmare is the nightmare that my life didn’t really change. What I fear is going back to school but never learning, never growing. 

What I love is the school of poetry, which invites me to play anew and wonder differently and try strange things—to test in the sense of to experiment. To test in the sense of encountering nerve-wracking challenges, but trusting that the fear is a sign of one’s hunger for and effort toward real growth. Maybe one day I will experience essay writing more like that: an experiment in good fear. 

5.
A poem I find instructive for writing about nightmares is “The Dream”3 by Aracelis Girmay, one of my former professors, whose work continues to nourish as well as push me. Indeed, Girmay’s writing always reminds me how poems themselves can be the best poetry teachers. I also return to this one because it focuses on a mother, the figure beside or behind the French teacher of my first nightmare. Here is the startling start of “The Dream”: 

Last night, all night
the dream, the dead
mother, my small sister,
tiny, her mouth
over my shoulder
(screaming) like a knapsack
when she heard the news,
& my brother playing
the stereo. I howled
like the coyotes; myself.

The poem then shifts from the howl to a sunlit, tranquil scene, the way dreams can, suddenly and completely. “The Nightmare” ultimately wouldn’t be the most fitting title for this poem. The word dream can encompass good ones and bad. That said, nightmare can contain the abject as well as the gorgeous (my favorite horror movies have stellar aesthetics). My French teacher nightmares feature both terror and tenderness—fear of disappointing the mother/teacher figure, but also admiration for her and a longing for a time when I could, on a regular basis, talk with her in person. Rereading Girmay’s poem I realize that at the heart of the poem I want to write are questions like: How do fear and affection sit side by side? Why do I connect French teachers and mothers in this manner? 

This is what I mean by poems being the best poetry teachers: They offer an array of techniques to emulate, yes, but more fundamentally and expansively, they conjure up uncomfortable questions and encourage bewildering (sometimes frightening) leaps in imagination.

6.
One week, feeling particularly defeated by this essay, I write a draft of my poem “The Nightmare.” It reads ridiculous, then not, which seems like how a lot of my writing goes. I’d like one day to write a poem that shifts from not one bit ridiculous to utterly. Still, this poem is some new occurrence. Every truly new poem4 is its own strange school. 

I revise and revise. The poem teaches me about how my recurring nightmares are linked to the world’s shared nightmare of COVID-19. How afraid I am, as a teacher myself now, to be back this fall; how fortunate I feel that my university has allowed me to teach online; how much I miss teaching in person; how angry I am that not every teacher “gets to” do this. 

I revise and revise the ending of this essay. I’m afraid of being so direct and so pared down in my diction. But I know from poetry that it’s often when I’m trying the least to be “poetic” that the most charged truths emerge. 

Truths like: I’m afraid my students will get sick. I’m afraid of losing a student, more than one student. I think I should be more afraid of getting very sick too. I miss my mother, who, as a high school Mandarin teacher, knows that school is more than a building, but misses her classroom. I’m relieved she has the option to teach online as well. I miss many of my high school teachers and hope they are safe and finding ways to rest. 

To dream, both literally and creatively. To speak back to the nightmares, both personal and collective.

 

ENDNOTES

1. A beautiful nightmare: how much poets adore the word bloom.
2. In life, I know better than to go exploring attics, basements, or other favorite hangout spots of vengeful ghosts and demons. 
3. From
Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions, 2011).
4. I mean new mainly in terms of process; new to the writer. The big hope is that the poem will then do something new for a reader.

 

Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017)which was longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry and won the Publishing Triangle Thom Gunn Award. His work has appeared in many publications, including Poetry and the 2015 and 2019 editions of The Best American Poetry. He has received a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Kundiman and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at Brandeis University as the Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence. 

Thumbnail: Chuttersnap

Craft Capsule: Night Call

by

Alex Dimitrov

6.7.21

This is no. 100 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

New York’s streets are everywhere in my poems. In February of 2014 I used the city quite literally. It was for a project called Night Call. The idea was to travel to strangers and read them poems in bed, or in the most intimate space of their homes. For many people this ended up being the kitchen or living room. For one guy, his balcony in Tribeca. Mostly though, strangers walked me right into their bedrooms and offered me a glimpse of their lives.

I’ve lived in New York for more than ten years. It still feels like the city doesn’t need me or know that I’m here. And to be honest, I like that. I’m a writer who thrives off resistance. That kind of pushback and being ignored excites me. In Night Call, I wanted to fuse that feeling with the intimacy of going over to someone’s apartment. Being in a person’s space is often more intimate than sleeping with them. It’s an alluring exchange: people showing you where they spend the majority of their lives. The poem is also an exchange. It’s like showing you a map to the interior though not the interior itself. The poem, to me, is a conversation between people.

I announced Night Call on social media and offered to do readings for anyone who didn’t know me. That was the catch, they had to be total strangers. They could be in any borough and had the choice of four separate Sundays on which we could meet. I’d leave my apartment around eight in the evening with poems and my phone. Nothing more. Maybe a pack of cigarettes (though I was trying to quit). Sometimes I didn’t know the gender of the person I was going to read to (based on their name) and I didn’t care either. I took the N and the R and the 6 and the B trains. Most of the readings were quick. Twenty or twenty-five minutes. Other times I wouldn’t leave someone’s apartment until two or three in the morning and I’d cab back, exhausted and exhilarated both. People offered me drinks, told me stories about their childhoods, affairs, the death of their parents. They took me up to their roofs, made me coffee, showed me things they had written or painted. One stranger cooked me dinner and told me she regretted both of her marriages. “Don’t get married,” she said. “There are more interesting things to do with people.” I’ll never forget the way she kept adjusting a silver pendant around her neck.

At the time I had a nine-to-five job and I’m not sure how I got up on those Monday mornings. Several major media outlets asked to cover Night Call but I declined. I’ve never written or talked about it before. It was private. My interest was to open up a new space between the reader and the poet and between the reader and the poem. I wanted to demystify both. I wanted people, in the privacy of their beds, to encounter the poem like a bedtime story (being read to having been one of the only pleasures of my childhood).

The poems I read were from drafts of my second book, Together and by Ourselves. The strangers in Night Call were the first people to hear it. It’s my favorite book I’ve written and my most personal, too. In some ways I wrote it to survive the change in an important relationship. It’s amazing the things people shared with me when I read them those poems. We usually sat across from each other on top of the bedspread, sometimes about one or two arm-lengths apart, sometimes for long stretches of time, often in silence.

For about a month, in the dead of winter, I went to the Village and Queens and Brooklyn, and almost to Staten Island once but it was too late at that point. Some people I read to ended up becoming my friends. I remember even those I haven’t seen again, which is most of them. I remember what they told me about their lives and I remember their faces. The poem is, of course, a place to remember. It keeps people’s voices and things right there, outside time. And those first hours after midnight, when Night Call would often take place, they feel outside time to me also. It’s a beautiful illusion. The imagination is the only real freedom. That’s what Night Call helped me remember. I had forgotten it too.

 

Alex Dimitrov is the author of three books of poems, including Love and Other Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2021), as well as the chapbook American Boys (Floating Wolf Quarterly, 2012). His work has been published in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Paris Review, and Poetry. He was previously the senior content editor at the Academy of American Poets, where he edited the Poem-a-Day series and American Poets. He has taught creative writing at Princeton University, Columbia University, and New York University, among other institutions. With Dorothea Lasky, he is the coauthor of Astro Poets: Your Guides to the Zodiac (Flatiron Books, 2019). Dimitrov lives in New York City.

Thumbnail: Guillaume Técher

Craft Capsule: What’s So Funny?

by

Kristen Arnett

4.26.21

This is no. 96 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I do not consider myself a craft expert, but I do consider myself an aficionado of the dumb stuff that makes me laugh. Television plots centered on easily solved miscommunications? Check. Dogs that look like they’re smiling? Oh yeah. Writing that asks me to unpack the joke, repackage it, and then try to resell it as a brand-new product? Oh baby, absolutely yes.

There is something compelling about the standard joke format. What is the “standard” joke, you might ask? The best way to describe it is to consider the Dad Joke. Think of puns and silly wordplay. Or the Man Walks Into a Bar format. It’s the knock-knock joke your weird uncle tells at a family barbeque, one you wind up telling your kids years later. It’s the joke that gets modified with each retelling. Its primary purpose is simply that: retelling.

How many ways can you write the joke and still get a laugh?

For example, when I was growing up, my family inherited an ancient computer from my elderly aunt. She had managed to download a virus before gifting it to us, so its main use became listening to an animated bird do an abbreviated stand-up routine. Pete the Repeat Parrot fluttered in vibrant green-pink-yellow, squawking his fool head off, desperate to tell you his one and only zinger. Here is that joke:

“Pete and Repeat sat on a fence. Pete fell off. Who was left?”

Obviously, the answer here (and the joke itself) is found in the Repeat. But the humor came from the trajectory of the experience: It was funny at first because hey, it’s an unexpected joke. After a while, it became funny because our parents got so angry every time the bird popped up and disrupted their work. Further down the line, it was funny for a different reason entirely: The joke embedded itself in the language of our family. “Stop being such a Pete the Repeat,” I’d say when my brother was being especially annoying. The joke expanded, more fascinating than the original. It became its own story and contained its own plot trajectory.

I think about this a lot in my work. How can I repackage the initial premise of a joke in more colorful wrapping and offer it up to the reader as something brand-new? Gifting them the same bit, but a different experience of it? Often this means I need to situationally experience jokes for the first time as my characters experience them. Humor is subjective; it requires background to understand how any person would receive something as funny. As I write, I understand that even if the joke isn’t funny to the characters in the scene, it retains humor for the reader.

Another example: the scene in Rebecca Dinerstein Knight’s novel Hex (Viking, 2020) in which a large mattress is unexpectedly delivered during a dinner party. It’s left awkwardly on the entryway rug and no one knows what to do with it. There’s the joke setup. Later on, a guest at the dinner party exits the entryway bathroom and trips over the mattress, which was not there when he initially entered. That is a use of the mattress in a different comedic way, yet it is still the same joke: weird mattress where it shouldn’t be. The party continues along with the mattress, which gets used as the site of further hilarity. There are drunken secrets told on it, even an impromptu karaoke dance session occurs on its quilted top. Same joke, repackaged and retold to great and hilarious effect.

When considering how humor can sit inside fiction, perhaps imagine it as the same strange and unexpected body wearing different disguises to a costume event. If you can get the joke to put on a fake mustache and successfully reenter the party they have already been kicked out of, perhaps it is worth letting them stick around a while longer. Let them spike the punch. See what other kind of mischief they can get into. I bet it is worth repeating.

 

Kristen Arnett is a queer writer based in Florida. She is the author of the novel Mostly Dead Things (Tin House, 2019), which was a New York Times best-seller, and the story collection Felt in the Jaw (Split/Lip Press, 2017). Her writing has also appeared in the New York Times, North American Review, Gulf Coast, Guernica, and McSweeney’s, among other publications. Her second novel, With Teeth, is forthcoming from Riverhead Books in June.

Thumbnail: David Waite

Craft Capsule: Self-Deprecating Humor

by

Kristen Arnett

5.3.21

This is no. 97 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

At a recent writing conference panel, a group of writers and I sat at the head of a packed room and spoke for well over an hour about women and humor. It was an interesting conversation; we all cared deeply about the topic since our writing contained different forms of comedy. Since the panel was so well attended, we wound up fielding a tremendous number of questions once the session was over. There were many good questions, but one stuck out in particular: A woman inquired why one of the writers didn’t think that self-deprecating humor was a valuable form of comedic writing.

The response was that self-deprecating humor is often lazy, that it is choosing to focus on the negative aspects of the self instead of engaging with the larger picture of the outside world. The person who asked the question responded with the fact that they were queer, and that self-deprecating humor felt important to them and their coming out process, so therefore it felt significant to their writing of queer characters.

I considered that response for the rest of the afternoon, and in fact, I am still thinking about it today. I would absolutely say that what I find funny in writing (and in life) sits inside the realm of the self-deprecating. I like joking around about my work as well as joking around about myself—throw my Word doc in the computer recycling bin, throw me in along after it, that kind of thing. Self-deprecating humor, to me, is funny. But I also understand that not everyone finds the same things humorous. Taste is subjective, right? Well, humor is too.

When I think about self-deprecating humor, I often attach it to my queerness. When I was first coming out—or perhaps even before I was all the way out, just one toe out the door—I was thinking about who I was as a person and how I wanted to be seen. I did not, in fact, want to be a lesbian. It made my life (stuffed inside an evangelical, very Southern Baptist family) extremely difficult. So upon coming out, my go-to resource was humor that was self-deprecating. It was easy to poke fun at the things that made me weird or different—the things I did not, in fact, wish to be. It is a way in which many queer people learn to process things. By making fun of ourselves, we are better able to understand the things that we can’t seem to uproot.

Not every queer person forms their sense of humor from a place of self-deprecation. But if my humor started out from this specific site, then perhaps self-deprecation has essentially formed my identity and therefore influences my writing.

When applied to queer work, self-deprecating humor becomes a touchstone not only for the author, but for the queer reader. Consider Peter Kispert’s recent short fiction collection, I Know You Know Who I Am (Penguin Books, 2020). Many of these stories contain characters hiding behind a facade. By presenting themselves packaged as a lie, they are able to deceive others for some form of gain—generally, intimacy. But if we consider that so many of these lies are built upon the fact that the characters dislike themselves, then the humor is obviously self-deprecating. To sit with a character who creates a fake friend so he can have something to talk about with his boyfriend, then paying an actor to pretend to be that fake friend? Hilarious, but also deeply self-loathing. I need to make up something better than me to present to this person in order to keep them, it tells the reader. Funny and sad all at once!

There is much to be mined from self-deprecating humor, especially if we remember that it can deeply inform characterization in fiction. After all, writers are always searching out ways to flesh the “bag of bones,” as Thomas Hardy put it. Maybe that bag of bones is rooting around in the dumpster. Maybe that bag of bones wants to fight a raccoon over the carcass of a rotisserie chicken. Maybe that bag of bones winds up with nothing to show for it but a fistful of grimy chicken fat and maybe they hate themselves for it. And hey, you know what? Maybe that’s a little bit funny.

 

Kristen Arnett is a queer writer based in Florida. She is the author of the novel Mostly Dead Things (Tin House, 2019), which was a New York Times best-seller, and the story collection Felt in the Jaw (Split/Lip Press, 2017). Her writing has also appeared in the New York Times, North American Review, Gulf Coast, Guernica, and McSweeney’s, among other publications. Her second novel, With Teeth, is forthcoming from Riverhead Books in June.

Thumbnail: Jackson Simmer

Craft Capsule: In Praise of Italics

by

Susan Stinson

3.29.21

This is no. 93 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I love italics. They make me feel as if the author is whispering tremulous secrets to me. The words need to be worth leaning closer to take them in. That’s all I ask.

An idiosyncratic, opinionated, passionate reader who is dear to me skips passages in italics. Reading next to her was the first time I learned that some people don’t read them. It breaks my heart.

Moby Dick has a famous first line, but before “Call me Ishmael,” Melville gives an italicized description of a “late consumptive usher to a grammar school” who provides an etymology of the word “whale”:

The pale Usher—threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him now. He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nations of the world. He loved to dust his old grammars; it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.

Dusting books on grammar and punctuation with my own queer handkerchief embellished with gay flags, I am also reminded of the approach of death. I am also in search of dry and spectacular facts about creatures from the watery parts of the world. About people, too.

I am wearing a new T-shirt emblazoned with Fat and Queer (which is the title of a forthcoming anthology) in the font Italic Lobster Two. Some friends have confused the font with cursive. The lean of italics can suggest handwriting, language shaped through the press and flow of a hand. The queerness of italics for me is both in the way it looks—that tilt—and in how it brings attention to that which gets set aside.

The poetry of Adrienne Rich is one place I learned to linger over italics. She wowed me with sudden evidence or testimony, complete with notes in the back. Poring over those notes, I discovered that Emily Dickinson, June Jordan, or Édouard Glissant might be speaking in her work in direct quotes, not attributed in the body of a poem, but marked by italics. That tensions and influences within a piece of writing can be made explicit and acknowledged without loss of lyrical beauty and power. The voices that spoke to her might speak to me, too. I could speak back.

Italics as revelation! Slipped in so softly, briefly. Easy to miss. Rich to explore. I followed those italic breadcrumb trails.

And, oh my goodness, dedications? In the front of a book: a name, maybe a line. Those are the hottest italics of all time.

And epigraphs? The quotations at the beginning of a novel, a story, a poem, or a chapter? There, the writer gives a glimpse into or intentional misdirection about other writing that the piece is in conversation with. Those italics were some of the first things that allowed me to sense what it might be like to be a writer.

In my novel Venus of Chalk, I wrote a good deal of the prologue in italics. It involves an afternoon party and the only sex scene in the book. The sex is between fat lesbians. One is a home economist. It’s very specific. Readers often miss the erotic lives of such characters. This is one of my persistent challenges as a writer and a human being: how to effectively invite people to notice—to linger over—characters, bodies, lives, impulses that seem easily skipped.

The novelist Daniel José Older has pointed out that using italics when a multilingual and/or multicultural speaker switches languages is a falsification of how people speak, think, talk, and are.

The text of the King James Bible that friends gave me in high school is set in a font very close to italics, half-slanted. Because it was the King James Version, it invited me into all sorts of intense experiences with language. That King James Bible was the first adult book I owned that was and is an intentionally beautiful object. Everything Jesus said is printed in red.

I started writing on a manual typewriter. I used it to draft my first novel, Fat Girl Dances With Rocks. I couldn’t type italics. I had to underline words and imagine them. I dreamed of italics. I aspired to them.

I had to fight for that prologue with fat lesbian sex and italics. I wanted to offer that chance to readers who could brave those things.

Who could brave them or who longed for them.

 

Susan Stinson is a writer, editor, and teacher. She is the author of four novels, including Spider in a Tree (Small Beer Press, 2013) and Martha Moody (Spinsters Ink Books, 1995; Small Beer Press, 2020). Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Curve, Lambda Literary Review, Seneca Review, and Kenyon Review Online. She is also a recipient of the Outstanding Mid-Career Novelists’ Prize from Lambda Literary. Born in Texas and raised in Colorado, she lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Craft Capsule: In Praise of Italics

by

Susan Stinson

3.29.21

This is no. 93 in a series of craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.

I love italics. They make me feel as if the author is whispering tremulous secrets to me. The words need to be worth leaning closer to take them in. That’s all I ask.

An idiosyncratic, opinionated, passionate reader who is dear to me skips passages in italics. Reading next to her was the first time I learned that some people don’t read them. It breaks my heart.

Moby Dick has a famous first line, but before “Call me Ishmael,” Melville gives an italicized description of a “late consumptive usher to a grammar school” who provides an etymology of the word “whale”:

The pale Usher—threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him now. He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nations of the world. He loved to dust his old grammars; it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.

Dusting books on grammar and punctuation with my own queer handkerchief embellished with gay flags, I am also reminded of the approach of death. I am also in search of dry and spectacular facts about creatures from the watery parts of the world. About people, too.

I am wearing a new T-shirt emblazoned with Fat and Queer (which is the title of a forthcoming anthology) in the font Italic Lobster Two. Some friends have confused the font with cursive. The lean of italics can suggest handwriting, language shaped through the press and flow of a hand. The queerness of italics for me is both in the way it looks—that tilt—and in how it brings attention to that which gets set aside.

The poetry of Adrienne Rich is one place I learned to linger over italics. She wowed me with sudden evidence or testimony, complete with notes in the back. Poring over those notes, I discovered that Emily Dickinson, June Jordan, or Édouard Glissant might be speaking in her work in direct quotes, not attributed in the body of a poem, but marked by italics. That tensions and influences within a piece of writing can be made explicit and acknowledged without loss of lyrical beauty and power. The voices that spoke to her might speak to me, too. I could speak back.

Italics as revelation! Slipped in so softly, briefly. Easy to miss. Rich to explore. I followed those italic breadcrumb trails.

And, oh my goodness, dedications? In the front of a book: a name, maybe a line. Those are the hottest italics of all time.

And epigraphs? The quotations at the beginning of a novel, a story, a poem, or a chapter? There, the writer gives a glimpse into or intentional misdirection about other writing that the piece is in conversation with. Those italics were some of the first things that allowed me to sense what it might be like to be a writer.

In my novel Venus of Chalk, I wrote a good deal of the prologue in italics. It involves an afternoon party and the only sex scene in the book. The sex is between fat lesbians. One is a home economist. It’s very specific. Readers often miss the erotic lives of such characters. This is one of my persistent challenges as a writer and a human being: how to effectively invite people to notice—to linger over—characters, bodies, lives, impulses that seem easily skipped.

The novelist Daniel José Older has pointed out that using italics when a multilingual and/or multicultural speaker switches languages is a falsification of how people speak, think, talk, and are.

The text of the King James Bible that friends gave me in high school is set in a font very close to italics, half-slanted. Because it was the King James Version, it invited me into all sorts of intense experiences with language. That King James Bible was the first adult book I owned that was and is an intentionally beautiful object. Everything Jesus said is printed in red.

I started writing on a manual typewriter. I used it to draft my first novel, Fat Girl Dances With Rocks. I couldn’t type italics. I had to underline words and imagine them. I dreamed of italics. I aspired to them.

I had to fight for that prologue with fat lesbian sex and italics. I wanted to offer that chance to readers who could brave those things.

Who could brave them or who longed for them.

 

Susan Stinson is a writer, editor, and teacher. She is the author of four novels, including Spider in a Tree (Small Beer Press, 2013) and Martha Moody (Spinsters Ink Books, 1995; Small Beer Press, 2020). Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Curve, Lambda Literary Review, Seneca Review, and Kenyon Review Online. She is also a recipient of the Outstanding Mid-Career Novelists’ Prize from Lambda Literary. Born in Texas and raised in Colorado, she lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Dear Black Queer Boy

by

Myron McGhee

8.12.20

I know what it means to feel as if parts of yourself are missing. You look in the mirror and see a brown face, full lips, and a crooked smile. You listen to your mother when she tells you to keep your hands out of your pockets for fear someone will mistake your disinterest for danger. You listen to your father when he coaches you on facial expressions. 

“They’re gonna think you’re giving them attitude, so keep your lip in your mouth.” 

I understand what it meant to see Trayvon Martin’s face displayed across every computer screen in the nation and to fear walking outside. Danger enveloping you like a net. You wake up thinking your father would never come home because his dark skin—the skin he gave to you—meant he was too dangerous to be allowed to breathe. 

And in this story, you see yourself. You see how the shades of your skin and the browns of your eyes tell a tale of strength and rebellion. 

But even now you’re still an outsider. 

Because you remember the church sermons your parents dragged you to. The hollers of how God’s son did not die for men to love other men. How the pastor slammed his fist against the pulpit as if he were trying to wake Satan himself.

“This is not God’s way.” 

And you remember how you met your first crush in kindergarten. How he shared his lunch with you and made you smile, and you did not understand what that tight squeeze in your chest meant. You were too young to understand the fullness of the human heart. 

You grew older, and every moment your heart raged against what your head told you was normal. You fell in love with your karate teacher, how he would change your stance, move your arms, and grin when you got something right. You crushed on your friend who sat in front of you in history class. You’d always ask to borrow a pen just to get him to glance your way. You loved that kid in yearbook class, tall and slender, a young River Phoenix. You taught him how to waltz in the empty classroom when the teacher wasn’t paying attention. 

But the teachings of the world around you did not coincide with what your heart wanted. You were Black. Black men could not love other men. Being gay was for white people. 

You felt as though you had betrayed yourself twice over. Who were you supposed to be? A Black man who wanted what was best for people like him, or a gay man whose heart fell too far and too fast. 

When Prop 8 was passed in California, gays blamed Black people. When you downloaded Grindr, every profile you saw said, “No Blacks. Sorry.” When you go to church, you’re afraid someone will pick you out, smell what you are on your skin and banish you from the pews. When you walk into a club of dancing men, rainbow flags waving in the air like arms, you can only sit at the bar as guy after guy says, “Sorry, you’re cute but I’m not into Black dudes.” 

And you feel like a stranger all over again. 

And all you can do is learn. Learn of Bayard Rustin, who helped Dr. King reach his dream. Learn of Marsha P. Johnson, who raised her voice at the Stonewall Inn. Learn of the Black queers who made ballroom culture because their beauty could not be removed. You watch Paris Is Burning and you smile. You read Countee Cullen and you cry. You listen to Wanda Sykes and you grin.

And for the first time since you dreamed of tasting another boy’s lips, you don’t feel as though you are at war with yourself. You are whole. And always have been. 

So you begin to write about boys like you. Boys who learn what it means to feel the stubble of another man on their lips. You write stories of wrestling matches and anticipated dates. You learn to vogue and try to replicate the beauty of Black movement in your words. You place yourself in the story, and one by one you begin to fill in the holes the world has left behind. 

I know what it means to feel as if parts of yourself are missing. But remember: The world is missing a piece without your voice. Dear Black Queer Boy, your voice is needed to guide this world to be greater than what it once was. Don’t deny it that. 

We need your voice with us. 

Yours,
Myron McGhee

 

Myron McGhee earned his bachelor’s degree in English literature from the University of Central Florida. He lives in Orlando, Florida. 

(Photo: Gina McGhee)

I’m Writing to You: Letters From Writers of the Black Literary Community

by

Various

8.12.20

On June 11, 2020, during the third week of protests in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and against police violence, we posted an open call at pw.org inviting writers of the Black literary community to submit letters written to any individual or group—a friend, a family member, the publishing community, other writers, themselves—that loosely pertained to their lives as writers. Our intention was to give Black writers a platform to directly address whatever they wanted, and on their own terms. The following selection of letters is further evidence that, as Melva Graham puts it, writing, too, is a form of resistance. “Every time you sit down to write your true voice becomes louder,” she writes, “and in the fight for racial justice we need all the voices we can get.” 

Dear Fellow Black Writers by Melva Graham

To My Precious Black Son by Shanay Bell

To the Tentatively Hopeful by Kameron Bashi

A Letter to the Allies by S. P.

To Writers Struggling With Their Whiteness by Sarah Valentine

A Note to the Shareholders by Donald Quist

Dear White Readers, Gatekeepers, and Members of the Media by Candace McDuffie

Dear White Publishers by Noro Otitigbe

Dearest Tayari by Leslie-Ann Murray

Dear Black Queer Boy by Myron McGhee

My Beloved Black Ancestors by India Gonzalez

Top row, from left: Melva Graham, Shanay Bell, Kameron Bashi, and S. P. Middle row: Sarah Valentine, Candace McDuffie, and Donald Quist. Bottom row: Myron McGhee, Noro Otitigbe, Leslie-Ann Murray, and India Gonzalez.  (Credit: Graham: Photos by Jamaal; Bashi: Sean Pessin; Valentine: Marcello Rostagni; McDuffie: Daniel Irvin; Quist: Dalton Rook Barber; McGhee: Gina McGhee; Murray: Veronika Savitskaya; Gonzalez: Justin Aversano.)

Small Press Points: Bloof Books

by

Staff

10.13.21

Tiny by design” is how publisher Shanna Compton describes Bloof Books, a press known for its beautiful linocut chapbook covers, eclectic tastes, and investment in each of its writers. “I’ve found a direct, hands-on collaboration with poets is where I find the most satisfaction in publishing,” says Compton, who also acts as the press’s editor and cover designer. Compton started Bloof in 2007 after stints at larger publishers in New York City and savors the more intimate process the smaller press model allows. “We do both widely distributed paperbacks and handmade chapbooks in limited editions, in a way we hope honors authors’ visions and cultivates connection and community among our readers,” Compton says. “Maxing out with too many books a year, or from a cubicle in a midtown high-rise, just didn’t feel like enough.”

The press, which this summer relocated from Lambertville, New Jersey, to Blue Hill, Maine, releases two or three paperbacks as well as six handmade chapbook titles annually. Bloof publishes only poetry but considers the genre expansively: “We’ve published two books of experimental sonnets, a huge conceptual list poem, and some post-Flarf, as well as a varied range of gorgeous, hilarious, and downright creepy work,” says Compton. Titles to be released in 2021 include On Dreams, a book of lyric essays by Maureen Thorson. In October and November of this year, the press will hold a free reading period to consider submissions for its 2022 chapbooks. “I can never predict what we’ll choose, and we always want more than we can take,” says Compton, “but we are very excited to attract a diverse pool in terms of identity and style and to see collaborations and translated poetry in the mix as well.”

Go to Source

Author: adavis@pw.org

  • If you’re an artist, up to a creative challenge, and love this story, enter your email here. Click here for more info.

Date:
  • April 12, 2022
Share: