9 Books With Fabulist Worlds That Push Boundaries

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

In its origins, the word “fabulous” lacked a positive connotation but simply meant “having to do with fables.” I’m no etymologist, so I don’t know how “fabulous” drifted into its current meanings, but I suspect it has something to do with the concepts that are expressed by similar words like “wonderful” (full of wonders), “marvelous” (related to “marvels”) and awesome (“expressive of awe”). Fables are stories that depict marvels, that narrate supernatural or paranormal events that evoke wonder or awe. Fair enough. But why have we come to use these words with a consistently positive connotation, when the marvels revealed by a fable could easily be ominous or terrifying rather than auspicious?  

I was raised in the Southern Baptist church, and while I’m no longer a believer, I grew up hearing stories of the great flood, the burning bush, the plagues of Egypt, the Leviathan that confronts Job, paralyzed with fear. My teachers in the church tried to convert these stories into Disneyfied tales appropriate for children, with an easily comprehensible moral, but no amount of Sunday School sanitizing could eliminate the terror. And so in my debut collection of short stories, The Book of Disbelieving, I try to help reclaim the concept of the “fabulous” in all its complexity—to create worlds where inexplicable, fantastical events might occur, but for the characters who inhabit these worlds (and, hopefully, for the readers who encounter them), there is a mixture of terror and awe—above all, a destabilizing sense of metaphysical bewilderment.

The novels and story collections that I’ve included in this list range in scope, setting, tone, theme, and method, but they all do something similar: create worlds that defy expectation, that challenge our conception of the ordinary, that renew our understanding of the “fabulous.” But in all these authors’ work, the fabulous is not invoked merely for the purposes of sensationalism—as in The Book of Disbelieving, reality is being manipulated or exaggerated for thematic purposes, to explore some element of our shared collective existence that might have otherwise gone misunderstood or unappreciated. Samuel Taylor Coleridge claimed that appreciating a work of art required “the willing suspension of disbelief”; never has suspending one’s disbelief, as in these fables, been so rewarding.

Orange World and Other Stories by Karen Russell

Russell opens this collection with a quote from Ghostly Matters, by Avery Gordon, which could well serve as an epigraph for all fabulous narratives: “We need to know where we live in order to imagine living elsewhere. We need to imagine living elsewhere before we can live there.” That’s the reason fabulist worlds, such as the ones that Russell conjures in Orange World, are so compelling—they illuminate the complexities of our own world while offering a glimpse of compelling—or horrifying—alternatives. Do we want to live in these alternative worlds? Or should we find ways to live with—or improve—our own? 

In “The Gondoliers,” the landscape has been overwhelmed with water, navigated by a brave family of gondoliers who transport travelers across this fraught and haunted topography. In the wickedly funny yet weirdly touching “Bog Girl: A Romance,” the protagonist falls in love with a corpse excavated from a bog, bringing her with him to his high school dance. In the most original of these eight stories, “The Tornado Auction,” a farmer—one of the last of his kind—grows tornadoes, raising them “from seed” to mighty whirling cataclysms, barely restrained by the meager structures meant to contain them. Like the best conceits, the story works on multiple levels—first, on the level of narrative, as we follow the protagonist’s doomed efforts to grow one last tornado, the most gorgeously formidable of them all. And then also, of course, at the level of resonant metaphor: what kind of tempests do we grow from seed in our own hearts—and for what purpose?  

The City and the City by China Miéville

The City and the City, like Russell’s “The Tornado Auction,” originates with a core speculative conceit that both inspires an engaging plot and teems with the potential for metaphor. Two city-states, Besźel and Ul Qoma, exist in the same geographical space yet are considered to be distinct politically, legally, linguistically, and culturally. Inhabitants of this shared space are born, raised, educated, and indoctrinated as either a citizen of one city or the other; while some spaces within the city homogeneously belong to one city only, other “crosshatched” spaces are simultaneously inhabited by both cities. Inhabitants are trained from birth to recognize subtle differences in architecture and dress to differentiate the two cities; and it is an inviolable law that inhabitants of each city must ignore (or “unsee”) any element of the other—a law enforced by a powerful police entity known as Breach. The plot is comprised of a murder mystery that takes careful detective work—breaching both cities—to solve, but it is the rich evocative imagining of the daily operations of these two co-habitant cites that I found fascinating. The conceit provokes us to think about our own experience in urban environments—who and what do we “see” and who and what do we ignore, and why, and what are the perceived dangers of seeing what may be considered taboo?—while also conjuring more specific geopolitical conflicts, in which two politically and ethnically distinct communities live on top of each other, riven by bitterly ingrained and longstanding ideological differences, such as Jews and Palestinians in Jerusalem.  

White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link

The latest story collection from author, editor, and publisher Kelly Link, these fables transport readers to a range of eerie fairy tale locales, from a house visited by a sentient mist and a retinue of anthropomorphic animals in “Skinder’s Veil,” to a Nordic underworld governed by a vengeful, ageless witch in “Prince Hat Underground.” In my favorite, “The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear,” Link transforms the swimming pool at a typical airport hotel into a luminous dream-cave in which the protagonist, unable to return to her family, is suspended in a vexed, spectral limbo, until an uncanny encounter on a plane offers revelations about the debilitating nature of sexual jealousy and the bewildering claims that our bodies make upon us. 

Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler

Dystopian novels are a warning to readers of what their own society may one day become. In Butler’s Parable of the Sower and its sequel, Parable of the Talents, set in the US in the 2020s and 2030s, climate change upends civilization, corporations force people into subsistence level dependency or indentured servitude, public institutions like the police and public schools are increasingly privatized, only available to the wealthy, and public trust has disintegrated. A right-wing Christian demagogue named Jarret runs for president and is elected on the slogan “Help us make America great again” (startlingly prescient—Talents was published in 1998), waging a violent campaign against non-Christian faiths. And yet these two books are not your typical dystopian horror-show, for Butler also imagines that such social collapse could create blank-slate conditions in which a new utopian community might be created.

The protagonist, Lauren Oya Olamina, having fled her family’s walled enclave when it is looted, wanders north with fellow refugees and creates a new community, called Earthseed, predicated on the notion (you could call it a faith) that God is change. Butler skillfully manages to both imagine a compelling vision of an alternative community, modeled on many utopian predecessors, while also demonstrating the community’s potential weaknesses and the fascinating but deeply flawed character of its founder. In this way, like Ursula K. LeGuin, Butler creates that rare thing: a depiction of a utopian community that isn’t merely a boring wish list of desirable social reforms (think of influential but tedious novels like Walden Two or Looking Backward) but an intellectually and aesthetically complex work of art.  

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin

Like Butler’s Parable series, The Dispossessed puts forward a vision of a utopian society that is ideologically compelling but also dramatically interesting. The narrative alternates between two planets: Urras (like Earth) and Anarres (like the Earth’s moon). While Urras is dominated by two nations, one capitalist, the other authoritarian/socialist, Anarres was founded according to anarcho-syndicalist principles, and as such, the centralized state—as well as ownership of private property—have been abolished. The protagonist, a physicist named Shevek, a native of Anarres, was modeled on a friend of LeGuin’s parents—J. Robert Oppenheimer. Shevek is struggling to finish formulating his life’s work, a new theory of time called the Principle of Simultaneity. Thwarted by departmental politics and restrictions on his time in the form of manual labor required of all Odonians (i.e., citizens of Anarres), Shevek travels to Urras, hoping to gain the time and support he needs to complete the Simultaneity, which he believes will benefit all humanity. Having grown disillusioned with the restrictive social mores on Anarres, he finds that life on Urras is worse, characterized by unrestrained competition, greed, and inequality. In the end, he publishes his Principles through a third entity, the Hainish, who help him return to Anarres, where, labeled a traitor, his fate is uncertain.

As with The City and the City, it is the imaginative details of LeGuin’s invented worlds that are so fascinating: she creates on Anarres a living, breathing culture, whose language and mores reflect their political ideology in nuanced ways. Thanks to LeGuin’s comprehensive depiction of Anarres’s anarcho-syndicalist society, we are able to regard it with wonder while analyzing its flaws and virtues.

Children of the New World by Alexander Weinstein

These thirteen dystopian fables all envision one kind of disaster or another in our not-too-distant future, some at the social and political level—entire worlds come undone by ecological collapse. Others at the personal level, as the protagonists struggle to reconcile their all-consuming dependence on technology with their need for human contact, human touch. In the worlds that Weinstein imagines, even experiences as profound as parenthood and transcendence can be manufactured and commodified by technology. 

In “Moksha,” the main character travels to Nepal in a desperate search for a particular kind of enlightenment that is facilitated by an advanced video game console banned by the U.S. government, while in the collection’s title story, a married couple raises two virtual reality children only to lose them when their VR account is fatally corrupted by malware. “I’m not deleting my children!” cries the father, but “delete” them he must, and it is a testament to Weinstein’s skill that we deeply feel the loss of these kids, despite the fact that, as the technician reminds us, they’re “just data.” “The Cartographers” achieves a similar effect, describing how a team of tech-savvy entrepreneurs sells fake memories implanted in people’s minds; ultimately, the protagonist must confront the fact that his own cherished memories of his life’s greatest romance are nothing more than artfully constructed terabytes of digital information. “Love scars memories, even if it was never real. When I walk the streets I think: we walked here together, she used to touch my arm like this, and the pain of white emptiness sets in. You can’t get rid of memories; you can only try to ignore them.” Weinstein’s worlds—though composed only of another kind of data in the form of words—are equally hard to ignore.

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

“Saying Goodbye to Yang,” the first story in Alexander Weinstein’s Children of the New World, imagines a near future where advanced technology has created AI robots available as companions for children. This is the same conceit in Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel, Klara and the Sun, where androids known as Artificial Friends (AFs) are commonplace, available for purchase at a range of prices and abilities. The twist is that the novel is written from the point of view of one particular AF, Klara, who, like so many of Ishiguro’s protagonists, is curious, compassionate, naïve, somewhat stilted, and decorous to a fault. Klara is picked out for companionship by a girl named Josie, who, though smart, enthusiastic, and gregarious, is suffering from a prolonged illness that is the result of a common process of genetic engineering (called lifting) that was intended to boost her academic performance and prospects for a career. Solar powered, Klara becomes convinced that the sun has special healing powers, and thus begins a protracted effort, like a propitiate to a god, to persuade the sun to cure Josie’s ailment. 

In many respects, Klara and the Sun resembles another of my favorite Ishiguro novels, Never Let Me Go, told from the point of view of a clone created for the purposes of organ harvesting. In each of these tales, Ishiguro adopts the perspective of a sub-altern class of proto-humans that we ourselves have created, exploring our collective preference for social hierarchy and exclusion as well as the individual’s yearning for belonging, while, ultimately, attempting to determine what it means to be human.  

The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington by Leonora Carrington

I’ve saved the wildest imagination for last. Leonora Carrington, the surrealist painter who fled Europe (and an insane asylum) during World War II (she may have escaped via submarine), settling in Mexico, where she continued to devote her life to art and literature and eventually became one of the founders of the Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1970s. Her collected stories, not published until 2017 by Dorothy, a publishing project, were composed in three languages (English, French, and Spanish), many written in her early 20s. 

These are stories where talking wild animals wreak havoc on human society, where queens and kings, ensconced in their castles, are no safer from danger than the rest of us, where even aggressive vegetables, animated by hate, get into the mix, and where corpses loom large, possessed of a potent capacity for both terror and balm (as in “How to Start a Pharmaceuticals Business,” where the miniaturized corpse of Joseph Stalin provides a source of magical hairs, the original ingredient in what will become a successful drug useful in the treatment of “childbearing and other convulsions”). Wandering through these worlds are Carringtonesque figures of various ages, who encounter the unexpected with courage, curiosity, and a surprising amount of tact. Two of her finest, most hilarious and most terrifying stories bookend this collection: “The Debutante,” in which a girl refuses to attend her own debutante ball and sends a hyena in her place instead; and “Jemima and the Wolf,” in which a similar protagonist, resisting her overbearing mother’s attempts to turn her into a “normal little girl,” flees her home for the forest in pursuit of a mysterious figure—who may be a man or may be a wolf. Carrington herself (as quoted in Kathryn Davis’s terrific introduction) provides an excellent epigraph to her work: “Even though you won’t believe me / my story is beautiful / And the serpent that sang it / Sang it from out of the well.” For more on Carrington’s life, writing, and art, see Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art by Susan Aberth.

The Collective Tragedy of Maternal Isolation

Posted on by Wynter Miller

“The Swing” by Marianne Jay Erhardt

Eleanor Gaw didn’t know she was one of the last people to see Luca Swenson alive. She had seen him from quite a distance, just the little shape of him. The hood of his winter coat, moving back and forth in the bucket swing, on the far side of the playground in the park across the street from Eleanor’s home. From her stoop, while her own child napped hard in the house, Eleanor often took stock of the playground equipment—the slides, the little ladders—to see if there would be the right kind of company for her boy when he woke up grumpy, hungry, lonely for other children. If there were tender little kids, or oversized school-aged disasters, or no one at all. If there were other mothers there and if those mothers found their children, in that afternoon, precious, or boring, or utterly exhausting. Eleanor would see if there was company—saw that there was company. Eleanor looked, planned to go. But then there was a phone call or her child awoke with a rash, a surprise; there was something she had to tend to, something she needed to savor or something she wouldn’t want another child to catch. So what she saw, and then forgot, was company. For her: a mother. Her name was Rene. For her son: a boy in a bucket swing, Luca, not knowing how to pump, not knowing what to do in a swing beside send his arms and legs out, making his body a star.

Only a few months prior, the police had been called to that very swing set to rescue Lakela White. Lakela had no business swinging in a baby swing. She was twelve, and she climbed in as a joke when her friends commandeered the two big-kid swings. Some middle schoolers could tuck themselves easily into a baby swing. But Lakela was no bendy string bean. She was a strong girl, with strong legs, a girl that took up space without apology. When she got stuck in the swing, her jeans bunching, her sneakers just shy of reaching the mulch below, it was not Lakela who was embarrassed. It was her friend Victoria, who turned pink and said, Jesus Lakela, trying to lift her out.

Some of the mothers rushed to Lakela, as if to shield her from shame. One got on her hands and knees underneath the girl and said, Pretend I am the ground! Use my body! Another meant to reassure her that everything would be okay, the way things were okay when mothers were in the vicinity. One mother briefly forgot about her own son, then went into a panic, shouting, José! until he emerged from a tunnel slide, unharmed. On the whole, the mothers were ready to mother. But when they saw that Lakela felt no shame, that Lakela was not about to try to stand on the back of a middle-aged white lady in order to wriggle out of a plastic diaper hung from chains, when Lakela pulled out her phone and calmly called 911 as if she were calling for pizza, and when Lakela laughed, explaining her predicament to the operator, the mothers backed off. They admired her. They resented her. They felt exposed, found out, and they stayed to see what would happen to the feeling and to the girl.

And though it was getting late, even the small children forgot their hunger, sensing that this was a story worth staying for. The police arrived, then a fire truck, no siren. In the end, they had to cut the swing away from the girl with a large set of shears (although some of the mothers would say the firemen used the jaws of life when recounting the drama to their husbands, stabbing at their salads that evening) all while Lakela played a game on her phone. It was Candy Crush. Or maybe Pokémon something.

When she was free, the mothers cheered, and some clapped, as if they had all really been through something together. Lakela did not acknowledge the celebration and left with her friends, taking the path that cut through the woods.

For weeks after, empty chains hung from the swing set. And then one day, a new swing appeared. Only it wasn’t new; it was worn in the seat. The blue was whitened at the stress points. Which suggested that this swing had been taken from a different playground, maybe a better playground, which had been upgraded. Or maybe a worse playground, where rainwater pooled in the slides and the mulberries made a mess and the yellowjackets lasted past Halloween. Where that pale old man wore nothing under his trench coat that time. Where your favorite thing—a basketball hoop, a hot metal teeter-totter, a swing—the thing you loved best, might be taken from you, might vanish in the daylight.

If it weren’t for the rain, Jennie would have stayed longer, maybe long enough to know something was off. They had only just arrived at the playground when the skies opened up, and though her Waldorf parenting books told her that There is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing! Jennie was cold, and depleted, and now wet. And her daughter Anna Claire was less than two, barely verbal, unable to reveal to the Waldorf mom Facebook groups that her mother was a lazy fraud. Jennie resolved to be a better, more wholesome and nature-loving mother, when Anna Claire was older. When it counted. For now, for just today even, she would go home, light up her living room with Peppa Pig or some other animal in human clothing, and fall half-asleep on the couch with one hand on her daughter, who was easy to entrance.

Jennie resolved to be a better, more wholesome and nature-loving mother, when Anna Claire was older.

Days later, it was more Peppa Pig, and Jennie missed the news about Luca entirely. No bad news, she had once promised Anna Claire. A world that is lovely and predictable. Where there is a sweet little song for every mundane thing. Taking off your boots. Washing your hands. Folding the cloth napkins and lighting the beeswax candles before supper. That had been the hope.

If Jennie noticed Luca or his mother Rene, she noticed that they stayed, despite the rain. She noticed that Rene took off her own coat and wrapped it around Luca while he dangled. He made a sound. He was looking at the ground. Jennie thought special needs to herself, and felt a wave of gratitude that Anna Claire had only unspecial needs, followed by guilt that those needs felt endless nonetheless.

Months later, Rene’s mother defended her daughter to a local reporter She stayed with him all night, sang to him until her voice ran out. She was always loving. And it was true. Rene did not hide Luca in a bag or throw him in a ravine or bury pieces of him in the woods. No sharp shovel, no moonless night. She took her son to the playground. She pushed him on the swing. She wrapped him in her coat. Her hands were nothing but tender.

Rene was supposed to take the pills to quiet the disturbances. Only she didn’t find them terribly disturbing. For instance, when Luca’s father Doug left, calling her batshit, she heard a voice saying guano, which was a beautiful word. Also the voice said Rene with a warmth that Doug hadn’t used in years. Said, Rene, you will be okay. He is wrong. He has never been right. Which, Rene knew, was exactly the kind of thing a voice would say, but also the kind of thing a friend would say if the friend were good.

And at the playground, when Rene couldn’t leave, couldn’t figure out how to lift Luca out of the swing, how to move her legs or shout for help, couldn’t figure out how to do anything other than push that swing, push, push, for nineteen hours, through night falling and dawn rising, the voice was kind then, too. Help is coming, it promised. Push. You are okay. Push. Someone will be here any moment. Push. I think I hear them now.

Luca is born every day before he dies. Rene has this lovely curtain panel she found at the Goodwill. It’s baby blue, semi-sheer, embroidered with these rust-colored flowers and flourishes. Rene bought it because she would never have guessed that the colors would look so good together, but they do. They look so good. She delights in the surprise of it. It’s a long panel, no companion, meant for some floor-to-ceiling accent window in some tony neighborhood west of Route 52. Rene imagines she will cut it in half, learn to sew, and make a pair of café curtains for Luca’s bedroom, which for now relies on broken blinds for darkness. Until she learns to sew, the curtain is Luca’s plaything. He drapes it over his head and walks delicately through the apartment.

Grandma says, Where’s Luca? Is he hiding, Rene? But Rene says, Where’s Luca? It’s time to be born, Luca! And when he pulls the curtain down, both women have taken to saying, Happy Birthday! just like they did when Rene delivered him, fierce and focused, no wrong sounds in that room. Only the sounds of life, magic, a body becoming two bodies. It’s time to be born! It’s time! Happy Birthday, Luca! he hears every day. And when he pulls the curtain from his face, he has started to say, Bean Bone, which they realize is Being Born. And Rene pushes away the thoughts of his bones made of dried beans, the thoughts that the red beans she heats for dinner are not beans at all.

She tries another game with the curtain. When he tiptoes around, she pretends he is a celebrity about to perform. A trapeze artist, a pop star, a Guinness book of World Records novelty. Someone who gets famous. She tries on the voice of an announcer. Ladies and Gentlemen…But Luca hates the new voice, hates ladies, hates gentlemen. Bean Bone! he demands, and she relents. Happy Birthday, says Rene, dozens of times a day, dozens of days, more birthdays than any human lifetime could contain.

Maria could not push a wheelchair without thinking of Nellie Olson. The old episode of Little House where Nellie is in an old-timey wheelchair, and goody-goody Laura is pushing her along, until they come to the crest of a steep, overgrown hill. Mean Mrs. Olson at the bottom, on her literal high horse. Laura gives the chair a shove, shouting, Your mother wants you, Nellie! sending Nellie careening. And, while it might be true that bratty Nellie had it coming (she was, after all, faking paralysis for attention), Maria was shocked that Laura had it in her to do something so cruel, something that could, after all, result in real paralysis for Nellie, although Nellie fared just fine, landing in a pond, forgetting her lie, and standing up on her healthy legs to wring out her pinafore, petticoat.

Maria had always thought of herself as a Laura. Nice. And when she saw the episode as a child she was shaken at the girl’s capacity for violence, and thus her own capacity for violence, given the right circumstances.

And now Maria pushed a wheelchair every day. Her father’s, mostly, though before she left her job to care for him day and night, she was a CNA in a nursing home and pushed many wheelchairs there, too. Every time she held the handles, she felt the warmth, the possibility in the palms of her hands. That she might launch the chair down the hallway, down the sidewalk, down the ramp at the church, which backswitched three times between the door and the parking lot. She loved her father. The burden of his care, she knew, was quite temporary. He was dying, rising only to take a few bites of egg and attend Mass, where he slept. She did not want to hurt him. She had no reason to think that she ever would.

She tried to tell her husband about Nellie Olson. But John didn’t remember these kinds of things or have these kinds of thoughts. He once admitted, when she asked, What are you thinking? that he was thinking nothing at all. That his head was often pleasantly empty.

Maria was pregnant. The baby would be born a few months after they buried Maria’s father at the VA cemetery. Already, Maria was beginning to worry about the baby, about pushing the baby in a stroller. Would she still think about Nellie Olson every time? She said to John, There are mothers who drown their babies in the bathtub. There are mothers who have to drive their kids around until they fall asleep, and when they get home they plug up the exhaust pipe in the garage and nobody sees it coming. John waved her off, telling Maria that she will never be one of those mothers. You’re just not that type of person.

When Maria walked by the playground, before the rain, her hands were free. John was with her father for the hour so she could exercise. She touched her belly, happy to be showing. She took the path over the stone bridge, past the swing set, past Luca. He smiled then. She tried to guess his age. Two? Hi! he called out. Hi! said Maria, who locked eyes with Rene. Maria wanted her to notice her belly, wanted her to know that she and Rene were part of the same thing. Rene greeted her with a nod, but Maria couldn’t read her face. She was not good with faces, she told people after it happened. Just ask my husband.

A kid died on that slide, you know. Felix took it upon himself to inform the little kids. It had been more than a decade since they found Luca, in full rigor mortis, Rene still pushing in the light of dawn. Felix was a newborn, then, too little for a slide or a playground although Felix’s mother Toni admitted that she took him to the zoo when he was only six weeks old and that it was too hot and the animals all looked tranquilized, which made her worry about what kind of world she had brought this child into in the first place. Now she knew it was stupid to think such a young baby would appreciate a zoo, but she took flattering photos of herself and Felix with a dazed tiger behind them and in one of the photos you couldn’t see the glare of the plexiglass and it looked like they were in the enclosure together. She put the photos online. #adventuremom. These days, she posted photos of a messy house, an unused elliptical machine, and of Felix and his sister packing their own lunchboxes with fruit-shaped gummies, animal-shaped gummies, and cheesy puffs. She no longer obsessed over the caption: “I surrender. #realmomlife.”

Nobody died on the slide, but children map stories on to the equipment at hand, and there were no swings at the park anymore. After Luca, they were wrapped with caution tape, and when that caution tape began blowing around in the wind, kids began tearing it down. Some young couple stole the rest to decorate their front lawn for Halloween. They debated how best to tape it across the doorway. How to make their house look like a murder scene but also allow Amazon packages to be delivered without incident.

And maybe kids would have returned to the swings, but a few days after the caution tape was removed, the swings were, too. All of them, leaving empty metal A-frames for several years. But then word got out that the playground was getting some new equipment, better-than-swings equipment, along with new state-of-the-art playground turf. No more mulch or sand or diced tires from decommissioned school busses. The new ground would be made of something squishy but not too squishy. Walking on it would feel like walking across the surface of a kickball, if the kickball were flat or if you were very, very tiny and so the kickball seemed flat, like the earth seems flat.

The new equipment was donated by the corporate offices of CiderMill Donuts as a part of their Healthy Communities campaign. There was a CiderMill sign at the park now, next to the sign discouraging concealed weapons, and when Felix came here, Toni usually said something like, “CiderMill Donuts. Keeping kids healthy since 1958.” She and Felix both disliked the new equipment. It was just a bunch of plastic poles sticking out of the flattened kickball ground. Each pole had a light on it and made the kinds of sounds reserved for first generation video games. The game you were apparently supposed to play was to run among the poles, hitting the lights as they appear. Glorified Simon, said Toni. What a waste.

What’s worse was that after the first big spring rain, the squish of the turf grew untenable. And the game must have gotten wet in the wrong places because the lights never worked when you wanted them to anymore. You thumped them with your hand and they were unresponsive. But now, unprovoked, they lit up and sang out at random. In the middle of the night, even, when the donut batter was still raw and cold in the silver refrigerators, when the playground was dark and the only people who came through were a couple of teenagers with a joint, or a restless man in a reflective vest, running with his lean dog. No kids, of course. The kids were in their cribs and beds, where they belonged.

It was 4 AM when Rene understood that she and Luca had become invisible. It had been fifteen hours. While she shivered all night, Luca, somehow, slept. But he always ran hot. Kids run hot was what her mother said when Rene wanted to add another layer to the boy. When a police car drove by on Miller, she was sure it would stop and stop the swinging swing and bring her and Luca somewhere warm. Like the time she’d been found in the highway median with the boy. Or the time the bus line shut down because of the snowstorm and a man in a truck drove them home and nothing disgusting happened. Something about the storm made it okay to be stranded. Something about the white made people generous. In better weather, she knew, that man would have looked away, driven on. He wouldn’t have found a pouch of Goldfish crackers in his glove box to give to Luca, wouldn’t have blushed when he admitted, Nah, I don’t have kids. I just love these damn things. Wouldn’t have hollered to them to Watch the ice! as they tiptoed their way up the sidewalk to their building, which was not beautiful but looked beautiful as it disappeared under the snow.

It was 4 AM when Rene understood that she and Luca had become invisible.

But the cop didn’t notice Rene. And the not being noticed continued into the morning, into another spell of soft rain. Earlier, she had seen a pregnant woman and remembered being noticed when Luca was still inside of her. Everyone back then wanted a look, a guess, even a touch. Doug wanted all of her all of the time. But now, there were afternoons when she tried to buy a pack of gum and the cashier didn’t register her presence at all. Times when the bus driver almost missed her stop, times when the robotic voice on her doctor’s automated answering service said, Sorry, I missed that. Can you try again? State the last four digits of your social security number.

Rene thought of her best friend Sita. As a pair, Sita and Rene were always seen. There was that night long before Luca, before Doug, before Sita moved away, when they danced together at The Vital. It was the kind of bar where there was danceable music but nobody dancing. They didn’t care. Sita said, “Everyone is looking at us. Don’t look back.” And they ignored the stares, the men, even the free mixed drinks they were offered—shiny pink things with a lemon crescent worried onto the lip of each glass. “We don’t drink juice,” said Sita. “We’re not children.” And she bought them shots instead, which went down easy. And later they fell into a booth at a different bar and ordered the sweetest, pinkest daiquiris on the menu and laughed and cried about some things, and then Sita’s eyeliner was all fucked up and Rene found some wipes in her bag and tore one open and fixed everything in a matter of seconds.

It was easy to bury the wonder. Because the horror came first. This happened. A child. A mother. A swing. But then the wonder slipped out sometimes when the mothers were alone. Nineteen hours, one of them said out loud in the shower. It’s like a filibuster. One of them remembered the townie hot dog-eating contest she and her sorority sisters had entered, in jest, in college. It was supposed to be funny or sexy, good for photos, meant to shock the people who were the type to enter such a contest in earnest. But one of the Kaitlyns had a competitive streak and a remarkable capacity to swallow food without chewing, and the sisters rooted for her and rooted for her until it was down to Kaitlyn and some greasy man. There was a trick of the light or something off in the sisters’ bellies and they grew, in one shared breath, disgusted with themselves, disgusted with Kaitlyn, who didn’t even want to enter this contest in the first place but was now disappearing everything into herself, was unbecoming, was winning, winning, was the winner. One of the sisters, the one remembering it now, had cried on the drive back to campus.

Nineteen hours. Longer than my labor, thought another mother. Longer than my longest double shift at the warehouse. Did she lean against the metal pole at all? What kind of shoes did she wear on her feet?

I could never, thought another. And they weren’t referring to pushing a child on a swing until that child died of dehydration and hypothermia. They were referring to pushing a child on a swing for more than five minutes. They hated pushing a kid on a swing, even their own kid, especially their own kid. It was so boring. It was so lonely. It required no energy yet entirely wiped a person out. And the child kept demanding that you keep going. Of course you will keep going. Only a terrible mother would put an end to such joy. But it felt like a dog was barking at you. It felt like you were falling down an endless staircase and your child was naming every step your body hit along the way. Naming it with glee.

Another mother remembered Sister Mary Daniel from elementary school. Sister Mary Daniel was all about gratitude, and the way she taught you to practice gratitude was to make you imagine all the ways that your life could be so much worse. Skinned knee? A leper would gladly trade you for it. Boy snapped your training bra? At least you’re not a pillar of salt. Classroom radiator broken? Go complain to Joan of Arc, happy to share the warmth of her fire. Once, Sister Mary Daniel made the class stand up and stretch their arms out on their own invisible crosses. She wanted to show them how hard it can be to last. But instead of a twinge of suffering or solemnity, the kids savored every moment of discomfort. The longer they stood there in their plaid skirts and neckties, the fewer notes they would have to take on the Stations of the Cross. When they finally broke, with the bell, no lesson had been learned. One boy complained that he was sore and told Sister Mary Daniel that Jesus had it easy because Jesus didn’t have to hold his own arms up on the cross. There were ropes or nails or whatever.

There are different kinds of endurance. When, nearing dawn, a family of deer wandered onto the playground, there was a soft wind from the north and so they caught no scent of the humans. There was still a set of swings, still grass, still Luca. The deer nosed around the honeysuckle. One found a granola bar wrapper, the silver mirror of its interior still sticky, sweet. The deer licked at it, her tongue forceful, indelicate. When she lifted her head, the wrapper clung to her tongue, to her dismay. It became an ordeal. It became her project for the morning, for her lifetime. Who knows how time feels to a deer. She felt it. How she got it loose was another deer came along. All it took was one lick to the underside of the new deer’s neck—that tender, shadowy place—and the wrapper was free, falling away like nothing, like confetti, the silver rearranging the new day’s light. Rene told Luca to look, and that was when the deer realized they shared the morning. Mid-breath, they quieted every rhythm in their bodies. Their eyes fixed in place. Their hearts scarcely beat. They were almost invisible, almost trees, almost strollers. And again Rene said, Look. Rene said, Luca, would you look at that?

7 Books About Women Committing Acts of Violence

Posted on by EL Assistant2

If you search the web for books about violent women, you are instead met with countless novels about violence against women. There are hundreds more books about murdered and abused women than there are about women who murder and abuse. But I’m tired of reading about how women are violated, traumatized, and killed. I want to read about dark, dangerous, and powerful women. Women who do to the world what the world does to them. After all, women have plenty of reasons to become violent.

Early on in my debut novel, the narrator remarks that “I knew, I’d always known, that war was a woman’s thing.” This is a lesson that she has learned from her mother, who brings her daughters to see the Irish border but leaves her sons at home. It is a lesson that she has learned from watching the Troubles unfold around her: women fighting in the guerilla war beside men. Women masterminding attacks; women luring soldiers to isolated areas to sabotage them or ply them for information. 

I always knew that the narrator of my novel, Trouble the Living, would commit an act of violence. But, as I wrote and edited, her feelings about this action changed. What began as an act of revenge—something she did because she felt she had no other choice—became something murkier, a violence from which she derives a twisted pleasure: “The feeling in my chest was hot and thick, raw milk straight from the udder, a sweltering desire.” It is this lust for violence that fascinates me; I think that many women feel it, and yet we very rarely see it represented. 

So, here are 7 books about women committing acts of violence. Books in which women have twisted desires or commit acts of vengeance in the name of some greater cause. These are books that flip the paradigm we’ve learned—bad man, battered woman—on its head, and show women as devastatingly powerful and wonderfully, frighteningly violent. 

The Perfect Nanny by Leila Slimani

We start Leila Slimani’s slim novel with the knowledge that two young children have been violently murdered by their nanny. We then flash backwards in time, first to a French couple’s search for someone to watch their children—“No illegal immigrants,” the husband says, “No veils and no smokers” —and then through the strange, complex relationship that forms between them and the woman they eventually hire. Exploring class, race, culture, and gender, Slimani unfolds a dark and disturbing story about how we rely on each other, the toll that domestic work takes, and what it means to raise a child that is not your own. Told in elegant, unemotional prose, the novel culminates in an act of violence that is particularly female—an act that is triggered by the pressures that the world has put on women in general and one woman in particular. 

Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe

A New York Times bestseller, Say Nothing is a vivid history of the Provisional IRA in the 1970s in the north of Ireland, focusing especially on the disappearance of a Catholic woman, believed to be an informant. But the most intriguing part of the book is the story of Dolorous and Marian Price, IRA members and sisters who committed notorious acts of violence throughout the late ‘60s and ‘70s. The Price sisters were imprisoned for a bombing in London in 1973 and subsequently went on hunger strike, surviving only because they were force-fed by the British. Both women were traumatized by the torture they underwent, and later in life would reflect on their actions in different ways. It’s worth noting that Say Nothing has been criticized for condemning the violence of the IRA without examining the violence perpetrated by the loyalist volunteer groups during the same time period. But, if read alongside other texts, the book richly dramatizes the amazing story of the Price sisters and the violence they committed in the name of what they believed in. 

Females by Andrea Long Chu

The thesis of Andrea Long Chu’s thin, provocative book is “everyone is female, and everyone hates it.” Long Chu defines “femaleness” as an inversion of self, a prioritization of other over self, and a negation of our own desires. In this way, she argues, we are all female; and it is a state we all despise. Of course, in a world where everyone is female, “all rapists are female…females masterminded the Atlantic slave trade.” But female violence is explored in more depth than just these generalized statements; braided into her gender theory—and brief discussions of her own transition—Long Chu explores the story of Valerie Solanas, a playwright and infamous misandrist, who shot Andy Warhol after a long vendetta against the artist. This act of violence—revenge for not helping her achieve success—is also an enactment of Solanas’ philosophy, expressed in her provocative work, the SCUM Manifesto (SCUM stands for “the Society for Cutting Up Men”). Females is a clever, funny and deeply probing exploration of the wickedness and vindictiveness of women and the expansiveness of gender.   

My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

Set in sprawling, sweltering Lagos, My Sister the Serial Killer tells the story of two sisters: Ayoola, a beautiful fashion designer, and Korede, a nurse. Ayoola is—you guessed it!—a serial killer. Or, at least, she has a habit of killing her boyfriends. Against her will, Korede has again and again been put in charge of the post-murder cleanup, rescuing Ayoola from her own messes. After yet another murder, Korede begins to wonder why she is helping her sister and why Ayoola is killing her boyfriends in the first place. Maybe, we learn, it has something to do with the sisters’ shared trauma. Maybe Ayoola just needs the power rush. Maybe all the men are violent, as she claims and Korede doubts. Ultimately, the novel playfully suggests that killing—and getting away with it—might really be a woman’s game.

Medea by Euripides  

The oldest title on this list, Medea is a tragic play by Ancient Greek writer Euripides. Written in 431 BC, Medea tells the story of a wife who, when her husband leaves her for a princess, exacts revenge by murdering his new wife and her own two sons. The play—though brutal—is often read in a feminist context, with Medea as a heroine desperate to take control of her life. In the final moments of the work, Medea ends her speech to a distraught Jason by saying, “My claws have gripped thine heart, and all things shine.” The beautiful poetry of this play, alongside a devastating act of violence, is gripping. And the idea that women must exert control in the only ways they are allowed—here, by attacking their own children—is insightful and provocative. 

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

It’s hard to fully express the ingenuity of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead without spoiling anything. The novel follows an elderly woman living alone in a rural Polish town and a string of strange murders. Filled with allusions to Blake (like the title), tongue-in-cheek astrological interpretations, and a deep love for animals—especially the narrator’s dog—the book would be delightful even without the final, delicious twist. Ultimately, this is a book about how we treat each other and what we each deserve. And, of course, it’s a book about what women are capable of, how they exert autonomy, how they are seen by their neighbors, and what darkness lives inside them.

The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste

A beautifully crafted novel about Mussolini’s 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, The Shadow King was longlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize. In it, Mengiste tells the story of violence, both personal and political, and what it means to withstand it. The novel mostly centers on Hirut, the maid to an officer in Haile Selassie’s army, and Aster, the officer’s wife and Hirut’s abusive employer. Over the course of the war, Hirut devises an ingenious plan to fool the Italian army; meanwhile, the women, led by Aster, become an essential force in fighting off the would-be colonizers. The Shadow King is about the wars women fight across multiple arenas, and how their fractured, traumatized experiences can become sites of power. The women soldiers in The Shadow King are a fierce force to be reckoned with, and the way they see the world because of their gender is what ultimately enables them to fight so successfully. 

Sally Wen Mao Shatters the Looking Glass With Her Poetry

Posted on by EL Assistant2

Sally Wen Mao has built a powerfully intricate world in her third poetry collection, The Kingdom of Surfaces. An incisive examination into the Western gaze that others and exploits so much of Chinese culture, Mao’s poems invite the reader to enter into a lush garden of art, pop culture, fashion, and China’s artisanal crafts, to fall into the mirror and wake in a dream and nightmare. It is a truly brilliant collection which takes us on a deep, fantastic journey and awakens a profound yearning to not only learn more about the ancient crafts she interweaves throughout, but to question all you’ve ever internalized or learned about Chinese culture, especially in these current times when the pandemic fueled life into a frenzy of violent anti-Asian hate throughout the country.

The Kingdom of Surfaces is both a reckoning and a reclamation, whose poems are scalpels that carve themselves into you. To truly empathize, you first must bleed. It is only fitting as the blows to the AAPI community continue, with the Smithsonian’s abrupt cancellation of the Asian American Literature Festival and Mao’s own dismay at beloved NYC bookstore Yu and Me Books temporarily shutting down due to a fire. Mao had planned her launch event for The Kingdom of Surfaces and it was moved to Books Are Magic as a special partnered event. The Asian American literary community is a strong and vital force, one that has endured much but cannot, and will not, be kept down.

I met Mao at a literary event a few years ago in Washington, DC, and my first impression that she is a very funny, kind, and fun person has always born out every time we get a chance to catch up, so I was delighted to speak with her about about The Kingdom of Surfaces and her fascinating research.

Angela María Spring: How are you? I’m so sorry about your launch, but how are you feeling otherwise going into putting this book out into the world?

Sally Wen Mao: Currently, I’m feeling pretty grounded. I’m at the Millay [Arts] residency at the moment. It’s the residency on the former land of Edna St. Vincent Millay. She is a poet that I read a lot when I was in middle school, so I’m thinking a lot about my poetry journey here and how it’s returned to this. It’s returned to one of the first poets I read as, I want to say, a sixth grader. And I’m feeling her presence everywhere. It’s said that she pops in every now and then here at the residency. I am communing with her and my twelve-year-old poet self.

AMS: Speaking of spirits, I was wondering if you had a patron God or goddess or saint for the collection or that you tend to invoke when you’re writing.

SWM: Yeah, oh, absolutely. There are many of them. I worked on this collection side by side [with] my debut story collection, Nine Tales. So obviously I was thinking about nine-tailed fox spirits and some of them crept into this poetry collection, as well. I was thinking about Sekhmet, who is the Egyptian goddess of war, healing, a solar deity that is the goddess of wrath. She comes up in the collection because I visited the Temple of Dendur in The Met. She actually is in the book but back when I was living in Las Vegas during the height of the pandemic, I found out that there was a little goddess temple an hour away from Vegas and I just needed to visit, so I found someone to drive me an hour away to visit the Temple of Sekhmet. I do think of her as one of the patron goddesses of this collection.

AMS: Which poem in this book was the seed?

SWM: So, one of the early poems was the title poem, “The Kingdom of Surfaces”. That poem actually was shorn off of Oculus. It was a poem I wrote in December 2016 and I remembered asking my editor, Jeff Shotts, what he thought about adding this twelve-part epic poem as a last-minute addition to Oculus and basically it was, oh, Sally, you’re getting ahead of yourself, and it was ultimately left out. But years later, as I was working on whatever my next project was going to be, I kept returning to that poem. I felt that that poem led me to some of the new concerns that the The Kingdom of Surfaces is undergirded by, so all of these questions surfaced because I wrote that poem. So there are a lot of seeds that originated in Oculus, they bled into the The Kingdom of Surfaces.

AMS: I totally didn’t expect you to say that but it makes so much sense, especially if you’re familiar with Oculus. I’m just going to ask you my “Kingdom of Surfaces” question because it’s such a fascinating poem; I view it as your “Kubla Khan”. Of course it encompasses all the themes of your books: exploitation, consumption of Chinese people, their labor, their art, anti-Asian racism and the xenophobia, the ugliness of Orientalism and all the things that go with it, but in the poem, you turn the white gaze not only inside out as the looking glass, but turn it on itself. So how did you disappear into this poem and then come back?

SWM: The reason I wrote the poem was that I went to that Met exhibition “China: Through the Looking-Glass,” and wandering through that exhibition, I remembered thinking how beautiful everything was. It was just so sublimely beautiful. But then I would look at the descriptions or I would look at the walls of copy and it was really disturbing. I actually included some of [of that copy] in the book. This exhibition attempts to propose a less politicized and more positivistic examination of Orientalism as a site of infinite and unbridled creativity. That’s a literal quote from the wall and I remembered thinking but that examination, that examination itself is politicized. There’s no way to extract the politics. To fantasize about something is a political act, especially if it’s something that’s positioned as the “other” or something that’s positioned as, like, oh, it’s a looking glass. It’s this topsy-turvy world, which is I also grabbed from the copy. They called it a topsy-turvy world. So what I did was attempt to deconstruct that and decided to interpret it literally.

I wanted to take as many liberties with this white imagination as the white imagination has with this Chineseness that gets fetishized.

I took each chapter of Through The Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll and I applied each chapter title as like the poem heading. I imagine myself stepping into the shoes of Alice and entering this portal or this looking-glass that the Met provided. It was really fun to construct this poem because I reread Through the Looking-Glass and I assigned different roles to different people. For example, the role of the Red Queen, it has to be the mastermind of it, so Anna Wintour. I also watched a documentary about the planning of that particular Met Exhibition and the Met Gala. I remembered moments in the documentary where the Chinese collaborators were pushing back against some of the ideas and then there was a little bit of a conversation between the organizers of the Met Gala and these Chinese people and there was a little bit of disagreement. The research for this poem was really fun because it involved not just probing into other people’s imaginative processes, but it also allowed me to take liberties. I really wanted to take as many liberties as I wanted with this white imagination as the white imagination has taken all of these liberties to imagine this Chinese-ness that gets fetishized in these contexts.

AMS: I love not only how you tie together so many pieces of European and US colonized history, both past and present, focusing on the Asian experience of Western exploitation and dehumanization through porcelain and silk, but also how deeply you go. There’s a whole decolonized Chinese Art history course in this collection. Was there a piece or, maybe, one or two pieces of that research that you had to cut out that you want it to leave in?

SWM: Wow, I did cut out a few poems that later I kind of wish I left in. There was one poem that actually focused on the auction house, and I ended up publishing it in The Washington Post as an illustrated poem. I call that a The Kingdom of Surfaces B-side. It’s a poem that replicates the sound of an auction house. It consider[s] all of these different. journeys that these objects take in order to get to the auction house. I think one of the things I’m still trying to probe through this collection and through my work in general is the process of attributing value and how that can often feel so arbitrary. One of the big historical dissonances I wanted to point out is that pricing Chinese objects as high in value, like the Ming blue-and-white porcelain is an example. The Dutch really tried to replicate it with their Delftware, right? Like Delftware comes from how much they love that blue-and-white porcelain look from China and now that’s become a really big signifier for Holland and the Netherlands. I went and there were blue and white Delftware everywhere as a cultural sign of being Dutch.

So I wanted to look at all the ways in which Europe interacted with Asian aesthetics but then, at the same time, starting these Opium Wars and in America, all the laws that arose, [the Chinese Exclusion Act], that all of this was happening at the same time as this China mania, this obsession with the Chinese aesthetic and the appropriation of that aesthetic. So all of this was happening in the 19th century and I wanted to place them side by side, right in the porcelain poems.

AMS: Absolutely. And you contain it within the shape. It made me interested in the art of the Chinese art of making porcelain, so I wondered if you were researching that or looking at specific vases, because the poems front and back are different vases.

SWM: Over the years, I visited several different galleries that focused on Ming, blue and white porcelain. So I learned a little bit about the specific recipes for making that porcelain. And the cobalt, the kaolin processes and most of that is in contemporary times. The porcelain town in China is still extremely famous for its porcelain. It’s very much like everyone who works with porcelain wants to go visit that town, Jingdezhen, in China.

The Met’s China exhibition attempts to propose a less politicized and more positivistic examination of Orientalism as a site of infinite and unbridled creativity.

So Jingdezhen, this is a city in China that is pretty much the Porcelain City and it’s been the Porcelain City for thousands of years. It’s been the pottery city as early as the 6th century CE and by the 14th century, it became the largest center if Chinese porcelain production. It’s still to this day famous for its porcelain. Wing On Wo & Co, which is one of the oldest Chinatown businesses in New York City, they do a lot of these beautiful porcelain wear and they source from Jingdezhen. These crafts are so ancient. When it comes to the history of porcelain production and the richness of it, I only scratch the surface and I hope it did bring you to these new discoveries because there’s just such a long and illustrious history of Jingdezhen on porcelain.

AMS: So I want to talk about silk. I’m haunted by all I learned from you about silk because I love silk and then it broke my heart. I didn’t realize there are no silk worms left in the wild, but through the process of extraction, there’s also a continual genocide of the silk moth, as well.

SWM: So there’s this funny thing called primal astrology. It’s if you combine your Chinese or your lunar astrological sign with your Western astrological sign. So I’m a Pisces and a Rabbit. If I combine them together, my primal astrology sign is a silkworm. And when I found this out, I was like, oh, that’s a bummer. Because silkworms, they’re pretty much just work worms, right? They’re just spinning the cocoon to make the silk but then they cannot become entombed in the cocoons [to become silk moths]. They can never actually grow up, so that is really fascinating to me. And they feast on the mulberry leaves. I went to a silk museum in Suzho, which is one of the show capitals of China back in 2018 and I remembered seeing the little silkworms eating the leaves and seeing the silk looms. That is also another ancient industry in China. So I was thinking about all of these really ancient industries that produce beauty in one way or another. So there’s silk and then there’s also the porcelain. And then there’s also the pearls. So those were the trades that I was really interested in examining.

AMS: When your readers walk away from reading this book, what do you want them to take with them that changes not just their minds but also their behaviors?

SWM: I want them to come away from it the way that you came away from it, with a renewed sense of curiosity. I love that. I hope that it opens up these other worlds and other histories that people then become curious about and they’re free to seek it out for themselves. I did do some research in the book and I hope it causes people to seek out those histories, which I think is very important to preserve especially given all the censorship happening now in this country.

Exclusive Cover Reveal of Cynthia Marie Hoffman’s “Exploding Head”

Posted on by Jo Lou

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover for Cynthia Marie Hoffman‘s poetry collection, Exploding Head, which will be published by Persea Books in February 2024. Preorder the book here.

Cynthia Marie Hoffman’s vivid memoir-in-prose-poems, Exploding Head, chronicles a woman’s childhood onset and adult journey through obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which manifests in fearful obsessions and counting compulsions that impact her relationship to motherhood, religion, and the larger world. Cynthia Marie Hoffman’s unsettling, image-rich poems chart the interior landscape of the obsessive mind. Along with an angel who haunts the poems’ speaker throughout her life, she navigates her fear of guns and accidents, fears for the safety of her child, and reckons with her own mortality, ultimately finding a path toward peace.

Here is the cover, designed by Dinah Fried.

Poet Cynthia Marie Hoffman: “The poems in Exploding Head are the most personal, raw, and vulnerable I’ve ever written. I knew I wanted a face on the cover of the book to kick-start the human connection I’m reaching toward in telling what has been, until recently, a very private, decades-long struggle with OCD. 

Any person pictured on the cover of a book risks being interpreted as a representative stand-in for the main character, so it was important to find a female figure I could see myself in. I had to believe this figure had something unsettling churning behind her eyes. 

I searched online for months. The images that appealed to me were troubling and sometimes off-putting, and when one such image sparked intensely visceral but opposite reactions in two of my trusted friends, I realized outside opinions were disrupting my ability to trust my own vision. 

My Pinterest board filled up with surreal images of women whose heads were dissolving into blurs, streaks of color as if the wind had swept their thoughts away in a tangle of threads, or the tops of their skulls entirely disappeared. These images depicted how I felt when OCD ran off with my thoughts, what OCD has taken away. 

Artist Sandra Boskamp is gifted in obscured portraiture. Her series have names like ‘Glitch,’ ‘Mindscapes,’ and ‘Undulating Figures.’ One image in her ‘Reclaimed by Nature’ series depicts a family of woodpeckers living in the holes they’ve pecked into a woman’s face and neck. Of course, Gabriel Fried, poetry editor at Persea Books, pointed out what I already knew: that spot-on violence was a step too far. 

But Boskamp’s portrait ‘Rachel’ is the perfect combination of stability and disruption. The woman’s lips are parted, her posture upright as if she were simply sitting on a stool in the painter’s studio, posing for this portrait. Meanwhile, the top of her head is quite literally swirling into flame. There is violence in the reds and oranges. But there is also something so delicate, so masterful in the movement of that swirling flame. I am enticed by its beauty, by the woman’s ruddy complexion, by the way the negative space leads my gaze across the page from left to right, as if inviting me to open the book to my words waiting inside. Persea’s designer Dinah Fried created a masterful design, and her placement of the title Exploding Head in big, attention-grabbing letters complements the art without competing.”

Cover designer Dinah Fried of Small Stuff: “In most cases we resist the urge for a cover image to ‘say’ the same thing as the title itself, but in the case of this cover for Cynthia Marie Hoffman’s poetry collection, we embraced the repetition of title and image as a nod to the subject-matter. Together, the prominent title typography Exploding Head atop the painted portrait of a literal Exploding Head—expressed in this painting by Sandra Boskamp with swirling warm hues creeping off the top of the page—gesture at the relentlessness of the poet’s struggle with OCD throughout her life.”

Every Pregnant Person Walks a Tenuous Tightrope Between Life and Death

Posted on by EL Assistant2

In He’s Expecting, a 2022 six-episode Netflix drama, Kentaro Hiyama is a 37-year-old successful ad executive shocked to discover he’s one of a small percentage of cis men in Japan who have become pregnant. We watch him navigate some of the typical scenarios of a surprise pregnancy we’re used to seeing around women. He counts weeks to figure out who the mother is. He’s tired, nauseated, and unable to focus. At work, he’s quickly marginalized and left out, given work “anyone could do.” The project that was his idea is reassigned to his less talented and unpregnant male colleague. When he turns to the internet for advice on symptoms and worries, he’s talked to in the particular, patronizing, and bizarre communication style usually reserved for women (think “your little jumping bean” instead of “fetus”). Though, not bizarre, actually, if you want pregnant people to think what they’re doing isn’t serious or life-changing. Or if you want pregnant people to think they are people who should be talked to this way. “What’s with this lame design?” Kentaro says about a site called Pre-Mama Land. “Why do maternity products have such childish designs? The one who’s pregnant is an adult.”

I am very interested in empathetic pregnancy thought experiments, and have written many drafts of a novel in which I imagine a version of this, a man experiencing some of the sensations and effects of pregnancy and birth. I thought my interest lay in a safer exploration of how it felt for me. If a man is experiencing pregnancy, it’s at a distance, removed from me to the point of impossibility, and then I can examine it without fear. But in watching He’s Expecting I found myself also relating to the oppressor, thinking about pregnancy and birth as a miracle, and objectifying Kentaro’s pregnant body.

For me, pregnancy was lonely. I was the only passenger on an unstoppable train, destination 0-2 lives. Strangers’ smiles felt like hazing, my pregnancy cute and inconsequential to them. Even in rooms filled with other pregnant women, waiting rooms or birthing classes, we didn’t talk to each other. We were each on our own train with its own unknown destination. One of us arriving there alive with a living baby didn’t mean the same would happen for the rest of us. Maybe it even meant our chances went up for being the one something horrible happened to. People bought my future baby clothes, an assumption that felt dangerous. My husband wanted to have sex, of all things. Everyone around me drank alcohol and stood comfortably in the heat, while I felt temporarily removed from having any kind of shared experience.

Every one of us is here because someone gave birth. There’s something comforting about that idea.

In talking to my friend about this essay, she thought it was interesting that a pregnant person would feel more lonely than usual when there’s actually another person inside their body. It does seem paradoxical. Once, before I was ever pregnant, I visited my pregnant friend and asked, when she was alone in a room, did she feel like she was alone? She thought for a minute, maybe reflecting on the way she felt when she was alone, maybe wondering if it meant she didn’t have a deep enough connection to her fetus if she said yes. Yes, she said. She felt alone.

Maybe you feel alone, even when you can feel the baby moving and imagine a future together, because you’re facing something very much like death, if not actual death. One of my friends described herself laboring with her mother’s help. She said, perched over the toilet in the hospital room, she couldn’t do it and she wanted to stop. Her mom told her what you have to tell someone in this situation: the only way out was through, and no one could do it but her. There is an element of sacrifice in birth, one that if you wanted to be pregnant, you’re probably willing to make: a sacrifice of the way your body used to be, the way you spend your time, the way you use your mind, your sense of self, and sometimes, your actual life. I wanted to be pregnant both times, but I still resented the excitement of my community members for the arrival of the baby. I needed them. I needed them to support me, monitor me, sew me back together, to love the baby once they arrived, and also to consider how different the stakes were for me and for them.

Yes, birth is a tenuous tightrope between life and death, one I longed so badly for the people around me to acknowledge. After having a second hemorrhage outside the “window where it’s common” (the first 24 hours), I asked to talk to a doctor before being discharged and cornered her with unanswerable questions: Will it happen again? What are the signs to look out for that it will happen again? If it happens again, will I be able to get to the hospital before I die? With each question, she almost imperceptibly moved backwards away from my bed, finally shouting, “Childbirth is extremely dangerous!” And it was in this fleeting moment of honesty that I felt safe, that one other person and I understood each other.

A micromort is a unit of measurement defined by a one-in-a-million chance of death. Giving birth carries a risk of 120 micromorts vaginally. Birth by C-section is 170 micromorts, which is how the cis men in He’s Expecting give birth. If these numbers represent all births, they will be much higher when considering only Black mothers and much lower when considering mothers of other races, the lowest for white mothers. For anyone, they’re in a range much, much greater than skydiving (8), paragliding (74), and scuba diving (10), all things I would never do. And for a baby, simply living their first day of life is 430 micromorts, the same risk as base jumping.

At work, he’s quickly marginalized, given work ‘anyone could do.’ His project reassigned to his less talented and unpregnant male colleague.

When Kentaro vocalizes doubts to his boss about giving birth, he says, “I’m not sure I can actually do it.” His boss says, “You’ll be fine. Women get pregnant and give birth all the time. You’ll nail it.” I remember people telling me these exact words. Every one of us is here because someone gave birth. There’s something comforting about that idea. Everyone. The evidence of survival is everything you see around you. You can hide safely in these vast and real numbers. Billions. There’s something dismissive about it, too. You’ll nail it. You got this. What are the micromorts for other activities you might say that about. Giving a presentation? Scoring a goal? Jumping into a body of water? Kentaro’s boss gives him a supportive pat on the shoulder and catches up with another colleague leaving Kentaro standing alone in the hallway, gaze downward, hand on his stomach.

It’s not difficult to find Kentaro Hiyama attractive. He’s shaggy-haired, confident, and talented. Takumi Saito, the actor who plays Kentaro, is, among other things, a model. But it was when the character became pregnant that I was really drawn to him. His pregnant body, yes, was surprising and beautiful, but it was his singular, private experience that I found so alluring. He’s preoccupied, both inward- and outward-looking, and in both cases, concerned with something bigger than himself. That experience changes a person’s way of existing and relating to others. It changes the expression on their face. They’re not thinking about you. They’re not thinking about anything you’re thinking about.

When I think back on crushes I’ve had, part of the longing was longing for knowledge I couldn’t have: what was it like to be them? What music do you hear walking around Berlin nights in the ’80s? How humid is it when you visit your grandparents in Hunan Provence in July? These are experiences you can try to describe. You can try to close the gap between two bodies by one person saying, “You walk around crushed by disappointment that a girl you wanted to take out canceled your date and then you hear ‘Metropolis’ by Schwefel coming from a window.” Or, “You can tell your grandparents are disappointed that you didn’t have the correct expression on your face when their friend asked you a question.” And the other person can imagine feeling that way. What would those feelings feel like in me? If I can approximate, I can get closer to them.

After someone has been pregnant, they have another person’s DNA in their body forever. They contain actual multitudes.

The experience of pregnancy is paradoxically even more singular and isolating. Your experience is both marginalized by and mingled with someone else’s as you temporarily share a body. A compounding of two singular experiences, a quadrupling of impact like a head-on collision. You can say “my dreams are crazy, I can smell things miles away, I can’t lift my legs to put my own pants on, I’m treated differently by everyone around me, I’m worried about my job, I’m wondering when the last time I felt the baby move was,” but how do you describe the feeling of being cellularly connected to someone? Of sharing blood, fluid, calories, and chemicals?

For each pregnancy a person has, born or unborn, fetal microchimerism can occur, in which cells from the fetus are moved around the pregnant parent’s body and harbored in the tissues of different organs. Fetal cells can remain in the parent who carried them for decades, even until the end of life, and the cells are often credited with regrowth and repair of the organs they reside in. After someone has been pregnant, they have another person’s DNA in their body forever. They contain actual multitudes, unknowable even to themselves.

During both my pregnancies, my doctor asked what form of birth control I planned to use after delivery, and I said not to worry, I was never going to have sex again. The joke was unrealistic, but not untrue to my desires, in a state of loneliness nothing, especially sex, could remedy. I sometimes found it monstrous that my husband could be in such a wildly different emotional and mental state, to want to have sex when I was terrified, physically uncomfortable, and bearing the burden of keeping our baby safe all alone. Sex, I reminded everyone, was what got us into this mess in the first place. But maybe it’s that very state of loneliness and inaccessibility that makes pregnant people so attractive.

Aki, the mother of Kentaro’s child, is tall and thin with short hair. Perhaps the actress, Ueno Juri, was cast for her boyishness. She’s described as boyish on IMDB, even before her name appears. Her character is a freelance writer and photographer overloaded with work. She’s casual about her relationship with Kentaro, letting him come over or not as their busy schedules allow. When he tells her he’s pregnant she asks the familiar line we hear from men in this position, are you sure it’s mine?

When Kentaro asks Aki to sign an abortion consent form, she stalls, wondering aloud if the pregnancy is a blessing. She could have a baby without having to give birth, she says. Maybe it could even lead to new job opportunities for him as an ad man. Maybe, she says, it’s actually a huge stroke of luck. Kentaro listens a little resentfully and says, “Look, Aki. I’m actually pregnant.” “I get it,” she says. “You don’t,” he says. “I feel queasy all day. My boss is watching me. It’s already destroying my life. Don’t joke with me.” She apologizes and says she agrees they won’t have the baby. Kentaro says, “It’s not just about agreeing. Don’t make it sound so easy. I have to harm my body for an abortion. I’m the one who bears the risk whether it’s childbirth or an abortion.” 

Recently, two friends, independently, told me I needed to deal with my anger. Two spontaneous interventions.

Clichés are useful when the show tries to show a flipping of tired male and female gender roles. The characters themselves often comment on it. Kentaro tells Aki she sounds “Just like one of those guys,” when Aki is dismissive about the effect pregnancy is having on Kentaro’s body. But the way I related to both Kentaro and Aki revealed to me that I am already embodying both the pregnant and the impregnator. My friend told me, “You’re already bought into the hegemony. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have had a second kid.”

Since having kids, I’ve had a constant, generalized hum of anger in the background of my days. Part of it is likely a reaction to some of the life-threatening experiences I had with my second birth. But part of it isn’t. I’ve had a hard time separating the lonely, dangerous experience of pregnancy from the institutions of heterosexual marriage and sex. Even as the country removes the right to healthcare for women and more and more states make abortion illegal, I know I am a white woman with enough money to have an abortion. I live in a state where abortion is legal and protected. I’m not presently at risk of forced birth except by myself. But I don’t want to have another baby or an abortion. I don’t want either. And to exist in a heterosexual marriage feels acutely dangerous to me in a way it is not to my husband.

Recently, two friends—independently—told me I needed to deal with my anger. Two spontaneous interventions. In an effort to help, they asked me questions: Am I gay? My friend who is gay reflected that she, too, had a lot of generalized anger before she came out. If I were independently wealthy, had so much money that all my possible needs were met, and had a ton of exciting and rewarding friendships, would I want to have sex with men? If my husband were pregnant, would I want to have sex with him? Would I want to impregnate my husband?

Imagining my husband pregnant is like imagining the United States without police. Impossible at first; I could feel my mind trying to change shape around this fundamental shift in reality, realizing all the features of our world, no matter how minor and unrelated they seemed, would be totally different, too. And then I couldn’t stop thinking about it, how much more sense everything made in a world like this. If childbearing were shared across genders, can you imagine it? Can you really imagine it? Men faced with the decision of whether or not to abort their own pregnancy. Men deciding on the right balance between breastfeeding and the independence they need for their mental health. Feeling guilty if they quit. Pumping in parking garages and designated conference rooms. Men stigmatized for needing government assistance for single dads. Men proudly telling their friends how quickly they got back down to their pre-pregnancy weight. Fathers talked to the way we talk to mothers. Fathers thinking about themselves the way mothers think about themselves. 

He’s Expecting kind of tries to imagine it, but not in good faith. When the show could do anything, it still makes light of pregnancy, and particularly of a man being pregnant. Even while satirizing the Pre-Mama Lands of the world, it doubles down on the same style of infantilizing pregnant people and making the experience funny or inconsequential. When a doctor tells Kentaro he’s pregnant, he buys pregnancy tests to confirm. Women on the street giggle at him when they see he’s bought pregnancy tests and he walks away in an unnecessary, hip-swinging way, a feminine way, we’re supposed to understand, accompanied by playful music—though I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a woman walk like that. And why is it funny for a “man” to walk like a “woman?” Have you ever asked someone, after they tell a racist joke, why it’s funny? They don’t know. Why is it relieving to vocalize stereotypes and have other people laugh, acknowledging that they are aware of them, too. What do we do to ourselves when we laugh at the dehumanization of others?

Yes, I would want to have so much sex with my pregnant husband. I would feel so sorry for him and scared for him. I wouldn’t be able to stop touching him. I wouldn’t be able to stand not being able to help. Was his desire fueled by guilt? I would have felt less lonely if it had been, if we had had the same understanding of my experience in relation to his.

Would I want to impregnate him? Absolutely not. Even if he wanted me to, it’s too violent. Am I angry at him for doing to me an act so violent I couldn’t possibly commit it? Or could I?

How can you make a risky decision if the language used to describe it is purposefully and sinisterly playful, patronizing, and reductive?

In a scene where Aki and her friend discuss the pregnancy, her friend says, “It’s a pretty great time to be alive where men can give birth. I mean, being pregnant is tough. Nausea and headaches for months. People nagging you constantly until it’s born, like, ‘Don’t eat this, move that, go for a walk.’ You can’t drink or eat raw stuff. And to top it all off, the hellish pain of labor is waiting for you at the end. If a man did all that for me, I’d be over the moon.”

I would also be over the moon. Maybe I would impregnate my husband and make the consensual decision together, the same one we made for me, that we were willing to risk his and a future baby’s life for the chance at having one. Maybe I’m mad at his willingness to do that to me, and at my willingness to do that to him. Maybe I’m mad at life and death and fear and pain.

What can be helped are the Pre-Mama Lands who call this state, the delicate line between two lives and zero, a bun in the oven. Framing things in this way matters to the way society treats pregnancy, pregnant people, and the dangerous and life-changing process of birth. It matters to the way people think about themselves, their own worth, and what they want. How can you make a decision 15 times riskier than jumping out of a plane if the language used to describe it is purposefully and sinisterly playful, patronizing, and reductive? 

Pregnancy is so much scarier than jumping out of a plane. It can (and usually does) happen by accident. It can happen by force. It can only happen to one group of people. And as soon as it happens, your human rights change. I wanted to have kids, I just wanted people to talk honestly, to me, about what it meant. Maybe what I wanted everyone to say instead of you’ll nail it, is, good luck. I love you. This might be the last thing you ever do.

10 Books That Show the Lives of School Teachers

Posted on by EL Assistant2

You would think that with all the TV shows and books set in schools, people would have a pretty good idea of what happens in them on a day-to-day basis. But school stories are more often stories set in schools than they are about school. Stories that show the actual work of teaching and learning remain frustratingly few and far between. Quinta Brunson’s Abbott Elementary is a true delight, but that show’s realistic depiction of teaching is the exception that proves the rule. 

When I first started writing my memoir-in-poems Dispatches from Frontier Schools, I was desperate to find a way to explain why teaching was so hard in a way people would understand. No matter how I told the stories about my work, my friends and family didn’t get it. They would tell me to quit, as if that didn’t mean leaving behind people I loved. They would tell me to just stop trying so hard, as if that didn’t mean purposely underserving other people’s children. They would praise me like I was saint, as if I hadn’t recently lost my temper, slammed a door, and hung my head in shame during my prep period. So, I started writing the stories as poems, the kinds of poems my husband described as “pain cries” and “cries for help.”

Heartbreakingly, the culture war over schooling continues unabated. Increasingly, my memoir-in-poems feels less like one teacher’s story and more like part of a larger, necessary project to humanize the people inside our school system. Teachers are feeling pretty embattled, and anti-teacher sentiment flows freely. But people consistently rank their own communities’ schools and teachers higher than they rank the nation’s schools as a whole. And I wonder if that is simply because they know the teachers in their community schools—can recognize them as people. 

In that spirit, I offer these ten books, then, as part of that larger project of humanization. They portray educators with nuance, demystifying the job and demonstrating that it is a deeply human endeavor. 

Minor Dramas and Other Catastrophes by Kathleen West

From the emotional-support Nalgene bottle and handouts hot from the photocopier to the student who knocks on the door the moment a teacher settles in to get her grading done, Minor Dramas and Other Catastrophes nails the details of teachers’ daily lives. I was hardly surprised to learn that author Kathleen West is a veteran teacher. The novel tells the story of how Isobel Johnson, an English teacher with a social justice mission, and Julia Abbott, a theatre mom who simply cannot keep her nose out of her kid’s life, both find themselves targets in the gossipy, politicking world of a high-achieving, suburban school district. Both Isobel and Julia make mistakes—some of them quite disastrous—but the story makes clear that their aim is always what is best for the kids. 

Up the Down Staircase by Bel Kaufman

My mom hassled me for—years!—to read this book, and I refused, thinking it was another one of those stories where the (white) teacher in an urban (Black and/or Hispanic) school is a conquering hero who saves her students from a life of poverty. But Up the Down Staircase refuses to bestow sainthood on its main character, rookie teacher Sylvia Barrett. (Also, it is set in New York City in the 1960s, before New York City public schools became majority-minority.) The novel tells the story of Miss Barrett’s first semester in the New York City Department of Education through the reams of notes, memos, notebook pages, school assignments, and student feedback forms that land daily in the trash can. Though satirical in its send up of the DOE’s dysfunction, the story holds on to its heart by showing its characters failing as often as they succeed, highlighting the Sisyphean task of teaching in a broken system. Most delightfully to me, the book also foregrounds what it feels like to be a human with a body in a classroom, from the teenagers struggling with their self-images to Ms. Barrett’s undeniable beauty. 

Election and Tracy Flick Can’t Win by Tom Perrotta

Tom Perrotta understands how even seemingly small-stakes contests—like the titular election in Election and adult Tracy Flick’s quest to become principal in Tracy Flick Can’t Win—can feel like life and death endeavors. The schools in both of these novels capture the ephemeral alliances between teachers and students that can provide a life raft in trying times—or, when they turn sour, weigh you down like an anchor. The schools in Perrotta’s universe remind us that schools don’t always recognize the efforts of those who work hardest. And the problems Tracy Flick encounters, first as a student and later as an aspiring principal, demonstrate how petty politics can get in the way of even the most determined overachiever.

The Most Precious Substance on Earth by Shashi Bhat

The Most Precious Substance on Earth charts the protagonist Nina’s journey from high school student to high school teacher. The book reflects the fraught power dynamics between students and teachers, beginning with Nina’s statutory rape at the hands of the teacher she has a crush on and culminating in her realization that her fear of being a bad teacher herself is just too much to bear. On an internet date, Nina explains teaching like this:

[I]n the classroom, you have to be teaching, of course, and doing teacherly tasks like handing out photocopies and telling people to stop talking, but you also have to be constantly aware of how fragile your students are. Sometimes it’s almost a high, and then other times it like being an air traffic controller—just…too much.

And I feel that in my heart, the way teaching is high-wire act of professionalism and personal connection that you are almost destined to screw up. 

Saul and Patsy by Charles Baxter

Saul and Patsy is the story of how Saul and Patsy get married, move to a small town where Saul becomes a high school teacher, and have a baby. Saul never seems to have too many papers to grade or too many lessons to plan—in fact his life is nothing like a teacher’s life! But I forgive Charles Baxter and this book for what it gets wrong about teaching because what it gets right is the way students haunt teachers—especially the students who seem unreachable. Much like Nina in The Most Precious Substance on Earth, Saul cannot shake his responsibility to his students. Gordy, one of Saul’s struggling students, takes to standing in Saul’s yard for hours a day to torment him. Gordy is a phantasmic figure, and his looming presence causes Saul—and Patsy—to fray at the edges. The violence Gordy inflicts on himself and those around him is a heartbreaking reminder of how we disinvest in education at the risk of the whole community. 

The Classroom by Dana Diehl and Melissa Goodrich

I read the short story collection The Classroom in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, missing my students and crying at how the fantastical and surreal short stories capture the weird alchemy of a classroom. In “The Floating Away School,” an elementary school literally floats away, to everyone’s delight. But weeks pass and the teacher eventually encourages all the students to jump to safety, staying behind to make sure they make it out safely. In “All of the Infinite Possibilities,” a substitute teacher takes his students on a field trip in his time machine, dazzling and endangering them all at once. And in “The 41st Bee,” a young teacher finds herself struggling to teach a new student—if you can a swarm of bees a singular student. Even in such fantastic situations, the teachers in this collection approach their jobs with heart and humility. 

The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession by Dana Goldstein

Dana Goldstein was a New York Times educator reporter for fifteen years, and reading her history of the teaching profession, The Teacher Wars, is like uncovering the source code for every fight over teachers and public education I have lived through as an educator. Though the book is almost ten years old, Goldstein’s thesis easily captures the state of education today: the fights we have about teaching and public education now are variations on the fights we’ve had for the past one hundred and fifty years. Goldstein compellingly digs up the roots of our debates over whether teachers are nurturers or academics, whether they should teach for the love of it or for the money, and what exactly we should teach our children and why. The Teacher Wars shows a possible path out of those wars, one where we understand teaching in all its complexity and thus don’t fall for the easy binaries culture warriors insist on. 

Cutting School: The Segronomics of American Education by Noliwe Rooks

Noliwe Rooks’s Cutting School: The Segronomics of American Education, analyzes the history of American schools through the twin lenses of race and class. Rooks argues that the project of equality depends on good public schools and that the United States has a dismal history of guaranteeing good schools to all its children. She traces American schooling from the post-Reconstruction period through Brown v. Board of Education and to the school choice movement of today to demonstrate how our school system remains stubbornly separate and unequal. Further, Rooks argues, failing schools are good business because they facilitate the transfer of wealth from the students who most need investment into the hands of private businesses who rarely deliver on the educational promises they offer (see: charter schools and vouchers, for two current examples). Cutting School helps explain why a single good teacher—or even a school full of good teachers—is not enough to fix our nation’s public schools, moving the policy focus away from individuals and to the broader system in which they struggle.

The Teachers: A Year Inside America’s Most Vulnerable, Important Profession by Alexandra Robbins

I end this list with a recent book that does basically everything I have been longing to see: an honest accounting of everything it takes to teach. In The Teachers, journalist Alexandra Robbins follows three dedicated and effective teachers for a year and supplements their stories with thoroughly reported and researched analysis of the issues teachers face, from incompetent administrators to politically motivated school boards, from struggling students to struggling coworkers. The result is a dizzying portrait that makes clear the enormous sacrifices, both monetary and emotional, teachers make in order to serve the students and communities they love. Perhaps what I love most about this book is that is never quite dips into the teacher-as-saint narrative. Even as the three teachers we follow are heroic, they make mistakes and struggle with their own failings—and some of the educators who surround them are downright awful. In other words, The Teachers both illustrates what is unique about teaching and how it is just a job like any other, filled with challenges and staffed by people both excellent and mediocre.

The Elegant Balance of a True Friendship

Posted on by Wynter Miller

Hyperboles

Two mathematicians but they are more friends than colleagues. The older of the two, Henry, teaches to graduate students in Tokyo while Liam, fifteen years his junior, works as a consultant for a private contractor in Madison. Liam makes fun of Henry because his name pentadecimally has more letters than his in correlation with the gap in their ages, but no one but them finds it funny. The two have been sending each other letters every month for the past eighteen years, on the days or weeks of the calendar marked with a prime number as another inside joke.

What did the triangle tell the circle? Henry asks Liam in his last letter before Christmas, postmarked on the twenty-third day of the month.

What? Liam asks in his reply.

You’re pointless, Henry writes back two weeks later.

They have a tradition where they send a pen nib back and forth as part of their snail mail correspondence, to be used for when someone important in their field passes away. The rule is that whoever is in possession of the nib on the day of the news should write a few words after the deceased and reserve a memorial spot in either The Times or The Tribune, the only two international papers distributed to where each lives. They’ve only made use of the nib six times in eighteen years, the last dedicated to Henry’s professor from his doctorate, who had lent him the nib in the first place. As the recipient of the nib, Henry wrote a numerically melodic eulogy for the man, showing his gratitude and appreciation in iambic pentameter. When he later tried to describe the experience to Liam, he used such quaint words as exultant and qualmish, the kind of feelings only the people past a certain age like him would feel.

In one of his more recent letters to Liam, Henry writes, What’s one word that starts with an E and ends with an E and only has one letter in between?

Liam replies: Envelope. He knows this thanks to the video his son shared on Twitter a few months back, which is also probably where Henry saw it.

Two months later, following their longest lapse in communication, Henry asks again in another letter: What’s one word that starts with an E and ends with an E and only has one letter in between?

Envelope, Liam writes at first but then, keeping in mind his friend’s declining health, replaces his paper with new stationery to ask him, What?

You’re pointless, Henry replies.

The next morning, before Liam can make it to the post office, he receives a phone call from Henry’s stepdaughter in Tokyo. Her father has passed away in his sleep.

“Toward the end, he started naming his friends after the months they died in,” she tells him. “So I guess you can start calling him August from now on.”

Today, it’s Liam’s turn to feel qualmish. He feels as if his past and present are drifting apart in front of his eyes like the continents that have separated them for all these years. As Henry used to complain, numbers defined an invariable order of things, dictating in an industrial precision what came before and what came after, unlike people; with people, he would say, it was all so random, the young going before the old, the big turning small. It pulls him from both edges like the tug-of-war that’s been happening inside him since losing his younger brother as a kid to the sea.

That morning, the nib in his possession, Liam’s mind cooks with possibilities. These days, the nib is chewed on its back end, showing all the wear and tear of its travels. Following the advice he gives to clients, he waits for the right moment, which happens on the seventh day of the month. It’s one of the sparkly ones, as Henry used to call them, a sensation he hasn’t felt in so long, most definitely not after he took up this stupid job. He sits at his desk looking out to the sea and goes through all 206 letters Henry has sent him over the years. He makes a list of all the jokes his friend made, both good and bad. He cuts parts from each​ joke and​ stitches them together with some others that have irregularly stretched out over two decades of long-distance friendship. He shuffles them as if they are variables of a formula whose outcome is yet unknown.

On the seventeenth day of the next month, the opening line of Henry’s memorial in The Times reads, What does the triangle say to a word that starts with an E and ends with an E and has one daughter in between?

On the same day, Henry’s memorial in The Tribune opens with: What does a heartbroken circle tell August?

Liam runs the memorials every week, each time with a newly pastiched joke. To his surprise, some people write back to him—and sometimes, thanks to the irony of fate, on prime number days. It’s not only colleagues who get in touch with him but also underappreciated kids, underpaid husbands, and undervoiced housewives from around the world. Sometimes, they confuse the jokes and accidentally generate new ones between their lines, which makes the outcome even more interesting for Liam.

We need new words, reads the letter of a high-school teacher from Leeds, where Liam’s mother was from.

An infinite amount of them, Liam writes back. Not unlike numbers if you ask me.

Months later, the day before Henry’s first anniversary, Liam pens a new joke to his old friend and slides the nib into the envelope. He writes Henry’s address in Tokyo on the flip side and tosses the letter in the mailbox, hoping one day it will be his turn again.

Home he walks, five steps at a time.

8 Books About the Dark History of Banana Plantations in Latin America

Posted on by Jo Lou

Banana Republic. No, not the clothing store. The term is more insidious than cotton slacks and button downs. In the 20th century, the phenomenon known as the “Banana Republic” originated from a white, American man’s imagination to describe a country with a monocrop economy, ruled by a small, powerful elite, and prone to political turmoil, easily overthrown governments, and above all, a habit of U.S. intervention. The banana—that delicious, golden fruit—started it all; the United Fruit Company—known today as Chiquita—bent entire nations to its will for produce and profits. 

This reading list comes from those who survived banana plantations owned by the UFC, those who organized against it, who wrote with unflinching truth of its exploitative nature, squalid living conditions, and political meddling on local and national levels. The banana reigned supreme, and these authors sought to attack its influence, not with machetes like their countrymen, but with the pen. Their literary tradition, known as Social Realism, follows the lives of the lower classes and exposes the greater machinery that manipulates and subjugates their lives. 

My debut novel Where There Was Fire deals a lot with bananas, more specifically, the American Fruit Company, a fictional amalgamation of United Fruit and the Standard Fruit Company (known today as Dole), and its use of an infamous pesticide by the name of Nemagon. While I’d visited banana plantations before to watch men throw bushels into piles and donkeys haul them to mills, the novels on this reading list provided me with an intimate, painful look into what really had happened on these same plantations decades before. What the United States sowed, and the sweet, toxic fruit indentured Latin Americans reaped. 

Mamita Yunai by Carlos Luís Fallas

Carlos Luís Fallas (known affectionately as Calufa) is arguably Costa Rica’s most famous writer, and his 1941 novel Mamita Yunai Costa Rica’s greatest literary export. While any other day, Mamita is a term of endearment in Costa Rica, Mamita [United Fruit Company] is used ironically, and sets the tone for the novel’s hyper-realistic depiction of life on the UFC’s plantations—disease and squalor, salaries spent on services provided by the company, men smashed by falling trees, and chopped to bit by machetes. The protagonist, a peasant union activist, confronts firsthand the impossibility of escape from the hellish shade of banana trees.  

Bananas and Men by Carmen Lyra

“I put ‘Bananas’ first,'” Carmen Lyra’s epigraph reads, “because on the banana plantations, the fruit comes first, or, in fact, it is of singular importance… Man is an entity that has none.”

Carmen Lyra was the cofounder of Costa Rica’s Communist party, and her 1931 short story collection, Bananas and Men, tackles a myriad of social nuances and consequences on the banana plantations. While this book inspired Calufa’s Mamita Yunai, Lyra’s feminist tales begin with a woman’s illegible name written on a black, wooden cross buried on a beach, sea eaten. Lyra’s narrative documents the injustices women faced on these plantations—exploitation, disease, rape, abuse—and courageously condemns the Company and machismo beyond its plantations’ borders. 

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

Skillfully buried below the yellow butterflies, discovery of ice, and Remedios the Beauty ascending to heaven, is a searing reproach of the UFC, namely, the Colombian Banana Massacre of 1928. In the fantastical prose of One Hundred Years of Solitude, three thousand men, women and children, protesting the squalid working conditions on the Company’s banana plantations, arrive and organize in the town square to negotiate with a government official. What greets them is military gunfire from every angle, and all but one is left dead, their bodies piled onto trains and tossed into the sea. While exaggerated in the novel, the real-life version is not too far off, and no less horrifying. 

Puerto Limón by Joaquín Guitérrez

In 1950, a renowned Costa Rican literary critic exclaimed that Puerto Limón was Costa Rica’s finest novel, even if most of its population had never even heard of it. Originally published in Chile, the novel follows a young high school graduate named Silvano who relocates to work on his uncle’s banana plantation in the countryside, amid rising labor tensions between the government, labor syndicates, the UFC, and independent landowners. What follows is a deeply human internal struggle within a young man who loves his uncle but empathizes with the workers fighting for sanitary working conditions. A cast of characters accompanies Silvano, and its climax is a breathtaking scene of his uncle and union busters careening their car into a river, finally setting Silvano free and sets his eyes on the sea. 

Green Prison by Ramón Amaya Amador

Like the other Social Realist writers on this list, Ramón Amaya Amador lived and worked as a pesticide sprayer on banana plantations, but his writing deals with the Standard Fruit Company in Honduras. Prisión Verde takes place in 1940s Honduras, where a military dictator protects the exploitative fruit companies to gain their favor by destroying labor strikes and assassinating workers. After publication, Amaya Amador was forced to flee Honduras, and Prisión Verde was banned; reading it could land you in jail, and for many years, those who mentioned it would have to do so in a whisper. 

Strong Wind by Miguel Ángel Asturias

Starting off Asturias’s Banana Trilogy is Vientos Fuertes, a literal whirlwind of a novel. Local banana producers are undercut, short changed, and blown off by the fictional company Tropical Fruit, Inc., simply because it can—as their only buyer, the Company toys with these Guatemalan farmers, just as it did in real life, dropping prices, and if angered, leaving their fruit to rot. Initially aided by a white American who is secretly a stock owner of Tropical Fruit, Inc., the farmers are saved by a Native ritual that summons a literal cyclone that rips Tropical Fruit, Inc. plantations from the map. 

The Green Pope by Miguel Ángel Asturias

The sophomore installment of Asturias’s Banana Trilogy, El papa verde tackles the fruit companies from the inside, or rather, from the top. Its anti-hero, George Maker Thompson, is a ruthless money-maker dealing in bananas in Central America. With so much power given to him by greed and the fruit, he christens himself as the Green Pope. He wishes for the annexation of Guatemala by the United States, fends off rival fruit companies, and pulls out every dastardly deed in the book to become president of the Company. With such caricature of a protagonist and a melodramatic plot, the novel carries the tone of a biting political cartoon and the mastery of Asturias’s prose. 

Eyes of the Interred by Miguel Ángel Asturias

Los ojos de los enterrados leaves off right where The Green Pope stopped—George Maker Thompson is still a powerful plutocrat, though he’s dying from throat cancer. Tropical Fruit, Inc. has become a behemoth, manipulating governments, economies, and people with the sticky dexterity of an octopus’s tentacles. Two “good gringos” ally themselves with Native laborers to fight against the influence of Tropical Fruit and its Green Pope, who plans to section off a swath of Central America as a “green zone”, where American culture and the dollar reign supreme with the help of the almighty banana. Asturias’s final installment of the Banana Trilogy is a rewarding, volcanic rollercoaster ride. 

In Times of Environmental Collapse, Storytelling is a Form of Repair

Posted on by EL Assistant2

In Alissa Hattman’s debut novel Sift, the world, at first, appears hostile to life, nearly uninhabitable. Skies darken with toxins and smoke. Food, especially produce, is scarce. Drinking water is limited, a result of rivers and other natural bodies that have been poisoned. Fires rage and a tenor of violence hums at the edges of the story. 

From this bleak landscape comes a story that unfurls like a new frond: green, bright, and tender. In the opening pages, the narrator, yet unnamed, is picked up by a woman she describes as “the only person I’d met who had learned how to keep living.” As the two travel across a dying landscape in the hope of finding some tangible relief, they begin to better understand not only one another, but themselves, the world around them, and the larger web of history that they are a part of. 

Hattman’s prose is lyric, brimming with the pleasing sounds of a poem, and the novel is told in a series of sharp, sparse vignettes that feature not only the human perspectives of the narrator and her newfound travel companion, The Driver, but also includes segments exclusively focused on pond snails, the western banded gecko, wild mustard, and more. Reading Sift encouraged me to think about what it means to listen to the narratives of flora, fauna, and other elements in our world, and just how possible it is to translate that into language; what it means to care for another being or entity, and the cost that sometimes comes with our attempts to care; and how to grieve while also holding on to hope. I had the opportunity to speak with Hattman about all of this, and more, via Zoom. 

Jacqueline Alnes: Your book opens with a quote from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss, in which she writes: “From Tetraphis, I began to understand how to learn differently, to let the mosses tell their story, rather than wring it from them.” 

I love the way that your book is a human story but also includes lyric sections that are focused on elements in the natural world. What does it look like when we let the environment speak to us rather than us imposing a story on it? 

Alissa Hattman: With that epigraph, I was trying to be intentional in this process of gesturing toward the stories outside the human-driven story of the two main characters. I wanted to include more of the environmental elements within their own stories. It can be a hard thing to do because you don’t want to talk for the non-human other, but I approached it as a deep listening. I tried to remove any of the pronouns and any of this sense of subject or agency and see what could surface from that. 

JA: In terms of that deep listening, this story seems to be so much about bearing witness: to environmental collapse, and to moments of joy—which aren’t very frequent in this story. You write,  “Observing is one way to go on” and “I knew the act of writing would help it stay in my head.” There’s this recurring theme of wanting to remember. For you, does this book represent the importance of all of us bearing witness to what is currently going on in our world or the idea of putting that into language?

Storyteling helps us emotionally to engage with this very difficult topic of climate change or systemic racism.

AH: I do think this deep attention and witnessing can be a type of understanding, and then maybe also resistance in some cases. Paying attention to the environment, the long history of the land, another person’s grief, all of this is a type of repair, a type of listening that I think is very important. Grieving humanity or some of what we’ve lost, like species or the degradation of the land, is a larger witnessing. It can lead to action as well. If there is that type of listening that becomes more relational and becomes more understanding of a larger history, then I think it moves people to change and to act. 

JA: It reminded me a little of when Trump was elected and people were keeping track of his tweets. It felt like something to do. It felt powerful at first but then, as it went on, it felt like an insurmountable wall of horrors. In your novel, there is this accumulation of grief—for humans, for air, for water, the internal landscapes of the characters. Did writing during a time of collective grief and unrest inform how you approached this subject?

AH: I started writing Sift at the beginning of the pandemic. It began with a deep fear of loss, which was something that was individual, this fear of losing loved ones, at first, but then it became so much larger. It became an anticipatory grief, of realizing how large and overwhelming it would get. There was so much happening alongside the pandemic. The pandemic is related to climate change. In Oregon, we had fires and then ice storms, increased air pollution, poverty, displacement, environmental racism, redlining, all these things were happening and coming to a head. The larger loss was an environmental grieving, grieving not only this moment but what came before as well. 

In terms of what that means for Sift, I knew that I was going to write something that was going to encompass this heavy material, these traumatic moments. I wanted it to be in a way that felt the narrative was calm and safe as well, so there was a sense of yes, this is all happening, and we have community and connection, even if that connection is only one other person or even if that connection is with some aspect of the environment. It was originally just something I felt like I needed to write in this moment to go on but I was thinking about how to create a work that allows us to enter into that space that so many people feel overwhelmed by. I don’t know if it succeeds, but that was the plan when I started. I wanted to thread in love, community, friendship, and a certain amount of safety.

JA: While reading, I got this sense of interconnectedness, which is so beautiful but also means that when one thing starts to falter, everything does. It’s hard to reckon at any moment with how connected we are to the environment and other people. 

AH: This quote from Hannah Arendt, “Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it,” gets at this idea of being able to place a lot of these intersections together into story and some meaning will come of it. This is one of the great tools that we have as storytellers and novelists, to express a moment in some amount of clarity so that a number of people can take away intersections from that moment, something that will be meaningful to them. Storytelling is a place where repair can happen. 

I think about holding some of those histories, social and environmental collapse, as being a rupture; holding and witnessing and discussing outside of the story is a type of repair. Not in a sense that it will fix everything, but that it emotionally helps us to engage with this very difficult topic of climate change or systemic racism. I think about how story is many-faceted in that way. Even though it might not change hearts and minds, there is a potential for something larger in that conversation in talking about literature or writing. 

JA: In Sift, you write, “I did not care for you as I should have because I did not know, or I did not take the time to learn what caring for you meant…I am sorry for every casual or not-so-casual way I harmed you.” Care and harm seem like flipsides of each other in that none of us are perfect in our attempts to care for another person, being, or the space we are in; it’s an imperfect practice. Did you start to develop a semblance of what care might look like in our present world?

AH: The passage that you read is recognizing that there are things we will do that can hurt and can harm. There is no perfect way of caretaking. I’m not a parent, but I talk to people who are parents and they will say that one of the early lessons they have is that there is no perfect way of doing this. They are going to make mistakes and it’s going to be hard. There is going to be some harm, no matter what. I think about that in terms of any relationship, really. So you try to do what you can so you cause the least amount of harm or, if you do cause harm, to spend time repairing.

In this book, there is what’s held and what’s let go. The characters keep passing back these stones, these stories, back and forth. There are certain times when the other person can hold it and certain times when they can’t. It’s difficult to be able to recognize that and also communicate that, on the small and large level, too. When we talk about ecological grief, which is a term that’s been around since the 1940s, we are talking about the pain that is caused by environmental loss. In 2020, there was a survey that showed two-thirds of adults experience eco-anxiety. Allowing more of this discussion around some of the grief and the fears and the loss of environment is a step toward understanding, witnessing, and action and change. 

In the same way we think about grief with individuals or about these different topics with our loved ones, I think about it as trying to hold some of it when you can and recognizing when it is not something you can hold or when it’s something you need to let go of. It would be so interesting to see more environmental grief groups or something like that in the world.

JA: The book highlights that there are these tangible forms of care, or attempts to pre-empt someone’s comfort through blankets or canned food, but then so much of care seems so intangible, which is maybe where some of the anxiety in regard to the environment comes from. I care, but I’m flailing. What can I physically, personally do about this thing that feels so far beyond the limits of my daily existence? 

AH: That idea of tangibility and what can be done on a day-to-day basis is something I think about a lot in my life. In the book there’s this one scene where they come across a bag of garbage and I think it’s a very human problem where it’s like, what do we do with all this garbage? In the book, seeing garbage is a moment of hope: maybe there are other people. The characters have this conversation about what to do with it. One character wants to take it with them, but they have to travel light. The other character is being very practical and says no, somebody might come and it might be theirs. She thinks it might be someone else’s treasure. The narrator just takes one bottle from the garbage because she thinks it might be useful.

When I have felt joy in life, it’s because I have recognized my mortality or the mortality of others.

The thought process of going through recycling or being a conscious consumer is something that happens every day. There are these practical everyday things that you do not because you think about what it might mean long-term, but because this is what we do, right now, to care for each other. I think that it’s somehow trying to do the tangible but not being too overwhelmed by the intangible. You’re right that the anxiety comes from not knowing what to do. It’s going to be different for each person, but if it’s an emotional response, maybe it should be dealt with in an emotional way. Any time you’re having anxiety, there’s an underlying fear; can we get at that fear? Can we talk about some of that and learn how to be there for one another in the discussion rather than avoiding it and feeling like it’s too big or too much?

JA: There’s a thread of gender in the book. There’s this group of nameless men who keep coming back, and the brother has to go to war and that violence forever shapes him. There is also a strong theme of friendship between women. The ways that these expectations imposed on us in relation to gender shape who we are, what we are exposed to, and how we hold those traumas and carry them with us. 

AH: I was absolutely thinking about the harms of patriarchy throughout this and what that looks like for men, women, and nonbinary people. I did want to look at how the harms of patriarchy show up in this particular world and I think it’s something that we see a little bit with the brother character and the harms of war. There are also moments where the past traumas with the narrator and these faceless men who are described only as “the men.” It’s meant to show the lack of individuality in moments of violence. They become this larger system, machine, something, that is taking away from identity in many ways. That violence becomes its own character. 

JA: You obviously thought so much about language in this book. Some elements you just describe, others you leave vague, some you name. There’s always a tension, right, in how we name something? Naming something can be an act of colonization in the way they can be imposed, but a name is also a form of knowing, of intimacy. 

AH:I know this comes up with a lot of writers around naming. In a number of Ursula LeGuin’s books, there are characters who have multiple names but there is one true name, and that is given by another character. I intentionally waited for the characters to name themselves in the drafting process and I realized I wanted there to be as much time to go by for the reader as time had gone by for me as the writer. The names encompassed other elements and were in harmony or concert with their environment. To me, that felt right. It felt like it represented collectivity. 

The tension you’re talking about is an interesting one. I certainly don’t think I get around it in this book, even after the characters name each other. When they name each other, there is this familiarity and they see each other differently, but there’s that pinning down that happens with identity when there’s a name. I don’t know if it gets around that tension at all; it’s still quite there. 

JA: Part of the book is about deep griefs, but there is this longing from the characters who want to get out of the darkness. What do you think the role of grief is in developing joy? 

AH: I think that they are one in the same, in many ways. It’s a strange thing to say, but in my grieving process, it has always felt like an act of love to me, and an act of joy. And when I have felt joy in life, it’s because I have recognized my mortality or the mortality of others. It feels very much entwined. 

In Sift, there are moments from the past where the narrator is talking about joy. There’s a moment in the field with music and there’s a moment at the grocery store, getting bread: small, small moments that didn’t feel like much, but now having lived through so much chaos and trauma, they hold a lot of medicine and joy. They are things that the narrator keeps calling on as a type of coping mechanism. I don’t know if I could write a grief narrative without including joy. Grieving is recognizing some of the joys of life. 

JA: Do you feel like that’s part of your compulsion to write, especially in this current landscape we’re living in? You’re making something beautiful in a dark time.

AH: Yes. This is also the difficulty. I don’t want to aestheticize the environment or the horrors of the environment in a way that might ameliorate that horror. It’s a very tricky balance. My attempt is to be in the space of grief or of trauma or of a deep sense of loss or remembrance and witness of the degradation of the environment. I feel like as an artist, trying to create it in a way where people can still see it and hold it, but not be so beautiful that it distracts from the realities. It’s something that’s very hard to do and I don’t know if I’m successful at it, but to me it felt like the lyric of it, the music of the prose, was the beauty and that allowed me to do whatever else I feel like I needed to share with the content of the piece. My hope was that it would be a balance. 

JA: It’s hard because you don’t want to go the other way, either. For me, if I read straight environmental horror it makes me feel like I can’t do anything. 

AH: When I was working with the editors on writing the synopsis for this story, I kept bringing in the darkness and they were saying no, no, there’s lightness and joy. I was bringing in more of the grief aspect and they helped remind me, as you are reminding me, that there is a lot of joy mixed up with the grief.