Page 163 – Electric Literature

7 Novels About Questionable Geniuses and False Saviors

Posted on June 27, 2023June 29, 2023 by EL Assistant2

In the climactic moment of the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, Toto the terrier moves aside the Technicolor-green curtain to reveal that the Wizard is a mere mortal, pulling and twisting at levers to create the illusion of a great, smoke-puffing god. Even before the big reveal, though, Dorothy and her friends are already disappointed with the Wizard. He had promised he’d get Dorothy back home, to Kansas, if she liquified the Wicked Witch of the West, and now he’s dawdling—yeah, maybe tomorrow, come back later, he says. Dorothy calls him out on his BS: “If you were really great and powerful,” she says, “you’d keep your promises.”

As a kid, I remember registering that the characterization of the exposed Wizard was complicated by him proceeding to explain his story, why he does what he does, why he’s a fraud. It was not the swift and simple unmasking of a villain as observed in Scooby-Doo—another bit of pop culture that young-me devoured. The story of the genius-villain in Oz was more adult-like because it gave him a motive, and was made complicated by the reasons he provided for what on its face was despicable behavior. I could see his point: that his lies kept a whole population happy. It involved ethics and all the stuff that seemed intriguing and like an introduction to thinking about others and the world in an exciting—because nuanced—way.

In my novel Big Shadow, a young and isolated woman starts paying visits to a man she views as an “established and professional artist,” at his East Village apartment. The narrator convinces herself that she stands a chance at becoming part of his world, that they’re equals. Maurice is a poet, a fixture of the former punk scene that flowered in New York in the mid-1970s. Now nearing 50, this villain-genius is not as grand and flame-throwing as the Wizard. He is not even overtly villainous, and definitely not a genius (though the descriptor is bandied about). As with Oz, it’s complicated. Judy, our inexperienced narrator, chooses to see the better parts of Maurice and their relationship.

What if Dorothy wanted to return to Kansas so badly, she drew the green curtain shut again, pushed what Toto had shown her out of her mind, and continued to wait at the foot of the floating green head of the Wizard until he delivered on his promise? “Since you’re really great and powerful, you’ll keep your promises” is a line of thought she could’ve comforted herself with. But I think an attendant thought would inevitably follow: how long can one cruise in a mode of self-deception, and is the cost of doing so worth the tenuous reward?

This reading list features a crew of questionable geniuses, part saviors, part villains, all due for exposure. The common thread is that they keep the wool over someone else’s eyes, and the smoke and mirrors of their genius-status has the power to greatly affect others. Sometimes that someone is our protagonist, sometimes that someone is us, the readers.

The Weak Spot by Lucie Elven

The Weak Spot follows a woman who arrives at a small, isolated town to start an apprenticeship at a pharmacy. From her first moments in the peculiar, fable-like locale, it becomes evident that her employer, the pharmacist August Malone, is a revered and elevated local god. The pharmacy employees and the whole town buzz around Malone. Townspeople seek his counsel; he has a Delphic oracle quality, it appears, and people spill their beans to him “as if at confession.” And yet when he runs for mayor, armed with the secrets of his constituents, a different side of him becomes apparent to the narrator. The Weak Spot is a portrait of power and manipulation rendered in a style so dreamy and suffused in moodiness that the story’s sinister elements might elude you on a first read, as if you’ve fallen victim to the soothing powers of that trickster genius yourself.

The Polyglot Lovers by Lina Wolff

Wolff’s novel has a three-part, three-narrator structure with a central object that links the lives of the disparate narrators: the destruction of the sole existing copy of a literary genius’s manuscript. The first narrator is a woman who goes on a date with a literary critic. At the end of their rendezvous, she burns said manuscript, which the critic had in his possession for the purposes of writing a review. “Genius” is not a term I’ve imported into the plot. Max Lamas, the author of the lost manuscript, is unabashedly referred to as the genius of his age. The satirical notes are discernable. The novel brings up Michel Houellebecq in various contexts, sometimes as a competitor to Max, though Max is obsessed with the controversial French writer as well. The second narrator is Max himself, which grants us closer, and more horrific, insight into who he is. The final narrator is the granddaughter of one of Max’s lovers. She offers yet another lens through which to view—and judge—the super-revered man at the center of it all: Max, or is it Houellebecq, or perhaps it’s more generally the Male Genius Literary Writer who has held an annoyingly long tenure in the industry in which Wolff makes her art.

Indelicacy by Amina Cain

Indelicacy reads like a dark yet hopeful fable. From the start we get the sense that we are untethered to place or time; there’s no need for those sorts of details. The narrator is a cleaning woman at an art gallery, leading an austere life. With the beautifully uncomplicated unfolding of a fairy tale or magic illusion, she meets a man at the gallery and is suddenly married, Cinderella-like, coming to live at her new husband’s grand homestead, complete with a maid and a seeming freedom born from financial security. Yet very quickly we question this savior. Who is this prince who can whisk a poor woman into a new life from one page to the next? Tension arises from growing, subtle disappointments, the biggest being the narrator’s feelings that she is hindered from pursuing her dream of writing. The prince-husband is perhaps more of a Bluebeard—the anti-savior-supreme. Things in the castle are not as they seem, and for a long time the narrator doesn’t fully understand the extent of what is going on within the walls she inhabits. Indelicacy is a striking meditation on dreams, life’s callings, art, independence, and freedom. It is a novel uniquely conceived and captured.

Sorry to Disrupt the Peace by Patrick Cottrell

But what if it is the first-person narrator herself who is convinced of her genius-status, in full-on megalomaniacal—and wholly unreliable—glory? In Cottrell’s darkly humorous, unexpectedly devastating novel, Helen, our narrator leaves New York City to visit her midwestern hometown to attend her brother’s funeral, announced suddenly after he takes his own life. Helen’s mind is peculiar—sometimes veering on absurd, her adoptive parents’ behavior so extreme and disturbing, a lot of the fun of the novel is trying to get a grip on reality, and better yet: letting go of that impulse and committing fully to Helen’s lens. As is often the case with people who have a weak grasp of the world, a lot of Helen’s attention is devoted to presenting her picture of herself to us, to control the image of herself, and this is tied to her occupation as a counsellor of troubled youth. Helen’s idea of her success as a shaper of young minds makes up some of the more amusing and disturbing moments in the novel. The dramatic irony hits peak-levels as Helen—who in her own mind is a savior to her students, the type of genius-pedagogue that has films made about them à la Dead Poets Society—recounts moments at work, in the classroom, where the reader can see the horrifying truth of the situation. And witnessing this allows the reader to meditate further on what the narrator’s disconnect from truth means in regard to other aspects of her life and upbringing.

The Shame by Makenna Goodman

The Shame follows Alma, a woman who decides to leave her family and home in Vermont and pursue a barely planned, tenuous new life in Brooklyn. The magnetic mountain to which the narrator is drawn is Celeste, whose life Alma has glimpsed through her social media posts (the platform is not named, though the posts have an Instagram-like feel). A significant part of the novel is focused on Alma’s growing immersion in Celeste’s life in her picture-perfect apartment—or rather “life” in quotation marks, as it is of course merely the life Celeste presents through the funhouse mirror that is social media. In the narrator’s mind, the woman is elevated to an ideal, a god, a new religion. Celeste’s mythology is sufficiently believable that Alma is able to leave behind her young children just to be with her—or, more likely, to be like her. The drive to New York, which encompasses the “present moment” of the novel, and the narrator’s time in the city, as she seeks to find and finally meet her savior, is full of tension. What will the meeting result in? What can a meeting with an ideal result in? Is Celeste a worthwhile savior? The novel leaves us asking why we idealize others when all signs point to there being reasons to suspect our impulse—what this says about us and our own condition.

My Heart Hemmed In by Marie NDiaye

My Heart Hemmed In is a mystery—not the genre of mystery, but a story seemingly oblivious to the need to explain anything to its reader. The idea that this can’t go on is propulsive, and conducive to paranoia. The unknowns become suffocating in the most pleasant of ways, and we read on for the hope of release, some air to be let in. The novel follows a woman living in Bordeaux who attempts to understand why others have suddenly come to despise her and her husband. The antagonism is so severe that the couple is effectively ostracized. In the opening page, the husband has been stabbed; he may be dying. One of the many unexplained phenomena is the presence of a neighbor, Richard Noget, who unilaterally moves into the couple’s apartment to act as a nurse. His aggressive presence, marked by absurd actions, adds another level of oppression for the narrator: she cannot understand it. And what truly fuels her (and so, our) flame is that while she’s convinced Noget is sinister, he is a famous and revered figure in France. Noget’s status as beloved is a repeating, painful blow, as the narrator’s whole consciousness has turned to the question of why she is despised and unloved. While Noget is only one of the few terrifying elements that challenge the notion of realism in this novel, he is a central symbol that haunts the narrator until the very final scenes.

Acting Class by Nick Drnaso

In Drnaso’s graphic novel, a motley crew of outsiders ridden by all shades of past and present problems attend an acting class taught at a community center by the enigmatic John Smith. Smith is no Gene Cousineau from HBO’s Barry. His ambiguously flat yet demanding pedagogical approach lends the story a tense, uncomfortable tone, and he is ultimately unlikeable, with a slight whiff of cult leader. Acting in Smith’s acting class is not a route to scoring a part in a film or TV show. It instead entails a role-playing that leads to accessing memories and fantasies. As students enter imagined (or procured) scenarios, the result is a blurring of the boundaries between real and not-real. Smith’s students quickly come to depend on his versions of reality, though it is unclear whether healthy progress is being made and whether the students are benefitting from the so-called acting lessons. The story culminates in a trip to the teacher’s isolated home and leaves a dangling question of whether this group should have placed so much of their inner lives in the hands of a reticent guru.

Cuddling My Way Through a Quarter-Life Crisis

Posted on June 26, 2023June 20, 2023 by Wynter Miller

An excerpt from Holding Pattern by Jenny Xie

After indulging my misery for two weeks, LB made me download a dating app. We were in her loft at Dolly’s, a West Oakland co-op converted from a former packing warehouse for Dolly’s Sweets, a now-defunct cookie company—the members called themselves Dolls in tribute. LB’s place was on the fourth and topmost floor, its high ceilings traversed by pipes from which she’d hung ferns and streaming pothos. An expansive grid of windows faced the street, the panes cranked open over a mattress raised on shipping pallets. Aside from the bathroom, the space was completely open.

We were each nursing our fifth Aperol Spritz, lying in opposite directions on the couch, our ankles knitted together. With LB, touch came naturally; we’d spent so much of our childhood jostling each other, scrambling to turn the pages of trashy teen magazines and rub our wrists against the perfume samples, or pinching each other’s pores to eject globules of sebum. The ease I had with her didn’t translate to other people. Oren had had to coax me into creating our own language, a calligraphic system of strokes and caresses. The first time he’d kissed the back of my neck—I’d been bowed over a textbook—I’d yipped with nervous laughter.

LB sprung up from her side to snatch the phone out of my hand and started scrolling through photos to add to my profile.

“How does every single picture of you have Oren in it?” she said, slouched low against a pillow so that her chin flattened against her chest.

“All the good pictures of me are on his phone.”

“You don’t take selfies? Oh, hey, it’s me! Aw, I remember that day.” She flipped the screen around to show me the picture. It’d been taken a year ago at the county fair. We were squatting next to a pygmy goat at the petting zoo, its bristly face cocked at the camera; LB’s baseball cap was crooked, and she was making the metal horns sign with her hand. “I’ve got one hand on a go-at,” she sang in the strained, spiraling voice of Alanis Morissette, “and the other one’s giving a metal sign.”

She raised her glass from where she’d placed it on the concrete floor and slurped from her luminous drink.

“Whoops, that’s a nude. What angelic tits you have, Kath, seriously. But shouldn’t you keep these in a separate folder?” She tsked. “Oh my God, you only take selfies with dogs. Whose dogs are these, even?”

Later, when she’d finally cobbled something together, we huddled next to each other and thumbed through hundreds of faces. Men in plaid flannels held their prize fish up to the camera; men flexed in front of mirrors at the gym. They loved to travel, and held dear the notion of pineapple on pizza, and would only trust you if their dog liked you. They were GGG and ethically nonmonogamous, and punctuated their wholesome portraits with a snapshot of themselves in Burning Man regalia, rosy and powdered with desert dust at sunrise.

“He’s cute, sorta,” said LB, pausing.

I hummed an indecisive tone. “Oh, no, he’s a moderate.”

She swiped his photo away, condemning him to the digital abyss. “Not gonna lie, this is rough. Guess we can’t all inherit our best friend’s exes.”

I had always been grateful to LB for preserving our friendship through her candor and optimism, her disarmingly vulnerable way of saying things like “Kath, I wouldn’t go down this road if I didn’t feel like there was a real chance at happiness at the end of it” when she’d first started dating Andrew. “I really need your blessing.” She was the sort of person who sought blessings, who looked out for signs of goodwill from the universe—a ring of mushrooms parting the grass, an exquisite rock plucked from the riverbed—and made you a believer, too.

An ad popped up next. Need a hug? Cozy up to cuddle therapy, it read, accompanied by a photo of a couple snuggling by a campfire, a blanket draped over their shoulders. We snickered at its cheesiness.

“I’m sorry, come again?” I said. My glass collided with my teeth and I repositioned it, tipping the drink into my mouth and gesturing for LB to click through.

The website that loaded was for Midas Touch, a self- proclaimed cuddle clinic with locations in San Francisco, Oakland, Brooklyn, and (coming soon) Austin. Hygienic photos of people spooning in bed or curled up on the couch ran alongside a friendly, sans serif font. Whoever had art-directed the photoshoot had been scrupulous about representation, as though they’d had a checkmark beside every race, gender, age, and size.

“This is so creepy,” said LB.

“Is this a cult?”

“It’s either a cult or a millennial sock brand.” I clicked on the About Us page.

Take a hands-on approach to happiness. Studies have shown that a kind touch lowers stress, boosts your immune system, and releases oxytocin—you know, the hormone that gives you the warm and fuzzies. It’s time to get back to basics: unplug and unwind with a wellness consultation with one of our trained cuddle providers.

“What on God’s green earth,” LB breathed. “The founder’s a babe, though.”

The creator of Midas Touch was Abigail Brown, a woman with a spiraling mass of red hair, whose thin lips were tilted in a knowing half smile. “‘The seed for the cuddle clinic was planted during her one-y ear solo trip around the world, when she made so many meaningful connections—but still craved the simple, soothing comfort of touch,’” read LB bombastically. “‘Over the past two years, Abigail has consulted with experts in touch therapy to develop the Midas Method, a code of ethics and cuddling manual.’” She widened her eyes at the screen. “This is wild. Is this based on any science at all?”

“To be fair,” I said, “there is this thing in social psychology called the Midas touch. Like, if a waitress touches you at a restaurant somehow, puts her hand on your shoulder or something, you tip more. And students participate more in class if they’re touched by the teacher—no, not in a molesty way—and basketball players score more points if they high five or hug each other.”

“Ew!” she shrieked. “Of course you would know that. Look,” she said, tapping on the START CUDDLING button, “they need brains like yours. ‘Become a certified cuddle provider and earn up to $100 an hour.’ I’m signing you up.”

“No!” I grabbed for the phone, but LB twisted away. “I’m going to get so many spam emails.”

“Hey, I’m doing you a favor,” LB said. “This is a job. One that pays four times as much as I’m making.”

I tried to imagine what it would feel like, holding a stranger, but instead my brain substituted Oren, the stubble I grazed when I sought his lips in the dark. A slow sadness, like cold mud, saturated my body, and my eyes welled. I was always within reach of pain; it could assault me at any time.

A slow sadness, like cold mud, saturated my body, and my eyes welled.

“Sent!” LB dropped the phone and noticed my tears. “Oh, no.” She confiscated my glass and looped her arms around my neck, pulling me close. “See? I’m healing you with the incredible power of touch.”

I laughed through a shudder. “Thanks.” I blinked against the dark of her shoulder for a while and then pulled back, wiping my nose with the inside of my collar.

“Have you, like, tried being angry?” she asked.

“Yeah, I’m angry,” I said indignantly. I regularly cycled through my list of grievances: that Oren had kept his unhappiness from me, that he’d unilaterally decided the relationship was past saving. That he hadn’t been present to support me through school because he was too busy excelling, that he hadn’t admitted that he found my lack of motivation unattractive. It was a dark pleasure, seething about these things, flattening him into something easier to discard.

“Have you been so angry you’ve broken something?”

A pause. “What are you trying to get me to do right now?”

“Come on!” she exclaimed, flinging her hands up, looking around her space. The light cascading from the warehouse windows sharpened the knolls of the mussed sheets on her bed, revealing the whirligigging dander in the air. She launched herself toward a long dresser, its surface a tableaux of books, candlesticks, and pert-eared plants, and brought back a mug. It was white with a teddy bear pattern running around it.

“I’m not going to break your mug,” I protested.

“Just try it,” she said, shaking it at me. “It might be satisfying. I hate this mug. This mug is cursed. I accidentally stole it from the kitchen at work and now this woman named Cheryl is asking everyone for it, and it’s too awkward to put it back now. It must be destroyed.”

“How? Where?” I grasped the handle.

“On the floor! We’ll sweep it up! I mean, you’ll sweep it up.”

I walked a few paces into the center of the room and conjured my apartment in Baltimore, how empty it had seemed after Oren had gone, how utterly airless, and I hurled the mug against the floor, where it petaled into several pieces. The sound came hot and bright.

“How did it feel?” asked LB.

I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. “Good.” I started gathering the shards with my shoe. “That felt good.”

The next day I had an email from Midas Touch: Little spoon or big spoon? Let’s get to know each other. It opened with a testimonial from a cuddle provider named Drishti, age thirty-six, in San Francisco: Seeing my cuddle clients is the absolute highlight of my week. Midas Touch takes care of the scheduling and payment processing, so all I have to do is show up and snuggle. I always leave feeling like I’ve made a difference.

I told myself I was reading it ironically, but something compelled me forward. I didn’t believe in the sanitary veneer Midas Touch presented, but that only made it more alluring. Here was research of the flesh, so far from the hermetic experiments of school. So many relationships and flings had made me suspect that I was less fluent in touch than other people: I marveled at how easily other bodies warmed to mine, yielding like butter whenever my hand grazed the back of a neck, the slope of a thigh. I tensed when they kissed me in public as though it would help to fortify the borders of my body. Oren had had to encourage me toward him, saying when I pressed my lips to his bare shoulder once, “I like that. You never do that.” But it was less complicated with strangers. I was only afraid to reach for someone I was scared of losing.

The next steps to becoming a certified cuddle provider, the email explained, were to complete a background check, take an online training course in the Midas Method, and pass an in-person Cuddle Aptitude Test. After that, I would be added to the directory for clients to book within my available days and time frames.

At worst, I reasoned, my nerves swimming with a strange electricity, it would be a good story to tell; I could already imagine LB’s eyes inflating with shock and glee. I clicked on the button—GET STARTED—marveling how even the most innocuous copywriting could feel like a benefaction to someone like me.

Midas Touch was in downtown Oakland, occupying the sixth and seventh floors of a building that had once been coworking offices. Long ago, in high school, I’d peed in the front courtyard out of desperation after leaving a show on Telegraph Avenue, squatting behind a concrete planter while my friends stood as lookouts. Now, the elevator doors opened to a landing of dark tile and mirrors. Glass doors bearing the company’s logo, a golden palm radiating lines of energy, slid open as I approached, beckoning me to the front desk.

“Hi,” I said to the woman at the computer. “I’m here for my Cuddle Aptitude Test?” She was intimidatingly put together, like a gift, presentable, with her dun blond bangs in a crisp line across her forehead and small gold hoops pinned to her ears.

“Great, just one sec,” she said, swiveling to the monitor. As she searched for me in the system, I ogled the open office behind her. Everything was unsettlingly neat: there were rows of standing desks lined with marigold felt dividers and white orb pendants hanging above the employees, headphones clamped over their ears. Fiddle-leaf figs and voluminous palms grew lustily out of burlap-sack planters.

“Kathleen Cheng?” asked the woman.

“Yes, that’s me.”

“Perfect. I have you all checked in. If you’ll have a seat in the waiting room, someone will call your name in a couple of minutes.”

“Thanks.” I walked in the direction she pointed. The walls were gallery white, hung with blown-up photographic prints of nuzzling bodies, composed to abstract the joist of a collarbone or the swell of a stomach.

I was both impressed and distressed with how seamless it all felt, as though I’d stepped through the app into a physical manifestation of the brand. Everything about the startup was studiously youthful, friendly, conscientious, cool. During the online training, after every video segment a quiz would slide onto the screen. Your male- bodied client becomes physically aroused during the session, it asked. How do you handle the situation? I’d tapped on Take a break from cuddling and assess how you’re both feeling, and a flare of confetti had showered the screen.

The waiting room was wrapped in a hushed taupe felt, and a curvaceous built-in wooden bench wrapped around three sides, accented with circular cushions. There were knotty wooden blocks dispersed as side tables, adorned with dried flowers and eucalyptus. Ambient music bled softly into the room. I sat down on a cushion and studied the large canvas on the opposite wall, its blotches of sienna and fern green.

Soon, someone walked in and I straightened, but it didn’t seem like he was there for me. We glanced at each other—he, a forty-something white man in a checkered button-down; I, a visibly tense woman in a black T—and decided not to disturb our private spheres. He took a seat on the bench and pulled out his phone. A client, I realized. I imagined gathering him into my arms, feeling the shifting of his spine and smelling the faint tang of coffee on his breath, and my nerves flared again, both in agitation and with an odd longing. I felt protective of this human creature.

I imagined gathering him into my arms, feeling the shifting of his spine and smelling the faint tang of coffee on his breath, and my nerves flared again.

I sat examining this feeling until a woman around my age entered the room. She was tall and plump, with shining cheeks and a gap-toothed smile. “Kathleen? Thanks for waiting. If you’re ready, I’ll take you to our therapy rooms.” She glanced at the man waiting.

“Wayne, let me know if you need anything.”

“I’m great, thank you,” said Wayne, holding up the phone as though it was proof.

She introduced herself as Nadia—“senior cuddler and community liaison”—as she led me out of the waiting room and up a carpeted stairwell. “Do you have any experience as a professional cuddler?” she asked.

“No, not professionally.”

“Most of our cuddle providers don’t have formal experience, but that’s not a problem,” she said, her high-pitched voice ringing with a slight echo. “I’ve been at it for four years now, so let me know if you have any questions. At first I was doing it on my own, but then I found Midas—or, more accurately, they found me. I helped beta test the whole thing, smoothed out the kinks. And here we are: the bathrooms—there’re changing stalls if you need to get into something comfier—and the therapy rooms.” We’d emerged on the next floor, where a long hallway connected meeting rooms encased in frosted glass. I could see dim silhouettes in the occupied spaces; a touch screen at the door closest to us counted down the minutes left in the session. She took in my silence. “Not what you were expecting?”

I couldn’t put it into words—the eeriness of commodifying intimacy, the company’s willfully cheerful answer to the urgent and pervasive loneliness of existence. Studies on the physiological benefits of touch were sparse, and questions around ethics stayed the hands of caretakers, doctors, and therapists. Midas Touch seemed poised to satisfy a primal need, but what about the ethics of privatizing touch at all? In the end, profit would be the only metric that mattered. “It’s very regulated,” I finally said lamely.

“Oh, absolutely. Everything’s been streamlined to feel as safe and comfortable as possible.” Nadia unlocked a door with a string of numbers and held it open to let me pass.

Here, a low platform bed took up most of the space, draped with a fringed coverlet, and a slim leather couch hugged one wall. A wooden coffee table held a brass tray of melted candles and a singed nub of palo santo in a marble bowl.

“Go ahead, have a seat,” said Nadia. She took her place on the couch, then leaned over to wedge a finger into the back of her sneakers. “We just ask that shoes stay off the furniture.”

Unsettled by the sudden familiarity in the room, I stepped out of my flats and sat beside her, maintaining a cushion’s width of distance.

“So the first thing I want to point out,” said Nadia, “is that there’s a camera in every room that monitors the session. This is just to ensure that everyone is complying with the Midas Method, which, as you know, includes cuddling, conversation, and companionship, but is completely nonsexual.” She gestured to the white camera mounted in a corner. “If you feel uncomfortable in any way, it’s your right to terminate the session, and that’ll flag the user in our system for a follow-up with the safety team. Nine times out of ten, that will result in them being permanently banned. Not that it happens very often—less than one percent of the time, to be exact.” She flashed a reassuring smile. “Do you have any questions before we begin?”

The misgivings I had were jumbled in an impossible knot. I shook my head.

“Okay, feel free to let me know if anything pops up. Otherwise, how about we start with you showing me The Armchair?”

The Midas Method included a guide to cuddling positions that ranged from basic poses, like spooning, to more elaborate choreography. Start with something simple, the training had advised, and let the rest come naturally. Feel free to incorporate stimulating movement, like back rubs and head scratches, with the consent of the client, checking in periodically to make sure you’re both comfortable and relaxed. I’d studied the illustration for The Armchair, recognizing it as the way Oren would often hold me: he lying on his side with his knees bent at a right angle, me resting on my back with my legs hooked over his, as though in a seat. I guided Nadia to the bed and into the pose, suppressing a laugh at the strangeness of our bodies connecting so unceremoniously, as though we were models performing for a camera. My arms encircled her shoulders as she settled into my lap, and I could feel the warmth and give where her breasts began, and I smelled coconut shampoo.

“Are you comfy?” I asked, hoping that she couldn’t feel my sputtering heart.

“Mhm. This is nice. Are you?”

“Yup.” I cleared my throat to stifle a cough. I waited for further instruction, but it did not come. Thirty seconds passed, then a minute. I marinated in my own self-consciousness until it deepened and metastasized into a kind of horror. To disperse the feeling, I tried to think about the science of what was happening: the unmyelinated C-tactile fibers in the skin responding to tenderness, the insular cortex of the brain processing sweetness. While I labored, Nadia was breathing deeply, letting the air graze the back of her throat so that she emitted a light snore, and I wondered if she were falling asleep.

I closed my eyes. I focused on the rise and fall of her body pressing into mine. Gradually, my thoughts lost their rigidity, began to drift. I became less aware of time and more aware of the heat coalescing between us, my consciousness sinking until it was a small, eyeless seed within a broadening galaxy of flesh, bone, blood, nerve, steady and alive. It felt like a meditation, a color dawning inside my head. Apparitions of sound and image ballooned and dissolved, forming a diaphanous tunnel that transported me back: the tick of a car signal, windshield wipers clearing a swirl of snow. Oren’s hands climbing over the wheel as we cruised left. The tires dragging through slush on the road. I was telling him about Brian, how flushed my mother sounded on the phone; maybe they were taking things too fast.

He glanced at the directions, the blue line charting our path. “I think I turned too soon.”

“That’s okay, we’re close, I think.” I cleared a patch of fog on the window and watched it regain its milky opacity. “Did you hear me?” I’m worried she’s going to get hurt.”

“Have there been any red flags?”

“Other than an alien abducting my mother and replacing her with a freaky clone? No. Can you imagine Marissa running?”

“What’s so bad about her wanting to be more active?”

“It’s not bad, it’s just . . .” I arced against the seat, stretching my back. “It’s alarming. It’s like everything she went through—that we went through, really—didn’t count or matter. All she needed was to meet some dude?”

He patted my thigh. “I’m sure it’s jarring, but if she’s happy, what’s the point in overthinking it?”

Comfort, encouragement—Oren offered them readily, but he had a hard time acknowledging when things were off. He did this when I talked about Marissa, about school, about us, as though the troubles of my life could seep into and taint his. It was because he saw my life fundamentally as a reflection of his own, a shadow that couldn’t survive without its counterpart. It was lonely to trudge through my doubts, though at the time I’d dismissed them as my own insecurity and anxiety.

The truth was, my body had sensed the relationship straining before the breakup. Oren and I had stopped touching each other. The sex was still there, but not the palm caressing my lower back as he passed me in the kitchen, not the sardine squeeze of our bodies stretched across the couch. We fell asleep with just our ankles intertwined, and I would wake up huddled on one side with the covers while he lay exposed in the dark. These were inches that felt like miles, the negative space between us like runes we’d refused to decipher.

Nadia sighed and shifted, and I miraculously moved with her, and we nestled facing each other with my chin buried in her hair. I felt as though I’d landed a dazzling gymnastic maneuver, but it had come naturally. My body had known what to do.

7 Books about Gripping Family Secrets

Posted on June 26, 2023April 29, 2023 by EL Assistant2

I was a teenager before I learned my father’s real name. During a trip back to Vietnam in my twenties, I discovered he had more children after me, half-siblings I’d never met. It wasn’t until my thirties that I learned how my parents fell in love—over books—and how their story ended, with an unanswered letter my mother sent across the world. I often imagined my father as Bluebeard with his hidden trunk, and thought that if I could ask the right questions—find the right key—he would reveal himself to me. He never did, not really, but I still couldn’t stop searching.

This is all to say that I know something about family secrets, the kind that burrow under all the other stories we hold up to the light. These secrets reveal not only the difficult facts of the past, but how we’ve evolved into the people we are today. They tell the messier stories of human nature, bringing us closer to rage, despair, and, if we’re lucky, forgiveness.

When I set out to write my novel, Banyan Moon, I knew that family secrets would be a central theme. In the book, Ann Tran inherits a crumbling old house in the swamplands of Florida from her deceased grandmother, Minh, a survivor of the Vietnam War. Ann and her estranged mother, Hương, spend months sorting through Minh’s hoarded burdens: walls of creepy dolls, yellowing linen tablecloths, piles of unread magazines. One day, in the musty old attic, Ann comes across a locked trunk that holds the greatest burden of all, a secret that will change the way each of the Tran women interpret their stories—and how they see each other.

The books that captivate me are the ones that explore the dark spaces between families—all that’s unsaid. Often, that’s where we can find humanity and love, no matter how warped. In the end, despite my investigative tendencies, the revelation of the family secret hardly seems the point. The point lies in our desire to search for that darkness, all for a chance to grasp at the truths that bind us.

Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love by Dani Shapiro

In 2016, on a whim, reporter Shapiro sends in a sample of her DNA to a genealogy website. To her shock, she discovers that the man who raised her isn’t, in fact, her biological father. Deeply unsettled by this revelation, she grapples with questions about what her parents chose to hide from her, and why. With the help of her husband (also a reporter), Shapiro follows a series of winding threads that take her across the country, where she must navigate the impacts of science, technology, and record-keeping on her own life. In the end, she must determine what constitutes identity, and the extent to which we’ll go to open the closed doors of the past.

Dust Child by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai

Phong Nguyễn, a Vietnamese Amerasian who is Black, is trying to immigrate to America with his family for a better life. However, government officials decide to halt the visa process until he can find concrete evidence that he is the product of a union between a Vietnamese woman and an American G.I., as he’s always been told. This sends him into a frustrating quest with many dead ends and faulty assumptions. Meanwhile, former helicopter pilot Dan returns with his wife Linda to Vietnam in order to try to heal from past trauma as a soldier. But what Dan doesn’t tell his wife is that his secret mission is to find Kim, a Vietnamese mistress he’d kept from Linda during the war. In another timeline, we learn about sisters Trang and Quỳnh, who escape to Saigon in the 1970s to work as bar girls whose job is to entertain American soldiers. All three stories intersect in surprising and touching ways that continue to remind us of the impacts of the war on the Vietnamese people.

The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

In Georgia, Ailey Pearl Garfield navigates her life between Atlanta and Chicasetta, her rural hometown where her family still lives. Ailey’s thirst for education takes her from her predominantly white high school to Routledge, a historically Black college where her beloved Uncle Root teaches. She wants to be a historian, which prompts her to look back into the history of her family. What she discovers is a more tangled story than she could have ever imagined, illuminating themes of class, colorism, inheritance, and deep ancestral trauma. This epic book is a riveting, unforgettable story of the American South, both past and present.

What My Mother and I Don’t Talk about: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence by Michele Filgate

This essay collection gathers fifteen of the most celebrated voices in contemporary literature—Melissa Febos, Alexander Chee, Carmen Maria Machado, André Aciman, to name a few—to write about the silences between mothers and their children. Here, each author explores seminal experiences from their childhood, such as what it was like to have a deaf mother; whether one can share too much with one’s psychotherapist mother; how to have a relationship with a mother without mediation from a controlling father. Full of heartbreak and hope, this collection articulates the nuanced love we hold for our mothers, well into adulthood.

Black Candle Women by Diane Marie Brown

Four generations of Montrose women all have one thing in common: the mysterious curse that dooms the people they fall in love with to die sudden deaths. Little is known about this curse, except that it originated in New Orleans nearly half a century ago, in a world of powerful hoodoo. In present-day California, Willow and Victoria live in peace with Victoria’s daughter Nickie, until the day Nickie brings a young man home for dinner. This unleashes a series of events that shakes the core of the family, scattering all three women across the country, toward their destinies. Their only hope of reunification is to break the curse, but that means unlocking their silent matriarch Augusta’s past—a near impossible task.

All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung

In this memoir, Chung deftly weaves an important story about her experience as a transracial adoptee, and how she came to find her birth family. Growing up, she’d been told the myth that her birth parents sacrificed for a better life. In reality, the story was far more complicated. When Chung became pregnant with her own daughter, she decided to reopen the tidy narratives of her past in order to search for the truth. By transposing her own story with that of her birth sister, Cindy’s, readers are able to follow Chung’s journey to unveiling secrets that transform her relationships—and her own identity as a Korean American woman.

Weyward by Emilia Hart

In 2019, Kate is running from an abusive relationship that has taken everything from her. With nowhere to go, she flees to ramshackle Weyward Cottage, bequeathed to her by a great-aunt she hardly remembers. There, among her great-aunt’s belongings, she discovers hints of a centuries-old secret that whispers of magic and violence. Meanwhile, during the second world war, rebellious Violet seeks a way to free herself from the life of convention her father expects of her. As she comes into her own gifts, she begins to ask probing questions about her mother, who died of sudden and mysterious circumstances when she was a child. Her father’s refusal to answer only stokes Violet’s curiosity and determination. In the third timeline, Altha is on trial for witchcraft in the 17th century. She’s been accused of murdering a neighbor, and the final verdict is all too clear to her. These women must fight the desperation of their own circumstances to find their way to freedom—and maybe even joy. Together, their stories paint a compelling portrait of resilience, a trait passed down through the centuries in the Weyward clan, along with the secrets of the past.

Famous Walt Whitman Poems and What I Wish They Were About

Posted on June 23, 2023June 22, 2023 by EL Assistant2

I Sing The Body Electric

An epic recounting the history of the Electric Slide that can also be sung to the tune of The Electric Slide.

I Dream’d A Dream

A stream of consciousness narrative from someone who chose the iconic Les Mis tune at karaoke and now suddenly realizes they absolutely do not have the vocal capacity to sustain the entire song, also it’s really killing the mood.

I Hear America Singing

The judges of X-Factor come together to spill their behind-the-scenes secrets and most cringey audition moments…but in the form of an acrostic.

The Untold Want

A villanelle where a woman secretly hopes her boyfriend will offer to go grocery shopping so that she can watch the Vanderpump Rules finale.

A Noiseless Patient Spider

A tense sonnet of a woman who saw a spider in her apartment but then it disappeared a moment later, so now she lives in agony every second hoping that it doesn’t crawl into her mouth while she’s sleeping.

I Saw In Louisiana A Live-Oak Growing

A soothing composition about all the different types of trees the narrator saw in Louisiana and fun facts about them. Essentially a transcript of a David Attenborough show.

The Sleepers

A ballad about a precious little angel baby whose gentle breathing is the beat of the most calming song known to man. The leitmotif is the delicate beauty of the human experience.

Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking

A punchy cinquain about an awful little demon baby who somehow has the lung capacity of an opera singer and is able to scream for hours on end for no apparent reason. The leitmotif is the endless pain of the human experience.

Delicate Cluster

An ode to eating one of those Nature Valley granola bars where the entire thing collapses without warning and you are left finding oats crumbles in the folds of your clothing days, or even weeks later.

O, Captain! My Captain

A juicy sestina tell-all from the cast of Dead Poets Society detailing who secretly hooked up, who had big blowout fights, and who accidentally fell off their desk once or twice during the seminal goodbye scene.

Shut Not Your Doors to Me Proud Libraries

A free verse poem where a misfit group of ragtag librarians team up to save their libraries from budget cuts and evil PTA boards trying to ban classic young adult novels. Kind of like Ocean’s 8 but there’s a big section about the dewey decimal system and an army of children armed with Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret storming a school board meeting.

Song of Myself

The lyrics to “Survivor” by Destiny’s Child.

7 Obsessive Love Affairs in Literature

Posted on June 23, 2023June 20, 2023 by Jo Lou

To the obsessed, only one thing in the world has luster: the subject of their obsession. The person or thing we are obsessed with is our only answer to incredible longing. Questions like What is my life about? What is worthwhile and what is not? are easy. The answer is her, him, them, it.

My novel, The Adult, follows Natalie, a first-year university student at the University of Toronto, who has moved to the city from Temagami, a small town in northern Ontario. Deeply uncertain, and lonely, Natalie meets Nora, a 38 year old woman whose unexpected interest gives Natalie a sense of clarity and purpose she has always lacked. The book explores the nature of obsessive romantic love. It asks what we take from one another by loving, it asks what we give, and it asks eventually, what can be salvaged.

The books on the list below encase the intensity of obsessive love. They are at times, devotions to a beloved, they are relics of love’s overwhelm, they are attempts by lovers to stop loving, to remember a different answer to the always-there question— how should life be?

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart

“There are no minor facts in life, there is only the one tremendous one.”

Elizabeth Smart’s work of prose poetry expertly captures the rapturous, all-consuming experience of love, beside which all other experiences pale. Set during World War II, on a journey throughout various states and provinces, Smart shows the ability of tremendous love to make everything around it banal by comparison. The palpable longing in each of her sentences distills the surrounding world, and makes her suffering, her desperation, her love, the only important thing we can think of.

They Say Sarah by Pauline Delabroy-Allard, translated by Adriana Hunter

Pauline Delabroy-Allard tells the story of a teacher in Paris who is swept up in a love affair with Sarah, a violinist. The book is brief and chaotic, as it oscillates between deep loneliness, desire, fear, pleasure, and despair. The emotional intensity of the protagonist shows how responsive life becomes to the beloved. There is no small gesture, no feeling left unfelt. Delabroy-Allard evokes a love in which everything else in life—work, friends, family—fades. She shows how pleasurable this sensation can be, despite the ruinous effects it can have.

You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat

Zaina Arafat follows her unnamed protagonist, a young, bisexual woman, through a series of vignettes that take place in the United States and the Middle East. She is riddled with desire, and these longings evolve into reckless romantic affairs and obsessions, and eventually take her to The Ledge, a treatment centre that diagnoses her with “love addiction.” Arafat explores obsession through the lens of self-destruction and introspection; love can be an affliction of the lover and, in this case, her cultural and familial wounds, rather than an obsession with a desired.

Couplets: A Love Story by Maggie Millner

Told through a series of couplets, Couplets follows a woman who lives in Brooklyn, with her boyfriend and their cat, who has dreams that rotate around desire and seduction. These dreams become real as she has an affair with a woman she meets at a bar, and enters into new communities—both queer and BDSM—and new forms of desire. Maggie Millner writes of the narrator’s “second first love,” the love that comes after coming out, and the ways that this discovery can feel like a new adolescence, with all of its obsession and sentimentality. While this desire brings about chaos and heartbreak, it also brings about a deeper and more in tune sense of self. As Millner’s narrator says, “For any fierce, untrammeled feeling, / now I know I’d give up almost anything.”

Written on the Body by Jeannette Winterson

Jeannette Winterson’s nameless and genderless narrator asks, “You want love to be like this every day don’t you? 92 degrees even in the shade.” The book depicts an affair between the narrator and the beloved, Louise, a married woman.

Winterson depicts a love affair based on particularities: in Written on the Body, love is specific. It has a subject, a beloved. Winterson describes parts of her beloved’s body against the anatomical definitions of these parts, for example, drawing into focus the separation between a general understanding of a clavicle, and Louise’s collarbone in particular. This particularity is what makes losing love so painful—as Winterson’s narrator states, “[t]his hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no one else can fit it.”

Y/N by Esther Yi

Esther Yi, conversely, explores the other side of obsessive love: love whose subject is never fully known or understood, despite the intensity of feeling the lover has for them. Y/N follows an unnamed narrator through her obsession with Moon, a member of a k-pop group. The narrator begins writing self-insert fanfiction, in which the reader inserts their name (your/name) and is the main character of a relationship with Moon. When Moon retires, the narrator flies to Korea to search for him, while Y/N journeys towards Moon in their own story. Yi explores our culture’s relationship to celebrity and the kind of love that we feel for people we do not know. Love can, in fact, be a process through which we relate to ourselves, above all. As the narrator’s therapist notes, “[t]he best way to fall out of love is to realize there exists no love out of which to fall.”

Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux, translated by Tanya Leslie

“I had no future other than the telephone call fixing our next appointment. I would try to leave the house as little as possible—forever fearing that he might call during my absence.”

Told from the perspective of an unnamed narrator, Simple Passion is an incisive reflection on a two-year affair with a married man named “A.” Ernaux describes how life transforms itself to accommodate and sustain the affair with “A”, composing an intimate revelation of obsession and passion. Though Ernaux’s novella revolves around “A”, there is a great sense in which her work is not about “A” as an object of love, but rather about the current of feelings experienced by the one who loves. Ernaux gives attention to obsession and love not only as feelings to describe but as ideas to think about. This is a brief and forceful look at a person consumed.

Translating Trauma for an Immigration System Designed Not To See It

Posted on June 23, 2023February 1, 2024 by Jo Lou

Stories are built on journeys. The best characters start in one place and end in another. They face obstacles, experience setbacks. Sometimes they lose hope. But, in the end, they reach somewhere new. This is the hero’s journey. As Octavia Butler put it, God is change, and watching people navigate change—and move forward despite it—is at the heart of all storytelling.

Alejandra Oliva’s new book, Rivermouth, tells the story of multiple journeys, of asylum seekers fleeing political instability in the Global South (made possible by Northern imperialism) only to find cruelty and bureaucratic violence at the U.S border, of her family flowing, like the Rio Grande, between Texas and Mexico, and finding paradise in unexpected places. At its core, Rivermouth is about accompaniment. Oliva grabs her readers firmly by the hand and marches them through the byzantine (often impossible) process of seeking asylum. As we walk with her, she chronicles the societal costs of an immigration system that separates and imprisons families, narrates everything from biblical epics to small moments of care among border communities in Tijuana, and considers how something so fundamentally human—the pursuit of life and protection—became a crime.

nia t. evans: Rivermouth as a title of a story about migration works on so many levels. Can you unpack its meaning for me? How did you come to see rivers as a central theme of the book?

Alejandra Oliva: Rivermouth alludes to a few things. A huge part of the US-Mexico land border is made up of the Rio Grande. My grandmother was born in Brownsville, Texas, which is right at the mouth of the Rio Grande, where the land meets the Gulf of Mexico. But there’s also this idea of the “river mouth,” a place where the fresh water of the river meets the salty water of the ocean. It’s its own ecosystem, a place that’s not quite the river and not quite the ocean. That feels a lot like border cultures and languages. There’s also this idea that a river doesn’t have a singular source. Sometimes a river is a navigation path; sometimes it’s a barrier or a border that you have to cross. It all depends on who you are and where you’re trying to go. That all felt like the right metaphor to be thinking about while writing this book.

nte: This book is about the migration of language as much as it is about people. Can you talk a bit about your experience of translating for asylum seekers at the border. What is lost, gained, and revealed through those kinds of translations? And what principles and allegiances do you hold as a translator?

Sometimes a river is a navigation path; sometimes it’s a barrier or a border that you have to cross. It all depends on who you are and where you’re trying to go.

AO: What is lost is agency. Stories of violence and harm are deeply personal. Violence often strips people of agency. Telling your story, choosing how and whether to talk about it, can be a way of reclaiming power. But when we ask people to disclose these stories for asylum, we are essentially removing that agency from them. We’re saying, “you need to prove that these terrible things have happened to you, that you have suffered very specific forms of violence. And we need you to tell that story in as much detail as you can, regardless of how it impacts you.” As a translator, you can try to make this process as easy as possible. You can find a private, quiet environment. You can give them as much time as they need. But, in the end, you’re still saying “if you want to stay here, I need this story, and you have very little agency in whether you want to share it or not.” And that’s incredibly violent in and of itself.

In the context of asylum work, my allegiance is to the form, to filling it out as correctly as possible. I want to make the process as comfortable as possible, but with the goal of filling out the form as well as I can. You kind of feel the government or whatever forces created this forum and do not care about people’s recovery or healing pressing down on you. You can feel yourself become the instrument of that. It’s painful and difficult sometimes, and you’re doing it to enter people into this system that is deeply violent and dehumanizing. And so, as the interpreter, you’re sometimes stuck in the middle of wanting to do as much justice to this person as possible, but also trying to move them forward and through this system.

nte: You write “asylum seekers and immigrants in detention centers are political prisoners. They are held against their wills for a political belief manifested into action: that they deserve life.” Can you talk about how you came to that realization?

AO: This is true of wherever people are coming to the States to seek asylum from, but I’m going to talk about it in the Central American context, because that’s what people are most familiar with. In Central America, gangs are incredibly prevalent and violent. They’re not controlled by governments in any meaningful way. Many of the people I have talked to left because their families were facing active threats. Children recruited by gangs; women threatened by sexual violence. And with each story they were essentially saying “I deserve a life where my family and I can live without the threat of violence.” That is a political belief. It’s a personal and individual desire for safety but it’s also a political belief that I should have the right to live in a society where I don’t have violence hanging over my head.

You see this in other movements too, abolitionist movements in particular, the assertion that we deserve to live. When people migrate, they do so to make that desire real. They see the United States, for better or worse, as a place where active, pervasive violence will not be hanging over their heads in the same way. They see it as a country where the rule of law is followed. And when they come here, they come here following the laws of this country because you do have a right to claim asylum. They come here and exert that right. But instead of saying, yes you have that right, let’s move you through the system, and find a way to make this work, we put people in jail. We submit them to medical neglect and horrifying conditions.

nte: This is a memoir of “language, faith, and migration.” When most people think about faith within the context of migration, they think of Christ as a refugee. But you write about the Israelites escaping Egypt, the Tower of Babel, the Book of Job, and so much more. Can you talk about the role of divinity, faith, and religion in Rivermouth?

We take these people who have fought incredibly hard for all these values we claim to value as a nation, like freedom and safety, and we put them in jail.

AO: So much of the Bible is people moving from one place to another. You have the Israelites traveling through the desert to get to the promised land, Christ as a refugee, traveling for 40 days and 40 nights. The Bible is full of migration, of different peoples coming together dealing with conflict and translation. A lot of translation theory, which is intimately connected to questions of migration and language, is biblical theory. The very first translators of the Bible were asking “if this text is the word of God, if I translate it, is it still the word of God? How do we preserve that? What is the fairest or best way to preserve this as we move it from one language to another?” In the Reformation, you have all these people trying to translate biblical texts into modern languages, like English, German, Spanish, and French, being treated like heretics because the this was supposed to be language that was inaccessible. It was meant for educated people. And this idea, that some things should be reserved for select groups of people, like say U.S. citizenship or being able to understand this country’s immigration system, is still with us. There is so much elite knowledge that is hoarded for select groups of people, even as it shapes people’s daily lives.

I also think today’s immigrant rights movement is rooted in religiosity and spirituality. You have the sanctuary movement, which uses churches as a place where people who may have deportation orders can stay safe. I spent some time working with the New Sanctuary Coalition, a New York-based immigrant justice organization based out of Judson Memorial Church. There are groups like Never Again Action, a Jewish group that has done some interesting actions around immigration detention and highlighted its similarities to concentration camps during World War II. This isn’t just rhetoric; it’s a moral foundation a lot of people are oriented around.

nia t. evans: You tell horrifying stories about the conditions within ICE detention centers. Just earlier today, border officials confirmed that an 8-year-old girl died in their custody. What is happening in these prisons? And what are the consequences of allowing this mass incarceration to continue?

AO: In that story you can see pervasive anti-Blackness, anti-immigrant sentiment, and Customs and Border Protection not recognizing immigrants as people on a fundamental level. It’s the same tone as that horrific audio clip of Border Patrol agents talking to children who had been separated from their parents, saying “oh we’ve got a real orchestra here.” Of course, these children are crying, they were just separated from their parents after a long and difficult journey. We take these people who have fought incredibly hard for all these values we claim to value as a nation, like freedom and safety, and we put them in jail. We disbelieve and mistrust them. What else is that but political prisonership?

It’s also important to note there are two types of detention. One of them is called hieleras or ice boxes, and those are run not actually by ICE but by Customs and Border Protection. And those are supposed to be places where you stay for a maximum of 72 hours. It’s supposed to be a quick, short-term stay, but in many cases it’s not. These places aren’t set up for long term stays and they are rife with human rights abuses, like what happened to that young girl. There’s also the wider immigration detention system, which is not just for people who have recently crossed the border. It’s for anyone who has been picked up by ICE. There’s usually a mix of people, some have just arrived, some have been picked up by ICE randomly or as a result of contact with the criminal legal system. So, if you get caught shoplifting or in possession of drugs, anything big or small, you go through the criminal legal system. You may end up serving time. And as soon as you finish serving time, ICE will usually be there to pick you up and take you to immigration detention. You essentially serve two sentences, the second of which is sometimes longer than the first.

If you are in immigration detention because of a criminal legal issue, you can’t get bonded out, which is crazy. Those places can be private detention centers like the one I visited in Mississippi, a big jail you would see in Orange is the New Black. Huge dorms, very regimented. Local and county jails also have contracts with the federal government to house ICE detainees as well. And they have the same problems you’d see at any prison: horrific mistreatment, medical neglect, a lack of privacy, dehumanization. There’s also not adequate care taken to ensure staff speak the same common languages as the people detained there, so you have a general lack of communication between staff and people. Theoretically, there’s a person from ICE who comes in once a week and listens to complaints, but as with any bureaucracy that process can get messed up. Immigration detention is unique in that they have family detention centers. Sometimes one parent and their children. Sometimes one parent will be sent to regular detention and the other will be put in family detention with their children. Whole families are put into prison together.

nte: Shifting to a lighter or maybe more complicated note, what was your experience of diving into your family’s history for this book? Did anything surprise you?

AO: I knew a fair amount of our story going in. My great-grandparents felt really alive to me, even though my great-grandfather passed away before I was born, and my great-grandmother passed away when I was probably four or so. My grandmother talks about them all the time. They’re still very vivid people. We still visit the hotel my grandmother grew up at in the mountains in Mexico. In a very magical place, even now. So, there were things I knew, but looking at our story through the lens of immigration was complicated and interesting.

I started looking further back, particularly in my great-grandfather’s history. His last name was Pue, which is a Welsh name. You can trace it back to colonial Maryland, which is where things start getting ugly. I found out that some of my family were slaveowners. It wasn’t a part of history I thought my family would be a part of. But you’re on ancestry.com, 20 generations deep, and suddenly there’s a manifest of their holdings and it includes people. It was shocking. There was some genealogy research that didn’t make it into the book that was surprising to me and made me realized my family’s history goes deep into the roots of this country and Mexican history. It’s complicated and messy.

nte: You recently wrote about the Biden administration’s new asylum laws and the end of Title 42. What are asylum seekers up against now? What? What do you want your readers to know about current policy and how it’s evolved or not evolved?

AO: It’s bad. I’m not an attorney but I’ve worked with many attorneys over the last couple of years. I know how to read these documents and understand what these policies mean for individual people. And I can still barely wrap my arms around this new policy. There are basically two tracks right now. One is for asylum seekers. If you arrive at the U.S. border to seek asylum, you need to have already requested and been denied asylum from any country you passed through in order to apply for asylum successfully in the United States. For a lot of people that means Mexico, a country whose asylum system is as bogged down or more than ours. So, you’re looking at 5-10 years in Mexico trying to adjudicate that process before even having a chance at our border.

Or you can, before leaving your home country, secure yourself a passport, a plane ticket, and a financial sponsor and be awarded something called “parole.” I’m unclear on how or whether parole can lead to a work permit or being able to apply for asylum, but the bar to access parole is purposefully unattainable. This is a program that was rolled out and piloted on Ukrainian refugees who came over last year during the onset of the war with Ukraine and Russia. The difference is that there is a settled and established Ukrainian community here in the United States. There are very few, relatively speaking, Venezuelans living in the United States in a settled way with strong connections to people back home. People who could afford to buy plane tickets and be financial sponsors. The program is not only financially difficult to enter; it’s also logistically and relationally difficult to navigate. It’s also important to note that the Trump administration already tried to do this, and a judge struck it down as illegal. There’s this rehash of rules that have already been tried by an administration by an administration that said they were better than on these issues. These have already been shown to be bad and illegal policies. And all of this was passed not by Congress but by memos and executive orders. They ignored public comments on the federal register begging them not to do this. It feels like there’s no real way to register your displeasure on a policymaking level, which feels infuriating and undemocratic.

Coming Out of Two Closets Is Impossible Without a Sense of Humor

Posted on June 22, 2023May 23, 2023 by Intern Electric Lit

Greg Marshall’s memoir Leg: The Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew from It is a brave and hilarious tour de force, taking us through his journey of self-acceptance as he grapples with cerebral palsy, queerness, and the early death of a parent.

By offering us a front seat to the uproarious antics of his quirky and loving family, and sharing with us his sharp and honest observations of past romantic and sexual encounters, he invites us to look back on the more embarrassing and uncomfortable moments of our own lives, and to recognize how these moments have fundamentally shaped us. Vulnerability is a trait that many writers struggle to achieve, and it’s a role that Marshall bravely takes on in his writing, showing how the mere act of acknowledging our physical and emotional vulnerabilities can lead us toward a braver and truer understanding of ourselves.

Greg Marshall and I were newly admitted fellows at the Michener Center for Writers when we first met in 2010. Over zoom, Marshall and I talked about making the leap from fiction to memoir, the role of truth in storytelling, listening to one’s body and its spectrum of differences, and how the queer sensibility can give us the audaciousness to take creative risks.

Monica Macansantos: I know a lot of fiction writers who struggle with the nonfiction form, but you seem very comfortable with it. I was wondering if you could tell us more about that.

Greg Marshall: My writing has always come from a place of humor and, you could say, quirky observation. But when I was willing to write about disability, to closely observe my brain and body, I started showing up on the page in new ways. I knew right away I wasn’t chronicling the misadventures of a fictional character. These were my experiences. They belonged to me. So it became about using the same craft toolkit I’d picked up in grad school—setting, plot, style—to explore my own life. I was using the same voice that I was using in fiction, but nonfiction had much stricter goalposts, which was a good exercise for me. It let me contain what I was trying to do and give it borders and definition, because my fiction, which I love and really want to get back into, was so beyond imaginative—and I don’t mean that in a good way. My last story in grad school was about a father-son duo who have the heads of falcons and the bodies of men, and they run a grocery store in Idaho. Hyper-imaginative stories are great if you can pull them off, but I think that I was exercising those outlandish, imaginative muscles too much.

MM: Your book made me think more deeply about being born with a clubfoot and how I’ve completely forgotten about it because I had corrective surgery as a baby. But then it reminds me at unexpected moments that it’s there, like when I’m running and I trip on it. Maybe that’s one of the purposes of memoir that isn’t often discussed, how it brings out the most vulnerable parts of the reader’s self as well as the writer’s self.

GM: Memoir brings up so many things you might never get around to talking about with a friend, like my leg or your foot. That’s what is delicious about it: you go into the confessional booth and have the most meaningful, deepest, funniest, silliest, strangest conversations that you’ve ever had with another person, because all the niceties are taken away and all of the dead air is taken away. And it’s just the best parts of a person’s story, however you define best: most interesting, most vulnerable, most intriguing.

MM: What I loved about your book is that it’s so embodied. You really took to heart what our teacher, Elizabeth McCracken, told us: that our writing must be embodied because our characters have bodies. In a sense, a lot of your writing ties in with muscle memory. Sometimes you have to listen to your body to make sense of what didn’t make sense in your head.

GM: Elizabeth’s advice was so seminal to Leg! It’s amazing the amount of specificity and feeling and narrative propulsion that you can create just from observing your own body. The most vivid example is, you know, in terms of sex and romance. What does your body do? What is it capable of in terms of pleasure, and does it feel limitations? What hurts, what doesn’t? Having a lover’s conversation with your own body can be really powerful when you want to add specificity to your work, whether you identify as disabled or not.

MM: I guess this ties in with something I said in one of our previous conversations about these parts of ourselves that mark us as disabled. It could be cerebral palsy or club footedness. In your book, you talk about how your parents decided not to tell you about your cerebral palsy in hopes that you would grow up to be this person who didn’t have to shoulder what they imagined to be its burden, or the limitations it would impose on you. Your book proposes that we change that narrative and talk about disability in terms of diversity, rather than as difference.

GM: Yeah, or even just as a spectrum. Disability is a universal experience that can happen over the course of a day or a year. You might experience an injury, you might be in an accident, you might have a new diagnosis. Being disabled is just part of the human continuum. Why shouldn’t it be part of our literature? And by making it part of our literature, we can start to decompartmentalize our conditions. Stories do weird work: by delving into those trashy details we talked about, our personal narratives become more relatable, more universal, more whole. We can accommodate the foibles of our bodies and we can make allowances for them, but we’re really making allowances for our humanity, not just for one specific part of ourselves. That’s the wink and nudge of the title. Nothing to see here, it’s just a leg. And then the book goes in a million different directions.

MM: Your book participates in many conversations simultaneously: there’s disability in here, but also queerness and how these two are intertwined in your life.

GM: Like a lot of gay men, and children of the ‘90s in general, I was fascinated and terrified of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. My obsession started with an Afterschool Special we watched in my seventh-grade science class and culminated, in a terrible way, with the death of my boyfriend Corey at the start of my time as a Michener in the fall of 2010.

Being disabled is just part of the human continuum.

Experiencing a life-changing event like that as I was beginning to study fiction in a serious way—as we were reading Before Night Falls in our first-year seminar with Cristina Garcia—shaped my voice and subject matter as a writer. Chroniclers of the plague like Allan Gurganus, Alexander Chee, and Paul Monette gave me a blueprint for how to write through dark periods with humor, panache, and a sense of resilience.

For as different as they are stylistically, what these writers have in common is that they are willing to go there. They write about everything: the disabled body, illness, sex, family, money, religion, dildos. It’s like they’re laughing in the face of death, flipping death the middle finger, maybe even making love to death—pick your metaphor. The ability to do that seemed intoxicating, to pair outrageously funny with outrageously serious. Like, what could be stranger and more powerful than bottoming for the grim reaper?

I believe it was the poet James Merrill who said that being gay isn’t just a sexual preference. It’s an artistic sensibility, a way of seeing the world. I think there’s something to that: a mix of high and low, innuendo, camp, puns, and a certain neurotic lust for life. I’m not saying only gay people have this sensibility, or that all gay people do, just that it’s a comedy lineage that spoke to me as I wrote Leg. I decided to use my body. I decided to go there.

MM: While reading your memoir, I felt that gayness as a sensibility was instrumental in navigating these experiences of marginalization, and that humor was an intrinsic part of that sensibility. In general, humor helps us cut through the deceptions that we tell ourselves, by making us somewhat more comfortable about these truths that we’d rather not live with.

GM: Comedy does have a way of exposing the truth. Sometimes even a knock-knock joke can contain jaw-dropping honesty just by being literal, and that’s what is outrageous about it. That it just announces the truth in our world full of subterfuge and avoidance.

What I’ve noticed is that the queer sensibility is willing to go there a bit more, to take a deeper cut, to take a more audacious creative risk. To be heard, we’ve had to be louder, and to be understood, we’ve had to be more daring. It helps you go to the embarrassing places, which can be rich fodder for vulnerability and honesty and exploration and help you find a little corner of the human experience that hasn’t been written about a million times.

MM: I feel like kids growing up in Utah won’t feel as timid about writing about their experiences of queerness or disability after reading your book. Once you set an example, people coming from similar backgrounds and experiences feel braver to tell their stories.

GM: I hope that’s true. Once you have a template, you can break it. If you use a canonical coming-of-age story like Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life as a starting point, you can start to filter your own experience through it, like literary cheesecloth, and see what sticks around. Those can be really interesting narrative curds to munch. Are there places Tobias Wolff didn’t go? I’m pretty sure that in the 1950s, he didn’t have his mom’s Brookstone back massager to discover himself. So hey, that’s something new I can write about puberty.

MM: I’m thinking of my own experiences as a memoirist and how a lot of it again ties in with this act of performance that you write about so well in the book. We often think of performance in terms of masking something that should be hidden. But in your case, you write about performance both as a child actor in the book and as a writer and memoirist, as being something that allows you to embrace these difficult truths and to bring everything out there.

To be heard, we’ve had to be louder, and to be understood, we’ve had to be more daring.

GM: Performance is a way of holding space and having a spotlight shone on your own experience, whether you want the spotlight there or not. It has this ability to make things so artificial and heightened you can’t ignore them, like the fashion on a runway. Or a closeted kid making jazz hands and singing his heart out to the Beach Boys.

MM: And by giving your own performance, you make your own rules.

GM: There’s power in a pratfall, well-told. You deliver the punchline versus being the punchline.

MM: You’re also freer when you exist outside conventions.

GM: Exactly! It’s not like there are no risks or blowback or hurt feelings when you break conventions. I just knew that to say something worthy of the conversation, I had to bring my entire self to the page and not hold anything back. There’s an argument to be made, on a human level, that you shouldn’t do that. But artistically, I had a bit of a Joan Didion Spidey-Sense that this was the moment for Leg. There’s an element of exposure, of personal risk, of upsetting the norm of your culture or family when you write a memoir, but isn’t that kind of the point? Because hopefully you’re not just publishing a book. You’re expanding what’s possible for your contemporaries and the people who come after you.

I Wanted To Write and Teach Literature Like My Mother Did

Posted on June 21, 2023June 20, 2023 by Intern Electric Lit

I feel the recognition in my bones when I read the opening line of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer: “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.” When I write in English, I feel like I’m lying. I am making up every waking thought I had since childhood, in a language that I did not grow up dreaming in. And yet, I feel the constellation of letters tickle at my senses, rebuilding a life reimagined in English. For instance, I do remember this being true: waking up in the first house I lived in, the one my father and mother built with their friends, and seeing the specs of dust moving through the beam of light that came through the wooden-framed window. In this beam of light, my mother sat at the desk wearing fingerless gloves that protected her hands from the cold. With a fountain pen with her name carved in its teal body, on green and red lined manuscript paper, she wrote her first book.

It was around then, in China, I learned the word wen xue, literature in English, from the stacks and stacks of books that seemed to spill out of every corner of our house. “Zuo jia, zuo zai jia.” My mother joked, that a writer (zuo jia) sat(zuo) at home (jia). A lover of literature, she seemed to have a joke or a poem to go with any occasion. She said she loved literature because literature allowed the understanding of love. I wanted to write and teach literature like my mother did. But in our life, literature meant Chinese literature and dedicating your life to the Chinese language meant a life of limitations. People who studied English literature could easily go abroad. People who studied other subjects could, with hard work, transition into the field of their study in another language. Choose Chinese and you choose a Chinese life. My mother said, once she became a Chinese major, she knew she’d be tied to China forever. She dissuaded me from getting tethered to this language she loved like her own house; I uttered poetry while knowing that one day, I might live in a place where no one will appreciate its meaning.

…literature meant Chinese literature and dedicating your life to the Chinese language meant a life of limitations.

Growing up, I read through the modern Chinese literary canon, remembering the searing social commentaries by Lu Xun, tender familial memories by Zhu Ziqing, or the romantic, global perspective in San Mao’s twelve volumes of memoir, only one of which was translated into English in 2019. I liked taking a book to bed, reading it before sleep, and waking up in the morning to read it first thing. I wrote on Chinese manuscript paper like my mother did, filling each red or green square with a carefully chosen word.

I’m no longer writing in Chinese in China. I’m writing in English in the United States. I’m crafting a voice: who do I want to sound like? Who can I imagine sounding like? What does it mean to have an authentic voice when I know it will never be authentic if we take the word for its literal meaning, original and genuine?

I didn’t show anyone my prose writing for the first ten years I lived in the United States because I didn’t believe in the legitimacy of my use of the English language. Perhaps, I don’t want to believe I can write in English for the purpose of making art. For me, English has been a language of practicality, business and work, travel, and even reading, but I still doubt whether it is the language of literature in my life. But your English is so good! People sometimes confuse my ability to use English with my willingness to express myself in this language. I don’t want to pass as real. I don’t want to be caught trying.

My affinity to the English language flickers on a day-to-day basis. Some days, I feel seamless in my command of the letters, words, and sounds and their connection to my identity. Other days, I feel like I have never written anything satisfactory at all. “I shouldn’t be doing this,” I think to myself, as my essays stare back, unfamiliar, like a stranger. I wonder if my English should be perfect before it can become art. I know it won’t be.

My father, a migrant from the Northern middle-plain province of Shanxi and the first person in his village to attend university, told me he could not pursue a life of professorial teaching because of his accent. He had trouble differentiating many sounds in putonghua, and even uses a sound-agnostic input method to type, as opposed to the pronunciation-based pinyin. Even before he told me this, I could tell he didn’t sound like my kindergarten teachers or news anchors on TV. When I talk to him, I can still hear the places where his native dialect pushes through his putonghua. “Is it Lao Chen, Lao Cheng, or Lao Chang?” I teased him about saying one of his coworker’s names. Knowing he couldn’t differentiate those sounds, he opened his mouth and smiled with teeth, like a boy.

Some days, I feel seamless in my command of the letters, words, and sounds and their connection to my identity.

An accent is not just about pronouncing words; it’s a way of being, a posture of life. When my father talks, he starts with short, open lines, building a good cadence before blooming into an elastic speech that flows like the xipi segments of the Jin opera he likes to listen to on tape. Like an opera, there is opulence in his speech with the variety of sounds, tonal transitions and vibrations that are out of the putonghua world. Hearing his native dialect is like hearing warmth itself. If the sun made sounds when it moved slowly across the sky, perhaps it would sound as flowing, musical and thunderous as it did in Shanxi. I never learned to speak my father’s native dialect, and I grew up only speaking putonghua, which sounded neutral and official with its ups and downs more regulated at set intervals.

Polishing your speech was not just about regulating the pronunciations, either. It was always to get closer to the source of power. In my father’s case, to speak putonghua was to be wen ming. Wen ming, like wen xue, had to do with reading and writing, with being educated. I noticed him doing small odd things like insisting to call a spoon by its proper name, tiao geng, if we were at a restaurant, while my mother and I would freely use homegrown vernacular without a care for how we would be seen. I realized what he was doing much later in life — performing a facade of acceptability — when I became a migrant myself, when I knew what it was like to want to be perceived as polished and complete.

Being a bilingual writer, I spend a lot of time thinking about linguistic loyalty, which brings me back to the opening line of The Sympathizer, and how the narrator’s linguistic abilities mirror his ambiguous political identity. The cost of being fluid is never feeling true, the curse of being inauthentic to all sides. Many times in my life as an immigrant, I am asked whether I feel more American or Chinese. It is too big a question to answer definitively, but when I set out to make art on a day to day basis, the competition of languages and how much time I am willing to invest in each begs to be resolved with urgency. I had been considering the choice of a primary language as a problem of access: if my father had kept his native tongue, he would not have accessed this educated, urban life. If I invested all my time in Chinese literature, I would likely to home with my mother. In theory, we all have choices; in reality, do we really?

The cost of being fluid is never feeling true, the curse of being inauthentic to all sides.

But here’s the plot twist: I find out that the writers who proposed and practiced ban hua wen, the modern principle of Chinese literature, were fluent in Western languages and had lived extensively in the West. Lu Xun studied English, and San Mao was fluent in German and Spanish; one of the first female playwrights I read, Yang Jiang, spoke fluent English and French from her years of teaching in Europe. The famous founder of bai hua wen movement, Hu Shi, was a student of philosophy at Columbia University in New York, and when he published his first book of bai hua poetry he named it chang shi ji, a collection of attempt, after Montaigne’s essais. I remember feeling a sense of awe, and definitely betrayal, and maybe jealousy, at this discovery. And a tinge of recognition. Some of us bilingual writers can be men of two faces, like Nguyen’s narrator, who did not exist in the rigid void between cultures, but a sleeper, an agent who must declare himself.

What if I never find myself able to feel completely loyal, authentic, original in English? Now I know it won’t keep me from writing. Literature to me has become more than a mission of furthering one language over the other. The writer, seated at her desk, still diligently describes the light that comes through the window, in a childhood home; she records it, in a language that belongs to her, a speech that requires no disguise. “I am here,” she writes, in a yellow legal pad, Chinese manuscript paper, a word processor — “to write like no one else.”

I Keep My Black Hole on a Leash

Posted on June 21, 2023June 14, 2023 by Wynter Miller

Seven Darknesses

No one knows how dark the darkness is. A bat flaps from the hay barn
dressed in a shawl of webs. Call to the night. It answers with a thud against the neighbor’s house. It screams like a fox at the gate. The black spots on your heart grow blacker. You might never cast off your darknesses. One trots beside you like a black hole on a leash, barking. No one was meant to live at absolute zero, absolute dark. The earth itself cannot imagine it. Its oceans are strung with lanternfish like fairy lights. Tonight, this spongy cloud blotting copies of the moon across the sky. The warmth of your body emits a single photon detectable by the most sensitive machinery. And then another. And then this fog slipping into your pocket like a ghostly hand, seeking comfort.

Diagnosis

How would you characterize the counting? Drawing a star on the face of
everyone you meet. Right now, are you counting these windows? Yes, but
only the edges that make the windows. What is the thing you are most
afraid of? The star peels from your face and floats through the window. In
the mornings, you descend the stairs counting the railings of the banister.
They rise as hammers inside a piano to make a silent music in your palm.
Beyond the window, star-shaped leaves dangle in the tree, turning on their
thin necks. What are you afraid of? The wind in their faces.

Therapy

Stand with your neck bare to the window. The principle of exposure
is governed by how long the camera gazes at its subject. Visualize the
shadow creeping behind you on the porch. The squeak of leather as
he raises an arm. Exposure is saying revolver over and over until the
word discharges its meaning. The exposure takes as long as it takes.
Night passes. Clouds pass between you and the moonlight so you
stand by turns in blindness and clarity. Stand until your heels root
into the floorboards, until your limbs lengthen into vines. Your body
flowers with honeysuckle, luring wild animals to the foyer. And you
will wear an ammunition belt of hummingbirds around your hips,
their shimmering, streamlined bodies. Nothing lives forever, not even
the planet Earth. But nothing lives by always dying. The exposure
includes the bullet in your brain and the drifting continents of bone, remapping a world in which you will die or be reborn.

Folk Religion Isn’t Backward, But I Walked Backward Into It

Posted on June 20, 2023May 29, 2023 by Wynter Miller

The parade started early in the morning, before the heat could set in. The humidity in Taiwan was formidable, and heatstroke-addled marchers made for poor celebrants. The bustling streets of Taipei had been half-cordoned off; aggrieved drivers inched along single file. I waited on the sidewalk, craning my neck over the crowd, trying to catch a glimpse of the floats.

First, the loud music of brasses. Instead of gangly high schoolers, I spied a troupe of grannies huffing into their horns and banging on their drums, wearing uniforms best described as somewhere between majorette and cheerleader, with short, pleated skirts and vests pink enough to signal for help from a deserted island. Next came the standard bearers, waving red and gold banners embroidered with dragons and characters like “harmony” and “hope.” Suddenly, the tone shifted. The folksy brass music faded away, to be replaced by . . . EDM? And then I saw them. The teens and twenty-somethings were on their float, blasting a club remix of a pop song. Like the older women, they were there to celebrate Mazu, arguably one of Asia’s most beloved goddesses.

It was hard not to get swept up in the excitement, not to marvel a little at how Mazuism was thriving across generations and across the strait from Fujian, where the historical figure is said to have lived more than a thousand years ago. I surprised myself by tearing up—one of the few times I’d ever done so in response to an act of worship. Why had I never given folk religion a moment’s thought prior to this, I wondered. Why had it taken me so long to embrace a longstanding religion of my homeland as my own?

I was a happily godless child. A distant family member, deeply concerned about my immortal soul, convinced my mother to let her take me to Sunday school a few times, but either the material itself or the way it was taught didn’t connect with me. I remember sitting in an overly air-conditioned room, coloring in a picture of David and Goliath with three stubby crayons that were giving me no pigment at all. The teacher droned on and on about how faith could help one overcome all obstacles. I also remember thinking, rather blasphemously, that if God were so great, then He would have given the church some crayons that worked.

Even if the spiritual teachings had made more of an impact, my mother soon decided that she was more concerned about my inability to play the piano than about my immortal soul (“Your soul won’t get you into a good college!”), so Sunday school gave way to music lessons. I wouldn’t be surprised if she thought that a diploma from Harvard carried weight in heaven—like when I showed up at the gates, I could surreptitiously slip the document into Saint Peter’s hand the way a restaurant patron without a reservation can slip a twenty into the host’s.

Where my mother was indifferent to religion, my father was outright hostile. One of my earliest memories is passing by a famous Taoist temple in Taipei while taking a walk with my father. A service had just concluded, and plumes of worshippers were drifting from the temple courtyard like incense smoke. “Don’t be like those people,” my father said to me. “That’s how you end up getting scammed out of all your money.”

By high school, I was feeling the lack of spirituality in my life even more than I was feeling my lack of dates. Adolescence is, after all, a time of identity formation. Watching my friends peel off after school for Bible study, catching up with them on Mondays and hearing about all the church-sponsored social activities they’d participated in over the weekend, I wondered if I was maybe missing out on something great. But did I want to go back to church? I didn’t love a lot of the ideas I was hearing from these same friends about women, premarital sex, LGBTQ+ rights, etc. And of course, there was that crayon problem.

Like approximately sixty percent of people who grew up in the 90s (I’m approximating here), I was greatly influenced by the movie The Craft. In retrospect, I don’t know why I was so into it. It’s not that great. But I liked the idea of connecting with nature, and I really liked the idea of girls and women wielding power—which explains how I took a movie in which three of the four main characters suffer terrible fates practicing witchcraft and turned it into a plan for personal development. I was going to become spiritual or be damned trying.

Around the same time, as if in support of my terrible plan, a metaphysical store opened a block away from my high school. A hole-in-the-wall space lined with candles and oils, this store quickly became my favorite after-school (and sometimes during-school) hangout. In one corner, books with titles like The Truth About Wicca and Witchcraft for Beginners squeaked around on wire racks. I read them all and immediately threw myself into practice, drawing pentagrams on my belongings, doing rituals in the park with like-minded friends. But something nettled me, something that would take me years to properly articulate: I didn’t feel an emotional connection to any of it. I appreciated Wiccan tenets the way I did avant-garde art. Goddesses like Brigid and Freya were abstract to me, symbolizing concepts like poetry and love, but they were not “people” I could “talk” to when I felt scared or down. If my spirituality wasn’t serving as a source of comfort, I wondered, then what was the point?

A few years ago, I began doing research for my novel about the legendary pirate queen of Qing-dynasty China. I wanted to accurately represent not only the worldly lives of these pirates, but also their spiritual lives. Chinese pirates of that era were often extremely religious, particularly when it came to Mazu, the goddess of the sea. They had to be—their lives were contingent on the whims of nature. A freak storm could ruin everything. My research on Mazu brought back memories of those gilded gods and goddesses my father had warned me about when I was a child. I recalled the fruit-laden ancestral altars found in almost every home and shop, the pungent smoke of burning “ghost money” on festival days, the thin fortune sticks that made a sound like rushing water when you shook them in their containers. My memories were vivid, but I still didn’t consider making those spiritual practices my own.

Then, shortly after I started working on the novel, everything in my life went terribly wrong. It started when a massive tree outside my front door fell over at 4 AM. My partner and I woke to the smell of gas filling our house—the tree had pulled up a gas line. We grabbed our important belongings, stuffed our cat into her carrier while she clawed up our forearms, and evacuated. Once outside, we saw that the tree had fallen . . . onto our car . . . and the power lines. Sparks leapt and gas spewed into the air. Waiting in the cold for the fire department to arrive, I had the half-dissociated thought that this could be it. Everything that we had built together could just disappear.

Thank goddess it didn’t. The gas company and fire department arrived, and, all things considered, the damage wasn’t too bad. We chalked the experience up to chance, or perhaps some trickster god passing through the area. We figured we were done with freak accidents. But the weirdness clearly wasn’t done with us. Over the course of that month, financial problems cropped up, one after the other; our insurance company dropped us unexpectedly and without reason; and our cat suddenly needed very expensive dental work.

But the coup de grâce?

My mother was diagnosed with an aggressive form of uterine cancer. I remember sitting in the hospital waiting room while her surgery took place; on every TV screen, Notre Dame, one of the finest and most expensive religious tributes to Mother Mary, was burning. For the second time that month, I found myself in a dissociative state. It felt as though something immense had shifted in the universe, like a black hole coming into being, and I, having crossed the event horizon without even realizing it, could do nothing but watch helplessly.

It felt as though something immense had shifted in the universe, like a black hole coming into being.

The wait to see if my mother’s cancer had metastasized felt like an eon, though in reality it was only a few days. At the advice of a metaphysically minded friend, I took a raw egg that was still in its shell and rolled it all over myself. Then I repeated the ritual on my mother. Not knowing what to do with the two eggs, I set them aside. By the time I came out of my room an hour later, my mother had cooked and eaten both.

“Why would you do that?!” I asked her, because it doesn’t take a curandera to know that spiritually cleansing yourself with an egg and then eating the “contaminated” egg is . . . suboptimal.

“I don’t waste food,” my mother, who grew up poor, told me. “And you can tell your friend to send all her used eggs to me because, hey, free eggs.”

When everything had settled down and I finally had time to think, the symbols seemed undeniable: the tree, my mother’s uterine cancer, the financial problems, the burning of Mother Mary’s tribute. Whatever was happening had something to do with my roots, with motherhood. It had to do with my maternal lineage. Incidentally, the name of the Chinese goddess of the sea, Mazu, translates to “Maternal Ancestor.”

So, I found my way back, through disaster, to the folk spiritual practices of my birthplace. I visited temples, talking to the aunties who volunteered there, all of whom had very strong and completely different opinions about the “right” way to celebrate the gods. I burned incense for Mazu and my maternal ancestors, turning to them when I felt worried, or excited, or confused. I felt connected to them in a way I hadn’t with the European spiritual figures of my youth. There was something beautiful and almost inevitable about honoring my lineage—I’d grown up in a household of women presided over by my maternal grandmother. From them, I’d learned about the world, and from my grandmother in particular, my culture and family history. I never got a chance to meet my maternal great-grandmother because she and my grandmother were separated during the Communist Revolution, but my grandmother never stopped telling stories about her: a clever woman, as loving as she was sometimes punishing, who moved mountains to keep her teenage daughters from harm when the soldiers came. What a person she must have been, and what a shame it would be for me to not to get to know her, if only spiritually.

Looking back, I wonder why I never even considered folk religion and ancestral worship in all my years of spiritual confusion. Somewhere along the way, I’d bought into the idea that the folk religion of my homeland was backwards, maybe even sinister. It might have come from my father, or from Sunday school, or simply from feeling as a child that I had to Americanize as fast as possible, to fit in, to stay safe.

When I consider everything my ancestors survived—or at least, survived long enough to make my existence possible—I can’t help but be filled with awe. Each of us is connected, in a single unbroken line, back to the Mitochondrial Eve. I imagine a golden thread weaving through space and time, burrowing deep into the earth, shooting through the sky, and being borne along the seas.