Tracking Down the Lover From Her Dreams

Posted on by Preety Sidhu

An excerpt from House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk

Krysia from the Cooperative Bank in Nowa Ruda had a dream. It was early in the spring of 1969.

She dreamed she heard voices in her left ear. At first it was a woman’s voice that kept on talking and talking, but Krysia couldn’t work out what it was saying. She felt worried in the dream. “How am I going to work if someone keeps droning in my ear?” In this dream she thought it might be possible to switch the voice off, just like switching off the radio or hanging up the telephone receiver, but she couldn’t do it. The source of the sound lay deep in her ear, somewhere in those small, winding corridors full of drums and spirals, in those labyrinths of moist membrane, in the dark caverns inside her head. She tried sticking her fingers in her ears, she tried covering them with her hands, but she couldn’t stifle it. She felt as if the whole world must be able to hear this noise. Maybe that was it—the voice was making the whole world vibrate. Some phrases kept being repeated—they were grammatically perfect and sounded fine, but they made no sense, they were just imitations of human speech. Krysia was afraid of them. But then she started hearing a different voice in her ear, a man’s voice, clear and pleasant. “My name is Amos,” he said. It was nice to talk to him. He asked about her work, and about her parents’ health, but in fact—or so she imagined—he didn’t really need to, because he knew all about her already. “Where are you?” she asked him hesitantly. “In Mariand,” he replied; she had heard of this region in central Poland. “Why can I hear you in my ear?” she wanted to know. “You’re an unusual person,” said Amos, “and I’ve fallen in love with you. I love you.” Krysia dreamed the same dream three or four more times, always with the same ending.

One morning she was drinking her coffee surrounded by piles of bank documents. Outside, sleet was falling and immediately melting. The damp penetrated the bank’s centrally heated offices, permeating the overcoats on their pegs, the bank clerks’ imitation leather handbags, their knee boots and even the clients. But on that unusual day Krysia Flaster, head of the bank’s credit department, realized that for the first time in her life she was wholly, omnipotently and unconditionally loved. This discovery was as powerful as a slap in the face. It made her head spin. Her view of the banking hall faded, and all she could hear was silence. Suddenly suffused with this love, Krysia felt like a brand-new kettle, filled for the very first time with crystal clear water. Meanwhile, her coffee had gone cold.

That day she left work early and made her way to the post office. She got out the phone books for all the large cities in central Poland: Łódź, Sieradz, Konin, Kielce, Radom and Częstochowa, home of the Black Madonna, the Virgin Mary’s city. She opened each one at A and ran a painted fingernail down the columns of names. There was no Amos or Amoz in Łódź, Sieradz, Konin and so on. She couldn’t find him among the small list of names from the surrounding countryside either. What she felt now would best be described as indignation. She knew he must be out there somewhere. For a while she sat still, her mind a blank, and then she began all over again, taking in Radom, Tarnów, Lublin and Włocławek as well. She found Lidia Amoszewicz and the Amosińskis. Then in desperation she began to contrive new combinations: Amos, Soma, Maso, Samo, Omas, until finally her hands with their painted fingernails broke the dream code—and there he was, A. Mos, 54 Sienkiewicz Street, Częstochowa.

Krysia lived in the countryside, and every morning a dirty blue bus took her to town, crawling up the twists and turns of the road like a dingy beetle. In winter, when darkness fell early, its blazing eyes swept over the stony mountain slopes. The bus was a blessing—it gave people the chance to know the world beyond the mountains. All manner of journeys started in it.

Krysia went to work in it every day. The journey took twenty minutes, from the moment the bus picked her up at the stop to the moment she stood before the massive doors of the bank. In those twenty minutes the world changed out of all recognition. The forest became houses, the mountain pastures became town squares, the meadows became streets, and the stream became a small river, which was a different color every day, because it had the misfortune to flow past the Tinworld textile mill. Still on the bus, Krysia would change her gum boots (which she called Wellingtons) for a pair of pumps. Her heels clicked on the broad steps of the old German building.

Krysia was the most elegant girl at the bank. She had a fashionable hairstyle—a well-shaped blond perm with carefully dyed roots. The fluorescent bulbs brought out its doll-and-diamond highlights. Her mascara-coated lashes cast subtle shadows on her smooth cheeks. Her pearly lipstick discreetly emphasized the shape of her mouth. As she grew older, she wore more and more makeup. Nowadays she sometimes told herself, “Stop, that’s enough,” but then she worried that the passing years were blurring her features, depriving her face of definition. She thought her eyebrows were thinning, her blue irises fading, the lines of her lips growing fainter and fainter—that her whole face was becoming foggy, as if trying to disappear. This was Krysia’s greatest fear—that her face would disappear before it had developed and truly come into being.

At the age of thirty she still lived with her parents in a village outside Nowa Ruda. Their house stood beside the winding, potholed local highway, looking hopeful, as if it expected this location to bring it a role in history, in the march of passing armies, in the adventures of treasure hunters, or in the border guards’ pursuit of bootleggers from the Czech Republic. But neither the highway nor the house had much good fortune. Nothing ever happened, except that the forest above the house grew sparser, like Krysia’s eyebrows. Her father kept chopping down the young birch trees to make shafts and poles, and every year he cut down the spruces for Christmas trees. Meanwhile the pathways in the tall grass grew blurred, just like the line of her mouth, and the sky-blue walls of their house kept fading, like Krysia’s eyes.

At home Krysia was quite important; she earned the money and did the shopping, carrying it home in bags her mother had made. She had her own room in the loft, with a sofa bed and a wardrobe. But only at the bank did she really start to come into her own. She had her own office, separated from the banking hall by a plywood partition as thin as cardboard. As she sat at her desk she could hear the hubbub of the bank—doors creaking, heavy farm boots shuffling across the wooden floor, the murmur of women’s hushed voices gossiping nonstop, and the rattle of the two remaining abacuses that the management hadn’t yet got round to replacing with the modern machines with handles that made a whirring sound.

At about ten the daily coffee-drinking ritual began, announced by the clatter of aluminum teaspoons and the sound of glasses striking softly against saucers—the usual office chimes. The precious ground coffee brought from home in jam jars was shared equally between the glasses, and formed a thick brown skin on the surface, briefly holding up the torrents of sugar. The smell of coffee filled the bank to the ceiling, and the farmers queuing for service kicked themselves for having run into the sacred coffee hour.

That was when Krysia remembered her dream.

How painful it is to be loved for nothing, just for existing. What anxiety this sort of love brings. How muddled your thoughts become out of disbelief, how badly your heart aches from beating faster. How quickly the world recedes and slips from your grasp. Krysia had suddenly become lonely.

Following the Easter break, the bank was notified about a training course for employees to be held in Częstochowa. Krysia saw it as an undeniable sign and decided to go. As she was packing her things into her synthetic leather bag, she thought of God, and that despite what they say about Him, He always turns up at the crucial moment.

Sluggish trains full of crumpled people took her there. There were no seats free in the compartments, so she stood glued to a grubby window in the corridor and dozed standing up. Then someone got out in the middle of the night, and at last she could sit down. Squashed between hot bodies in the dry air, she fell into a heavy, black viscous sleep, without any images at all, not even the tail ends of thoughts. Only when she awoke did she realize that she was on a journey; until then she had just been drifting about in space, casually changing location. Only sleep closes the old and opens the new—one person dies and another awakes. This black, featureless space between days is the real journey. Luckily all the trains from Nowa Ruda to the world at large run at night. It crossed her mind that after this journey nothing would ever be the same.

She found herself in Częstochowa before daybreak. It was still too early to go anywhere, so she ordered some tea at the station bar and warmed her hands on the glass. At the neighboring tables sat old women swathed in checked shawls and men stupefied by tobacco—husbands and fathers crushed by life, with leathery faces like old wallets—and children flushed with sleep, from the corners of whose half-open mouths trickled thin streaks of dribble.

Two lemon teas and one coffee later, dawn finally came. She found Sienkiewicz Street and walked right up the middle of it, because the cars weren’t awake yet. She looked into the windows and saw thick, pleated curtains and rubber plants nestling up against the glass. In some of the houses the lights were still shining, but they were weak and insignificant. By this light people were hurriedly getting dressed and eating breakfast, women were drying out their tights over the gas or packing sandwiches for school, beds were being made, trapping the warmth of bodies until the following night, there was a smell of burned milk, shoelaces were being threaded back into their nice safe holes, and the radio was broadcasting news that no one was listening to. Then she came across the first bread queue. Everyone in the queue was silent.

Number 54 Sienkiewicz Street was a large gray apartment block with a fishmonger’s shop on the ground floor and a cavernous courtyard. Krysia stood in front of it and slowly studied the windows. My God, they were so ordinary.

She stood there for half an hour, until she stopped feeling the cold.

The training course was extremely boring. In the exercise book she had bought specially to make notes, Krysia doodled with her pen. The green cloth on the chairman’s table cheered her up a bit. Absent-mindedly, she stroked it. The Cooperative Bank employees seemed all alike to her. The women had peroxide hair fashionably cut à la Simone Signoret and cyclamen-pink lips. The men wore navy blue suits and had pigskin briefcases, as if by mutual agreement. They cracked jokes in the cigarette breaks.

For supper there was bread and cheese and tea in ceramic mugs.

After supper everyone went through to the clubroom, where vodka and gherkins had appeared on the tables. Someone produced a set of tin shot glasses from his briefcase. A man’s hand wandered over a woman’s nylon-clad knees.

Krysia went to bed feeling rather tipsy. Her two roommates turned up around dawn and shushed each other in a loud whisper. And so it went on for three days.

On the fourth day she stood before a door painted brown, bearing a china nameplate reading “A. Mos.” She knocked.

The door was opened by a tall, thin man in pajamas with a cigarette in his mouth. He had dark, bloodshot eyes, as if he hadn’t slept for days. They blinked when she asked, “A. Mos?”

“Yes,” he said. “A. Mos.”

She smiled, because she thought she recognized his voice. “Well, I’m Krysia.”

Surprised, he stepped aside and let her into the hall. The apartment was small and cramped, flooded in silvery fluorescent light, which made it look grubby, like a station waiting room. There were boxes of books, piles of newspapers and half-packed suitcases lying around. Steam came gushing through the open bathroom door.

“It’s me,” she repeated. “I’ve come.”

The man spun around and laughed. “But who are you?” he said. “Do I know you?” He clapped his hand to his brow. “Of course, you’re . . . you’re . . .” he said, snapping his fingers in the air.

Krysia realized that he didn’t recognize her, but there was nothing odd about that. After all, he knew her in a different way, through a dream, from the inside, not the way people usually know each other.

“I’ll explain everything. May I go on in?”

The man hesitated. The ash from his cigarette fell to the floor and he ushered her into the sitting room.

She took off her shoes and went in.

After all, he knew her in a different way, through a dream, from the inside, not the way people usually know each other.

“I’m packing, as you can see,” said the man, explaining the mess. He removed the crumpled bedclothes from the sofa bed and took them into another room, then came back and sat down opposite her. His faded pajamas exposed a strip of bare chest; it was thin and bony.

“Mr. A. Mos, do you ever have dreams?” she asked hesitantly, and immediately knew she had made a mistake. The man laughed, slapped his thighs and gave her a look that seemed to her ironic.

“Well, I never—a young lady comes to see a strange man and asks if he has dreams. It’s just like a dream.”

“But I know you.”

“Do you? How come you know me, but I don’t know you? Oh, maybe we met at Jaś’s party? At Jaś Latka’s?”

She shook her head.

“No? Where was it, then?”

“Mr. A. Mos . . .”

“My name’s Andrzej. Andrzej Mos.”

“Krysia Flaster,” she said. They both stood up, shook hands and sat down again awkwardly.

“So . . .” he said after a while.

“My name’s Krysia Flaster . . .”

“I know that.”

“. . . I’m thirty years old, I work in a bank, where I’m quite senior. I live in Nowa Ruda—do you know where that is?”

“Somewhere near Katowice?”

“No, no. It’s near Wrocław.”

“Aha,” he said distractedly. “Would you like a beer?”

“No, thank you.”

“Well, I’m going to have one.”

He stood up and went into the kitchen. Krysia noticed a typewriter on the desk with a piece of paper in it. Suddenly she got the idea that what she should do and say next was written on it, so she got up to take a look, but Andrzej Mos came back with a bottle of beer.

“Actually, I thought you were from Częstochowa. For a while there I even thought I knew you.”

“Really?” said Krysia, perking up.

“I even thought . . .” he said, his eyes shining. He took a large swig of the bottle.

“What?”

“You know how it is. You don’t remember everything. Not always. Was there something between us? At the party at . . .”

“No,” said Krysia quickly and felt herself go red. “I’ve never seen you before.”

“But didn’t you say you know me?”

“Yes, I do, but only your voice.”

“My voice? God, what are you on about? I must be dreaming. A chick comes round and insists she knows me, but it’s the first time she’s ever seen me in her life. She only knows my voice . . .”

Suddenly he froze with the bottle to his lips and his eyes bored into Krysia.

“Now I know. You’re from the secret police. You know my voice because you’ve been tapping my phone, right?”

“No. I work in a bank.”

“All right, all right, but I’ve got my passport now and I’m leaving. I’m leaving, get it? For the free world. I’m packing up, as you can see. It’s all over, you people can’t do anything to me now.”

“Please don’t.”

“What do you want?”

“I dreamed about you. I found you through the phone book.”

The man lit a cigarette and stood up. He started pacing up and down the cluttered room. Krysia took her identity card out of her handbag and placed it open on the table.

“Please take a look, I’m not from the secret police.”

He leaned over the table and examined it.

“That doesn’t prove a thing,” he said. “You don’t write on an identity card that you’re a secret policeman, do you?”

“What can I do to convince you?”

He stood over her, smoking his cigarette.

“You know what? It’s getting late. I’m just on my way out. I have an appointment. And besides, I’m packing. I’ve got all sorts of important things to see to.”

Krysia took her identity card from the table and put it back in her handbag. Her throat felt painfully tight.

“I’ll be off, then.”

He didn’t protest. He saw her to the door.

“So you dreamed about me?”

“Yes,” she said, slipping on her shoes.

“And you found me through the phone book?”

She nodded.

“Goodbye. I’m sorry,” she said.

“Goodbye.”

She ran down the stairs and found herself in the street. She walked downhill toward the station, crying. Her mascara ran and stung her eyes, turning the world into a brightly colored blur. At the ticket office she was told that the last train for Wrocław had just left. The next one was in the morning, so she went to the station bar and ordered some tea. Her mind was a blank as she sat staring at the slice of lemon floating limply in the glass. From the platforms a damp, foggy night came drifting into the station hall. This is no reason not to believe in dreams, it finally occurred to her. They always make sense, they never get it wrong—it’s the real world that doesn’t live up to their perfection. Phone books tell lies, trains go in the wrong direction, streets look too similar, the letters in the names of cities get mixed up, and people forget their own names. Only dreams are real. She thought she could hear that warm voice full of love in her left ear again.

This is no reason not to believe in dreams, it finally occurred to her.

“I called the travel information line. The last train to Nowa Ruda has already gone,” said Andrzej Mos, and he sat down at her table. He drew a little cross on the wet oilcloth. “Your makeup’s run.”

She took out a handkerchief, wetted the corner with spit and wiped her eyelids.

“So you dreamed about me? It’s an incredible honor to be dreamed about by someone you don’t know, who lives at the other end of the country. . . . So what happened in the dream?”

“Nothing. You just spoke to me.”

“What did I say?”

“That I’m unusual and that you love me.”

He snapped his fingers and took a long stare at the ceiling.

“What a crazy way to pick up a guy! I take my hat off to you.”

She didn’t reply, but just went on sipping her tea.

“I wish I was at home now,” she said at last. 

“Let’s go to my place. I’ve got a spare bed.”

“No. I’m going to wait here.”

“As you wish.”

He went to the buffet and got himself a mug of beer.

“I don’t think you are A. Mos. I mean, not the one I dreamed about. I must have gone wrong somewhere. Maybe it’s another city, not Częstochowa.”

“Maybe.”

“I’ll have to look again.”

The man plonked his mug down on the table with such force that he spilled some beer.

“Pity I won’t know the results.”

“But you do have a similar voice.”

“Let’s go to my place. You can spend the night in a bed, not at a bar table.”

He could see that she was wavering. Without the ghastly mascara she looked younger. Tiredness had diluted the image of a provincial girl.

“Let’s go,” he repeated, and she stood up without a word.

He took her luggage and they went back up the hill along Sienkiewicz Street, now deserted.

“And what else was in the dream?” he asked, as he made up the sofa bed in the main room for her.

“I don’t want to talk about it anymore. It doesn’t matter.”

“Shall we have a beer? Or some vodka as a nightcap? Mind if I light up?”

She agreed. He disappeared into the kitchen, and after a moment’s hesitation she went up to the typewriter. Before she had even read the title of the poem written there her heart began to beat. It said: “A Night in Mariand.” She stood over the typewriter as if rooted to the spot. Behind her, clattering about in the kitchen, was Amos from her dream, a real, live skinny man with bloodshot eyes, someone who knew everything and understood everything, who entered into people’s dreams, sowing love and anxiety, someone who moved the world aside as if it were a curtain concealing some other, elusive truth, not supported by things, events, or anything permanent.

Her fingers trembled as she touched the keys.

“I write poetry,” he said behind her. “I’ve even published a small volume.”

She couldn’t turn round.

“Do sit down. It doesn’t matter anymore, because I’m off to the free world now. Give me your address and I’ll write to you.”

She could hear his voice just behind her, in her left ear.

“Do you like it? Do you read poetry? It’s just a draft, I haven’t finished it yet. Do you like it?”

She let her head drop. The blood was pounding in her ears. He gently touched her arm.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

She turned round to face him and saw his eyes fixed on her curiously. She could smell his scent—of cigarettes, dust and paper. She snuggled up to that scent, and they stood there without moving for several minutes. His hands rose and hesitated for a while, but then he began to stroke her back.

“It is you, I’ve found you,” she whispered. 

He touched her cheek and kissed her.

“If you like.”

He pushed his fingers into her peroxide hair and pressed his lips to hers. Then he pulled her onto the sofa bed and started to undress her. She didn’t like this, it was too abrupt, she wasn’t going to enjoy it, but it had to be done, like a sacrifice. She had to allow him anything, so she slipped out of her suit and blouse, her suspender belt and bra. His thin rib cage loomed before her eyes, dry and angular like a stone.

“So how did you hear me in the dream?” he asked in a breathy whisper.

“You spoke in my ear.”

“Which one?”

“The left one.”

“Here?” he asked and slipped his tongue into her ear.

She squeezed her eyelids shut. She could no longer break free. It was too late. He was pinning her down with the whole weight of his body, touching her, penetrating her, piercing her. But somehow she knew that this had to happen, that she had to give Amos his due before she’d be able to take him away with her and plant him in front of her home like a huge tree. And so she surrendered to the alien body, and even embraced it awkwardly, joining in the bizarre, rhythmical dance.

“Well, I never!” the man said afterward, and he lit a cigarette.

Krysia got dressed and sat down beside him. He poured vodka into two shot glasses.

“How was it for you?” he asked, glancing at her and draining the vodka.

“Fine,” she replied.

“Let’s get some sleep.”

“Already?”

“You’ve got a train to catch tomorrow.”

“I know.”

“I’d better set the alarm.”

A. Mos shuffled off to the bathroom. Krysia sat still and looked around Amos’s temple. The walls were painted orange, but the cold fluorescent light made them look a dull shade of blue. Where a patch of burlap had come away from the wall she could see a brighter orange color. It seemed to be shining, dazzling her. A curtain yellow with cigarette smoke hung at the window, and to her right stood the abandoned desk and the typewriter with “A Night in Mariand” in it.

“Why did you fall in love with me?” she asked when he came back. “What makes me different from other people?” 

“For God’s sake, you’re cracked.”

He was wearing the striped pajamas that exposed his chest again.

“What do you mean, I’m cracked?”

“You’re crazy. Off your rocker.”

He poured himself a shot of vodka and downed it in one gulp.

“You came halfway across Poland to see a complete stranger,” he said. “You told him your dream and you went to bed with him. That’s all. You’re cracked.”

“Why are you lying to me? Why don’t you admit you’re Amos and you know all about me?”

“I’m not Amos. My name’s Andrzej Mos.”

“What about Mariand?”

“What Mariand?”

“A Night in Mariand. What’s Mariand?” 

He laughed and sat on a chair beside her.

“It’s a pub in the marketplace. All the local vagrants come there to booze. I wrote a poem about it. I know it’s bad. I’ve written better things.”

She stared at him incredulously.

The return journey was filled with the crashing of doors closing—the doors of the cars on the night train, of the compartments, of the station restrooms and buses. Finally the front door of the house gave a hollow crash behind her. Krysia threw down her bag and went to bed. She slept all day, and when her anxious mother called her down to supper in the evening, Krysia had forgotten that she had been anywhere at all. Sleep, like an eraser, had wiped out the entire journey. A few nights later, Krysia heard the familiar voice in her left ear. “It’s me, Amos, where have you been?”

“How come you don’t know where I’ve been?” “I don’t,” he replied. “Don’t you travel about with me?” she asked. The voice fell silent. Krysia felt that this silence expressed some sort of embarrassment. “Never go so far away again,” he answered in her ear shortly after. “What do you mean by far away?” she asked him angrily. Maybe her tone frightened him, because he stopped talking, and Krysia had to wake up.

After the trip to Częstochowa nothing was the same. The streets of Nowa Ruda dried out and were flooded with sunshine. The girls put bunches of forsythia on their desks. The varnish began to peel off Krysia’s nails, the roots of her peroxide hair grew dark and the fair ends worked their way down to her shoulders. At noon a large window in the banking hall was opened, letting the din from the street flood in—children’s voices, the noise of cars streaming by, the rapid clatter of stiletto heels, and the flutter of pigeons’ wings. It was a pleasure to leave work. The narrow streets beckoned you to enter, to look at the people’s faces and be reminded of a painting of a courtyard scene. The cafés were inviting, their smoke-filled expanses full of curious glances and idle conversation. Even better, they offered the timeless fragrance of coffee brewing in glasses and the tinkle of metal teaspoons.

In May Krysia went to see a clairvoyant and asked him about her future. The clairvoyant read her horoscope, then spent a long time concentrating with his eyes shut.

“What do you want to know?” he asked her.

“What’s going to happen to me?” she said, and he must have been able to see into distant space beneath his eyelids, because his eyeballs kept moving from left to right as if he were surveying inner landscapes.

Krysia lit a cigarette and waited. The clairvoyant saw ash-gray valleys, with the remains of cities and villages. The scene was dead still, reduced to ashes, and was growing dimmer from moment to moment. The sky was orange, low and light as a tent cover. There was nothing moving, not a breath of wind, not a hint of life. The trees looked like stone pillars, as if frozen by the same sight as Lot’s wife. He thought he could hear them creaking gently. Krysia wasn’t in this landscape, nor was he there either, nor anyone. He didn’t know what to say. He only felt a spasm of fear in his stomach at the thought that now he would have to lie and invent something.

“No one dies forever. Your soul will come back again many times, until it finds what it’s looking for,” he said, then took a deep breath and added, “You’ll get married and have a child. It will fall ill, and you’ll look after it. Your husband will be older than you and will leave you a widow. Your child will go away from you, far away, over the ocean perhaps. You’ll be very old when you die. Dying will not cause you pain.”

That was all. Krysia went away calm, because she knew all that already. She had spent her money in vain. She could have spent it on a willow-green bouclé top of the sort that were arriving in parcels from abroad. That night she heard Amos’s voice again. “I love you, you’re an unusual person,” he said.

In her sleepy state she thought she recognized the voice, and felt sure she knew whose it was, and she fell asleep happy. But as happens with dreams and semi-dreams, in the morning it had all drifted away and she was left with nothing but a vague impression of knowing something, without being quite sure what. And that was all.

You Don’t Have to Write Every Day to Be a Real Writer

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Years ago when I was in graduate school, my head was filled with rules for fiction, edicts from professors or classmates, a few foolish notions I came up with myself. These rules were based on the anxieties of the time and place, 1988–1990, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Plenty of writing advice comes out of the anxieties of the time; in thirty years, at least some of today’s common advice will seem old-timey and wrong. 

We were told, or told ourselves, a lot of things. For instance, we should strive to be timeless. No very specific historical markers, nothing that could be seen as only now. In this way our work wouldn’t become outdated. As though we could keep that from happening! I had classmates who said that fiction shouldn’t be political, who intoned at every opportunity, Show, don’t tell, or Write what you know, or Kill your darlings. 

People said, Show, don’t tell, so often it had the valence of a mob threat, something everyone knew you should do because the made guys said so. Snitches get stitches. I still don’t know what it means exactly. 

Write what you know. Subtext: Maybe you don’t know anything. Subtext: If your life hasn’t been interesting, you can’t be a writer. 

Kill your darlings. If you love something, kill it. If it comes back to you, kill it again. 

It’s true that such pieces of advice prove the power of language, because they sound plausible even though they’re devoid of meaning. I can still picture the faces of the people who said these things to me (as some of my classmates can surely picture my face, saying something ignorant) because it was so long ago. My grudges are fossilized, preserved in excellent, unmalleable detail. 

I loved graduate school: I made dear friends at Iowa who are still dear to me, whether or not we’re still in touch. We took one another seriously. Nothing is better. That might be my number one piece of advice for young writers: Find the hardest-working writers you know; take one another seriously. 

You should dismiss grudges when you can. If they stick around despite everything, they probably mean something. Use them.

People said, Show, don’t tell, so often it had the valence of a mob threat,

When I speak at writing programs and say with certainty that not every writer needs to write every day, that I myself don’t, without fail afterward one of the resident faculty will take me aside to say, “It’s so interesting that you don’t write every day! But I really think writers have to.” 

Their eyes are bright and panicked. They have issued this proclamation to their students. Real writers write every day. Why won’t I just say so? I don’t believe it. I’ve never managed it. I haven’t been great at making anything a job in my life, including my actual jobs. I always do too much or too little; I overvolunteer or I goldbrick. I’ve never been a person of moderation, though I have tried. Sometimes I write every day for months, but never with a sense of proportion. Is it a matter of psychology or neurology? Laziness, I used to think, and vowed continually to start my new life of discipline. Tomorrow, I told myself. Monday, then. Okay, April. I did try. When I was young and struggled to write interesting fiction every day, each morning was anxious, another day I might fail to buckle down. 

And yet I persist in believing that I’m a real writer. I’ve never doubted that I am. My work, yes, I have doubted. My work ethic, and my reputation. Not my identity. I write; I am a writer. My qualifications are that I say so. 

I understand that this can seem simultaneously glib and daunting. You might think it’s a philosophical question. Am I a writer? A real writer, as the director of my graduate program specified long ago, scaring the bejesus out of all of us? 

Am I a writer? is the sort of question (there are a lot of them) that seems deep but only wastes time. It’s a binary question and—To be or not to be aside—no binary question is all that interesting, at least until it’s answered. 

If you call yourself a writer, whether you’ve written that day or month or year, you go into the world as a writer. Anything you see becomes more interesting because of your acquisitive writer’s soul. A middle school production of The Three Musketeers in which the cast wears expensive rented capes and cheap store-bought plumed hats and their own dress pants and leggings, their own black sneakers and ballerina flats. The young lifeguard whose dark manicure has grown out, like waxing moons. A man in the grocery store who says into his phone, in a voice of love, “You’re crazy. You’re crazy. You’re certifiably insane.” A colleague, now buttoned-up and dull, who reminisces about her time as a teenage huffer of paint. You don’t need to write any of this down. You could. You could have a little notebook; if you remember to carry it around, you’re better than me. To consider yourself a writer as you move about the world is—I am a true believer—a beautiful way to live, a form of openmindedness, even in terrible times. Here life is, going on all around. It is a form of writing itself; if you do it, you are a writer. It’s likely to lead to putting words down on a page, at least a few, but even if it doesn’t it can make you feel alive. Lucky. Luck you can make yourself.

So much of fiction is a trick of the mind. (Much of life, too, but my only expertise is in fiction.) 

Find the hardest-working writers you know; take one another seriously. 

Lots of people speak scornfully of pen-and-paper questions after literary readings, meaning generic mechanical questions: Can you tell me about your process? Do you write by hand or on a computer? What time of day? These are concrete questions about work instead of art: answerable, opposable. We writers believe that everyone else is doing it right while we bumble along in the gutter; we also believe that it’s the rest of the world who bumbles and only we know the True Way. 

Ask yourself those pen-and-paper questions, as though you are both audience member and visiting writer. 

Or think of yourself as a science experiment. Try out everything to see if it works: early rising, late night, nice pens, crappy pens, the notes app on your phone, voice memos. Listen to white noise or music. Some of these experiments will only show what doesn’t work. Make your space as amenable to work as possible. One year—one whole year of my life!—I wrote almost nothing because I lived alone in an apartment with plenty of room, a place I never had a single visitor, and I had crammed my desk in the corner of my bedroom next to a cast-iron radiator in such a way I had to clamber into the chair. This difficulty meant I almost never sat down at my desk to write. I certainly never sat down idly in my desk chair to read a book, an essential step in my process. When I moved house, away from the radiator, I immediately began writing. You might get away with moving the furniture. 

Make process (and only process) a contest with your writing friends (and only your friends): how long you work, how hard. What weird complex note-taking system you have in place, the beauty and obsessiveness of your notebooks. Whiteboards, murder boards, charcuterie boards: whatever fuels the work. Trash-talk. Self-aggrandize. Challenge. I once told a friend that one day I worked so hard I scared myself, and I saw an answering fear in his eyes—I scared him, too—and this is one of my favorite writing memories. 

Every-day writers have a clear answer to the question, How will you get work done? Me, I harness the power of my own self-loathing. 

Self-loathing is a common commodity among writers. An uplifting craft book would tell you that you must forgive yourself before writing, that writing is hard, but I believe self-loathing has its uses, if you know how to angle it. Don’t think of days, but weeks or months, a period of time in which you want to get work done. Say it’s four months. You know that you have enough time in those four months to amass some pages, even if week to week you don’t know where you will find those hours or minutes. Decide what you’d like to accomplish. Make it wildly ambitious, more than you think is reasonable. 

Think: How mad will I be if I don’t get this done? How much will I hate myself? Travel forward in time in your mind; make yourself really feel it. Put yourself into your body and take it on: the misery, the self-recrimination, the shame. 

Travel back in time to the current moment. Realize that you can avoid these terrible feelings: All you have to do is work. Not every day. For you—for some people—the manageable units of time involved in daily writing aren’t useful. Remember what you want to avoid: the nauseating feeling of having wasted a block of time.

I persist in believing that I’m a real writer. I’ve never doubted that I am.

A whole stretch of the calendar allows you to be more grandiose. If your aim is unreasonable, and you fall short, you won’t feel too bad; if your aim is modest and you don’t meet it, you will be crushed. 

This method is the only way I get work done. 

In the past few years people have become fond of the phrase imposter syndrome. “I suffer from imposter syndrome,” a young writer might say, meaning they don’t deserve what they’ve achieved, or, in its worst form, are afraid to dare to try. As though this isn’t the human condition. Imposter syndrome sounds fantastic. It probably comes with a cape and a false nose and the ability to perform surgery without a medical license. What it means is: fear of failing. Calling it a syndrome instead of a feeling suggests that it can’t be tampered with. It’s not a problem to be solved, but something you will have forever. 

It’s not that I’m unsympathetic. No, clearly I am: I have just said that I have never doubted that I am a real writer, which is true. I have only doubted and loathed my writing and excoriated myself for not working harder. 

Don’t make a journey out of something that can be a decision. This is a corollary of no binary question is interesting. If you have received something—a place in a writing program, a compliment, an acceptance—do not wonder whether you deserve it. That is a question aimed at the past. You have it; the answer is yes. Turn your eyes to the future and put all your worry into your writing. 

Am I good enough? is, on the other hand, an interesting question to write about. You could do worse than to take all your personal, worrisome flaws and put them into your characters. To feel ashamed about writing isn’t interesting, but writing about shame is fascinating. A jealous writer may get no work done; a jealous character can scheme and murder and say astonishing things. You might even discover that once you have removed your flaws to use them in fiction—like a splinter, a bee’s stinger—they no longer bother you. 


From the book A LONG GAME by Elizabeth McCracken. Copyright © 2025 by Elizabeth McCracken. Reprinted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

The Transcendence of Writing Your Fears

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

It’s hard to not constantly think about how you look these days. Our lives have been subsumed by the ultimate sensory deprivation tank that is the Internet, where all of our sensations are left unstimulated for hours on end—all, that is, besides our sense of sight.

Acclaimed author Elaine Hsieh Chou’s debut story collection, Where Are You Really From, may not be a direct interrogation of the internet, yet its reckoning with our obsession over perception is undeniable. In the first story, “Carrot Legs,” a teenage girl wonders if she would have been better off had she not met her attractive cousin who, fitting the “algorithm of beauty,” has access to all she has ever wanted. In “Happy Endings,” a fastidiously “ethical” john enters a sex parlor with the sole concern that his fantasies be performed by Asian women, regardless of whether they are virtual or not. And in “You Put a Rabbit on Me,” an au pair meets her doppelgänger in France, sending her on a quest to figure out how much she can learn about herself from someone who shares an uncanny, down-to-the-mole resemblance. Chou’s stories illuminate how our modern fixation with images has trapped us into cycles of narcissistic self-consciousness. It becomes clear that the invasive question in the collection’s title is not only asked by pushy strangers, but also posed to oneself.

Initially connected via our sensory deprivation tanks (Instagram), Chou and I brought our conversation to Zoom to discuss writing from uncomfortable perspectives, how to subvert power dynamics through humor, Asian fetishization, and the resurrection of the author in the contemporary lit scene. Our interview begins with Chou providing advice on how to get over writer’s block.

Jalen Giovanni Jones: Have you ever found yourself in a rut? What did you do to fill that well back up?

Elaine Hsieh Chou: You have to keep living. That’s how the well fills up.

I’ve gone through several ruts. Whenever you push yourself to meet a deadline, you don’t really have a choice. You feel like you have to force yourself to be creative, which is not ideal, but it’s sort of inevitable. When I’ve had to write in those circumstances, I feel very depleted afterwards. It’s really hard to return to that space of writing—not as something that is looming over you, but instead as creative exploration. As a playground. For me, taking breaks from writing and doing other things fills up that well of experience again. 

For example, I’d always wanted to take an acting class. They say eventually you have to take an acting class if you want to seriously become a screenwriter and learn how dialogue lives in the body, because a lot of our job is writing dialogue. I think a lot of writers would enjoy it because acting classes are about interior excavation and understanding yourself—and understanding other people. I ended up writing a new story about it! I also didn’t intend to write a story about background acting, like in “Featured Background,” but after background acting for a couple years, I became fascinated by it and inevitably, I wrote about it. That’s my advice, now that it’s happened to me accidentally a few times. I’m like, “I’m in a rut, I guess I have to take a clown workshop, or learn tap dancing!” [laughs.]

JGJ: That’s a great reminder. We’re writers, but there’s also more to life than writing.

EHC: We’re so sedentary and isolated, and the things we write about typically are not sedentary or isolated. We’re writing about people in the world, you know?

JGJ: Let’s bring it to Where Are You Really From. This collection also critiques similar themes to your last book—Asian American identity, racism, fetishization, self-discovery. How did your approach to these topics differ when writing short stories versus writing a novel?

In a short story, I’m very conscious of the fact that I may not be able to say everything I want to say.

EHC: In a novel, you have a lot more space to play with these themes in an expansive way. Ideally, the plot will shore up the actual subjects that you’re interested in. Novels give you a lot more freedom and space to go deep. In a short story, you have to use a lighter touch because of the page constraints. There are short stories that deal with complex topics like race beautifully and succinctly in such a short amount of time—but it’s trickier. You have to really isolate the situation, and stay there the whole time. In a way, it’s harder to have multiple subplots or characters. 

In a short story, I’m very conscious of the fact that I may not be able to say everything I want to say. Maybe I can get across one theme I feel strongly about, or just have it manifest in a much more specific way. With “Happy Endings,” for example, that story touches on the sexpat industry in Asia. There’s so much to be said about that topic, but I couldn’t say it all. I’m just creating a spark.

JGJ: These stories are provocative in how they bring to light topics that people don’t like to acknowledge. For example, the ways that Asian women are fetishized by white men. There’s humor, but that doesn’t distract from communicating the seriousness of the topic at hand. Why do you find yourself drawn to humor when approaching serious topics?

EHC: Humor allows me to approach heavy topics that are difficult to write about. Sometimes they can be too difficult to write about head on, even when they have happened in real life in some shape or form. For example in Disorientation, some situations were so absurd that I think the humor presented itself naturally as a way to also exert some power or control over harmful events that have happened in the Asian American community.

Humor has this other power. It’s not just making you laugh, or making it enjoyable to read. There’s a history of subversion of power through humor. There’s this saying: “The worst thing you can do to someone is to laugh at them.” Not meeting them with reciprocal violence and instead laughing at them—it renders their attempts at violence even more meaningless and silly.

JGJ: Multiple times throughout these stories, you took on the perspective of the perpetrator, or of the person embodying the perspective being critiqued. “Mail Order Love” and “Happy Endings” are both written from the perspective of white men who go for younger, Asian women as part of their fetish. What pulled you to write from the POV of the perspectives under critique?

EHC: Well, I love the challenge. This is a topic I’ve thought about extensively. It’s something that has preoccupied me since my MFA. When writing something new, you don’t want to repeat the same beats you’ve written before. That’s uninteresting—ideally you’re writing to learn about yourself and what you believe in while juggling new ideas in your head. In “Mail Order Love,” I wanted to witness Bunny the way Frank first does. Reading from his point of view helped situate the absurdity of that situation—of mail order brides arriving in the mail. 

“Mail Order Love” was a story I didn’t outline, and I’m glad I didn’t. Typically, that story would have played out in a much more expected way, which is that Frank is a creep, that he’s gross and he abuses her; that’s the story people expect to read. That’s a story that I expected myself to write. But it didn’t feel new to me. So it evolved to being not so much that he had a fetish, but rather that this website is mostly full of Asian women. I don’t think he chooses her with much intention, he’s just deeply in grief. Both of them are grieving in very unhealthy ways. 

There’s a history of subversion of power through humor.

A lot of these choices came from a craft perspective. I’m curating the experience I want the reader to have, which is so crucial to think about as a writer. It is not just a question of, “I want to tell this story, so I’m just going to start telling it from this POV.” Considering what experience you want to take the reader on, and how the actual structure and point of view of the story informs that experience? I think that’s so necessary.

JGJ: An aspect of your collection that surprised me was how sinisterly sexy it was. I don’t see many other authors writing about sex in such a critical, forward way. What/who were some of your inspirations as you took these stories in that direction?

EHC: I was thinking of Carmen Maria Machado. Her Body and Other Parties. She’s so skilled at writing about sex and interrogating it on a larger, social scale. “The Husband Stitch” was so eye-opening for me. “Cat Person” by Kristen Roupenian too. Before I read those stories in 2017, it was more rare to read about sexual dynamics in a way where it’s not from the straight, cis, male point of view of, “I want woman. Woman rejects me.” In “The Husband Stitch,” you can be loved and you can love this person back, but they may slowly exert their power and control over you in a way that ends up being fatal. In “Cat Person,” Roupenian does such an incredible job of delineating how women who are raised to think that “no” is almost a slur—like you cannot just say the word “no,” period. How do we try to navigate these intimate situations? When you’re so afraid of hurting the other person that you just erase yourself and erase yourself and erase yourself? I hadn’t read many other stories like that. Lastly, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Mary Gaitskill—she has been an enormous influence when it comes to writing about sex and desire.

JGJ: Why do you think it’s so hard for writers to write about sex as it relates to Asian racialization, and Asian fetishization?

EHC: It can be really hard to look in the mirror and write about something that you’ve been complicit in, which I certainly have been. For me to answer this question, I might be making a lot of conjectures about Asian writers’ sexual lives and histories and desires, and I don’t want to paint with a broad brush. But for me—turning it toward myself—I would say that when I first started writing in undergrad, I did not write about race at all. I had been taught under the aesthetics and ideologies of Raymond Carver, of Hemingway, these “literary Gods of the short form” that we were supposed to aspire to. So I’d try to write like them, and they didn’t write about racial subjects. 

I’m not interested in writing that plays it safe. That’s not the writing that has ever moved me.

Looking at myself at that time, I did not understand myself enough to write about things that I was experiencing in my own life. It’s almost like you’re standing too close to the fire. It burns, so you step away. A lot of fiction writers are drawn towards fiction because it’s escapist; you can step out of your own life and into someone else’s, and you don’t necessarily want to perform self-therapy in your writing. But having gotten older, and having really thought through and educated myself on racial issues and how they’re so pressing, I’ve learned what’s at stake. Our lives, our safety, our security. It doesn’t make it necessarily easy to write about, because it’s something that I’m implicated in. I will carry my own baggage into this, and it’s pretty obvious that I stand on one side of the fetishization vs. “it’s just a preference” debate. But I would say it’s difficult, especially if you’re in a relationship. Let’s say you’re an Asian woman writer, and you’re in a relationship with a white man. Maybe that would make writing about it very uncomfortable, because you’d have to examine your attraction to and relationship with that person. I would say Jenny Zhang and her essays in [the now defunct teen magazine] Rookie—R.I.P. Rookie—are so frank. I think she wrote “Far Away From Me” 10 years ago, and she was writing about this question with such openness and vulnerability and self-criticism that I had never seen before. To this day I don’t often see the level of self-critique that I found in Jenny Zhang’s essays.

JGJ: Did you ever find yourself having trouble writing what was necessary to tell these stories?

EHC: Ideally when you’re in that creative womb of total safety and privacy in your head, you’re thinking, “No one’s ever going to read this.” That’s where I’m always trying to write from. When I’m in that space, I allow myself to write without constrictions. To just say the thing I’m afraid of saying. When I was editing the collection and was very much aware that, well, people are going to read this, I actually challenged myself to keep inhabiting that creative womb space. I thought about the fiction that has moved me so deeply, that has resonated with me and stayed with me. It’s the fiction that says the thing we’re all thinking, but aren’t supposed to say, or that you’re afraid to say because you’re afraid of being judged. 

In the history of literature, typically we didn’t think of the writer as much as we do now. We would read a book, and we would not necessarily think about the writer as a person, right? But now the writer and the story are so intertwined. Your book is almost always seen as a stand-in for you as a person. That pressure can be terrifying and limiting. I resist that. I want to write what I feel is necessary. The thing that scares me to write because otherwise, what’s the point if you’re going to play it safe? I’m not interested in writing that plays it safe. That’s not the writing that has ever moved me. When a writer is extremely self-protective and recalcitrant, I’m not really sure what the process of writing is doing for them. I believe in the transcendence of the writing process. I believe that if you want to reach that transcendence, you have to let ego—which is ultimately where the fear of judgment comes from—drop away, so something greater can emerge from behind it. The greatest way we can explore what it means to be human is to look at ourselves and say the thing that we’re most afraid to say. So I challenged myself to do that. Ultimately, this unzipping of the self is what draws people to literature.

In the Afterlife, My Dad Is at the Races

Posted on by EL Assistant2

If Heaven Was a Race Track by Sarah Curl

When I hear the news of the Pope dying, my first thought is that my dad will be so happy to meet him, as if I believe heaven is a real place, and there are only a few dozen people there milling about, greeting the newcomers. The deceased might come together forming two lines, hands outstretched above their heads, fingertips touching, forming a tunnel for the Pope to dash through, as if he’s the star player in a basketball game.

Three years after my dad died, my mom did, too, and I feel like a traitor that I don’t also imagine her eagerly in line to meet the Pope. I picture her, instead, reclining on a cloud while flipping the pages of a Real Simple magazine, a morning show playing too loudly in the background. 

“Come on!” I imagine my dad urging her. “It’s the Pope!”

“You go,” she tells him. “I’m just not in the mood.”

Because, even in the afterlife, my mom would still be my mom.

Days after my dad died, I saw a crushed, empty ginger ale can in a parking lot and, heart overflowing at the site of my dad’s favorite beverage, I called Mom to tell her the news.

“It’s like he’s sending hugs through litter,” I told her, still somewhat delirious from the recent days following my dad’s unexpected death.

The other end of the line was quiet. 

“Mom, are you there?”

Finally, she responded. “I can’t believe he’s sending you signs, and he hasn’t sent me any.” 

After that, I didn’t call Mom to tell her about the owl I saw in broad daylight, about the hummingbird that fluttered at our front door on my daughter’s first day of kindergarten, or about how it seemed like it was 6:53, my dad’s lucky numbers, every time I looked at the clock. I don’t even believe in signs, I wanted to tell her.

Even in the afterlife, my mom would still be my mom.

She knew, though. She knew I didn’t believe in signs, in heaven, in god; she was always reminding me I was a skeptic, too hard, too judgmental. Mom decorated her bedroom in angels and believed in horoscopes and tarot cards. She didn’t go to church, but thought I should. 

After Mom died, it fell to me, the only child, to clean out the home where I grew up. When I got to the house, I walked into the living room and found the coffee table still pushed to the side, where it had been moved to make room for the stretcher that was rolled in for Mom on that awful night. Through the window to the back porch, I glimpsed my dad’s hoodie on the back of a chair like he had only just stepped out. Overwhelmed, I headed upstairs to start sorting Mom’s closet, thinking its small size would make the task more manageable. Inside the closet, on top of a pile of clothes, was a Mother’s Day gift I’d made as a kid. In one of those small photo albums that used to come with film, I had gathered photographs of Mom and I together and written a poem about how grateful I was for her. She must have been looking at it on those last days. I stood there, photo album in hand, staring. “She loved me,” I think. “She loved me?” I wonder. She was looking at these pictures of us together before she was helicoptered to the hospital. She was reading this poem about us when her heart was giving out. Like a child pulling petals off a flower, I stood in the hallway of my childhood home, thinking, “She loves me; she loves me not,” wondering if the last petal would ever fall, and where in the poem I would be when it did.

When my dad died, my mom kept telling me I didn’t understand her sadness. 

“We were married for almost forty years,” she said to me, almost daily. More than once, she added, “It’s longer than you’ve been alive.”

“I know,” I would say. “It’s awful.” I said this like a mantra, again and again.

“I miss him so much,” I ventured, but only once.

My mom responded, “Not as much as me.”

We had been having a version of this conversation for decades.

Lately, I have been imagining that heaven is a sort of horse track, or off-track betting parlor, even. I imagine my dead dad there in line, his Levi’s just a little too big and sagging at the waist, waiting to make a bet. Neck craned, watching one of the dozens of TVs mounted at the top of the wood-paneled walls, he’s watching the races play out, although instead of horses dashing toward a finish line, he’s seeing bits of my life, waiting to see if I’m receiving his messages. Finally his turn, he steps up to the thick glass window, not unlike one you’d find at an unkempt DMV, but instead of placing his signature six-five-three trifecta, the first three digits of his childhood phone number, he places two dollars down on an orange Ford Escape driving through the intersection of Campbell and James River Freeway at 3:17 p.m. on a Friday.

In cinematic style, my daydream cuts to me sitting in my car, also a Ford Escape, at a stoplight at that very intersection at that very time, watching the same kind of car my dad used to drive pull in front of me. I smile and give my dad a thumbs up, imagining him in the heaven-OTB, fist in the air, shouting, “Yes! Yes!” 

It’s as likely as anything.

I picture Mom on her cloud, reprimanding my dad for his time at the track. 

“It’s been almost four years,” she tells him.

“You could come, too,” he says. “Wanna place a wager? You know it’d mean the world to our girl.”

“Nah,” she says, flipping the pages of her magazine.

Some of my earliest memories are at the track with my parents, definitely before I was old enough to be allowed in. I’m still not sure how my parents managed it, but I suspect it had something to do with my dad’s charm. People often bent the rules for him, without his asking or realizing it had happened.

My dad loved the races the way he loved church. He loved the way a two-dollar bet could change the course of a day, the way people slapped each other’s backs like old friends, the smell of the grass, the sudden hush before the gates opened. It was ritual, a form of communion. The grandstands like pews, my dad would shout with strangers, leaning forward with the crowd, united in a kind of faith—in a horse, a prayer, a hope that something good would come. He somehow managed to make gambling wholesome.

My dad loved the races the way he loved church.

Mom and I would watch him scribbling odds in a small spiral pad, pacing, murmuring, cheering, his folded racing form sticking halfway out of his back pocket. We were mesmerized by the blur of energy that was my dad. 

Where he was movement, Mom was quiet and steady, unmoving in the midst of commotion. We’d sit at a table, Mom with a cigarette and cold one, helping me sound out the names of the horses. I’d borrow a pen from her purse to doodle on napkins or the back of discarded tickets. If I pleaded, she might indulge me in a game of tic-tac-toe, but mostly she drifted away without even leaving the table. Mom never seemed to want to be where she was, and I felt that weight, even as I felt gratitude for the popcorn she’d buy me and for the chair beside her. 

To this day, I don’t remember what Mom or I thought about any of the actual races. That was never the point. When the horses rounded the final turn and my dad would rise to his feet, Mom and I would too. 

In the months following Mom’s death, I went through boxes and boxes of old letters both to and from my parents. Sitting on the living room floor I read and read, slipping back into my childhood self. Letter after letter, Mom and I wrote to each other, always apologizing about something, always professing how much we loved each other, worried, I think, that it seemed otherwise. 

Many of Mom’s letters to me address me as “Sweet Pea,” a nickname she gave me in high school that was mostly without meaning, except it was her favorite Bath and Body Works lotion scent. 

“I want to have a nickname for you,” she told me simply, and it felt like she was auditioning for the role of my mother, like it was nothing more than a performance.

I was not gracious about it. “It doesn’t even mean anything,” I told her, annoyed, and then instantly felt guilty. 

“Fine,” she said, refusing to talk to me for the rest of the day.

Still, the nickname stuck. I could never hear it without being bothered. Was that why she did it? Or was it truly a term of endearment? I felt like the one at fault, questioning her motives. Why couldn’t I accept what she was offering? What was she offering? 

My letters to her were declarations. “You must love me!” they nearly shout without actually saying anything at all. I trotted out everything she’d done for me, every memory we shared. “Remember watching Full House together those Tuesday nights?” I’d ask. “I love your homemade pizza,” one note would say. “Thank you for getting me a new outfit,” would be on another. Or, “Your no-bake cookies are the best.” I would pile up the evidence, and all of it would be real. 

It wasn’t perfect, but it was something. 

I was trying.

Mom was, too, in her way. She used to make most phone calls in the walk-out basement, where she would smoke in secret, assuming I didn’t know that she had picked up the habit again. After she died, I found a pad of paper there, scribbled with notes of our phone conversations. She had jotted down dates of a big work project I had, the title of a book I was reading, the name of my daughter’s teacher. On the top of the page, underlined three times, she wrote, “Call Sarah.” It both filled and broke my heart. I know she felt like calling me was a chore, something she needed, rather than wanted, to do. But wasn’t it enough that she called? 

A week before the paramedics moved the coffee table to the side of the living room, Mom mentioned she felt like she had the flu. The next day I called to check in and she said her shoulder blades and upper spine hurt. She said her left arm had been aching.

“You need to go to the emergency room,” I told her. “It sounds like it could be a heart attack.” 

“Stop it,” she told me.

“I’m going to call someone to take you to get it checked out,” I said.

“If you do, I’ll never talk to you again,” she said, hanging up the phone.

I stood there, stunned, phone quiet in my hand. Mom sometimes said things for effect, whether or not they were real. Even after a lifetime together, I could never separate what was true from what she wanted me to think was true.

It felt like she was auditioning for the role of my mother, like it was nothing more than a performance.

Before I could call her back, my phone lit up with a text.

“I wouldn’t be here right now if it was a heart attack,” Mom wrote. And then, “I know. It’s scary for me also. XOXO.”

I responded instantly. “If it’s scary for you, please let me call someone who can take you. You can either feel fine and do nothing, or feel scared and do something. You shouldn’t feel scared and do nothing.”

“Do not push this any further,” she texted. “You just hit a high nerve button. If I wanted you or anyone else to take me to the ER, I WOULD TELL YOU. Don’t be mad at me. I don’t need that.”

This was the hand Mom and I were always playing. She could be scared and upset, but I could not. Over the next few days, she would not call me or answer the phone. Instead, she would send texts of her symptoms, each a sign of a heart attack, as if she had googled an article about it, and chose a section to send me each day. It felt like a game I couldn’t win. Any time I would bring up the idea of a doctor or emergency room, she would ignore or chastise me. “I don’t need this from you,” she kept saying, and yet, my phone kept pinging with her maladies. 

Finally, after several days of this, I decided I needed to drive down to see Mom in person. When I told her my plans, she said I shouldn’t come. This was often what she said when I asked about visiting, though she would complain she never saw me. For once, I ignored her. My six-year-old and I drove south and arrived by lunch time. After a while, my mom pulled out a paper grocery sack filled with Barbies from when she was a girl, a whole collection of toys I had never seen. The three of us crowded around the coffee table and my daughter designated us each a doll with the assignment to see who could come up with the best outfit. We sifted through the clothes from the sixties and seventies, some of them hand-sewn by my mom’s mom, and my mom told us stories from when she was a girl. I sat there, soaking it up, my mom there in front of me, happy in my company, sharing things I’d never heard about her life. It was like an exhale, sitting there between my mother and daughter. My anger, oddly, never bubbled that day. Not once that afternoon did I feel upset that Mom’s texts about heart attack symptoms were seemingly false. This, I remember thinking. This.

And yet. The symptoms were not false. Mom had had a heart attack. Just hours after that almost perfect afternoon, Mom’s heart failed.

The night when the paramedics were lifting Mom onto a stretcher, I was dreaming of my dad, only my third dream of him in as many years. It was just a glimpse, his floating torso telling me a sentence I have tried and tried to remember, but can’t. Had he lined up at the heaven-OTB to be there that night? Was he already getting ready for Mom, making a spot for her on his cloud? 

Sometimes I think about my parents’ notebooks: Dad’s steno pad filled with wagers and Mom’s list in the basement for our phone calls. Both, in their way, were records of odds—what could be won, what could be lost. My dad would hurriedly scrawl his notes, tracking the wins—if not the horse he had bet on, then at least the way the sunlight slanted across the dirt. Mom, though, would mark the losses, both real and imagined.

When loved ones die, people often want to tell you that the person is better off now, in some blissful afterlife, but I can only imagine my parents as they were when they were alive. I see my dad grinning hugely—high fiving the Pope and hitting trifectas all day, which is the sort of energy he exuded in life. And while I would like to think Mom has finally found a place she wants to be, I still just imagine her as she was, sitting at the table like old times while my dad goes to place a wager, only this time the chair beside her is empty.

“Sarah would hate this,” I imagine my mom saying to my dad, arranging porcelain angels on a shelf in her new home. “She was always so cynical.” Because, of course, Mom would still be Mom. 

She’d finish settling in while my dad polishes his boots, and then they’d set off to the track. Mom would order a Red Bull, and perhaps borrow my dad’s Daily Racing Form to study the entries.

“Thinking of making a bet?” my dad would ask her, and she’d look at the empty chair beside her. Maybe she’d remember a game of tic-tac-toe she never wanted to play, or maybe she’d still be thinking of that young girl who used to pull petals off of flowers—she loves me, she loves me not. She’d pause, picturing the photos in that old Mother’s Day gift.

“You know what?” she’d say to my dad. “I would like to place a wager, after all.”

After Mom’s death there were no ginger ale cans in parking lots, no hummingbirds at the front door. I walked around my childhood home in a daze those weeks, sorting through three lifetimes, never imagining both of my parents would be gone before my fortieth birthday. I donated boxes to Goodwill, gave things to relatives, and brought the bag of Barbies home to my daughter. 

Like everything, it wasn’t perfect, but it was something. 

Then one day when I was feeling especially depleted, I walked down to our mail box. There among the bills was a single Real Simple magazine I never subscribed to, addressed to me. Mom’s at the races, I thought to myself, holding a thumbs up to the sky for Mom’s win.

It wasn’t perfect, but it was something.

At the track, I picture my parents as they’ve always been. They wander outside for the last race, taking in the smell of the turf and the sounds of the horses being loaded into the starting gate. The last horse is in just as my mom and dad reach the rail. Dad pulls up his Levi’s and Mom leans against the top rung. And then, at the sound of the bugle call, they both lean forward, the announcer bellowing, “Annnd they’re off!”

Exclusive Cover Reveal of “Self-Portrait as the ‘i’ in Florida” by P. Scott Cunningham

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Self-Portrait as the “i” in Florida by P. Scott Cunningham, which will be published on April 7th, 2026 by Autumn House Press. You can pre-order your copy here.

A love letter to Miami and a meditation on fatherhood, Self-Portrait as the “i” in Florida paints a vivid portrait of contemporary South Florida in all its contradictions and beauty. Selected by Major Jackson as the winner of the Donald Justice Poetry Prize, Cunningham’s second collection weaves together ecological and familial landscapes, capturing both the spectacle—burning sugarcane fields, snake farms, chaotic highways—and the daily rituals that bind a family: school drop-offs, sick days, and small kindnesses. Blending formalist and free verse, the book becomes both an inquiry into belonging and a celebration of the essential everyday moments that define a life. At once panoramic and deeply personal, Cunningham writes with a documentarian’s eye and a father’s heart.

Here is the cover, designed by Gabriel Alcala:

P. Scott Cunningham: This book is a love letter to Miami. Many of the poems are tagged with a specific location in the city, or honor a particular Miami moment or person, as I wanted the poems to portray the city how I experienced it, namely intimately, and with joy. As such, it was very important to me that the cover design was made by a Miamian. I’ve known Gabe for almost two decades. Even though we’d never collaborated before, I’ve always been a huge fan of his work and dreamed about making something together. In fact, in retrospect, I think I was waiting until I thought I’d done something that was worthy of his talents, and I hope that’s true! But if not, buying the book is still worth it to have an original Gabriel Alcala on your shelf. His style and use of color feel inextricable to me from the Miami I love—a place of supremely talented and caring people. As the city is currently being attacked and dismantled by outside forces, I think it’s important to remind folks that Miami is one of the great artistic hotbeds in the world, and every inch of it is worth fighting for. Gabe and his work embody that spirit, and I’m super honored that he agreed to work on this project.

Gabriel Alcala: I was truly honored when Scott asked me to design the cover. The title immediately struck a chord, and ideas began to bloom. I soon imagined a hand holding a mirror amid Florida’s flora and fauna, an image that invites the reader to look both outward and inward at once.

A Severed Finger Is Rarely a Good Sign

Posted on by Preety Sidhu

Fissures

Everything began with a tube of dried-out lipstick. 

The cat pulled it out from under the fridge. 

Julie and I nicknamed the cat The Inspector. She was new and so was the house. We moved in after my third miscarriage, when I was bleeding and desperate for a fresh start.

The Inspector sniffed our old things with suspicion, especially the framed embroidery—a wedding gift—that said Katie & Julie Forever. 

Julie had not wanted children when we met. For me, she’d been willing to try. 

I had come to suspect she was relieved things had turned out this way.

The dried-out lipstick belonged to neither of us. It was fig flavored. 

“Must be a former tenant’s,” Julie said, tossing it in the garbage. 

“Unless you’re having an affair,” I joked.

“No mistress of mine would wear fig-flavored lipstick,” Julie retorted. 

We hadn’t slept together in months. 

The Inspector could reach into spaces we couldn’t see. 

Crevices between sink and dishwasher. Openings between stove and counter. 

“Who knew our home had so many cracks and gaps,” I said. I was holding an unfamiliar pen the Inspector had surfaced.

The Inspector leapt onto the counter between Julie and me, knocking the pen out of my hand. 

Julie was already moving out of the room. These days she worked late and took dinner into her office. She fell asleep on the couch and showered in the guest bathroom. 

“I’ll get some caulk this weekend,” she called over her shoulder. “Fill in the fissures.”

But she kept forgetting, and so the fissures remained.

Every day The Inspector found something new. 

An earring excavated from beneath the sink. 

A frayed dog toy pawed from under the fridge. 

One day, she found fragments of expensive-looking china. 

The next, a yellowed pacifier. 

“They left a lot behind,” I said to Julie, holding the pacifier. “The former tenants.” 

I was in my frayed robe. She was sending emails. I put the pacifier in my mouth; she didn’t notice, and so I took it out.

“Probably didn’t get their deposit back,” she said. “Or this stuff is from multiple tenants.”

“The past and present commingle beneath the fridge,” I said. 

My capacity for this sort of analysis was one reason Julie married me. But she didn’t laugh or ruffle my hair. She just replaced her earbuds.

I wondered when I’d first ceased to charm her. 

For a while, The Inspector brought us nothing.

She sat, crouched and vigilant, staring for hours at the shadows beneath the heavy mahogany piano. 

The piano had been a selling point. Neither of us played, but I thought its presence was romantic. I fantasized about duets. I daydreamed of lessons side-by-side.

Julie thought we could sell it. “We can put away the money for a new fridge,” she said. “Or a deep-clean of the place.”

For days, the cat stared into the dusty darkness beneath the piano and I stared at her. 

“Maybe we have a mouse,” I said to Julie. 

“You worry too much,” she said, before disappearing into the office. 

After she locked the door I heard her exhale, relieved in her solitude.

On a winter morning, The Inspector dropped a human finger beside our bed. 

I screamed. What else could I do? 

Julie was in the office. She didn’t run to me—she walked.

“Is that real?” she said. 

It was a pinky finger. There was a tiny tattoo of a palm tree on its knuckle.

The tattoo was badly done—blurry at the edges.

The skin looked all wrong. Like the finger had been detached from its owner for a long time. 

But the fake nail was immune to time’s passage. 

Gel manicures are indestructible.

The fingernail displayed a sunset in miniature, the darkening sky dotted with tiny rhinestones. 

“Let’s get out of here,” Julie said. She grabbed my wrist. It was the first time we’d touched in weeks, and my heart began to pound. 

We left the pinky on the floor and called the police. 

When the policewoman showed up, I was trembling. 

Julie hugged me like it was an inconvenient obligation. 

The policewoman was rotund and impatient. She asked a lot of questions as she followed us upstairs. 

When we got back to our bedroom, the finger was gone.

“Maybe the cat ate it,” I said. 

The Inspector was always trying to eat onion skins and other things I dropped while cooking. 

“Maybe it was a fake finger,” Julie said. “We didn’t get too close a look.”

The policewoman rolled her eyes. “You couldn’t tell?”

“My wife worries,” Julie added. “It’s possible she panicked.”

“It was a real human finger,” I said. “I know it was. It was right there. It was real.”

“Maybe it was a finger made of cake,” the policewoman offered. “Like for Halloween.” 

“Halloween isn’t for months,” I said. “And who makes cakes that look like fingers?”

“The cat has been pulling out a lot of old things,” Julie said. “Could’ve been from last year.”

“It did not look like a cake finger,” I said.

“It looked more like cake than flesh,” Julie said, exchanging a glance with the policewoman.

“Jeez,” said the policewoman, “now I want cake.”

Julie chuckled, and I said nothing.

After the policewoman left, The Inspector slunk out from under the couch. 

She looked at us with green-eyed suspicion, as if we had tried to sell her pelt.

“Did you put the finger back where you found it?” I asked The Inspector, kneeling towards her. 

She ducked out of my reach.

“I need some air,” Julie said. She left. 

She was gone until the sun sank behind the buildings. I ate dinner alone.

What happened then? We continued living in the house. 

Our silences stretched longer. We kept our different hours. 

The Inspector avoided us. She brought us no gifts.

We left the horrible mystery undisturbed at the center of our shared life. 

We left it there for so long we forgot we had once lived without it. 

Couples performed their easy closeness in the supermarket. They were grotesque with their handholding and intimate whispers. 

I became a gel manicure fanatic, knowing that if I died, my nails would live on.

And then, one night, The Inspector went into heat and ran away. 

She didn’t go far. A neighbor picked her up along with her kittens. He called the number on our flyer.

Julie said the neighbor could keep the cat.

“The Inspector was not meant to stay with us,” Julie said. “I want to travel. Pets complicate that. This is a sign. She is a free spirit. I am a free spirit.”

“I want to settle down,” I said. “I want to try again.”

“Try again for what?”

“You know,” I said. 

“Well,” Julie said, “I booked a trip to Spain for the summer. I’ll be gone for a month.”

“Just you?”

“Just me.”

I didn’t know if The Inspector was a free spirit. But I didn’t want to subject her to the mysteries of our house any longer. Maybe she, like me, was trying to forget.

Summer is here now. Julie is gone.

I see The Inspector in the bay window of that other house sometimes, curled around three orange kittens.

She looks like a different cat. They have a soft teal bed for her, and the bed is embroidered with her new name. When I see her she is always sleeping. 

She is fat, and weary, and no longer, apparently, searching for anything.

7 Literary Diaries That Illuminate the Lives of Great Writers

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

There’s something fragile, accidental, almost cruel about the literary diary. Some other accident has to bring us into contact with it. Its classics are limited, which is to say there aren’t many of them, but by nature, those that exist are quite long. A great diary or set of notebooks can occupy a scholar or reader for almost a lifetime. Great diarists are, in my opinion, almost inevitably great writers in general. By definition, a literary diary is something you open because you’ve read something else by that writer—because you want to see under the lid of a great mind. This is a circular justification, but it explains why diaries come down to us. I do not know Edmund Wilson the diarist unless I know Edmund Wilson the critic and novelist. We read Kierkegaard and Kafka’s diaries because we love Either/Or and The Trial. We read the diaries of Alice James or Dorothy Wordsworth because we’re obsessed with their brothers.

We may call the names on my highly idiosyncratic list “The Samuel Pepys All-Stars.” We should not forget that Pepys—who commenced the tradition of great diary writing in the Western world in 17th-century England—was inspired by the influx of commerce and activity and science, the explosive world of a booming London. The diary is a way of coping with overstimulation, with modernity, with science, with technology. It’s a wonderful, woolly, strange form. I proudly practice the art of the modern, public diary too, showing that our wonderful, woolly, frightening century is not wholly new—and that its concerns, and the pressure that is exerted on our brains, our consciousness each day, are of the same character, if not of the same intensity, that were exerted on the brains of sensitive literary people in 1950, 1850, or 1750.

Outside the canon, surely, there must be thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of fascinating diaries sitting in filing cabinets, stuffed into storage, bookshelves, or in drawers next to nightstands. I have no doubt that a wider and more capacious literary genius lives in the world outside the domain of sanctified “great minds.” Below is a list of diaries that, in a sense, made it: the tip of the iceberg of the human mind.

Diaries by Robert Musil

Robert Musil, most intellectual and critical of novelists, tracks, in his diaries, not only his own novelistic process, but the breakdown of the old world, the world of Franz Joseph, the chaotic world of Weimar. Musil’s diaries reveal not only a novelistic mind, but a philosophical and sociological one; we can see, in a plain, simple sense, how The Man Without Qualities emerged out of a process of deep thinking. “Only when placed in the context of casual observation is such a person irrational. The things he does are irrational, too, the way things happen, indicate sickness, etc. But such people are aware of the open countryside around, after all, knowing that melancholy is caused by a sluggish digestive tract does not tell us anything about it. Unless one wants to destroy it, i.e., heal it.” Musil is urbane, caustic, and dialectical. “Thesis: the difference between a genius and a sharply critical gifted person lies not in their capabilities, but in the objects in which these are expended.”

Diary by Witold Gombrowicz

This diary is one of the great literary projects, one of the great literary works of the post-war West; Gombrowicz is a master of the form. Gombrowicz’s diary was published between 1953 and 1969 in the Polish expat literary journal Kultura, and became a running chronicle of his gripes, readings, rivalries, aphorisms, fears, desires—a blog precursor. Gombrowicz began his diary when he was 49 years old, living in Buenos Aires (he had a fake job at a bank thanks to a sympathetic Polish employer who let him write at work), recreating his Polish homeland and culture through language. His Kultura diary was, in many ways, Gombrowicz’s attempt to refashion himself for the second half of his life, creating his own legend, his myth as a writer. “Yesterday, Thursday, a cretin began to bother and worry me all day. Perhaps it would be better not to write about this, but I do not want to be a hypocrite in this diary.”

The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 1: 1915–1919 by Virginia Woolf

I’ve chosen Virginia Woolf’s diaries, Volume I, because they represent, or show us, Woolf’s mind during her apprentice years as a novelist, and during the years of the Great War, when she watched so many of her male friends, including her brother, get exterminated in the trenches. We should see a theme here, that all these great 20th century diaries come from terrible contact with reality, from upheaval and change and destruction. Should we start to think that the diary is a 20th century form? It is very possible. The great and wonderful, the liquid and syllabic prose of Woolf gets developed here in the diary-laboratory. “She led him to describe a Romanian prince, whose voice, he said, was the loveliest in London. He rang him up to account for not coming punctually to dinner, and I listened and heard a soft and hesitating voice stumbling over long words, rather romantic, down the telephone.”

Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas by Clarice Lispector

Clarice Lispector’s Crônicas are a perfect companion to Gombrowicz’s diaries. Like Gombrowicz, Lispector was a European (Ukrainian) who fled to South America. The difference between Gombrowicz and Lispector is that Lispector arrived in Brazil as a girl and wrote in Portuguese; Gombrowicz never ceased to be a Polish aristocrat. From what I understand, this liminal quality gives Lispector’s Portuguese an unusual, alien, and unique texture and quality. The language of an almost-native speaker. Crônicas was (like Gombrowicz’s diary) a public project. These chronicles, dashed off for publication in Brazilian newspapers, are a public chronicle of a sinfully profound mind. “How at forty she managed to be so cheerful I really don’t know. She was full of loud laughter. I knew too that she had wanted to kill herself not because she had left the convent but out of love. She explained that at the time she didn’t know love was like that. Like what? She didn’t answer.”

Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume II by Ralph Waldo Emerson

We’ve finally arrived at an American, and one might say, the greatest of all diarists. If you want to understand the heart of what Harold Bloom, by way of Wallace Stevens, calls the American sublime, you have to go here. “Chemistry, entomology, conic sections, medicine—each science, each province of science will come to satisfy all demands. The whole of poetry, mythology, of ethics, of demonology will express by it. A new rhetoric, new methods of philosophy, perhaps new political parties will celebrate the culmination of each one.” Emerson’s great synthesizing slime mold-like mind woke up one day and wrote that down in 1842 and continued in the same journal the same day: “It pains me never that I cannot give you an accurate answer to the question what is God, what is the operation we call providence and the like. There lies the answer, there it exists, present omnipresent to you, to me.”

The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume I: 1931-1934 by Anaïs Nin

Anaïs Nin’s diaries are a fantastic confession machine of the twentieth century: desire, psychoanalysis, and artistic ambition. She begins in Paris, in media res in flight from American puritanism, in the process of constructing herself as a literary sensualist. She undergoes analysis with a genius analyst (Otto Rank). Nin’s diary is both performance and erotic meth lab, a mask and a Real Me at the same time. She writes herself into existence daily, hourly. The diary becomes her primary work, the novels disappointing offshoots. “Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another.”

Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963 by Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag’s early journals show us the construction of an American intellectual (and Sontag is the Platonic ideal of an intellectual): the ultra-self-conscious making of a significant critical mind. Beginning at age fourteen, these notebooks track Sontag’s voracious reading, her similarly voracious sex life, her marriage at seventeen, her time at Chicago and Harvard and Oxford. Self-analysis is productive of desire in Sontag’s case. “My desire to write is connected with my homosexuality. I need the identity as a weapon, to match the weapon that society has against me.”

“I Deliver Parcels in Beijing” Illuminates That Financial Security Is a Matter of Luck

Posted on by Katie

When I picked up Hu Anyan’s memoir, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, translated by Jack Hargreaves, I expected a window into a life I might not otherwise see. A memoir covering Hu Anyan’s career—or lack thereof—in China’s gig economy, the story unfolds along the contours of a picaresque. Over a scattered timeline, from the late aughts to the dawn of Covid, he does stints as an e-commerce delivery driver, bicycle shop assistant, and a popsicle salesman beset with social anxiety. At one point, he is drinking on the job as a shopping mall security guard of sorts. We follow him through 19 different low-paying jobs before arriving at the conclusion that, basically, in the most thoughtful possible words: Work sucks and capitalism steals our souls, or, at best, severely compromises our humanity. “Work for the sole purpose of making a living is a miserable prison, which is why very few people will confess that this is what they do,” he says in an excerpted journal entry that his elder self describes as “exaggerated and childish today” but true to his former perception.

Described as humorous by its publisher, the book is periodically funny with its deadpan account of on-the-clock misery, but Hu is as much a critic as he is a comic, relaying insights earned through strained contemplation over years of struggling to make ends meet. 

I quickly realized, making my way through Hu’s stories, that this supposed “window into another life” also provided a reflection of my own. Nowadays, I’m financially secure, a status which would feel unfathomable to my younger self, who graduated with a liberal arts degree in Florida in 2009, feverishly uploading resumes into a void as the global economy was melting down. Reading Hu’s experiences churned up memories from my own years in the minimal-wage trenches. He delivered parcels, and I delivered pizzas. (For the record, these were respectable thin-crust, New York imitations—a mom-and-pop strip-mall operation which, based on the Google photos, remains as frozen in time as a nuclear bunker.) I was also a school picture-day photographer, restaurant server, tutor, fast-food worker, smoothie-maker, airport check-in agent, enthusiastic market research subject, and a grocery store checkout clerk. 

At most points, it was barely possible to live on my wages, though I was generally expected to.

Like Hu—like everyone—I’ve had good workdays and bad, kind bosses and exceedingly awful ones, wonderful colleagues and a few borderline psychopaths. I’ve also encountered irate customers throwing low-stakes tantrums, Karens and Chads before we knew them as Karens and Chads, whose displeasure could verge on harassment. Physical endurance was usually required, although my work was overall far less hazardous than Hu’s. I had the benefit of US labor standards and a car, so I never had to zip around a big city balancing packages on a motorized tricycle, never saw a manager demand pushups as punishment, and never refrained from drinking water for lack of access to a restroom or fear of losing a few bucks. A common denominator across our jobs, for both the author and me, was low pay. At most points, it was barely possible to live on my wages, though I was generally expected to by my parents, who, unlike Hu’s, had the means to help but did so sparingly because they wanted to teach me lessons about self-sufficiency. Also like Hu, I loved literature and harbored aspirations to write, but was raised in an economy and social milieu where creative careers were fantasy; I was an outsider, a state of mind that never really disappears. 

Throughout his memoir, Hu approaches his conditions without self-pity, but he is sharp about the basic injustice underlying the demands of his work versus his compensation. “Capitalists aren’t known for sympathizing with slackers,” he says early on. His prose, clean of pretension or posturing, gives the text a sense of raw immediacy and speaks volumes about market-driven despair. In a bizarro Lady Macbeth moment, he writes about the hopeless condition of his work clothes:

The uniform proved impossible to ever get fully clean. We lifted and moved goods for hours on end—grease and oil stains were inevitable. Plus, it was easy to convince ourselves when we were already tired that we didn’t need to make sure our clothes were pristine. They were only going to get dirty again the next day.

Despite my liberal arts education exploding the capitalist-pixie-dust narrative fed to me by my folks, it was only years after I’d independently achieved some measure of economic comfort and security that I could look back at those jobs and think, I hated that not because I was weak, or entitled, or lazy—all the ostensible reasons I believed at the time—I hated it because it was a lousy job without health insurance. I was terrified of poverty. And no, my uniforms were never fully clean.

He indulges few decadent aspirations other than the desire for freedom.

Hu’s memoir illuminates the truth that one can work hard indefinitely and never achieve financial security. This is also the reality for millions of Americans called the “working poor,” defined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as people who work at least half the year and earn below the poverty line. The federal minimum wage itself ($7.25 an hour) is a poverty wage. With the rise of digital labor platforms, which classify workers as contractors, workers forfeit not only “perks” like employer-sponsored healthcare, but basic rights such as unemployment insurance, minimum wage, and the power to negotiate their compensation. Human Rights Watch, who studied gig-worker exploitation, says that app-based gig companies have “undermined decades of US labor law regulation and enforcement, denying workers hard-won rights to an adequate standard of living and safe and healthy working conditions.” All this is to say nothing of the difficulty scraping by in today’s economy, where, according to Pew Research, the middle class has steadily declined since the 1970s, and the share of total household income held by the middle class has “plunged” from 62 to 43 percent. For most Americans, these are discouraging statistics—and this is to say nothing of ethnic and gender disparities loaded into these numbers. No matter what I’ve done correctly to get my finances out of the gutter, it would be willfully delusional to look around and deny that the bottom-line factor separating my life as it is from a life counting every penny is luck. 

Hu Anyan’s rise to Chinese literary success was lucky, too. Part of a growing Chinese movement, sheng zuojia, or “wild writers,” whose careers have developed beyond the nation’s literary establishment, his writing likely would’ve continued into obscurity had his editor not stumbled across his blog. Wild as he may be, Hu is certainly a triumphant author. In May a Financial Times profile reported that I Deliver Parcels in Beijing has sold almost two million copies. Gone are the 12-hour days scraping by on manual labor. 

But throughout the book, before Hu could’ve imagined where his writing would take him, he doesn’t seem to consider his proletarian stature an obstacle to overcome so much as a reality into which he must settle. During one job search, he seems resigned to the fact that his options are limited, and the ones that exist are lacking. “Putting lots of hours into finding the best job didn’t seem worthwhile,” he says. “My qualifications would never secure anything with good pay…” 

Why exhaust himself with extra handwringing when his baseline is tiring enough? From his recollections of his mother and father, I gather he was not raised to believe he was entitled to a great deal of mobility. “They had spent their whole lives in the same work units,” he writes of his parents, “the market economy was completely alien to them.” He indulges few decadent aspirations other than the desire for freedom. Perhaps this is the influence of a culture which, for better or worse, has placed the collective before the individual, even before the major political revolution of communism. 

I wish that people were capable of a better world, where luck matters much less.

Growing up in the United States, I hoped my lowly professional station in life would be temporary. My parents, both of whom grew up blue-collar and built comfortable lives together, had instilled in me the sanctity of honest, hard work and personal responsibility as essential to success. (My father, hand to God, had a framed photo of George H.W. Bush hanging in his office.) Even today, working in a media industry where such logic is not only unfashionable but often inapplicable, I see why my parents raised me how they did: What worked for them surely should work for me. Another generation would further climb the ladder of capitalism. I was going to be the first in my family to graduate from college. On all those nights I spent dragging grey, smelly tentacles of a mop across a floor, I thought of how one day, somehow, with the right attitude, I’d transcend all of it. 

Toward the end of the book, Hu draws a dialectical distinction between work (“a concession of our personal will”) and freedom (“the other parts of life…that remain true to our desires”), declaring that few people achieve both at once. “But this kind of luck is rare,” he says. Perhaps, in our work today, with Hu now writing full-time after the success of I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, both of us have found that unicorn. 

It’s been about 15 years since I professionally donned a uniform or mopped a floor. What was it that allowed me the leverage to break from the cycle of dead-end employment? I can cobble together a hundred reasons, assemble critiques related to my identity, my personality, the timing of my every step within the procession of history. Underlying every reason is luck. Americans often hesitate admission to the mighty power of good fortune. How many second-generation performers have insisted, amidst “nepo-baby” discourse, upon the supremacy of their talent and hard work as the key to their success? How many family-owned businesses carry into the next generation of scions? Every parent, in their own style, intentional or not—helpful or not—paves the way for their children, so I understand the impulse to defend one’s own labors as vital. 

I have not achieved some style of earth-shattering, incandescent superstar success; I am not so terrifically rich that money is a joke or a formality surrounding my world domination. But I think it’s fair to say, objectively, statistically, I’ve done alright for myself. Financial stability was a slow road. I started down a career with an airline, squirreling away enough cash to jump off the corporate cliff, at age 27, into an unexpected opportunity for an unpaid internship in television. Some measure of competence—plus the fact that I’d already burned through my Plan B career as my Plan A career—fueled my upward rise, over the course of a decade, from Production Assistant to a Producer who has won industry awards for doing a job that had once seemed like a dream. Hu Anyan’s rise to financial stability through his writing was likewise unexpected, and somewhat accidental. There is another world, though, a parallel universe where we worked just as hard, sweat just as profusely, wrung our hands with just as much muscle when our bills seemed objectively unpayable, kept our chins just as high. The only element separating us from this world and the world where we did not prosper is luck. I wish, as a body of eight billion human beings, with opposable thumbs and big brains and the gifts of evolution, that people were capable of a better world, where luck matters much less, where even basic survival was guaranteed, where work was synonymous with truly living and nothing less than that. 

Work can be such a difficult, deeply personal endeavor; I understand why we protect the narratives which credit all to our individual wherewithal. But the fact of luck does not detract from our individual achievements—it only challenges the myths that seem to be serving fewer and fewer of us, as wealth and power continues concentrating far out of almost everyone’s reach, and gig work grows and grows. The story of our work is the story of our lives, and in that capacity, we are all best served by the truth. 

Every Writer We’ve Published in 2025

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Below is a list of the 431 writers Electric Literature has published so far in 2025. Every single one, from illustrious new voices like Tochi Eze or Kayla Min Andrews, to regular contributors like Greg Mania or Bareerah Ghani. We publish new work every weekday, year round, bringing you an exciting mix of fiction, poetry, essays, and book coverage—without any paywalls. Whether it’s finding your next great read or delivering extraordinary original work, Electric Lit has you covered.

We can’t publish these phenomenal writers without your support, which is why our year-end fundraiser is moving full steam ahead! We’ve raised $20,000 of our $35,000 goal. An anonymous donor has pledged to match the next $12,500 we raise, dollar for dollar. That means any gift you make will have double the impact. Now is the time, so please give today.

  • A.D. Lauren-Abunassar
  • Aaron Gwyn
  • Aaron Hwang
  • Abbie Kiefer
  • Acree Graham Macam
  • Adedayo Agarau
  • Adele Elise Williams
  • Aiden Arata
  • Aimee Bender
  • Aisling Walsh
  • Alex Dueben
  • Alex Foster
  • Alex Moreno
  • Ali Moss
  • Ali Solomon
  • Alia Dastagir
  • Allie Tagle-Dokus
  • Allison Gunn
  • Ally Ang
  • Amanda Lehr
  • Amie Souza Reilly
  • Amitava Kumar
  • Amy Rossi
  • Amy Shearn
  • Ana Hein
  • Ande Pliego
  • Andrea Jurjević
  • Andrew Martin
  • Andy Anderegg
  • Angela Hui
  • Anna Bruno
  • Annalee Newitz
  • Annie Liontas
  • Antonio Lloyd Jones
  • Anu Kandikuppa
  • Anu Khosla
  • Apoorva Bradshaw-Mittal
  • Ariel Courage
  • Ariel Gore
  • Ariel Katz
  • Ariél M. Martinez
  • Arin Alycia Fong
  • Ashley Whitaker
  • August Thompson
  • Bareerah Ghani
  • Belle (Bom) Kim
  • Ben C. Davies
  • Benjamin Gantcher
  • Benjamin Schaefer
  • Bernie Jean Schiebeling
  • Bill Cotter
  • Bradley Sides
  • Brian Buckbee
  • Brian Trapp
  • Brianne Kane
  • Bruce Krajewski
  • Carley Moore
  • Caroline Bleeke
  • Caroline Hagood
  • Carrie R. Moore
  • Case Q. Kerns
  • Casper Orr
  • Cassandra Lewis
  • Catharina Coenen
  • Charlie J. Stephens
  • Charlotte McConaghy
  • Chelsea Davis
  • Chelsea Fanning
  • Chelsea G. Summers
  • Cherry Lou Sy
  • Christ
  • Christine Estima
  • Christy Crutchfield
  • Chyana Marie Sage
  • Cindy Fazzi
  • Claire Lombardo
  • Claire Vaye Watkins
  • Claudia Guthrie
  • Cleyvis Natera
  • Coco Picard
  • Colleen Abel
  • Colleen Oakley
  • Cooper Green
  • Corinna Vallianatos
  • Corinne Goria
  • Courtney Duchene
  • Daisy Atterbury
  • Daniel D’Addario
  • Daniel Kenitz
  • Daniel Turtel
  • Danielle Shorr
  • Danilo Marin
  • Danit Brown
  • Daphne Fama
  • Daphne Kalotay
  • Darrow Farr
  • Deb Werrlein
  • Debbie Urbanski
  • Deena Elgenaidi
  • Deidre Sugiuchi
  • Devan Murphy
  • Diana Arterian
  • Donna Hemans
  • Dustin M. Hoffman
  • E.Y. Zhao
  • Edgar Gomez
  • Elda María Román
  • Eliza Moss
  • Elizabeth Austin
  • Elizabeth Galoozis
  • Elizabeth Held
  • Elizabeth Lee
  • Elizabeth Polanco
  • Ellie Gold Laabs
  • Emily Berge
  • Emily Bludworth de Barrios
  • Emily Greenberg
  • Emily J. Smith
  • Emily Meg Weinstein
  • Emily Saso
  • Emma Copley Eisenberg
  • Emma Pattee
  • Emma Weisberg
  • Erin Crosby Eckstine
  • Erin Dorney
  • Eshani Surya 
  • Etgar Keret
  • Evander Reyes
  • Flávia Monteiro
  • Francesca Spiegel
  • Fred Lunzer
  • Fredrik Deboer
  • Genevieve Abravanel
  • Genevieve Hudson
  • Genevieve Plunkett
  • Grace Gaynor
  • Greg Mania
  • Gregory Laski
  • Griffy LaPlante
  • Hafsa Zulfiqar
  • Hal Schrieve
  • Hala Alyan
  • Hamid Ismailov
  • Hanif Abdurraqib
  • Hannah Beer
  • Hannah Gregory
  • Hannah Pittard
  • Hannah Selinger
  • Hassan A. Usman
  • Heather Sweeney
  • Heather Thompson-Brenner
  • Heidi Seaborn
  • Hope Henderson
  • Hugh D’Andrade
  • Ilana Masad
  • Ilze Duarte
  • Issa Quincy
  • J. Condra Smith
  • Jackie Jennings
  • Jackie Thomas-Kennedy
  • Jacob Tobia
  • Jacqueline Faber
  • Jaeyeon Yoo
  • Jake Levine
  • Jan Clausen
  • Jaqueline Alnes
  • Jared Jackson
  • Jared Lemus
  • Javier Sandoval
  • Javier Serena
  • Jayda Skidmore
  • Jeanette Horn
  • Jeff Bender
  • Jen Siraganian
  • Jeneé Skinner
  • Jennifer Chen
  • Jennifer Haigh
  • Jennifer Hope Choi
  • Jenny Kroik
  • Jessamyn Violet
  • Jessica Anthony
  • Jessika Bouvier
  • Jeyamohan
  • Jiodan Castle
  • Joanna Howard
  • Joanna Rakoff
  • John Freeman
  • Jon Bassoff
  • Jonathan Lethem
  • Josefin Dolsten-Kuhel
  • Josh Riedel
  • Joshua C. Gaines
  • Joshua Wheeler
  • Judyth Emanuel
  • Julia Lundy
  • Julián Delgado Lopera
  • Karen Lord
  • Karen Wilfrid
  • Karis Rogerson
  • Karleigh Frisbie Brogan
  • Kate Broad
  • Kate Cayley
  • Kate Martin Rowe
  • Kate McKean
  • Katherine J. Chen
  • Katherine Larson
  • Kathleen Radigan
  • Katie Burgess
  • Katie Whittemore
  • Katy Hays
  • Kaveh Akbar
  • Kay Sohini
  • Kayla Min Andrews
  • Kelly Ramsey
  • Kevin Moffett
  • Kevin Wilson
  • Kiese Laymon
  • Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi
  • Kinsey Cantrell
  • Kirtan Nautiyal
  • Kirthana Ramisetti
  • Kristen Arnett
  • Kristina Ten
  • Krys Malcolm Belc
  • Krystelle Bamford
  • Kyla D. Walker
  • Laia Asieo Odo
  • Laura Leffler
  • Laura McCluskey
  • Laura Moore
  • Laura van den Berg
  • Laura Venita Green
  • Leah Mell
  • Lee Cole
  • Leni Zumas
  • Lesley Pratt Bannatyne
  • Leticia Urieta
  • Liann Zhang
  • Lidija Hilje
  • Liese Greensfelder
  • Lillian Li
  • Linnea Gradin
  • Lisa Borders
  • Lisa K. Friedman
  • Lisa Ko
  • Liz DeGregorio
  • Lizzie Lawson
  • Lori Ostlund
  • Louise Hegarty
  • Lucianna Chixaro Ramos 
  • Lydi Conklin
  • Lydia C. Buchanan
  • Lydia Millet
  • M. L. Rio
  • Mac Crane
  • Maggie Andersen
  • Maggie Smith
  • Maggie Su
  • Mai Serhan
  • Malavika Kannan
  • Malka Older
  • Mandana Chaffa
  • Mandy Shunnarah
  • Manuel Betancourt
  • Margaret Mitsutani
  • Maria Robinson
  • Maria Zoccola
  • Mariah Rigg
  • Marian Womack
  • Mariana Serapicos
  • Marie-Helene Bertino
  • Marisa Russello
  • Marisa Wright
  • Mark Chiusano
  • Mark Labowskie
  • Mark Mustian
  • Marta Balcewicz
  • Mary Ardery
  • Masashi Matsuie
  • Matthew Nienow
  • Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
  • Maureen O’Leary
  • Meg Doyle
  • Megan Cummins
  • Megan Leonard
  • Megan Peck Shub
  • Mehruba Chowdhury
  • Mel Kassel
  • Melanie Faranello
  • Melissa Chan
  • Melissa Febos
  • Mia Risher
  • Michael Knapp
  • Michelle Gurule
  • Michelle Hart
  • Michelle Herman
  • Mickie Kennedy
  • Miguel Bonnefoy
  • Milo Todd
  • Miranda Schmidt
  • Miriam Jayaratna
  • Molly Gott
  • Monica Macansantos
  • Morgan Dick
  • Morgan Leigh Davies
  • Myriam Gurba
  • Nadia Born
  • Naheed Phiroze Patel
  • Nandi Rose
  • Natalia Theodoridou
  • Natalie Zutter
  • Nathan Alling Long
  • Nicholas Montemarano
  • Nicole Louie
  • Nina C. Peláez
  • Nina Sharma
  • Noreen Graf
  • Nyuol Lueth Tong
  • Oak Morse
  • Olga Tokarczuk 
  • Olivia Parkes
  • Olivia Wolfgang-Smith
  • Olufunke Grace Bankole
  • Ori Fienberg
  • Osamu Dazai 
  • Pardis Parker
  • Pat Lipsky
  • Paul Lisicky
  • Paul Theroux
  • Paula Bomer
  • Polly Rosenwaike
  • Preeta Samarasan
  • Priyamvada Ramkumar
  • R.L. Maizes
  • R.O. Kwon
  • Rachel Cantor
  • Rachel Deutsch
  • Rachel León 
  • Rachel Lyon
  • Rachel Mans McKenny
  • Rafael Frumkin
  • Ramona Ausubel
  • Rasha Shaath
  • Rav Grewal-Kök
  • Rebecca Schankula
  • Rhian Sasseen
  • Richard Bausch
  • Rickey Fayne
  • Riddhi Dastidar
  • Robyn Ryle
  • Ron Currie
  • Rowan Beaird
  • Roya Marsh
  • Ruby Mora
  • Ruth Diver
  • Ryan Murdock
  • Saachi Gupta
  • Sakhi Thirani
  • Sam Herschel Wein
  • Sam Wachman
  • Samantha Allan
  • Samantha Xiao Cody
  • Sammy Aiko Zimmerman
  • Sammy Stevens
  • Samuel Ashworth
  • Sanchari Sur
  • Sanibel
  • Sanjena Sathian
  • Santiago Jose Sanchez
  • Sara Jaffe
  • Sarah Anjum Bari
  • Sarah Aziza
  • Sarah Bess Jaffe
  • Sarah Fawn Montgomery
  • Sarah Garfinkel
  • Sarah Gerard
  • Sarah Hagaman
  • Sarah Jilani
  • Sarah Lyn Rogers
  • Sarah Maria Griffin
  • Sarah Wheeler
  • Sari Fordham
  • Shane Burley 
  • Shannon Ives
  • Sharmini Aphrodite
  • Shelley Fairweather-Vega
  • Sheluyang Peng
  • Shizuka Omori
  • Skylar Miklus
  • Sophie Madeline Dess
  • Steve Majors
  • Su Chang
  • Sumaiya Aftab Ahmed
  • Summer Farah
  • Summer J. Hart
  • Susanna Crossman
  • Susannah Nevison 
  • Sydney Rende
  • Tala Khanmalek
  • Tamar Shapiro
  • Tanya Guerrero 
  • Tarisai Ngangura
  • Tehnuka
  • Tennessee Hill
  • Teresa Dzieglewicz
  • Tessa Fontaine
  • Thomas Dai
  • Tiffany Graham Charkosky
  • Tochi Eze
  • Tom Comitta
  • Tom McAllister
  • Tom Pyun
  • Tony Tulathimutte
  • Travis Dahlke
  • Trisha Sakhlecha
  • Ulrich Baer
  • Valentine Sargent
  • Vanessa Chan
  • Vesna Jaksic Lowe
  • Victoria Livingstone
  • Vincente Perez
  • Virginia Marshall
  • Wayne Scott
  • Weiji Wang
  • Weike Wang
  • Wendy J. Fox
  • Will McMillan
  • Will VanDenBerg
  • William Boyle
  • Yu-Mei Balasingamchow
  • Yuka Igarashi
  • Yuki Tanaka
  • Z. Hanna

Abandoned On the Street That Will Bear His Name

Posted on by Preety Sidhu

An excerpt from The Dream of the Jaguar by Miguel Bonnefoy

On the third day of his life, Antonio Borjas Romero was abandoned on the steps of a church in a street that today bears his name. No one could be sure of the precise date on which he was found. All that is known is that every morning, a destitute woman would sit there, always in the same spot, put down a gourd bowl, and hold out her fragile hand to the passersby on the parvis. When she first set eyes on the infant, she pushed him away in disgust. But her attention was suddenly caught by a little shiny box hidden in the folds of his blanket, which someone had left with him as an offering: a tin rectangle, its silvery surface engraved with fine arabesques. It was a cigarette rolling machine. She filched it, put it into the pocket of her dress, then lost interest in the baby. But she noticed during the morning that the infant’s timid wailing, his hesitant cries were so endearing to the churchgoers, who thought the two of them were together, that one by one they soon filled the bottom of her bowl with copper coins. When evening came, she took the baby to a farmyard, stuck his mouth to the teat of a black goat whose udder was covered in flies, and kneeled under its belly to make him suckle the thick warm milk. The next day, she wrapped him in a kitchen towel and hung him at her hip. After a week, she started saying that the child was hers.

This woman, whom everyone called Mute Teresa because she had a speech impediment, must have been somewhere in her forties, although she herself was incapable of giving her exact age. There was something Indian about her face, and on the left side, a slight paralysis caused by an ancient fit of jealousy. She carried nothing more than spongy skin on her bones, her hands were covered in sores that never healed, and her dirty white hair fell flat beside her face like the ears of a basset hound. She had lost the fingernail on her left thumb when a scorpion hiding in the back of a drawer had stung her hand one day. This did not kill her but formed a kind of sausage of flesh at the end of her thumb, a dead growth, and it was that flap that the child sucked before falling asleep during his first weeks.

She named him Antonio, for the church where she found him was placed under the patronage of Saint Anthony. She fed him with her own rage, with her silent pain. During his first few years, she had him lead a disorderly, shameful, indigent life. She convinced herself that if he should survive this misery, no one other than himself could kill him. At one year old, he could barely walk but could already beg. At two, he spoke sign language before he could speak Spanish. At three, he looked so much like her that she started wondering whether she had actually found him on the church steps, or might in fact have brought him into the world herself, in the backyard of a hovel, in the hollow of a hay bale, between a gray donkey and a lamb. She dressed him in filthy rags, and, to gain sympathy from the passersby, would hold him tight in fake tenderness, drenching him in acrid sweat that the heat turned into a kind of greasy yellow gelatin. She fed him goat cheese rolled by hand, slept with him in her shelter made of faded newspapers at the back of a makeshift sheep pen, and perhaps no woman ever showed so much courage in looking after a child she did not love.

Nevertheless, for Antonio, this lying, miserly, scurrilous, and thievish woman was the best possible mother to whom he could aspire. He took the roughness she showed him and the venomous love that poverty had woven between them to be tenderness. He grew up with her at La Rita, on the shores of Lake Maracaibo, in a place that was so dangerous that it was called Pela el Ojo, “Keep your eyes peeled.”

When Antonio turned six, he no longer believed in miracles but sold jet pebbles as lucky charms and knew how to read cards, for Mute Teresa was adamant that this was the only science that people could be convinced by without it having the inconvenience of being true. When he turned eight, she taught him to recognize the crooked aguadores, the water carriers who sold dirty water from the lake passing it off as clean rainwater. But also the grocers who tipped their scales with a bent paper clip, the workmen who resold screws from the formwork on their building sites, and the trainers who, in the cockfighting pits, hid razor blades under the claws of the roosters’ spurs. She had prepared him for this hard life, full of caution and necessity, of battles and suspicion, to the point that if a pastor suddenly announced during mass that a saint had burst into tears, Antonio was the first to raise his eyes to the church ceiling to see where the water leak was coming from.

In those days, Pela el Ojo was a kind of vast swamp crushed by the heat, with damp shores populated with little houses on stilts whose doors were always open. The dwellings were erected over that murky water, with open-air kitchens, blackened old stoves, and floating trash cans that the city had dumped on its outskirts. Bread was baked there, fuel was trafficked. The children lived naked on the boards, moving over this skeleton of thousands of tree trunks, which were constantly being patched up, wading on the surface of the lake as did the palaces in Venice, a sight which had made the Venetian navigators of long ago, arriving with their fragrances of vellum and sealing wax, say that they recognized it as a “little Venice,” a venezziola, a Venezuela.

However, the immobility of these landscapes no longer conjured dreams of the ancient cities of the Caribbean, of Tamanaco and Mara, populated with women dressed in cotton gowns and mantles embroidered with gold, or young men whose chests were covered in fine silver dust, or newborn babies swaddled in jaguar skins. It was no longer a vision of a nation before all nations, of men dressed as eagles, of children who spoke with the dead and women who transformed themselves into salamanders.

At the time, it was no more than a township lacking in poetry, with roofs of hot palm fronds and teenagers wearing sandals cut out of old pickup-truck tires. The hovels were built from the hoods of old Indiana Trucks, the window handles from tin cans, the chair seats from aluminum posters for Shell. And since the rains were torrential and the palm-frond roofs needed to be protected, people bought old advertising billboards for Chevrolet, stolen at night along the highways, so that all the cladding of the shacks in the shantytowns, where people who could not drive slept, carried the words: “No happiness without Chevrolet.”

Those rains, which were called palo de agua, often made the lake swell and burst its banks. The water flooded the plain in slow advances, drowning the countryside. The downpours could lash away continuously for forty furious nights, covering the fields with dead parrots, and when the tide reached the farms and submerged the crops, thousands of crayfish swam up from the gulf into the cornfields and enjoyed an underwater banquet that decimated the entire year’s harvest in two weeks. People cursed the crayfish in Maracaibo as they cursed the grasshoppers in Egypt.

One day when he was eleven years old, he put his hooks and lines into a bag, went to the village dock, and stole a canoe.

It was in this world that Antonio grew up, fishing on the lake, swimming through the pondweed and the mangroves. His diet was composed only of catfish, white-fleshed stone bass, blue crabs, and giant freshwater shrimp, to the point that Mute Teresa started to believe, in her most intrepid dreams, that Antonio would grow gills and start breathing underwater. One day when he was eleven years old, he put his hooks and lines into a bag, went to the village dock, and stole a canoe. Some children saw him and snitched on him. It did not take long for the owners of the vessel to appear in the distance. These were the rich men of La Rita, those who held power, those whose word was law on that side of the lake: Manu Moro, a tall fellow more than six foot seven, as wide at the waist as he was at the shoulders; Hermès Montero, an agitated little man who was red with anger; and Asdrubal Urribarri, a mixed-race man with green eyes and a clubfoot, wearing a white undershirt and waving his arms with a napkin in his hand, as if he had hastily stood up from the table.

“Antonio, I recognize you!” he shouted. “Come back here!”

On the shore, they were pacing furiously back and forth through the trash littering the beach, casting impetuous looks at Antonio as he paddled away. Asdrubal Urribarri disappeared, then came back again with a rabid dog with foaming jaws, which he threw into the water. The dog swam to the boat as if possessed and with an ease and energy that surprised everyone, climbed onto the boards and sprang at Antonio’s neck. But Antonio had time to dodge it by jumping overboard and escaped by swimming against the current. The dog followed him, letting the boat float off to the horizon as Asdrubal yelled, “The boat! Don’t let it get away!”

The dog persisted in its chase, barking feverishly, biting the waves, growling like mad. Antonio redoubled his efforts, dove underwater, and disappeared. After half an hour, when he felt a strong cramp pull at his thigh and his arms started stiffening with pain, he realized that the dog’s barking had softened to whining, to the wails of the shipwrecked, and after a few minutes there was nothing but its little nose poking out of the water. It was only when the dog properly started to drown, yapping like a puppy, that Antonio decided to slow down. In a last gasp for survival, the dog caught up to him, and instead of biting him, eagerly clasped his shoulders. It was six in the evening. The owners of the boat, holding leather straps and belts, were watching keenly from the shore.

“You’ll get tired in the end,” they shouted. “We’ll be waiting for you here.”

Exhausted, with the dog on his back, Antonio let himself be carried by the current until he arrived at Punta Camacho, and resigned himself to waiting for darkness before getting out of the lake. Night fell only half a mile farther on, at Puerto Iguana, and when at last he was camouflaged by the light of the moon, protected by the darkness, he swam up to a little dock and ran, accompanied by the dog, toward the gates of Camino Real by the free pathway that led to Pela el Ojo.

As he was sighing with relief at the familiar sight of the lights of his hovel, reassured to have arrived home safe and sound at last, he got a sudden fright when he saw the silhouette of Asdrubal Urribarri, with his limping gait, talking to Mute Teresa, still waving his napkin and gesticulating wildly. Although Antonio was about to faint with exhaustion, he thought it was too dangerous to show himself. He found a solid palm tree, climbed up to the top, and waited for the night to be over.

The stars were enormous in the sky, and the world seemed flooded with silt. A group of men started tracking him. At the top of his palm tree, Antonio cried, not out of fear but out of rage. Alone and chilled by the wind from the lake, disturbed by the rustling of the fronds from which he had dislodged two rats nibbling at stalks in the crown, he took two hours to fall asleep while listening to the frogs copulating, and in his dreams he confused their croaking with men’s voices.

He was awoken in the early morning by blows from a stick on his feet. He looked down to see Mute Teresa. She had searched for him all night in every shrub, in every sea grape tree along the shore, in vain. The dog, against all expectations and unbeknownst to its owner, had led her to him out of gratitude at having been saved from drowning. Mute Teresa put two cornmeal arepas and some grated cheese on a napkin on the ground. In her restricted language, she signaled for him to stay up in the tree for another night, maybe two, for Asdrubal Urribarri was keeping watch around their shelter. Antonio hunched over in anger.

“One day I will be a man, and I will no longer be afraid,” he said from the top of the palm tree. “I’ll teach him who’s boss.”

But Mute Teresa did not answer. Seeing him perched up there in that tree, hidden away and forgotten by every­ one in the desolation of the world, she felt a pain in her soul, for she could conceive of no other future for Antonio than one as a street ruffian, born in the wrong place, dragging his loneliness until his death in the miserable rum joints where only vagrants and delinquents stray, desperate men who expect nothing from beauty and no longer know whom to die for. She imagined him as one of those brutes who was looking for him, who wanted to beat him, those nasty, arrogant men, raised on the lake’s violence and by miserly fathers, whose hearts were thorns without a flower. Worse still, she imagined him like herself, living a life of disasters and frustrations, sitting on the steps of a church holding out a bony hand to strangers, ruminating on the humiliations and errors of her youth, having survived a childhood with no home nor refuge, with no love nor protection, a childhood when no one had taught her how to live.

That was the reason why, three days later, when everyone had forgotten the incident with the boat and Antonio was able to return home, Mute Teresa greeted him with patient gentleness. She was waiting for him there, perched on a little stool, doing her laundry, leaning over a tub, and when she saw him, so pale with hunger and exhaustion, trembling with fear and cold, she could not help wondering how humankind had managed to survive amid so much cruelty. She sat him on the ground in silence, took off his clothes, and gave him a summary wash in the laundry water, rubbing down his body, filling the tub with scraps of lake weed and palm bark, and they never said so much as a word about this incident for the rest of their lives.

The next day, she searched the recesses of her hovel and put a package into his hands. Antonio, who had never received a present before, opened it quickly. It was the little cigarette rolling machine she had found, eleven years earlier on the church steps, in the folds of his blanket. These letters were engraved on the back: Borjas Romero. She looked Antonio straight in the eye, and it was one of the rare occasions he heard her voice.

“If you want to become the boss, don’t steal,” she muttered. “Work.”

And so Antonio got it into his head to sell cigarettes. He got his first handful of tobacco thanks to his cunning. One September morning, a few days after the episode with the boat, he crossed the only square in La Rita and with a determined step entered the La Pioja grocery store belonging to Henri Reille, a fine fellow in his forties with no shady dealings, full of health and vitality, the son of immigrants from Nantes who had come at the beginning of the century and whose French lineage had endowed him with the bold art of commerce. Antonio offered him the following deal: “Give me some tobacco and some paper. I’ll come back this evening with double its price.”

Give me some tobacco and some paper. I’ll come back this evening with double its price.

Antonio left Henri Reille with ten grams of tobacco, rolled thirty cigarettes, and went to the port of Santa Rita, where dozens of men arrived every day from the south of Lake Maracaibo, the mountains of Mérida, and the backwaters of Santander, Trujillo, and Táchira, disembarking on the dock from their dinghies hewn from a single tree trunk and canoes filled with animals whose cries echoed throughout the bay. He sold everything he had until nightfall, handling his machine as if it were a Venetian lute and calculating each gram of tobacco with the care of a goldsmith, economizing each sliver of paper. At around seven, he returned to the grocery store and set down the bounty of the day on the counter, under Henri Reille’s astonished eyes.

“You are richer this evening than you were this morning,” he said. “And so am I. Let’s keep going.”

For three weeks, in the suffocating heat of the coast, he went tirelessly back and forth from Pela el Ojo to La Rita, persuading anyone he crossed paths with on the port to have a smoke. With savage obstinacy, he mingled with the vast community of sellers of crushed ice and guarapo, the cold drink made from sap, sugar paste, and pinole, until the day when a goods porter offered him three pennies to help him unload some sacks of coconuts from a boat.

Antonio, who at that age already had wide shoulders and a muscular back, threw one of the sacks onto his spine with the help of two leather straps, surprised himself with the strength of his arms and the solidity of his legs, then hunched forward and walked off under the weight toward the truck, with a blind tenacity that the other porters ascribed not to his strength but to his youth. Despite the excessive weight that compressed his lungs, he managed to unload everything, and earned in one hour with his arms what it would have taken all day to earn with his cigarettes. From that day onward, he never set foot in Henri Reille’s grocery store again. The following day, he came back to the same spot on the dock, convinced that he would make a fortune with the strength of his muscles, but he quickly understood that there was a hierarchy in all things, even in the world of porters.

He was introduced to an old boatman called Alfaro who was in need of laborers, a hawk-nosed man from Panama whose fingers were covered in rings and was notorious for his abrupt mood swings and choleric character. Antonio was a model of discipline and flexibility, uncomplaining, obedient, and selfless. He was happy to do whatever was assigned to him. In the stifling air of the port, where the docks were covered every day with crates of fragrant spices and cages of flowers, Antonio learned to read, to count, to recognize the maritime flags that the smugglers modified to thwart the coast guard, to calculate by touch alone the worth of the coins he was given, and to file away in his imagination not only all the accents he heard around him but also all the fabulous stories that came to him with the arriving goods and that blended together in his head as in a great ancient novel.

This is how he learned of the existence, in the south, of a village that moved around, a shifting village that gravitated around Barinas as a planet around a star, and that could only be found by chance. He heard about the legend of the solid-gold Virgin of Benito Bonito, about the opera house in Manaus built in the middle of the jungle, about the thirty-eight-minute-long war in Zanzibar and the story of an Andalusian settler who brought four hundred elephants from Nepal to fill his stables in the middle of a desert in the dunes of Coro. These marvelous tales remained etched so profoundly in the marble of his memory that, many years later, when the plaque was unveiled in the street that bore his name, Antonio was able to relive with acute precision that stifling morning in the little port of Santa Rita when all at once, in the middle of the tumult of ropes and heavy chains, he saw the statue of the libertador Simón Bolívar arrive at its port of call in Maracaibo.

It loomed up one Tuesday in November. The lake dwellers saw it in the distance, on the promenade covered in crushed mangoes and rotten fish, an imposing statue four yards high made from six tons of bronze cast in Tuscany. It was of a man on horseback in nineteenth-century dress, looking straight ahead and pointing his sword at the future with an authoritarian air. His elegance was so striking to the children on the beach, boys in rags who had never seen Simón Bolívar, that they ran into their shacks yelling, “God has come down to Maracaibo!” After a perilous traction with iron pullies, weights, and straps, Simón Bolívar was unloaded from the ship and set down between the chicken cages and crates of plantains and dried meat, surrounded by sacks of coffee. The bronze stank of guavas. The statue had come a long way, having made a voyage on the ship down the course of a tumultuous river and survived rust and oxidation as well as the tropical rainstorms that had broken out several times and fifty miles of crocodiles and howler monkeys. It was supposed to stay a few days in Maracaibo before continuing its journey up the Rio Escalante to reach the port of Santa Bárbara del Zulia, across from the city of San Carlos where, one day in 1820, Simón Bolívar, making the most of the abundance of wood in the area, had ordered the construction of five ships to attack the Spanish.

By two o’clock, the whole town had heard about the visit of the libertador. People were crowding around the statue in a carnival of acclamation, carrying children on their shoulders and bringing the elderly out of their rooms to see it, and there were even some Guajiro on the dock, who had come down barefoot from the Sierra de Perijá with birds in their hands and a ruckus of tiny bells, attracted by the rumor that a metal man had been discovered in the middle of their lake. It was not long before the local authorities made an official appearance, with the governor of the province of Zulia at their head, along with other town dignitaries, to render homage to the hero of the nation, by trampling the jumble of rotten fruit.

Eventually the speeches were so long and pompous that, over the course of the ten days that the statue was standing by on the port of Maracaibo, people ended up losing their curiosity. At night, some men who were roaming around the docks tried to paint the horse’s rump, while others threw avocados as big as melons at the libertador’s head, and still others tried to steal his sword by cutting it with a lumber saw, but they managed only to leave a notch an inch deep in the palm of his hand, such that three days later, when the statue was examined, this was believed to be the mysterious trace of a Christlike stigmata.