If you’ve turned on a TV lately, you’ve likely heard more than enough ‘opinions’ from certain conservative news outlets about the trans community. In the face of hate, misinformation, and violence, standing up for one’s identity may begin to feel like fighting an endless war rather than an act of power. At Electric Literature, we’re celebrating trans writers with some of our favorite essays, reading lists, and stories from the archives.
In this excerpt from Nevada by Imogen Binnie, recommended by Jackson Howard, fed up Maria reflects on the right way to fake an orgasm as she is being choked by her girlfriend Steph. With cynical, sardonic humor, Binnie depicts the mundane realities of being trans.
Trans women in real life are different from trans women on television. For one thing, when you take away the mystification, misconceptions and mystery, they’re at least as boring as everybody else.
Despite an increase of trans characters in stories by cis authors, trans characterization is rarely discussed by cis critics. Eli Cugini interrogates what exactly cis authors gain from writing trans characters and uses contemporary examples to show how trans characters should and should not be written.
But talking about a complex and fraught phenomenon like transness means being honest about the roots of the discussion: what do trans characters do for cis people? What messages, anxieties, and ways of seeing are being encoded in trans rep today? And where does that need to change?
In late ‘90s Houston, before the era of YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter, Addie Tsai was convinced people like them–Asian, biracial, queer, and non-binary–did not exist. The only place they saw themself was the anime Ranma, in which the titular character existed as both boy and girl in one body.
We no longer live in a world where we’re relegated to the queer selves that are ‘obvious,’ or the one or two pieces of media that show us who aren’t cis white gays who we could really be.
As her wife’s pregnancy progresses, Elanor Broker feels alone in her impending trans motherhood. Broker finds guidance and solidarity in Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts.
We humans rely on stories to make sense of overwhelming change, not just as practical maps for planning and preparation, but to expand our horizons, to envision new possibility.
In the instance of gender apocalypse, where do trans people fall? Katherine Packert Burke analyzes Afterland and The Men to discuss the disappearance of trans people in apocalypse narratives by cis writers.
References to these trans women, or to the trans men who survive, are fleeting and uncomplicated. But these are books about gender. They’re trying to reckon with something toxic in the structure of society. Why wouldn’t trans people be a part of that? What fears are they reckoning with that don’t include trans people?
As Christ came to understand her own gender identity, she gravitated toward femme makeover films as a substitute for explicitly trans narratives. Through Miss Congeniality and Detransition, Baby, Christ comes to understand womanhood as a gift given and shared among women.
Boys who become men and girls who become women are rewarded with increasing returns the more any person commits to their assigned bit.
In an era that’s tearing down toxic masculinity, boys can do all the things we traditionally prescribed as feminine–so what makes a woman a woman, and how do we choose our identity? Years into her transition, Elanor Broker is still pondering this question, the answer of which she unexpectedly finds through Star Trek.
It’s a nervous tic, every time you try to explain this thing you suspect, this thing you think must be there — you try to relate some trait, some habit, some tendency, some aspect that feels gendered in a meaningful way, but out comes that inevitable ‘oh, but of course boys can totally do that, too.’
Electric Literature presents a list of fantasy novels written by trans and non-binary authors that celebrate and include gender queer characters, as opposed to the works of certain other transphobic billionaires.
Thank goodness the biggest-selling fantasy author of all time hasn’t thrown her lot in with a pack of weirdly genital-obsessed identity police! That would, after all, be an extremely weird choice…
Joss Lake, author of “Future Feeling,” recommends new trans books that expand the once narrow narrative of what it means to be trans.
This is the problem with clutching a single portrayal of trans life. We—writers, trans folks, everyone—model ourselves on each other. We need nourishment: a vast range of narratives, styles, and lives.
Trans characters have become more prevalent in cis literature–so why aren’t cis reviewers talking about them? Eli Cugini analyzes how avoidant cis responses to trans characters have harmed trans depictions.
Avoidance is disappointing, as is an uncritical, magnanimous ‘oh, how lovely’ attitude towards the mere existence of trans representation. Transness has the curious capacity to turn off cis reviewers’ critical capacities.
To say that The Last Catastrophe is a dystopic take on humanity’s final hour is to miss the humor in these pages, as well as the tenderness in Allegra Hyde’s gaze. She is looking upon all of us—even those with the greatest culpability—as if she is sad to lose us and for us to lose ourselves. This places her squarely in the lineage of writers like George Saunders, as does the collection’s strip malls, experimental surgeries to consign youth, data points that “extrapolate likely outcomes,” zombie humans, humans with “eyes blank as chicken broth,” bee extinctions, white lies, immigrant detention centers, DNA market, and the discomfortingly familiar algorithm that knows what you want before you even ask, then drops it at your door by drone (“Praise be, we paid”).
In these short stories, “America unfurls in every direction,” and we stand helpless before capitalism’s gaping maw. Hyde approaches her subjects with a naturalist view, reflecting back our foolish instinct to flex our power against nature, how it will kill us or conscript us to an unrecognizable existence. In these pages, we follow a caravan of motorhomes that are over a millennium swallowed into the earth’s core, embark on a doomed mission to save the last remaining moose, join a woman at a center for digital disorders (wondering, all the while, what ours might be), and remain alert to the predatory animals that are lurking.
The people in these stories are lonely, mystified by their own existence—especially by love—and seeking purpose in a collapsing world. There is the woman whose skin turns the color of the Gatorade she drinks after her husband leaves her, the woman who takes in foster husbands, the woman who needs “a little extra attention as she face[s] her own impending obsolescence,” and the émigré searching for his beloved in every surgically supplanted face. The last catastrophe might be our feral state, now that we’ve become unhinged at our own doing. Yet, despite herself, Hyde is not without hope. The writer reminds us that the human spirit has transcended our base self to invent language and pencils, and this same imagination has brought us twenty thousand leagues beneath the sea. Perhaps it is not too late for us to solve the problem of us.
Annie Liontas: These stories look to potential distortions rather than the concrete past, and make us feel as if we’re reading about ourselves in the not-so-distant future. If you’re right and the clock is ticking down, what do you want to say to humanity?
Allegra Hyde: I want to grab everyone by the proverbial shoulders and shake them and say, “Look around at what’s happening. We’re heading towards great danger and towards really difficult times. However, we do still have the opportunity to change course, to radically rethink what we value, and to have a better future.”
AL: You’re saying there’s still hope.
AH: I think so. I think even if we do face great challenges—and we’re facing those challenges already—there’s still the opportunity to find joy, to find meaning, to find connection. And I think that’s something to really hold on to. I’ve been walking around Oberlin, Ohio recently, and we’re having a really weird winter—it’s been like 60 degrees in February. That’s disturbing and that’s objectively bad for the environment and for us as a species, and yet there are flowers coming up. It’s kind of beautiful and charming, and it’s wonderful to walk around in the warm weather with loved ones. And so I try to balance my sense of anger and despair with holding on to what we have.
AL: Satire can be conflated with anger or scathing reproach, but I find it’s usually entangled with grief. Are you writing from a place of mourning? Are there other satirists who work similarly, and whom you admire?
AH: I am writing from a place of grief, both personal and as part of a collective. I think a story like “Frights,” for instance—which is told from the perspective of ghosts and is thinking about extinction and the end of species and ways of living—comes from a part of me that is grieving for the loss of those things. And yet that story is not necessarily all melancholic. It’s processing extinction in a playful, sometimes humorous way. And that reflects my own way of managing grief generally. I think other stories in the collection are also translating or transforming grief in order to cope. I draw from Barthelme in many ways, how he uses absurdity and how he creates emotion by taking unexpected turns and working with humor as a means to access pain and tragedy. This is not an example of a satirist, but I’d also say I draw from someone like Maggie Nelson and a book like Bluets, which is so loaded with grief, but we’re not always looking at it directly. We’re looking at it sideways and diagonally and refracting grief through objects and through ideas.
AL: There is so much humor in these pages, despite the existential grappling. In one of my favorite stories, “Loving Homes for Lost and Broken Men,” we’re told that “husbands without loving homes could end up on the streets, eating junk food, openly farting, harassing young women, impersonating dead celebrities.” Do you think of humor as a survival tool? Is it true in your own life?
AH: Telling jokes and transforming pain and frustration and anger into humor is absolutely a coping mechanism that I’ve used. “Loving Homes for Lost & Broken Men” is a story that’s very much expressing my frustrations with the heteropatriarchy. I think rather than writing a long screed, being able to write a story that invokes humor and that invites people in who would otherwise avoid such subject matter is a way to communicate what I’m feeling. I hope it’s more fun and creates more connections and openness, while also offering catharsis.
AL: What does first-person plural open up for you in a work that is about collective anxiety?
AH: That was a perspective that just kept coming back for me. I didn’t set out to write multiple stories in first person plural, but I found that point of view to be the most effective way to explore certain ideas. Whether I was writing about algorithmic dependence or reckless consumption, speaking as a collective and presenting this hive mind helped me get to the heart of what I wanted to say. The stories in this collection take on many different forms. Some are a couple of pages long, one could be called a novella. But the collection is held together by this larger exploration of what it means to live through the Anthropocene and how we might better understand our reality through metaphor, absurdity, and speculative premises. We are, on one hand, individuals living our specific individual lives, but we’re also very much all caught up in the fabric of society, we’re all part of this cultural consciousness. We’re all complicit in all kinds of collective decisions and actions that create catastrophe. Capturing that in first-person plural felt like another way to speak to that aspect of being human.
AL: I love how you take on the individual and the collective in “The Eaters,” which is about vegan zombies and survivors. One of the characters in that story, a historian and professor, talks about how it is a privilege to see the very last of anything, whether a species or a race. What is the relationship between the end and beauty? The end and the grotesque, the end and nostalgia?
We’re all complicit in all kinds of collective decisions and actions that create catastrophe.
AH: Offering up the perspective that it is, in fact, a privilege to witness the end times might open up avenues for people to actually witness it at all. Because I think many of us, myself included—all the time—want to, and do, bury our heads in the sand. I have environmental news sites that I look at, but sometimes they’re just too horrible to read and I instead go on The Cut and read about makeup. I think reminding ourselves that it’s both a privilege and a responsibility to pay attention, to be informed, to hold onto what is happening in our minds and our bodies is important. It is a unique position that people in the future will, if they exist, recognize clearly.
AL: Though in these stories, we see the raw awareness of youth, and how they’re eager to participate. You write a young person who grows a mysterious horn, a young space traveler, and a teenager who is brave enough to do what the adults in the compound won’t do. We can’t help but admire how they meet the world.
AH: I aspire to be an adult who listens and pays attention and honors the perspectives of young people because my sense is that as many people get older, they really shut themselves off from hearing younger generations. But the truth of the youth has been proven over and over again. In this collection, I really wanted to honor the unique positionality of younger people. They often have to face situations and realities that they in no way created, and I wanted to show how they might cope with such situations in the near future. I’m continually impressed and inspired by youth out in the world today and the youth activism that’s taking place around the environmental movement, with responsible gun use, and elsewhere. Working as a professor, I’m constantly interacting with Gen Z-ers, and I try to continually learn from them and appreciate the position that they’re in.
AL: Marmalade is wonderful! I also love Karoline, who appears in one of the collection’s most innovative stories, “Colonel Merryweather’s Intergalactic Finishing School for Young Ladies of Grace & Good Nature.” In preparation for the space promenade, Karoline is taught the power of white lies as “a bridge between possibility and reality,” and is conscripted to tell them. The complication of what she has inherited and her position in the world is not unlike our own, and you push the reader to think about their own culpability and capitulation.
By lying to ourselves and each other about the overall functionality of our current power structures, we’re setting ourselves up to repeat the same mistakes.
AH: That story stems from my frustration with billionaires investing a gazillion resources into going to space and the idea that the answer to all our problems on earth is by leaving earth and settling a new planet in the galaxy. Besides being impossible, this “solution” perpetuates a classicist, colonial framework. My hope is that this story, which is set in the future, shows how the same oppressive frameworks that have created the crises we’re living through will continue unless we change them. By lying to ourselves and each other about the overall functionality of our current power structures, we’re setting ourselves up to repeat the same mistakes. We won’t solve our problems that way, even if we eventually have cool spaceships.
AL: If the apocalypse arrives tomorrow, does Allegra Hyde survive?
AH: It depends on the kind of apocalypse. I can be pretty crafty and resourceful, but at the same time I do wear contacts. That might be my downfall. If I was trying to gain admittance into a survivalist compound and I needed to demonstrate what I can do—all I can do is teach short fiction. I probably need to brush up on my skills. I used to be good at setting up tents pretty fast.
AL: In a world of constant catastrophe, what is the last catastrophe?
AH: Your own death. Or is it nuclear apocalypse. Or is it when the internet finally goes down. It could be many things. I named the collection the Last Catastrophe because I hoped it would resonate in a glass half empty/half full way. It could be the last catastrophe in the sense that doom is near, or it could be the last catastrophe before we change course.
The night my boyfriend switched from when to if while he talked about our future, I said I’d eat nothing but boiled carrots and egg whites until I dropped twelve pounds. One for each month we’d been together, though I hadn’t planned that. I just picked a number. Twelve would make me small enough to please him. At that size, he could throw me around in bed, and when he finished, I’d be small enough that he could toss me over to a chair where he could ignore me until he needed me again. Now, at one hundred and thirty-five pounds, I was unavoidable.
I liked a lot about him, so don’t ask. I liked that he was a hobbyist metalworker. I liked his apartment with a view of a building that looked like but was not the Statue of Liberty. I liked that he liked some dogs but not all of them. When he ignored a dog, it broke my heart. I’d never empathized with a dog before. I liked how he showed me emotions I didn’t know I had. Sure, he probably served some metonymic function, too, alright? The way someone quiet and distant becomes who you imagine them to be, and in their silence, you become everything you fear about yourself, so you try to bridge the gap, attain a sense of self which you hope to be, but suspect is not, consonant with that person’s love. I was always grinning wide and saying, “Is there something in my teeth?” He’d never tell me. He’d say, Stop pretending I’m a mirror.
“If you only eat boiled carrots, what restaurants can we go to?” my boyfriend asked.
“And egg whites. Boiled carrots and egg whites. There are a million places with that.”
“Michael, I’m not going to watch you eat that.”
He was lying. A major problem I had with the men I dated was that I knew what they wanted better than they did. I know this sounds presumptuous, but explain this: the smaller I got, the more they fucked me. The cheaper my meal, the more they brought me out to eat. The quieter I stayed, the more they laughed and called me clever, even though they were the ones who’d made the joke.
If they admitted what they wanted, it would be considered abuse, and these were nice guys, so I just had to guess. I asked if he had a peeler. He went to the drawer and handed me one. I hadn’t even bought the carrots yet.
By the time the sun woke me up, my boyfriend had left for work. Everything in the room was white. I looked in the mirror. I was a stain on the sheets. He always woke up before me to jack off. The cum-filled tissues he left on the bed were already brittle. When I woke up feeling sexy, I’d jack off too, usually into the same tissue, to save trees. When there were no tissues left on the bed, I assumed he was planning to cheat on me during the day and was saving his cum for that.
I always woke up feeling sexy. His body drove me crazy, especially when it was gone.
After I came, always thinking of him, I felt sad and imagined a bunch of little scenes between me and my boyfriend. First, I imagined I’d said something that impressed him in a conversation, something about Flaubert, whom I’d never read but often pretended to know about in my daydreams. But my boyfriend only liked mystery novels and books that made new arguments for capitalism, so then I imagined I said something about Flaubert at the wrong time, like at a work event where everyone else was talking about pie charts or the world of politics, and where saying literary things looked pretentious in a desperate, grasping way. Then I imagined having a threesome with him and one of his friends, maybe Tony who was an amateur MMA fighter. In the fantasy, everything I did in the threesome got no response, but when Tony sucked his cock, my boyfriend came and said, “When you suck my cock, I’m afraid I’ll come forever.”
The problem was, I did not know what he wanted me to be. I tried so hard to be quiet when he wanted that, and sexually affectionate when he wanted that, and to affirm his ideas when he seemed to want that, but no matter how hard I tried to infer the partner he desired, my own traits kept seeping through. When they did, he did not like them. I’d say, “I read a new poem today,” and he’d groan. I’d have a horrible nightmare, and he’d wake up and say, “Maybe you’d be more comfortable out on the chair.”
I had this idea that if I became the willowy, weird anorexic boyfriend, he could know me as a trope, wear me on his arm, roll his eyes, and with my strangeness juxtaposed to his leading-man propriety, feel reassured of his own centrality in his life and our relationship. This seemed easier than any alternative.
For breakfast that morning, I gulped a little pool of coconut oil. I’d read it ran right through you, leaving nothing but pure energy and bright skin. I wanted to get better at letting loose what my body tried to hold. I ate a piece of bread for lunch, so I ran along the waterfront until I dropped to my knees and dizzily puked in the trash. People in Williamsburg threw away such nice things. Whole outfits! Nice suits and dresses damp with untouched delivery food. I opened a takeout container and salad dressing spilled out onto me. In this neighborhood salads were expensive. I could not afford this neighborhood, but my boyfriend could.
If my boyfriend did not marry me, or at least decide to stay with me, I would have to move to a bad neighborhood. What would I lose? Fake lady liberty, the leather furniture, the nicest bathroom I’d ever puked in. Most of all, the friends I’d made.
They were all bums. They’d all stayed in Williamsburg past when this was a place where bums lived. I liked them because I always stayed past the end of things too. I did nice things for them. I’d walk to the bodega and buy them canned drinks called Lime-A-Ritas. When they fell asleep in the sun I’d drag them to the shade under the BQE. I didn’t know their names, but I knew the feel of their underdeveloped forearms that I gripped like wishbones. I got real generous with my boyfriend’s card once and bought one of my friends a six-dollar ice cream cone. Then he told me he was lactose intolerant. I licked it and let it fall on the sidewalk.
After I puked in the trash, I noticed this same guy was lying there. He asked, “Was that bread? Bread would’ve gone good with the yogurt your roommate gave me.” Lactose intolerant my ass. I never knew when to believe my friends.
“Roommate?” I asked. “What do you mean.”
“That guy I see you up there on that balcony with.”
He pointed to our apartment. It hurt my eyes to look at the sun flaring where we lived.
“My boyfriend, you homophobe. That’s my boyfriend.”
“No homophobe,” he said. “Love fags. I am one. I was at Stonewall.”
He spooned a little yogurt.
Yeah right, I thought.
“He’s out of your league,” my friend said. “He’s a nice guy. Chiseled jaw. Like a Ken doll. Good musculature. Gives me yogurt and dollar bills. You don’t give me shit. You. You’re a menace. You’re a devil.”
He started cackling and hissing, a devil impression. I looked up at the balcony, the balcony where my boyfriend and I used to stand to look out at the world. He’d point at buildings along the waterfront and say, “I’ll buy property there and there and there.”
It was a major turn on for me, knowing he could have whatever he wanted. I’d imagine how he’d call contractors to come knock down walls, how he’d point and say “knock down that one” while I stood behind him nodding in agreement, feeling warm light come through the big windows. On the balcony, when he talked and I imagined and he put his arm around me, I’d blur my vision and let my body go limp and numb.
Under his winter coat he probably had a perfect body, a body that was barely there at all.
“Don’t talk to my boyfriend,” I said to my friend as I glared down at him. Under his winter coat he probably had a perfect body, a body that was barely there at all.
When I got home, my boyfriend was watching MMA fighting and jacking off so hard I knew he was about to come. When he noticed me, he groaned and stood, still holding himself. He said, “Where were you all night?” and went to bed. He was definitely going to leave me soon, and I had to do something to stop him.
I had another place I went, too. I taught ESL to recent immigrants in the basement of a church six stops east on the L train. I’d found the job online and signed up to prove a point to my boyfriend, something about my selflessness, but he didn’t care about my selflessness and neither did the students. Most of them had wandered in off the street looking for mass or confession or a bathroom and kept coming back because they had nothing better to do. A famous writer also volunteered there. Once I heard him ask a young black man which gangs he was in. I didn’t realize this guy was famous, and after I heard him say the gang thing, I was rude to him at the copier. We only had one book, so we had to make copies. I said, “Wait your turn,” like I was talking to a kid or a dog. Then I took a long time copying a list of “Ch” words: chubby, choke, chains.
My students were Claude and Jessica. Claude knew about fifteen words in English. Jessica knew English as well as I did. I taught them the same thing. Jessica was a single mom and a sales associate at DSW. When I went to buy shoes, I’d see her at the register and she’d say, “Hi shoe lover,” without an accent or any acknowledgment of who I was. She was white and said she came from Florida. I don’t think she knew where she was. Once, during a break, I heard her on the phone telling someone she was at college. Had I said something that made her think this was college? There were space heaters. All the chairs were folding chairs. There was only one book.
To teach them, I had them repeat whatever dumb sentences I thought of.
I said, “Let’s torch the church and go to brunch.”
They repeated, “Let’s torch the church and go to brunch.”
I said, “At every chance my boyfriend chokes the chicken.”
They repeated, “At every chance my boyfriend chokes the chicken.”
Claude only knew the sound and shape of words, not the words themselves, and Jessica just smiled. I think she thrived in situations where she knew exactly what to say, no matter what it was, and relished the absence of uncertainty. I related to this pleasure.
Sometimes I went on tangents. “This is not just about making the words legible, this is about making you legible.” I’d stand up at this part. “Legible to a system that does not want to see you as human, legible to the white heteropatriarchal State that quite frankly will never see you as human as hard as you try.”
When Jessica looked smug about being white, I’d add, “Even you, Jessica. You are a tool of empire.”
The speeches did not inspire. They clung to their insane dreams. Claude wanted to be an engineer. Jessica wanted to be a neonatal nurse. They asked me what I wanted to be. “Be!” I shouted. “You will spend your whole lives trying to be something and then the world will change what it wants from you.”
I lost four pounds in a week. The sentences I said made less sense to me but seemed to make the same amount of sense to my boyfriend: none. I looked at the yolks I cracked into the drain and said to my boyfriend, “Look, it’s the sun. An abortion of sun. Look at the albumen, the albumen’s the ghost of the sun. The ghost of the wasted days of youth!”
I cackled at that, the way my bum friends laughed when they saw rich kids struck by cars, but my boyfriend had already carried his laptop and its blood splatter sounds back to the couch.
I didn’t ask if he thought I looked better, and he didn’t try to fuck me more.
One morning, I brought my egg and carrots to the church basement in a Styrofoam container. Claude and Jessica kept pointing at it. Jessica called it “the sad breakfast.”
“My boyfriend makes me eat it,” I said. “My boyfriend is trying to fit me into clothes too small for my body.”
I’d assumed they were both homophobes, Jessica because she was so American, Claude because he was so not American. I felt bad about my surprise when Jessica said, “That’s not how a man should treat you. You’re the best teacher I’ve ever had.”
As if talent made someone deserving of love.
I was even more surprised when Claude said, “My boyfriend treats me right.”
“Who’s your boyfriend?” I asked with a kind of tone that implied, “Prove it.”
That’s when the experimental poet came in. An experimental poet volunteered at the church, too. He used to speak so quietly that you’d think you could ignore him, but he was so beautiful that you couldn’t help but strain to hear. Whenever I used to walk past the table where he sat to teach, I’d hear his students shouting, “What do you mean?” and “Speak up, please!” Recently, the director stopped giving him students because he was such a bad teacher, so he’d appointed himself as a sort of supervisor.
Power gave the experimental poet a renewed vitality. As supervisor, he would come around and listen to our lessons. He’d wait for us to make a mistake and correct our grammar even though in one of his poems he used the words “willow tree” as a verb.
“I didn’t know you were gay!” the experimental poet said to me. “You always just seemed depressed.”
I said I was both.
“Well then aren’t we just a bunch of homos?” the experimental poet said. “And you can be our fag hag.” He pointed at Jessica.
I hated the experimental poet because he was smarter than me and imbued his work with a quiet mystery, yet he could also fluently enact the tropes of gay male femininity, which made him outgoing, likeable, and unthreatening, even in his misogyny, to large audiences of morons. He had ten thousand followers on Twitter because he made jokes about anal bleaching and astrology, but I didn’t think anyone read his poems.
“I don’t have a boyfriend,” the experimental poet said, and I knew this did not mean “I’m lonely” or “I’m signaling availability.” He meant, “I fuck a lot of men.”
But maybe I could be one of them. He could probably tell fucking me would be good material for a sad poem. There was already one published poem about how sad sex with me could make a person. It had been nominated for, but did not win, a Pushcart Prize.
See, I had already begun to realize my diet was misguided. The more I saw my boyfriend jack off to MMA fighting, the more I realized he probably liked combative, muscular men. But this seemed unattainable. I could barely lift my pots of salty carrot water. If I tried to lift a weight I figured my arm would snap.
A few days earlier, I had asked some of my bum friends what they knew about boxing. I assumed most of them had at least done stints as boxers, but I was wrong.
“I only know about dog fighting,” the guy who lived in the trash said. “Do you want to know rule number one of dog fighting?”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s why I’m talking to you.”
“Punch him in the balls,” he said.
At home, I would playfully jab at my boyfriend. I’d say, “Think fast.” But I couldn’t squeeze my hand into a fist. I kind of pushed my half open hands into him. I felt like I was tickling him with a prosthesis that wasn’t mine.
“Would you quit that. What are you even doing?”
“Sorry.”
Maybe he resented that I could not hurt him and wanted to be with someone who could. I had gone about this all wrong. I had forgotten all gay men were masochists. Since I couldn’t hurt him physically, I could try to do it emotionally.
So, looking at Claude and the experimental poet, I had the idea. A double date. “Let’s all get drinks,” I said to Claude and the experimental poet. I felt light-headed as I said it. I’d never made a suggestion before.
“Bring your boyfriend,” I said to Claude. “And Jessica, I know you’ll probably have to watch your daughter or work at DSW that night, too bad.”
We agreed on next Thursday. I didn’t tell them I would invite my boyfriend. I wanted him to walk into the bar and see us already there. We would be having a visibly incredible amount of fun. He would not have a single word to say to Claude or the experimental poet. He would hate them both for their French accents. My boyfriend knew nothing of culture. In fact, he probably hated culture. He would not even realize that the experimental poet’s accent was fake. I doubted the experimental poet knew a word of French. My boyfriend would feel so uncomfortable. He’d see I was all he had, and he would see how easily I could have someone else.
We decided to meet in the West Village, where the experimental poet lived, even though Claude lived deep in Brooklyn. The experimental poet survived off of Amazon gift cards that older men sent him in exchange for short videos of sex acts, and Claude was poor, so we decided to meet at a cheap gay dive bar, the kind that had significance during the era of gay rights. Now though, it was too crowded and too sad, and though it was also too dark, the dim lights hung above each table revealed every blemish that had ever been on your face.
I got there first, ordered a martini and sat at the end of a semi-circular booth in the back. I was a little nervous. I wanted to look extremely hot. I’d worn a big sweater with a very tight shirt underneath for when we lost our inhibitions. All my tight shirts were not tight anymore. I bought a new one at H&M on the way. It was made for very hefty twelve-year-olds, and it fit me like a crop top.
I had one hour until my boyfriend would come. By then I wanted to be in my crop top and sitting in the experimental poet’s lap. I wanted to whisper poetry in his ear and to see how hard my warm, good breath and intellect made his cock. I was wearing baby blue briefs I’d had since I was in college seven years before. They were faded. The elastic was torn. They were the nicest underwear I had. I’d worn them for the experimental poet, or for my boyfriend, whichever wanted me that night.
I’d finished half of my martini and I was looking at myself in my phone camera when the experimental poet came in with Claude and Claude’s boyfriend. Had they come together? Had they gotten drinks somewhere else beforehand? Everyone was hiding something from me, cruel intentions and other attachments. As the experimental poet walked into the circle of light around our table, I saw that he had perfect skin. He probably drank more coconut oil than I did.
Everyone was hiding something from me, cruel intentions and other attachments.
“Oh my God,” the experimental poet said, more to the empty booth than to me. “Claude’s hilarious boyfriend is throwing serious shade on the government of Africa.”
“Wow,” I said. I knew the experimental poet was being ignorant, but I didn’t know anything about Africa either. I only read online descriptions of the nutrition in boiled carrots. My most recent internet searches were “how healthy are carrots” and “the newest sex moves.”
They crowded into the booth. The experimental poet took the seat beside me but did not gesture for me to climb atop his lap. Instead, he turned his body to Claude and his boyfriend. I yelled over his shoulder to make small talk. I asked Claude what he had for dinner. He thought for a while then said, “chicken and cheese.”
I didn’t know if this was true, or if these were the only words I’d given him to describe dinner, so I didn’t respond.
While the experimental poet kept asking Claude’s boyfriend questions, I just listened. The boyfriend had come to Brooklyn as a boy because of war. Now he was a bartender on the weekend and during the week he worked for Red Bull, leading focus groups. The experimental poet said there was definitely a poem to be written about that. He told us about his first poetry collection, My Diaspora, which was about leaving his childhood home to attend Sarah Lawrence.
“If the answer isn’t poetry,” the experimental poet said, “you just are not asking the right question.”
I was starting to realize that the experimental poet considered this night to be more anthropological than sexual. He would probably mine Claude and his boyfriend for material to break into writing lyric essays that used the immigrant experience as a metaphor, and I would not get laid, and my boyfriend would still leave me. I went to the bar and asked for another martini. I asked for an olive, but they put a lime in it. I stood there sucking it, then I left the rind over my teeth, like a sheath of mold, and smiled at the bartender. He said, “Are you okay?” On the way back to the table, I tripped over a backpack. I said, “Watch it!”
When I got back to the table, my boyfriend was there. He’d taken my seat beside the experimental poet. He was in a conversation.
“I tried to find you,” he said. “I described you to these guys. They said you were together.”
How had he described me? How could he describe me if he hadn’t asked me a question in a week, if he didn’t even know I’d lost ten pounds? Had he even noticed the love my weight loss conveyed? He didn’t say anything about how he’d expected us to be alone. He didn’t try to pull me aside to the bathroom to say how much he’d been looking forward to an intimate date, where he could give me his full attention. I pulled up a chair and watched the four of them from across the table. My boyfriend turned back to the experimental poet and Claude and Claude’s boyfriend, and he said something in French. When had he learned French? It sounded beautiful. Everyone laughed, and then they each said something in French. I didn’t know French, and I couldn’t think of any English words either. When I tried to remember facts or stories or the types of questions people asked each other, I could only remember things no one wanted to know: the calories in an egg, the vitamin A in a baby carrot boiled in water with salt.
“I’m sorry we’re speaking French,” my boyfriend said.
“We?” I said. “We?”
Where did he get off being a we with my friends? I sipped my martini very fast to communicate something, but my boyfriend didn’t ever know what anything meant.
My boyfriend said, “I thought it would make Claude feel included. He seemed left out.”
In French, Claude was a real chatterbox, a life of the party. My boyfriend had brought him right out of his shell. I’d forgotten my boyfriend was charming, or that he could be. It made it all the more offensive that to me he was despotic and stifling. He held in all of his energy and humor and curiosity, so he could save it up and use it to charm other men in front of me.
I bet he’d saved up his semen and orgasms too. I tried to remember if there had been tissues on the bed this morning.
I tried to imagine what he was saying in French. The only French words I knew were ménage a trois and jouissance, so I was on the lookout for those. Other than that, I had to guess. I imagined he was complimenting Claude’s bravery and intellect, traits I was too stupid to even perceive in Claude, though surely they were obvious to someone as observant as my boyfriend. When he wanted to, like when he talked to Claude, he could see all the good in a person. In me he saw nothing at all.
I imagined what he was saying to the experimental poet. I imagined the experimental poet was blowing his mind with innovative ideas about language. I imagined my boyfriend now finally appreciated literature, even though I wrote poetry too sometimes and had shown him some. To me, he said, “I just don’t get poetry.”
Then why did he love the experimental poet’s poems, the ones I figured the experimental poet was translating into French for my boyfriend on the spot? The language of these poems was more abstruse, evasive, and yet, I could tell, as my boyfriend listened to the experimental poet recite his work from memory, he worked hard to understand it, and he came to new knowledge about life, knowledge he could never get from me. There was a new martini in front of me. I must have stood and gotten it. It was full of olives. Six of them. Floating there, an orgy of untouched prostates preserved in some scientific fluid.
That’s when Tony walked in. He was in a sweaty tank top. He was holding a gym bag.
“What’s Tony doing here?”
“Tony!” my boyfriend shouted. “Tony’s MMA gym is right down the street. He studied abroad in Paris, so I texted him to come on over. He’s been wanting to practice his French.”
Had they been practicing French together? Had they been whispering nasally French sex words to each other in gym locker rooms?
Tony slid into the booth beside my boyfriend. There was plenty of space in the booth for Tony. For Tony my boyfriend would defy the laws of physics.
“Tony, man,” my boyfriend said. “Your body is looking incredibly fit.”
He reached over and touched his bare bicep. My boyfriend hadn’t touched me in weeks.
“Bonjour, Michael” Tony said to me.
I did not respond. My boyfriend whispered something in Tony’s ear.
“Oh! I’m sorry. I mean hello Michael.”
“You,” I thought to my boyfriend. “You are an oppressive regime. You have skinned me alive, and you do not even know what I mean!”
But of course, he could not infer what I thought. Of course, he didn’t know how he made me feel. The words he and Tony said were getting quicker and quieter. They were huddling close together. I poured my drink and my olives into my mouth and chewed.
I could feel my chair rising from the floor. My body couldn’t keep it put. Then I was on the ground. Under the table I saw it, Tony’s bandaged hand on my boyfriend’s knee.
“Cheater,” I hissed from the ground. “Cheater!”
But Claude didn’t repeat after me.
“Bathroom,” I said, standing, backing away, watching all their bodies shrink and shrink until I knew I would look small to them too, until maybe they couldn’t see me at all, until I was outside and running. At a corner I watched the glowing red don’t walk hand. It was slapping me. Slap, slap, slap, but I didn’t feel it. That’s the last thing I remember.
I woke up on the sidewalk but not the sidewalk outside the bar. It was dark. My pants were gone and so were my wallet and phone and keys, which had been in my pocket. I was in my crop top. There were tiny rocks in my belly button. My baby blue briefs were dirty from the ground. I didn’t think I’d seen this street before. Had I taken off my own pants? Had someone else? Had my boyfriend come after me? Had Tony? Had I gotten in a fight with Tony? Had he knocked me out? I had no bruises. Had I been drugged and raped? My cock felt fine, not chaffed at all, and my ass didn’t hurt. I checked my legs and stomach and underwear for wet or dried cum. What happened to me and how long ago?
I must’ve gotten too drunk. I had a horrible sense of shame, which I only felt after speaking my mind, which I only did when I was drunk. I couldn’t remember what I’d said. Who had been with me? My boyfriend?
A group of blond girls came up to me. They were wearing native American patterns sewn into crop tops. “Where are your pants?” they screamed. “This is the street! You need to wear pants in the street!”
“You’re bad ladies,” I screamed. “Bad ladies! Witches! You say you know the colors of the wind, but you don’t even listen to the wind!”
Then I hissed at them.
Then I was peeing my name onto the wall, or trying to, but I kept forgetting which letters my penis had to make, and anyway, I was too close to the wall. There was a lot inside me, but it came out slow. It made a dark descending stream. That’s when two guys in blue suits came up to me. “Someone had a good night,” one of them said.
“The experimental poet?” I asked. “What did he say about me? Was I good?”
I hoped I did the right moves and that he liked my body type.
“Once,” I said to the blue men. “My boyfriend said, ‘All your moves are from a list online.’ He read the same one, but he read it a long time ago. He had more practice with the moves. Plus he had new ones, too.”
The suit men didn’t understand. They pointed to their clothes, which were police clothes.
“Kid we’ve gotta arrest you or bring you to the hospital. You’re a menace.”
Yes, that’s it. That’s what I had been, but I said, “No, you’re a menace!”
They asked if I lived somewhere. I said, “No, but my boyfriend does.” I didn’t know if he was still my boyfriend. They asked where. I couldn’t remember where my boyfriend lived. I asked, “What if I know the neighborhood, but can’t remember the address?” I’d held onto it for so long. Was it gone? What about our bed? The chair where I’d hide? What about the MMA sounds? I missed my pots of tepid water I’d heat and reheat. What about my friends?
I said to them, “You don’t understand. You have to take me there. I still have carrots in Tupperware there.” I guess they didn’t hear me. “Please don’t let Tony eat my carrots. Don’t let him lose the weight I should lose.” I looked at my skin. I was glowing red. “This little light of mine,” I sang. “I’m gonna let it shine, shine, shine,” I sang. “I’m a lampshade from hell,” I said to the nice nurse when the ambulance came. “Jessica?” I said. “Jessica, my dear, I’m sorry I’m not who you thought I was.”
When they lifted me into the ambulance, I’d never felt so light. If only my boyfriend could see me. See me see me see me see me. I said it until the words merged together, and without space in between, neither meant anything at all.
Electric Literature is thrilled to reveal the cover for Vanessa Chan’s highly anticipated debut novel, The Storm We Made, which will be published by Marysue Rucci Books in January, 2024.
Malaya, 1945. A family in harrowing danger: a missing teenage son, a youngest daughter locked away in a basement as the only means of preventing her from service as a comfort woman. An angry eldest daughter who can’t avoid drunken Japanese soldiers while working at the tea house, and a violent Japanese occupation that looms ever closer.
It may already be too late for Cecily Alcantara’s family. She blames herself for a decade spent engaged in espionage, dreaming of an “Asia for Asians”, lured by the charming General Fujiwara’s promise of a life that would transcend British Colonialism. Her efforts to usher in a new regime, the even more merciless Japanese occupation, have finally caught up to her. As the war reaches its apex, Cecily’s family hangs in the balance, and she will stop at nothing to save them.
The Storm We Made moves through a decade of pain, triumph, and wartime atrocities. You won’t soon forget the way these characters render the complicated relationship between the colonized and their oppressors, and the question of right and wrong when survival is on the line.
Here is the cover, designed by Vi-An Nguyen.
“Vanessa’s novel is incredibly evocative and rich with detail, so there were many possibilities for this cover–from elements of the plot like a rain-soaked wheelbarrow, to intriguing visual symbols like a rooster or the moon,” says Vi-An Nguyen, the book jacket designer. “And of course the unforgettable characters and vibrant setting. We experimented with all of these ideas and more, but ultimately this gorgeous painting I found from the Malaysian artist Fadilah Karim was perfect. There’s a strong sense of character and movement and the surreal brushstrokes convey the emotional turmoil and scope of the story so well. There’s also a timeless quality to a painting, which makes sense for a novel rooted in history but also so relevant today. I’m so grateful to art director Jaya Miceli for bringing me onto the project.”
TAKSU Galleries, which houses the painting, jumped at the chance to be part of the project, says Judy Yuen, director. “Our gallery was thrilled when we got the request for Fadilah Karim’s artwork image Motion II to be a book cover written by Vanessa Chan. It strengthens the connection between Malaysian art and literature. It just made sense for us to be part of this. A first and significant achievement for TAKSU Galleries. It’s a perfect match when the artwork can complement the theme of the story. We’re proud to be part of this exciting launch and that we can promote Malaysian arts, culture, and history by featuring authentic and local artists.”
Chan feels an immediate, almost-fated connection to this cover, noting how much it personifies the novel’s title. “As soon as I saw this cover as an option, I knew. I felt startled, awakened, and remember blinking in wonder. The boldness, the person in motion – denoting, to my mind, a person who IS a storm, a reflection of the four main characters in the book who are all flashpoints to their communities, friends, and country. In fact, if you look closely, a fiery horizon is reflected in her face. I also love the directness of the font and how unquestioning it is. When I learned that the art was a piece by Malaysian artist Fadilah Karim, it felt meant to be – a Malaysian author, writing about Malaysia, with art by a Malaysian artist. Our team has fondly given the person on the cover a superhero name – Miss Blur, our perfect storm. I am beyond grateful to Fadilah Karim, TAKSU gallery, and Vi-An Nguyen, who found this personification of everything my novel represents. No questions, no edits – this was THE one.”
The Storm We Made will be published by Marysue Rucci books on January 2nd, 2024, and is available for preorder here.
Like magic, narrative rearranges the world through words, and Kelly Link is one of modern fiction’s boldest alchemists. Her stories (which have now been collected into five books, and garnered Link a MacArthur “Genius Grant,” among other honors) make the familiar so strange it’s almost familiar again, spinning straw into ghosts and ghosts into disgruntled exes. What happens, then, when the bard of the workaday weird sets her sights on fairy tales, a genre already firmly grounded in the impossible, a literature in which animals talk and potions swiftly transform? A trip within a trip within a trip, to be sure—but one whose longings, joys, and betrayals remain stingingly human.
The fairy tales that form the basis for each story in Link’s new collection, White Cat, Black Dog, draw upon a wide range of traditions, from Grimm classics to Scottish ballads to Norwegian folklore. Fairy tales are well-loved source materials for modern reimaginings, but the stories of White Cat stray wonderfully far from their sources; they’re not so much straight updates as they are fever dreams by the original characters that we’ve been permitted to step inside. Hansel and Gretel become android siblings marooned on a distant planet; hell’s royals brunch and bitch in modern-day Manhattan; Snow-White arrives at a house sitting gig where the instructions are scant but the magic mushrooms abundant. Into an ancient tradition of one-dimensional heroes and unbearably happy endings, White Cat instills the contradictions of real personality and relationships both fragile and tender. Slowly, these stories suggest that human desire is the dankest magic of all, every bit as likely to betray us as it is to save us.
Over email, Link and I discussed what keeps fairy tales forever in our cultural imagination, how growing up religious shaped her own “personal superstitions” around life and writing, and the two-sided coin of humor and horror.
Chelsea Davis: Rules—often arbitrary, always ominous—shape many fairy tales, and most of the stories in White Cat. Don’t let anyone enter the front door; don’t visit your lover unless it’s snowing; and (my favorite) don’t hunker down for the night in a home that doesn’t have a corpse inside. How do explicit rules activate or shape a story?
Kelly Link: I love thinking about rules! I’m deeply interested in the relationship that we have with them as members of a family, or a social group, or a culture. They mark out the territory in which we (or our characters) live our lives. When thinking about imaginary people, a useful approach is to consider what rules they live by, which rules they break, and the consequences or freedoms that occur as a result.
When I was a kid, I was fascinated and horrified by all sorts of rules: Don’t wear white after Labor Day! Wear pantyhose with skirts. Never wear navy and black together. Don’t take candy from a stranger.
I was a preacher’s kid, and aside from all the familiar stuff about virginity, and not taking the Lord’s name in vain, there were weirder, more interesting rules about not eating shellfish, or wearing certain fibers together, or not suffering a witch to live. (Though the two rules about loving your neighbor as yourself, and doing unto others as you would have them do unto you still seem like good practice.)
When thinking about imaginary people, a useful approach is to consider what rules they live by, which rules they break, and the consequences or freedoms that occur as a result.
Personal superstitions are interesting to me, too, and how they function as rules—for example, I have a rule that as much as I love Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey and Maturin novels, I can never read another one. When my daughter was born at 24 weeks, I read the first three books in the series in the NICU while sitting beside her isolette. But each time I started one, she would have a life-threatening crisis, and so I finally put the series down forever. Even now, when she is perfectly healthy, I have a horror of picking up the fourth book, just in case I summon up some bad luck again.
Horror and fairy tales are two of my favorite forms of narrative, and those are both genres where rules loom large. Don’t smell wolfsbane. Be kind to animals. Don’t invite strangers over the threshold. Don’t step on a crack. Don’t be greedy, don’t say thank you to fairies, but do listen to birds, but don’t blow on a whistle that you find on the beach, but always be polite to old ladies. I love rules that feel nonsensical and fraught with weight at the same time. I love when rules are inverted. The introduction of a rule tells the reader that story is going to follow, and hopefully the consequences will in some way be surprising or fresh.
CD: Fairy tales have been the wellspring of countless modernizations, adaptations, riffs. You yourself wrote an introduction to a reissue of one of the best-known iterations of this—Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber. In your mind, what qualities of fairy tales make them so inviting for artists and writers to reimagine?
KL: The original fairy tales have a brisk, conversational tone, as if they’re being told to you directly even though they’re words on the page. Maybe that makes them lodge in the brain more firmly? We often hear or read them first in childhood, and often more than once, or in more than one shape or version. Right from the start, they feel like shapeshifters.
There’s also the lack of psychological realism—once you begin to apply psychology to the characters, or allow those characters the narrative space to have deeper, more complicated reactions to pretty traumatic events (death, abandonment, parental cruelty), fairy tales become different kinds of beasts. Or else you can keep the characters relatively flat, and change the setting instead, or make the language more estranging or more personal. The patterns of fairy tales, too, are so recognizable that introducing even the smallest piece of those patterns—“once upon a time,” for example —means the language of the story that follows becomes charged. Readers will pay closer attention to the appearance of animals (talking or not), or colors, or, say, repetitions of three.
White Cat, Black Dog is dedicated to Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, who edited a series of anthologies of retold fairy tales—I learned a great deal by seeing how the same fairy tale could become something completely new in the hands of different writers, all with their own, particular points of view and sensibilities.
CD: You’ve said in other interviews that your past collections have come together in an organic way—from disparate stories you’ve already written, rather than from your sitting down and setting out to Write A Collection. Did this collection come about equally incidentally, or was there an idea of a Project from the beginning? It has such a clear thematic focus.
KL: The earliest story in this collection is “The Lady and the Fox,” which draws on Tam Lin, a ballad, rather than a fairy tale, but the next two were “The Game of Smash and Recovery” and “The White Cat’s Divorce,” which was specifically written to accompany a museum exhibition of fairy tale art. So as I was working on that story I was thinking a lot about fairy tales. I’d also read Daniel Lavery’s collection The Merry Spinster, and had been thinking about how much I loved the tone created by those stories in concert.
Humor and horror are both doors into story for me—and inside a story, they’re paths to understanding or rearranging situations.
I often set up a rule or two when I’m starting a new story, and it seemed like a good project to make a rule for a group of stories this time, which would be to use fairy tale approaches, or motifs, or language each time, even if indirectly. “The Game of Smash and Recovery” is the only story where I didn’t begin with this rule, but it moved into conversation with “Hansel and Gretel” in obvious ways once I added the subtitle. It’s been useful for me to think, during revision, about the stories or genre patterns a particular story is in conversation with, as I go forward. This time I started when I had an idea for a story, before I had any words on the page.
CD: The exact nature of the “influence” between original and new fairy tale seems to vary wildly and wonderfully throughout White Cat. Some of your stories borrow a character relation (the orphaned siblings of “Hansel and Gretel” become two mechanical beings marooned on a strange planet in “Game of Smash and Recovery”), for instance, while others compress the original fairy tale into an interpolated story (a bit of airplane smalltalk in “The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear”). Could you choose a story from White Cat and talk about how it arose, and how its finished form is in conversation (or argument) with the original?
KL: “Skinder’s Veil” came out of a story that I couldn’t quite figure out how to write in an interesting enough way. This was going to be a version of “The Juniper Tree” in which a girl made repeated visits to a swimming pool where her mother had drowned, and in which the pool gave her mostly unhelpful advice. There’s a very small fragment of this still in “Skinder’s Veil,” but mostly that particular fairy tale got eaten up by “Snow-White and Rose-Red,” which of course was swallowed up by the story of a graduate student with an unusual house sitting job. Because “Snow-White and Rose-Red” was the kernel at the heart of the larger story, I knew there would be animal visitors, and two sisters. Because I often have a hard time sitting down to write, I wanted to write a kind of story where that was the main problem, and where the protagonist got some very unexpected and slightly disturbing aid with the work he needed to do. I suppose there’s a bit of “Rapunzel” in there as well.
CD: Something I really relish about your fiction is the way it manages to knock me off balance with its humor. Often, you’ll immerse the reader in pitch-dark subject matter (grief, death, violence)… and still manage to make her chuckle. A kind of meta-commentary on this emerges in “The White Road,” which is among this collection’s grimmest stories: it has the feel of a medieval plague tale, except the plague is not a disease, but shape-shifting monsters that emerge at night to murder and maim. Yet the story also contains wry asides and farcical events; even the narrator says he can’t decide whether his brushes with paranormal body horror count as comedy or tragedy. How do you think about the relationship between violence and humor in art? Do you find yourself consciously injecting humor into your stories?
KL: Humor and horror are both doors into story for me—and inside a story, they’re paths to understanding or rearranging situations in which otherwise I (and perhaps the reader) might be overwhelmed in the most uninteresting ways. I reach for humor consciously because I have to reach for most things consciously when I write. And now I’m wondering if that might be an interesting rule to set for myself—to set aside even small bits of comedy. Argh.
CD: Cats appear in all of your short fiction collections, and in nearly every story (and the title) of White Cat. What keeps you coming back to cats?
KL: Perhaps it’s simply this—I love cats but can’t have one because I’m mildly allergic and my husband is even more so. But I do have a black dog now, who is sleeping on the couch next to me as I write this. She has terrible dreams, and every once in a while I have to stop typing to tell her everything’s okay.
CD: You run a small press, publish a zine, and have edited anthologies like The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror from St. Martin’s Press. In what ways have the acts of editing, curating, and anthologizing others’ work shaped your own writing process over the years?
KL: Mostly I’m just very grateful for how much good short fiction there is out there in the world, whether we get to publish it or not. I like editing, I like conversations with writers about the experience of reading their work, I love leading workshops and listening to writers talk about what they took away from someone else’s story, things that I didn’t even notice. What I take away from workshop is other people’s approach to reading and making meaning, so that I can attempt to apply those approaches to my own fiction. I spend a great deal of time considering what shapes or meanings very different readers might make out of what I’m writing, and sometimes I’m attempting to anticipate or guide those meanings. Mostly what I want to do is make as much space as possible for those varied shapes and meanings that seem interesting to me.
Oh, and reading slush has taught me that a poorly written story that takes risks and does some large and unexpected things is more interesting than a well-written story that doesn’t do anything surprising.
CD: Are there any patterns in what catches your attention, as an editor and a reader? In other words: what lights a spark for you, in another author’s story?
I want a sense that something important is happening, whether it’s language, or an event, or a need to connect and communicate.
KL: It’s very difficult to get across what I mean by this, but anything at the start of a story which persuades me that there is some authority or conviction here. That this is a story which the writer feels strongly about telling, and where the situation feels urgent or at least necessary to put down in words. I want a sense that something important is happening, whether it’s language, or an event, or a need to connect and communicate. I don’t need a big move or a wild first sentence, but I do want a feeling that there is something at stake. My friend Holly Black says a story or a novel makes a promise on the first page about what will matter in the story. This might be a character, or a need, or a genre, or an approach toward language and rhythm. I want a sense of what is being promised, and to trust that the writer is going to take me somewhere interesting.
CD: Last I heard, your first novel, Book of Love, was slated for release in 2024. Is that still the case? And how has the experience of writing a novel differed from that of writing short stories?
KL: Well, the novel is a beast—a much bigger book than I’d hoped to write. It’s now lumbering toward copy edits, and I’ve sent it out to various friends and readers. The most surprising thing to me was that it’s not possible to hold all of a novel, past a certain word count, (say 60,000 words) in your head. I’m used to being able to move back and forward in a story, revising backward as I write forward. With the novel, I could keep hold of the ending, which I knew, and of the beginning, but I kept forgetting bits and pieces of the middle, even as I was writing it. And when I was finished, I felt a bit flattened by the experience of rereading it.
I’m used to the particular pleasure of a collection, which is that there are many different stories written in different keys, so to speak. There can be a great variation in tone, in sensibility, in speed of movement, and in the general matter or question of what’s at stake. There’s liveliness and movement to a collection, whereas a novel is one mostly coherent thing. I spent so much time writing it that it felt strange to have it be all one object, if that makes sense. Perhaps I thought I would be a different kind of writer while I was writing a novel? And so it felt disheartening to finish it and still be myself, so to speak. But now I’m thinking about writing another novel, and maybe that one will do the business of translating me into something new and surprising.
I’m in the fourth exam room with one of my last patients of the day, late afternoon light streaming in through the windows behind him. We’re about to go over the results of his scans after several months of therapy for metastatic kidney cancer, and as I turn from the computer screen, squinting against the glare, I clear my throat once again. This is a routine I know well. But as I begin to tell him what we’ve found, I find my train of thought interrupted by the insistent strings of the battle theme from the recently released console role playing game Persona 5 Royal. Outwardly, everything proceeds as normal—the right words still come, and I tell him that the pills seem to be working, that we need to continue them every day. Yet my discordant mental soundtrack continues as a strange counterpoint, testing my waning powers of concentration.
Later that day, while I’m writing progress notes in my upstairs office, my focus breaks again, the pixels of the computer screen reforming themselves from lines of bland text into the animations that accompany the special combination attacks in the game. Every hour brings more evidence that the boundaries between worlds are not as solid as they once appeared.
It began with my wife’s desire to have a child, which became our desire, which came up against years of failed fertility procedures.
I know I’ve been spending too much time in the alternate reality Tokyo of Persona 5—mashing buttons to control my party traveling the in-game Metaverse, plotting my teenage characters’ social lives to gain new abilities. There’s real-world work to be done, after all. Taxes to be finished, messages from my cancer patients to be answered, and, of course, the paperwork for the interminable surrogacy process, which is itself the terrible culmination of the nearly five years of infertility my wife and I continue to stumble through. Yet, increasingly entranced by the all-consuming world of the game, its reality now bleeding into mine, I have neither the wish nor the will to turn away.
Persona 5 Royal gives the player control of a group of Japanese teenagers navigating high-school life, fusing this drama with that of their eventual quest to find the cause of a mysterious, high-profile series of psychotic breakdowns across the country. A role-playing game, it invites the player to very literally take on the roles of these characters as the peaks and valleys of their everyday lives are further intensified with the white-knuckle responsibility of saving their world. There’s a similarity between how the “real lives” of the characters in Persona become irrevocably entwined with their alter egos’ quest to save “the world”, and how my day-to-day life is slowly melding with the game. Daily disappointments feel smoothed out by Persona’s narcotic narrative. I fight a growing urge to wrap it totally around myself like a thick woolen blanket, keep warm, keep the darkness out. I want to live in that feeling.
Some days later, my wife and I are at our long wooden dining table, a laptop open between us. We’re on a video call with a psychologist who will determine our mental fitness to proceed with surrogacy. I think about how we got here, how it began with my wife’s desire to have a child, which became our desire to have a child, which came up against years of failed fertility procedures, false hopes, thousands of dollars paid, and a single, cursed miscarriage. Desire unextinguished, each disappointment is a redirection, not an end. Swept up in this current, lack of control can feel like a failure of will – maybe we just hadn’t wanted it badly enough—and with that thought, desire shrinks into desperation, a hope that a single success could wash away the whole sorry mess. We smile, move through the boilerplate conversation, the theme music again playing in my head, now the constant accompaniment to the ebb and flow of the world around me. “Tell me about your relationship,” the kindly psychologist says. The tune reaches a climax, and I think I know what to say.
The illusion of control is especially seductive, distinguishing video games from the escape of a good book or television series.
I turn Persona back on that night, tapping buttons to use my items, make connections with characters in the game, move the plot forward. I’ve loved games like these for years. While in elementary school, I was allowed to rent one for my Super Nintendo once every three months. I don’t know how my parents came up with that number, but for all its arbitrariness, the rule remained ironclad. Weeks of research went into each decision—poring over copies of Nintendo Power and Electronic Gaming Monthly, talking to my friends at school about what they were playing. The night before each trip to Video Giant off East Frank Phillips in the middle of Bartlesville, Oklahoma, I couldn’t sleep with excitement, wondering if my first choice would be there on the shelves. When we finally pulled up to the store in our Toyota the next morning, I raced to the far wall, where the game rentals were displayed on long, parallel shelves that, in my childhood, seemed to stretch on forever.
Each rectangular box was a portal to another world. When I was in elementary school, my favorites were side-scrolling platformers like Super Mario World, but I became drawn to role-playing games the older I got—the wacky alternative reality of Earthbound, the freewheeling time-travel of Chrono Trigger, the steampunk fantasy of FFIII. The finely drawn details of their imaginary worlds were what most captivated me. Though they seemed endless, they also seemed understandable, knowable in a way that what passed for the real world often was not. When my mom went to Wal-Mart on the weekend to get groceries, I begged to go along so I could go to the electronics department and read the guidebooks to whatever RPG I was playing at the time. I liked to know how much damage Mallow’s attacks caused in Super Mario RPG, how many hit points the pizza in Earthbound replenished. I liked to look at the details of all the inventory in the stores I’d find a little further on in Lufia II—what the shields and armor looked like, what they did. When I came home, I’d draw up my own detailed catalogs with pencils and paper, listing the attributes of all the battle gear I dreamed up.
Persona 5 Royal takes the average gamer over one hundred hours to complete. That’s time right after work, stolen hours later in the night. I recently talked to a good friend of mine, a busy neurologist, a father of three kids, who told me how the similarly all-consuming Elden Ring was ruining his life, its allure driving him to stay up far past midnight for weeks in a row. I dallied with pen and paper RPGs, but the console experience is what I’ve always loved most. Those hours on my own long after everyone else has gone to sleep, just me and the game, night after night, week after week, drawing deeper into a narrative that seems under my control.
The only guarantee is that it’ll go on until you have a child or until your emotional endurance or your savings run out.
The illusion of control is especially seductive, distinguishing video games from the escape of a good book or television series. Control over not only my character’s actions, but over their long term strengthening, their accrual of new powers and abilities. The Japanese RPGs I loved best followed a particular arc – you’d start off as a spiky haired young kid in some corner of a weirdly named empire, and you’d soon get sucked into a conflict regarding the renewal of a long forgotten magical power or something. As you passed through dungeons, towns, and the open land between, you’d be assaulted with random enemies. They’d start off slightly stronger than you, but as you battled them and gained experience, you’d soon become slightly stronger than them. Then you’d go on to the area’s boss, who maybe you’d beat the first time through. If you didn’t, you could retreat and battle some more underlings until you’d become strong enough to beat the boss and go on. It was a game mechanic derisively called “grinding”, a cheap way to side-step difficulty. Yet I still loved that if I put in enough time, any in-game challenge was surmountable. The story inevitably moved forward.
A few weeks after our interview, we receive an approval from the psychologist over email. There is no celebration. Wearily anticipating the next steps, I boot up Persona, taking Yusuke, Ryuji, and Ann with me into the tortured psyche of an evil fast food magnate. As I battle sentient robots with deftly timed special attacks, I think about what’s next, all the medical testing and legal discussions. What awaits afterwards looms even larger. There is no guarantee, after all, that even with an apparently healthy embryo, a surrogate lined up, and the papers signed that what comes next will progress the way in which we dream. There is no guarantee. I move my left thumb and the characters on the screen move along with it; I tap my right index finger and they loot a treasure chest.
But what does this control mean, really, in a totally determined world, one planned out by programmers at a game company? Skill matters some, the hours I put in, but in the end the outcomes are finite—either a “good” ending or a “bad” one. Perhaps what I really want isn’t control after all, but some assurance that the arc will all make sense, that I’ll fight longer and longer and get stronger and stronger and then there’ll be an end, for good or for bad, and then it’ll all be over.
That’s the thing about infertility: there are no assurances of a compelling narrative, no promises of a dramatic ending. The only guarantee is that it’ll go on until you have a child or until your emotional endurance or your savings run out.Some of our good friends entered the world of infertility alongside us for a while and succeeded with their first or second round of IVF. The experience for them will be a footnote to a story they’ll one day tell their wide-eyed children. What story will we one day tell? And to whom? Someday at brunch—we tried for a long time and then we didn’t anymore.
I’ve lived through so many narratives that were true for a while and now are not—I’m an Indian kid living in Oklahoma; I’m an assassin in Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion; I’m a medical student; I’m a survivor of nuclear annihilation in Fallout III. All have passed from present to past tense, the stories about what I could once say about myself as real or unreal as anything on my Xbox. Now, I advance through the labyrinths of Persona 5, destroying the perverted desires of the corrupt authority figures that populate the game world, still hoping that the story of our infertility can reach its own narrative climax, whatever that is. Drifting through time, moving from story to story, hoping that ours is interesting, or at least makes sense before receding irrevocably into the past. Plot has become the enemy of presence. The way I make sense of my past shifts constantly, my thoughts consumed with events that can’t be changed. The desires for what I wish I had now and in the future have become ways to be dissatisfied with all that the present gives me. If happiness exists, it can only be here, it can only be now. But I don’t know how to do anything but keep looking ahead: towards the next boss fight, towards a future I hope will finally bring my wife and I what we think we need. Just for tonight, I want to stay in the world of Persona 5 Royal, pushing aside questions of deeper meaning—if only for the length of the next turn-based battle, one step closer to leveling up.
In Gina Chung’s stunning debut novel, Sea Change, the familiar and unfamiliar mix harmoniously. A 30-year-old woman, Ro, finds herself adrift, struggling with a tense relationship with her mother, the disappearance of her father, a breakup with an ex who has left for Mars, and an unhealthy attachment to a cocktail called a “sharktini.” To cope with it all, Ro becomes attached to a very large color-changing octopus at the aquarium she works at. When the octopus, Dolores, may be taken away, all the crumbling pieces in Ro’s life come to a head.
Full disclosure: Gina is one of my closest friends. I was one of the first readers of the earliest drafts of Sea Change and remember losing myself so thoroughly in the novel that I did not notice it was raining on me through my open window. Gina and I spend most days texting each other funny, mundane things, while at the same time trying, together, to figure out this new life as emerging authors. We talked about Sea Change via email and text—discussing pandemic novel-writing and the many millennial anxieties that Gina renders so well in her novel—fraught parental relationships, frustrating breakups, uneven female friendships, and the idea that nothing is forever. This interview is a distilling of the expansive conversations we have had about this novel since Gina started writing it during the earliest, and toughest parts of the pandemic.
Vanessa Chan: What does the title, Sea Change mean?
Gina Chung: I sort of landed on the title on a whim, but over time, I realized that it did encapsulate one of the major themes in my novel. My protagonist Ro has gone through a lot of changes and upheavals, including the loss of her father and a major breakup. But change is inevitable, right? And one of the ways that we cope with change is to expand and grow alongside whatever is happening to us, sometimes without even realizing it. Transformation is evolution, ultimately, and I wanted to explore, with this novel, how change can be a source of both pain and growth.
VC: In this novel, the main character, Ro feels a persistent suspicion that everyone leaves her – her ex, her father, even her mother, and her best friend. She panics when Dolores, an octopus she has developed an attachment to at the aquarium she works at, might be sent away to a wealthy buyer. What draws you to this theme of abandonment?
Transformation is evolution, ultimately, and I wanted to explore how change can be a source of both pain and growth.
GC: As the oldest child in an immigrant family that experienced periods of emotional upheaval and precarity when I was growing up, I was always both very fearful of abandonment and very desirous of my independence. When I got a little older, I remember being so excited to grow up, to become an adult who didn’t have to rely solely on my family for support or survival. So, it’s a theme that comes up a lot in my fiction, this idea of leaving or being left. My emotional problems aside, I really enjoy, as a writer, thinking about how my characters’ desires for both closeness and freedom (desires which we all have, in differing degrees) might conflict with one another at times. From a craft perspective, it helped me understand all of Ro’s unspoken fears, the anxieties she can only voice to herself. I think Ro equates attachment with abandonment, and it’s only through learning how to trust others and herself that she can unlearn that association.
VC: Ro’s touchy relationship with her Umma and her obsession with her absent Apa are some of the most emotionally resonant parts of the novel, as is Ro’s constant suspicion that she is disappointing them. As the novel progresses, we see Ro wondering if in fact, her parents were simply disappointed in each other. Can you talk to us about this realization, and about parents and children?
GC: I think Ro has internalized her parents’ disappointments and believes that she must be the root cause of them. But I wanted her, over the course of the novel, to come to understand that her parents are their own people, who had their own hopes and dreams before they ever met and had children, and that their marital problems had nothing to do with her. It’s only in understanding and accepting this that she’s able to heal herself too.
For many immigrant families, there’s so much pressure to succeed and find security, and when you’re preoccupied with trying to find a foothold in this country, it’s difficult to find time and energy to tackle the other stuff. My parents are immigrants from Korea, and as someone who also grew up in a household where we didn’t talk about our feelings and where there were a lot of expectations—both implicit and explicit—to live up to, I think it’s so important for us to understand how to break cycles of silence, to learn to live in a different way, while at the same time extending compassion and love for our parents, as much as we can, and to our younger selves.
VC: Yoonhee, Ro’s best friend who she worries is drifting away, is a source of a lot of warmth and humor throughout the novel. She’s a mirror to Ro’s perceived inadequacies, but Ro also knows Yoonhee’s deepest, saddest insecurities. Why are female friendships important, in life and in fiction writing?
For many immigrant families, there’s so much pressure to succeed and find security.
GC: Female friendships are everything! I love fiction that tackles friendship in a serious, layered way, and that treats it with the same consideration that romantic relationships get everywhere else. You and I talk about this all the time, but I feel so lucky to have so many beautiful friendships with other women, where we can be vulnerable and safe and goofy, where we can talk about everything from the big emotional stuff to the small ridiculousnesses of the everyday. In terms of fiction writing, female friendship is such rich territory, especially when it comes to navigating coming-of-age. Friends are important at any age, but when you’re a young person who hasn’t really come into their own yet, your friends are literally everything to you, and, as you said, they can serve as a mirror for all your perceived inadequacies, but also your strengths. In writing Ro and Yoonhee’s friendship, I wanted to show how these two very different women can still appreciate and admire each other even when they clash, and how much they need each other.
VC: The novel takes place in a sort of parallel future—where climate change means that there is an expedition to Mars to build a human colony, where octopuses are unusually large. But this is not a dystopian novel preoccupied with alternate realities. Sea Change is focused on the familiar—millennial grief, parent-child relationships, breakups, female friendship, annoying colleagues. How did you come to this choice—to set the novel in a slightly different place, but center familiar themes?
GC: I’m always thinking about how my characters would behave in a given scenario, and I think it’s especially fascinating when you can place your characters in a situation that is ever so slightly “off” or altered from our own reality. In writing Sea Change, I knew that I wanted Dolores the giant Pacific octopus to be larger than life, and even more fantastical. I also thought having Ro and her ex Tae’s breakup center around the fact that he is leaving the planet to join a mission to colonize Mars would further raise the emotional stakes around their parting. It made me curious about what kind of person would be interested in joining such an endeavor, and what would happen to the people they had left behind.
VC: There’s a lot of humor in Sea Change which balances out the more serious elements of the book, for example when Ro thinks about how her best friend “talks like an Instagram caption.” And of course, you’ve written the Pushcart Prize-winning story “Mantis” in which a praying mantis hilariously contemplates finding love. What brings you to humor?
GC: Being able to find the humor in a situation, no matter how challenging it might be, is super important to me. It also helps to add emotional contrast to a story, when you have what’s otherwise a sad or difficult situation, but you add something surprising to it, in the form of a joke or a funny image. It’s like when you’re making a dish and you add contrasting but complementary flavors that enhance one another. I also think humor is an important tool for winning over a reader. It’s not that I need everything that I read to be funny, but when a book makes me laugh, I’m immediately way more invested.
VC: New Jersey suburban and mall culture is one of the most prominent settings of Sea Change. What’s your relationship with NJ? Is it an ongoing preoccupation?
GC: I was born in Queens, but when I was about three, my parents moved us to the New Jersey suburbs. I never really thought about my relationship to New Jersey while growing up, and it wasn’t until I went away for college that I learned to appreciate the particular nuances of the Korean American New Jersey community that I grew up in. My family lived in a very small, very white town, but when we ran errands or went out to get Korean food on the weekends, we had access to all these Korean restaurants, grocery stores, and businesses in the towns outside of ours. Because we were also an extremely churchgoing family, we were very connected to all the other Korean American churchgoing families in the North Jersey region. It was a very insular world, in some ways. But during the other days of the week when I was at school, I was surrounded mostly by white people, many of whom were completely unfamiliar with Korea and its history at the time. That kind of cultural whiplash was something I was always navigating as a kid. I guess you could say that New Jersey, or my particular experiences of the larger Korean/Korean American New Jersey extended universe, are an enduring preoccupation in my work.
VC: Sea Change is a novel without a villain. You have skillfully made us love and recognize all the characters. Was this intentional? Why?
I’m very interested in the question of how we can stay in relationships with one another when we’ve hurt each other or let each other down.
GC: I don’t think I was consciously thinking about this while writing the novel, but I did want all of my characters, even the minor ones, to feel fully considered and textured. I wanted to depict a world in which everyday people are ultimately trying their best, even when they hurt one another or themselves. I love villains and villain-y in fiction, but I think I’m most interested in writing about people who, even when they do morally questionable things, are doing them for understandable reasons. I’m very interested in the question of how we can stay in relationships with one another when we’ve hurt each other or let each other down. Sometimes it’s possible; sometimes it’s not. That space in between is such a fertile and fraught place. I wanted to stay there as much as possible while writing this novel, and to write about a character who is trying to repair those places within herself.
VC: I see Sea Change as being in conversation with other novels with millennial women trying, flailing, and needing to figure things out (think Goodbye Vitamin by Rachel Khong, Luster by Raven Leilani, Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier). The gift of those novels, and of yours, is, like real people, the characters do not solve easily. What drew you to this character archetype? Do you imagine your book narrators at parties together?
GC: I love this question and the idea of Ro hanging out with the protagonists of those novels, all of which I love and consider to be emotional touchstones for Sea Change. I sort of have a love-hate relationship with the “sad girl” archetype itself, since it’s often used to flatten or dismiss these kinds of coming-of-age stories in which the protagonists are often young, female or femme-identified, and figuring themselves out and making bad decisions along the way (so much of Western literature is devoted to “sad boy / sad man” stories, only they don’t get called that!). But I also really appreciate and gravitate to these kinds of stories because, honestly, life is sad and hard a lot of the time, and it’s important to acknowledge the hardships of being femme and female in this world (not to mention being a person of color and/or queer). At the same time, I think all of those books that you mentioned, and hopefully my own, are also funny and full of life, and the characters, as you say “do not solve easily”—the emotional ambivalence and the searching quality that their stories have is actually what leads them to an understanding of what they need and want.
VC: Who did you write this book for?
GC: I wrote this book for anybody who’s ever felt like Ro—lost, confused, unseen, and unconvinced that anything will ever happen to change that. I also wrote it for my younger self, the childhood version of me who often felt so alone and invisible and was also deeply angry and sad about it at times. I feel so joyful to be writing at a time when so many more Asian American and BIPOC voices are being championed, and the fact that Sea Change gets to exist in this world and in conversation with so many wonderful books, including the ones you mentioned above, feels like more than I could have ever dreamed of.
Author’s Note: These pieces are written in the style called “skaz”—a term coined by early-Soviet Formalists to describe an oral bard’s voice on the page. Somewhere between prose poetry, theatrical performance, and rambling essays—dense and personal, holding eye contact with the reader. It was particularly popular in Ukraine, where skaz’s greatest practitioner, Nikolay Gogol, grew up and where I, too, lived for the first fifteen years of my life.
More Comment Than Question
“This is more of a comment than a question . . . ” You know how people in the crowd always say that at talks and readings? There’s a certain sweet shamelessness about it. And a sense of dread, of hopeless inevitability, that’s released in the room and whose fingers immediately start straining the face of the presenter.
Well, what you’re about to read here is also more of a comment than a question.
Who is the comment for—I mean, whose talk am I responding to? That’s hard to pin down. Maybe Aesthetics? Or maybe my parents—as a source of discourse? Beauty, or immigrant expectations?
I must have been five or six at the time. We went on our annual summer vacation—this time, to Sochi, a town on the Black Sea, which was further out from my native Ukraine, and closer to Georgia, hot and dreamy the way old resorts are, conceived, in principle, to plunge you into a hallucination of sun reflected off the water. I remember almost nothing about the trip except for that hallucinatory feeling of irrational well-being, luxurious and fragrant and unfamiliar: and cedars, and new kinds of flowers, and enormous furry peaches.
And then there’s this one memory, the only one real anchor. The first morning there, I tottered out into the courtyard where we were staying, and spotted a peacock. It was my first peacock: I’d never even seen one on a photograph or in a movie. All I knew was the word, pavlin—a word that rung with inaccessible dignity, untouchable distance—but somehow, seeing it, I immediately knew what was in front of me. I was stunned, exhilarated.
And then, as I gaped at it, the peacock opened its mouth, and produced the most vile sound I’ve ever heard in my life. It was peering towards the trees, shouting towards some invisible presence within the branches. It couldn’t possibly have been a mating call. Could not possible be. Certainly not one that would warrant any kind of a response. Maybe it was a defeatist, self-sabotaging mating gasp—there’s a lot of poetry like that.
As far as birdsongs go, it was definitely more of a comment than a question.
The other day we sat around the table. It was my birthday, one of those easily divisible ones. The subject of the conversation was our shared forgetting—the big swaths of life that we have no access to, whole selves that are gone and can only be vaguely smelled from the pages of books we were reading at the time, or pictures we half-smiled from. Immigration, and other forms of decorated trauma hung thick in the air.
When I drink, a lot and quickly, in a brief short-lived rise, I sometimes see across time. That was the case at this birthday gathering. We sat together at the table, and I saw chipped bits, cracks of our forgotten lives pirouetting from our eyes, and, as we refilled our glasses, we drank them, drank each other’s rescued contraband memories.
It was there and then that my Sochi peacock wondered into the scene, and I remembered him for the first time in many decades. A memory coming through a distance like that comes wrapped in a few tears, that’s just a given. But why did I remember Sochi peacock on my birthday? Was it a present the subconscious shoved my way? Did the peacock shout louder than other inhabitants of my loosening and disappearing world? Or is it just the sort of a thing that friends do for each other when they sit together and tell stories, and I forgot that this was still possible? Was I hearing my parents’ laugher—at my helplessness and dismay as I attempted to comprehend the disparity between that tail and that voice? That voice and this tale?
I came to America as a teenage student and stayed, stayed, stayed, through endless visa iterations and law tightenings, through all those moments when it felt as if my status here was a frail validation of my existence, graciously extended for another year, or about to be pulled out from under me at any moment. It is hard to hold one’s history when it stems from such an alien world—the one you dread being thrust back into in your worst nightmare of bureaucratic outcomes. You want to erase its pathways inside of you so you would never have to risk going back. All of us, at that birthday table, were kind of like that too, worn by these overlaying, unwelcomed allegiances—and as we drank and talked, it was as if these allegiances became people, and we were these people’s jeans.
No question about it.
God, Dog, Daughter
You’ve all heard it at some point: “language isn’t enough.” Or even: “a poem that’s reaching the edge of the unspeakable”—you may even have said it yourself, or even worse, to yourself, quietly, like? And if you are Paul Celan that’s one thing, but if you merely sitting and reading, or getting up to congratulate someone, or wish them well when they’re sick, or if you’re sick in love and you want to congratulate the object of your affection, language should be adequate for covering the ground you’re standing on. Even if you’re standing on a shred of the abstract. Don’t tell me the “true meaning” of this or that is too precious to be captured in words, as if language just flails and stops short in front of the vast abyss of silence somewhere at the bottom of which, on the unshrinkable god-couch, a brilliant pre-lingual understanding of your experience resides.
Never mind all that: What I was getting up to tell you about is the two times I did enter Silence. In neither of the two situations was it the matter of language’s insufficiency or inadequacy. And even the great void, which many of my poet friends talk about—I saw no void to speak of. It was precisely the opposite.
The first time it happened, I was seven years old. I was biking fast, tearing down a steep hill after my friend. There were these parks all over Ukraine that weren’t exactly parks, for they were neither cultivated nor marked. They were just these “nothing-there” patches of the world left alone by people who lived near them. And we were wild street kids, hanging out in these so-called parks, or maybe my friend was a wild street kid and I imagined we were alike. As I was saying, I was on my bike, and I was going fast, and as I made a sharp turn at the bottom of the hill, the bike tumbled, and I fell, and my left butt cheek landed right on a big, sharp rock. I laid there, butt on the rock, and could not speak for a whole minute, and even after that, the only word I had access to was “sobaka,” which means a “dog” in Ukrainian and Russian both. I said just that one word, over and again, and with deep feeling and conviction—everything was packed into it. There was something utterly blissful about that dogged near-silence I entered—even though the pain was sharp, it was strangely thrilling to lie unable to speak anything other than that one single word. It wasn’t that I transcended language or was bigger than it. No way.
See, I didn’t speak a word of English at the time and so didn’t even know about the—you know, the whole god/dog thing?
Reader, when I landed on the rock, I was propelled into another dimension, ushered in and out of its gateways by this sobaka.
Eventually, the language returned, and sobaka waddled off. But I saw it one more time, I swear, out of the corner of my eye, wagging its liminal tail just a few short years ago, in a very different part of the world, in a tiny Californian apartment on a university campus, where my daughter came up to me, put her hand flat on top of her head, and then moved the hand toward me.
“Papa,” she said, “See, Papa, I am as tall as your vagina already!” It wasn’t so much my stunned silence but her language, her rocking, precious words that let the dogs of transcendence out.
Have you ever harbored a desire so fierce that you were consumed by it? Maybe to fall in love, or shut down a toxic mine, or reconnect with a lost family member, or move to another country? And during the day you plot out how to achieve this goal, and during the night you dream about how you will be fulfilled? Of course, life rarely works out as scheduled. In fiction, the best-laid plans more often end in messy escapades and misadventures. Desires are quicksand: the more someone pines for something, the more they’re likely to get stuck deeper in a scandalous tarpit of their own devising. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, for example, the young doctor achieves the objective of bringing his creation to life, but at a great and unforeseen cost.
Women especially, who have been for so long boxed into domestic roles and blocked out from more ambitious goals, might risk the roof over their heads to shatter the glass ceiling. Such fearless women are willing to blow up their lives for the idea of a better future. Strong women make history, sure; but strong women also catch fire.
Then again, maybe there is a part of us that wants to create a monster. After all, aren’t we predisposed to making something in our own image?
In my second novel The Formation of Calcium, Mary Ellen Washie finds herself on the precipice: her old life has been swept into the dustbin, and she can either make a clean break, or take herself out with the trash. But “survival was the most important thing, escape, no matter how painful it might be.” She abandons her family, quits her menial part-time jobs, and hightails it to Florida, where she risks everything to become a new woman, no matter if achieving her goals will require all the fight and cunning she’s got.
In the following reading list, you will find women who struggle just as hard to give themselves what they really want—and are damned to the consequences.
In this dark novel, our narrator Janina is suddenly alone after her “Little Girls,” a loyal pair of mutts, disappear. She is trapped by the stark winter, the isolated location of her home, and old age, but that does not stop her from plotting to create a better world, one where animals have a voice, and their rights are more important than the law. She is driven by a “state of clarity, divine Wrath, terrible and unstoppable,” and she channels this anger into action. Janina is an engrossing narrator whose obsessions with astrology, poetry, and the mounting murder count in her small hamlet make this novel a worthwhile read.
Sometimes what a woman wants is not accepted by society, and sometimes what she wants is plain illegal—as is the case for junior high school teacher Celeste Price, who takes the job so that, while chaperoning a school dance, she can waltz with a boy or two, her “pelvic bone ironing across the erect heat inside their rented tuxedo pants.” Celeste knows that what she craves could land her in jail, but her desire is greater than any consequence she could imagine. And, using her good looks, her husband’s money, and her influence as a teacher, she goes to incredible lengths to fulfill her fantasies.
Yeong-hye is a completely ordinary woman—that is, until she decides to become a vegetarian in a culture where every meal is meat. This decision is influenced by her violent dreams, where the “roof of [her] mouth, slick with crimson blood,” saturates her with a “vivid, strange, horribly uncanny feeling.” Soon the world inside her head becomes all-consuming, so much so that she feels she does not need to eat anything at all: perhaps she can turn into a plant and teach herself to photosynthesize. As Yeong-hye’s family tries to exert control over her body, she burrows deeper into her mind, where a startling transformation has taken root.
Deb, our astute and sarcastic narrator, is honeymooning with Chip when a fellow vacationer who happens to be a biologist informs them that she spotted mermaids near their Caribbean resort. Deb feels certain that the biologist is insane, or perhaps on LSD, until she sees the mermaids herself while diving. Chaos ensues: the resort’s “parent company” swoops in to figure out the logistics of commercializing mermaid tours, and Deb finds herself wrapped up in a fracas to save the enthralling creatures from “a mermaid zoo.” She is ready to risk anything, and she has one excellent reason not to hold back.
Connie is able to communicate with the year 2137, and so her present declares her crazy. This feminist classic explores a utopian future in which individualism is prized: people cannot be committed to an institution against their will, labor is equally proportioned, no one is homeless or marginalized or discriminated against—all the issues that plague Connie’s 1970s New York life have vanished. Through time travel, Connie experiences the sort of future she wants to be a part of, but she soon learns that she is an integral step in creating that future—and she decides to rebel against her present situation, to battle against her repressors, because she realizes that she is at war, and that the fate of the human race depends on her winning.
N.P. by Banana Yoshimoto, translated by Ann Sherif
North Point is the title of a sad, old song, and Kazami finds herself caught up in its mood, despite the fact that the summer days are clear and blue. She lost her voice during an illness, and without that communicative instrument, she experiences synesthesia; she begins to view language “as a tool that encompasses both a single moment and eternity.” But when her boyfriend commits suicide after attempting to translate the final short story of a famous Japanese writer who composed it just before his own death, she leaves her comfort zone to figure out what went wrong. As the end of summer looms and she surrounds herself with people obsessed by suicide, she realizes that she needs to fight for happiness, for love, and for her life.
In this jaw-dropping memoir, former Hollywood starlet Barbara Payton spills her guts, lets all the cats out of the bag, and cackles while the felines snack on the entrails. At the time of the telling, Payton is 35, fuels herself with cheap wine, and pays for her vermin-infested apartment via “favors” to men; but her focus is on the past, when she was a coveted movie star “sitting on top of the world and going higher.” Her calculated manipulation of those around her result in the highest highs and the lowest lows of a life lived to the extreme. Barbara sets lofty goals for herself—“I filed for divorce and decided to become a movie star. Just like that”—and she achieves them.
This experimental work—part novel, play, poetry, drawings, and dream maps—is a trippy dive into Janey’s quest for power and sex. Janey lives with her father/boyfriend in Mexico until he decides to leave her for a woman named Sally, which plunges Janey into a surreal journey to realize her self-worth. She meets Jean Genet and President Carter, as well as figures such as Death and Mr. Blowjob. Janey is the sort of wild child who does whatever, whenever; she follows her whims and interests, and her rich inner life, displayed in exquisite detail on the page, makes this an engrossing piece full of abrupt turns.
Lune works in Storylandia, “a place where mothers and fathers bring their children to learn about fantastical things right before they tell them to stop believing in fantastical things.” Her mother Marcrina, once a midwife, now cries enormous tears that fill a deep, mysterious cenote. When The Generales, who control Cenote City, decide to make Marcrina and her cenote a tourist attraction, Lune knows that she will need to risk everything in order to steal her mother away. But as the worlds of the living and los muertos become more and more intertwined, Lune realizes that her mother might not need to be saved after all.
Christine “Oreo” Clark is completely her own person, and though she is just a kid, “because of her constant bullshit, she was often disguised as an adult.” Her family knows that she will go far after young Oreo strangles a lion coat with her jump rope—she thought the coat was alive and wasn’t afraid one bit. Oreo is strong and witty and blessed as any Greek hero, and when she leaves home at sixteen after her Black mother provides her with the clues to search for her Jewish father, the adventures she encounters are legendary. This book goes to extremes of humor, language, and culture, and in the end, nothing is black or white.
The Whore by Márcia Barbieri, translated by Adrian Minckley
Anúncia, the town whore, recounts her life of conquests and defiance in this monologue that follows lines of thought as whimsically as an Exquisite Corpse is drawn—and there are plenty of body parts, living and dead and in-between, that make their appearance throughout this orgiastic tale. In the post-apocalyptic setting, “the population dropped almost to zero,” but Anúncia survives, and though the earth has become infertile, she seeks out abortion after abortion as she believes “a child is a loogie you forgot you swallowed that ends up sliding out your pussy hole.” But when she becomes impregnated with a fetus that won’t come out and consequently falls in love with Flamenca, her abortionist, her life takes an unexpected path.
It’s March Madness, and you know what that means (or, if you’re like most of us, maybe you kind of don’t. Basketball? Competing colleges? Probably a lot of drinking?): it’s time to fill out all sorts of brackets entirely unrelated to actual March Madness. We may not always be up on all the sports news, but we do love a good competition, so this year we thought we’d join in the fun. In that spirit, over the next week on our Twitter and Instagram channels, we’ll be asking you to vote for your favorite book-to-TV adaptations and help us find the one literary TV show to rule them all.
Book adaptations are all the rage lately, and there are more coming out all the time. Who did it best? Will it be Game of Thrones, or did the show’s ending ruin its chances (the part not based on the books themselves, may we add—factor that in or not, at your discretion)? Will one of the newer additions to the club (a Rooney, perhaps?) rise to the top? What about a beloved show that people have probably forgotten was based on a book at all, like Friday Night Lights(see, we included some sports content after all! We’re well-rounded!)?
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Fill out the bracket and make your predictions, then head to our Twitter and Instagram on Monday, 3/27 to start voting. May the best IP win!
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