The Craft in Writing Characters with Messy Psychology

Posted on by Wynter Miller

In the fall of 1973, just as the country finished watching the Watergate hearings, my mother enrolled in classes to become a psychologist. Watergate wasn’t why she decided to go to graduate school—my mother has always been interested in anxiety—but the national atmosphere it created certainly helped. At that time, we were living in Washington, DC, and she couldn’t run to the deli for a jar of pickles without getting caught in conversations about cover-ups and wiretapping and CIA conspiracies. 

As part of her studies, my mother sometimes used my younger sisters and me as practice subjects. She gave us batteries of IQ tests and asked us to interpret inkblots. We answered questions on the Myers Briggs Type Indicator to determine our personality types and whether we were introverts or extroverts. For our participation, we were rewarded with peanut M&Ms and, most meaningfully, her attention, which was hard to come by in a household with three children, three dogs, and my unhappy father, who was even more demanding than the rest of us.

That winter, a slim copy of the second edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) appeared on my mother’s desk in the little room by the front door she now used as a study. Leafing through it one afternoon, I found a list of ten personality disorders, which were “characterized by deeply ingrained maladaptive patterns of behavior,” and “often recognizable by the time of adolescence.” By then I was thirteen and moody: easily enraged by my sisters, easily mortified at school, tormented by guilt over small offenses and blunders, yet convinced I was destined for greatness (especially when alone in my room). I veered daily between bouts of despair and exultation that would exhaust me now but at the time seemed energizing. I also adored my mother and wanted her to myself. Consulting the DSM, I diagnosed myself with all ten personality disorders the way I once misted myself with her entire collection of perfumes.

Over the next several weeks, I presented my findings to my mother while washing dishes after dinner, one of the few dependable ways to catch her alone. “Possibly you have a tendency to be passive-aggressive,” she might allow, handing me a pot to dry. “We all have dysfunctional tendencies.” I would then offer evidence for why I really was obsessive-compulsive/paranoid/anti-social. If you wanted to edge out your barking, squabbling, brooding competition, the surest way to engage my mother was to be worried about something, especially something complicated. Yet unlike my problems at school or with my sisters, personality disorders failed to capture her attention. The more I insisted on my deeply ingrained maladaptive behaviors, the more blandly my mother reacted. These dishwashing sessions generally ended with a recommendation that I get outside more or invite a friend over, and the dogs, by the way, could use a walk.

It was a deflating response at the time, but I’ve come to believe my mother’s apparent disinterest did signal concern, quite a bit of it. Had she suggested dysfunction by subjecting her children to so much psychological testing? Created it by going to graduate school instead of staying home? (My father’s view.) I’m sure she also wanted to discourage me from embracing any of the conditions I was flirting with. A word is not just a word when it’s a diagnosis.

Whatever the case, confronted with a kitchen sink of disorders claimed by an adolescent reeking of Love’s Baby Soft with a spritz of Styx, my mother was clearly aware that explanations of human behavior are never trustworthy. Especially explanations of one’s own behavior, which are so often shaped as much by convenience, self-importance, and disingenuousness as by an effort to be understood. When it comes to people, my mother must have known, explanations hide as much as they reveal.

My mother went on to become an excellent psychologist, so this recognition ultimately served her well. It’s a recognition that serves novelists well, too. Characters always have problems at the beginning of a story, for example, but rarely do they have a firm understanding of those problems, or themselves, for the simple reason that misconceptions, ambiguities, and, above all, secrets, create drama. “What did the president know, and when did he know it?” Senator Howard Baker’s famous question during the Watergate hearings captured the power of uncertainty. If a character doesn’t know something or is hiding something, readers want that something discovered and explained. We want the facts. We need them in order to feel that the story has been told.

If a character doesn’t know something or is hiding something, readers want that something discovered and explained.

But has it? Have the effects of those misunderstandings and ambiguities—those secrets—been resolved? Or have new doubts moved in? Perhaps it’s our current hurricane of misinformation (which make the lies and dirty tricks of the Watergate scandal look like drizzle), but when it comes to thinking about human behavior these days, I find myself less interested in “the facts” than in how people become so convinced they know them.

While visiting my mother a few months ago, I found my father’s love letters, written to her during their courtship while he was getting divorced from his first wife. He believed he would love my mother forever—something he repeats passionately in those letters—and yet after twenty years of marriage, he divorced her, too. Was it because her attention was even harder to hold once she began seeing patients? Because he resented her success? Because he’d lost his own mother as a child and felt he was losing another? (The view of his third wife, a Jungian analyst.) What did he come to “know,” exactly, that altered how he felt—and when did he know it?

At the time, I was too young to ask my father questions like these, but even if I’d asked him later, I wonder how reliable his answers would have been. It’s hard to get to the truth about yourself, whether you’re a public figure, a teenager, or an elderly man with three failed marriages and many regrets. And if it’s that difficult to comprehend yourself, how on earth can you expect to fathom anyone else? This is not to critique psychotherapy, but rather to say that any analysis of human behavior is bound to leave so much out.

“The personal life of every individual is based on secrecy,” Chekhov writes in “The Lady with the Dog,” adding, “and perhaps it is partly for that reason that civilized man is so nervously anxious that personal privacy be respected.” By secrecy, I think Chekhov is referring not to whatever sins we might be hiding, but to the contradictions and incongruities that can’t be explained about us, that we can’t explain, even to ourselves. A secret inner life is our greatest privilege, but also often our greatest fear. (The current edition of the DSM lists almost three hundred mental disorders and runs over a thousand pages.)

Where you can go inside other people’s heads is, of course, the project of the novel, wherein secrets exist to be uncovered. As the critic Janet Malcom notes in Reading Chekhov, “If privacy is life’s most precious possession, it is fiction’s least considered one,” and goes on to refer, somewhat ruefully, to “the glaring exposure to which the souls of fictional characters are held up.” In other words, characters in a novel transform between the first and the last chapters, sometimes with enormous complexity, but everything there is to be known about them is on the page. If you miss something, you can reread a few chapters to figure out what happened. Characters may behave in puzzling ways, may be paranoid, anti-social, obsessed with their mothers or their political enemies, or pathological liars who couldn’t accept a fact if you gave it to them in a pickle jar—but eventually you find out why. More or less. As E. M. Forster puts it, “people in a novel can be understood completely, if the novelist wishes.”

And yet, explaining their behavior is not what makes characters relatable.

And yet, explaining their behavior is not what makes characters relatable. In fact, it’s when characters don’t understand themselves very well that readers worry most about them, identify with their difficulties and confusion, and keep reading—which is vital, because characters, unlike people, don’t exist when no one is paying attention to them. What makes the affair between Gurov and Anna in “The Lady with the Dog” so surprising and convincing, for instance, is that they can’t figure out why they have fallen in love with each other, or what to do about it. They truly don’t know their own minds and, as the story suggests by its famously irresolute ending, probably never will. Chekhov, of course, was a master at revealing how emotions we believe should be definite, like love and grief, are full of inconsistencies. He also understood that readers are more deeply intrigued by hesitating characters (see Hamlet) than by decisive ones (see Ivanhoe).

On the other hand, there are those characters who think they understand themselves perfectly and must discover, usually with reluctance, that they don’t—a problem I recently gave to one of my own characters, who is, incidentally, a therapist. In such stories, the reader is usually better informed than the characters, who believe their problems are simply resolvable obstacles and must be forced to see the real trouble they’re in. Frequently this trouble is of their own making, a result of misguided notions and projections. Jane Austen’s Emma thinks she’s shrewd about human nature, yet her assumptions about other people, and her motivations for interfering in their romantic lives, are completely wrong-headed. The reader’s own clear-sightedness becomes part of the drama: we see how Emma is misjudging herself and everyone else, so why can’t she? Anxiously, we hope she wises up before she ruins several futures, including her own. Once again, our engagement with the story is intensified by the character’s lack of self-knowledge, which reminds us, ideally, of our own blind spots. The longer characters can remain somewhat opaque to themselves, or at least have a few questions they keep asking, the more absorbing their predicaments, and the more their worlds feel like ours. 

In any case, fictional problems must reach a last page. The story has to end. The reader closes the book, and maybe, that same evening, picks up another and gets caught up in a new set of anxieties.

This past summer and fall, I spent hours following the January 6th Select Committee Hearings, which reminded me of watching the Watergate hearings with my parents, fifty years ago, down to the question of what the president knew and when he knew it. My mother’s current view of national politics is that it’s “one big mess,” which was also her opinion during the Watergate era. My mother is now in her late 80s; she still sometimes says she’s bewildered by what happened in her marriage to my father, who is no longer alive.  But she doesn’t like dwelling on past unhappiness any more than she likes talking about politics or her health. Anxiety, however, continues to interest her. During a recent phone call, I asked what she was reading. A novel, she told me. “Can’t remember the title,” she said cheerfully, “but the people in it certainly have a lot of problems.”

It’s a strange desire, in this world of trouble, to go seeking other people’s problems, and yet what a relief, for both readers and novelists, to feel that every so often a problem can be completely understood.

A Turkish Woman’s Dreams of Being a Writer in Berlin Faces An Expiration Date 

Posted on by Jo Lou

In her debut novel, The Applicant, Nazlı Koca takes the reader on Leyla’s identity crisis whirlwind  in Berlin, Germany. Recently failed from her masters thesis and at risk of losing her student visa, Leyla resorts to working as a cleaner at a youth hostel as she awaits an answer from her university appeal.

Leyla takes to keeping a diary as she attempts to make sense of the series of events that led her to this state. A once privileged upper-middle-class student in Istanbul, she is haunted by the reality of her family’s debt-ridden existence after the death of her alcoholic, abusive father and crash of the Turkish economy. What is the better option: fighting to stay as a non-citizen in Berlin to live the life of an artist or retreating home to clean up her father’s mess? 

To take her mind off of her family, she spends her days pocketing items left behind from hostel guests—half consumed liquor bottles, coins and snacks—clubbing in Berlin’s infamous nightlife with fellow immigrant artists, watching Turkish soap operas and attempting to work on her fiction writing. She even surprises herself by finding solace in a traditional leaning relationship with a right-wing Swedish Volvo salesman. 

With a biting sense of honesty, Leyla comments on the world around her, dissecting Western hypocrisies and double standards. Why are Europeans considered “ex-pats” while Turks are “immigrants”? Who has the privilege of living as an artist? 

As she slowly begins to reckon with her tangled past in Turkey and uncertain present as a writer in Berlin, we are left with glimmers of hope that Leyla has the resolve to figure it out. 

Amy Omar: Could you speak a bit on your journey as a writer? 

Nazlı Koca: I always wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t actually write anything until I was in my 20s.

I grew up in a city called Mersin on the Mediterranean coast and moved to Istanbul for college. I stayed in Istanbul for two years after graduation, working at advertising agencies as a copywriter. I tried working as an editorial assistant at a publishing house as well, but it was a horrible experience. I was so disappointed —I thought that publishing would be my way into writing and having a literary life. When I moved to Berlin I went back into copywriting but then also worked in social media policing and cleaning like Leyla. And I found unexpected writing communities at these jobs, cheap bars, zine stores. 

Then I moved to the US for a fellowship at Notre Dame, where I did my MFA. I lived in New York for a little bit too, working at a bookstore and writing The Applicant in a series of sublets across Brooklyn.

Now I’m in a PhD program in Denver. It’s been a long journey.

AO: As someone currently in academia, how does that impact Leyla’s perspective? Can you elaborate on that? 

NK: There’s nothing I could add to Leyla’s take on academia as someone who stayed in it. All universities run on the white-collar ethos of “We’re doing it all for the love of books.” No. This is not love. This is capitalism at its best, and you’re just a part of the system. A system that’s based on exploitation, manipulation, and hoarding power. And you’re holding on to dated rules and requirements for admission and success because you want to thrive in it. 

AO: So much of adulthood is learning the reality behind these institutions that, as children, we are taught to view as noble professions. But then, you get to the industry, and you’re like, wait, these are not noble at all.

NK: Yes! And I’m scared because I don’t want to turn into one of those novelists who fictionalize the emptiness of their safe academic jobs in a world where children are forced to marry 70 year olds or work in mines. But I do feel tempted to write about the not-noble-at-all position that I’m in. There’s something so ugly about the privilege of it—the respect that you get just being in academia. When I was working as a bookseller, I got less respect, both from my bosses and the customers, even though it paid more, and I already had a terminal degree in my field.

AO: Leyla believes that by moving away from Turkey, not speaking Turkish and “not thinking in Turkish, [her] past would not dictate her future”. She holds onto the hope that she can scrub her cultural trauma and start fresh. Is that a possible pursuit? 

NK: I don’t think it is. It hasn’t been possible for me at least. Up until a couple years ago, I still thought it was possible, if I found the right place. It was a kind of dark secret that I wouldn’t want to admit. But after reaching my 10th destination, my cultural trauma is inseparable from my lifelong attempt to escape it. I think there’s some value in the attempt though—as a viable coping mechanism.

When I left Turkey I was able to breathe for the first time. I told myself “I’m my own agent.” But then, I quickly realized, no, there’s no such thing as a free agent. In those first years away from Turkey, there was still an intense reckoning to realize that, in addition to having a cultural inferiority complex imposed upon me by the Western gaze, I also come from a problematic country, which made it almost easier to surrender to the worst perceptions of my cultural identity.

But if you’re anything like me, no matter how many poetry readings you conceal your name and home country at, sooner or later you end up in a place where you ask yourself, “Wait, should I forget about it? Or should I advocate for it?” Because you feel like you need to fight for it and make art on behalf of your people. But then, who exactly are your people? I’m still not sure.

AO: Could you speak to your experiences working as a cleaner? How did your cleaning experiences vary depending on the  city? 

You feel like you need to fight for [your home country] and make art on behalf of your people. But then, who exactly are your people? I’m still not sure.

NK: Actually, I was only a cleaner in Berlin. I was a dishwasher when I moved to South Bend because even though I had a fellowship, I still needed a little more money to get by. I worked at a huge dining hall that served Notre Dame’s infamously white and wealthy student body. And behind the dirty tray windows waited three dozen dishwashers, almost all people of color, including the student workers, because this was the best paying student job and international students are only allowed to work on campus. It was very different from working in a hostel in Berlin. Europeans are usually careful with their money and the environment. They don’t waste much. At Notre Dame, students would rarely finish or even empty the food on their trays. 

Even before I started working in the kitchen, during orientation week, I was shocked by how many plastic bottles were handed out. I think I have a draft of a short story somewhere that I wrote on my first week in the U.S., set in a dystopian religious society that wastes for worship.

AO: Leyla’s experience living in Berlin is atypical from the stereotypical image of Berlin as an artist haven. It seems like most of the foreign characters in the novel are disillusioned with the false promise of artistic freedom. Why is that? Are only certain people allowed to take part in artistic pursuits? 

NK: Immigrants are often erased from narratives of artistic pursuit in the city even though they’re the backbone of every major city that artists feed on. Berlin’s background is a mosaic of Turkish store signs, kebab cutters, bus drivers—how do you even erase it? 

Or the movie Paterson by Jim Jarmusch, which I loved. But later on, I heard that Paterson has the largest Turkish community in the Tri-State area. They have Turkish grocery stores and everything. But there is no hint of that in the film! 

AO: The thing about Paterson, it’s also just a normal suburb. So if you go to Paterson, you’re driving around and it just looks like a normal American city. There’s nothing special about it, but it is very, very Turkish. It’s very funny. 

NK: Yeah, so I guess I can’t expect everyone to make Turkish culture their background whenever there’s a large population of Turks. But also it’s funny that we don’t get to have any representation.

For me, it was important to reckon with my role in Berlin—as a gentrifier but also someone who shares an ethnicity with these people who are being gentrified and understands their language. I was like a spy, but I didn’t know who I was spying on and who I was spying for.

AO: In some ways, Leyla perpetuates her own self sabotage by getting sucked into the Berlin nightlife. Why do you think it is so easy for Leyla to lose control? And how much of this spiral is connected to her avoiding her family trauma? 

Immigrants are often erased from narratives of artistic pursuit in the city even though they’re the backbone of every major city that artists feed on.

NK: I often think Leyla has more control of her life and story than I do. She doesn’t have to answer to anyone because no one is listening to her. It’s easy to say that she’s avoiding her family trauma in a downward spiral—like she tells herself—but what if descending into the deepest corners of her subconsciousness on her own terms, at her own pace is the only way to confront it all? 

The family is the first social unit we know, and it’s based on control. Even in the least traumatic scenario, parents decide what their little human eats, says, and wears for years and years. Maybe it’s not so unwise to spiral until we’re far—and close—enough to the starting point, to all that we’ve learned under other people’s control.

AO: As someone who grew up in a privileged household in Turkey, what do you think is Leyla’s main takeaway after working as a cleaner? How does this “rock bottom” status contribute to her character arch? 

NK: I’m pretty sure Leyla knows that working as a cleaner is not rock bottom. But it’s a socially acceptable, honorable way for a woman to earn money with her body in a world where she’s often not allowed to exist outside of its oppression. Leyla’s mother was privileged in that she didn’t have to clean other people’s rooms for money, but isn’t Leyla more privileged as a single woman who doesn’t have to cook and clean for a violent man and can’t even write or speak about her life? Where does sex work fall within this triangle of financially, socially, and physically exploitative roles most women get cast in without a choice? Cleaning lets Leyla put these questions into words for the first time.

AO: This line stuck out to me: “I had been avoiding my own country’s art, as if I could separate myself from the pain, guilt, rage we’re all doomed to carry no matter where we go, rage we are not even allowed to scream about, make films about, write about, sing about.”  We have seen incredible political films come out of other countries, like Iran, why do you think this isn’t the case of Turkey? 

NK: We were at the center of an empire for hundreds of years. One that had mastered the art of oppression in mysterious ways, and coded it in our DNA. And oppression turns into self-censorship the moment a child asks a question their parents are too scared to answer. 

Our best political poets, writers, filmmakers have paid for their art with their lives. Each new government condemns the exiling of a political artist by their predecessors, then finds new ways to silence the artists of their time. Most contemporary artists stop making political art after they escape Turkey, if they can. And who can judge them after watching them get charged with speech crimes, antagonized in the media, and receive hundreds of death threats on social media?  

We all got scared and withdrew after a few people died at Gezi Park protests, but look at what’s happening in Iran. In Turkey, we still hold on to the illusion of being a free country and having more freedoms in comparison to other Middle Eastern countries, and that makes us not take risks. Whereas in places like Iran, people are revolting because they have nothing left to lose. But what is it that Turks have to lose? Our little bubbles made of debt and denial? 

Author’s Note: Thank you for letting me return to this conversation in the aftermath of the Turkey-Syria earthquake. To these three questions I asked myself, I think, even though I seem to have unconsciously but strategically planted them just outside of I, me, mine. 

But then, who exactly are your people? 

But what is it that Turks still have to lose? 

Our little bubbles made of debt and denial? 

My people are all the Turks who have been asked by their anxious mothers last week to delete the most political post they’ve shared on social media in years which simply said, “I can’t express my emotions in a way that won’t get me arrested.” They’re the Armenians who sent hundreds of tons of aid to Turkey. The Kurds, Turks, Arabs who have been left to die under the rubble because the government blocked access to Twitter where people shared their locations because officials didn’t want the world to see how angry the rest of us were that our little bubbles made of debt and denial had collapsed in on us. 

The Easter Visit From Relationship Hell

Posted on by Wynter Miller

An excerpt from Burst by Mary Otis

Walter McKinley put Viva in mind of one of those Renaissance men, the young swain type, depicted in paintings leaning against a tree, eating an apple, or plucking a lute. Slouching against the doorway to her living room, he wore a pressed white shirt, pressed black pants, and expensive black leather flip-flops. He looked like he’d just taken a shower, and the tips of his curls were still wet. Viva stared at him.

“Can I come in?”

“Of course.” Viva suddenly felt awkward. Walter was the first man she’d dated in Los Angeles after dating no one in Glenalbyn, where she’d recuperated from her knee surgery at her mother’s home. During college she’d never had time for a real relationship. She had to focus on dance. There were a few dates with a mirthless abstract painter—a wannabe Kandinsky with a coke problem—and a brief fling with a visiting dance teacher, but Viva felt she lagged behind most women her age when it came to relationships. Dating Walter was, in part, an effort to remedy the problem. That, and something she didn’t like to admit—Walter came from wealth, and unlike Viva, he’d lived in one place his entire life. She was drawn to the idea of his upbringing, the predictability and ease of it, perhaps as much as to Walter himself. He sometimes reminded her of her college roommate, Anastasia, who also had grown up with privilege, the easy expectancy of good things on the horizon, and an unquestioning belief that one parlays one success into the next.

Walter walked into her living room, halting midway. He put his hands on his hips and peered at the Elsinore Hotel through her window.

Built in the 1930s, the Elsinore was a tall, narrow hotel covered in dark gray stucco. A squat turret arose from the right corner, its paint flaking off, revealing another, paler shade that in certain lights caused the stucco to resemble mottled elephant skin. When Viva’s apartment manager showed her the building the first time, he told her a famous artist had overdosed at the Elsinore. A famous rock star, too. Not to mention the writer. It was that kind of hotel. Two medieval-style lamps hung from chains outside the entrance, which was built to look like a drawbridge. Viva loved the building’s baronial appearance, its just-this-side-of grim demeanor, which contrasted sharply with the candy-colored more popular hotels that flanked it on either side.

“That place gives me the creeps,” said Walter.

“I think it has character,” said Viva.

“Oh, that it does,” said Walter.

Viva’s phone rang, and looking at her caller ID, she saw Charlotte’s number, one that in its skinny arrangement of ones and sevens, numbers with no real meat on them, seemed to describe her mother’s physicality and loneliness.

She could picture her mother at her kitchen table in Glenalbyn, her wolf dog, Eddie, at her feet. The town was once a thriving tourist attraction, but now psychics sold spray tan products, and part-time contractors wrote diet books on the side. Tucked into the side of a mountain, it was rumored to have the strongest energetic field on the West Coast, and decades earlier, in an attempt to keep out visitors, residents chucked the town-limits signs. Charlotte liked living in a place that required grit and ingenuity, what with the frequent wildfires, the endless shower of leaves and needles falling on everyone and everything, jumbo pine cones dropping from the sky like dead birds, and the fact that people had to hold down at least two jobs just to get by. Not everyone had the stamina for the place, and her mother was proud of the fact that she did. She got by on odd jobs—sample server at the local grocery store, part-time cashier at the gem and crystal emporium, and, most recently, a brief stint as a makeup artist at the local mortuary. Sometimes she drove to Palm Springs to participate in focus groups where she gave her opinions on video games she’d never heard of or beauty creams she would never buy. It was an easy hundred, and sometimes the companies provided lunch. 

“Hello?”

“I need to talk to you about something,” said Charlotte.

“Can it wait?” Viva rubbed her neck and waited for Charlotte’s response. She’d slept poorly the night before and her entire upper back was stiff. 

 “No,” said Charlotte. “It can’t.”

“I’ve only got a minute but go ahead.”

“Are you with Scooter?” Charlotte knew his name. She’d met him briefly and declared him a milquetoast.

“Yes, and I can’t talk for long.”

Walter checked his watch and frowned.

“Mother?” said Viva. “Mother?” The phone had dropped out. Or Charlotte hung up. Viva called her back twice but got a busy signal.

It was Easter, and they were going to Walter’s family home in Orange County. Viva slung her purse over her shoulder and picked up the hostess gift for Walter’s mother, a bowl she’d recently bought at a farmers market. She’d heard about Walter’s previous girlfriend, Phillipa—how she and Walter’s mother had gotten along so well it took Walter an extra year to break up with her. Viva had spent too much time shopping for the hostess gift, a present that in her imagination would never compare with the one Phillipa would have selected.    

“And away we go!” said Walter, clapping his hands. His enthusiasm, the effects of which were legion at Findley Academy, suddenly seemed outsized to Viva within the confines of her apartment. A passionate recycler and popular civics teacher at the school, Walter possessed an easy confidence that spread to everyone in his vicinity like a most delightful flu. The fact that there were no male students at the school logarithmically increased his allure.

A passionate recycler and popular civics teacher at the school, Walter possessed an easy confidence that spread to everyone in his vicinity like a most delightful flu.

Viva had met him the day she was hired at Findley Academy to teach modern dance to young women whose curious, ridiculous, wanton energy flew out of them at all the wrong angles. It seemed to her she was hired to help them tamp it down, batten the hatches, close their mental loopholes, and do whatever it is people do when they try to get young women to focus.

She’d been working at the school for almost two months. When Charlotte kicked her out, Viva told her mother she’d return to New York. But in the end, she couldn’t do it—New York now only represented the end of her performing career. So here she was in Los Angeles, only an hour and a half from Charlotte but far enough away to start over. Maybe Charlotte had done her a favor, forcing her to move on with her life. Viva told herself that at least her job was related to dance. But it was hard. Some of the dancers were only six or seven years younger, and the ambition of the best ones reminded her of herself not so long ago. Here she was in the prime of her dancing years, teaching a bunch of privileged kids who spent more on their dance bags than she’d ever spent on a year of dance clothes. Even if they were terrible dancers.

As they cut through the courtyard of her building, which featured Moorish arches, terra-cotta tiles, and a grand but non-working fountain, Viva saw her neighbor Lukania Moravec, who lived in one of the coveted rent-controlled apartments, standing before his open window. Smoking a cigarette, he stared at her in a strangely intimate way, as if he knew something deeply personal about her.

Luka had the physical bearing of a fairy-tale woodchopper—slow moving, impassive, his shoulders straining against his suit jacket, which he never appeared to remove except perhaps when he went to sleep. When he wasn’t working as a driver, he parked his limo in front of the apartment building, and even though it took up two spaces, most tenants didn’t seem to mind, since it gave the impression that a celebrity was being picked up or dropped off. 

The day Viva moved into the building, she’d struggled through the courtyard with an antique mirror. Luka, who appeared to be coming home from a shift, helped her carry the mirror into her apartment where he set it on the floor in the corner of her living room. When she passed before it, she could see only her feet and calves. No knees. Viva preferred it that way. She meant to hang the mirror; she meant to hang it any day.

Luka continued to look at Viva and lifted his chin a fraction of an inch in greeting.

“Friend of yours?” asked Walter.

“Him?” said Viva. “No.” But as they walked away, she turned to look at him and saw Luka still gazing at her. 

As they neared their destination, Walter became increasingly agitated. His right eyebrow, which he often lifted in bemusement as he strolled the halls of Findley Academy, reached toward his left in mutual consternation. He began to whistle a tuneless, blatantly reactionless, anti-whistle of sorts that mysteriously bloomed in his mouth when he was in the throes of stage one distress. Was it possible that he was anxious about visiting his family? Viva worried that it might have something to do with her, but before she could ask, Walter pulled into the driveway of his childhood home. Bird-of-paradise flowers, nestless and eggless, savage in their pointy-headedness, clustered around a large bay window through which Viva could see Walter’s family peering out. 

“Shall we?” said Walter. He was sweating a little above his lip.

Viva stepped out of his car into bright sunlight and immediately realized the long flowered dress she wore must be see-through in this light. She’d meant to wear a slip.  Awkwardly, she tried to walk with her palms covering her thighs as they strode up the front walk between two rows of Easter lilies captured in gold pots, their medicinal fragrance potent and cloying.

Alexa, Walter’s sister, threw open the front door. Wearing chunky gold earrings that tugged at her earlobes and a matching cuff bracelet, she firmly clutched Viva’s wrist like a holiday gladiator. She introduced her husband, Mr. Jack, and waved them in.

Behind her, Viva didn’t notice Walter slip out of his flip-flops, and as she stepped into the house and onto lush wall-to-wall cream-colored carpeting, she saw before her cream-colored walls, a cream-colored baby grand, and a cream-colored sofa that resembled an enormous sunken meringue.    

“No shoes! Please!” said Alexa.

“Oh, of course,” said Viva. She quickly untied her espadrilles and couldn’t help but feel that not only was she leaving her shoes in the foyer but something essential to her ability to navigate the afternoon. A familiar queasiness overtook her as she recalled, as a child, trying to divine senseless family customs and rituals—the first order of business when she and her mother lived on the road and crashed at the homes of friends and acquaintances. Sheila Titus kept a cabinet full of expensive guest towels no one could use, especially not guests. Then there was the three-sheet-maximum toilet paper rule, the silent Sundays, no phone after five. As a child, Viva prided herself on being quick to please and blend into the situation at hand, but now her knee-jerk accommodation response felt like a personal betrayal. But not enough to keep her shoes on. She carefully set her espadrilles next to Walter’s flip-flops.

Evie, Walter’s mother, swooped into the room, clementine crepe swirling around her hips. She hugged Viva warmly, then grasped her shoulders, and said, “Just look at you!” Though she smiled, Viva thought she could see Evie remorsefully superimpose the legendary Phillipa’s face upon her own.

Walter palmed a pale yellow Easter egg into Viva’s skirt pocket, where it poked out like a weak, misshapen sun. They were hidden behind the chimney of his parents’ house where no one could see them, though they could hear everyone racing around the backyard, particularly Alexa, who yelped over every egg she discovered.

It was clear to Viva that the Easter eggs had been hidden in the same places since Walter and his sister were children, and when Walter’s mother shouted, “Begin the hunt!” Viva panicked. Across the yard, she’d watched Walter easily retrieve eggs from a coiled garden hose, an empty terra-cotta pot, a hole in a stump. 

Seated in a lawn chair, Walter’s father, Thomas, made a motion with his hand that seemed to indicate there would be plenty of eggs to find if only Viva would venture farther into the yard. At least he was trying to be helpful. When Viva first met Walter, he described his close relationship with his father, and, having never met her own, she felt a familiar inner drop, a sinking feeling of inadequacy. In a rush of envy, she told him her own father had been a lawyer who died of a stroke. 

The clammy spring heat and wafting wrist corsage that Walter gave Viva earlier that day, a lather of pastel ribbons embroiling two gardenias, was contributing to her disorientation. That and the fact she’d already drunk two mimosas. It was past noon, and they’d yet to be offered any food.

Walter was whistling again. He rubbed a lavender egg against his shirt as if to polish it, then he turned Viva’s palm upward and placed it in her hand. “Two is more realistic.”

Evie called everyone to lunch. They stepped out from behind the chimney, and as they turned the corner of the house and crossed the lawn, Viva held the lavender egg aloft in her left hand, the pale yellow in her right. But really the jig was up, everyone witnessed her not find a single one. Miserably, Viva thought of something Charlotte often said—We’re not joiners and we never will be.

A buffet table cloaked in a white linen tablecloth appeared to strain beneath the multitude of food placed upon it. There was a ham, a chicken, salmon, a plate of cold cuts, a platter of cheeses, two bowls of pasta, two kinds of bread, deviled eggs, green salad, bean salad, and one that involved seafood. A silver tower, displaying olives and nutmeats. A tray of miniature quiches. In the center of the table, a jumble of paper bunnies and ducks stared pop-eyed at this great abundance. Place cards stuck in tiny china eggs ringed the table. Viva was so hungry she almost swooned.

Walter’s sister and brother-in-law joined them and took their designated seats. Evie stood at the head of the table, hands gripping a folding chair. 

“Walt,” Evie said, indicating that he should sit next to her. When she pronounced his name, it sounded like walled, and it seemed to Viva that the exuberant Walter she knew from school was rapidly vanishing.

As she sat before a place card marked Vera, she remembered she’d left her hostess gift in Walter’s car. He left to fetch it, and as Walter walked away, she noticed two round spots of sweat appear on the back of his shirt like beseeching eyes. 

As Walter walked away, she noticed two round spots of sweat appear on the back of his shirt like beseeching eyes. 

Thomas, who sat not at the other head of the table but to the side of his wife, sliced a single piece of ham and chewed it contentedly. Viva flashed on a childhood memory—her mother flying down a grocery store aisle at 3:00 a.m. Only Charlotte could nick a ham like it was a pack of gum. Viva smiled at Thomas, and he looked at her carefully. Walter had told her his father was a heart surgeon, and he possessed a certain precision in his movements, a stillness that made it easy for Viva to imagine him before an operating table. His eyes were an odd flat blue, the shade of lake water when a cloud passes over it.

“So, you’re a dancer,” Thomas said.

“Was a dancer. I teach dance now.”

Viva poured herself another mimosa and drank half of it. She was so famished she was fairly shaking. She took a helping of salad and a slice of chicken, and as she reached across the table for the miniature quiche tower, Alexa pushed it toward her with both hands like a big pile of poker chips.

“Dance for us,” said Thomas. He put down his fork and knife.

Was he kidding? Did he want her to prove she knew what she was doing? Viva felt a kind of bemused antagonism ping around the table. She scanned the yard for Walter but there was no sign of him. The crick in her neck, which had only worsened since this morning, suddenly leaped to her left shoulder blade. The family stared at her, and she felt the ghost of Phillipa hover. What would Phillipa, the best girlfriend in the world, do? Perspiration streaked down the inside of Viva’s arm.

“I’d like to see a dance,” said Alexa.

“Right now?” said Viva.

“Yes,” said Mr. Jack. He smiled ruefully and devoured an entire deviled egg in a single bite.

Viva took a gulp of her mimosa. “All right,” she said, willing her neck and shoulder to relax. Viva rose and stepped to the side of the table. A sharp pain swiftly pinballed from her ankle to her knee, a pain that had begun not long after her surgery. But Viva would get through this moment. 

Alexa began to hum an odd, insistent melody. Was this meant to be her musical accompaniment? Viva scanned the yard for something she could use to spot. She saw what appeared to be a pink ball in the crook of a sycamore tree. She squinted. Not a ball, an egg. An egg that not even those in the know had discovered. This fact gave her a small burst of fortitude, and squinting, she lifted her right arm in a wide scooping motion.

“What are you doing?” said Walter, tapping on her shoulder. Tapping. Just as she’d seen him once do with a student who threw a Twinkie wrapper on the ground. It wasn’t until this moment that she realized how much she hated that tapping.

Clutching Viva’s hostess gift to his chest, Walter looked miserable and confused. He reeked of weed. He leaned into Viva and whispered, “Are you drunk?”

“They asked for a dance!” she said and looked to Walter’s family for confirmation. No reaction.

Awkwardly, Viva and Walter sat down, and he poured her a large glass of water. 

“For you, Evie,” Viva said, handing her the present.

Evie passed the package to Thomas who withdrew a pocketknife from his jacket and sliced it open in one swift move. Viva thought of him cutting open a chest with equal ease and enthusiasm and unabashedly staring at a person’s most private heart.

Evie picked up the bowl and inspected it. Viva noticed a rough patch on the side of the pottery just as she was sure Evie saw it, too.

“It’s high-fired with a raku glaze,” said Viva. 

“At the grocery store,” said Evie, “they were giving away similar bowls with the purchase of ham.” She laughed. “Of course, this isn’t the same bowl.”

At her side, Walter carefully folded, unfolded, and refolded his linen napkin.

“Excuse me,” said Viva and she fled to the house.

Viva opened the back door, grabbed another mimosa off the kitchen counter, and walked straight into the living room, forgoing the oversized cream-colored sofa covered in adamant family butt prints. She perched on a narrow piano bench and reached for the phone on the end table.

Charlotte picked up without saying hello and before Viva even heard it ring. This happened often, though neither of them ever mentioned it.

“Mom, what did you want to tell me this morning?” 

“Listen, Viva, they shot my Eddie.”

“Who? Who shot Eddie?”

“The police. He attacked the Gillettes’ terrier.” 

“For heaven’s sake, why did they have to shoot him?”

 “For his nature, I suppose.”

Charlotte sighed, and all Viva could think of was how ridiculously proud Charlotte was of the fact that Eddie could catch flies in his mouth.

“It’s a dark day, Viva, a dark day.” 

Viva stood and looked out the living room window past the cluster of bright orange bird-of-paradise that in the late-afternoon sun appeared to ignite. Beyond them, she could see Walter and his family. Something had happened since she’d left the table, a kind of energetic reconfiguration, and she couldn’t help but feel that it had to do with her departure. Alexa put a napkin on her head, and they howled.   

“Are you still there, Mother?” Viva heard Charlotte smoking.

 “Listen, there’s another problem.”

“What?”

“I’d rather talk about it in person.”

“Can you give me a hint?”

“No,” Charlotte said. “Have fun with Scooter and the bourgeoisie. Happy Easter, and don’t forget I’m the one who hatched you.”

“Wait—” said Viva. But Charlotte had hung up.

Through the window Viva watched Walter and his family head out for a walk. Were they not even going to wait for her? Viva considered how much it would cost to take a taxi from Orange County to Glenalbyn. A lot.     

How Reading “The Secret Garden” With My Daughter Reframed What it Means to Live Forever

Posted on by EL Assistant2

For the past two months, I’ve spent most mornings locked in a small room with a group of strangers. From the outside, our chamber looks like a submarine; inside, it’s more like an airplane, with several seats facing the same direction, a curved ceiling, and porthole windows. Once settled, we begin our “descent,” the sealed chamber gradually pressurizing to the equivalent of 33 feet below the ocean’s surface as we don plastic hoods and breathe prescription-strength, 100% oxygen for sixty minutes. We typically represent a range of races and genders, are anywhere from eight to eighty years old, and suffer from a wide array of conditions, from PTSD to cancer to in my case, long COVID—but we are all chasing the same elusive goal: healing.

You might be surprised, as I was, to learn that oxygen—the third-most abundant element in the universe, without which no life on Earth can survive—requires a prescription; the U.S. FDA considers it a drug. It’s also amusing to realize that this chemical compound on which we so profoundly depend is also so easy to take for granted. We don’t think about breathing, after all, we just do it—unless we can’t; then it becomes something of an obsession. 

The truth was that there was no solution—not yet, anyway.

Hyperbaric oxygen therapy, or HBOT, was first used in the U.S. in the 1940’s to treat decompression sickness in deep-sea divers, and later for carbon monoxide poisoning—but the first documented hyperbaric chamber, a sealed room that employed bellows and pipes in an attempt to treat respiratory ailments, dates back to the 17th century, a hundred years before oxygen was even discovered. In his 1873 novel Around the Moon, Jules Verne imagined “fancy parties where the room was saturated” with it—foreshadowing the 1990s trend of recreational oxygen bars, which first popped up in polluted cities. HBOT is now known to help a number of conditions ranging from emphysema to gangrene, and professional athletes and celebrity elites tout its healing properties. Michael Jackson notoriously paid $100,000 for his own chamber in 1994, which he hoped would help him “live forever.” 

A few recent clinical trials suggest HBOT holds promise for those with lingering COVID symptoms like fatigue and brain fog, which have plagued me since my initial infection with the virus back in the summer of 2020. It was in such a fog that I listened recently to the nurse practitioner at a free-standing private clinic explain how high concentrations of oxygen, administered under pressure, would help my body to heal itself through accelerated stem cell generation—or something like that. I couldn’t really follow her, and by that point, I didn’t care. The prescription stimulants which had for a time seemed to bring me back to life had abruptly stopped working. An essay I’d written about my condition some months before had appeared on Apple News, after which I received a deluge of advice from concerned readers, urging me to soak my feet in herbs, to accept Christ as my Savior, to contact this specialist in Houston or that one in the U.K. Well-meaning though they all were, my attempt to absorb their proposed solutions and to respond to each individually ended up giving me a panic attack. The truth was that there was no solution—not yet, anyway. But then I heard of a friend-of-a-friend who’d been essentially cured of her Long COVID symptoms by a mysterious technique involving submersion. 

I live in Durham, North Carolina, where Duke Hospital houses one of the largest hyperbaric facilities in the country, but while health insurance covers the therapy for certain conditions, Long COVID isn’t one of them. The cost at the private clinic seemed exorbitant and the long-term results were still unproven, but to quote a post I’d seen on a Reddit thread for long-haulers, I’d reached the desperate, “throw money at the problem” stage of chronic illness.  I booked an introductory consultation ($350) and charged a package of ten initial dives ($150 each) to my credit card. 

At the time I began the treatment, I happened to be reading Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden to my six-year-old daughter at bedtime. I’d forgotten much of the plot in the decades since last reading it as a child, but I was struck early on by the book’s repeated references to the healing properties of air—specifically that of the moors around Misselthwaite in Yorkshire, where orphaned Mary is sent to live with her uncle at the story’s outset. She arrives as a child unaccustomed to playing outdoors, but the strong winds “filled her lungs with something which was good for her whole thin body…whipped some color into her cheeks and brightened her dull eyes.” Again and again, in the book’s early pages, the “fresh, strong, pure air from the moor” is said to stir Mary’s blood and her mind, until soon she’s “beginning to care and want to do new things.” She works diligently in the long-dormant locked garden she discovers, clearing the earth around pale green shoots until they look “as if they could breathe.”

In addition to being smitten by these descriptions, I felt an immediate, perhaps silly kinship with Colin, the sickly “cripple” whom Mary finds hidden in part of the house she was initially forbidden to explore (as is the case with so many children’s classics, The Secret Garden gets dark). For one-third of my own child’s young life, thanks to COVID, I’ve been like Colin in that I’m often confined to bed, and reading to her has been one of the few activities we’ve been able to consistently enjoy together. Similarly, Colin and Mary first get acquainted over the sharing of his books, in addition to the stories she tells him. 

“Do you want to live?” Mary asks at one point, to which Colin replies, “No…but I don’t want to die. When I feel ill, I lie here and think about it until I cry and cry.” Reading this, I couldn’t help hearing echoes of conversations my daughter and I’d had in the early days of my illness, when I’d have no choice but to spend whole days in my darkened room. She’d snuggle close to me under the blankets and whisper, “When will the COVID tiredness be over?” I’m still not back to my old self—perhaps none of us are or will be, after the strain of the past few years (“If a whole people could be saturated [with oxygen],” Jules Verne extols in After the Moon, “From an exhausted nation, they might make a great and strong one”). But my long-haul symptoms have improved slowly with time—or I’ve learned to better manage them, at least—so it’s exhilarating to experience Colin’s recovery with her, and to see how the fierce optimism of a few determined children changes the course of his family’s once-bleak trajectory forever.

I worry sometimes that it’s all make-believe, that like other attempted remedies from blood thinners to diet supplements, it’s not going to help me.

Entering the hyperbaric chamber, I try to be optimistic—but I’m skeptical, too. I worry sometimes that it’s all make-believe, that like other attempted remedies from blood thinners to diet supplements, it’s not going to help me. The thing I hope will heal me is invisible, after all. It has no smell or flavor. (What is it? Colin asks of the unseen force he believes is found in everything, causing the sun to rise and the flowers to grow. It can’t be nothing! I don’t know its name, so I call it Magic.) Sometimes, during my so-called dives, I wonder if the tubes connected to my plastic hood are working, if I’m getting enough. Sometimes I worry about the possible dangers—oxygen makes fires burn hotter and can be explosive, and for this reason we must leave phones and electronics outside the sealed chamber, adding to the overall sense of immersion in another realm. Mary thinks of her secret garden as a place apart, too, “almost like being shut out of the world in some fairy place.” Sometimes, watching the tiny, lung-like plastic pouches inflating around me, I think of the people who died in the pandemic’s early days, hooked up to ventilators, and those who perished at the hands of police, saying I can’t breathe.

I don’t think I’m going to die soon, but the pandemic has indeed brought a heightened awareness of mortality to all of us. Another reason I’ve enjoyed reading The Secret Garden with my daughter: despite some instances of outdated concepts which present opportunities for either thoughtful discussion or on-the-fly editing, depending on a parent’s level of tiredness at bedtime—“[Indians] are not people—they’re servants who must salaam to you!” Mary shrieks at one point, prompting the former—Hodgson Burnett’s take on spirituality feels strikingly fresh, even powerful, for a book published in 1911. Mrs. Sowerby, mother to Martha and Dickon (and ten other kids) and surrogate to Mary and Colin, urges the young protagonists to “Never thee stop believin’ in th’ Big Good Thing, an’ knowin’ th’ world’s full of it.” It doesn’t matter, she says, whether they call this Big Good Thing God, Magic, or something else—they know that it exists, and that it’s a powerful force. That’s enough. One particularly gorgeous passage describes the rare and transcendent moments, often found in communion with nature, in which “one is certain that one will live forever and ever.” There is no hint of a traditional afterlife in the book, but rather an overarching view of something closer to infinity—the taste of the eternal evident in the sunrise, for example, “which has been happening every morning for thousands and thousands and thousands of years.”

I’ll focus on what I can control. This includes the ability to spend time with my kids, exploring with them the worlds opened to us through literature.

Perhaps more than anything else, The Secret Garden emphasizes the interconnectedness of all of life, something I’ve never felt more aware of than in this perilous, plague-weary period, as we teeter on the verge of irrevocable damage to our planet. In the waiting area outside the hyperbaric chamber, a projection on the wall creates the illusion of light reflected on water; inside, the techs alert us when we’ve reached “bottom,” the point at which maximum pressure’s been achieved and the oxygen has peak effect. These small embellishments add to the feeling of being on a journey together, exploring some new frontier. I joke to my kids that while I’m wearing my hood, breathing through tubes, “I feel like an astronaut in the ocean”—quoting from a song they love. They know that our planet is mostly covered in water, and that climate change is a cause for concern; they don’t know yet how dire the situation really is—that the warming of Earth’s oceans makes them less hospitable to plankton and bacteria, which in turn produce half of our oxygen, and help to stabilize our atmosphere. That the steady collapse of this ocean food chain will contribute to the release of additional emissions, which will contribute to additional warming…

We don’t think about breathing, we just do it—unless we can’t; then it becomes something of an obsession.

When Mary recalls that, in fairy tales, people in secret gardens sometimes sleep for a hundred years, she declares doing so “rather stupid… She had no intention of going to sleep, and in fact was becoming wider awake every day.” I hope to feel that way soon, myself—to be more alert and awake with each passing day, more present for my family and my friends and this fragile, fascinating world we inhabit, touched by the same mysterious force that enables Colin to at last stand on his own feet and cry out in triumph, “I’m well, I’m well!” In the meantime, confronted by the necessity of hope even as the fear and grief of the pandemic linger for many of us, I’ll focus on what I can control. This includes the ability to spend time with my kids, exploring with them the worlds opened to us through literature, especially as opportunities for travel are still somewhat limited for us; the joy of spotting “daffydowndillys,” as Dickon and the gardener Ben Weatherstaff (and now my daughter) call them, poking up through the soil in the front yard, evidence of time’s passage and spring’s inevitable return; the simple and steady act of breathing, in and out.

Making Space for Doing Nothing Helps My Artistic Practice

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Across her two books, How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy and the new Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, Jenny Odell excels at asking questions that unpeel a section of our brains. Her work prompts readers to unpack things they weren’t even conscious they’d accepted as truth—that more productivity is always the goal, that time is something to be spent or saved or wasted. 

Odell describes How to do Nothing, published in 2019, as “a field guide to doing nothing as an act of political resistance to the attention economy.” Though the first part—doing nothing—is often what catches people’s eye, the second half is equally vital. Odell isn’t arguing that we should nap all day, or spend our free time just scrolling on our phones; instead she maps out various kinds of nothing—bird-watching, learning the names of trees and plants around us, getting to know our neighbors, the many kinds of slow engagement that aren’t “productive” in an economic sense, but are an essential part of feeling like a person and a member of a community. I’ve been eagerly waiting for her new book since I heard her say in an interview that it began with an attempt to understand “the history of the idea that time is money.” Saving Time not only traces this history of this “industrial model of time,” in which time is reduced to “an input just like water, electricity, or corn cobs,” but also uncovers other ways of experiencing time.

Odell’s two books highlight the way that time and attention are often cast in capitalism’s terms—presented as things we can save or earn or spend but never really savor. This way of understanding time, as a scarce resource to be hoarded and distributed carefully, likely resonates with all of us, but I think it’s especially relevant for writers, given the pressure many of us feel to write more and publish faster, to self-promote and personal brand our way into an economic security that’s increasingly elusive. 

All of those pressures are real. But they’re not the full story. What I’ve found in my own writing life is that my best attempts at buckling down, getting serious, and managing my time have produced not more or better writing but a kind of tightening across my heart and brain that are actually the opposite of creative work. Odell’s books invite us to think about time and attention in new ways—not as individual goods to be spent or saved, hoarded or wasted, but as a capacity to be cultivated. This is especially vital for writers, I think, because time and attention—what we see, how we spend our days—are the most basic materials of our art. 

My best attempts at buckling down, getting serious, and managing my time have produced not more or better writing.

This craft essay presents some of the big ideas that have been most important to me across Odell’s two books alongside examples from other writers and artists and suggestions for how you might try these ideas in your own writing practice. They’re not prompts in the conventional sense—as in, follow these directions and you’ll produce a draft of a new poem—but rather invitations or perhaps experiments, ways of creating space for your creative spirit. You might think of them as ways to, as one participant in a workshop I taught recently put it, leave the door open. They might be, as the poet Keith Leonard put it, when we talked about Odell’s work, “little rope bridges into poetry-land.”

Redefining productivity and making space for doing nothing

Odell’s work is an invaluable counter to the omnipresent drive to “be productive,” even in our leisure hours, even while sick or mourning, even as our planet is burning or melting. When I hear myself talking about my own “productivity,” I often hear a little whisper of Odell that reminds me to question the terms by which I’m measuring my creative life: “Productivity that produces what? Successful in what way, and for whom?” 

Attention is a vital resource, Odell argues, because “patterns of attention—what we choose to notice and what we do not—are how we render reality for ourselves, and thus have a direct bearing on what we feel is possible at any given time.” These first exercises suggest a few ways to begin practicing your attention.

Try it out: a Real Things walk

Go for a walk and record, as poet Linda Gregg puts it in her essay “The Art of Finding,” at least ten real things. As Gregg says, these should be “not beautiful or remarkable things, just things.” Focus on nouns. Be sparing with your modifiers. No metaphors or gorgeous descriptive language. If you notice flowers, birds, dogs, and so on you don’t know the precise name of, try to look them up. 

Try it out: blind contour drawing

Do nothing. It should be something you’re not required to do. Ideally, it will feel restful.

I learned this one from Wendy MacNaughton’s podcast, Draw Together. Following the directions in this podcast, do a blind contour drawing of an object or place that’s familiar to you. What I love about this exercise is that it’s not really about making a good drawing, but about practicing attention to shape and light and texture. You could think of your drawing as a lead-in to writing, or just a way of honing your attention to the world around you. 

Try it out: a little restorative nothing

Do nothing. It should be something you’re not required to do. Ideally, it will feel restful; it shouldn’t produce a little zing of productivity. Going for an aimless walk is great; walking briskly to the library to return some books on the way to pick up your kid from t-ball is also great but doesn’t count as nothing (for our purposes). Baking a cake because you feel like it is great, but rushing to cook dinner is not, or it’s not really the nothing we’re after here. Staring into the distance is a great form of nothing. 

Beneath your feet: exploring bioregionalism 

A central takeaway for me from Odell’s work is the importance of feeling connected to a particular time and place. In How to do Nothing, Odell writes that she never feels like she’s fully arrived somewhere new until she can name some of the flora and fauna around her, and she uses an app to help her identify the plants she notices. Odell discusses this practice in the context of bioregionalism, which she explains includes “awareness not only of the many life-forms of each place, but how they are interrelated, including with humans.” Poet Erika Meitner told me she’d read How to do Nothing just before the beginning of the pandemic, and “her focus on naming in the book became really important to my sense of place.” Meitner shares that “I started to use i-Naturalist to identify flora and fauna and purple crown vetch and ditch lilies and chickory started to wend their way into my writing.” For Meitner, this practice not only helped her sustain her writing life when the actual distance she could travel was greatly circumscribed, but also had a deeper significance: “this idea that physical place is the opposite of the attention economy.”

Try it out: learn to name the world around you

Learn the names of the plants or birds or insects or cultural or ecological phenomena around you. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Merlin Bird ID app identifies bird species, or you could use i-Naturalist, as Erika Meitner suggested. Local news, historical societies, and neighbors are a great way to learn the quirky history and complex present of where you live.

Experiencing Timefulness

In Saving Time, bioregionalism is extended through time via timefulness, which is the idea that time and space are inseparable. According to geologist Marcia Bjornerud, who coined the term timefulness, “the events of the past are still present.” We can see this most easily, Bjornerud explains, in rock strata and tree rings, since those show the shifting layers through which they were built, but once you’ve got the concept, you can see it everywhere. In my own old neighborhood, many of the houses were built before most people owned cars, and so some of the side doors open into grass, rather than into the driveways that were jammed in decades later. Time is visible as I walk my dog, once I know where to look.

How do we learn to see time? Odell explains that “one way to see time is to pick a spot and pay attention to it.” Two examples of artists whose practices reflects that desire:

In an interview with Southeast Review, the poet Kathryn Cowles described a challenge she developed for herself while writing Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World:

“So, I picked a bench with this overview of the lake, right by where I teach, and I went there every day for—the idea was—two weeks, and I would sit down. I would snap a kind of mundane photo of exactly the same scene, with a couple of trees and a boathouse, and then the lake behind it, and then I would write a poem. 

I found after two weeks that I had to keep doing it, that I really wanted to keep doing it. I wasn’t getting bored with myself because I wasn’t writing about myself. I was writing about the lake that I kept looking at over and over again, and it would change. The number of ways that I described this surface of the lake, just the lake, just the water on the surface, because it would be just different every day, it would make me think of something else.”

The interdisciplinary artist Gina Siepel’s ongoing project, To Understand a Tree, is another example of deep engagement with time and place. In this project, Siepel has collaborated with naturalist Kate Wellspring in long-term study of “the dignity of a living tree and its network of eco-systemic relationships.” Or, to put it more simply, as Siepel did when we were residents together this winter at the Vermont Studio Center, it’s about having an ongoing relationship with one tree, in this case a 100-year old northern red oak. During weekly visits, Siepel shoots video, writes, observes, and meditates; a set of activities on their website provides a starting point for getting to know a tree that you could use in your own space.

Try it out: seeing time

Pick a place of your own and observe it regularly, whether that’s every day or once a week. You might take a photo, as Cowles does, or do a drawing, perhaps Wendy Mac’s blind contour drawing from above. The challenge here is not only to see what changes through regular observation, but how you are changed through that attention.

Time is Beans

In one of my favorite sections of Saving Time, Odell proposes a new metaphor for understanding time. Rather than accepting that “time is money,” she argues instead that:

“Time is beans. If we understand time as beans, time isn’t limited or scarce or the property of one individual; instead, seeing time as beans means that you could plant time and grow more of it and that there were different varieties of time. It meant that all your time grew out of someone else’s time, maybe out of something someone planted long ago. It meant that time was not the currency of a zero-sum game and that, sometimes, the best way for me to get more time would be to give it to you, and the best way for you to get some would be to give it back to me. If time were not a commodity, then time, our time, would not be as scarce as it seemed just a moment ago. Together, we have all the time in the world.”

Try it out: a different kind of day planner

We’ve been taught to see time as a set of interchangeable blocks. Think of a paper planner with space to write appointments or map the meetings and tasks of a work day, or an online scheduler: all of those chunks are equivalent, identical blocks to be spent or squandered. But I don’t think time really feels like that. You might experience a certain section of your morning as a bright, fresh time when your brain’s awake and ready for creative work. Or perhaps the quiet of late night sparks your creative impulses. Try drawing what your day or week or month feels like. Are some sections bright yellow while others are gray? Are there wiggles in some spots and zigzags in others? And then, consider how seeing your time visually might change the way you approach your creative practice.

Together, Odell’s books point to the expansive possibilities of understanding both time and attention not as individual goods to be spent and sold and saved and wasted—but as collective goods, to be shared and cultivated and practiced in community. Instead of paying attention, we can practice it. Instead of managing time, we can garden it. And think about all the art we might grow, if we practice our creative work that way instead.

For Two Ghanaian Siblings, the American Dream Is Poisonous

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Not having to think about the American immigration system is a privilege far less publicly acknowledged or understood. Even to me, who spent a good year and a half away from my partner because of American immigration, the weight of this truth didn’t hit as much as it does to the average Ghanaian made to endure a far opaquer, unnecessarily long and arduous process to (hopefully) obtain a visa. I realized this in my conversation with DK Nnuro. 

Born and raised in Ghana, Nnuro tells me he’s been fascinated by how the West complicates Ghanaian love in its different forms, and how the desire for America compels people to negotiate love and in what ways when confronted with the demands of U.S. immigration. It’s not surprising then that Nnuro’s debut, What Napoleon Could Not Do, is an unflinching interrogation of American privilege, and a complex and nuanced exploration of the farce of the American dream.

The novel follows siblings, Belinda and Jacob, as they pursue different pathways to the land of opportunity. For strong-willed, studious Belinda, the route is easy—she first secures a spot at a reputable school in Connecticut, then goes on to attend law school and eventually marries Wilder, a rich, Black businessman. Jacob on the other hand is not even close to reaching the US—his visa denied twice, his marriage in shambles because he’s unable to reunite with his wife in Virginia. What’s worse is that Jacob cannot move out of the family home and must live there in the shadow of Belinda’s brilliance, constantly reminded as he is by their dad Mr. Nti that Belinda has done “What Napoleon Could Not Do.” What Jacob or Mr. Nti don’t know is that America isn’t all that glamorous. Belina is lonely, her longing for home exacerbated by the delay of her green card, and by the tragic disintegration of her romanticized idea of America spurred by her husband’s experience of being Black in America. 

DK Nnuro is currently the curator of special projects at the University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art. He and I spoke over Zoom about immigrant parenting, the nuances of the colonized mindset, contending with white supremacy, privilege and more. 

Bareerah Ghani: I find this sibling rivalry between Jacob and Belinda very compelling. I wondered how much of their tussle was caused by their dad, Mr. Nti playing favorites, often unknowingly because he was enamored by how Belinda had seemingly achieved what he considered impossible. I’m curious about your thoughts on parents unconsciously pitting children against one another. Do you think it can ever be a healthy catalyst for self-improvement or will it always be a deterrent to intimacy in sibling relationships as we see in the novel?

Derek Nnuro: Well, yes, in my novel it certainly doesn’t foster any kind of love between these two characters. I think Belinda’s just naturally competitive. Jacob and her are polar opposites in terms of their ambitions, and how they go after their ambitions. Now their being opposites doesn’t necessarily mean they were going to have an antagonistic relationship, which is to some degree what they have. But I do believe that as a result of their father favoring Belinda that antagonism is engendered in Jacob. And he also exists in a patriarchal culture that says that as a man, in comparison to his sister, he should chalk up all the successes. It should be him who’s celebrated. So it’s especially wounding for him that he isn’t able to meet the demands of society—this society that says as a man, you should be the one who’s the star in the family, because there’s not much expectation from the other man amongst the children, Robert, because he’s deaf and mute. So all of this expectation rests on Jacob’s shoulders, and the fact that he cannot meet them is enough for him to to be as wounded as he is, and as a result hate his sister as much as he does. But I think it’s taken to a whole other level because of the special awe his father has for his sister.

I do believe that every parent has their favorite. But I think a good parent knows how to not make it obvious. Unfortunately, Mr. Nti has just made it obvious. But I don’t think he’s rare in the fact that he has a favorite child. 

BG: Honestly I feel like, in what I’ve read and seen in my own family and around me, that picking a favorite is more of an immigrant thing.

DK: I think you’re right. This is the thing. In America, there’s the “participation trophy”, we don’t have that outside of the U.S. We certainly don’t have that in Ghana. And I think the participation trophy is exemplary of how much this country expects parents to treat their children with equal pride. In Ghana, it’s either you win, or you lose. I think it’s an analogous metaphor for exactly what you’re saying. Why immigrant parents really are not that shy about exposing who their favorites are, because they come from places where there is no such thing as the “participation trophy.” The expectation is win, win, win.

BG: Looking at this family’s dynamic, we see how at different points Mr. Nti undermines Jacob, whether that’s his intellect, ambition or drive to find a woman for himself. In some places, it’s cruel but in others, it appears to be tough love and maybe an expression of Mr. Nti’s desire to see Jacob succeed. What do you think of tough love and to what extent is it justified, especially in the context of Ghanaian culture?

DK: If there’s a concept such as tough love in Ghana, it’s imported. I guarantee that if you hear a Ghanaian parent talking about tough love, they’ve been influenced by some Western idea. I don’t think the concept of tough love is indigenous to Ghana. I don’t think Ghanaians know any other love than toughness. A lot of my African immigrant friends and I talk about the difficulty fathers have in just showing love, hugging you, saying I love you. And I think this is probably true for immigrants in America, at large. Speaking specifically from my upbringing, and what I’ve observed to be true about Ghanaian parents, in their mind, of course they love you. Now how they practice love is different from how love is practiced in the West. In the West, it’s known as tough love, but it’s tough because surviving in Ghana is not easy. I think a lot of Ghanaian parents operate with this idea that I’ve to prepare you for this extremely tough world that I’ve brought you into, and if I’m going to be all huggy, huggy, lovey dovey, I’m stalling this necessary preparation. They feel like it’s their responsibility by virtue of being your parent. This is what love is: I’ve got to make sure that when you leave and enter the world specifically, the world that is Ghana, you have the skin that’s either going to be able to endure the inevitable pain and punches that are going to be thrown up at you or the kind of skin that allows them to just bounce off. Either way, the way they feel they need to cultivate that skin in their children is what we call toughness. It’s just the environment that shapes how parents raise their kids in Ghana and yes, in a lot of non-Western nations.

BG: Yeah, I can relate to that. You know what really annoys me sometimes about mainstream narratives around immigrant novels and experiences, is just oh, it’s not universal, but it’s like—no, it is. Because I’m here talking to you and being able to relate to so much of what you’re saying even though we’re not from the same place.

DK: It’s not universal, it’s code for it’s not white. I have got to the point where I just reject that. 

BG: I love that. You know I found it so interesting that at the heart of your novel is this desire to achieve the American dream, this colonized mindset of the siblings and Mr. Nti, how they see America as this land of opportunity. It’s a phenomenon quite prevalent across former colonies but it ignores the ugly side of American supremacy such as slavery, exploitation and oppression. How do you contend with this perception of American supremacy and the idea of the American dream? To what extent do you think it can be eradicated within formerly colonized communities?

In Ghana, it’s either you win, or you lose.

DK: Eradicated, huh. Let me give you this context. So everybody says 2020 was an inflection point in this nation. It was actually an inflection point worldwide, particularly in a country like Nigeria, where people were resisting police brutality which is very much a thing in West Africa as well. So 2020 inspired nations like Nigeria to fight against their own condition of police brutality. There were mass protests everywhere. I remember I went to Ghana not too long after that, in 2021. So it’d been a little over a year. And what I started to realize was that that inflection point had started to wear off, where people were starting to characterize (to some degree) 2020 in America as an anomaly. From what I saw it looked to me like people in Ghana were starting to see that America’s not all it’s cracked up to be because of these long reasons that you’ve touched on—white supremacy, slavery, imperialism,—and perhaps that colonized mind was starting to turn, thankfully. So I went back in 2021 but to my surprise, that eye opening that I thought had become of Ghanaians was wearing off. Why? Because the colonized mind had been restored. This pursuit of America, as this generous, kind country, where you can go and be all that you were born to be, had still won out. So I don’t know how we’re going to eradicate it, because America is the most well-branded country in the history of mankind. And if you brand something well enough, it’s very difficult for anybody to come in and taint that brand. It will take a force of nature, I really believe this, to taint that expertly achieved brand that is America. I mean the way the Constitution was drafted, ignoring the fact that this country was enslaving people and saying that all men are created equal. Okay, you can put that on paper and you can publicize it, and that publicity campaign worked. And continues to work. A lot of countries, when they turn to democracy, they model it after America. 

But at the end of the day you know, Ghana is not an easy country to survive. And there’s a way that as human beings, we just need something to hope for. It just keeps us going. For a lot of people who are having to contend with these difficult nations that they live in, America is just something to hope for, and that keeps them going, and to some degree I can’t begrudge them that because we all need something to hold on to.

BG: When Belinda comes to the U.S., her husband, Wilder, is the one who challenges her perception of America. That part is where I saw the novel making a commentary against the mainstream narrative that glorifies the American Dream and is speaking to the necessity of decolonizing your mind to better understand your privilege. I’m curious about your thought process when bringing Wilder’s character into existence and on how people of color can decolonize themselves and navigate white centered spaces?

DK: Wilder could’ve been the angry Black man, and of course I think he could be argued to be that stereotype. But what I found very interesting about Wilder, what drew me to him as a character is that he represents Black wealth. He represents Black resilience. He represents to a significant degree at least superficially, Black dignity. I’ve always been fascinated by Black, generational wealth like, wow! You know there are dark stories about Black people having owned slaves, which is how they came into their own money. That’s not Wilder’s family history. There are Black people who made money from oil and real estate, and all kinds of diversified portfolios, like Wilder’s family. What fascinates me most about them is that they represent Black resilience. That wealth represents a Black resilience because they didn’t achieve that wealth in isolation. They achieved that wealth despite white supremacy’s several attempts to end that wealth. And you know the idea of the angry Black man–that stereotype–is usually associated with maybe a working-class Black man. Certainly not a rich Black man. I believe, because I’ve seen it, that being Black in America and enjoying all the trappings of “good” that America has to offer you doesn’t mean that you’re immune to the rage that you’re going to find yourself filled with by virtue of being a Black body in this country. I’ve always had a hard time with such statements like, oh, get over it. Oh, it’s been so long! Like, no. The pain is especially there because there are different manifestations. They’re not as overt or as perverse as they were during the time of slavery, but dammit, they’re still as wounding. Something like microaggressions are still as wounding as anything else. It’s going to be very difficult for non-white people in this nation who are conscious of the perniciousness of white supremacy to exist without rage. 

For a lot of people who are having to contend with these difficult nations that they live in, America is just something to hope for, and that keeps them going.

Now, we exist in these white spaces with our rage, whatever degree of rage it is. How do we navigate it? I think we have been, by merely surviving. By virtue of the fact that Wilder Thomas exists with all his wealth and in all his Blackness, is evidence of the fact that he has survived it. He’s just a small example of how Black and Brown bodies have survived, continue to survive, will continue to survive. It is not without pain. It is not without rage. But somehow, we figure it out, and we keep going. And that was what I really sought to render or capture in Wilder. 

Just because we keep going with dignity, by holding our heads up, doesn’t mean we’re not angry, we’re not observing things. It’s incumbent on the purveyors of white supremacy, the practitioners of white supremacy to do the work for us to be less angry, to be less filled with rage. It’s not our job because we’re doing our job despite all the things being thrown at us. We’re still surviving. We’re doing what Napoleon could not do. So now, it’s your job. It’s been your job.

BG: I want to ask about a lack of resources for the deaf in Ghana which makes its way into the novel. It’s poignant to see Robert trying to start a deaf camp but failing to attract students because their hearing parents could not see the merits of it. I would love for you to share how you came to write deaf characters with such nuance and care and how you contend with this issue—which is universal—of the hearing world’s need for conformity and a lack of understanding of what the deaf community needs?

DK: Well, a beloved uncle of mine is deaf and mute. My mother is one of thirteen, and he’s the fourth child. His wife’s also deaf and mute. I’m able to communicate with him, but not expertly. So I think, having grown up with him has allowed me to cultivate more empathy, and understand the condition of deafness with more nuance. I’ve known him all my life and that has shaped me in profound ways so much that it made its way into my first novel.

One of the things that has always struck me is how inhospitable Ghana is to not just deaf people, but differently abled people writ large because there are very few resources to go around. Ghana has come to the understanding that only if we have a surplus upon surplus can we start to think about our differently abled populations. And this impacts how such people experience Ghana and why their experience is a difficult one. I’ve always been confronted with that fact, because again, he’s a dear uncle of mine, and I love him so much. So what hurts him hurts me. If there was any mission driven aspect of my novel, I think that’s it. I was desperate to make some noise.

And I think it’s true of human beings that we have to be made to pay attention to certain injustices that don’t directly affect us. And even when we’ve been made to at least recognize it, a lot more work has to be done for us to take it to heart so that we can put it into practice in order to curb the perpetuation of this injustice. And I think that’s a human condition that’s very much amplified in the relationship between the hearing world and the deaf community. It’s incumbent then on people like me, who have been affected by it, who have been paying attention to it from day one, to do the work to bring more attention to it. Otherwise it’s just not going to happen. And I take that responsibility very seriously.

Til a Thought Experiment Do Us Part

Posted on by Wynter Miller

The Divorce

It was a Wednesday when Christopher forgot to pick up the dry cleaning on his way home from the office. I want a divorce! Nadine said playfully when she realized her husband had arrived home empty handed. Christopher pretended to look down at the floor in shame. Nadine pretended to cry. Then Nadine went into the bedroom and pretended to pack a suitcase. She pretended to get into her car and drive away. She pretended to visit a divorce attorney’s office. She pretended to file paperwork. Back home, Christopher pretended to answer the doorbell and pretended to be served with the papers. The couple pretended to agree on joint custody for their two children. The couple pretended that Christopher would have the kids every other weekend. The couple pretended that holidays would be split 50/50. The couple pretended Nadine would get to keep the house and the family dog, and Christopher would pretend to move into a high rise downtown. Christopher pretended to develop a drinking problem. He pretended to shake his fists at the sky and curse god. He pretended to buy a sports car. Meanwhile, Nadine pretended to get back out there, and signed up for several dating apps. She pretended to fall in love with a handsome widow who had three daughters. She pretended to cry tears of joy when the handsome widow got down on one knee and proposed to her at the top of the Eiffel Tower. She pretended she would take the handsome widow’s last name, although she’d never taken Christopher’s. When the wedding invitation arrived, Christopher pretended to punch a hole in the wall. He pretended to skip the wedding. He pretended to drink too much and crash his new sports car into a tree. He pretended to stop having a drinking problem after that. A few months later, Christopher decided the joke had run its course and called Nadine. I think we may have taken things too far, he said, but by then Nadine had forgotten they’d been pretending at all. She hung up on Christopher and though she couldn’t remember why they’d gotten divorced in the first place, she was sure Christopher had done something horrible, something involving guns or violence or adultery or murder, and went downstairs to see if her new husband had remembered to pick up the dry cleaning on his way home from the office.

10 Novels that Borrow, Sample and Remix Found Texts

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Over the past decade, I worked on a novel, The Nature Book, made entirely out of nature descriptions from 300 other novels. I searched for patterns in how authors behold, distort, and anthropomorphize nature and gathered them into a seamless narrative, using no words of my own. 

Halfway through writing this book, I wondered: “Is there other fiction made out of found language?” I searched for precedent and found quite a bit—much more than you’d expect for a genre that seems allergic to such an act, often calling it plagiarism.

But the texts I found challenge this designation. If you wear your borrowing on your sleeve, if you make it clear that you’re using other people’s words, you can achieve something else entirely. These novels and short stories recontextualize found language to interrogate textual artifacts of the past and present, often critiquing worn tropes, questionable traditions, and problematic systems. All while creating new narratives in the process.

My research showed that fiction made partially out of found language—or “citational fiction,” as I call it—goes back as far as the writings of Medieval Arabic author al-Jāḥiẓ of Basra and the anonymous Chinese epic The Plum in the Golden Vase. Novels and short stories made entirely out of found language, or “literary supercuts,” didn’t appear until the mid 20th century with the writings of J.G. Ballard, Konrad Bayer, and William S. Burroughs. But even before the 20th century, a handful of novels included short strings of found language, which I also think of as supercuts.

Below, I’ve gathered 10 of my favorite literary supercuts from the past 200 years, from the extracts of Moby-Dick, the first instance of an novelist stringing tens of quotations together, to Kathryn Scanlan’s Aug 9 – Fog, one of the latest supercuts to hit bookstores.

Moby-Dick: Or, the Whale by Herman Melville

Melville’s epic is best known for its brilliant language and encyclopedic scope. It should also be known for including the first literary supercut. A few pages before “Call me Ishmael,” you’ll find two surprising “Etymology” and “Extracts” sections containing 82 found whale descriptions. Across 13 pages, Melville presents a chronological archive documenting how writers have rendered whales into words over thousands of years, from The Bible to Shakespeare to Hawthorne. Reminiscent of “commonplace books,” those notebooks of quotations common to pre-modern European households, this lengthy whale supercut sets the mood for the obsessive nautical story to come.

The American Claimant by Mark Twain

Forty years after Moby-Dick, Twain published the second-known supercut. The American Claimant begins with a note to the reader, stating that “no weather will be found in this book.” He elaborates: “Nothing breaks up an author’s progress like having to stop every few pages to fuss-up the weather.” If the reader wants weather, they can flip to the back of the book from time to time and read absurd, humorous descriptions from pulp writers, poets, and The Bible. The novel itself blends satire, science fiction, and romance and was composed in a non-traditional fashion: spoken by the author into a dictaphone and then transcribed into print.

The U.S.A. Trilogy by John Dos Passos

A century before The Daily Show compiled TV news fragments into supercut parodies, Dos Passos was cutting up newspaper clippings into his own form of cultural commentary. This trilogy, which tries to capture “the speech of the people” in the first three decades of the 20th century, is interspersed with “newsreel” sections, made of found newspaper copy as well as song lyrics and advertising slogans. Reading like a cross between Dadaist poetry and scrapbooks, these sections narrate the cultural history of the United States while interrupting the fictional narrative with the primary documents and real-life tumult of the era.

Talk by Linda Rosenkrantz

The first entirely found-language novel on this list, Talk is made entirely out of dialogue recorded by the author over the course of one summer. Rosenkrantz followed her friends around with a tape recorder and transcribed everything into a 1,500-page document. She then spent two years editing it down into a 28-chapter novel told in the form of a dialogue between three friends—like The American Claimant, there is no weather or even descriptions of places in this novel unless they appear in the dialogue. Written in the mid-60s, the book is a story of friendship, love, and loss as well as a time capsule of queer life, art world gossip, and popular culture of the time.

Don Quixote, Which Was a Dream by Kathy Acker

Acker is well known for her remixing of others’ texts and titles. Along with this novel, she wrote Great Expectations, which begins with the first paragraph cribbed from Dickens’s classic. Blood and Guts in Highschool contains a full summary of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and language by Jean Genet. What sets Don Quixote apart from other supercut texts is its musical use of found language. As Chris Kraus points out in After Kathy Acker, her repetition of full paragraphs from de Sade’s Juliette creates a kind of erotic, minimalist, verbal music reminiscent of the early work of Steve Reich and Philip Glass.

Memory of Fire trilogy by Eduardo Galeano

The most epic of supercuts, Galeano’s Memory of Fire chronicles the history of the Americas through primary documents, from historical accounts to newspaper clippings to the writings of Jorge Luis Borges, Che Guevara, and Juan Rulfo. Part 1, Genesis, is split into two sections: pre-Columbian life told through stories and creation myths of native peoples followed by the violent arrival of European colonialists. Part 2, Faces and Masks, documents the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Part 3, Century of the Wind, chronicles 1900 through 1984. The only citational text that nears Galeano’s trilogy in scope is one of the first ever published: the Han Shu, written between 82 and 111 AD by Ban Biao, Ban Gu, and Ban Zhao, a history of the Han dynasty consisting almost entirely of quotations.

An Arranged Affair by Sally Alatalo

Alatalo made two versions of this book. In A Rearranged Affair, she took 188 different romance novels, physically pulled them apart, and recollated every page of every book into an edition of 188 new novels. Because of the romance genre’s strict conventions, Alatalo was able to maintain a fairly cohesive narrative throughout each of these books, even if character names and settings changed rapidly. In An Arranged Affair, written almost 30 years later, Alatalo digitized one of these books, retyping it so that each found narrative flowed seamlessly from one to another.

Woman’s World by Graham Rawle

Woman’s World takes the cut-and-paste aspect of supercuts literally: appearing at first glance like a ransom note or visual poem by Bern Porter, it is composed of 40,000 text fragments clipped from 1950s women’s magazines. To write it, Rawle penned the narrative by hand and then searched these magazines for sentences and paragraphs that corresponded to his narrative, shifting scenes, descriptions, and other aspects of his original story to conform to the constraints of his source material. Fusing form and content in a visually and conceptually striking fashion—at one point, a picture of a train cuts through a chapter set on a train—Woman’s World tells the story of Roy, his sister Norma, and Norma’s plight trying to live up to society’s impossible ideals of femininity, rounded out with a queer twist.

Philippine English: A Novel by Angelo V. Suarez

Unlike the other supercuts on this list, Suarez employs little creative license with his source material. He simply took a dictionary used for compulsory English education classes in the Philippines, where he lives, and retyped the example sentences verbatim in the order they appear. What results at first seems like a disjointed sequence of micronarratives until a picture of the dictionary’s underlying colonialist, Western perspective begins to appear, revealing the ideology that this educational text seeks to impose on its readers. Suarez’s strict chronological process also produces humorous mashups: “The criminal is said to be living under an alias in South America. Superman, alias Clark Kent.”

Aug 9 – Fog by Kathryn Scanlan

Drawn from a diary Scanlan found at an estate sale, this novel narrates a year in the life of a rural Illinois octogenarian in the late ’60s. In an author’s note, Scanlan describes the process of editing and reworking the diary not as ventriloquism, but as a fusing of her voice with the words and syntax of the diarist: “I don’t picture her. I am her.” Oscillating between two and twenty words on each page, the narrative is so compressed and the images and scenes so specific and strange that the smallest, most quotidian things appear monumental: grass poking out of the ground in spring, airplanes flying high over head, “big snow flakes like little parasoles upside down.” It’s the closest fiction can get to poetry.

I’m a Sucker for a Good Family Drama

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

As a theater critic, I like to think I have been privy to a wide variety of productions. I know that a certain amount of forgiveness must always be granted when seeing live theater, but the recent performance of The Murder of Gonzago (aka The Mousetrap) playing at Elsinore Castle has been the most egregious example of unprofessionalism I have ever encountered. 

The play, a riveting family drama about a man who kills his brother and then seduces his brother’s widow, certainly promised to be a fascinating show. I must admit, I am a sucker for a good family drama (I’ll see as many productions of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf as I can!) However, throughout the performance a young man was constantly running around, making lewd jokes and talking to audience members about the play while the play was happening. I tried to ignore it and focus on the actors, but once he started talking about what was about to happen in the story, I decided enough was enough. I found a security guard to tell them that they needed to escort this man out, but they informed me that they could do no such thing as he was the writer/director. Well, Samuel Beckett this man was not! I don’t know if it was some immersive theater experiment or just some bold “artistic choice” but I found it very distracting. 

This theatergoer had the audacity to stand up and scream about stopping the show and turning on the lights.

Thankfully, the actors continued their great work. The tension built up and finally we were getting to the emotional core of the show, but alas the spell of the theater would be broken yet again by a particularly rude audience member. This theatergoer had the audacity to stand up and scream about stopping the show and turning on the lights. I thought that perhaps this interruption was also part of the play, maybe some kind of commentary on the audience as an active participant in the theatrical experience, but I was sorely mistaken. As the actors left the stage and people shuffled out of the theater, I realized that it wasn’t a high-concept staging idea, just a loud heckler.

I once again asked the usher why they didn’t just escort this perturbed man out of the theater, and they informed me that he was the owner of the theater. Frankly, I find it unfashionable to use your privilege to end a performance you don’t like. Maybe if I donated enough money to own The Old Vic, I would have had the power to halt a particularly tasteless production of A Doll’s House I saw in 2015, but I like to think I have a bit more class than that!

My readers know that I am usually a mild-mannered person, but I can assure you I walked right up to the staff and told them how disappointed I was. As I was airing my grievances, the owner of the theater came barreling through the lobby, visibly shaken, and I noticed that the writer/director didn’t even look upset that his play was disrupted midway through! Dare I say it, but he actually seemed rather excited, vindicated even. I mean, call me crazy, but it almost seemed as if the entire play was an elaborate ruse set up for entirely personal reasons and not at all produced for the love of theater and appreciation for the performing arts. 

That being said, the costumes were lovely and the seats had ample leg room, so one star.

10 Novels About Bees That Teach Us How to Be Human

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Several years ago, on a perfect August day, I lost 40,000 honey bees. My hive had been flourishing, the honeycomb filling out the frames, the brood thriving in perfect wax cells. Yet there they lay, in a pile outside the wooden hive I’d built with my own hands. The following year, it happened again. As I mourned the loss of the bees—presumably from toxic lawn chemicals used in my immaculately landscaped suburban neighborhood—I couldn’t stop wondering about the native pollinators. What if they were dying too? How would we live in a world without them? 

This “what if” led to the inspiration for The Last Beekeeper, my near-future novel about the tenuous relationship between a beekeeper and his daughter as the world’s pollinator population collapses. It’s a story about self-discovery, found family, redemption, and hope in the face of global crisis.

Bees, which can conjure whimsy and terror in equal measure, make for a beguiling subject for writers. We assign them characteristics such as altruism, a strong work ethic, and loyalty. They make honey and beeswax. They are often associated with mysticism. They can sting, even kill. The fact that they pollinate a third of the food we eat, and that they are under threat, creates immediate tension. In other words, unlike their equally important pollinator cousins – hornets, wasps, and yellowjackets – bees make for complicated, sympathetic characters and fabulous metaphors.

I’m not the only writer fascinated by bees and concerned about their welfare. When I sold The Last Beekeeper to my publisher in 2019, there weren’t any books listed with that title. As of my publication date, there are now five. They come from different continents and represent varied genres. My hope is that if we share these stories, if we ban the chemicals known to harm our pollinators, improve industrial agricultural practices, plant with native pollinators in mind, and treat our land with respect, no beekeeper will have to worry about being The Last.

This list of novels featuring bees and beekeepers from around the world is brimming with longing, fear, and hope, as well as explorations of human relationships and challenges to political structures. I invite you to listen to the hum of the hive and fall in love with the mythology and the mystique. But, as you read about the honey bees, I hope you will think of them as your gateway pollinator, a reason to care about the fate of all of our pollinators. Even the wasps.

Mad Honey by Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan

Mad Honey is part coming-of-age, part romance, part courtroom drama, all of which add up to a riveting and tender page-turner. Olivia, a beekeeper, is desperate to believe her son did not kill his girlfriend, Lily, who tells her own version of the story in reverse, moving backward from the time of her mysterious death. Mad Honey’s structure—Olivia’s timeline moving forward while Lily’s timeline moves in reverse— builds suspense as the reader tears through the book to find out what really happened to Lily and why. Throughout Mad Honey, Olivia’s observations about bees burst with metaphors for how we survive in community, and about identity, gender, vulnerability, and selflessness.

Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov, translated by Boris Dralyuk

Grey Bees, by Ukranian author Andrey Karkov, is a particularly timely novel about a beekeeper, Sergey, who must move his beehive to find pollen. His travels take him away from his home in Donbas, or the grey zone between the separatist pro-Russian territory and the rest of Ukraine. Eventually, Sergey, who tries to remain apolitical, makes his way to Crimea with his bees. When Russian sympathizers become suspicious of Sergey’s loyalties, he finds his safety threatened. Even worse, his bees could be in danger. In the forward to Grey Bees, Karkov writes: “The second half of this novel is, in some ways, my personal farewell to the Crimea that may never exist again.”

The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri

The Beekeeper of Aleppo follows the story of Nuri, a beekeeper from Aleppo, Syria, and his wife, Afra, as war forces them to flee their home and apiary. As they make their way toward the U.K. where Nuri hopes to work in his cousin’s apiary, they lean into the dream of keeping bees as a source of hope in their darkness. Nuri’s tenderness toward and reverence for the bees girds this heartbreaking story with unexpected optimism.

The History of Bees by Maja Lunde

Norwegian author Maja Lunde’s The History of Bees weaves three stories about the past, present, and future of beekeeping. In 1852 a beekeeper innovates a new way to keep bees; In 2007 a contemporary beekeeper wrestles with threats to our pollinators; and in 2098, in a world without bees, a woman employed as a hand pollinator must uncover what happened to her son. This theme of bees and beekeeping binds the three timelines together, as does the author’s focus on the human relationships that shape our lives.

The Ardent Swarm by Yamen Manai, translated by Lara Vergnaud

In the small North African village of Nawa, Sidi, a bee whisperer, is devastated when an invader destroys his beehive. His quest to find out what happened to his bees takes Sidi deep into a city torn apart amid the Arab Spring unrest. This book reads like a parable, drawing connections between the bees living in peaceful community and the quiet village of Nawa. The invading force that destroyed the bees—a non-native swarm of hornets—stands in for the religious fundamentalism dividing the country. The Ardent Swarm, written by Tunisan author Yamen Manai, takes on heavy subject matters with warmth and touches of humor.

The Last Beekeeper by Pablo Cartaya

This middle grade novel set in a climate-altered future features an endearing main character, Yoly Cicerón. Yoly has ambitions to escape farm life and become a doctor. But when the benefactors who promise to make her dreams come true reveal themselves as a threat to her family and their way of life, Yoly turns to her grandmother’s wisdom about the mythic bees. In a world where everyone is hyperconnected by technology, Yoly and her sister make it their mission to learn from the bees so they can save their family and community.

The Music of Bees by Eileen Garvin

Three unlikely friends bound by their dedication to protecting honey bees from a chemical company form an unexpected family. Alice, a reclusive beekeeper has accepted that her only life companions will be her bees. Jake is a young musician, angry and rudderless after an accident left him unable to walk. Harry, who suffers from debilitating anxiety and carries a prison record, wants to start over. Together, they find purpose, healing, and music in the hum of the hives they tend and defend together. This story about resilience and the families we choose is infused with joy and a soaring spirit.

The Murmur of Bees by Sofía Segovia, translated by Simon Bruni

Mexican author Sofía Segovia leans into the magic often associated bees. When a disfigured, abandoned child, Simonopio, is found covered in a blanket of bees, locals consider him a bad omen. His adoptive parents, however, see beyond what their neighbors fear in the mysterious child. Simonopio, who is constantly followed by his swarm of guardian bees, can see the future—the good and the terrifying. Set against the instability of the Mexican Revolution and the 1918 flu outbreak, The Murmur of Bees is about love, family, and faith in the impossible.

The Last Beekeeper by Siya Turabi

Set in 1974 in Pakistan, The Last Beekeeper follows 14-year-old Hassan, who must find the mythic last beekeeper to collect the legendary black honey that promises to restore his mother’s failing vision. But when Hassan gets a scholarship to study in Karachi, he must leave his village and abandon his opportunity to help his mother. Hassan, who prefers his village to the city, confronts complicated choices that affect his future, his heart, and his family.

The Bees by Laline Paull

This imaginative, dystopian novel is set inside a beehive, and, like all the characters, the protagonist, Flora 717, is a honey bee. In this world where the interest of the hive takes precedence over the needs of the individual, and unquestioning loyalty to the queen is demanded, Flora demonstrates dangerous qualities of bravery and inquisitiveness. When her curiosity leads to a discovery that all is not as it seems in the perfect hive, Flora lets her forbidden emotions rule as she challenges unchallengeable power.