Don’t Make Pregnant People Cross State Lines To Make Decisions About Our Bodies

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

The train lurches into Penn Station. I check my phone: it’s noon, two hours before my appointment. I climb out of my seat, gather my belongings, and text my best friend, Meredith. We manage to locate each other in this grimy underground world. Her blond hair bounces as she walks toward me. We’re almost 30 years old, and have known each other since we were 11, so it feels reassuring to see her familiar face. 

“Thanks for being here,” I tell her.

“Of course.”

There is a beat. 

“You hungry?” 

We decide on Japanese. I sip miso soup, hardly thinking of anything beyond the next few hours. Meredith makes small talk. When the waitress comes to take our plates, I ask her to head back to the hotel. 

“You can get us checked in.” 

“Okay—if that’s what you want,” she nods. 

We split the check and she leaves.

I wonder: will today bring comfort or terror?

I map the route to the clinic and begin my walk. Above the towering gray buildings, the sky is bright and blue. The sun beats down, the wind blows, and I feel increasingly like a character in a movie who will soon meet her fate. I wonder: will today bring comfort or terror? When I walk through the clinic doors, will I find the lady or the tiger? 

The building comes into sight. No protestors. I step through the clinic doors where I’m greeted by light wood floors and a smiling receptionist in a sensible sweater behind the counter. There is a basket of pretzels and trail mix; next to it tiny bottles of water. 

“Hello,” the woman says. “Are you Emily?” I nod. “That’ll be 1200 dollars.” I pay the woman using the money my mother has given me, feeling sick with guilt that my mom is literally paying for my mistake. 

“Please have a seat.” 

I’m the only patient. 

“Where is everyone?” 

“We want to ensure your privacy,” she replies.

I nap at the hotel, then shower. Stepping into the water, I tell myself it’s a metaphor, that the water is washing these past few months away–but I emerge from it just as lost, equally relieved and sad. Meredith suggests we try the downstairs restaurant, where we share tacos and make our way to the rooftop bar. Throngs of people swarm about, the mood celebratory. It’s a warm July night. A slow breeze brushes my skin, and the Manhattan skyline stretches before me, black and empty. I drink a margarita, feeling guilty about the fact that I can drink again without guilt. 

17-year-old Autumn and her cousin Skylar arrive in New York City on a bus, tickets paid for with cash stolen from their supermarket jobs. Stumblingly, they navigate the subway system, manage to make it to Planned Parenthood, and discover that the crisis pregnancy center Autumn visited in Pennsylvania lied about how far along she was. She’s 18 weeks, not 10. The office staff inform her they can only perform an in-house abortion up until 12 weeks, so she’s referred to their Manhattan branch the following day. 

There is no hip hotel, no rooftop bar.

Unlike me, Autumn, the main character in Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always, has told no one in her family of her predicament, so the girls have extremely limited funds and nowhere to stay. There is no hip hotel, no rooftop bar. Autumn has a little cash left in her pocket, which she will have to save for the procedure. The girls end up sleeping on the subway, where men touch themselves while staring. 

Eventually, day dawns and the pair makes it to Manhattan. Autumn has her appointment and learns that the procedure will take two days because she must have laminaria, or seaweed sticks, inserted on day one to dilate her cervix. After the first part of the procedure is over, a clinic volunteer offers to help them find a place to stay that night, but out of fear, pride, or shame, Autumn turns the assistance down. 

Now they have another night in the city with nowhere to stay—and also no more money for bus fare. So Skylar, who is very pretty, cashes in on her good looks and asks a guy they met on the bus if he can help them out. She makes out with him, he gives her enough money to get home, and in this way they eventually make it back to the clinic. 

Shortly after Skylar’s makeout session with Bus Boy, morning comes and Autumn has the second and final part of the procedure. Afterwards, she and Skylar go to a cafe where her cousin asks her if it hurt. Autumn shrugs and tells her it was mostly just uncomfortable.

Autumn’s assessment of the pain is crucial: it reveals one truth about abortion that the media doesn’t often portray. For some people, the pain level is more like bad period cramps than anything else. 

I’ve spent years working as an abortion doula. I’ve held the hands of many patients during their procedures, and I can attest to the range in pain levels. My own abortion hurt much more than Autumn’s did, but some of my patients had experiences comparable to hers. 

What matters is that the film shows abortion in a more realistic, mundane light.

What matters is that the film shows abortion in a more realistic, mundane light than most media does. Until recently, far too many films showed only women who didn’t have an abortion, like Michelle Williams in Blue Valentine, who changes her mind right before the procedure starts, or Miranda on Sex and the City, who does the same. 

The facts about abortion are distorted, very hush-hush. There are films that purposefully make it out to be a graphic, bloody situation, such as the anti-abortion propaganda film Unplanned, which purposefully twists medical reality to dissuade people from ending pregnancies. 

I have seen exactly one accurate representation of abortion on television, in 2015, when Shonda Rhimes decided to show Olivia Pope having one on Scandal. The scene was matter-of-fact. It was quick, it was boring—Rhimes didn’t inflate the moment. She let it be one fact in a woman’s life, a decision made, and one made without discussion. Another character of her creation, Cristina Yang, on Grey’s Anatomy, also goes through with an abortion, though it took Rhimes seven seasons of making the show to get comfortable and established enough to write such a storyline. She had almost done so earlier, in season one, but ABC’s legal team explained how infrequently writing an abortion into a script, and then showing it on television, had been done, and the kind of controversy it could create. Rhimes changed the plot so Yang’s first pregnancy turned out to be ectopic.  

Before Shondaland existed, I had seen only a handful of scenes depicting the procedure on television, or in movies, ever, in a lifetime spent consuming media. There was that scene in Dirty Dancing, where Penny the summer resort dancer gets sent off to “some butcher” as Baby’s father calls him. “The guy had a dirty knife and a folding table,” says a character named Billy who goes with Penny for her abortion. “I could hear her screaming…I tried to get in.” After the abortion, Penny lies in a bed, sweating and moaning, till Baby’s dad comes to save her. All we know about her situation is that she got “knocked up by Robbie the Creep,” who she thought loved her. The message here is clear: be careful who you sleep with. You, too, could end up quaking on the floor of the mess hall. 

I had also seen portrayals where a character finds herself pregnant and decides not to go through with it. Like Michelle Williams in Blue Valentine, who calls out to the doctor to stop right before the procedure begins, or Miranda on Sex and the City, who decides to have the baby she and Steve conceived accidentally in a “mercy-fuck.” Miranda makes it to the clinic but changes her mind once she’s there. “Is this my baby?” she asks her friend. 

These films and shows are most likely the reason I thought I too might change my mind at the eleventh hour. When I ended my pregnancy, it was 2013, pre-Shonda-Rhimes, and the hesitancies and no-I-can’ts were all I had seen. Except when I had seen women die—because I’d seen that too. The main female lead in Revolutionary Road, played by Kate Winslet, dies at home when she induces an abortion. Demi Moore’s character in If These Walls Could Talk bleeds out on a kitchen table after trying to end her pregnancy with a knitting needle. And the pregnant teenaged girl in The Cider House Rules dies while Michael Caine’s character, a doctor, tries to save her. “Should’ve come to me, dear child,” the doctor laments, all too late. 

I had never seen a show in which a pregnant person decided to terminate a pregnancy and came out okay.

At the time when I was faced with ending my pregnancy, I had never seen a show in which a pregnant person decided to terminate a pregnancy and came out okay. So the shame I felt—at the time—isn’t surprising. I felt like Penny from Dirty Dancing, who didn’t have her life together. 

Back then, I didn’t realize how this dearth of realistic representation of abortion creates a deafening silence where comfort could, and should, be instead. I clung to the stories I’d heard from friends and family who told me “I’ve had one too” when I shared that I might end my pregnancy—but these narratives were only a few weeks old in my mind. They came up against a lifetime of cultural silence and pre-absorbed terror. 

It’s wonderful that films like Rarely Never Sometimes Always exist—depicting a main character who goes through with the procedure, then comes out relieved. In this way, the film represents real progress. 

But that’s where the progress ends. 

Because even as we’ve come forward to the point where we’re beginning to break the tremendous cultural silence that surrounds the choice to end a pregnancy, the fact that this is no longer a safe, legal choice in every state constitutes a staggering retrogression. 

Roe v. Wade has fallen. As of this writing, 13 U.S. states ban abortion outright, and many more impose restrictions that severely limit access. Autumn in Never Rarely Sometimes Always should be one of the lucky ones, because she lives in a state where abortion is legal. But because she’s under 18, she can’t access the procedure unless she has permission from her parents, who she refuses to tell. 

She could obtain a judicial bypass, but that process involves submitting paperwork and going before a judge, which would likely intimidate many 17-year-olds, and certainly Autumn, who doesn’t even tell her friends. 

Instead, like many people who get pregnant unexpectedly and don’t have access to a safe, legal option, she initially tries to tackle the problem herself. She turns to Google and learns about several ill-advised, dangerous at-home methods. This includes taking extremely high doses of vitamin C and hitting herself in the stomach. 

Shortly after trying these tactics, she finds herself retching in the bathroom at work. Her cousin Skylar notices and decides to help her by stealing cash from the girls’ grocery store job so the pair can afford bus fare to NYC.

And thus begins their trek. 

The banning of the procedure in great swaths of states has expanded already existing abortion deserts.

Autumn’s journey is now going to be relatable because the banning of the procedure in great swaths of states has expanded already existing abortion deserts, meaning that someone seeking to end a pregnancy now needs to foot the bill for travel as well as the procedure itself, in addition to the cost of childcare for any children they already have. Someone in Louisiana, Mississippi, or Arkansas, for example, cannot turn to a single neighboring state for the procedure, as it is outlawed in all of the states that touch their boundaries. 

And the states that do still have relatively unfettered access to abortion are seeing greatly increased demand, reducing their ability to provide timely care. Illinois, for example, is an abortion oasis in the center of the country—and the wait time to end a pregnancy there is now often three weeks or longer. In the week after Roe v. Wade was overturned, the number of out-of-state patients went from 100 to 750, according to Planned Parenthood of Illinois. 

New Mexico has also become a beacon of hope and access for abortion seekers, with an announcement in September 2022 that it would earmark 10 million dollars to build a new abortion clinic near the Texas border, in anticipation of increased demand. 

And of course, as always, there is New York. New York, where Autumn went to reclaim her life. Where I went to extract myself from the mess I’d made of mine. Where countless others have gone ever since 1970, when the state legalized abortion three years before Roe was passed. Where they will go again, now that the Supreme Court has reversed it. 

Even as guilt and sadness washed over me on that stark Manhattan night when I stood on a hotel rooftop bar after ending my pregnancy, part of me felt lighter as I looked at the skyline. The blackness was a blank slate, telling me the future had been reset.  

I thought of that moment as I watched Autumn and her cousin Skylar laughing in a diner after her procedure. New York had freed her. 

The state’s governor recently pledged to make sure New York City remains a safe harbor for abortion. But it shouldn’t have to be this way. The Autumns of our country should be trusted to make decisions about their own bodies in their own states. Autumn reminds us of the perils pregnant people go through when seeking abortion. Many are left without money, shelter, safety, sleep, or food, and pushed to the limit. The film was made in 2020, two years prior to the reversal of Roe; how prescient it remains.

8 Books that Capture a Life in Motion

Posted on by Jo Lou

The world seems to be moving faster and faster, asking us to keep up and keep on with its changes. It’s dizzying. Between my general mental chatter and the noise of today, my desire for slow paths into quietude has increasingly grown. For the lucky and privileged, the pandemic served as a pause to reflect on pace. Hybrid work models offer the chance to recalibrate the flow of our days. I read and wrote excessively during the pandemic, after long daily rides around empty New York streets. Rides I suddenly needed as an escape from the confines of quarantine. Rides I now had time for in lieu of hours spent commuting. My pace—cerebrally and kinetically—has become synced with the pace of the bicycle.

I was not a sporty child (except when choosing Spice Girl allegiances). Despite trying my best at every school tryout, I never made a team. It was always the same kids making all the teams. Twelve years of straight-A report cards consistently featured the lone outlier of a passable PE mark. There was scant evidence that I would grow up to write a sporty book. And yet, my first publication is about my relationship to bicycles. Early into the book, I alert the reader that I am not a cyclist but a rider of bikes, almost as a preemptive defense against any gym teachers, jocks, or serious athletes that would inevitably find me out. It is also with this sense of alienation from those that sport that I hesitate to even describe my book as sport-adjacent, for fear of discouraging nonsporty readers. Perhaps my latent athleticism birthed this awareness of the impact of the physical on the mental, the interplay of stillness and travel, how my body sometimes needs to take over life processing when my brain is a jumble of questions.

With freedom gained through the bicycle, Cyclettes traces my thoughts and movements through diverse cultures and ideas as I contemplate how to live a meaningful life. The narrative is recursive in its themes and fluid in its spiraling from one into the next with written and visual rhythms that simulate the sensation of riding a bicycle. This is a list of some of my favorite books that keenly track on the page the experience of a mind in motion.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami

Prolific Japanese writer Murakami’s memoir feels almost like dispatches from the road, a light stream of consciousness that comes while he is running in Hawaii, Japan, and New England in preparation for the New York City marathon. His history as a runner and long distance racer has spanned the length of his writing career. What Murakami talks about when he talks about running is running, but also writing, and also the distillation of self. His self is one of great solitude, whose persistent focus at a writing desk parallels his fixed gaze on a horizon during a long run. He revisits past successes and failures in both writing and racing, which are really competitions between his younger and older self, stamina sharpened by a mind that remains present one word or step at a time. Murakami calls himself a physical more than an intellectual person who needs to physically strain his muscles to near an understanding of anything. The secret to succeeding in one’s pursuits is maintaining a pace, he says. Reading the book is like slipping into Murakami’s shoes and lapping in time with him. 

Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach

Bach said the idea for the book came to him as “a visionesque spooky thing”. This sleeper hit was hard to classify when it quietly debuted in 1970. Was it a children’s book? Animal fantasy? Religious parable? Nature? Photography? Whatever it was, Jonathan Livingston Seagull went on to sell over a million copies by its second year in print. Jonathan Livingston Seagull is living a typical seagull life when the story begins. Growing bored of his monotonous days, he is expelled from his flock and begins to push the limits of flight beyond his basic needs. Jonathan encounters other outcast gulls who share their wisdoms about a higher plane of existence, experiments with speed and aerial prowess, and develops a philosophy for an impassioned life. Dispersed throughout early editions are grayscale photographs of a seagull freezeframed against a stark sky or a vast seashore. In the centerfold, there is a sequence of filmy sheets capturing a seagull at multiple stages of flight. A previously unpublished fourth part was added to the story in the 2014 edition. The book remains a divisive text with some declaring it a spiritual classic, others finding it naïve. I read it a decade ago and still think of its windy heights every time I see a seagull.

Swimming to the Top of the Tide by Patricia Hanlon

The top of the tide is an intermission between flow and ebb. Hanlon writes that it is in that moment of reaching the top of the tide on a swim that a body is encircled by horizon, held at the apex of stillness, suddenly aware of the gravitational relationships at work. That moment becomes familiar to Hanlon and her husband over the course a book that documents a year of swimming in the tidal estuary of New England’s Great Marsh. They had made a pact to swim as often as they could for as long as they could before winter shut them down. But as the sun set earlier and waters cooled, they upgraded wetsuits and became more ingenious in their techniques to stay warm. Almost daily they swam after work, discovering new swimming spots in a locality they’d called home for forty years. Many areas were unnavigable by all other modes of transportation but a body shimmying through narrow hidden waters. Part how-to guide, part nature journal, part ecological call to action, this book inspires the reader to take a closer look at the everyday cycles in their own backyards.

Flâneuse by Lauren Elkin

Coined in the 19th century, a flâneur was a person (an affluent, urban, white man) that leisurely wandered the streets in aloof observation. Historically, women were largely excluded from such free rambling because of the male gaze, issues of safety, and domestic duties. By contrast, Elkin defines a flâneuse as a person (determined, resourceful, feminine) that walks the streets with purpose, searching for a metropolis’s creative potential. Weaving her own meandering insights with tales of women throughout history, literature, and the arts who shared the same streets in New York, Tokyo, Paris, Venice, and London, Elkin considers how women have engaged in complicated ways with public spaces. Walking is like reading, like map-making, like seeing the unseen. What can only be found on foot? Take a long walk and find out.

Bright Archive by Sarah Minor

In a combination of concrete poetry, interviews, memoir, and historical research, Minor’s experimental nonfiction collection is interactive architecture with directional force. Each essay demands the reader physically change perspectives to enter figurative and literal interstices that examine how people and places are shaped by one another. When Minor returns to her family’s old Iowa home, narrative is housed at an angle in and around attic trusses and soffits, numbered paragraphs serving as signposts for the eyes to follow as if the reader is also hunched over in the dusty rafters searching for squirrels. One essay requires the reader turn the book upside-down and back around as the story shifts from scenes in underground temples of the Damanhur commune, then back up for air. An essay written sideways and split down the middle recounts Minor’s journey down the banks of the Mississippi River as she considers the chutes that carry our refuse and where waste ends up. There’s an essay with sentences that knot like drawstrings on pants being pulled off, another that takes the shape of a log cabin from above as blocks of text interlock at 90-degree angles. From enclosure and release to falling and fleeing, the layouts transform each essay’s emotional core into a correlating bodily motion. 

Do Nothing by Celeste Headlee

Published a year after Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing and a week before the country entered COVID-19 quarantine, Headlee’s book is a more pragmatic dismantling of productivity. She charts the evolution of work culture—the rise of the 8-hour work day, how busyness became a virtue, careers got equated with identity, and people began working harder rather than smarter. Headlee challenges the foundation around which we assess the quality of our life, presenting research on how the brain reacts to technology, being overworked, and under socialized. She offers strategies for how to better perceive and make use of time, idle with intent, and enact daily habits to destress. The art of doing nothing is a trendy topic. This book is one accessible introduction to a greater consciousness around how and when to power down.

Arbitrary Stupid Goal by Tamara Shopsin

Illustrator and graphic designer Shopsin’s memoir about growing up in her parents’ infamous old-fashioned grocery story is told in fragmented anecdotes about the ongoings of neighbors, customers, and fringe people of Greenwich Village in the 1970s and ’80s. Her unconventional childhood is doled out in random, curious snippets of short paragraphs, drawings, and ephemera that feel like memories themselves. Told out of order, the assemblage almost presents time like a bouncy ball erratically bouncing without cumulation. At the heart of it all is her idiosyncratic father, constantly keeping busy with side musings and store upgrades. Shopsin’s father’s doctrine was that of ASGs. An Arbitrary Stupid Goal is something that “isn’t too important, makes you live in the moment, and still gives you a driving force. This driving force is a way to get around the fact that we will all die and there is no real point to life.” ASGs are like mini-preoccupations to get a person from one day to the next. This playbook for staving off tedium, depression, and existential despair is introduced and reinforced to the reader with every example of her father’s little motions.

So Many Olympic Exertions by Anelise Chen

In this work of autofiction, we meet Athena—a former swimmer seven years into her doctoral program with a yet completed dissertation on competitive sport—grieving a friend’s suicide, perseverating on what it would mean to keep going or give up. The narrative is formatted like a commonplace book of notes-to-self that meditate on progress and regress and the messaging on success defined in the world of sport. Each effort—to write a thesis, to play a sport, to live a life—acts as metaphor for the others.

The book is dripping with Athena’s languish as thoughts on desires versus goals are interspersed with descriptive clippings from sports media: interviews and footage of athletes quitting, collapsing, failing; a bruised limb; a perfect 10; commentator rhetoric on winners and losers; studies on the psychology of it all. So Many Olympic Exertions’ economical poeticism, curious collectanea, and introspective probing of modern stressors is reminiscent of Jenny Offill’s Weather about the anxiety of living in a time of climate emergency. Both ask, what now? Chen writes, “the daily resistance of living is a necessary exertion. Our musculature is designed to resist.”

7 Novels that Use Mystery to Examine Race

Posted on by Jo Lou

Unlike any other genre, mystery breaks the world apart. Sometimes this shattering comes from a death at a dinner party. Other times it happens when a family member goes missing in broad daylight. No matter how things fall apart, to solve a mystery, the pieces must come back together by the end. To do this, the genre often relies on systems of power that uphold the status quo: the good guys win, the bad guys lose and justice is served. To make it plain, the genre can look very white. 

When writing my debut novel, Jackal, I wanted to tackle difficult questions around history, race, and class by using a mystery. In the book, Liz Rocher returns home for a wedding only to uncover a disturbing pattern: young Black girls have been going missing in their predominantly white town for years.  

Mystery thrives on patterns and expectations. Readers expect the process of an investigation or the findings in a court room to reveal the truth because these are proven methods of righting an injustice. However, these methods assume the lens of whiteness. Examine these systems from the perspectives of people of color and they start to break down. Detectives dismiss leads because racial bias. Witnesses withhold testimony because they fear repercussions for cooperating with a system that has failed to protect others in the past. Victims aren’t believed because of assumptions around race and class. Bit by bit, these established rhythms of justice fall into discord. By the end, marginalized folks are left holding broken pieces of their lives with seemingly no way to put them back together. To center whiteness denies this brokenness. It also wastes an opportunity to do what mystery does best: solve things. 

In the list below, the writers disrupt the whiteness of the crime and mystery genre by centering BIPOC protagonists. Instead of relying on the same formulaic tropes, these books explore what it means to be a person of color navigating a justice system rooted in racism. 

My Sweet Girl by Amanda Jayatissa

My Sweet Girl follows Paloma Evans, a Sri Lankan adoptee. Having been adopted by white American missionary parents, she grew up with the best of everything. Now 30 and struggling to make the rent on her overpriced San Francisco apartment, Paloma sublets spare room to Arun, who recently moved to the United States from India. When she finds Arun dead, murdered in her apartment, she must face her past to fix her rapidly eroding present.

Paloma is charming despite being prickly, impatient and stuck in her bad habits. She is also as unreliable as they come. The story unfolds as she struggles to solve the mystery and navigate the racism she faces as a Brown woman, while reckoning with the tensions between her childhood in her birth country and her current life in her adopted country. 

All That’s Left Unsaid by Tracey Lien

Ky Tran, a young Vietnamese Australian woman, returns home after her younger brother is murdered. Once there, she notices how the circumstances of his murder don’t add up. After struggling to spur an indifferent police force into action, she sets out to track down witnesses. With each new voice, she begins to uncover a horrible truth rooted in violence, colonialism and the choices people make to survive.

A writer’s duty is to tell the truth and Lien doesn’t shy away from it. Fearless and unflinching when it comes to the immigrant experience, Lien crafts a story that deepens with each page and lands close to the bone.

Like a Sister by Kellye Garrett

When disgraced reality TV star Desiree Pierce is found dead in the Bronx in the early hours of the morning after her 25th birthday party, the authorities quickly declare her death an overdose. But her sister Lena Scott knows otherwise. Though the two are estranged, she knows her sister wouldn’t travel above 125th street. After being dismissed at every turn, Lena embarks on a search on her own to find out what really happened. 

The characters in this novel are deliciously complicated, imperfect and real. Additionally, Garrett utilizes how Lena and Desiree see themselves versus how society perceives them as Black women to drive this mystery through every twist and turn.

Your House Will Pay by Steph Cha

Your House Will Pay details the historical tensions between the Black and Korean communities in Los Angeles. While living with her Korean immigrant parents and working in the family pharmacy, Grace Park struggles to understand the distance between her parents and her sister Miriam. After a police shooting of another Black teenager, Shawn Matthews grapples with his relationship with his family while mourning the memory of his sister who was also killed by police and keeping his own demons at bay. When a shocking crime roils L.A., the Parks and the Matthews face a reckoning decades in the making. 

Cha deftly constructs a story where the personal is also political. Using real life events and beautifully drawn characters, the mystery breaks open and reveals the complexities of past and present racial tensions at every turn.  

Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson

A family saga told in dual timelines, Black Cake brings two estranged siblings together to uncover their mother’s hidden past. After their mother Eleanor’s death, Byron and Benny inherit her black cake recipe and a voice recording. Along the way, they untangle a legacy of murder, heartbreak, and betrayal that stretches from the Caribbean to California. 

Like Wilkerson and the characters in Black Cake, I come from an immigrant family. There are parts of my family’s past which are a mystery to me; who they were before they left their country and the circumstances that led them to leave are often wrapped up and kept close to the chest. Wilkerson uses the gradual unraveling of family secrets to challenge and question Black immigrant identity and relationships. 

Winter Counts by David Heska Wanbli Weiden 

A local enforcer on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota, Virgil Wounded Horse serves as a source of justice outside of the American legal system and the tribal council. When a heroin epidemic overtakes the reservation, Virgil must learn where the drugs are coming from and how to stop them from poisoning the community.

Virgil’s biracial identity and struggling to find belonging is beautifully woven throughout this story. This is a novel that details many facets of life on a rez without shying away from hard truths.

When No One is Watching by Alyssa Cole

Sydney Green’s block is changing. Tendrils of gentrification are quickly uprooting her beloved neighborhood in Brooklyn. She starts a walking tour to retain her community’s history, but as she digs into the past, more of her neighbors begin to disappear and Sydney must figure out what’s going on before she vanishes next. When No One is Watching is an excellent blend of hidden history and fast pacing, by the end Cole captured all the unease of gentrification in thriller form.

During the Black Lives Matter Movement, A Korean American Mother and Son Spar Over Political Activism

Posted on by Jo Lou

In Which Side Are You On, 21-year-old Reed returns to Los Angeles, his hometown, to call on his ailing grandmother. But once there, he uses the opportunity to finally break the news to his parents: he’s dropping out of Columbia. Why participate in the neoliberal system that perpetuates white supremacy and inequity? He would rather devote his time to the Black Lives Matter movement, organize protests to get justice for Akai Gurley, a Black man, shot at the hands of Peter Liang, an Asian American police officer. 

As Asian Americans advocate for Liang’s innocence in the name of community, Reed, who is half Chinese and half Korean, feels an immense responsibility to play his part in redressing the social injustice and bringing the revolution he thinks is around the corner. To that end, he seeks to learn about his mother’s involvement in the Black-Korean Coalition of the 1980s, hoping it would give him fodder to keep the current movement alive and relevant, and to better organize cross racial solidarity into being. But as conversations between him and his parents ensue, Reed learns the harsh reality of activism and organizing in practice. 

Using electric dialogue, Wong gives the narrative its forward momentum, and expands its scope across time and generations by raising questions of morality and social responsibility in the face of injustice and privilege and by examining historical moments that speak to the importance of cross-racial solidarity.

Ryan Lee Wong was born and raised in Los Angeles—a fact visible in his debut which paints the city with intimate strokes. Wong dedicated two years to living a Buddhist monastic life at the Ancestral Heart Zen Temple. Currently, he lives in Brooklyn where he’s the Administrative Director of Brooklyn Zen Center.

We spoke over Zoom on a Thursday afternoon about the role of social media in activism and organizing movements, empathy as an avenue for understanding, holding space for intergenerational trauma and much more.

Bareerah Ghani: I find it interesting that Twitter comes up a lot in the novel as a source of “woke” news. The book also insinuates the idea of Twitter as an avenue to assert moral superiority and perhaps a proxy for taking actual action against social justice issues. What is your view on the role of social media, in particular Twitter, in opening dialogue on social justice issues and fostering a community?

Ryan Lee Wong: Just like you said, I think Twitter can be both. On one hand, when I was becoming radicalized in my politics, Twitter was a really quick and illuminating way to build up my critical vocabulary. I could log up to Twitter when something happened in the news, and I would get maybe a dozen really smart and interesting takes on something that were often left of what, you know, The New York Times would say about something or other mainstream media outlets, and that felt true to me, on an intuitive level. I thought that was really powerful, and so helpful for me. At the same time, this other thing could happen where I’d be reading those dozen takes, and sometimes they would disagree with each other, and then there would be takes on the takes, and I found it tended towards anxiety and critique; those were the tweets that did the best, those were the kinds of accounts that often got the most followers. And if you are in a world that pushes you towards anxiety and critique it’s actually very hard, I think, to have certain kinds of conversations in which you build relationships and a shared sense of belonging. I didn’t really find that kind of sustained community building on Twitter. I think some people are maybe better at thriving in that kind of environment than I was.

BG: Yeah, my experience with social media is kind of similar—perhaps why the book really spoke to me in how it critiques social media. Even when Reed talks about The Black Lives Matter movement, he says how the movement gained impetus, and essentially made being “radical” “cool”. I thought it was really profound. It got me thinking about this bandwagon effect we now often see after big tragedies such as in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, everyone on Instagram began posting a black square on their timeline without realizing its significance or reflecting on their own credibility to partake in that action. I was wondering how you view the role of social media platforms and their rapid use in propelling liberal ideologies for social currency.

It actually takes a lot of sustained intimate dialogue to tell the difference between politics and performance; your actions in the world from what you post.

RLW: It’s a double-edged sword. I think that Reed is going through all this way before 2020 and had he been around then, he would’ve been very critical of juice bars posting Black Lives Matter signs in the windows without any kind of progress or social engagement. But then again, Black Lives Matter as a movement is hard to picture at all without social media so you cannot discount the importance of it, and the way that people were able to language and name an experience that was happening nationally and incidents in the country that previously had been seen as isolated incidents of police violence. At the same time, it gets very tricky once influence and celebrity culture get mixed in and there can often be a very facile engagement with politics that’s more about performance. At one point, Reed even says, for our generation it’s really hard to tell performance from your politics and being able to know the difference. And I think that’s one of the challenges of today—it actually takes a lot of sustained intimate dialogue to tell the difference between politics and performance; your actions in the world from what you post.

BG: I’m fascinated by how wide the scope of the narrative is because of its inspection of intergenerational differences. One instance that stood out to me is when Reed points out his mom’s inappropriate use of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), and she goes like, but that’s just how we talked, using AAVE terms was a display of endearment. And Reed says he understands but he could never take his mom’s case to Twitter for “fear of getting dragged.” What are your thoughts on this generational shift on how cross racial solidarity is envisioned now as a celebration of the differences between us, where previously it was about sharing language and culture? Could you speak to this in connection to the role of social media, cancel culture and cultural appropriation.

RLW: One thing that’s really interesting is how, what used to be coalition or solidarity building that happens on a very local, intimate, and geographically specific scale can now be transmitted out globally, almost instantaneously. So when Reed and his mother are having this dialogue about appropriation of Black language and African American vernacular, it’s a question of generational difference and social media, but to me it’s also a difference of geography, time, context and particular movements. So to be politicized in Oakland East Bay in the1970s and five, ten years after the Third World Liberation strikes at Berkeley and SF state, that’s a very different world than Brooklyn with social media in 2016, discussing Akai Gurley, Peter Liang. And it’s also a different world than LA 1980s, South Central and Black-Korean relations there. And so, I think it’s tempting to try to make broad statements about when it is and isn’t appropriate to share and borrow culture. But to me, the only way it’s actually been a constructive and interesting dialogue is when it’s focused in a very specific time, place and context. And so, to take those three moments, my impression is that, in the late ’60s, mid ’70s in the East Bay, there was a much freer sharing of those ideas and cultures—the Black Panthers were being influenced by Maoism, and then were in turn influencing Asian American activists whereas in my experience of Brooklyn in the mid 2010s, there was a lot more care and interest in making sure that non-Black protesters weren’t appropriating or misusing Black language and that also came out of a very real need, which is to think critically about when certain phrases or slogans developed by the Black community are not actually appropriate for non-Black people to use. So it’s all about context.

BG: For me, the heart of the novel lies in how it presents empathy as an avenue to understand one’s community. We see this in Reed’s mom and her being able to be there for her mother while holding space for the difficult emotions attached to that relationship. She teaches Reed to do the same; to understand his grandparents’ greed for money—something he detested—through empathizing with them and trying to feel the pain that led them to worship money. Could you speak to this idea of empathy as a powerful tool to heal and bridge gaps, in connection to your experience at the Ancestral Heart Zen Temple and the lessons you learnt there, in meditation, and community. 

RLW: So you could actually describe the entire movement of the novel as going from the head to the heart. So Reed’s big lesson is that in the beginning of the novel, he’s very cerebral. He’s very intellectual, good at applying theories. He’s kind of like a walking theory dispenser—whatever is happening, he has something to name it in a framework. And what he realizes is that it’s not something that’s going to get him far if his true goal is to build sustained community and movements. He has all these contradictions in his head, and he can’t really reconcile certain aspects of what’s going on, and the only space that can actually hold those differences is the heart. Because the heart does not have to divide the world into binaries, the heart’s more capacious and the heart’s a better listener. That is one of the big things that Zen practice has taught me. 

Of course you would want to try to alleviate all of the pain that we see and of course believing one could do that will absolutely lead to burn out.

The big misunderstanding around Zen Buddhism is that you sit there and kind of wipe your mind blank. But that’s not my experience at all. So much of Zen practice is actually sitting there in meditation and communal practice for long enough that your bodily wisdom actually starts to come forth. So it’s the opposite of what most people think where it comes from your head down. But actually, the wisdom and the grounding moves from the body up.

One of the big turns that happened for me was a very similar thing to what Reed experiences. I had all these ideas about how the world should be. The more I was able to drop those ideas for long enough to meet things with the heart first, the more I was actually able to feel more profound relationships with people, more compassion for myself and for others and more acceptance of the world as it is. And it’s not a passive acceptance as in oh, that’s just how things are. It’s an acceptance as the first step before trying to go out and change things; an acceptance of reality. The mind thinks it knows what’s going on but actually, I think it often has a hard time accepting reality.

BG: Do you think this acceptance of reality by listening to your heart helps in mitigating the burnout and emotional burdens we see Reed facing, as person of color striving to push against the white supremacist establishment?

RLW: Yeah, absolutely. One of the signs of burnout in my understanding is despair or nihilism. To me, Reed is very much on the cusp of that, if not already there. I think we as humans are not built to directly address all of the suffering in the world at the same time, even though I think for those of us who care and are paying attention that desire can arise, and that’s actually a very lovely, wholesome desire—of course you would want to try to alleviate all of the pain that we see and of course believing one could do that will absolutely lead to burn out. Self care is kind of the buzz word or popular phrase for this but actually what Reed starts to realize is it’s not about self-care in the sense that, I’m so important. It’s that you have to care for this body as an extension of a longer lineage. So part of what he understands over the course of the book is that he’s not just caring for him as this important person or not, he’s caring for an entire history that survived so that he could be there. And that helps to take away the egoism, the narcissism that can arise in certain self care circles. Once you start to understand the ancestry and the longer arc of yourself in history, that’s actually what you’re caring for.

BG: The novel also critiques the neoliberal order that we have, especially the college system that fits into and perpetuates that order by maintaining inequity and upholding white supremacy. We see Reed wanting to drop out of Columbia and his parents trying to convince him not to, even though they went through the same route. In this we see this precarious tug of war between Reed having to be practical or pursuing what he believes in. How do you consider the two in the face of wanting to change the world?

RLW: You know, I joked with my MFA Thesis adviser who read an early draft of this, that it almost seems like there’s something primarily human or evolutionary about being 18 to 22 and needing to burn things down, to do things completely differently. That’s why I think student movements have been so critical throughout history because they’re just willing to discard everything. At the same time, hopefully, those students grow up and realize it’s not necessarily the way to move the world for the rest of your life.

I think again and again what Reed’s parents are saying is not necessarily that he’s wrong, and not that this private university isn’t an institution that perpetuates inequality. They’re just saying that in order to actually change that fundamentally, it’s better to have the tools he will gain from staying. And you know, maybe this isn’t actually true of everyone in every context. But again, given where Reed comes from in terms of history, family and lineage, that is what makes sense for him. It was definitely the right way for some students in 1968, to take over university buildings, walk out and shut down campuses—that was really necessary. But that’s not the kind of historical moment Reed lives in. It’s not going to have the effect he thinks it will at the beginning of the novel.

BG: I love how the novel explores the dynamics between the immigrant parent and child. We see a certain kind of austerity alongside expectations held by the immigrant parent– Halmoni disowns Reed’s mother when she drops out of college, CJ’s mother is harsh on her about taking a semester break from Harvard. What are your views on the viability and fairness of such dynamics between the immigrant parent and child where the former considers the latter as an extension of self and thereby, a second chance, or a “do-over” in life?

RLW: As I was writing this novel, one of the really helpful frameworks was this theory of racial melancholia that David L. Eng and Shinhee Han put forth. They’re talking about the Asian American diaspora in particular, but this can be true of any diaspora—there is a perpetual unresolved mourning for the loss of their homeland and that mourning becomes melancholia, becomes kind of like a state. They actually say, unlike Freud, this is not necessarily a pathology, but it’s important to name.

I think one of the most radical things one can do in the first or second, or even third plus generations, is to really attend to and care for that melancholia because without that, we will project our unresolved mourning onto someone else in the next generation. That’s absolutely what’s going on between Halmoni, and Reed’s mother, and Reed and his mother.

Often first-generation immigrants don’t have the resources to do that care work, because they’re just trying to survive, trying to establish material security.

Often first-generation immigrants don’t have the social or financial resources to do that care work, to really start to attend to that mourning, because often they’re just trying to survive, trying to establish material security. So, of course, those feelings of grief and mourning get passed on in the form of needing the next generation to do something that they couldn’t. It’s a lot to hold and grapple with in that relationship. And so, by the end of the novel, what has to happen is that each side has to do its work, essentially—Reeds mother starts to realize some of the ways that she is doing that projection and Reed is more ready to receive the care his mother’s able to offer, and it’s just a small movement but for the purposes of this novel, it’s everything. 

BG: To what extent do you think there’s room for shared healing and holding space for each other?

RLW: When talking about intergenerational trauma and historic trauma, the term healing is used a lot but I’m still not sure what that means. When I think about this novel, and when I think about my own personal work in this area, to me, it’s much more about building the capacity to face those traumas, to really be still with them.

At the beginning of the novel, both Reed and his mother are being thrown around by their individual and shared traumas. They’re miscommunicating; can’t quite seem to ground themselves. And over and over again, Reed is forced to see the reality of his situation; his life, history, social context. As soon as he starts to really see that and develop an honest relationship with that, that’s what allows for real dialogue to happen. Similarly, in real life, my parents made a conscious choice not to talk that much about their past when they grew up. In many ways I think that was a wise choice because I don’t think I was actually ready to hear them until relatively recently. I had to have that emotional capacity and once I did, it all kind of clicked into place.

When we talk about starting to do the work of facing intergenerational trauma and opening a conversation, so much of the work to me is actually internal first. One has to be ready to meet those histories, and to be genuinely surprised by whatever that conversation brings, and that is what allows for a true dialogue to happen.

Ed and the Movies

Posted on by Wynter Miller

“Ed and the Movies” by Robert Glück

Seven on a warm June evening. The glossy light is full, the shadows are mild. Little brown birds make thin music, weak metallic trills. I’m walking through Ed’s garden to his front door. It’s overgrown and orderly, the smell of damp earth and heavy roses. There are fronds and branches to duck, red and green marble-sized apples growing out of their flowers on espaliered trees. Something in pots, and the brugmansia, night-scented trumpets, sweet and sinister. I climb the wooden steps. The porch light is on already. I’m empty handed.

No, I hold the string of a white pastry box heavy with two lemon tarts and two chocolate éclairs that satisfy my greed under the pretense of fattening Ed up. He’ll probably eat one bite. I feel sleepy and itchy as though some emotional demand will be made, and what will I do then? I sense his death behind the door. I don’t need to knock, he buzzed me in at the gate. The door swings open, he’s very animated. Would you rather see me lifeless, he mocks. I hold up the pastry box and we moan with satisfaction. Death is too serious for us. I hug Ed and I want to say I love you but choke on the words as though I’m lying (I’m not).

I smell the Japanese half of Ed’s childhood—soy and ginger. He intends to perfect a recipe for barbecued short ribs as he did for lemon bundt cake and sushi rice. It’s Tuesday, my night with Ed, an ongoing joke of self-interest. I contribute to Ed’s welfare by eating complicated meals involving the stove, the oven, and the microwave, that take Ed all day to prepare. The table is set, the food is a picture. Roasted pig—I start chewing before it is served, imagining fat. I can’t get enough of the salty, burnt-sugar succulence. We dissect the flavors—more rice vinegar? ginger? Sophie, a small gray and brown tabby with a vexed expression, heedlessly scrolls against my shoes, burrows into my armpits, and vanishes.

Ed pokes at the meat with his chopsticks, takes a few bites of rice, praises himself for eating as much as he does. When we lived together, he could warm up to dinner with a double bag of potato chips. His voice is strong but the air is seeping out of his posture. He’s down to 120 and wears a disorganized expression. He brings me up to date on the daily horrors. He has neuropathy—the nerves along the soles of his feet strum like electric guitars. Some fungus looks like fur in his throat. He started a new med. Dr. Owen said if the new drug causes pain in his muscles it means they are disintegrating, so his body started pulling apart like taffy as the doctor spoke. Owen added that if Ed feels pain in his liver he should call him at once. Ed tossed and turned all night, a finger jabbing him there. I confess I don’t pay much attention to these sagas, which are, like his blathering when we were together, tedious and appalling. I hear myself recite the same stupid good advice I bestowed on Ed six years ago—and I hear my mother’s voice in mine, calming, distancing. Ed’s days are obviously precious but also lonely, threadbare, and twisted by fear.

What do I have to say? It’s still the eighties. I feel so intensely that the party is happening elsewhere you could call my distraction a disease. That is, I feel like I’m reading a bad translation, with the knowledge that a better one exists. Distance installs itself in me, from thrillingly difficult technical vocabularies to the ascendency of the grid on, say, Calvin Klein sheets. Distance replaces the excesses and heartfelt essences of the seventies. Meanwhile, Ed sustains losses, giving up job, travel, movies—increased nakedness before death. He fights a hollowed out feeling, hard to portray, not dramatic.

I feel so intensely that the party is happening elsewhere you could call my distraction a disease.

Last winter, flattened under the buzzing lights, Owen told Ed he had a few months left. Ed went home and planted a hundred and thirty tulip bulbs. When he worked in the park, he would bonsai two hundred chrysanthemums for Easter. I’m bloated and wan. My life does not seem to apply and resists being shaped into anecdotes. Striving seems vulgar. I’ve eaten too much fat. While Ed talks I actually dream for a few seconds: I can’t find my pen, and when I do it’s on the kitchen table laid out between knife and spoon. Eating words and writing dinner. My dream sees me this way.

What am I leaving out? I remind myself to tape some conversations with Ed. Is that too gruesome? Half asleep, I brew strawberry tea for Ed and black tea for myself in the blue and white spongeware mugs that belonged to Ed and me when we were lovers. I’m almost taking them down from my own cupboard. The clear flavor of the tea is so welcome that some of me goes into it. Ed opens a window—I’m surprised by his initiative because I expect nothing from anyone. He actually does eat his share of the pastry, which is a satisfaction. “You never cooked like this when we were together,” I complain good-naturedly.

As though explaining, Ed says, “Remember Marty?”

“?”

“Who lived next door?”

“That greasy little guy who always wore the same sportcoat?” I’m surprised Ed knows his name.

“We had sex. He’d just finished eating a can of sardines.” Ed exhales to show the sardines swarming in Marty’s breath.

I’m laughing and stung by this thirteen-year-old infidelity. I feel it more deeply because I’m single again. Denny and I broke up two years ago and my insecurity has new life. I experience my only moments of hope when I think of him. How to extinguish the useless surges? The action of the disease makes Ed’s body attractive to me again. Is my love for him realer than I know? I attributed intention to his beauty because it had power over me. I remember the tenderness of snuggling in bed, soft cotton t-shirts and naked below—the cotton erotic, the hot and cold of train stations, a mix of directions. Ed replies with a look, What do you see? The face that detained me for so many years. Galaxies.

Why is Ed telling me about Marty? Ed was not confined to beauty and safety. I used him to experience risk, as I do in this story. The rough desires passed around at night by guys in a park or an alley. I’ll bet Marty is where Ed discovered rimming. One morning Ed seemed to know all about it—what a surprise that was. Pleasure hidden like treasure in that scary place. I hid my face in simple justice of representation and my body made noises that meant it had instincts I’d never considered, like a school of salmon migrating up my butt.

These carnal updates from Ed and his primeval romps give our marriage a weird posthumous life. Since we are on the subject, I remind Ed of the evening fifteen years earlier when I cooked an elaborate birthday dinner for him. He turned up around midnight, explaining without remorse that he had been patiently guiding Sean into bed, a straight friend he was “liberating.” “Having a reason doesn’t mean anything,” I cried. I blinked like a flustered professor and my body stuttered. Ed laughed in alarm and mimicked my frantic gesture. Then he offered, “You’re just a victim of circumstance.”

Ed laughs and says, “Well, weren’t you?” He places a buttery crumb on a desiccated lip. He tastes, separating the flavors into a panorama. I ask him if he’s painting. “Every morning from my studio I see a nanny push a buggy up the hill. I think she’s Nicaraguan. She looks really young. She puts the brake on the buggy, climbs a long set of stairs, unlocks the door, and then goes down for the baby. That buggy points right down the hill and it’s held in place by a thin piece of aluminum. Every day I expect the baby to go flying down the street into traffic.”

We share an expression of horror. Ed lives on a very steep hill down which the buggy already careens. I say, “Someone has to tell that woman!”

Ed solemnly agrees. “One sentence could save that child’s life.”

“But Ed, why don’t you tell her?” I feel a surge of relief—finally I can save someone’s life. “All you have to do is walk across the street and tell her!”

It’s so easy, but Ed has a question. “You think I should tell her?”

“Certainly, tomorrow morning.”

Ed’s head falls forward, his eyes pop and his jaw drops in amazement. Once I thought that was gay body language, but then I learned it’s Japanese.

“Do you know how sick I am?” He’s thinking, Why should all of civilization rise to protect that stupid baby?

In self-defense I think, You are well enough to cook dinner, to paint, to dig in your garden. “You could do it—it’s your responsibility—as a neighbor. Ed, you still go out all the time.” I blanch at the word still.

Ed’s really angry. I’m a whirlwind in his head. The baby I can’t save will not grant me permission to save some other life. His face is rigid and his mouth works on its own. “I am not responsible for that baby. Don’t I have enough to worry about? I don’t know that baby. I don’t know those people. I am trying to stay alive!”

I grin in desolation. Ed is slightly revolting—I remember the absorbing spectacle of that jaw working against me, a perpetual motion of amazing insult, the smashed furniture, the wonder I felt when his fury jumped a quantum level, beyond caring, heedless. His thin body or anything could be thrown onto the blaze. I know when I’m licked. Giving up is hard work. The other baby must live or die without us. The buggy plummets and I lack the willpower to alter its course. I picture Ed by his window, the witness of this drama which inspires no call to action.

Like most of the world, I watch TV to be somewhere else without exerting myself. Exertion is the only way to go somewhere else, so dissatisfaction builds up. It’s hard not to be bitter overall, as though I’d actually seen all those daytime talk shows. The entire message of TV is that life is not fair, more daydream than nightdream, yet the victim has his faults.

Like most of the world, I watch TV to be somewhere else without exerting myself.

Not so with Ed—when we were together we watched TV with joy. In the early seventies, a cousin took pity on us and bought us a little black-and-white Zenith. We watched it through the night in Ed’s studio. Ed painted and I kept him company. I am describing hours of perfect contentment. We liked Fred Astaire and musicals in general, but horror movies were even more histrionic. Ed and I felt delectation for these images of mayhem.

In Ed’s bedroom, light is a translucent rectangle even though it’s almost nine. The white glass arrests dappled shadows. Ed lies under the heavy indigo blanket, wasting; I lie on top, succulent. I’m happy to be lying down and I feel perfectly relaxed on Daniel’s side of the bed. The disease leads some of us into a deeper engagement with the world. Denny became a science writer for AIDS Treatment News, and Loring joined Gran Fury. (At Bo Houston’s funeral, his mother says, “Thank you so much,” as though I’d done anything, and before I can stop myself, I say, “Thank you,” as though she’d done anything.) An epidemic is like a mystery with heroes and villains, but I drift from my bedroom to Ed’s bedroom, where light falls through frosted glass in a certain way. Above us the screen doles out images we love: the pre-WWII unknown lurches basso profundo through shadows and dry ice; the supersized zoo of spiders, locusts, snakes, ants, and lizards climbs out of the squashed air of the 50’s desert. Ed and I love bad horror films for the lyricism of their failed effects. We must be among the few to have twice seen Curucu, Beast of the Amazon, a film that couldn’t afford a visible monster or even gore. Branches twitch on the jungle trail, the mike slides into view, the victim screams from off-screen. Its very artificiality makes Curucu a convincing exploration of the afterlife, like a church service.

Tonight we watch a Mario Bava film in which moist decomposition replaces the genre’s earlier effects, as though a horror of decay is more germane to the present. It’s weird to be watching corpses rock back and forth in their own putrescence while lying next to Ed. The monster shows the world what she is: she throws open her robe with a triumphant expression to reveal a red chest cavity packed with roiling white maggots. Because of this image, I don’t look Ed in the eye, as though I’d accidentally seen something too personal. What does he make of the skeletons with rags of flesh? I am the only one who can ask him this question so I do. He rolls his head on the pillow and reminds me in a mild voice that he will be cremated, and that decay is not the same as death. He says, “My death is an emptiness that I can’t fill.” I am relieved, but why? We both know Ed will soon be reduced to ash. He’s dying in stop action like a good make-up job: the chaotic expression, the skeletal jeer, the pumpkin head wobbling with bon vivance on the broomstick neck, the pinched nose, the eyebrows pulled back, the eyes starved and hurt.

The monsters rise up while Ed and I sink into the pillows. But horror movies are actually comedies because death is reversible. Or it’s a consummation: the one taken by the monster experiences the full extent of his death. In his last scream, the victim faces the monster and dredges horror to the limit. Like a sexual consummation, he groans from the deepest place where his body (the world) begins.

Writing Fanfiction Gave Me Community and Creative Freedom

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

When the pandemic erupted, I was in the midst of leaving my lucrative corporate job and transitioning to graduate school. I had returned to my parents’ home, logging onto client meetings from my childhood bedroom during the day, losing hours to fanfiction on Archive of our Own (Ao3) at night. As the terror of the pandemic appeared in push notifications on my phone, scrolling through fanfictions about Draco and Hermione’s imagined lives after Hogwarts soothed me. Escaping into stories that continued the plot of a childhood classic also comforted me as I came to terms with leaving the stability of my career for the instability of pursuing my passion. 

I had always wanted to be a writer, but as the only child of two Chinese immigrants, financial security was a religion in my household. I interpreted part of my inheritance to be the achievement of the upward mobility for which my parents had immigrated. Writing, especially the popular conception of a “starving artist,” did not fit into that framework; I spent my first year post-college trying to see if I could repress and extinguish my literary aspirations for a more stable career path. 

Leaving corporate America, I assumed, would return the creativity and writing drive that I had lost.

After graduating, I thought about writing while working on client presentations, molding my prose into corporate-friendly bullet points and sending out concise, “actionable” emails. I left my job to study creative nonfiction writing 14 months later, folding into storage my blazers and A-line dresses. I had a book inside of me; I was convinced of this. I wanted to write about Chinese culture, history, and society. I wanted to explore intergenerational trauma in a nuanced way that still honored tradition and demonstrated cultural competency. Leaving corporate America, I assumed, would return the creativity and writing drive that I had lost assembling PowerPoint decks and customizing Excel spreadsheets. Yet, despite how many creative writing classes I had taken in college, I struggled to articulate what my project was about in my graduate courses. 

My trepidation was multifaceted. On one hand, the pressure to impress my professors and classmates made me freeze up and second-guess my every submission. Given my relatively young age for my cohort, I expected to feel some imposter syndrome. My previous experience in business had also made me feel like a sell out, as if I no longer belonged in the literary world. On the other hand, my tenure as a consultant had forced me to prioritize precision over ingenuity, and I struggled to switch gears and return to creative writing. My perfectionism had also skyrocketed due to the high-stakes demands of client projects: I agonized over every word I wrote out of fear my prose would be lackluster.  

Fanfiction became my refuge. I sometimes read two books a week for my classes, but I’d gorge on Dramione (Draco and Hermione) fanfictions at night as a way of resetting my brain. The comfort of fandom stemmed from its familiarity. I had first discovered fanfiction in middle school, through a chance Google search about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In the aughts, fanfiction was still contentious, straddling the gray area of copyright laws. The work felt subversive then, due to both the explicit content of the work and the disgruntled reactions from various rights holders over copyright infringement. G.R.R Martin and Anne Rice have both famously spoken out against fandom, with the underlying critique that fanfiction writers should stop being so lazy and start creating their own characters instead of “borrowing” existing ones. 

When I finally re-emerged in fandom, I found an entirely new world. Archive of our Own had debuted, creating a more democratic repository for a dizzying amount of fan works. Rights holders such as Paramount Pictures now consented and, sometimes, encouraged fans to create transformative works from source material. AIM and Livejournal had given way to Discord and Tumblr, both acting as central meeting hubs for fandom, hosting book clubs, allowing for direct and instantaneous contact between writer and readers. Quite a few fanfiction writers were going mainstream, locking down six-figure book deals in YA fiction and fantasy. Fanfiction no longer felt taboo; in fact, it almost felt—wait for it—cool. Through Discord, I  made a contingent of friends I described as my “internet friends,” but my IRL friends also openly admitted to reading fanfic and there are multiple pandemic-era text threads filled with Ao3 links.

The increased interactivity between readers and writers was what intrigued me most about this new-era of fanfiction. Amanda, one of my best (and first) friends in fandom, writes under the screenname mightbewriting. Her story, “Wait and Hope,” is one of the most kudos-ed Dramione fics on Ao3, but I met her when she was still posting the series. I reached out through Tumblr DM with effusive praise, and she became one of my best friends in fandom, the person who introduced me to Discord and encouraged me to start writing my own stories. We’ve gone on vacation twice together, with a group of other writers; this year, I spent my 25th birthday with her and our friends.

I felt immense guilt for all the time fanfiction was taking from my manuscript and my coursework.

Despite my blossoming online writing community and the joy I derived from it, I felt immense guilt for all the time fanfiction was taking from my manuscript and my coursework. I recognized that fandom was serving as escapism for me, but I only saw the surface-level reasons for this. I wasn’t yet acknowledging how my MFA had affected my identity and confidence as a writer. I had taken creative writing courses in college, and while I was familiar with the workshop model–which can sometimes be vulnerable, contentious, and openly hostile–I hadn’t expected the negative critiques I received in my graduate-level workshop to affect me as much as they did. While I believed in the rigor of critique and wanted honest feedback that would help me improve as a writer, I also was writing a memoir about deeply personal topics. Despite the constructs designed to maintain the illusion of critical distance in workshop–substituting “the narrator” instead of “you” when addressing the writer, for instance–hearing that “the narrator” is “self-indulgent” or “immature” was wounding. Workshop environments are also not impervious to interpersonal grudges, a carousel of writers exchanging barbed critiques as a petty way in which to retaliate for having received a negative critique. 

The situation was compounded by the isolation the pandemic had wrought. I had begun my MFA online, and logistical snafus like a fractured internet connection or distracting background noise would prove irritating interruptions during critiques. Yet, the bigger issue was the sterile nature of delivering criticism through a screen, especially when there was no way to commune together afterwards and collectively shake off the sting of critique. Instead, after hearing a variety of commentary, both negative and positive, on my submission, I logged off and stared at my bedroom wall, my classmates’ statements echoing in my head. 

By the second semester of my first year, I dreaded submitting. Sometimes, I would glance at my Apple watch during critique and see my heart was racing at 100 BPM while sitting. It was not that I blamed the course––having finished my two years of coursework, I know that workshop was invaluable to the progress of my manuscript and my overall development as a writer. My problems were internal and personal. I had fallen into the trap of workshop, the reason critics sometimes deride MFAs as “writing factories” that flatten voice and style: I was writing specifically to please an audience, and every sentence I composed was infected by the question of how will this fare in workshop? It was not a particular class that was wounding or brutal; rather, it was the combination of isolation and my insecurity that made writing feel like a chore. I procrastinated relentlessly during the week and wrote feverishly at the 11th hour leading up to my submission deadline. 

My issue, I decided, was discipline. 

I declared that if by the end of summer I had not finished a first draft of my book, I would shave my head.

I devised a draconian system of daily word counts that would ensure 100,000 words by the end of my first year. “I’m going to get a first draft of this manuscript even if it kills me,” I told one of my professors. I set a minimum weekly word count of 10,000 words a week. “It’s not so bad,” I kept rationalizing to friends. “I don’t necessitate a daily word count. I just need to write 10,000 a week.” I didn’t penalize myself for days that were devoid of words, but I had a drastic system of punishments (all recorded in an Excel sheet) for every week in which I did not hit my goal. At one point, I declared that if by the end of summer I had not finished a first draft of my book, I would shave my head. I wrote the punishment on an index card and stuck it above my desk. 

To accommodate my new goals, I reconfigured my schedule, eradicating my nocturnal writing and forced a 6 AM wake up each day so I could drag myself into the foyer and work in tandem with the rising sun. I deleted my social media and installed SelfControl, a website-blocking app that featured a skull as its icon. I put my Dramione WIP (work-in-progress) on hiatus and centered my day around getting my 10,000 manuscript words in, rushing through dinner and social plans so I could sit at my computer and stare at the (sometimes) blank screen. This lasted for three weeks.

I was writing––that wasn’t the problem. If I had been less Manichean in my thinking, I would have celebrated that I was even hitting 500 words a day, but I self-flagellated every week that I missed my 10,000 word goal. With the threat of a buzz cut looming over me, I decided to loosen the guidelines for what type of writing I allowed in my daily word count. I rationalized that if I could finish both my fanfic WIP and a manuscript by the end of summer, then all the better. 

I could not see the irony in my conundrum, that in leaving corporate America, I had decided to appropriate the very rigidity and inflexibility of my former career into my passion, which had tainted an activity I once loved. I was trying to force writing into a consulting framework, calculating ROI, devising a writing schedule the way I would have made a project roadmap for clients. But reintroducing fanfic–and, thus, pleasure–back into my wheelhouse dramatically changed my output. There were weeks where I was writing 20,000 words without feeling depleted. On Discord, my fanfiction friends and I did writing sprints together, setting a timer and trying to get as many words out as possible within the time frame. We had video chat writing hours that transitioned into wine hours. I now had another contingent of writers whom I could call upon to help edit and read over my work, even if neither of us were being paid to do it. I have, on more than one occasion, directly cannibalized my fanfic, cutting lines from my stories and inserting them into my manuscript. Sometimes, these lines are the ones that are complimented most in workshop.

My fanfiction friends and community are sometimes my first readers for pages of my manuscript and other freelance essays.

Fanfic is still stigmatized within the literary community, and I’m particular about whom in my offline life I divulge my fandom identity, but my writing improved during the months I was most active in fandom. Instead of dissolving into a sentimental mess, my prose strengthened as I worked with a diverse range of editors (whom are known as “Alphas” and “Betas” within fandom, wherein Alphas help with big ideas and overall story flow while Betas are called upon for copyediting and syntactical issues) and learned about my blindspots that my MFA classmates hadn’t flagged before. My fanfiction friends and community are sometimes my first readers for pages of my manuscript and other freelance essays I work on. Once, Amanda left me a comment on my document that read, “Sabrina, I am saving you from yourself. Never use the phrase ‘vertiginous pleasure’ again,” and I still have a screenshot of that advice saved. 

The community of readers has also been invaluable and generous in both their praise and their actions: my work has been translated into Chinese and Russian, chosen as a book club pick-of-the-month, and turned into podfics; I’ve had bound copies of my work sent to me and fanart created for different stories. I’m far from a famous Ao3 author, but seeing my work recommended in Reddit threads or featured in TikToks is mind-blowing, and every email I receive notifying me about new kudos or comments on my fics still makes me smile. 

Fanfiction gave me two of the most important things a writer can have: community and creative freedom.

To date, I’ve published 117,542 words of fanfiction, comparable to 261 pages of prose. Some writers may balk at that literary expenditure for a medium in which I don’t receive any type of compensation. Others may feel bemused by why someone with a MFA wants to write about another writer’s characters instead of creating her own. But both of those reasons are precisely why I stay in fandom: in my stories, I don’t have to worry so much about writing the perfect sentence or the most impressive scene. I’m not writing on a deadline, for a fee, or to impress my cohort and professors; I write fanfic entirely for myself. The standard workshop questions around “what are the stakes?” of a piece and “why should readers care about your characters?” are null. Readers flock to these stories because we’re united by a lingua franca, our love for Harry Potter, and they comment on fics out of genuine appreciation for the work, not because it is part of an assignment or built into class expectations.

I’m not always proud of the fanfics I’ve published. In fact, I don’t particularly like re-reading my most-read piece. The writing quality noticeably slips in the later chapters because I rushed to finish; the plotlines stop making sense. At one point, I introduce a truly bizarre and convoluted crisis that I didn’t know how to write myself out of. 

Yet, I keep the stories up because I think it’s a mistake, to eradicate the joy and pleasure in its creation. Fanfiction gave me two of the most important things a writer can have: community and creative freedom. It is important for writers to retain a love of their craft, even though the work can often be isolating and emotionally taxing, even though criticism is inherent in this line of work. I write fanfiction for the same reason people join a recreational soccer league or enroll in a pottery-making class: to find a community where I could practice my passion and skills with like-minded individuals. 

I have a few fanfiction WIPs that linger in my drafts, but recently I’ve had to focus on finishing my manuscript to meet a deadline. Still, on days when words seem impossible to grasp, I log onto Discord and ping a friend, “Do you want to sprint together?”  Knowing they’re writing with me, no matter how far they are in the world, makes the words appear just that much easier. 

Vanessa Chan Says Publishing With Electric Lit Changed Her Life

Posted on by Wynter Miller

Dear Reader,

It is not an exaggeration to say that a large part of the incipient writing career I have, I owe to the platform that Electric Lit gave me when The Commuter published my story, “The Ugliest Babies in the World,” in October 2020. Editor Kelly Luce found my story in the slush pile—me, a then virtually unknown short story writer with only one or two publication credits to my name—and published Ugliest Babies a few weeks later. 

The story went on to live a life I couldn’t have imagined: it became popular, both on Electric Lit and also on social media (via Electric Lit’s immense online support), where literary agents and book editors found it. They began to steadily reach out, days, weeks, and even months after publication, asking to see more of my work. In addition, because the story is written in colloquial Malaysian English, many emerging Malaysian and Southeast Asian writers reached out to me, excited to see an American literary magazine readily and excitedly publishing the colloquialisms of our people.

Two years later, “The Ugliest Babies in the World” is the title story of my forthcoming collection, which alongside my debut novel, “The Storm We Made,” will be published by Marysue Rucci Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, as well as in twenty other territories and languages worldwide. Electric Lit’s support of this story—from finding it in slush, to publishing it, to promoting it across all channels—was invaluable in helping me become the author I am today. 

Which is why I’m writing to you on their behalf. Every chance I get, I tell new writers that publishing with EL changed my life. Help Electric Lit continue changing writers’ lives by contributing to their end of year campaign. Their goal is to raise $10,000, and I know it will be put to good use. 

Electric Lit is the place for emerging writers to emerge.  

– Vanessa Chan
Author of The Storm We Made (Jan. 2024) & The Ugliest Babies in the World

8 Schemers and Opportunists in Literature

Posted on by Jo Lou

From Iago, Claudius, Richard III, and the murderous Macbeths in Shakespeare, to Choderlos de Laclos’s master manipulators in Les Liasons Dangereuses, to Nabokov’s silver-tongued Humbert Humbert (who seduces the reader as effectively as he seduces young Lolita), opportunists abound in literature.

My last novel, The Answer to Everything, was about an impecunious artist who starts a cult to make money. In my most recent book, The Opportunist, I gave myself an entire cast of conniving characters to backstab, menace and double-cross. 

So, why do these odious types show up between the pages so often? Because, while they may be dodgy, even despicable, opportunists are never boring. They hunger for power, sex, revenge, riches (all the juicy stuff!) and will turf any principle to get what they want. If you aren’t acquainted with the opportunists listed below, I urge you to hit up your local bookstore or library forthwith. 

In no particular order, here is an armload of deliciously deceitful reads: 

What Was She Thinking?: Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller

Heller creates a wonderfully textured portrait of the treacherous Barbara Covett (maybe a little on point with the name though) in this tale of loneliness, desire and betrayal. Barbara, a friendless spinster who is amusingly contemptuous of almost everyone, becomes infatuated with Sheba, the blithe new pottery instructor at the school where they both teach. Barbara expertly wheedles her way into Sheba’s seemingly perfect life, becoming her key confidante. But when Barbara discovers that she has exaggerated her own standing in Sheba’s heart and mind—spaces occupied by those she deems far less worthy—she becomes enraged, bitter and vengeful. The book is presented as Barbara’s carefully written account of the scandal that explodes her friend’s life: Sheba’s ill-conceived affair with a 15-year-old student. Guess who detonates the bomb?

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz by Mordecai Richler

Come for the wheeling and dealing young gonif Duddy Kravitz, stay for the authentic flavor of mid-century Montreal, specifically Mile End, a working-class Jewish neighborhood (where breakfast at the cab-stand is a salami sandwich and a Pepsi) and Ste. Agathe, Canada’s answer to the Catskills. Duddy isn’t all bad, and watching him teeter on the edge of decency is what makes this story so ultimately heartbreaking. In becoming a big macher like the notorious Jerry Dingleman, a kid from the block who made good, Duddy betrays his friends, his family, his lover and his soul. 

Laughter in the Dark by Vladimir Nabokov

Love is literally blind in this wonderfully wicked tale of a man who has everything and loses it all. Albinus is a wealthy, respected art critic, living in Berlin with his devoted wife and daughter. One evening at the movies, he spots Margot Peters, an usher with a “pale, sulky, painfully beautiful face.” He pursues the 18-year-old and soon begins an affair. Margot, a vulgar slattern, doesn’t give a toss about Albinus, but she knows a meal ticket when she sees one. Even though he’s an adulterer who eagerly abandoned his spouse and young child, it’s hard not to feel a little sorry for Albinus as first Margot, and then Margot and her dastardly boyfriend Rex, strip him of absolutely everything (including his eyesight). You can almost hear Nabokov chuckling as he gleefully puts Albinus through the Margot/Rex wringer. 

Alys, Always by Harriet Lane

Frances Thorpe is driving home one night when she comes across a crashed car with a dying woman inside. By the time the ambulance arrives, Alys Kyte is dead. Because Frances was the last to speak to her and hear her final words, Alys’s family wishes to meet her. Thus begins Frances’s entry into a world of wealth, privilege and culture. It turns out that Alys was the wife of celebrated author Laurence Kyte, and the mother of two children. Once Frances gets a glimpse of the Kytes’ lifestyle, complete with country house and swimming pool and lunches at the club, it’s as if a veil has been lifted. There’s really no going back to her lowly singleton existence. Frances is a clever woman who knows exactly what makes people tick. That insightfulness, plus an abundance of patience, enables her to infiltrate the world of the Kytes and milk the illustrious connection for all its worth. 

Erasure by Percival Everett

Everyone gets erased—whether through dementia, murder, or an opportunistic act of self-deletion—in this scathing novel about an African American writer and his family. Thelonius Ellison, aka Monk, is an erudite novelist who writes books that the publishing industry doesn’t want—at least not from Black writers. They prefer runaway bestsellers like We’s Lives in Da Ghetto by a contemporary of Monk’s who spent a week in Harlem once. Pissed that his most recent manuscript is failing to attract an offer, he bangs out a parody of what he thinks the White world wants from him: My Pafology— a “gangsta” tale of turmoil (in which chapter four is “Fo” and chapter five is “Fibe”). Alas, the manuscript is taken at face value and his agent sells publishing and movie rights for gazillions, forcing Monk to make a decision. Will he own up to his prank, or will he become Stagg R. Leigh, the ostensible author of the ghetto narrative? Monk isn’t conniving or evil, but he does seize a lucrative opportunity in an unprincipled way, and his literary hoax is too cutting and fun not to include on this list.  

The Switch by Elmore Leonard

The bad guys in Elmore Leonard novels range from slightly adorable to absolutely terrifying. In The Switch, we have two of the former and one of the latter. Louis and Ordell are low-level criminals who kidnap the wife of Frank Dawson, a rich and shady businessman. Richard is the dangerously stupid, heavily-armed neo-Nazi with a convenient place to stash Mickey, the businessman’s wife, until he forks over the ransom. The fly in the ointment: hubby has no intention of paying. Frank filed for divorce from Mickey a few days before she was kidnapped, and he has a buxom young mistress who he hopes to marry when the kidnappers conveniently make it easy for him to do so. The fun is in watching Mickey self-actualize and go from meek housewife/kidnapping victim to full on opportunist when she learns the truth about her asshole of a husband. 

The Plot by Jean Hanff-Korelitz

A fun one, especially for writers. Jacob Finch Bonner’s first novel garnered the “New and Noteworthy” stamp of approval from the New York Times Book Review. His second was a bit of a bust. His third and fourth couldn’t find publishers. Now, the once promising writer is slogging it out as a teacher in a series of third-rate MFA programs around the country. As he begins his latest gig at Ripley College, Jake expects the usual cast of MFA-program types. What he doesn’t expect is Evan Parker, a smug young man who says writing can’t be taught and that he only joined the program to get an agent out of it. Parker informs Jake that he is well into a novel, one with such a compelling plot it will be an unparalleled success, a “sure thing” that Oprah will pick for her book club and everyone will buy and love. One evening, Evan privately shares the plot of his novel with Jake, and Jake realizes with chagrin that the arrogant jerk is right. The story is so good it can’t be messed up. When the program is done, Jake waits for the news of Parker’s outrageous advance and insta-success. But it doesn’t arrive. And Jake learns why: Evan has died. So, Jake pinches the plot and writes the novel himself, and just as Evan predicted, it’s a huge success, propelling Jake to the top of the bestseller lists and back to literary stardom. There’s just one problem: somebody out there knows Jake stole the story, and he’s going to have to deal with the repercussions. 

The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood

You won’t find a more malevolent force than the beautiful and deadly Zenia, who rampages through the lives of three very unlikely friends: Tony (Antonia), a war historian, Roz, a wealthy businesswoman, and Charis, a hippie-dippy crystal seller who reads auras and raises chickens in her backyard. What bonds these disparate women together is their shared dread and hatred of Zenia, the maneater, the husband stealer, the thief, the liar, the rogue who stirs up strife for the sheer pleasure of it. Bitch on wheels is too gentle a term for cunning, malicious Zenia, whose words are “what a fist sounds like just as it smashes.” When the book was first published, rumors swirled about who Zenia might be based on, and it’s fun to read and speculate on Atwood avenging herself (or her pals) in print. 

The Ocean is Queer and Wondrous

Posted on by EL Assistant2

In Sabrina Imbler’s How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures, the ocean is queer. Survival is subversive. Tiny shrimp scurry around hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, scrappy and alive in a place hostile to all life. A yeti crab dances for food. The goldfish, an animal we can only imagine as a tiny carnival pet, grows feral when released into the wild, far bigger and browner than the bowl that once confined it. All this time, we realize, we’ve had the wrong idea about goldfish. 

Reading this book, you can feel Imbler, a queer, non-binary writer of mixed race, holding up each sea creature to the light, asking not “what are you?” but “How do you live?” What they imagine for these beings—perhaps hope for—are unstable, wide open futures. Descriptions invite readers below sea level (“personal pan pizza,” “shiny bodies like someone put a dime on a pat of butter”), we watch life bloom in the wake of a whale’s death, and, somehow, there is beauty even in a ten-foot worm with jaws. Yet even when thinking of the butterfly fish, Imbler displays a resistance to the uninterrogated. “Almost every system we exist in is cruel, and it is our job to hold ourselves accountable to a moral center separate from the arbitrary ganglion of laws that so often gets things wrong,” they assert. 

These essays are deeply personal, nuanced, searching. “My Mother and the Starving Octopus” examines Imbler’s relationship with their Chinese mother and their shared anxiety around food. “My Grandmother and the Sturgeon” recounts how Imbler’s family fled Shanghai during occupation, escaping on a small houseboat down the Yangtze and nearly dying of starvation until a Japanese soldier brought them a sack of rice. In a piece that raises questions about sexual autonomy and the gray zone, Imbler juxtaposes the predatory habits of the sand striker with that of boys and men, marveling at the ingenuity of creatures in danger, even themselves. “Hybrids,” an essay “dissecting ourselves,” grapples with the writer’s half-Chinese, half-white identity, confronts histories of miscegenation and eugenics, and recalls how they first encountered the word “half-breed” when they were twelve years old and scoping out a Neopets chat board. (“And this is the part where I might tell you how my parents met”—they write—”but I don’t want to because I have to keep some parts of my family to myself”). 

The collection, reckoning with climate change and disaster, relays anxiety but also wonder, innate curiosity, and adventurousness. “There are many ways to be a predator,” Imbler writes, but even more ways to exist. Ten creatures, they seem to be saying—but one life.

Annie Liontas: Is the ocean queer?

Sabrina Imbler: I was just reading an essay by Sarah Thankam Mathews, the author of All This Could Be Different, where she writes: “Oh me and my friends like to play this game where we look at an object and we’re like, is this gay? Is this light bulb gay? Is this rug gay?” I think that’s a good exercise to apply to everything around you, but, also, the ocean is very frequently described as a queer space. If you look anywhere in the natural world, if you think about it biologically, everything is queer. Things are reproducing and creating more of themselves in ways that are so beyond any kind of frame of heterosexuality that we humans have. I think of the ocean as a space of imagination and impossibility, and I think about queerness also as a place of possibility and imagination and wonder. So, yeah, at least to me, the ocean is gay. But I don’t think anyone looks at the ocean and thinks, “This is straight.”

AL: I’m also thinking about queerness as resilience and how, considering all we’ve done to try to kill the ocean, it keeps coming back in these surprising ways. That was one of my favorite things about your book. You tell us “it is easier to die than live,” but we are shown, time after time, the resilience of these ten creatures, often juxtaposed against the experiences of queer youth. So what do you want us to remember about survival?

SI: I’m happy that you picked up on that word resilience. So much scientific research on biological systems and the ocean is centered around this question of resilience. We often think there’s no way there could be life here, and then we find it, and we’re like, “Why? Why is it here? How is it living? How is it thriving?” These spaces are defined by our very limited human view of what we need to survive and what we find hostile. I’ve been recently reading Ed Yong’s An Immense World, also a book with a bunch of different creatures. It’s very focused on the specific ways these animals can sense their environments. We use light, we use heat, but other creatures have all these different staples for how they experience the world, and are unknowable to us.

How do we manage to be resilient in the face of all these things that seek to destroy us?

If I were to be plunged down to the bottom of the sea, I would die immediately. I don’t belong there—they belong there. Still, I couldn’t help but draw these parallels in the book, using the ways that their bodies have evolved to be perfectly suited for these foreign and alien environments, spaces that might not seem friendly to life. That’s the big thread of the book, How do we manage to survive? How do we manage to be resilient in the face of all these things that seek to destroy us? Whether that’s the chemistry of the earth or, you know, these communities around us that are human or non-human that we may feel threatened by. I could never camouflage my body in the way that a cuttlefish could, I can’t take that directly and apply it to my own life. But all these ways of living, they sort of open new portals, and I start to wonder, how does this make me feel about the way that I move through the world and the way that I am perceived and the agency that I have in my own life?

AL: “My Mother and the Starving Octopus” reads like an act of empathy towards your mother, who immigrated from Taiwan, but it also grapples with your eating disorder. (“If mom grew up wanting to be white, I grew up wanting to be thin”). What did this writing and research illuminate about your relationship with your mother and your own body?

SI: The first time I wrote about the octopus was for Catapult. I didn’t really think about the ethics or understand consent back then, I was just publishing this essay on this website and thinking, my mom’s not gonna see it; who’s gonna see it except for my little community?

When it was time to revise and expand it for this book, I realized my mother was the spark of this story. But I really want to respect her privacy as a person and acknowledge that the reason I’m writing about this octopus and my relationship to it is informed by my own fixations. So I tried to remove a lot, and when I expanded the essay, I expanded my own personal experiences. Then I sent her the final version. I was so nervous. Maybe she would say that I couldn’t write it, or that she didn’t want to appear in it. And I love my mother so much and I’d respect her wishes. But it ended up being a really generative conversation for us, because over the years I had tried to broach a conversation about eating and about food and about weight, and we would hit these walls. It was very raw for both of us, and neither of us really wanted to go to certain places. And my mother is very stubborn. But she read the essay and added some points of clarification, like moments of mismemory that I had had, and that was really interesting. It allowed me to dig deeper and to ask, why did I remember that this way? Why did my mother remember this that way? She helped add a lot of levity in how she talked about her own body and her own eating. She shared an anecdote of this racist doctor being like, “Stop eating so much Chinese food!” and her being like, “Fuck you!” I think that’s so funny, and it also just helped spotlight how my mother pushed back. I was so inspired.

AL: A similar stitching or mirroring also happens in “How to Draw a Sperm Whale,” where you borrow the language of whale autopsy to give us the necropsy report of a queer relationship. But, as with the rest of the essays, you’re never wanting to draw direct lines, it would be too neat. Yet it does seem like you learn something about aloneness versus feeling alone.

SI: I was still reeling from this breakup, not necessarily the breakup itself, nor the relationship itself, but—just trying to understand why this breakup had this magnified impact on me. I found it almost embarrassing, like, why am I still thinking about this person? Also, I really didn’t want to write a breakup essay that looked the same. I needed to find a wrinkle that made it feel like a fresh and generative thing to write about. I kept coming back to Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams because they felt very similar in the ways they asked, how do we use medical language to talk about death or illness or grief? These incredibly emotional human experiences, how does the language of bureaucracy warp them? I read so many whale autopsies, I went through so many weird marine and mammal stranding reports and looked at all of these very graphic photos. I went in many different directions. But the heart of the essay, ultimately, was about how the whale lived. Not just the grief, but what remains after something that large dies or is killed? How can we think about that? What is restored?

I learned that queerness is not tied up with a relationship. It really is tied up with identity and how you live your life and your platonic community.

I started [“How to Draw a Sperm Whale”] as an essay about this particular relationship, and then in writing it, I realized this is much more. It turned out to be about me and how I learned to understand myself as a queer person who could be alone and who could be single. I learned that queerness is not tied up with a relationship. It really is tied up with identity and how you live your life and your platonic community. What it means to be alone, and how there can be joy in that.

AL: Tell us why we should love crabs.

SI: Well I’m a Cancer.

AL: Same!

SI: So I guess this is a biased conversation. We are all pro-crab. I should come out in the pocket of Big Crab. 

I mean, crabs are super cool. I don’t know if you’ve heard of the evolutionary phenomenon called carcinization. It goes viral every so often because it is so funny: this evolutionary trend of more and more separate evolutionary lineages evolving the crab body plan and how there are so many things that we call crabs that are not true crabs. Like porcelain crabs, or spider crabs, or king crabs, or yeti crabs, which are technically squat lobsters, which are also not lobsters. [These] species evolve over time and their bodies realize that actually, the ideal form to be is a crab. You can scuttle, you can walk in all these different directions. You have a hard shell. It just works. I’m less interested in taxonomy debates and am more inspired by the fact that all of these different lineages came independently to the conclusion it just makes sense to be a crab. You find them all over the world. I was in Puerto Rico in March, and I was at a gas station, and there was a crab. It lived in a hole, it would come out and snap its little claw and go back. They’ve been able to conquer all these different niches and little realms on earth, it’s just very, very impressive. 

AL: Who is the unsung hero of the ocean?

SI: My book is absolutely biased towards large or at least visible creatures. A lot of the creatures that I wrote about, such as the salps, which are gelatinous—their body is almost entirely water, they really don’t fossilize—are hard to capture. It’s hard to record them through our own human machines and human contraptions, and yet, they are responsible for cycling so much carbon toward the bottom of the ocean. They’re agents of global cooling, it’s just all happening out of sight and out of mind. As I was learning about the salps, I had this realization that, oh my God, my book is all made up of macroscopic organisms. Maybe I should have a plankton chapter! There’s this whole scale of oceanic creatures that I didn’t even get into, yet they are so vital to the chemistry of the ocean and they feed all of the creatures in my book, in some way. The plankton that are photosynthesizing at the top of the ocean are responsible for all of the nutrients that cycle out into the creatures that I talk about. And krill! Krill do so much! Without krill, so many whales wouldn’t be around. There was a moment when I was looking at all the essays in my book and I was like, where are the tiny guys? 

AL: A frank discussion about climate change is inevitable, grim, heartbreaking. What in the research was hardest to confront? What is our failure of imagination? 

SI: As someone who is a science journalist by day, every day I wake up, I think about climate change at least once. It is so present in so much of the work that I do. I was really trying to figure out how I could talk about climate change in the book. I didn’t want it to feel redundant or preachy or to distract from the connections of these narrative switchbacks, but it was absolutely something that I thought about all of the time, this grief that I held throughout the reporting process. I would learn about a creature, and then I would immediately think, let me just Google it and see what’s happening. And what would come back is [something like] “half of this population will disappear because of climate change,” or a statistic that all sharks are in danger because of climate change. The grief and anxiety that hung over the process helped bring me back to the work when I felt disconnected from it or when I found it hard to write. It creates this urgency around why I want people to know about these creatures and why I want them to care.

Twenty Questions with a Philosopher Iguana

Posted on by Wynter Miller

When I Look Up an Iguana Turns His Head Away From the Sun

He asks: What is beginning? 
Something I never notice, like my nails growing.
I hiccup, forgetting why I’m waterside
or that we’re both abandoned 
like balloons at a wedding. 
A foraging pelican winks at me 
twice. Somewhere in Nevada
a goldfish has resolved 
to starve to death. 

He asks: What if aspens aspire to silence,
which the wind has outlawed? 
I trust the expired volcano 
that admits its vulnerability 
more than an escalator step moving 
wearily into the destined position. 

He asks: Are you inculpable 
enough? Drinking down the winter
that brims my southern eye socket,
I freed my ravaged enemy 
with an unrecognizable bear hug. 

He asks: Will you pity a graffitied lamppost 
or the machinist imprisoned by his own gadget?
I, speechless, only think of my father.

He asks: Can you love
in all the ways love is named?

The Frond

Today I bike to work and run over
a coconut leaf the size of my leg,
shaved off by last night’s razor storm. 
No bell tower tolls for this fall;

                                 even the rising sun turns a blind eye. 
                                 The frond blocks the narrow sidewalk 
                                 like a fish bone stuck in the town’s throat.
                                 When I run over it,

the fish bone gives a moan
as if spitting a bubble. 
Celery on the cutting board. A bamboo 
broom sweeping the sea into a ditch. 

                                 Dew splashes. Three tiny lizards 
                                 flee with their tails curled. 
                                 A woman yawns in her fern-green jeep 
                                 waiting at the traffic light. 

Desolation echoes. My porch light 
long broken. Mailbox unchecked,
and I bike to work. Summer is eternal. 
Somewhere, a couch longing 

                                 for my lolling skeleton: if sharp enough,
                                 my ribs could lacerate the moon.
                                 Tire marks all over my spine.
                                 Soul never closer to soil.