Page 193 – Electric Literature

An Indigenous Writer Discovers New and Old Ways to Connect With the Land and With Each Other

Posted on November 23, 2022November 14, 2022 by Jo Lou

Joshua Whitehead can’t be held by genre. Following on the success of his Lambda Literary Award winning novel Jonny Appleseed and poetry collection full-metal indigiqueer, Making Love with the Land is Whitehead’s first full-length work of creative nonfiction. But to describe this book as merely an essay collection is limiting for the depth of emotion and reflection he brings to the page.

Instead, Whitehead describes the narrative form as “biostory,” a hybrid form rooted in oral storytelling that blends the best of the prosaic and poetic. The result is a truly rare reading experience, with his essays frequently shifting and taking shape in ways that seem to mimic the author’s own thought process as he mourns, copes, and heals from his past wounds. Whitehead explores topics ranging from indigeneity, queerness, loss, and the relationship between his body and the land as if he’s arriving at the right questions to ask as he writes. Meditative and wholly cathartic, Making Love with the Land is a book to savor; its words best experienced the second time after letting them fully wash over you.

Whitehead and I talked about the emotional power of storytelling that supersedes genre and process of writing through pain to find healing.

Michael Welch: This is your first official work of nonfiction. What was your experience putting yourself and your life on the page in this way?

Joshua Whitehead: Harrowing, to say the least—this is vulnerability as I’ve never known before. Freeing, as well. A kin of mine once said that when you lose nerve, when you’re no longer anxious before setting foot on stage, and I’d add the page, you’ve lost something along the way. My penultimate goal in writing is for the betterment of my communities and non-fiction was, at this point in time, the most stalwart motion of doing so. To remove the mask of character and step on stage, bloodlet and cauterize simultaneously—I had to put my theory into action lest it be petrified wood and aged into something merely aesthetic vs. utilitarian. I hope in showcasing myself, my body, my history, and my joy, that I’m making space and allowance for others to as well. That the page is a forge.

MW: Making Love With The Land is described as “biostory,” a form that reads as such the perfect blend of prose and verse. Can you talk more about how you define this way of telling stories and how it allowed you to better express what is a very intimate and personal narrative?

If I was to be decolonial on the land, I needed to do it on the page too

JW: What I named biostory for myself, here, was a way of letting me become an outlaw to genre. If I was to be decolonial on the land, I needed to do it on the page too. Often, I’ve found, Indigenous narratives are characterized by either: testimony (a synonym, perhaps, for residential school stories or a synecdoche for stoic historical accounts) and/or pulp (inasmuch as when our stories are not about that they’re called “simple,” “mystical,” or “magic realism”). Surely our stories can be these forms, but they’re rich with allusion and metaphor—of riotous joy and complex constellations of creation. I needed MLWTL to be as it ached to be: prosaic, poetic, theoretic, autobiographic, philosophic, futuristic. And so, biostory came to me as a way to pay homage to the oral stories of the peoples I come from as well as fully embedded within my physical body but also the layered textures of our bodies of water, land, and text too. I could not discount how a snake, meandering through the badlands of Alberta, too was not a poet of their own accord, the land, too, a page.

MW: In the book you argue that storytelling requires animation and life like lovemaking, as you write that the desire to “master” the craft of story is “wholly violent.” Naturally, this immediately made me think of the formalization of writing and its attempt to place rules that students can follow. What do you see is the danger of this approach and how we return to something more lived?

JW: When I’m teaching my creative writing students, what I want for them to take away from my pedagogies is that they are all storiers in their own rights. That the aestheticism of this thing we call literature need not be bound by borders, because we are always integrally tied, umbilically, with our bodies of text. A story is a leaking, not a container, and when we autopsy under the suspicion of preordained form—we are losing precious syllables and syllabics that ought to be there. I suppose what I feel I want myself, and others who find themselves inspired by my writing, is that the motoring noun of all writing is: the body.

MW: Now that you mention the body, I was really drawn to your relationship to video games growing up as not one of distraction but as a “medicinal tool.” Can you talk more about how giving yourself over to games helped you heal both physically and spiritually?

JW: Video games have always been a space of solace for me in my life. A refuge. A safe house. And they are rich with narrative. Primers in characterization and serialization. They allow you to craft an avatar of yourself and embed them into any landscape, any parable. I think back to the lockdown periods of COVID and how everyone was playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons and we were richer in connectivity for it—as our physical bodies waned from a starvation of intimacy (especially for those of us who lived alone) our digital bodies excelled in latitudes of reunion. How could I not find that a gifting? And of course, there are accessibility issues pertaining to the affordability of gaming consoles and the video games themselves, but I know, for myself, I am richer in experience for having been a gamer.

MW: Ultimately this book is as much about healing as it is about mourning and pain. How important was it to you to balance showing these conflicting experiences, and how did you work through on the page the messiness and ambiguity that often is the healing process?

JW: I think here of Vision in WandaVision who notes to Wanda, “What is grief if not love persevering?” What a beautiful line. What a gorgeous television show that centers around grief, loss, mourning, pain, love, heartache, isolation, trauma—all wrapped up within a witch who is one of the most powerful beings in the universe. To know some thing we might call god (or godly) can mourn and cry is a humbling reminder. For me, it was less about thinking about pain and love as separate entities, but rather as transformations of each other. Perhaps love is pain evolved. And pain is love that forgot it was never a closed circuit. I would be remiss that it took a village to write this book, both actualized and conscious decisions for help in writing and editing (of the many “you’s” denoted in this book, a good handful were very active participants) and that no writing, or writer, thrives in a vacuum. Healing is messy, it’s ambiguous, it’s confusing and bewildering, it’s cyclical—like all relationships are within a nêhiyaw (Cree) epistemology. So perhaps I return to the metaphor of the circuit, that when we place any emotional body within it, when we attempt to close it we invent finality, when means we strive for ownership, so in that healing and transforming, I had to leave the circuit open so that the spirits of each direction could enter, visit, breathe life anew into a rotting floorboard of memory.

MW: One thing I loved about Making Love With The Land was that even while it is quite an intimate story about your body, your grief, and your healing, you continually return to a larger narrative about the land and kin you come from. How do you see the personal fitting into this larger collective in your work?

Perhaps the point is not to unwind those tangles [of the human condition], but to let them thrive into a hinterland that is an emotional meadow of wildflowers that know no invasive species.

JW: Let me regress us a bit into the lockdowns again (I’m sorry, hah) but I want us to remember what we did, realized we took for granted, how we were in relationships with everything around us when we were at our most isolated and lonely: we went for walks. We walked with parks. We swam with rivers and lakes. We sat with mountains and hills. The land and water held us when we needed it. They are kin to us. They nourished us when we were starving (emotionally and physically). I am grateful beyond belief for the bodies of lands that held me. I think of Kim TallBear who writes about ethical non-monogamy, not only of partners, but more specifically (and I paraphrase here) how she is never single because she is always in relationships with that which we call kin, the non-human, around us. It is those relations that I tried to position as the epicenter of kinship within MLWTL.

MW: You write about your responsibility to your kin as to be “a pain eater.” In our modern era and its violence against Black, Brown, and Indigenous people, how do you make space for others’ pain and also your own pain in a way that has the potential to be restorative as opposed to traumatizing?

JW: There’s a line in my novel Jonny Appleseed where he and his partner/best friend/rival, Tias are discussing their relationship and Jonny notes, “It’s funny how an NDN ‘I love you,’ sounds more like ‘I’m in pain with you’”. Sometimes I think back to that book, and Jonny, and I am bewildered, I’m like, who wrote this passage? I don’t recall ever being that wise or observant. It frankly makes me laugh in awe and terror. Which, I don’t mean to exacerbate ego, but rather, humble myself to our characters who live with and share so much of ourselves that they become twins to us, almost, and offer us insights we didn’t know we had.

With “The Pain Eater,” I wanted to theorize how that is what so much of us do, for others, of ourselves, and it’s sometimes through our shared pain that we find connectivity and political mobilization. If pain is a closed circuit that love forgot, then to unlatch its closed door is to make it ouroboric: collaborative, communicative, and cyclical as we eat pain and expunge love. Of course, there are boundaries and limitations to this as a praxis of being—but to eat pain is really to share story. Narration beautifies it, beatific, and its passing lightens our kin if we so choose to enact this form of community care—it’s our role than to know when the well is enough and how to dispose of it properly and ethically. I’m still learning that, I believe I always will—the profound and profane eligibility of the human condition twisted into thorns from systemic injustice and violence. Perhaps the point is not to unwind those tangles, so as to straighten them, but to let them thrive into a hinterland that is an emotional meadow of wildflowers that know no invasive species.

It’s a Lot of Work Being a Woman on Instagram

Posted on November 22, 2022November 22, 2022 by Jo Lou

In Allie Rowbottom’s novel, Anna is preparing to have an innovative, high-risk surgery known as Aesthetica™ that will reverse all her previous plastic surgery procedures, supposedly returning her to a truer version of herself.

At 35, Anna’s influencer career is long-ended, and she now works behind the counter of a department store selling beauty products to other women looking for self-love in the skincare aisle. Though it’s been said that “the only meaningful change comes from within,” like most of us, Anna isn’t immune to the allure of happiness promised by neatly packaged products whose price seems easier to pay than serious self-reflection. She knows from experience just how anesthetizing beauty products and procedures can be to the pain of human experience, but in the hours leading up to Anna’s last surgery she is forced to confront the traumatic events of her past that resulted in the end of her social media fame.

Told in a split narrative alternating between the chaotic moments preceding Anna’s surgery and her tumultuous coming-of-age as an Instagram model, Aesthetica examines the lengths we go to in order to love ourselves. Anexploration of womanhood and aging under the influence of social media and late-stage capitalism, the novel examines how internet culture impacts bodily agency and gender. At its core, Aesthetica is about the desire to be seen as we want to see ourselves.

I spoke with Allie Rowbottom via email about social media’s impact on self-perception and the difficulty of connecting with others online and in real life.

Shelby Hinte: I’ve been waiting for a book to come out that addresses the relationship between social media and body modification in an original way, and I definitely think your book does. Can you share a little bit about what inspired you to write this novel?

Allie Rowbottom: I felt inspired to write Aesthetica for several reasons, not the least of which was desperation, shame, and a personal obsession with several Instagram models, their ever-changing bodies and insistence that puberty, not plastic surgery or Photoshop, was the reason for those changes. But mainly I wrote it because I was in the same boat as you in that I wanted to read about image culture, beauty standards, and the lengths many women (including myself) will go to attain and uphold those standards —and nobody was writing about it! Especially not without finger wagging. I suppose I generally just write what I’d like to read and hope others feel the same way.

SH: I like that phrase “finger wagging.” It feels like a lot of women, even women who promote lifting other women up, can be guilty of this (myself included)—especially towards women who go the distance to uphold so-called patriarchal female beauty standards. It is totally hypocritical to say that on one hand women should have full autonomy over their bodies while on the other hand discrediting certain choices, such as choosing to get plastic surgery, as antifeminist. Personally, I would consider myself a feminist, yet I often feel torn on how to make sense of both wanting to say “damn the man, you can’t tell me how to look,” and also wanting to feel attractive and desirable. Sometimes it feels impossible to strike a balance. Have you had any major insights on how to navigate this precarious territory?

Women fighting with each other is produced for the masses as entertainment [because] keeping us split is what upholds the normative power structure.

AR: Finger wagging is just another symptom of a culture that has a vested interest in splitting and disempowering women. We (all) do it because we’ve literally been trained from birth to do it. When women judge other women for augmenting their bodies in ways that appear to pander to the male gaze, or when women judge other women for not augmenting their bodies, they are making assumptions and reductions that actually serve to support a culture in which men dominate. That’s why women fighting with each other is produced for the masses as entertainment—keeping us split is what upholds the normative power structure (exhibit A: many reality TV shows, though I want to point out that some shows that start out this way turn into abiding portraits of women’s power against all odds, as is the case with The Real Housewives, in my opinion). But bottom line: we’re all human. When we see someone inhabiting a physicality that threatens us for one reason or another, we’re going to judge them for it. I’m as guilty of this as the next person. But I think what writing this book has helped with is softening that impulse, especially when it comes to judging myself. For a long time, most of the finger wagging I did was directed at myself.

SH: I’ve heard a lot of warnings against writing about the internet, and while some of those warnings feel dated or unreasonable at this point, I do find that depictions of the internet in literature sometimes come off as cringey or unrealistic. That wasn’t true with Aesthetica though. The way you write about the internet, and social media in particular, feels accurate. What sort of challenges did you run into while writing about social media?

AR: I think the key for me was not to try to write about the internet per se, but rather to focus on my characters, their core wants and woundings, and then incorporate the internet to the extent that it had any bearing on their lives. For that reason, I don’t think of Aesthetica as a book about the internet or social media. I think of it as a novel about a deep, human yearning to be seen, and how that yearning amplifies and augments under the pressures of contemporary patriarchy.

But I know what you mean. Why are writers hesitant to write the internet? Why is literary fiction about life online often so cringe? I think a lot of people who are publishing books now grew up at a time when the internet wasn’t so pervasive and are therefore hesitant (or unable) to chronicle it with authority. That will change as Gen Z grows up and starts publishing. The internet is also always changing, so there’s a question of relevance. Will my novel about an Instagram model still feel urgent and important in ten years’ time? I think so if only because the underlying principles of Instagram (scopophilia) are the same underlying principles of Seventeen Magazine twenty years ago, and they’ll remain the same underlying principles of whatever image-based platform comes after Instagram.

SH: One of the things I loved most about Aesthetica is it reveals the deep layers of manipulation that go into the images we see rendered on the social media accounts for public figures — both in terms of manipulating the bodies those images depict, and in the altering of the actual images themselves. It felt a little like getting to see the behind the scenes work of curating an influencer’s public life. What drew you to writing about this world?

In addition to leaning on old food and exercise rituals for comfort, I was getting really into Instagram, consuming images of super hot, thin, young women, and comparing myself to them.

AR: The experience of body dysmorphia has been a prevalent one in my life, as it is for many women. By the age of twelve I had an eating disorder. By the age of fourteen, that eating disorder was a serious one. I went to treatment for it when I was in college, which helped, but it stuck with me and when my mother died in my late twenties, I turned toward my old restrictive habits in a big way. I was aware I was doing it, but I was also in crisis. And to make matters worse, in addition to leaning on old food and exercise rituals for comfort, I was getting really into Instagram, consuming images of super hot, thin, young women, and comparing myself to them. Even before I fully understood the Photoshop and surgery going on behind the scenes, I could feel what the images were doing to my brain, so worrying what they would do to the brain of someone half my age was the logical next step. The next step was wondering what creating and disseminating those images would be like for the model herself, because I do believe that in addition to some truly evil content creators out there (The Kardashians), there are many young girls who despite their veneer of perfection are irreparably damaged by the images they post. Once you start to bend reality, either with FaceTune or surgery or restriction or whatever else, once you then receive praise for that bending, it’s hard to return. It’s hard to see yourself with any clarity. That’s a great tragedy of many women’s lives: that no matter how well they conform to beauty standards, they can’t see themselves clearly and can therefore never claim the power their beauty might entail. Another ruse of patriarchy, I’m afraid. And all the more reason to work toward alternative valuations of beauty.

SH: How do you work through the feeling of conflating the self with your work/success? Those feelings of pressure or discomfort?

AR: Conflating myself with the subject of my work is part of what makes the work any good. Conflating myself with my career is where the trouble starts. Even worse is conflating myself with the negative things people say about my work and career. But there will always be people saying negative things if the work/writer is any good. That’s just a fact of human behavior, the internet and challenging art disseminated on a certain scale. It also appears to me to be a fact of human behavior that we zero-in on the negative stuff and assign it more weight than the positive. Like, for some reason, the word of some random book blogger who dislikes my novel counts as much if not more as the support of a writer or critic I deeply admire. Someone told me recently that this response to negative feedback has to do with fight or flight, which makes sense, but I’m still doing my best to override it. My advice is this: as painful as it is to see a one star drag down on your goodreads page, you actually don’t want everyone to like your work. If you’ve made work everyone likes, it’s middle of the road and unchallenging.

SH: What were some of the difficulties you faced while publishing Jell-O Girls? Have you had any of those same experiences while publishing Aesthetica?

AR: Blissfully, not writing about real people has taken from me some of the difficulties I had publishing Jell-O Girls. Related to what I was just saying about goodreads and the internet’s democratization of book ratings and reviews, I found writing and publishing a personal narrative about my mother’s death and then having randos on the internet rate it on a scale of one to five, often including digs directed at her, deeply troubling. I also found the critical acclaim troubling and I still don’t know why. I think it just felt so exposing at a time in my life where my grief was really raw and unprocessed and my sense of self was somewhat obliterated. But I did learn a lot about the publishing industry. Later, observing and supporting my husband Jon as he went through the process of publishing his novel Body High also taught me a lot. So going into putting Aesthetica out into the world I think I have a good grasp on how to build off the books that came before. Number one takeaway is this: no matter who your publisher is, no one cares about your book as much as you do. It’s up to you to promote and push for your work. I realize a lot of writers are like that’s not my job, and maybe it shouldn’t be. But it is what it is.

SH: Earlier you mentioned that Aesthetica is about yearning to be seen, and I think that really comes across, especially in the scenes between Anna and her mother. To me, that yearning to be seen feels like a yearning to connect, and I think some of the work Aesthetica does is illuminating how difficult meaningful connection can be in our digital age (though maybe it’s always been this hard—I am a millennial so I only know this way). Why do you think it is so hard for us to connect with others these days?

AR: I mean, we are all addicted to our phones. That’s an automatic, fairly recent barrier to connection, though of course our phones and social media apps do connect us, also. But I think the constant rush of information is such an overwhelm to the system that it can be hard to sit down and think for ourselves or talk to others. Maybe I sound old saying this, but it’s also just a fact: people who have grown up on the internet are having trouble socializing irl and it’s causing real problems. Then there’s the Twitter mob thing, the number one reason I am on Twitter is solely to repost stuff and leave. I find it so depressing. People rush to weigh in on whatever topic du jour simply because other people are doing it; everyone seems so ready to cancel based on nothing but what some other person said. Why is that? I suppose it’s loneliness and a longing to belong, to prove oneself “good enough” to be accepted by like-minded others. All very wrenchingly understandable. But the outcome is often terrible. All to say I guess maybe we’re having trouble connecting because the tools we’ve adopted to do so are failing us.

Mila Jaroniec Doesn’t Want You to Be Precious About Your Writing

Posted on November 22, 2022August 21, 2024 by Wynter Miller

In our series Can Writing Be Taught?, we partner with Catapult to ask their course instructors all our burning questions about the process of teaching writing. This month we’re featuring author and creative writing instructor Mila Jaroniec, who is teaching Catapult’s upcoming 12-month novel generator. We talked to Jaroniec about the importance of reading for writing, not doing things you don’t want to do, and the best beverage rotation for a workshop.

What’s the best thing you’ve ever gotten out of a writing class or workshop as a student?

Permission to create freely. When I took Frederic Tuten’s Radical Fiction seminar, I had already been in several writing workshops, where I heard a lot of do this/don’t do that that was making me doubt whether I even had any business trying to write fiction. But his approach was so refreshing. It was about taking risks and trust-falling your visions rather than writing a perfect book. He said things like, “Do what you want and don’t be frightened” and “Put everything in your first novel, even the kitchen sink. No one’s looking at you, no one expects anything.”

What’s the worst thing you’ve ever gotten out of a writing class or workshop as a student?

An anxiety disorder! No, I’m joking, I already had that.

What is the lesson or piece of writing advice you return to most as an instructor?

It reminds me to start at the roots and never be precious.

Faulkner: “Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.”

It reminds me to start at the roots and never be precious. And that a good book always succeeds on its own terms.

Does everyone “have a novel in them”?

No.

Would you ever encourage a student to give up writing? Under what circumstances?

I never have, but I can see myself encouraging them to take a step back if writing is somehow painful to them? If it causes great distress with no joy, zero return on investment, and yet they still feel pressure to produce, I would probably invite them to examine that. It wouldn’t be like “you suck and should quit writing” but more like, “you don’t have to write if you don’t want to.” We do so many things we don’t actually want to do, that we feel some weird inherited pressure to do. I remind myself of that first, when I feel like my head is on fire.

What’s more valuable in a workshop, praise, or criticism?

It depends. If the project is young, praise. You can’t trim a plant before it’s done growing (I think—I’m not a plant person, so maybe you can, but you know what I mean). Early drafts, if they’re being put in front of eyes at all, benefit the most from encouragement for what glows. If it’s several drafts in, I think criticism with the writer’s goals in mind is more useful. At that point it’s complete enough to really pinpoint what’s out of alignment.

Should students write with publication in mind? Why or why not?

It’s good to have a goal. Sometimes that’s publication, sometimes it isn’t.

It’s good to have a goal. Sometimes that’s publication, sometimes it isn’t. But I would encourage students—especially in a workshop/class situation, where their writing is being scrutinized—to get clear on their goals, whatever they are, so the feedback has a chance to be helpful.

In one or two sentences, what’s your opinion of these writing maxims?

Kill your darlings: Agree, but you have options! You can also “lovingly displace your darlings” or “cryogenically freeze your darlings.”
Show don’t tell: You have to tell a little, or else it’s experimental poetry.
Write what you know: Boring and limiting. I think it should be, write towards your obsessions.
Character is plot: I feel gaslit by this one, because we see evidence of it being true and yet, a lack of plot is usually the first thing that gets your manuscript booted.

What’s the best hobby for writers?

Anything that gets you off your ass and out of your head.

What’s the best workshop snack?

I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to eat during workshop, but I always have at least three beverages in rotation. Tea, seltzer, and (nonalcoholic) wine.

My Menstrual Cup Will Outlast Us All

Posted on November 21, 2022November 21, 2022 by Wynter Miller

Blood Cup

Shape of a shape,
foldable up
and able, in,
to open out,
stay put, collect,
beyond my notice, 
riches I have no
further use of. 
Latex or plastic 
echo of cervix, 
funnel without 
an exit; held up, 
a wine glass without 
a stem but with 
the wine-dark end 
of an egg within. 
Each month, washed,
scalded clean, ready				
to capture the swell
and wane of me. Ten
years, one lasted,
of stable yet suspect
silicone, till 
I overboiled it—
its modest, purposeful 
self safe 
on the shelf and in 
again, ad in-
finitum, I’d thought,
reminded only
then that infinities,
too, end.

Instructions for Escape

For everyone it will be different. Bend
time to your will, bend your will
to the bitter need. Bite down
hard, tear through. So 
I’ve heard, another 
way is to cede: 
open your face 
upward, 
allow
rain, 
bright
light, too 
bright to see 
through but see 
through it, let it 
edge you into an expanse 
you hadn’t known and knew,
even if rusty, even if ill at ease 
with ease, realizing, realized, there for 
the living. It’s yours. You’re its. Breathe.

A Book for Every Era of Taylor Swift

Posted on November 21, 2022November 21, 2022 by Intern Electric Lit

Taylor Swift is having a moment—just ask anyone who endured the presale Ticketmaster queues to try to get tickets to the Eras tour. That’s right: Taylor is heading on tour next year to celebrate all her different eras, from her debut album in 2006 to the newly released Midnights of 2022. If you think her albums are all about unrequited heterosexual crushes or heartbreak, then you clearly haven’t been listening close enough. (Or watching TikToks about her relationship with Karlie Kloss…) Taylor’s songs often take heartbreak and love as their subject, but her tones and methods range from obsession, delusion, reflection, regret, wonder, and delight.

Writing this list made me reflect on the ways I’ve grown up with Taylor Swift’s music. Her music was my girlhood obsession—I had “Teardrops on My Guitar” and “Our Song” on repeat during middle school—but for a few years in high school and college, I lapsed in my listening, determined to have cooler and more artsy taste. I’m happy to say I’m back in the Swiftie fold now—I made it through a terrible half-marathon last year by playing the 10 minute version of “All Too Well” on repeat. I like what I like, what can I say. And Taylor’s albums have been there for me through breakups and late-night writing deadlines, long road trips and kitchen dance parties.

If there’s anything listening through Taylor’s oeuvre shows, it’s that she has the range. She can collab with The Chicks or Bon Iver or Phoebe Bridgers. There’s an album for almost any mood…so there must be a book to match these moods. I asked my most literary Swiftie friends (including fellow EL intern/Swiftie Laura Schmitt!) to weigh in, and here’s the definitive Taylor Swift Eras reading list. You can trust me…I was in the top 1% of Taylor Swift listeners on Spotify last year.

Taylor Swift / The Ensemble by Aja Gabel

Taylor Swift by Taylor Swift—real ones know how groundbreaking it was to have the iTunes free single version of “Teardrops on My Guitar” downloaded onto your iPod nano. The debut album is Taylor at her most earnest, most affected country accent, but it’s also the album of gems like “Our Song” and “Picture to Burn.” It’s an album of anthems for a girl, but Taylor’s debut album is also about what music can do for people. My recommendation? Aja Gabel’s novel The Ensemble. Taylor sings that “when you think Tim McGraw, I hope you think of me,” reminding us how much music can remind us of each other—and the four characters in The Ensemble, themselves members of string quartet, navigate complicated relationships alongside their love for music. There’s love for the art, but there’s also rivalry and ambition and jealousy, as they all grow up together.

Fearless / Outlawed by Anna North

Cut to 2008: I’m on the floor of my childhood bedroom listening to “Hey Stephen” on repeat, skipping back and forth on my Barbie CD player so much that I scratched the actual disc. Fearless is an album of passion and excitement—which I loved as much in middle school as I do now—making it a perfect pairing for a novel of high drama about a girl coming into her own as a young woman: Outlawed by Anna North. Billed as a feminist Western, Outlawed follows a young woman, Ada, who joins a gang of outlaws to save her life. Outlawed is a book about growing up, and the real drama of Fearless is about growing up. It’s like Taylor sings on “Fifteen,” “I didn’t know who I was supposed to be / At fifteen.” Neither does Ada, but she gets a good start leaving the religious tradition that constrains her, joining the notorious Hole in the Wall Gang, and learning how she wants to be in the world.

Speak Now / Persuasion by Jane Austen

This might be a controversial take, but I think Speak Now has to be a Jane Austen novel. Here’s why: on Speak Now, Taylor is confronting things she wishes she had said but didn’t. In “Enchanted” she sings about the bubbly feeling of meeting someone for the first time and having intense chemistry but walking away without saying anything. This world doesn’t feel like the 21^st century world of sliding into DMs…it feels much more Regency era. Speak Now has a confessional tone, a raw quality to songs like “Last Kiss” and “Back to December” that reflect on old relationships with a twinge of regret. So of course it must be paired with Jane Austen’s Persuasion, a novel that centers on the regret of our heroine, Anne Elliot. Confronted with an old flame, Anne wonders whether he ever has or will forgive her—how to move forward. Both Speak Now and Persuasion ask how to live with regret, and they do so through vivid introspection and reflection.

Red / Possession by A.S. Byatt

I have to be honest—Red wasn’t my favorite album when it came out. “Trouble” and “22” were on the radio for an entire summer and I never listened to the entire album until a few years later. But now, Red (Taylor’s Version) is a special album for me. Maybe it’s because of my own return to the album that it feels like the book pairing must pick up on the album’s nostalgia, its insistent return and recollection. On Red, Taylor remembers a relationship marked by heartbreak, reflecting on her own complicated feelings of ownership about the relationship. In “I Almost Do” she remembers on her desire to return that is never enacted: “And I hope you know that every time I don’t / I almost do.” For me, Red is paired with a book about history and romance, about the drive to unearth memories and artifacts, like the scarf that both is and isn’t a metaphor—Possession by A.S. Byatt. Possession is a novel about uncovering the truth about an old relationship while also being in a new one. There’s two stories here: a romance between two 19^th century poets whose archives are being discovered by two contemporary academics who get entangled together. Possession and Red both thematize returning to the archive to make sense of your present world, suggesting that the work of memory is never really done—that there’s always more to find.

1989 / Happy Hour by Marlowe Granados

1989 is an album for the pop stans, for the people like me who had “Style” on repeat all throughout college. It’s not a no-skips album by any means (miss me with “Shake It Off” forever) but Taylor’s lyrics here are beautiful and deep even when the synth is going strong. There’s a balance between recklessness and tenderness on the album, the fuck off vibe of “Blank Space” and the earnestness of “You Are In Love,” and the only book pairing for this? Happy Hour by Marlowe Granados. Following Isa Epley and her friend Gala over a summer in New York City (cue “Welcome to New York” please). Happy Hour takes on the form of Isa’s diary to reveal both the excitement and fear of starting over in a new city. Like 1989, Happy Hour is equal parts optimistic and terrified of what comes next.

Reputation / Vladimir by Julia May Jonas

On Reputation, Taylor’s all grown up and out for revenge. Is it the best of her songwriting? Maybe not. But it’s a front seat to how anger can work as a motivator. She might have lost everything but Reputation is her sexiest album, making it a perfect pair for Julia May Jonas’ novel Vladimir, which also follows a woman who feels like she’s lost everything. Our protagonist is a middle-aged English professor whose husband is being investigated for sexual misconduct. But when the titular Vladimir arrives on campus, she’s reinvigorated by her crush on him, both sexually and creatively. It’s just like Taylor sings on “King of My Heart,” “your love is a secret I’m hoping, dreaming, dying to keep.” Like Reputation, Vladimir asks what kind of creative inspiration we get when we have nothing left to lose.

Lover / The Carrying by Ada Limón

Lover is bright and fun—it’s about being in love after all!—but there’s an edge to it. It’s the only album I know that transitions from pop fun (“London Boy”) to a song about a mother’s cancer diagnosis (“Soon You’ll Get Better”). Looking at the world in its rosy hues and alongside the pain of existence? That’s poetry territory. I pair Lover with The Carrying by Ada Limón, a collection that contains some of my favorite love poems right next to poems reconciling with loss, infertility, and national distress. In “Instructions on Not Giving Up,” Limón writes about “the strange idea of continuous living despite / the mess of us, the hurt, the empty.” Like Lover, The Carrying dramatizes the need to keep carrying on, keep loving and being loved, even when the world is in turmoil.

folklore / Normal People by Sally Rooney

Okay yes I have basic taste…there’s a Sally Rooney novel on my Taylor Swift reading list. You might think I’d pick Conversations with Friends because the Hulu show featured Taylor’s longtime partner Joe Alwyn. You’d be wrong: folklore is Normal People because it’s really an album about heartbreak. Normal People shows us two people, Connell and Marianne, who seem perfect for each other but keep slipping out of each other’s lives. (Connell says to Marianne, “I’m not a religious person, but I do sometimes think God made you for me.”) For a reader, it’s heartbreaking to watch them connect and then fall out again and again. And folklore shows us an even more imaginative and lyrical heartbreak, following a love triangle between Betty, James, and August. In “betty,” James wonders what would happen if he just showed up at Betty’s party: “Would you have me? Would you want me? Would you tell me to go fuck myself?” It’s this wistfulness, this wondering if reconciliation will happen again, that screams Normal People to me.

evermore / Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

evermore is not just folklore’s weird older sister—it’s an album about loss and recovery. It’s a chilly album, meant for the winter, about re-ordering and rearranging your memories. evermore is a collection of precise details, perfect little phrases that stop you in your tracks. On “gold rush,” Taylor sings, “I don’t like that falling feels like flying ‘til the bone crush / Everybody wants you / But I don’t like a gold rush” and I remember literally stopping in my tracks. Like—what a metaphor! What a phrase! There’s only one book that gives me this intense feeling of wonder for language: Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. Like evermore, Housekeeping follows a girl, Ruthie, who lives in Idaho with her aunt and sister. But the plot is subordinated by the language—Robinson has said that the book began as a list of striking metaphors that she kept. It’s a novel about what we keep and what we lose, dramatizing the details that stick with us like burrs on a coat, an impulse that is giving strong evermore energy.

Midnights / Bluets by Maggie Nelson

Midnights is dark but sparkly. It’s lyrically rich but also sometimes…very silly. (Yes, I am speaking of the “sexy baby” in “You’re On Your Own, Kid” or the intro on “Lavender Haze.”) But what makes Midnights so different from other albums is how it crosses through all the Taylor eras: on her Instagram, Taylor wrote that Midnights comprises the “stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life,” so what better book to pair with Midnights than one that also celebrates a scattered form, united by one reflection? In Bluets, Maggie Nelson traces her relationship with blue as a color, as a feeling, and as a stand-in for others. Nelson finds both beauty and terror in the blue, just like the late-night hours of Midnights offer heartbreak and love. The episodic texts of both Midnights and Bluets meditate on the lines between pleasure and pain, and the complicated gray area in between.

We Partied With Padma Lakshmi, Union Supporter, at the National Book Awards

Posted on November 18, 2022November 17, 2022 by Jo Lou

The National Books Awards returned in full force on November 16, 2022 for a night of in-person glitz after two years of virtual ceremonies. In front of white tents where the literati gathered for photos on the red carpet, publishing workers with the HarperCollins Union, standing in the cold, handed out flyers and buttons about their fight for fair pay, better working conditions, and codified diversity inclusion. Unionized workers with the second largest publishing house have been on strike since November 10th after almost a year of failed negotiations.

Inside the venue, Cipriani’s on Wall Street, host Padma Lakshmi took the stage wearing a union button pinned to her ballgown, with a speech about the wave of book bans across America: “Deciding what books are in school libraries is the job of librarians, not politicians who want to continue to whitewash the country. I want my daughter to have access to what was missing from my classroom: the truth and not just the truth that isn’t painful.”

Padma Lakshmi took the stage wearing a HarperCollins union button pinned to her ballgown with a speech about the wave of book bans across America.

Dr. Ibram X Kendi announced the Literarian Award for Outstanding Contribution to the American Literary Community to Tracie D. Hall. He spoke about the late senator John Lewis who as a child growing up in segregated Alabama wasn’t allowed to attend local libraries. Kendi, author of Stamped: Racism, Antiracism and You, a target of book bans, denounced “tyrants taking away our right to read,” and called on the American literary community as a whole to be a vehicle and driver of justice.

Hall, the first Black woman to lead the American Library Association, dedicated her award to her grandmother Bessie Marie Sanders-Scott: “For her that her granddaughter can grow up in a library is an act of reparation.” A former librarian, she lauded her fellow librarians who “are resisting censorship efforts to ensure every reader has the chance to see themselves represented on bookshelves. Let history show that librarians were on the frontlines of upholding our democracy.” She continued her speech saying, “Tonight is a refection of two groups of people: people who long to read and people who fight for the right to read. The right of reading is being politicized and weaponized that contemporary acts of censorship surpassed the McCarthy Era, books itself have become contraband. Information wants to be free. Free people read freely.”

‘Free people read freely.’
Tracie D. Hall

Neil Gaiman presented The Medal for Distinguished Contributions to American Letters to his friend and Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman: “Art is a mensch, but he is a genius… He combines visual art with literary art and he makes magic.” With his signature self-depreciating wit, Spiegelman joked that he was so terrified of putting together a speech that he contemplated sending a suicide note instead, but had writer’s block: “Against all odds, Maus became a blockbuster. It was rejected by every publisher in town. Now they’re letting cartoonists into the great hall of literature. Maus was never made to teach anyone but me anything. To understand parents who were suppose to be dead long before I was born.” Gaiman’s Absolute Sandman and Spiegelman’s Maus are the most banned and challenged graphic novels in the country and both authors have been actively involved with Pen America to protest against book restrictions in schools. Referencing how his book about the holocaust has become a cause célèbre, Spiegelman warned: “as the clouds of fascism gather over a frying planet, perhaps Maus can be a cautionary tale: Never again.”

The National Book Award for Young People’s Literature was awarded to Sabaa Tahir for All My Rage, a Pakistani American love story set in a small desert town. Through tears, Tahir remarked: “I’m the first Muslim and Pakistani woman to win this award. I honor my Muslim sisters who are fighting for their lives, their autonomy and their bodies, and their right to tell their own stories. Sisters, may you rise above your oppressors.”

‘I honor my Muslim sisters who are fighting for their lives and their right to tell their own stories. Sisters, may you rise above your oppressors.’
Sabaa Tahir

Author Samanta Schweblin and translator Megan McDowell were jointly awarded the National Book Award for Translated Literature for the short story collection Seven Empty Houses. In a conversation with Halimah Marcus earlier in the evening, Scweblin mentioned that Electric Literature was one of the first magazines to support her work. We published her short story “Birds in the Mouth” from the collection Mouthful of Birds in Recommended Reading back in 2012. In their speeches, McDowell said “Writers are people who question words, distrust them, and demand more from them. Any act of communication is an act of translation,” while Schweblin reflected on trickiness of words: “Words can be misleading and even harmful. And we need to be very careful. But then someone calls you from back home and says even if you have to dress up tonight, make sure you don’t get cold—keep warm and be happy. And then words become a gift and a privilege.” Read “None of That” from the collection here.

John Keene was the recipient for The National Book Award for Poetry for Punks: New and Selected Poems, published by the small press The Song Cave: “I want to honor my ancestors by lineage and by association—the Black, gay, queer, and trans writers. Especially those who we lost to HIV/AIDs in the ’80s and ’90s. They were brilliant, they were fierce, they were courageous. Let’s return to their words and the words of so many vital writers we may have forgotten.”

‘For the hungry, the caged, the disregarded, the holding on—I write for you. I write because I love sentences, and I love freedom more.’
Imani Perry

South to America won The National Book Award for Nonfiction, a book about how the history of slavery, racism, and activism in the South has shaped the entire country. In her lyrical and rousing speech, Imani Perry proclaimed: “I write for my people. I write because we children of the lash-scarred, rope-choked, bullet-ridden, desecrated are still here, standing. I write for the ones who clean the toilets and till the soil and walk the picket lines. For the hungry, the caged, the disregarded, the holding on—I write for you. I write because I love sentences, and I love freedom more.” Read an interview with Perry here.

Debut novelist Tess Gunty took home the National Book Award for Fiction for The Rabbit Hutch, a book about a murder in a low-income housing complex in Indiana. Not expecting to win, she didn’t prepare a speech saying: “I truly believe that attention is the most sacred resource that we have to spend on this planet. Books are perhaps one of the last places where we spend this resource freely and where it means the most.” Read an interview with Gunty here.

Thus concluded a night of revelry where we celebrated diversity, lauded the work of librarians and denounced the rise of book bans. And of course, we had to party with Padma Lakshmi at the afterparty who told us to raise a glass to books. Salute!

7 Short Story Collections That Examine Life in a Small Community

Posted on November 18, 2022December 5, 2022 by Jo Lou

A woman who lives on my street knocked at my door. She told me she and her husband, members of the local historical society, had written a walking tour of our neighborhood, and she thought I might like a copy—it would cost three dollars.

I did want a copy. It interests me that in the Vermont college town where I live, history feels so omnipresent in day-to-day life. I also felt something like déjà vu, a thought that wouldn’t coalesce, as the woman chatted amiably about her research. Then I realized: in my story collection, set in a fictionalized version of this town, I’d written about a woman who has self-published a slim historical account of the two-hundred-year-old inn in her neighborhood. She goes door to door, giving people copies. The story’s basic outline echoes the moment currently happening on my porch. I was experiencing something I’d previously imagined. I wrote this story, I wanted to tell my neighbor.

I told my parents about this, and they cheerfully proclaimed me psychic. But, I think this blurring of the fictive and the actual came from my sense of the community I live in.

As I wrote the stories in The Woods I was trying to imagine the preoccupations and interests of my neighbors in our small Vermont college town. In doing so I was considering how regional and cultural forces shape us. Where does our sense of self come from? In part, it comes from the private, idiosyncratic rush of our hearts. But it also arises from the company we keep, chosen or otherwise, and the landscapes we live in.

I love fiction that engages this question of community: how being part of them shapes us; what unspoken bonds keep us tethered to them. The story collections here also, almost by necessity, examine notions of identity—how we’re formed not just by our individual wants and desires but also by our place in a larger collective.

Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout

In this follow-up to the Pulitzer-Prize winning Olive Kitteridge, we return to Olive and the other residents of coastal Crosby, Maine, where the past lingers and is often cause for sorrow. Olive, cantankerous former school teacher, is in a new relationship with Jack Kennison. Both widows, both in strained relationships with their adult children, they’re plagued with regret over their mistreatment of those they loved, still love. Several stories involve sad homecomings, with people who grew up in Crosby briefly returning to find their childhood homes altered or gone. Olive’s son, Christopher, resents his mother for planning to remarry and moving out of the house his father built. Susan Larkin must deal with the aftermath of her childhood home burning down, her father dying in the fire. Yet Olive, in her seventies and discovering new contentment with Jack, is testimony to the possibility of people freighted with the past still finding present-day happiness.

Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So

In the late 1970s, when the brutal, murderous Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia, the regime killed two million people. A sizable population of refugees ended up in Stockton, California, a city of “busted potential,” as it’s described in “Three Women of Chuck’s Donut’s,” the first story in So’s vibrant collection, which is an affectionate portrait of a Cambodian community and a sustained examination of how trauma becomes inherited, shaping the younger, American-born generation. These are stories of strained relationships, missing fathers, failing businesses or businesses on the brink, of lives laced with grief and optimism, often from the point of view of the children, who are considering if their own futures will involve running donut and car-repair shops, grocery and video-rental stores—if they want to escape this life or if they find a comfort in it they can’t find or recreate anywhere else.

Prepare Her by Genevieve Plunkett

Plunkett, in distilled, elegant prose, creates disquieting portraits of young women and adolescents trying to make sense of their lives. Living in rural Vermont, these characters, in their dissatisfaction and confusion, leave their marriages; they seek out new friends; they worry about their inabilities to comfort those closest to them. In almost every story, tension arises from witnessing people who want emotional connection and companionship—a rich life well lead—but are confronted instead with limited choices. One character marries someone she grew up with, someone whom she’s been living with since they graduated from high school. Without money for a honeymoon, they spend their wedding night in her husband’s grandfather’s camp, a cabin without running water. The protagonist recognizes how meagre a celebration this is, but thinks, “To stay where we were would have been unbearable.”

Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty

In stories that center on themes of sickness and healing, Talty provides a clear-eyed look at members of the Panawahpskek Nation who live on a Native reservation in Maine. This linked collection—spare and moving—primarily focuses on David, a young boy trying to make sense of his family members’ traumas; and on Fellis and Dee, unemployed young men struggling with addiction and hopelessness. The three of them handle their frustrations differently. Fellis is a marvel of self-absorption and a burden to everyone around him. We first encounter him having passed out outside, his hair frozen to the snow. Dee rescues him—a gesture that subsequently becomes a motif. Dee also beats up a cocaine dealer Fellis had picked a fight with; later he takes his friend to electroshock therapy sessions. But Dee avoids his own woes—including a girlfriend he needs to break up with, a mother living in a crisis center. David seems clearest on wanting to help his mother, his grandmother, his mother’s boyfriend friend, his older sister—all saddled with trauma and illnesses—but he’s mostly helpless in what solace he can provide. He thinks, “It was all sickness, the whole thing, something that couldn’t be cured…and I wanted to get up and right it all, but I didn’t know how.”

Battleborn by Claire Vaye Watkins

This stunning, devastating collection suggests that the Nevadan desert landscape—vast, empty, at turns beautiful and violent—mirrors its despairing people. In the opening autofictional story, “Ghosts, Cowboys,” the narrator, Claire, says, “At the end, I can’t stop thinking about beginnings.” She describes both the “cursed soil” that makes up Reno’s history—suicide, death by fire, a nearby nuclear blast—and her own origins: her mother’s suicide attempts and her father’s part in Charles Manson’s cult. In “Rondine Al Nido” a woman tells her lover about a terrible night from her past. She, as a teenager, looking to escape the dreariness of her life, convinces another girl to go to the Las Vegas Strip. They set out for adventure and to escape pain, but “…all those billions of bulbs flashing in time, signaling to the girls that they are, at long last, alive” turn out to be a siren’s lure. When the night starts to sour, one girl wants to go home, but the other—the woman telling the story—convinces her to stay, even when the night becomes sexually degrading and ugly. The story’s closing image is of a “city’s hunger for ruin.”

Nobody Gets Out Alive by Leigh Newman

In Newman’s absorbing collection, one character offers a theory: “Your average happy person didn’t last in Alaska. It was too much work not to die all the time.” And while these are stories of people enduring hardship—emotional, physical, spiritual, these characters have fight in them, and it’s their displays of tenacity, hardheartedness, and beautiful, sometimes goofy, hope that makes the writing electric.

The collection reminds me of Richard Ford’s Rock Springs, which also portrays people down on their luck in austere, bleak landscapes, but then manages a marvelous balance of emotional resonance, violence, and absurdity. In “Howl Palace,” a woman is selling her home after living in it for 43 years. Amidst the chaos of an ex arriving unannounced the day the realtor is showing the house—needing someone to take care of his dog while he travels for chemo—we learn that this woman’s “wolf room,” a place where she has 387 wolf pelts, from her time hunting wolves, was initially meant to be a nursery. But after five miscarriages, her then-husband took her “to the snowfields to go after wolves.” Newman creates all this metaphoric density in the wilderness and the homes of these people, for whom, “everything comes back, over and over.”

Filthy Animals by Brandon Taylor

Mostly set in Madison, Wisconsin, Taylor’s collection is cerebral, rhetorically savvy. The prose is well-ordered and controlled in service of drawing readers into the emotional turbulence that’s most often the book’s subject matter. Broadly, as well, this technique mimics the portrayals of the characters—people who appear placid but are charged with grief or feelings of alienation. The stories are meditations on feeling disconnected from identity and from the community that, in part, gives rise to this sense of self.

In the opening story, Lionel, who has paused in his graduate studies after he’d attempted to kill himself the year before, looks through the window of a party he’s about to attend, feeling “powerfully anonymous.” And in a later story, he feels “homesick for math,” a beautiful conflation of intellect and sense of place. In “Ann of Cleves” Marta, who’d started dating—and ended up marrying—Peter, another engineer, because they saw each other so often, is now in her first relationship with a woman, which extends to her exploring her identity separate from her profession, from her life’s exterior markers. “Marta felt for the first time in a long time that she had an inner self she didn’t owe to anyone.”

Booktails From the Potions Library, with mixologist Lindsay Merbaum

Posted on November 18, 2022November 17, 2022 by Wynter Miller

In A Touch of Moonlight by Yaffa S. Santos, Larimar Cintrón is a successful 34 year-old brand manager at a growing chain of bakeries in NYC. She’s also a devoted Dominican daughter who lives in the same building as her parents, a punk fan, avid foodie… and a magical being known as a ciguapa. Larimar appears human most of the time, until the full moon rises. Then her rizos go straight, covering her body in a robe of tresses, down to her inverted feet. Too fast for the human eye to see, she runs heels-first through the night. But her identity as a ciguapa is only one of the secrets Larimar is keeping from Ray, a sweet, gentlemanly owner of a local bakery who’s as delicious as his pastries, and likewise irresistible. Surely dating a ciguapa is unimaginable, but Larimar’s second, much more human secret may be the one that’s unforgivable.

Punctuated with actual recipes for some of the treats Larimar and a cast of lovingly nosy friends and family enjoy throughout this book, A Touch of Moonlight is a romance rooted in a search for belonging and self-acceptance. Though Larimar is not the only ciguapa in the family, to find her place in the world, she has to look deeper within herself, and at her history: “The ciguapas had taken her home. […] This knowledge was a bracing tonic for her spirits. It gave her roots, and she needed roots to soar.”

It’s only fitting for this booktail to borrow from some of the rich spices and flavors found in the array of mouth-watering pastries and baked goods described within this novel, including boozy cupcakes: black spiced rum honors Chocolate Espresso Rum-Infused cupcakes, Pumpkin-Spiced Rum cupcakes, plus rum on the rocks on Nochebuena, and last but not least, the rum-soaked macarons served at a very special occasion. Meanwhile, the honey in mamajuana inspired the honey chamomile ginger syrup that defines this drink. Chamomile can be found in Chamomile Lemon cupcakes with honey buttercream, while bestie Brynn mixes ginger in her hot toddy, and Borrachitos uses ginger in the bakery’s Dominican Hot Chocolate-Inspired Cupcakes. Ginger also makes an appearance in Larimar’s own Bourbon Spice Naked Cake with Edible Flowers. Finally, the frozen coconut water references Ray’s coconetes and Larimar-inspired cupcakes, and Coconut Arroz Con Dulce cupcakes.

A deceptively simple yet strong cocktail—for a woman for whom “alcohol was like water”—with notes of coffee and spice, the sweetness of the rum and syrup are well balanced by the neutralizing frozen coconut water. The booktail is presented on a liquid mirrored base for ciguapas’ penchant for water, while the two-toned background sparkling with the day/night bling of a city symbolizes Larimar’s human and supernatural aspects. A white moon crosses both sides, hanging over the drink, mirrored in the ridged sphere of coconut ice in the glass. The glass is garnished with a candied hibiscus flower, a rare and wild-looking treat.

A Touch of Moonlight

Ingredients

2 oz black spiced rum
1 oz honey chamomile ginger syrup (see recipe)
Coconut water ice

Instructions

First, freeze the coconut water in an ice mold of your choosing, preferably a large square, sphere, or diamond shape. Meanwhile, prepare the syrup. Once cool, add to a mixing glass filled halfway with ice, along with the rum. Stir until well-chilled, then strain into a rocks glass. Add the coconut ice.

Honey Chamomile Ginger Syrup

Ingredients

1 1/2 cup water
3/4 cup honey
4 chamomile tea bags
About 2-inches of fresh ginger, peeled and chopped into small pieces

Instructions

Mix the honey, ginger, and water in a small saucepan over medium heat.
Bring to a gentle boil, then lower heat and let simmer for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.
Remove from heat and add the tea bags to the pot.
Steep until cool, then discard the tea and ginger. Store in a glass bottle or jar and keep refrigerated.

Leaving the Church to Find Spiritual Nourishment

Posted on November 17, 2022October 17, 2022 by Wynter Miller

The memoir Heretic opens with Jeanna Kadlec boarding a bus to the Middlesex County Courthouse in Massachusetts, where she is filing for divorce against her husband, an Evangelical Christian, and pastor’s son to boot. Kadlec is twenty-five and exhausted from the labor of suppressing her queerness. But, as a lifelong believer, she knows the consequences of straying. Already, she’s been chastised by her husband for her ambition, shamed by other women in the church for her clothing and curves, and pressured by herself to repent for the wrath she feels toward a pack of boys who assaulted her at a youth group hayride (because boys are permitted sexual transgressions, after all). Kadlec also knows her future if she stays. The reality for many women and queer people in conservative Christian communities is complete sublimation.

Running parallel to Kadlec’s personal narrative are well-researched historical and political nonfiction threads that contextualize Kadlec’s experience of the church, and provide readers unfamiliar with Evangelicalism a foundational understanding—a timely effort given our current political landscape. In sharing her trajectory from devout believer to heretic reborn into queer joy, Kadlec offers a hopeful roadmap for the future, both for ex-Evangelicals and for anyone looking to leave religious fundamentalism behind.

I spoke with Kadlec over Google Meet about the Evangelical groundwork for overturning Roe, biblical womanhood, and Kadlec’s utilization of tarot to get in touch with her intuition.

Melanie Pierce: This book has the potential to reach at least two audiences: former Evangelicals like me, who are excited to see our experiences reflected, and outsiders unfamiliar with the Evangelical framework, who are possibly looking to learn more about it now, with the rise of Trump and the fall of Roe. How did you decide on this research-intensive, hybrid approach to your memoir, and who were you writing the book for?

Jeanna Kadlec: I was writing the book as a hybrid memoir before I realized I was writing a hybrid memoir. The way that I write personal narrative is the way that I think—really, I’m just making my thought process legible for the reader. In a lot of hybrid memoir, especially by queer writers, we’re not trying to claim to be the sole authority of our own ideas. Obviously I’m the authority on my own lived experience, but if I’m going to situate myself within the context of growing up Evangelical, I’m not going to use my experience as the end all be all.

My impulse as a person and as an ex-academic is to do historical research. I don’t know that I could write what people consider to be a straightforward memoir that doesn’t incorporate other threads. This is what I love to read, and it’s what I love to write.

Honestly, you perfectly picked up on the audiences that I had in mind when I was writing. My ideal readers, first and foremost, were younger versions of myself, which is to say ex-Evangelical queer people who were coming out of the church. You can narrow that to folks who are also Midwestern, or who also grew up in working-class homes. But ex-Evangelical queers are certainly my most targeted audience. My hope for the book was that it would find the readers who it was supposed to find, the people like us. But as is evident by the fact that I stopped [in the memoir] to explain virtually everything to do with the church: it’s meant to be user-friendly for people who grew up in other parts of Christianity, or in other religions, or with no religion at all, who are curious or angry about the impacts that this one very hardline faith has on their everyday life in this country.

MP: Right. Heretic is timely because the white conservative Evangelical framework has permeated America’s political landscape to such an extent, it’s hard to unravel where Evangelicalism ends and the government begins. For example, you cite a 2020 Pew Research study that found that half of Americans think the Bible should influence US law—far more than the population of white Evangelicals.

This is a complex question that you wrote an entire book to answer, but to give readers a taste: can you describe some of the ways that the average American experiences the efforts of Evangelicals “pressing on their life,” as you write?

My ideal readers, first and foremost, were younger versions of myself, ex-Evangelical queer people who were coming out of the church.

JK: I’ve been living on the East Coast for almost 10 years now, basically the entirety of my post-college adult life. These places, culturally speaking, are not saturated by Evangelicalism in the way that the towns that I grew up in the Midwest are, where even if folks are not attending a church, the biblical literacy, the awareness of cultural Evangelical phenomena, is so high. I was staggered by how many people I knew out here, who I was in community with—wonderful folks, incredibly smart folks, queer folks, but who were mostly from the coasts—were not aware of how much of our culture is directly based in Evangelicalism. Not just the stuff that’s explicitly anti-choice, but where that comes from with purity culture. School dress codes, for example, are profoundly connected to the church. Those are profoundly connected to segregated schools. Who was pushing segregated schools in the mid-20th century, long after Brown v. Board? It was Republicans; it was Evangelicals. So many contemporary social issues, things to do with “protecting children,” you trace it back and it goes back to Evangelicals, almost always. It’s astonishing to me how much folks don’t recognize the church’s influence. Even Evangelicals, right? There was so much that ended up in the book that I didn’t know when I was still in the church. So I can’t harp on folks too hard who aren’t in the church.

We’re at a point right now that seems so extreme, a crisis point. But really, all of this is based on Evangelical priorities, on the foundational ideology of Evangelicals and Republicans (at this point, they’re virtually interchangeable). [They] have been laying the groundwork for decades.

MP: There’s this thread in the book about the values that growing up Evangelical instilled in you, like the importance of community and nourishing your soul, the power of the communal sacred, and—to get really specific—how exegesis, or close reading of the Bible, gave you a foundation for textual analysis in your English classes in college. How important was it to you to knit these lessons that you learned from Evangelicalism together with unpacking your religious trauma?

JK: I don’t know that it was conscious, though hearing it framed that way, I would absolutely call those positive experiences and lessons from the church. My ability to look back and to see what was good about the experience is the result of time and healing. Those were very important and profound experiences I had within my faith that helped lay a foundation for things that I came to value. It’s impossible for me to talk about my love of literature without the church. It’s impossible for me to talk about why community is important to me without talking about the church. Certainly there were times in my past when I was more fresh out of those experiences, when I tried to excise those things, but I’m far enough out of it at this point that I can take the holistic view.

MP: Biblical womanhood is an important subject in Heretic. You talk about the Evangelical ideology of male headship and the lack of power that women and queer folks have over their own bodies. I’m assuming you were in the final stages of publication with Heretic as Roe fell. What was that like for you?

JK: We were in third or fourth pass. It happened in time for us to adjust some language, but it didn’t really have an impact. It’s still an undercurrent—[I write] about the lack of sexual agency, the way that women and queer folks are conditioned to not trust themselves, and to not believe that you can make decisions for yourself, for your body, for your health, without the input of a parent or husband or pastor or an authority that is not you. The next logical step is to go to reproductive health.

We’re at a point right now that seems so extreme, a crisis point. But really, all of this is based… on the foundational ideology of Evangelicals and Republicans.

How it was for me: it was actually very strange, and I’ve talked with other ex-Evangelicals about this. My girlfriend is also ex-Evangelical. I was just numb. I feel like for those of us who grew up in this, this has always been the plan, this is always what they said they would do, and then it happened. And I was like, “Well, they did it.” And my girlfriend was like, “Yep, they did.” They’ve been saying they were going to do it, and there were so many folks that didn’t fucking believe that it was ever going to happen, and who still don’t take it seriously. I have so many issues with the church—obviously! I wrote a whole book about it! But at least they tell you exactly what their plan is. A lot of my rage in the months since has been, quite honestly, for folks who continue to dismiss the seriousness of it, like folks on the left, and establishment Democrats of course.

MP: Part of this memoir narrates your former marriage to an Evangelical man. A factor that drew you to him was that he claimed to want a partnership of equals, and he wasn’t interested in your submission, so you expected to have a marriage that was godly but differed from rigid gender roles. But then, early in your marriage, he seems to have a problem with your ambition, and he tells you in this chilling scene at the kitchen table, “You’re not an individual, you’re my wife.” What was it like to revisit that time in your life and probe it so thoroughly for the book?

JK: This book has had a number of different iterations over the years, and the scenes with him that made it into this final version are the ones that have made it through every version of the book. So at this point, the arc that is my marriage, and the scenes that I have chosen with him, are very distilled, and I have been sitting with that arc for a very, very long time. The emotional rawness feels pretty distant. What you’re describing, how chilling it is—I’m like, “Oh, I guess that is chilling. I guess that was bad.” And it is. I had to bring all the walls down to write it, and then I put them all right back up.

MP: You write about how the teaching of original sin instilled a deep sense of shame in you, and how believers are trained to actively disconnect from and distrust their bodies and desires, because those bodies and desires are rooted in original sin. Evangelicals are not only denied the agency to make their own decisions, but they’ve also been programmed to shut down their intuition.

Can you talk more about your shift from prayer journaling to your tarot and journaling practice, and utilizing tarot as a tool to tap back into your intuition and feed your spirit?

JK: I’m a lifelong journaler. My earliest ones are from when I was 10 or 12 years old. I still have a lot of these childhood journals, and they stop being a record of my days and turn into constant talking to God when I’m a teenager. It clearly coincides, in my mind, with when I started getting policed by other women in the church for what I was wearing and started to get the talks about purity culture and how sinful we all are, how sinful our bodies are. Those coincide with my journal diving into constantly talking to God, which is to say constantly checking in with God and being like, “I want to do this. Is this okay?” Eventually, I realized I had this incredible journaling practice but I didn’t really know how to record my days or how to articulate my desires if I wasn’t using God as an interlocutor, if I wasn’t checking in with someone. If there wasn’t that arbitrary authority in my life, how did I know if I was doing it right?

Tarot essentially provided me with a structure to help me get through that really messy valley. I knew that I could write my way through it, but I needed a structure to get me to the other side. Tarot came in as a helpful tool to do that. It’s really like the art of close reading. That’s what I was doing in the beginning. The spiritual part of tarot for me came a little bit later. In the beginning, it was just me using the cards to give a structure to the journaling. It was like playing twenty questions with myself, figuring out what I want.

MP: As a follow up to that: what advice do you have for those coming from religious fundamentalist backgrounds who are interested in alternative spirituality and finding meaning in other rituals?

JK: I don’t know that I would give advice in the form of, like, here are specific tools, because the tools aren’t necessarily going to get someone there. For me, tarot was helpful because it jump-started my way back into an existing practice. It was helping me unlock why journaling felt so stuck for me. It was helping me get back in touch with myself, redirecting that conversation with myself back to, “Oh, I can want things. Oh, I can just talk and God doesn’t have to be here.” Which sounds so basic but if you’ve been in the church—

MP: That’s a radical notion, really.

JK: Yes, that’s radical! You can just want things and not have to check if they’re godly or not! So it was helpful for me for that reason. If folks are curious—they’re leaving the church, leaving organized religion of any kind that’s conservative and harmful, or that just isn’t good for you—and wanting to explore stuff, I would recommend journaling, or at least would recommend having a little session with yourself where you really sit and write or think or voice memo or drive around in the car and talk to yourself, to really think about what you’re looking for. Is it the connection to the divine that you’re missing? Is it that you miss Bible study, reading something and rigorously studying it? Do you miss community? Do you miss singing with other people? Not that it has to be framed in terms of what you miss, but that spiritual practice, however harmful it was, did feed something for you, and what aspect of that can you explore in terms of bringing it in? I think the more helpful thing is looking at the specific need that you’re looking to fill. All of those things are spiritual, and all of those things are holy, so think about which things you crave and which actually really nourish you. There are paths, modalities, different traditions and tools that you could institute, and different kinds of gatherings for any and all of those things.

In Real Life Arranged Marriage is No Joke

Posted on November 17, 2022January 16, 2024 by Intern Electric Lit

How do you discuss something so intimate and uncomfortable as finding a spouse, without laughing or crying or cringing in embarrassment or fear? How do you talk about it without using the L-word? As in Luck. As in, you can plan and strategize as much as you want to, you can prepare as if you’re preparing for battle, you can organize and plan for all contingencies. There is still a certain amount of luck involved.

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